Intimacy in Art: Lessons from Mark Doty, John Gutoskey, and a Communion Service

Some questions that have been troubling me lately: how personal is good art? how personal is good art criticism? As a literary critic in training, I spend a lot of time writing very impersonal critiques of texts, and, frankly, I often find this impersonality stifling. The texts I study move me, challenge me, exasperate me; why can’t I write about that, I sometimes wonder? Indeed, in a previous post, I asked this very question and argued that literary critics should acknowledge their emotional and spiritual responses to texts more than they do.

However, after some more pondering, I’m beginning to think that I didn’t tell the whole story. A convergence of three very disparate events in my life has changed my thinking: (1) visiting an art fair and seeing the work of John Gutoskey, (2) reading Mark Doty’s Still Life With Oysters and Lemon: On Objects and Intimacy, and (3) participating in a communion service at my local Seventh-day Adventist church.

First, Gutoskey. As my reading log and my recent posts betray, I’ve been obsessed lately with autobiography, nature writing, and writing about the body–that is, writing concerned with real life and material existence, with immanence. So, when I stumbled upon Gutoskey’s work, I was attracted to its materiality. Gutoskey works in “mixed media assemblage”–that is, he creates by putting together diverse objects, paints, and images–so his pieces are strikingly physical. Moreover, Gutoskey’s work is very grounded in personal experience. He himself says that his work “implies a story, a line of thinking, a feeling, some issue I am mulling over.” Gutoskey does explore transcendent spiritual and philosophical themes, but ultimately his pieces are exercises in immanence–exercises in paying attention to physical objects and reflecting on individual experiences. Here is Gutoskey’s website, and below are some of my favorite of his pieces:

The Metamorphosis of Faith, 1. Prayer:

Towers and Shrines, So No One Can Forget:

Renaissance Cloning Kits, Purification of Consciousness:

Second, Doty. Doty’s book is a beautiful memoir, an insightful consideration of still life painting, and a useful philosophical discussion about materiality and intimacy. Reading it complicated my response to Gutoskey’s work. On the surface, Doty’s understanding of immanence in art mirrors my response to Gutoskey. Doty stresses that the power of still life is in its immanence–in the artist’s intimacy with the subject and his dedication to material detail. However, Doty also points out something I missed: that the power of still life–of art in general–also comes from its transcendence. Doty says still lifes are powerful not only because they portray an artist’s intimacy with his material subject but also because they conceal the personalities of their creators and because their subjects are unrealistic in their perfection. This thesis was hard for me to swallow until I got to the book’s pivotal question and answer: Doty asks, “Why, if all that is personal has fallen away, should these pictures matter so?” and he answers, “something would remain, something distilled and vibrant in the quality of attention itself” (my emphasis). In other words, even when a painting is not grounded in material reality or in the painter’s personal life, it still retains a trace of intimacy in its attention to life. Indeed, Doty suggests, art motivated by “pure attention” is the best art because it maintains a balance between immanence and transcendence.

But Doty’s new insights didn’t home for me until I participated in communion last Sabbath at my local SDA church. For several weeks, I’d been thinking about the need for immanence in art and religious practice, and I’d been privately lamenting the fact that, as a Protestant, I can’t practice intimacy with spiritual objects as Catholics do–for example, with icons, shrines, and rosary beads. And so, when the deacons passed out the communion wine and wafers last Sabbath morning, I found myself wondering if SDAs would get more of an artistic and spiritual blessing out of communion if they believed it to be the actual body and blood of Christ. But then, the pastor began to read the story of the last supper, and I was caught unawares by Christ’s words about the bread and wine: Christ says enigmatically, “This is my body which is given for you: this do in remembrance of me.” In the space of a breath, Christ says both that the bread and wine are his actual body and that they are mere mementos. He leaves us hanging, and so, like countless theologians throughout the centuries, I wanted to stand up and ask, “Well, which is it? Are the bread and wine real or symbolic?”

I’m not even going to pretend to offer a theological answer to that question, but I will say that good art and good art criticism raise a very similar question. Like the bread and wine, they bring us to the edge of our seats and make us ask, is that real or symbolic? And, while I’m unsure about the theological answer to that question, I think the artistic or literary answer is “both.” On the one hand, good art and good art criticism must emerge from material and personal reality. On the other hand, though, they must leave behind only traces of that materiality and personality–only symbolic momentos of the artist’s attention to them. The theological battles over the question of transubstantiation demonstrate that this balance is a hard one to strike, but I think it’s an important one. For me, Christ’s enigmatic words unexpectedly offer a challenging but necessary standard for appropriately integrating the personal into art and art criticism. It’s a standard I hope I can begin to live up to in my own work.

