Elatia Harris

One autumn decades ago, my then husband and I drove around France, hunting down art masterpieces. We were young and in no hurry to go home, on a mission to be swept off our feet. And France was very obliging that way.  We should have been happy — did we not live for love and art? I’ll never know how far from happy he was, but I was unhappy in spite of being in love and in France, and that’s pretty unhappy.

We came to Colmar, an Alsatian town of such reproachful quaintness that the locals might as well have wandered about in costume. The idea was to spend the day with the Isenheim Altarpiece, housed in the Musee d’Unterlinden, a modern structure built around the ruins of a Late Gothic convent. I knew the nearly 500 year-old work the way you do from art history class — tiny figures writhing inside churchy frames on a textbook page, 35 mm slides so old they reduced all European painting to a green, amber and russet wash on the pockmarked projection screen of the lecture hall. And I had come to know the painter, Matthias Grunewald — that’s a self-portrait under the title, above right — from his drawings, which had shown me I was in for something intense. You could count on German painting for that, couldn’t you?

Ready, as always, to be overwhelmed by painting, I made my way to the big light vaulted room where the Isenheim Altarpiece had been displayed ever since it narrowly escaped destruction by a mob in the French Revolution. I was geared up for a complex and imposing work about 12 feet across and 10 feet high, oil on huge panels made into hinged wings that opened out to three different views.  It could not possibly be seen all at once, art historians had written. Sometime after World War II, the hinged panels were dismantled and mounted free-standing, allowing you to walk among the three views: the Crucifixion, the Madonna and Child, the Annunciation, the Transfiguration, the concert of angels, the meeting in the desert of Paul the Anchorite and St. Anthony the Great. His demons.

Familiar territory, no? And, oh, had I not studied, believing my time with this work, though long in arriving, was as inevitable as the transit of Venus? I did not then understand that you could over-prepare for experience, grinding to powder your sense of encounter, building in a cosmic letdown as sturdy as a masonry ramp. This would not be the day I found out about that, however, for turning a corner into the big vaulted 700 year-old room in the Musee d’Unterlinden, I came face to face with an image of immeasurable suffering.

It was the Crucifixion, and it may be wrong to post a photo here, where few readers will take it to heart. For a long time, I have wanted to write for readers here about the Isenheim Altarpiece, but have stopped at two obstacles. First, while Internet photography is orders of magnitude better than any photos available to me back in the day, this work of art defies the camera like few others, defies it not like a painting but like an ocean. Second, it is not just religious painting, but passionately religious painting, and readers might be moved to dismiss it on those grounds, aided by photography that fails to draw them into that parallel world of freedom from the usual philosophical constraints.

Art is the direct language of the human condition, cutting through our stupefactions and sophistries with its matchless power to surprise. To do as I did, to go to Colmar and abide with these images, is to put yourself in the way of an infinite work of art, one that will throw you, and then haunt you, forever. It actually operates more like music — it will get you. It will show you the pain beyond naming and the love beyond love, and show you that you already know these things — and feel them, and are made of them — no matter what you think.

Although I am, despite many inhibitions, writing about the work of art that I find more powerful than any other, I am not alone in being superlatively moved by it. I am not alone, either, in appreciating the feebleness of words and photos to give an idea of it. It’s not about ideas — why would I want to give you an idea? For all I know I could be like the street ranter who — merely by quoting from it — gives you the very distinct idea not to read the Bible. There are works of art that are annihilating — blessedly so — to your powers to conjure them, and this is one of them. That annihilation can resolve to extreme curiosity about the painter. If it does, you’ll be almost on your own, out there with others who have been so curious they could find steady ground only in their imaginations. For of Matthias Grunewald — my software won’t make an umlaut over the “u,” but it doesn’t matter, because that’s not his real name — precious little is known.

