The Cerasi Chapel (August 1)
Finally feeling well enough to go back to Santa Maria del Popolo and look at the Caravaggios. I rallied for long enough yesterday to go to the one church with a Caravaggio that I hadn’t been to yet — Sant’Agostino — dedicated to St. Augustine and his mother, Monica, whose bones are kept there in the Basilica. The painting is “Madonna dei Pellegini,” or Madonna of Loreto, Loreto being the Italian town where it is said the original house of the Virgin Mary in Nazareth was transported to by angels. Archeological research has supported the claim that it is indeed the original house, though most think it was more likely transported by boat (maybe with an angelic crew?). This painting was extremely controversial for depicting the Virgin Mary and child in such an ordinary way. She could be any woman and her child, standing at the threshold of any house. She is shown barefoot, as are the two pilgrims who have fallen to their knees before her. Caravaggio’s rival, Giovanni Baglione, who worked to have Caravaggio jailed for libel, said the painting "caused the common people to make a great cackle (schiamazzo) over it.” It reminds me of the controversy over Colm Toibin’s beautiful novel, The Testament of Mary, which was protested by nuns for daring to depict Mary as a grieving mother, wondering why her son had to go and get himself killed. But this approach to the spiritual life is the only approach that interests me at all. I remember talking to Tobias Wolff once about certain scenes in the Gospels that, to us, prove the story, the way good details in a work of realist fiction allow us to forget, for a moment, that what we’re reading is an invention. Toby particularly admired this moment from Luke 19:
“19 1 Jesus entered Jericho and was passing through. 2 A man was there by the name of Zacchaeus; he was a chief tax collector and was wealthy. 3 He wanted to see who Jesus was, but because he was short he could not see over the crowd. 4 So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore-fig tree to see him, since Jesus was coming that way.
5 When Jesus reached the spot, he looked up and said to him, "Zacchaeus, come down immediately. I must stay at your house today." 6 So he came down at once and welcomed him gladly.”
It’s possible to find all sorts of interpretations of what this moment “means,” as here: “At a point in his life, Zacchaeus wanted to see Jesus more than he wanted to maintain his economic comfort hence a sycamore tree is a symbol of a place in our own lives where we are able to have a clear vision of our Saviour, Jesus Christ.”
But what impressed Toby and I much more was that a short man had to climb a tree to see Jesus coming along the road. It seems too random and yet perfectly sensible a detail to have been made up.
Similarly, the worldly details in Caravaggio’s paintings literally bring these scenes down to earth, no more so than in his depictions of soles. And yes I do believe the homophone to be significant. The sole of the foot, to Caravaggio, seems a way of conveying the simultaneous sullying and innocence of the soul. I’ve always interpreted Shakespeare’s phrase about a human being being a “poor forkéd creature” to mean that we are oriented simultaneously towards heaven and earth. Animals: earth. Saints: heaven. Us: both. In Crucifixion of St. Peter, the soul/sole of the torturer is sullied, but in its creased concavity is also turned upwards towards the same light that falls upon the saint. Indeed, this morning, for the first time, I noticed an echo between the creases in the torturer’s sole and those in Peter’s belly as he writhes up off the cross. Both the torturer’s foot and the saint’s body are depicted at the limit of flesh. I saw almost the exact same sole in the painting yesterday, of the pilgrims kneeling to the Madonna of Lareto. What may be even more radical than depicting the Virgin Mary as a barefoot woman standing in the doorway of a rundown house (my favorite detail is the patch of exposed brick to the right of the doorframe) is this rhyming of soles between the pilgrim’s in one painting and the torturer’s in the other. What I love about Caravaggio is there seems to be no moral absolutism in his work. He centers his subjects right in the middle of that fork Shakespeare identified, and so we find ourselves centered there as well. Of course pilgrims and torturers would have dirty feet! Why would anyone depict them otherwise? Mary must have had filthy feet, too, but of course Caravaggio knew not to show that (Peter’s feet, while similarly creased, are perfectly clean, not even bloody despite the fact that they’re riven through with stakes). What’s more interesting to me than that Jesus would stay at the house of a wealthy tax collector is that this wealthy tax collector was so short that he had to climb a tree, and not just any tree, but a Ficus Sycamorus. Of course, taken to the extreme, this sort of thing leads to those people who try to figure out where exactly Noah’s Ark was built. I’m not as interested in that as I am in these details, in stories and paintings, that make me feel involved in the work, participant rather than observer. We spend so much time thinking of Christ hanging or ruling over us. It’s remarkable to inhabit Zaccharias’s perspective and look down at Jesus looking up at him. Was he maybe balding a little by thirty-two? Yes, the long hair, but a thin patch at the crown? Similarly, we only see Mary via those dirty feet the pilgrims have reached her by walking upon. This is why I love and trust Thomas Merton so much - those pictures of him in a denim jacket, standing against some old barn in Kentucky, laughing. I love the stories of him hopping over the monastery wall to sit around in a tavern, drinking beer with farmers.