What Hiking the Narrows Taught Me About My Body and Fitness

Last month my family went on vacation to Zion National Park, and my father, my boyfriend, and I spent a day hiking the Virgin River Narrows. The experience was an eye-opening one for me.

I should say first that I’m not usually the sort of person who “lives in my body.” That is, I don’t spend very much time thinking about physical things, and instead I tend to focus on “heady” subjects–my thoughts, ideas, and emotions. Much to my detriment I’m sure, when I’m working on an interesting research project or wrapped up in a stimulating conversation, I often forgo eating and sleeping. Moreover, motivating myself to exercise is difficult because physical challenges don’t excite me, and the mindless repetitiveness of exercises like jogging and swimming and lifting weights bores me.

But the experience of hiking the Narrows made it next to impossible for me either to be bored with exercise or to ignore my body. The Narrows was truly like nothing I had experienced before. The complete “top-down” hike, which we did, is a 16-mile trek, along–and sometimes in–the Virgin River. True to its name, the Narrows is a narrow slot canyon, and, on either side of you as you walk, carved red sandstone cliffs jut up into the sky, sometimes as much as 2000 feet. In places the canyon is wide enough for small banks to form on the edges of the river, but in its narrowest points it is only 20 or 30 feet wide and the water reaches from one canyon wall to the other.

As I hiked, I found myself constantly bombarded with physical stimuli, stimuli that forced me to pay attention to my senses as I usually don’t: the cold of the water and the force of the current on my feet, the scratch of undergrowth on my legs, the magnified roar of the water and our voices as they echoed on the canyon walls, the striking contrast of the red sandstone against the blue of the sky above. The glut of beauty around me made me exhilaratingly aware of my senses and of my body.

To be fair, though, I should also admit that the hike made me uncomfortably aware of my physical limitations. I have bad knees, and after 12 or so miles of hiking, bending them became quite painful. I even started to look for patches of deeper water that would cushion the movement of my legs and, because the water was cold, numb my pain. Maybe because of dehydration or just physical strain, I also developed an irritating nosebleed–never serious enough to really warrant Kleenex but just bothersome enough to make me notice it. And of course, I was simply tired. Since I don’t exercise much, 16 miles was a considerable trek for me. Accompanying the euphoric feeling of my senses in full alert, then, came a disconcerting cognizance of my physical “unfitness.”

Unfitness really is the word I want here. It expresses, of course, that I wasn’t fit in the sense of being out of shape. But, more than that, it also captures a deeper epiphany I had about my body as I rode the shuttle back to our campsite after our hike: that is, that my body was disappointingly unfit for or unworthy of nature, its natural habitat. What do I mean by this strange statement? I mean that on the one hand, my body’s responses to the hike’s sensual pleasures made me realize that natural landscapes like the Narrows are my natural habitat, my home. But on the other hand, the pain and discomfort I experienced on the hike made me face my own feebleness and my inability to function in my newfound home.

I suppose for the Christian, I’m merely restating the old teaching that humans were created to be perfect beings and to live in a perfect world, Eden (or Zion!), but that they fell and are now too sinful to live in paradise. Under such a paradigm, my unfitness is an inevitable state which I must pray to change. For the pessimists I hear on NPR, I suppose my struggle to hike the Narrows is just another example of the descent of American culture and its disinterest in the natural world and physical health. From their point of view, my unfitness is something about which to dialogue, worry, and write books.

While I think both of these approaches have their merits, I have chosen to deal with my unfitness in another way–a strikingly physical and unintellectual way. I do enough praying and dialoging, worrying and writing, and, for me at least, the problem of unfitness requires a more hands-on solution. Namely, something rather unoriginal and anticlimactic: exercise. For the past month, I’ve been trying to spend more time “out of my mind” (!) and “in my body” which usually amounts to spending a few minutes 3-4 times a week on the treadmills or elliptical machines in my apartment complex. I’ll admit, running in a fitness room isn’t nearly as exciting as hiking the Narrows, but, in light of what I learned on my hike about sensual stimulation, I’ve been trying to pay more attention to my senses as I exercise in order to make it more interesting. I ask myself: what does my breathing sound like? how does my sweat feel? how–I ask myself, embarrassed–does it smell? how does my body look as it exercises? I am, after all, a bit of nature, and if I can’t enjoy the beauty of a stunning canyon or breathtaking vista, I can at least enjoy whatever small curiosities I can find in myself. I feel more motivated to exercise too if I think of it as preparation for returning to the wild, for returning home. I try to think of my exercise as “fitting” myself to the beauty I encountered on my hike, beauty I hope to encounter again. In the end, I suppose my solution isn’t very original or earth-shattering, but for me at least it’s a start and it’s what I can do.