Compared to Albrecht Durer, his almost exact contemporary, Mathis Gotthart or Nithart has barely a biography. There is no date of birth, and there was no teacher anyone can be sure of, although as a Rhinelander painting in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, Mathis must have known of Martin Schongauer. The plot of Paul Hindemith’s opera of the mid-1930’s, Mathis der Maler (Mathis the Painter), is counterfactual — except that it is established that Mathis was in great distress over the Peasants’ War. In the summer of 1525, when Mathis was within several years of the end of his life, 300,000 peasants rose up, from Muhlhausen in the north to Bern in the south. About 100,000 of these insurgents died, and not in battle, for, barely protesting, they were simply cut down. Order was restored, and for a long time after Mathis was known to wear a dark bandage over his face.

W. G. Sebald’s prose poem, After Nature, was published in 2003, shortly after he died, although it was written much earlier. Now, there’s a writer who can show you Mathis. In the first section of After Nature, “…As the Snow on the Alps,” Sebald enters the painter’s mind — I am convinced of it.  First, he quotes Dante.

                      Now go, the will within us being one:

                      You be my guide, Lord, master from this day,

                      I said to him; and when he, moved, led on

                      I entered on the steep wild-wooded way.

It is hard not to understand his use of these lines as both an allusion to the Dantesque themes in the Isenheim Altarpiece, and an invocation of the painter. How many people have summoned the painter to be their guide on the steep wild-wooded way?  They have seen the face of the painter in many presumed self-portraits, usually in St. Paul the Anchorite, below right. Alone in the Theban desert for almost 100 years, clothed and fed by a single palm tree until a raven began flying in with a daily ration of bread, Paul knew the contemplative life, and his grave was dug by lions. Adding decades to the face of the self-portrait drawing under the title, you can see the resemblance — but St. Anthony, too, below left, resembles the painter in a more courtly mode.

Sebald makes much of there being two of Mathis, one wilder than the other, one Grunewald, one Nithart. At the death of Mathis, Sebald tells what he left of wordly goods that were not paint, and then of paint, and then of luxury togs.

                                      lead white and albus,

                       Paris red, cinnabar, slate green,

                       mountain green, alchemy green, blue

                       vitreous pastes and minerals

                       from the Orient. Clothing, too,

                       beautiful, item: a gold-yellow pair of hose,

                       tunics, cinnamon-coloured, the lapels overlaid

                       in purpled velvet with black stitching,

                       a grey atlas doublet, a red slouch hat

                       and much exquisite adornment besides.

                       The estate in truth is that of two men, but

                       whether Grunewald, an inventor of singular

                       hues, shared his departed friend’s liking

                       for such gaudy arrayment

                       we cannot presume to say.

Mathis, painter of extremes, may have sensed a doubleness in his nature — more than most artists do, that is. Much more. In his self-portraits, Durer famously played up a likeness to Christ as most contemporaries would have recognized Him, but Mathis probably gave his own face to Lucifer. If it is Lucifer, blending in — sort of — with the musical angels who serenade the Madonna, sawing away at his instrument more timorously than the others, beringed as others are not, and more extravagantly befeathered than they.

A contemporary scholar, Dr. Ruth Mellinkoff, makes that argument and supports it soundly. I believe her because, although she was writing many, many years later, her interpretation corresponds to my own thinking the day I saw the Isenheim Altarpiece, and I am under no obligation to have better reasons than that for what I hold to be true of art. Is this not the very picture of a fallen angel setting about regaining insider status? Of a painter who is both insider and exile, dandy and damned? To have painted as Mathis did, you have to have known hell — you just don’t have to have ruled over it.

You must also have seen an eclipse, Sebald writes — “a catastrophic incursion of darkness.” In October of 1502, when Mathis was around 30, “the moon’s shadow slid over Eastern Europe,” and Mathis,

                              who repeatedly was in touch

                              with the Aschaffenburg Court Astrologer Johann Indagine,

                              will have travelled to see this event of the century,

                              awaited with great terror, the eclipse of the sun,

                              so will have become a witness to

                              the secret sickening away of the world,

This then is how Mathis imagined the state of erosion, after nature, that he painted, the “ruining of life that in the end will consume even the stones.”

