“Could I but find the words”–– Art vs. the Barbarians

The dictator and his holocaust in “I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians.”

If a nation’s sins go unconfessed, can it ever be free of them? Or will they continue to flare up, resistant to every cure? If measles can make a comeback, why not fascism, racism, anti-Semitism, or even Nazism? Radu Jude, a Romanian director, explores the persistence of evil in his demanding new film, “I Do Not Care if We Go Down in History as Barbarians” (2018). The title is from a 1941 speech by the Romanian dictator, Ion Antonescu, calling for the eliminationof the Jewish population of Odessa. After the Ukrainian city was taken by Romanian forces in alliance with the Nazis, Antonescu’s soldiers murdered some 30,000 Jews. Before Romania switched sides to the Allies in 1944, Antonescu would preside over the slaughter of 400,000 Jews and other minorities.

The dictator was executed for war crimes in 1946, but most Romanians repressed their guilty memory. The Romanian government would not make an official admission of complicity with the Nazis until 2000––54 years later!––in order to gain admission to the European Union. But the subject remains largely taboo in that country. Who can break the contagion of silence? And who will listen?

Jude’s film proposes art as a remedy. When an idealistic director, Mariana Marin (the riveting Ioana Iacob), is hired by a municipal government to stage a sanitized account of the Odessa occupation as a public spectacle, she decides to tell the truth of the massacre instead. To rip away the mask of denial might be the beginning of repentance and healing.

Mariana’s ambitious production is hampered from the start. Many of her non-professional reenactors resent its critical stance on Romanian history. Some are uncomfortable playing the part of the hated Russians, while others seem a little too willing to put on the uniforms––and the swagger––of the Nazis. Others refuse to play Roma gypsies, the untouchables of eastern Europe. Old bigotries remain alive and well in the twenty-first century.

And Mariana’s production staff, for all their shared idealism, are not exempt from anxiety and discomfort. They too are Romanians, shaped by a culture of denial. When they gather to view historical footage and photographs of naked brutality, their conversation is laced with crude jokes and trivial asides, as though only laughter and silliness can lighten the oppressive weight of horror.

But Mariana’s greatest challenge is Movilă (Alexander Dabija), a city official who pressures her to tone down the truth-telling, so the public will not be offended. His extended debates with Marin, unlike conventional movie dialogue, are fraught with critical theory and intellectual fireworks. Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Elie Wiesel are all invoked. The didactic talkiness, showing the influence of Brecht and Godard, subverts the insulating escapism of commercial cinema.

Movilă is witty and charming, and the chemistry between him and Mariana generates a palpable charge. But his “whataboutism,” downplaying the significance of any particular atrocity by citing examples of even greater evils, is insidious. Sure, Odessa was bad, but not as bad as some other massacres. Why single it out? Do you want have a competitive massacre Olympics, or award an Oscar for the worst atrocity? It’s a human problem, not a Romanian problem. And what good does it do to beat ourselves up for something that is past and gone? Negativity can’t bring a people together.

Mariana agrees to make changes in order to maintain her funding, but it’s a promise she doesn’t intend to keep. On the night of the public performance in the city square, what the crowd sees is a horrifying representation of the massacre. The actors playing Romanian soldiers round up the actors playing Odessa Jews, locking them inside a wooden barracks. The building is set on fire, making a great holocaust in the middle of the square (the actors having slipped out through a hidden exit).

Mariana had hoped that this alarming spectacle of national evil would shock the audience into an awakened conscience, producing a collective cry of “never again!” Instead, the spectators seemed to enjoy the whole thing. It was not only hugely entertaining, it mirrored their own prejudices and resentments. Instead of being an indictment, it was celebrated as a festival of tribalism. The people’s eyes glowed as they gazed upon the flames. Many nodded and smiled. Some even cheered.

Mariana had failed to make a difference with her art. But what about the filmmaker? What were his expectations? Can his story about the failure of art to change us become itself an example of art that does transform? I don’t know how Romanians have responded to this film, but when I saw it recently at this year’s Seattle Film Festival, I came away wondering about the transformative role of art in my own country.

Winslow Homer, The Gulf Stream (1899)

On a recent visit to New York City, I saw several works which strive to make our darkness visible and bring the repressed or forgotten to light. In the Metropolitan Museum, Winslow Homer’s The Gulf Stream (1899) shows a black man adrift without mast or rudder in a stormy sea. The high horizon accentuates the enclosing mass of water. A sea spout looms dangerously near. Sharks prowl hungrily, while patches of red paint suggest blood already spilled. Homer never explained the painting. Some have interpreted the man’s calm in the face of peril as an image of hope. Others, finding suggestions of a tomb in the cabin’s dark opening, see a man resigned to death.