Jane Goodall’s Reason for Hope: Why Evolution Can Be a Beautiful Idea

I’ve decided to break up my series on tensions in religion and literature with some other writings. I plan to return to it every once in a while in the future as the spirit moves.

Even though I grew up hearing a lot about the science and religion wars (as I mentioned in another post), until last month, I really hadn’t given much thought to the debate between evolution and creation. I’m a literary critic, not a scientist, so I tend to care less about what actually happened at the dawn of time than about the stories we tell ourselves about it and how they affect the way we live. If pressed, I suppose I would have said evolution was more scientifically convincing than creation, but I would have also stressed that I find the story of creation far more artistically and ethically appealing. I would have said that Genesis 1-2 is a breathtaking storytelling feat and that I like what it teaches: that creativity is worthwhile since God himself is a creator, that humans are valuable because they are made in God’s image, and that the world is (or at least was) “good” and that we should take care of it. In contrast, I would have said, the story of evolution is never as beautifully told as the story of creation, and, at least in its extremist forms, it teaches troubling messages: that life is an accident, that success comes only with violent competition, that art and religion and human relationships are, like everything else, only survival devices.

That was what I thought of the story of evolution a month ago, before I read Jane Goodall’s Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey. Goodall’s book is a remarkable spiritual autobiography about a life-long study of chimpanzees, and it opened my eyes to the beauty in the story of evolution and helped me see its potential for inspiring ethical living. While I still think the story of evolution has its artistic and ethical problems, I now think it has undeniable strengths as well.

From the start, Goodall puts the debate between evolution and creation into perspective, a move I find appealing. She describes herself as an evolutionist, but, like me, she seems to care less about whether evolution actually happened than about how it influences how we live. She explains this philosophy to a curious bellhop one day:

I ended by telling him that it honestly didn’t matter how we humans got to be the way we are, whether evolution or special creation was responsible. What mattered and mattered desperately was our future development. Were we going to go on destroying God’s creation, fighting each other, hurting the other creatures of His planet? Or were we going to find ways to live in greater harmony with each other and with the natural world? That, I told him, was what was important.

However, while Goodall downplays the necessity of believing in evolution, she also does a good job of quietly demonstrating, in the example of her own life, that the story of evolution has the potential to make a profoundly positive impact on one’s spiritual life and that it can make one a more responsible citizen of the earth. Indeed, for Goodall, the story of evolution is inextricably connected with a spiritual and moral existence because if, as evolution teaches, humans share a common ancestry with monkeys and alligators and mosquitoes and daffodils, each of them are part of our extended family and must be treated with care. Moreover, if every living thing is included in our vast family tree, each can tell us something about ourselves and our place in the world.

Indeed, Goodall’s belief in the story of evolution seems to propel her toward an intimacy with nature that I find deeply moving. For example, she describes giving personal names not only to the chimpanzees she is studying, an unusual enough practice in scientific research, but also to inanimate natural phenomena–a nearby mountain, a stream, the wind. In fact, she describes having an “intuitive” connection with the trees she encounters in the forest:

I became intensely aware of the being-ness of trees. The feel of rough sun-warmed bark of an ancient forest giant, or the cool, smooth skin of a young and eager sapling, gave me a strange, intuitive sense of the sap as it was sucked up by unseen roots and drawn up to the very tips of the branches, high overhead. Why, I used to wonder, did our human ancestors not take to the trees, like the other apes?

Ultimately, Goodall’s connection with the natural world–and in particular, with the chimpanzees– stimulates her ethical development as well. Goodall talks at length about how the chimpanzees taught her, not only scientifically, but also personally–about how to mother, how to resolve conflict, and how to cope with death. Furthermore, it is Goodall’s belief in the interconnection of all life that prompts her to become a leading advocate of environmental preservation and animal rights.

I suppose Goodall’s appreciation for the natural world would have been equally possible from a creationist worldview. Genesis teaches humans to be stewards of nature, and Goodall says herself that she knows many environmentally-aware and admirably moral creationists. In the end, then, Goodall seems to be right in saying that it doesn’t much matter what one believes about what happened in the beginning; what matters is how one acts now. And, I would say, Goodall offers an admirable example of how one should be acting now, convincing me that the story of evolution can be beautiful and that it can produce at least one extremely beautiful life.

