White on Black
Antti Nylén ⎜Essayist
I
In Charles Baudelaire’s poem A Voyage To Cythera the poet is sailing off the shores of the island where the goddess of love was born and of an ancient cult site. The person through whose eyes we see in the poem, sees a gibbet on the shore, and suspended from it a hideous hanged corpse, pecked to shreds by carrion birds, left unburied and at the mercy of the forces of nature as a punishment for his “cults of infamy”. Our poet stares at the putrid corpse in horror, until he realizes that he is looking at his own image: “Ridiculous hanged man, your sufferings are mine!”
There is something very Merenmies-esque about Baudelaire’s alternative crucified man – the scapegoat, who explicitly having lost his place, lost his own shape, represents anyone who simply dares or can be bothered to look. The extreme is, in fact, universal, the strange and atrocious ordinary. Realizing this would be a mercy. But realizing is not easy. Something gets in the way of mercy. That is why the poem ends with the stark, simple prayer: “O! Lord! give me the strength and the courage To contemplate my body and soul without loathing!”
Baudelaire’s hanged man is not that alternative a Crucified, but rather only a duplicate of a familiar theme. Unless the poem is based on the poet’s personal memory, its model is undoubtedly an ordinary crucifix, whose violent carnality can easily remain unseen (we see only the symbol), as it in fact remains, so that it represents not only Jesus on the cross, but also humanity at its simplest, the human lot in this world, ‘human nature’, if you will permit me the expression. We have been ‘nailed’ not just to the world, but also to our own flesh, we cannot ‘save ourselves’, something for which the chief priests and elders mocked Jesus, too (Matthew 27:42).
They, too, looked at themselves as they looked at the crucified Jesus. According to Christian thinking, we always have to look outside ourselves, at others, even, and especially, when we want to see ourselves.
The flesh is a mystery. Especially our own, personal flesh, which is not, however, totally our own; after all, in the end, it has to be returned to whence it came, to ‘the earth’ and, in the end, when the sun is extinguished, to the stars and space winds. The body is familiar and alien at the same time. A human being does not, in fact, have a body that can be felt and owned like a piece of merchandize. A human being is a body. None of us can go about being an object to ourselves, or investigate (any more than we can help or save) ourselves. As we said, only an other can do that.
We feel the temptation to be lulled into believing that there is nothing strange or alien in our flesh, that it is under our control and that we are balanced and healthy, even though we secretly know that we are warped, leaky, ugly, lumpy monsters, specifically like the crucified Jesus – or Elina Merenmies’ ink drawings, in which every hairline has been calculated. They are serious, meticulous, centred images, realistic, I would say, even naturalistic – only the moralism is missing!
I see a kind of ‘progression’ from the metaphysical horror of the Birds, Worm and Wasps of the first half of the 1990s, via the Facts of Life and a few teddy-bear motifs, to the most recent ink drawings, in which the terror has eased and a physical calm reins; the flesh is now looked at without nausea, peacefully, as it is (Hair, White Phosphorus…). Ugliness ceases to be ugly, once we dare to look at it. It receives grace. We are allowed to be warped, leaky, lumpy and the rest…
I wrote the word ‘progression’ in quotation marks, since the process is not a chronological one (it does not refer to the artist’s ‘intellectual growth’). Rather, running through Merenmies’ production there is a kind of spiritual path that has to be trodden again and again, from start to finish. In the Christian way of thinking, unlike the great ‘path religions’ of the East, conversion or reconciling oneself with the world and with God is specifically an endless repetition. We do not reach a destination, at least not by our own efforts. We always have to pray for the ‘strength and courage’ to look at ‘the facts of life’ with a calm, steady mind, and not gripped by disgust and horror.
Sometimes, however, before our eyes there opens up the cosmic panic of Wasps, the experience of chaos, of disintegration (the wasps fly inside me and through me), sometimes a mocking semi-humanity (Bad Bad Teddy and Party Animal also represent absolutely anyone), and conversely sometimes reconciliation and rest, which Merenmies has surely expressed at its purest in a number of her works depicting nuns: everything is fine and beautiful now, just look.