The docent giving a talk when I entered the gallery acknowledged the generalizing views of the painting as a metaphor for the universal human condition, but she also suggested that Homer may have had a more specific subject in mind. Whatever rights and freedoms had come for ex-slaves at the end of the Civil War, they were soon eroded by legalized segregation, which became firmly established in the South over the last 15 years of the nineteenth century.

Could this 1899 painting have been for Homer an image of African-Americans in a racist country, not just set adrift without the power to control their fate, but actively threatened by hostile forces? When some of his contemporaries complained about the apparent hopelessness of the picture, Homer added a distant schooner on the horizon. But as a type of vessel more common to the slave trade era than the new century, perhaps it signified not the hope of rescue but the lingering ghost of slavery, refusing to vanish.

At the New York Historical Society (where I had gone to hear Cole Porter tunes played live on his 1907 Steinway), I discovered an exhibition of works by Betye Saar, best known for her washboard assemblages––adapting a common tool of laundresses and maids to address “enslavement, segregation, and servitude.” In Liberation, for example, Saar recycles a demeaning stereotype into an image of defiant strength.

Betye Saar, Liberation (2014)

Among Saar’s washboards was posted a poem by Langston Hughes, “A Song to a Negro Wash-Woman” (1925):

Oh, wash-woman
Arms elbow-deep in white suds,
Soul washed clean,
Clothes washed clean,––
I have many songs to sing you
Could I but find the words. . .

And for you,
O singing wash-woman
For you, singing little brown woman,
Singing strong black woman,
Singing tall yellow woman,
Arms deep in white suds,
Soul clean,
Clothes clean,––
For you I have many songs to make
Could I but find the words.

Betye Saar, (I’ll Bend, But I Will Not Break (1998)

I was particularly taken by Saar’s installation piece, I’ll Bend, But I Will Not Break (1998). The ironing board is printed with a famous icon of human evil: the cruelly impersonal graphic of black bodies crammed into the British slave ship Brookes. The original 18th-century engraving was widely disseminated by the abolitionist movement, making it “perhaps the most politically influential picture ever made.”[i]

Over one end of this diagram is superimposed a photographic image of a female house slave, bent over as she irons. An actual iron, signifying both female labor and the branding of slaves, is attached to the board with a chain, another symbol of bondage. The neatly ironed sheet hung on the wall bears the initials “KKK.” Saar has commented on the weird paradox of this image:

“In order for a klansman to go out, he had to have a clean sheet, and a black woman—an Aunt Jemima type—had to wash that sheet. It was about keeping something clean to do a dirty deed. It’s just an ironing board and a wash line, but the political implications are strong.”[ii]

Nichola Galanin, White Noise: American Prayer Rug (2018)

The recurring Biennial at the Whitney Museum is dedicated to what’s going on now in American art, and this year’s exhibition, where half the artists are women, half are people of color, and 75 percent are under 40, features many subjects and perspectives intended to open our eyes to what may be hidden, unnoticed, or even uncomfortable for many.

One of my favorite works was White Noise: American Prayer Rug (2018) by Nicholas Galanin, an Alaskan of Tlingit/Unangax descent. Made of wool and cotton, it suggests a television screen filled with electronic noise or “snow”––the flickering dots of static picked up by an antenna in the absence of a transmission signal. But “white noise” is a specifically acoustic term, referring to a mix of all the sound frequencies audible to the human ear, suppressing unwanted sounds so we might more easily fall into sleep.

White Noise vibrates with a rich play of differences: soft fabric representing the hardness of glass, the freezing of restless static into a static image, the correlations and disparities between visual and acoustic “noise.” But the sharpest contrast is between the devotional context of a prayer rug and the idolatrous worship offered to our screens. Prayer is the practice of deepest attention, but the all-knowing, all-seeing screen which devours our time is a poor substitute for true divinity.

Galanin describes his work as a protest against such idolatry. “The American Prayer rug is hung on a wall in place of flat screen televisions, as the image accompanying droning sound we use to distract us from our own suffering, from love, from land, from water, from connection; there is no space for prayer, only noise.”

But the spirituality of White Noise is firmly intertwined with timely political critique:

“The work points to whiteness as a construct used throughout the world to obliterate voices and rights of cultures regardless of complexion. Calling attention to white noise as a source of increasing intolerance and hate in the United States as politicians, media, and citizens attempt to mask and obliterate the reality of America’s genocidal past and racist present.”[iii]

It should be noted that the old-fashioned analog television screen is a relic of the past. Can we say the same about white supremacy?

