These pieces are ongoing responses to Life, reflecting my interest in art and music, as well as what Buddhists call 'the manure of experience'. Future titles will include an essay on Silence, a piece on Aquinas and the Zen Master, and a short story called Chicken Legs.
A TERRIBLE BEAUTY
Francis Bacon: disorder and reality
"Two years before his death, the self-professed atheist Francis Bacon travelled to Colmar. The man who pronounced ‘I believe in nothing. We are born, we die, that’s it’, made the journey to Alsace to see the Isenheim altarpiece of Matthis Grϋnewald.
Grünewald’s Crucifixion panel was for Bacon a touchstone, one of the few works of art to which he conceded greatness. According to French author J-K Huysmans, it
'strikes you dumb.… It is as if a typhoon of art had been let loose and was sweeping you away, and you need a few minutes to recover from the impact to surmount the impression of awful horror made by the huge crucified Christ… At the ends of the unnaturally long arms the hands twist convulsively and claw the air... while the feet, nailed one on top of the other, are just a jumbled heap of muscles underneath rotting, discoloured flesh and blue toenails'
Grünewald’s hyper-realism, the blood-spattered pain of his hanging Christ pale against a night-dark landscape, the feet swollen and green-tinged around the wound of the nails, the lips grey with thirst, the thorns gouging into the delicate skin of the forehead and scalp (said to be the most excruciating of tortures) are difficult to look at. Grünewald, as Bacon, peels back the skin of appearances to expose the soul..."