October 31, 2023

Something Good #90: Temples

Lately, it’s been hard to write. It’s difficult to overcome the feeling that nothing I can say will make any difference; that the most I can hope for is to shift somebody’s opinion slightly in one direction or another. This overwhelming feeling that we’ve all been enlisted into battling PR campaigns in the endless proxy war for public opinion.

Nevertheless. We had woken on our first day in Spain to news of war. A week later, it was a grey morning in Barcelona’s Barri Gòtic and my head was still full, swimming with images of carnage. The cognitive-emotional dissonance always audible to me on some level, like a form of tinnitus, was at a full-blown roar.

Everything was closed except the tourist shops. It started to rain, so we ducked into a nearby church. This was the Basílica de Santa Maria del Pi, a 15th-Century structure that has survived earthquakes, bombings, and anarchist arsonry over the last 600 years.

Entering its quiet space, I was struck by a huge painting hanging in the apse. A woman, her lips a startling scarlet and her eyes fixed in the middle distance, held and comforted a young boy. It was a familiar Madonna and child scene at least in subject matter, but stylistically it contrasted powerfully with the Gothic surroundings. Reading a plaque, I gathered from the shaky translation that this originated as a piece of graffiti painted on the basilica’s exterior walls, and that the artist had been invited to recreate the image inside.

My daughter, who had never been in a church before, asked if she could light a candle. I gave her a euro and we helped her light a devotional at one of the side-chapels.

As an agnostic, unreconstructed Jew, I’ve never felt much more than polite disinterest in entering a church. It’s always bothered me that so much of the history of art and architecture has concerned itself with the same images and themes over and over again, motifs that I feel no personal connection to. But this graffitied mother, her face angry, pensive, and loving, her image suspended so brazenly in this medieval basilica like an intruder from the narrow streets outside, held me tight. I sat and watched her for a while.

One of the great ironies of Christianity, given its institutional history, is that the faith has an undeniable ability to communicate suffering, to represent it nakedly, to find dignity in it. When you see a suffering child, you can only imagine all children who have ever suffered. I remember the horrible photograph of a wailing boy separated from his family at the border in the first year or so of the Trump administration, and how his face reminded me so much of my daughter’s when she cried. It was impossible to distinguish between them. The value of that strand of empathy, carried over millennia, whether in the form of mural, photograph, sculpture or words, is I think impossible to separate from our own humanity.

On the same trip, I was able to step inside Antoni Gaudì’s Sagrada Família for the first time since the interior was opened to the public in 2010. For those who do not know, this spectacular, still-unfinished basilica has been under construction since 1892, and like the Santa Maria del Pi, has endured its share of misfortunes since: Civil War, arson, bad urban planning.

Getting into it took some work, and money. Tickets, I discovered, were already sold out weeks in advance, so I had to book a tour. A local guide shepherded us and some other tourists around the crowded exterior and into the building. We were handed portable radio receivers so we could listen to his monotonous, detailed explanations of the various architectural and decorative features, a spiel that never seemed to end. It was crowded, loud, and about as far from an experience of solemn reflection and awe than I could imagine.

But still—something of its grandeur broke through like the sunlight as it pierced the stained glass and cast a psychedelic wash of colours on the interior stonework of the church. If you could tune out the tour groups and the crackly radio transmission, you could almost get a sense of the ecstatic communion Gaudì must have built this basilica as a divine machine to create.

About 10 years ago I was travelling in Guangzhou, China, and I had an experience in a Buddhist temple that re-arranged my mind. I’m not going to call it a spiritual awakening, because that’s extremely corny and not at all accurate besides. It was more of a structural awakening.

Entering the grounds, I was immediately struck by how it was laid out. I was used to synagogues and churches, arranged nearly always so that the congregation faces one central altar, one rabbi or priest, a hierarchy of attention laid down in stone. This temple had no singular focus. It was an arrangement of shrines, incense holders, walkways, statuary, meditation areas, groups of elderly people praying together. Something about this organization shook something loose from my mind. I had grown up hating the wooden synagogue pews in which I’d spent hours bored out of mind, listening to adults pray in a Hebrew I barely understood. And while I will make no claims to being a Buddhist, or dare to say I understand the faith on a level deeper than the Religious Studies courses I took and the books I read in university, the layout of this place spoke to me.

