Hi Doug: I hope you did not take my affections for Renaissance Catholic
architecture and ritual (!!) as some desire to resurrect all of that into
the present, or the present of life here in the west. I don't think so.
We go with we got (relatively barren or not).
I am sure some are turning - or have already turned - monitors into
cathedrals as we speak.
(Off the cuff I just heard an ultra-marathon runner describe how he will use
his cell phone - periodically during a 200 mile run - to call the next town
to have Round Table Pizza deliver him a small pizza as he runs by a certain
corner. I suspect - in his spirit - each slice tastes like the Lord's wafer
- Gatorade, the wine. I would think it pretty special, too.)
Stephen V
Blog: http://stephenvincent.durationpress.com
> I take your points here, Stephen, but want to suggest that what we are
> smitten with are monuments of the past, now rather empty of
> contemporary spiritual meaning for all but a few, & those still locked
> into a past unrecoverable. Any attempt to reconstruct it is even more
> empty, as my experience of a brand new cathedral to Mary in the middle
> of a field in Poland proved to be (overwrought but dead). And it seems
> to me that it's a strain of Christianity that insists we can do
> whatever we want with the lower orders of animals & plants, ie, the
> environment.
>
> So, we need to find in the world as it is (or can be if not totally
> exploited) the icons of faith in what is that inheres in art, it seems
> to me.
>
> Doug
> On 19-Jul-05, at 10:02 AM, Stephen Vincent wrote:
>
>> Thanks, Doug. What was (in the piece, "Word Icons") is an awareness of
>> how
>> stripped bare of icons - with attendant architecture - we are in this
>> west.
>> I got that consciousness particularly after being in Rome and inside a
>> number of Churches with all the adherent sculpture, painting and the
>> iconic
>> architecture implicit to the rituals and celebration of Catholic
>> belief. I,
>> as many Protestants before me, was totally smitten, infatuated, etc.
>> Along with that experience came the consciousness of how such
>> adoration is
>> so minimally expressed in a west of simple churches; "Direct Faith" or
>> communication with God involved renouncing - as "we" know - most of
>> all of
>> the icons, the intermediaries, including the complexities of Church
>> hierarchy. Comparatively, early on, the western US the west, as a
>> religious
>> situation, is/was terribly barren. At best we were left celebrating the
>> sublime as manifested in the landscape (Beirdstadt, Carleton Watksins,
>> Ansel
>> Adams,Weston, etc.) And, that celebration is more often now than not a
>> besmirched myth, replaced by environmental exploitation and
>> destruction of
>> all sorts.
>>
>> Curiously, Ed Rusha - raised Catholic - turns Hollywood and LA signage
>> and
>> street maps into relative - perhaps bemused - signs of the Cross.
>> Yes, I think part of the aim of my piece, was to celebrate the ways in
>> which
>> we - among the bereft of formal iconography (and now an increasingly
>> bereft
>> landscape) - exploit a deep consciousness of the empirical
>> to make a transformative practice of art and poetry. And boy, not to be
>> self-piteous, does that take faith!
>> The importance of Jewish and Buddhist traditions - among others - to
>> becoming at home with the Protestant separation from the Church is
>> another
>> important element in this story, as well. But today, I will not risk
>> articulating any or all of such!
>>
>> Stephen V
>> Blog: http://stephenvincent.durationpress.com
>>
> Douglas Barbour
> 11655 - 72 Avenue NW
> Edmonton Ab T6G 0B9
> (780) 436 3320
>
> NOT MUCH
>
> Not much you ever
> said you were thinking
> of, not much to
> say in answer.
>
> Robert Creeley
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