I Do Not Care, The Gulf StreamI’ll Bend But I Will Not Break, and White Noise all bring what is hidden or repressed into public visibility. God only knows what difference any work of art (or liturgy or sermon) makes in either individual or social consciousness, but let us be grateful for the prophets and visionaries among us. Where there is no vision, the people perish (Proverbs 29:18).

And for those who don’t frequent traditional art venues, many artists are taking their work into the streets, where their prophetic message is impossible to ignore. Just the other day (June 12), twenty-four guerilla installations appeared overnight at public sites around New York City. At tourist sites like museums and Rockefeller Center, and outside media outlets from the New York Times to Fox News, a small cage was set up. Inside was the sculpted image of a child under a foil blanket. Continuous audio of crying children played for everyone to hear. A sign on each cage read: #NoKidsInCages.

attribution: Matthew Earle Scott/Twitter

As I have written in previous posts on art activism, Beautiful Trouble and Insurrectionary Imagination, “making the invisible visible is one of the key principles of art activism. Bring an issue home, tell its story, put a face on it.” The placing of those cages, like Mariana’s reenactment of the Odessa massacre, made the public look evil in the face. Of course, the authorities soon covered the cages with blankets and disabled the audio, restoring the invisibility of this shameful American sin.

The Republicans who are abusing those children
do not care if they go down in history as barbarians.

What about the rest of us?

 

 

Related posts:

Beautiful Trouble: A How-to Book for Creative Resistance

Insurrectionary Imagination and the Art of Resistance

Temporary Resurrection Zones

 

[i] https://unframed.lacma.org/2018/04/23/new-acquisition-betye-saars-ill-bend-i-will-not-break

[ii] New York Historical Society: “Women, Work, Washboards: Betye Saar in her own words” (https://unframed.lacma.org/2018/04/23/new-acquisition-betye-saars-ill-bend-i-will-not-break)

[iii] Nicholas Galanin: https://www.flickr.com/photos/galanin/31102635898

“The Worm That Gnaws the World”––Trump and the Problem of Evil

Dis gnaws the traitors in the pit of hell (Inferno 34), Codex Altonensis, Pisa, c. 1385.

Trump will eat your soul in small bites.

–– James Comey

What could I say, what could I do to help this wounded creature whose life seemed to be flowing away from some secret hurt?

–– Georges Bernanos, Diary of a Country Priest

 

In his timely essay on “The Psychology of Evil,” Frank Batavick summarizes M. Scott Peck’s diagnosis of evil as a personality disorder:

“Evil individuals programatically indulge in scapegoating, blaming personal problems or the problems of society on someone else or another class of people. That’s because the evil parties consider themselves above reproach and must deny their own badness. By lashing out against others and saying they see evil in them, they are able to transfer their guilt. Evil people are also unable to assume the viewpoint of their victims, and so they lack empathy for the hurt they have caused with their cruel words and deeds.”

Such “malignant narcissists” reject all criticism and repress all self-doubt. They cannot bear the pain of introspection. As “people of the lie,” they deceive themselves as well as everybody else. Their own will trumps all others, and they take no responsibility for the damage they do. As Peck put it, “It is said ‘neurotics make themselves miserable; those with character disorders make everyone else miserable.'” [i]

Our country was poorly prepared for such an “evil” person to be given the power of the Presidency. So far Trump has paid little price for defying norms and breaking laws. And his 10,000 lies (since being elected) go largely uncontradicted in the media, which simply repeat them without correction 65% of the time [ii], amplifying his corrosive disinformation many times over. Corruption, collusion, federal child abuse, a shameless war on the poor, the strangling of democracy, and the ravaging of planet earth are all met with a shrug by craven Senators and 40% of the electorate. Even our best-intentioned leaders lack effective means to contain the raging fires of fascism, tribal hatred, and climate suicide.

What’s going on now, what’s driving us all to the brink, seems more than one man’s “personality disorder.” It may be too late for therapy. We need an exorcism.

“The world of evil is so far beyond our understanding!” says Georges Bernanos’ fictional country priest. “Does the Monster [Satan] care that there should be one criminal more or less? Immediately he sucks down the crime into himself, makes it one with his own horrible substance, digests without once rousing from his terrifying eternal lethargy.”[iii]

Bernanos’ image of evil as an eater of souls, a black hole sucking everyone’s crime into its own “horrible substance” seems disturbingly apt for these times. None of us is exempt from its gravitational pull. Even as we resist its malignancy, we risk being tainted by it, feeding it with our own fascinated loathing. Gaze at it too long and your own heart turns to stone.

