The Cerasi Chapel (July 8)
July 8
I throw my trash away in the public bins on the wide, empty piazza and walk to the church. A woman has already paid for the light. I join her, look maybe thirty seconds. The light goes out. I pay to bring it back. I begin today by focusing on Saul/Paul’s assistant in CONVERSION. An old man, furrowed brow, thinning hair. He stands in the same light Saul/Paul does, but is looking down, as is the horse. He doesn’t quite hold my attention, to be honest. He’s necessary to the picture as a witness. It wouldn’t work if he weren’t there. But my eye is drawn down to the confusion of limbs, like saplings in a forest, growing and shading one another out. I count twelve — the horse’s four legs, the servant and Saul/Paul’s four limbs, though Saul/Paul’s right leg is impossibly lopped off at the knee. It need not be. It’s as if Caravaggio wanted to show him without a literal leg to stand on.
I notice, too, for the first time, the beautiful detail of the reins. I believe also there’s some sort of leather cup that perhaps fitted over the horse’s mouth. The reins run away under the horse like a snake, or a river. Their sinuousness makes them seem fluid, alive, as if they might at any moment rock upright like cobras. But they’re dead, inert. Formerly means of control, they languish in the dust.
I’ve noticed that Caravaggio loves things with clear dimensions. They allow him to play with dramatic differences in light and shadow. For instance, yesterday, St. Francis’s cross was a small, handmade thing, certain sides in shadow, certain sides in light. Similarly, the reins have a hearty, strong look about them. They haven’t broken. They’ve simply been let go of. All the trappings of earthly life have simply lost their purpose. The sword means nothing if it’s not in a hand. The helmet means nothing if it’s not on a head. The reins mean nothing if they’re not held in tension against the horse’s will.
All of these things that have fallen are signs by which we can read that Saul has given up his will. In Alcoholics Anonymous, it is said that the only right use of the will is to align oneself with God’s will for us. This is seemingly a contradiction. The only correct use of the will is to use the will to give up the will.
I’ve tried to refrain from thinking beyond the moment of the painting, but I can’t imagine him literally or figuratively taking up the sword again. Cringe, but he will become a warrior for Christ. In fact, he’ll be blind for three days, whereupon a man named Ananias, called by the Lord in a vision, will go — you can’t make this up - to the house of Judas on Straight Street and ask for a man from Tarsus named Saul. Ananias had the nerve to remind the Lord that Saul had been doing some Christian-killing down here, but he was told, again, to go. He placed his hands on Saul and said, “Brother Saul, the Lord—Jesus, who appeared to you on the road as you were coming here—has sent me so that you may see again and be filled with the Holy Spirit.” Immediately, Saul was able to see. He got up. Was baptized, ate something, regained his strength.
So that’s the aftermath of the painting. Saul/Paul is already blind in the painting, while we, sighted, stand there looking at him. It’s almost voyeuristic. But of course what is always suggested is that there is no clear link between physical and spiritual sight — one can be blind and see, another can see and be blind.
What’s clear regardless is that this is the moment when Saul/Paul’s life changes. We understand something of this moment, for everyone has fallen at one point or another — in love, or for a vocation. But why do I feel all of a sudden an urge to secularize it? I think maybe because of that “warrior for Christ” thing I said earlier, which sounds too evangelical, though evangelist Paul was. Is his equivalent today some pastor at a mega-church in Des Moines who makes TikToks about Jesus? I don’t like Christianity in the same way that I don’t like poetry. But certain poems…
Last night, thinking I would just peek into another church, I found Mass already going on. It was in Italian but I more or less followed. Wonderful to give one another the sign of peace. Language ceases to matter. Then communion, remembering the taste of the wafer when I was a boy — stale, dry, dissolving into the smallest bolus of bread. In Larkin’s, “Churchgoing,” the church is holy if only because so many have gravitated there, in life and in death, “since someone will forever be surprising / A hunger in himself to be more serious, / And gravitating with it to this ground.”
Now I’ve wandered away from the painting, but last night, after midnight, sitting by the fountain on the Piazza, kids playing TikTok videos for one another on their phones, I looked across at the dark church, closed now, and felt such tenderness towards those of us who’d been there, like remembering a dinner one shared with friends years ago, not remembering a word that was said, only the feeling of having been together.