Mathis believed in Salvation, so it is possible to see his masterpiece as darker, even, than he can have conceived of it himself or intended it to be seen. Among those tights and doublets and rings, among those glorious colors he left behind — colors reputed to have been different from those of other painters, but they were not: he only used them differently — were found Lutheran tracts. The Isenheim Altarpiece was completed two years before the Reformation got underway, and it was painted for a special purpose. The Antonite friars at Isenheim, whose Abbot commissioned the work from Mathis, were a medical order, tending the sick for whom there were no cures. There was a plague of ergotism in the land, and those who ate milled rye could become fantastically sick, losing their minds and rotting as if with leprosy before, unswiftly, they died.

As there was no cure, so there was no prevention — anyone, at any time, could become ill like that. When they did, they were brought to the chapel at Isenheim to have before them a testament to the redemptive power of suffering. They were lain down there the better to find meaning in torment, to place hope in a distant realm, to believe that the love of God included them still and would bear them up. This is where the enormous winged altarpiece, in those days, fit in.

Michael Blim

“The first man who, having fenced off a plot of land, thought of saying “this is mine” and found people simple enough to believe him was the real founder of civil society. How many crimes, wars, murders, how many miseries and horrors might the human race have been spared by the one who, upon pulling up the stakes or filling in the ditch, had shouted to his fellow men, “Beware of listening to this imposter; you are lost, if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to all and that the earth belongs to no one.”
–Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men”

Two weeks ago (see “Stop the Home Wrecking and Protect America’s Future, 3qd, 11/3/08), I argued that homeowners in trouble should be helped, and that helping them should necessarily trigger a discussion of whether it is wise and just to make homeowning a universal condition in America.

I think we should do both. Most people agree that homeowners in trouble should be helped, though many often carp about how undeserving homeowners will get over on any national solution that helps all. And providing housing has been national policy since the New Deal. The Federal Housing Act of 1934 sought to encourage improvement in housing standards and conditions” as well as “to provide a system of mutual mortgage insurance.” Successive acts of Congress in 1937, 1949, 1968, 1986, and 2008 affirmed and extended the national commitment to what the 1949 act called the national goal of “decent, safe, and sanitary” housing for all.

My column received several thoughtful responses. One I found especially challenging. The writer argued that favoring homeowners discriminated against renters, and that helping people own homes was encouraging the growth of a conservative class of property-rights protectors. To move forward, the writer argued, we need to be free from property, not encumbered and conditioned by it.

As the wonderful quotation from Rousseau suggests, my 3QD respondent’s beliefs find good company in a long political and philosophical tradition fearful of the reactionary effects on the human condition of property-owning. Suffice it to recall that Thomas More in Utopia abolished private property altogether. And though Rousseau’s position on property was in fact contradictory, his attack found voice among anarchists, socialist, and communists – in short, every major radical political movement of the 19th Century. Both the Russian and Chinese revolutions sought immediately to confiscate and collectivize private property at no little cost to its owners, and with few concessions to the masses that might have harbored a bit of desire for a touch of property too.

Today, not only some people on the left still feel that property-owning, in this case homeowning, nourishes the seeds of reaction in the bosom of the body politic, but others, notably on the right politically, resent policies that facilitate homeowning. “Political extortion” by left-wing organizations such as ACORN using the Community Reinvestment Act as their club, Villain Phil in a National Review editorial (September 22, 2008) argues, “’trumped businesses’ normal bottom-line concerns.” People, according to Villain, got mortgages without the requisite income, assets, or credit, and he attributes a reverse racisim, what he sees as the bending of the housing market by the Clinton administration to serve low-income, predominately minority residents of big cities, for the sub-crime crisis.

I would submit that both sides have it wrong.