(Years later, I would learn the 4,500-year-old Chinese game of Go from a coworker, and have a similar revelation about how the game, with its chasm-deep strategies based on tactical encirclements, surprise and insinuation, compares to Chess, a comparatively straightforward game of battle in which the goal is to beat your way through to your opponent’s “King” on the other side of the board. There are no really “sides” to the Go grid, and pieces are never moved.)

Back in Barcelona, I thought about how few places or spaces we inhabit that are designed for the purpose of contemplation or ecstatic experience. For me they’ve been few but precious—dance floors where we commune with others’ bodies, cinemas when the lights go down. Places where we can find sanctuary from the endless river of other peoples’ thoughts, but not from their emotions, their souls. It’s the miracle of writing that we can commune on a telepathic level with people around the world, even people long-dead, but the tragedy of communications technology that we can now hear all of their thoughts at once, relentlessly.

I made another, sillier pilgrimage while in Spain. Some 25 years ago or so I found myself in the Kabul youth hostel (pictured) in Barcelona's Plaça Reial, debilitated by a mysterious backpacker's illness that lasted more than a week. I couldn't do more than lie around the premises, listening to the Pulp Fiction soundtrack on repeat as it looped on the stereo. (I still can't listen to any of those songs ever again).

Worse, I was running out of things to read, and it was August and every bookstore in the city was closed. I ended up trading my brick-like copy of The Name of the Rose to another traveller for, get this, a copy of Time magazine—the slim international edition, no less. I had an upcoming 10-hour train trip to Paris and I was desperate. I ended up re-reading the magazine about 20 times on the journey, and it’s only now that I’m asking myself why I didn’t just keep the Umberto Eco novel and read it again. Chalk it up to the illness.

So many years later, this dumb “party hostel” is still here, and so am I.

All I have been able to listen to this week is PJ Harvey’s Let England Shake, which I am still convinced is one of the great and most essential artworks of this century, particularly alongside its accompanying video interpretations by war photographer Seamus Murphy.

What is the glorious fruit of our land?
Its fruit is deformed children
What is the glorious fruit of our land?
Its fruit is deformed children
What is the glorious fruit of our land?
Its fruit is orphaned children
What is the glorious fruit of our land?
Its fruit is deformed children

The great British filmmaker Terence Davies (Distant Voices, Still Lives, The House of Mirth), has died at the age of 77. In 2008 I had the good fortune to interview him at the Toronto International Film Festival on the occasion of the premiere of his film Of Time and the City, a symphonic montage of mostly archival footage exploring his home city of Liverpool and his upbringing there. The film is suffused with deeply personal references and signifiers, and I asked him if he was ever afraid that his art wouldn’t be understood, if it was so specific to his own memories, that it could somehow fail. He replied:

I don’t feel that when I’m making it. It’s art. I’ve never thought that.
But yes, there is the simple level of, will people like it or not? And of course if they don’t, it makes you a non-person in a way. Because it is a visceral thing. You either respond to things or not. And when I've had a bad response—and I have had in the past—I have to say to myself, well, if I don’t like a film, what do I do? I say, “I don’t like it.” So I can’t moan when people do it about my work.
All you can do is be true to your inner voice and your inner eye. You can’t do anything else. As T.S. Eliot says, “The rest is not our business.”1 Because you can’t control it. You can’t. Neither should you!
But some people have had dreadful times—look at Bruckner. One success! In all those years, one. And he still wrote nine glorious symphonies.
If Anton can do it, there's no excuse for the rest of us.

This week’s #nojacketsrequired comes via reader Mark Mosedale (socks pictured). Confession: the dust jacket is lovely. But I think I prefer the cover itself, and hope that at least some readers of this graphic novel get to see it someday. Watch out for Mark’s own graphic novel, Gigs, coming out via publisher Top Shelf sometime in the near future. As always, please send your own discoveries to me at [email protected].

I’m happy to report that You Can Live Forever won the Audience Award at the Vues d’en face festival in Grenoble, France. I’m also happy to report that Canadians can now stream the film on Crave. If you’re outside of Canada, you can likely rent or buy it on a streaming service such as Apple, Amazon, Google, Vudu, etc.

Rest in Peace Matthew Perry, whose “you are everything I never knew I always wanted” from the 1997 romcom Fools Rush In I performed onstage at least once in the early 2000s (long story).

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