Tensions in Religion and Literature III: Self

Religion and literature tend to disagree about how one should treat the self. This was a point I first discovered during my senior year in high school when I was trying to decide what college to attend and what to major in. Part of me wanted to study English in a prestigious secular university. I had liked my English classes in high school and, being relatively good at them, had enjoyed my teachers’ praises. So, I concluded, studying English at a big name university would allow me to continue learning about what I liked, and it would incite further admiration from my friends, family, and teachers. However, another part of me felt compelled–or in the religious lingo, “called”–to study theology at a small parochial college. At the time, sacrificing my ambitions and becoming a pastor seemed nobler and more selfless than becoming a writer or an English teacher. I’ve since realized that my understanding of the appropriate role of the self was too simplistic–religion isn’t all about self-sacrifice, and literature isn’t all about self-promotion. However, my difficulty with choosing a major and a college does point to a significant difference in how religion and literature view the self–a difference that has troubled not only me but others working on the fault line between religion and literature.

Religion does tend to call for a loss of self. Christians, for example, are supposed to imitate Christ’s self-sacrifice and follow his command, “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me” (Matt 16:24). Furthermore, Christians are not supposed to exalt themselves because, as Christ says, “the last shall be first, and the first last” (Matt 20:16). Admittedly, Christ also says, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” (Matt 22:39), suggesting a need for self-love, but Christians usually emphasize loving others more than loving self.

I know less about other world religions than I do about Christianity, but I suspect a similar emphasis on self-denial obtains for them as well. Buddhists, I know, teach the concept of anatta or anatman which means “no-self” or an “absence of a separate self,” and they believe that all suffering arises from one’s clinging to an individual and immutable self. Similarly, Muslims teach the concept of islam, meaning submission, and they believe that one should give up the will–or the self–to God.

While religion tends to require self-denial, writing great works of literature or great critiques of those works often calls for self-assertion and even self-promotion. Fundamentally, to write is to seek an audience and preferably an audience who likes what one writes and praises one for it. Whether a writer strives to appear on the New York Times bestseller list and be praised by prominent reviewers or merely hopes to get views and favorable comments for a personal blog (say, this one), in the end she always writes in order to get attention. Granted, on some level pastors and theologians want attention too–we all do–but the push for recognition seems to be stronger in literature than it is in religion.

The need for literary recognition and the compulsion to piously deny oneself frequently run up against each other in religious writing. I could list scores of writers who wrestled with this tension, but I’ll just name two with whom I’ve come to identify most. First, John Milton. Strangely, Milton is both one of the most important English religious poets and one of the most egotistical English poets–a combination that often produces peculiar contradictions and contortions in his poetry. In “Lycidas,” for instance, Milton seems to have conflicting feelings about fame. He calls it, enigmatically, “That last infirmity of Noble mind,” suggesting that it is at once an undesirable sickness and an admirable sign of nobleness.

Gerard Manley Hopkins too frequently wrestled with the problem of the self. Both a poet and a priest, he famously burned all of his poems when he took his religious vows because he believed writing poetry wasn’t appropriate for his profession. Even when he decided, seven years later, that writing poems would be suitable for a priest after all, he continued to struggle with the problem of the self in his poetry. In “As kingfishers catch fire,” for example, he says that mortal things should assert both their own presences and, in a sort of self-denial, Christ’s presence. The mortal thing, he writes, “speaks and spells” itself and cries “What I do is me: for that I came.” But, Hopkins continues, man also “Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is– / Christ.” In the end, then, Hopkins argues not that mortal things should speak of Christ instead of themselves, but that they should speak of Christ and themselves. They should not so much resolve the tension between self-assertion and self-denial as try to accomplish both at once.

I can’t say that Milton or Hopkins–or any other religious writer–ever determines exactly how one should conceive of the self. And if they haven’t figured it out, I certainly can’t say that I have. However, I do think that the tension in the lives and poetry of religious writers like Milton and Hopkins raises a number of potentially profitable questions: Can composing literature ever be a selfless act–say, when one writes instruction or exhortation? And, if it can, how does the writer distinguish selfish motivations for writing from selfless ones? Can pious self-sacrifice ever be a form of self-promotion? Whose recognition, if any, should the religious writer seek–God’s or man’s? Is self-promotion even necessarily bad? In the end, I imagine some of these questions exceed even the interdisciplinary boundaries of religion and literature and become philosophical questions about altruism or psychological questions about self-actualization. Still, I think that literary and religious scholars could begin to engage these questions more rigorously than they do now and that doing so could significantly enrich their understandings of literary and religious texts.