As Bernanos’ priest warns a young woman whose hatred for her father’s mistress is eating her own soul:

Who are you to condemn another’s sin? He who condemns sin becomes part of it, espouses it. You hate this woman and feel yourself so far removed from her, when your hate and her sin are two branches of the same tree. Who cares for your quarrels? Mere empty gestures, meaningless cries––spent breath. Come what may, death will soon have struck you both to silence, to rigid quiet. Who cares, if from now on you are linked together in evil, trapped all three in the same snare of vice, the same bond of evil flesh, companions––yes, companions for all eternity.”[iv]

 

Eugène Delacroix, Dante and Virgil in Hell (1822)

In the Divine Comedy, Dante finds the direct road to salvation blocked by three beasts: a leopard, a lion, and a wolf, representing “the three dispositions that heaven refuses”–– incontinence (obsessive lust for one’s own satisfaction), violence (the will to do harm, but also mindless rage) and fraud (hatred of truth and betrayal of trust). His only remedy is the downward path into the depths of the human shadow, facing the condition of our fallenness with honesty and humility.

Aided by a wise companion (Virgil) and protected by the powers of heaven, he makes his harrowing descent into the underworld. Along the way, various monsters and demons try to hinder his pilgrimage. The Minotaur tries to bully Dante and Virgil, but it becomes so consumed with “inhuman rage” that it loses focus. “Run past him while he’s going berserk,” shouts Virgil, and the pilgrims slip safely by.[v]

Further down, the hybrid form of Geryon, “that foul effigy of fraud,” seems even more daunting. “Behold the beast whose stench afflicts the world,” warns Virgil. Geryon has the face of “a righteous man, benevolent in countenance.” These are qualities seen nowhere else in hell, but Geryon’s disarming smile is only a mask. His body is that of a serpent (the archetypal deceiver) and his tail wields the poisonous sting of a scorpion. In classical myth, Geryon “enticed strangers to be his guests, only to kill and eat them.”[vi]

But while Dante is left by himself for a time to converse with dead souls, his guide (we know not how) manages to tame the beast, who consents to carry them into hell’s deepest place. It’s a frightening plunge into darkness, with only the blast of air against the poet’s face to measure the speed of their descent. Recalling the tragic images of Phaeton and Icarus falling to their deaths increases Dante’s sense of panic. “I thrust my head forward / and dared to look down the abyss. / Then I was even more afraid of being dropped, / for I saw fire and heard wailing, / and so, trembling, I hold on tighter with my legs.”[vii]

Facing his fear of the beast and accepting the dangers of the downward passage enable Dante to continue. As Helen Luke insists in her Jungian interpretation of the Inferno, the journey toward wholeness requires us to embrace our shadow and hold on tight. “[I]f we have the courage to see the true menace, and will consent to be aware of our own frauds, then Geryon becomes our servant and will carry us down on his back that we may look upon the roots of evil in the [human] psyche.”[viii]

And what does Dante find at hell’s deepest core? He finds Lucifer, or what is left of him, forever stuck in ice of his own making (the bitter wind generated by his flapping batwings freezes the outflow of infernal rivers). His single head has three faces, each with a different sickly hue. The mouth of each face chews without swallowing the body of a notorious traitor. Everything about him is a wretched parody of the Divine. The three faces parody the Trinity, the freezing wind parodies the life-giving breath of the Holy Spirit, the eternal chewing parodies the eucharist.

This is not the heroic and colorful rebel of Milton’s Paradise Lost, but a virtually lifeless thing without mobility, speech or thought. The “creature who had once been beautiful” is reduced to “the evil worm that gnaws the world.”[ix] Virgil calls him “Dis”––not a proper name, but a prefix: “away from,” “split-off,” “apart from,” as in “dis-ease” or “dis-order.”

