The Cerasi Chapel (August 2)
August 2
I’m coming up on my last days of being able to look at these paintings. I haven’t visited them every day like I intended to but, walking in today, I have the feeling of coming back to a familiar place, and when I compare that feeling to how I felt the first day, still a little jet-lagged, not remembering in which part of the church they were, I realize that I’ve cultivated a relationship with these paintings that I can carry with me for years. It seems to me that the world is more open to our involvement in it than we tend to believe. One has only to stay a moment longer, return two or three times more, and the attention we pay is returned manyfold. Hopkins said that what we look hard at seems to look hard at us. What do we look hard at these days? Our phones. And our phones look hard at us. But we could just as well look at other things with equivalent hardness. Suddenly, to “look hard” seems the wrong phrase. We should look softly, for longer, and more often. To look hard at something makes that something skittish. Better to look softly, obliquely. When I walk up to the chapel this morning, I realize that I approach these paintings the way one approaches a horse in a pasture, a fitting metaphor, I suppose, considering that there is a horse in one of the paintings. In the way they’re hung, the paintings themselves invite this obliquity. They refuse to be stared hard at, head-on.
The light is already on when I arrive. A big gaggle of people. Someone leaves. I take their place along the left wall to look at CONVERSION. I’ve noticed before the corpselike quality of Paul’s legs. The right one seems to be lopped off at the knee. There is, technically, no right leg to stand on. What legs there are resemble rotten meat. Diminished and discolored, they’re not the legs of a warrior. They seem like the legs of someone who’s been in a wheelchair for years, or the legs of a frog being dissected in some Midwestern high school classroom. But when it comes to his upper body, Paul is hella swol. There is strength in his raised arms, and his body armor echoes his abs. The physics of this painting have to do with the contrast between the many legs of the horse and assistant, forming a kind of leg-forest, and those raised arms. I can’t look at this painting without thinking of Weil’s GRAVITY AND GRACE. I’m convinced now that the power of this painting has to do with the seemingly contradictory fact that, at this moment of abject powerlessness, Paul is filled with a new power. All the trappings and weaponry of state power have literally fallen away (out of his hand, off his head), and he has come into possession of a different species of power. And this is where the raised hoof becomes so vitally important to the message of the painting. The “traffic” on the road to Damascus is represented by that raised hoof. That raised hoof is at once the power of God in microcosm and the disdain of the world. It’s as if someone were to lie down on a busy highway. But it is this very vulnerability that offers space for true power to enter. This is a theology not of legs (what one “stands” for) but of raised arms, open hands, closed eyes.
The light winks off. There’s always a kind of rudeness to the light going out, as if something offered has been preemptively withdrawn. In the dark I allow my eyes to adjust to the painting as it actually is. Soon, the white markings of the horse begin to glow, a beam of light falling between his raised arms, directing my gaze upwards to the less successful painting above CONVERSION, which shows Paul kneeling before Christ in heaven. As I’ve read, the light in CONVERSION comes from the painting hung above it, which is remarkable, I think. A painting lit not by artificial light, but by the light of another painting. The humbleness of that.
When someone slips some coins in and the artificial light comes back on, it seems I see less. I leave.