Both sides need to acknowledge that not only is providing housing a 75-year old national priority, but the policy has supported the acquisition of housing by 70% of all American households. Homeowning is normative. I think it is also very reasonable to assume that homeowning is key to the American outline of the good life. Having a home too helps people support a stable household life and keep their housing costs down, or at least more stable, instead of finding themselves exposed to the much less controllable rental market.

My challenge to both sides then is: who are you to tell a grand majority of Americans whether they should or should not own homes? Do either of you really want to redefine the American Dream to suit your political ends, the latter putatively made to serve the people, without regard to the life choices they have made?

Those on the right might reflect on the fact that conservatives since the Reagan-Thatcher period have championed homeowning as the lynch pin of the ownership society. Even the present President Bush once envisioned it as the cornerstone to his attempts to return to a society in effect without government — a society in which everyone might be property-owners, and thereby solid conservative citizens. Where are these voices from the right now? Why is the Bush administration helping banks instead of homeowners, those new members of the “ownership society?” Explain to me why putting families in homes is not the most important thing a conservative administration can do, given its conservative healing powers.

Those on the left might reflect on their (and our) past. Does revolutionary socialism require that the people be dispossessed of all of their property down to and including their houses for the greater good? Or would justice be better served by extending homeowning to the remaining 30% without homes?

The 20th Century’s two greatest revolutions in terms of size and scope, the Russian and Chinese, committed unspeakable crimes as they confiscated the private property of the masses and created a state in which the people became abject subjects of a tyranny that still visits people’s memories and their children’s dreams. (See my column, My Summer with Stalin, for reflections on this topic). A patch of land, a small flat — these bits of life and their homely but personal accoutrements provide us with shelter for our spirits, some respite from the impressments of authority.

I would suggest to those taken with the revival of anarchist sentiments that while “property is theft,” homeowning provides some precious autonomy from the state. As derivative as the maxim “a man’s home is his castle” is of a certain possessive individualism, it is also the foundation in the Anglo-American world for the right to be left alone, as Justice Douglas put it. How does therefore homeowning not rise above class resentment and serve the greater end of a more just society?

If one must judge in theory, rather than relative to people’s preferences in a relatively democratic society, I would argue Rousseau had it wrong, and his cross-channel colleague Locke had it right. In fact, it was Locke who figured out something important about the relation of property to revolution. The totally dispossessed often lack the resources to mount a revolution, and even if successful are brought up shortly under one tyranny or another. Little property-holders, peasant with their plots, artisans with their workshops, workers with their modest bungalows, are often the one more capable of bringing on salubrious social change of greater as well as lesser intensities.

It is crucial that we re-point our politics toward homeownership — its protection in this perilous moment and its spread to all. This is the goose and gander of the thing for people on both sides of the question.

This is a ruinous time for many, and can get much worse.

If Lincoln is quoted in times of national division, Roosevelt is just the tonic for times of national peril:

“It is not in despair that I paint you that picture. I paint it for you in hope—because the Nation, seeing and understanding the injustice in it, proposes to paint it out. We are determined to make every American citizen the subject of his country’s interest and concern; and we will never regard any faithful law-abiding group within our borders as superfluous. The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”

–Franklin Roosevelt
Second Inaugural Speech
1937

by T. K. Armistead

For those that are not familiar with the story of the prodigal son it seemed to have gone this way. A man had two sons, the younger son demanded his share of his inheritance while his father is still living, and went off to a distant country where he “wasted his substance with riotous living”, and eventually had to take work as a swine herder –most likely a low point, because swine are not kosher in Judaism–. There he came to his senses, and decided to return home and threw himself on his father’s mercy, thinking that even if his father decided to disown him, that being one of his servants was still far better than tending pigs. But when he returned home, his father greeted him with open arms, and hardly gave him a chance to express his repentance; he killed a fatted calf to celebrate his return. The older brother becomes jealous at the favored treatment of his faithless brother and upset at the lack of reward for his own faithfulness. But the father responded:

Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine. It was meet that we should make merry, and be glad: for this thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found. — (Luke 15:32, KJV)

As an expatriate black American living deep in the heart of Western Europe I, like many others had turned my back and dulled my heart to America. After the election of George W. Bush and the subsequent re-election I believed that we, as a country lost its way. I couldn’t identify with any of the new values of the last eight years and felt I was no longer useful to the cause of the country. I stunted my patriotism and began to make a life in Europe with only passing interest and little attention paid to the country I once lived in. I became an American in name only, a blue passport holder, a cynic, a critic to all American interests both foreign and domestic. I became disenchanted with America and its many phrases in hyperbole. “We are the greatest nation on earth” people would exclaim but to outsiders the “greatest” nation on earth brought terror and fear. America seemed hell bent on separating the world into to halves and I felt I had the straddle the two halves surreptitiously.

After 9/11 there was a sense of love for the gentle giant that was wounded unjustly, everyone I met on the streets of Italy rallied around my family. They wanted to hold us and take care of us. We were flooded with stories of how someone’s uncle was rescued from starvation by some American solider or how a friend of a friend got a little money from his American friend and that helped start a business. This was the America they knew and now simply because of my nationality, I was now like family. My landlord, at the time, lived in America for a while and said this me, with tears in his eyes and the thickest Neapolitan accent you could imagine: “America always helps everyone out and now it is time for her to be helped, if you need anything at any time just ask to me”. I never took him up on the offer, because I had no family lost and zero damage to any property I left back in the States. But the sentiment was taken and we moved on.

Some of the patriotism came back after 9/11, I began to watch the news and saw how the people of the Nation rallied around one other. It was beautiful, it was hopeful, I was wrong. By the end of 2001 we not only made some bad decisions but, in my opinion, were set on the wrong track completely. All of the sympathy we earned with 9/11 began to erode into vitriolic attacks on America and conversations, prefaced with: “I know it’s not you but…” I became an unwilling surrogate for all the anger and confusion aimed at the U.S. I retreated further into my apathy being momentarily released from it by 9/11. “Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice shame on me.”

Life continued as normal with the regular blunders, hypocrisies and mishaps from the Bush Administration, then on a normal day I happened to turn on the Oprah Winfrey show—through the miracle of satellite television– and caught a glimpse of a fellow by the name of Barrack Obama. I was curious and assumed like most people that he was a bit audacious, hopeful, naïve and kind of cute. I followed politics, but only as a curiosity, I lost all hope in the system and would live as most expat Americans do, quietly praying never to be sent ‘home’. But I have to say as the election drew to a close I began to get on board with the big idea of small change and felt like maybe this could happen. The night of the election I put my children to bed, kissed my husband and prepared for the long night ahead. I watched as the states began stacking up in Barack Obamas favor and grew more positive with each one. When the election was called at 11pm eastern time, 6am my time, I dropped to my knees a wept. I wept for all my relatives who felt fear in believing, I wept for all the men who had to wear the “I am a man” signs in the south, I wept for the WWII vets who came home from relieving oppression only to face it at home, I wept in shame for doubting my country, I wept for the challenge of a hopeful man against the winds of doubt and lastly I wept for the knowledge that the Whitehouse, I visited as a child, will now have a family that resides in it that looks like mine. As a matter of fact I tear up at every mention of President-elect Barack Obama because I am proud, I am on-board with hope, and I am back to loving the country I almost gave up on. Hopefully she welcomes me back…

I would like to end this open letter to America the way I did when I woke my children up the day after the election, please forgive the sentimentality because this really happened, it went like this: Good morning girls, Barack Obama won last night and I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands ONE nation under God INDIVISIBLE with liberty and justice for ALL. It was a little corny but necessary. Oh and there is no need to kill that fatted calf for me because I’m a vegetarian.

Respectfully,

A Former Prodigal Daughter