Shifting gears, about my big rant against Clover’s poem yesterday - I feel how I always feel after exerting that sort of negative energy on something. Sort of dull and unhappy. As important as I think negative criticism is, I'm not interested in being the next William Logan. It’s actually funny to read Logan’s poems, to watch him try to do what he faults pretty much every living poet for failing to do. I think that one has to either be a critic like that or be a poet. I don’t think it’s possible to be both. Of course Eliot was a great critic as well as poet, but an essay like, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” is not a takedown, but a call. I adore Geoffrey Hill’s Oxford Lectures, especially his gleeful annihilation of Larkin’s “Churchgoing,” a poem I had always loved and that I’m now, thanks to Hill, indifferent towards. It’s certainly more important to talk about what we love than to talk about what we hate. But I do find that there’s a tendency in the literary world right now to simply accept mediocrity for fear of offending someone, or, more likely, for fear of being canceled. We don’t seem to be allowed to hate anything these days, which is maybe not a bad thing, but nor do we seem to really, truly love anything, either. We live in a tepid middle ground (poor forkéd creatures), sending our true thoughts to group chats. I have a friend, a poet I respect quite a lot, who gets scared when I send him a takedown of some new poem I somehow stumble upon. He’s afraid of screenshotting, of being implicated, canceled. He has a job, tenure-track, and he doesn’t want to risk it. For instance, I laughed about a poet who, in her bio, said she “writes atop her hyphen,” meaning she writes from a hyphenate perspective. I just thought it was a funny phrase. I tried to imagine someone literally sitting on a hyphen and writing. But my friend seemed to want us to talk on Signal instead of text, or something, in case someone delved into our phones. This is not a healthy literary culture. Someone should absolutely be able to say that they “write atop their hyphen,” but we should absolutely be able to laugh at that phrase.
In the next few days I’ll write about a poem I truly, truly love. But just one last thing about the poem I hated. I want to distinguish between humor and silliness. What’s really lacking (in my opinion!) in so much of our lives at the moment is humor. An ability to not take ourselves so damn seriously. I’m not saying all of our poems should be funny. But do we really have to settle for only two choices? One being a kind of dour, dire poem that makes us feel like shit, the other just silliness? Because Clover’s poem is simply silly. Don’t tell me it’s not. I mean, it’s accompanied by a drawing of a pirate-cat! Have we become children? I know Christ said we ought to, but he didn’t mean it like this! If you look at the bottom of Caravaggio’s “The Inspiration of St. Matthew,” you’ll see that the bench St. Matthew kneels on is actually tipping off the canvas, threatening to plunge the saint right into our world. This is hilarious! But it’s not silly. It’s excessive, but not extraneous. I think the reason artists get silly is they’re afraid to give a shit. It’s a defense mechanism lest they be accused of really caring. Because to care is embarrassing. In the English Department at Stanford, there is a barely concealed antagonism between the literature and creative writing departments, which is maybe why the work I like least tends to try to cleverly conceal its political and critical agendas in what passes as a poem. The poem becomes a Trojan Horse in which the enemy crouches. What had seemed a gift is actually an invasion. As usual, Keats said it best:
“We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us—and if we do not agree, seems to put its hand in its breeches pocket. Poetry should be great & unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself but with its subject.”
Poems written from the brain are, not surprisingly, brainy. They work at the level of the intellect, the same level that allows people to get into grad school, get a teaching job, write smart criticism, curate their social media identities, pose for pictures as intellectuals they admire. Poems written from the heart, as cringe as that sounds, proceed directly from writer to reader, and are shared in such a way that the difference between writer and reader is incinerated. This is why we feel we ourselves have written the poems we love. But because the poetry world today is a profession, with a lot of money and clout at stake, the difference between poet and audience needs to be fiercely maintained. The consequence is that people find themselves confused by poems that have been vetted and offered to them by the institutions they inherently trust. When they don’t “get” the poem, they believe the fault to be with them, not with the poem.
Again, I’ll share my thoughts soon on a poem I love. It’s a poem I’ve read and taught hundreds of times and it never gets old for me. I have no interest in the poet herself, or, frankly, in any of her other work. It’s this particular poem I love, and that, in loving it, has become as much mine as it ever was hers.