Merenmies conceals the soul and the spirit, leaves them to be judged by their own unexamined worth. She does not try to depict them either symbolically or abstractly. She also, of course, conceals God, but “No man hath seen God at any time” (1. John 4:12), Of course, God, any more than the soul, can neither be painted nor photographed. But perhaps the most explicitly Christian element in Merenmies’ art is her devotion to the idea of the incarnation, i.e. becoming flesh, which – in the manner of many vital ideas – is a mystery. In incarnation the invisible becomes visible, the spirit flesh, but the number of beings does not increase. There is neither difference nor hierarchy between spirit and flesh. They are one, and one is as good as the other. That is why Christian doctrine is first able to declare that no man can see God (and thus be in total agreement with any atheist) and then to point to the mutilated man’s body nailed to a tree and naturally to proclaim: Behold, God! The Christian faith bears no trauma with regard to the flesh or corporeality. Contrary to the sublime body aesthetic of Ancient Greece, it specifically glorifies the grotesqueness of the body.
In God’s world every fleshly being, man or animal, ugly or beautiful, deformed or perfect, is ‘black on white’, created, and that’s that. Birth, i.e. becoming flesh, is an indissoluble contract about the existence of each fleshly creature. Approximately in the same spirit, Merenmies, too, shows a pimply, fragile human face with black veins growing from one eye out into the air, and says without irony: Exceptional Beauty.
II
But, after all, are not Merenmies’ violent visions, her horrifying images, which, as is thoughtlessly said, ‘well up from the unconsciousness’, blatantly Godless? Is Christian art not supposed to be harmonious and orderly, and to exude divine peace? Is this artist not depicting sin and hell rather than mercy?
I have already said that the Christian faith, too, has, for centuries, portrayed itself in extremely violent and grotesque visions. The most official and cultivated of its images ooze blood and anguish. How can Christians feel any joy when they look at the instruments of capital punishment hung above the altar, where the executed body still sprawls, much in the same way as Baudelaire’s hanged man? How dare they!
Undoubtedly Christians see something that is not visible. Or then light is seen best in the dark. Perhaps the crucified is the best way to portray the emptiness of the grave, the resurrection.
In the 16th century, Saint John of the Cross wrote the famous book of devotions Dark Night of the Soul. He writes that the soul is safe wandering in darkness. This is more worthy and fruitful than treading familiar, well-lit paths. In Saint John’s metaphor, the traveller, too, has to set off on new, unfamiliar roads, that is, into the dark, if he wants to learn something. Baudelaire ends Flowers of Evil specifically thus: “[W]e wish to plunge To the abyss’ depths, Heaven or Hell, does it matter? To the depths of the Unknown to find something new!”
“So in like manner the soul,” Saint John goes on to write. “When she is making the most progress, wanders in darkness and regions to her unknown.” Underlying Saint John’s thinking is the Christian view of conversion. A Christian has a straightforward duty always to go towards the strange and to cast off convention, even though approaching the strange always involves a frightening plunge into deep waters.
According to Saint John of the Cross, it is for that reason good for the soul to wander in darkness so that it will then “suffer constantly”. The way of suffering is more beneficial than that of enjoyment and action, because “in suffering she acquires strength from God, and in action and enjoyment she exercises her weakness and imperfections.” It is strength and vigour, when man trusts in them unquestioningly, that make evil, too, possible. Weakness and lostness, meanwhile, are for the good and the blessed states amenable to self forgetting.
The gaze, like thought, too, is often clumsy and conventional. We instinctively look at the white of Merenmies’ ink drawings as a background colour, as empty, meaning nothing. Our eye wants to see the black as ‘flesh’ and attributes value only to that. But the eye can be mistaken. It lacks strength and courage. Perhaps the empty also means the most? Such works as Universal and Space may, after all, be white on black. But how hard it is to see these pictures like that!
And how hard it is to know which the artist created, the black or the white, and which came about of itself.
Literature:
Baudelaire, Charles 1954: The Flowers of Evil. English translation William Aggeler. Academy Library Guild, Fresno, CA.
St. John of the Cross 1905: The Dark Night of the Soul. English translation Gabriela Cunninghame Graham. John M. Watkins, London.