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.

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.

Karen Armstrong’s The Spiral Staircase: Literary Criticism as Spiritual Autobiography

I’ve just finished rereading one of my favorite books, Karen Armstrong’s The Spiral Staircase. The book is Armstrong’s memoir about leaving her life as a Catholic nun and then struggling to re-enter the world. When I first read the book several years ago, I strongly identified with Armstrong’s story. Like Armstrong, I study religion and English literature, I spent time studying at Oxford, and I struggle to integrate myself into the world after being raised in the counter-cultural environment of Seventh-day Adventism.

The part of Armstrong’s story with which I most identified as I read her memoir this time, though, was her struggle to personalize her study of literature. She says that the the strict obedience and emotional restraint that she learned in the monastery made it impossible for her to form her own emotional and intellectual responses to literary works. The essays she wrote during and soon after her time as a nun did not represent her own thoughts about literature; instead, she describes them as “Gothic cathedrals” built of others’ ideas.

Recently, I too have had trouble personally connecting to the literature I study. And, what is more, I have wondered how I would appropriately express my personal responses to literature in the academic community, even if I wanted to. My graduate program–and I would imagine most graduate programs in literature–doesn’t exactly encourage students to talk about their personal responses to literature. Reader response theory began to broach this taboo topic, but it taught us to think more about others’ responses to literature than it did about our own responses.

And for good reason. I would be the first to agree that good literary scholarship should be grounded in an understanding of a work’s historical context and not only an anachronistic response in the present. I can see too that good literary criticism needs to thoroughly understand and respond to the remarks of other literary critics and not emerge solely from individual opinion. Moreover, I am not so idealistic as to believe that every work of literature should emotionally or spiritually resonate with every literary critic all of the time. Even given all these reasons why not to focus on personal responses, though, I still wonder if literary scholars are overlooking a potentially rich field of inquiry when they fail to acknowledge their own feelings about the works they study.

Part of the genius of The Spiral Staircase is that it in essence a work of literary criticism in the form of a spiritual autobiography. Armstrong acknowledges the need to personally connect with the literature she studies, noting that regaining the ability to emotionally connect with literature was her first step toward recovery. In one of the most moving passages in the book for me, Armstrong describes the first time she was able to hear a poem, T. S. Eliot’s Ash-Wednesday, on more than a cerebral level:

In the Hilary term of 1973, I felt the first flicker of true recovery. I had gone to hear Dame Helen Gardner, the Merton Professor of English Literature, lecture on T. S. Eliot. She was known in the faculty as “the Dame.” It suited her grand manner and her way of waving students into an auditorium as if she were welcoming them to a garden party. That day she was lecturing on the sequence of poems which Eliot has called Ash-Wednesday….As I listened to the Dame reciting Eliot’s lines, I felt for the first time in years profoundly and spontaneously moved by the poetry. I no longer had to wait for her to interpret it, and my appreciation was no longer wholly cerebral. It was an essentially emotional, intuitive response that somehow involved my entire personality, reaching something deeply embedded within. I had thought I had lost this capacity forever, but now here it was again. There was a complete and satisfying fit between my inner and outer worlds. The poem, with its quiet, haunting accuracy, perfectly expressed my own state, and endorsed it, showing that I had not weakly abdicated from the struggle for life and health, but had somehow stumbled upon a truth about the human condition and the way men and women work. (139-140)

In the next few pages, Armstrong goes on to offer what I think is a perceptive and insightful reading of Ash-Wednesday by explaining it in terms of her own experience. In fact, the whole of Armstrong’s spiritual autobiography can be read as a critique of the poem. Armstrong uses the first section of Ash-Wednesday as a sort of epigraph to the book, and she continues to reference it throughout her memoir, even using key lines as chapter titles. By the end of the memoir, then, the reader arrives at a far deeper understanding of what could initially have been a very baffling poem, and her spiritual story becomes an illuminating reading of the poem.

I’m not sure that Armstrong’s approach is always the best approach to take in the academic setting. A graduate seminar structured around students’ spiritual stories is probably not the most effective way to teach literature. I do tend to think, though, that the most penetrating and “true” readings of literary texts are grounded in a private, emotional investment in and a personal, spiritual connection with them, and I wonder if critics would do better at least to acknowledge, if not to formally discuss, the emotional and spiritual power that literature can have for them.