Tensions in Religion and Literature II: Empathy

In my last post, I promised to try to answer a long-neglected question: what are the tension points between religion and literature? In this post, I’ll begin by discussing a tension point that I’ll call “the problem of empathy.”

Reading or writing a work of literature is, fundamentally, an exercise in empathy. One of my English professors first suggested this idea to me when she opened my freshmen survey of literature class by saying grandiosely, “If you don’t learn anything else in this class, or for that matter in your liberal arts education as a whole, I hope you learn the art of empathy.” At the time, my professor’s words puzzled me, but as I’ve thought more about them over the years, I think I’ve worked out what they meant. And, I’ve decided, my professor was spot on. As I’ve studied literature, I’ve learned that reading a text well requires walking around in the shoes of the author for a while. I have to live in the world the author lived in, think the thoughts the author thought, and believe the beliefs the author believed. Only after I’ve “been” the author for a while, after I’ve truly empathized with him or her, can I offer a true and persuasive reading of the text. The same principle applies for writing literature. In order to create persuasive fictional characters or make insightful poetic claims, an author has to get inside the mind of humanity and attentively look out of its eyes. The best authors are those who do this best, those who have mastered the art of empathy.

Here’s the rub: while reading and writing literature requires empathy, religion requires just the opposite. This may sound counterintuitive, but hear me out. It’s not that religious people are cold, unfeeling ogres; in fact, I would be the first to argue that religious belief has made for some of the most warmhearted and caring people our planet has seen. However, while religion encourages empathy in some things–like in caring for the sick, the elderly, and the poor–it restricts empathy, whether implicitly or explicitly, in other things. Within Christianity, a taboo list might include witchcraft, alternative sexual practices, and acts of violence. Such things are not to be empathized with, and doing so is succumbing to temptation.

The restrictions imposed on literature by religion routinely create quandaries for religious writers and readers of literature. C. S. Lewis, for one, in the preface to The Screwtape Letters–a book which takes the form of a series of letters written from the perspective of a senior demon to a junior demon–says he won’t write anything else from a demon’s perspective because doing so gives him, as he puts it memorably, “spiritual cramp”:

I was often asked or advised to add to the original Letters, but for many years I felt not the least inclination to do it. Though I had never written anything more easily, I never wrote with less enjoyment….Though it was easy to twist one’s mind into the diabolical attitude, it was not fun, or not for long. The strain produced a sort of spiritual cramp. The work into which I had to project myself while I spoke through Screwtape was all dust, grit, thirst, and itch. Every trace of beauty, freshness, and geniality had to be excluded. It almost smothered me before I was done. It would have smothered my readers if I had prolonged it.

While Lewis’ literary sensibilities enabled and encouraged him to compose an astonishingly empathetic work from a demon’s point of view, his religious sensibilities made him think better of it. Even though most Christians would argue that The Screwtape Letters is a very tame and well-intentioned trek into the demonic, Lewis felt the urge to rein himself in.

The problem of empathy gets even stickier when we deal with other works. Consider Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, a novel written from the perspective of a man sexually obsessed with a 12-year-old girl. Is this the sort of text the religious person should be reading? How about J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, in which the teenage narrator repeatedly swears blue streaks so blue they’re almost purple? Or what about Eve Ensler’s play The Vagina Monologues, in which various women, one of whom is a lesbian prostitute, talk candidly about their vaginas? For Catholics at the University of Notre Dame, the question of whether to perform The Vagina Monologues on campus has spurred many heated debates over the last several years. Is The Vagina Monologues the sort of play the religious person should watch? What about the woman who plays–that is, who empathetically pretends to be–the lesbian prostitute? Is this a fitting role for a religious person?

I don’t have definitive answers to any of these questions, though maybe I should say that I have chosen to read Lolita and The Catcher in the Rye and go to a showing of The Vagina Monologues. At least for these works, empathizing with great literature was more important to me than adhering to religious teaching. I decided these classics were classics for a reason and that their positive messages outweighed their negative ones. What I want to point out, though, is that I’m not sure my decision was the “religious” one. That is, I think many in the religious community would disagree with my choice. In the end, then, the gap between what I and many religious people think is right in the realm of literary empathy suggests, if nothing else, a need for more dialogue about the problem of empathy. Empathy is a tricky business, and I think students of literature and religion alike could benefit from thinking and talking about it more than they do.