Gustave Doré, Dis frozen in the lake of ice (1861)

Dante scholars Charles H. Taylor and Patricia Finley “dis” the king of hell as the epitome of brokenness : “The figure at the center of the realm of darkness symbolizes what is most split off from consciousness; separated into opposites the ego does not conjoin, giving rise to the psychological splitting and the paranoia that are at the core of destructive pathology. . . Dis stands frozen at the nadir of Hell as the emblem of lovelessness, the coldheartedness at the core of our deepest failures to be human.”[x]

In Perelandra, C. S. Lewis gives a similar diagnosis of Satan as “no longer a person of corrupted will,” but “corruption itself, to which will was attached only as an instrument. Ages ago it had been a Person; but the ruins of personality now survived in it only as weapons at the disposal of a furious self-exiled negation.”[xi]

What does all this add up to? Although these various literary and psychological descriptions of evil seem chillingly on the mark with respect to our current political situation, the point is not to demonize Trump. He is doing a fine job of that without our help, and he is a symptom more than a cause. As Gandalf says of Sauron in Lord of the Rings, “Other evils there are that may come; for Sauron is himself but a servant or emissary. Yet it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succor of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know. . .”[xii]

And I make no claim for anyone’s innocence––not even the saints who “persevere in resisting evil.”[xiii] As Will Campbell has reminded us in his succinct summary of the Christian faith, “We’re all bastards but God loves us anyway.”[xiv] Or as Pete Buttigieg, the most theological of the new presidential candidates, told Time magazine recently,

“This idea that we just sort people into baskets of good and evil ignores the central fact of human existence, which is that each of us is a basket of good and evil. The job of politics is to summon the good and beat back the evil.”[xv]

Good and evil are not usual subjects for political discourse, but we live in apocalyptic times. Souls are at stake, the human future is at stake, and to ignore the spiritual dimension of our current crisis only gives the advantage to the malignant shadow trying to consume the world. Night is falling, and it is time to put on the armor of light.

But as the Bible says in its most political book, the battle will not be won by our own violent replica of the devouring beast, but by the wounded Lamb of self-diffusive love.[xvi] Bernanos’ compassionate priest is an incarnation of this sacrificial archetype:

“Truly, if one of us, a living man, the vilest, most contemptible of the living, were cast into those burning depths, I should still be ready to share his suffering, I would claim him from his executioner.”

But the priest is also realistic about the soul-eating alternative: “the sorrow, the unutterable loss of those charred stones which once were men, is that they have nothing more to be shared.”[xvii]

Trumeau (detail), St. Marie de Souillac, France, 12th century.

 

Related post: Dante and Lewis Carroll Walk Into a Dark Wood

 

[i] Frank Batavick: “The psychology of evil,” Carroll County Times, March 23, 2017. https://www.carrollcountytimes.com/columnists/opinion/ph-cc-batavick-032417-20170320-column.html

[ii] Matt Gertz & Rob Savillo, “Study: Major media outlets’ Twitter accounts amplify false Trump claims on average 19 times a day,” Media Matters, May 3, 2019. https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2019/05/03/study-major-media-outlets-twitter-accounts-amplify-false-trump-claims-average-19-times-day/223572

[iii] Georges Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2002), 144.

[iv] Ibid., 138-139.

[v]Inferno, Canto xii.

[vi] Robert and Jean Hollander, note on Canto xvii.1-3, in their translation of Dante’s Inferno(New York: Doubleday, 2000), 295.

[vii] Inferno, Canto xvii, Hollanders translation.

[viii] Helen Luke, Dark Wood to White Rose: Journey and Transformation in Dante’sDivine Comedy (New York: Parabola Books, 1989), 33.

[ix] Infernoxxxiv.108 (Hollander).

[x] Charles H. Taylor & Patricia Finley, Images of the Journey in Dante’s Divine Comedy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 111.

[xi] C.S. Lewis, Perelandra (1943).

[xii] J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King (London: The Folio Society, 1997), 162.

[xiii] From the baptismal vows in the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer (1979).

[xiv] Will Campbell, Brother to a Dragonfly (1975). In a conversation following the killing of Episcopal seminarian and Civil Rights martyr Jonathan Daniels, Campbell was asked to sum up Christianity’s message in 10 words or less. His response indicated that simply pointing the finger at the evil of others did not do justice to the shared condition––and salvation––of fallen humanity.

[xv] Buttegieg, an Episcopalian, has also referenced Christ’s washing of the disciples’ feet as model for serving the common good. Time interview is quoted here: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/5/5/1855559/-Pete-Buttigieg-shut-down-homophobic-hecklers-then-got-support-from-a-surprising-sourceThe footwashing quote is here: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2019/04/07/pete_buttigieg_hypocrisy_of_evangelical_christians_supporting_trump_is_unbelievable.html

[xvi] In Revelation, a beast uttering “haughty and blasphemous” words makes war on the saints. “Who is like the beast, and who can fight against it?” everyone wonders. God’s reply is not an angelic army, but the Lamb offered since the creation of the world (Rev. 13).

[xvii] Bernanos, 164.