Easter under a cloud

It might be me, but this Easter hasn’t felt much like Easter. We seem to be stuck in a crucifixion loop, and our sure and certain hope of the resurrection no longer feels so neat and tidy.

I’ve been plodding through the 14th century mystical text The Cloud of Unknowing. The anonymous author advises us to climb above our usual way of thinking of the kindness and worthiness of God:

’… thou shalt step above it stalwartly, but listily, with a devout and pleasing stirring of love, and try to pierce that darkness above thee. And smite upon that thick cloud of unknowing with a sharp dart of longing love.’

But this is no longer just the spiritual aspiration of the individual contemplative, as it was for the writer of The Cloud. It has become our shared position in these plague years. That central great Benevolence to which we all looked, whatever we called it – is it really so benevolent now? We find ourselves faced by a thick cloud of unknowing, onto which the soul can only heave itself in its ignorance. We must step stalwartly above our assumptions about goodness, and go where there is nothing.

And when the cloud lifts, things may look very different.

If you can’t have a happy Easter, I hope you have a blessed one. And if you pray in any way, shape or form, please pray for the people of Myanmar.

We look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come

I used to love exploring the Tate when I was a kid and the Tate was the Tate and not yet Tate Britain. In the stairwells down hung huge Stanley Spencer Resurrections, audacious, absorbing, overwhelming. This one, significantly from 1945, is apparently in Dundee, and shows the reunion of families – an image that speaks to our times also.

It’s the matter-of-factness that is so audacious. Spencer has the guts to take it absolutely literally. We will meet again, as somebody or other said recently. Even if we have to climb out of our graves to do it.

A sure and certain hope to you. Happy Easter!

The path to life lies open

Our culture is happy to recognise the reality of the Crucifixion, less so that of the Resurrection. The dialectic seems broken.

But this is the one good day, the day that shows us, if only in a brief vision, what can and must be. All happy endings are folk memories of this ending.

So Happy Easter! And here’s a David Jones.

Living paint: Edwin Lucas’s ‘Resurrection’

To mark this best of all possible days, here is a bit of a cracker (click to enlarge) by the always interesting, and sometimes startling, Edwin G Lucas (1911-1990), the subject of an earlier post on this blog. (A biography and whole galleries of his work can be found here.)

The Resurrection, dated to 1940, is lifted from the Art UK site, where it’s credited to NHS Lothian, the owners, perhaps surprisingly, of nearly 500 paintings. So I guess you might stumble unexpectedly across this abstract expressionist parody of the baroque somewhere along the meandering corridors of an Edinburgh hospital, or at least let’s hope so.

I’m left wondering how Lucas achieved the consistently gorgeous, squidgy, almost munchable plasticity of his rapid brush marks. And how did he get those edges and tonalities into each sweep of paint? Presumably he left the bare strokes to dry off a bit before painstakingly tweaking in the details that transform some of them into teeny tiny people with little beards and haircuts, the multitudes of the redeemed. It’s a feat of technical virtuosity, and a witty celebration of the sheer incarnational lushness of paint, the brush marks coming to life – in more senses than one – before our eyes. And at the heart of it all, the luminous, cross-shaped body of Christ pings from the tomb. Alleluia!

As a rule I disapprove of God as a sky-god, but I rather like the big cartoony egghead Father at the top here.

If the 1940 dating is secure on this, it’s hard to think of anything else comparable. It would be more than a decade before Howard Hodgkin (to whom I’ve compared Lucas in a different respect) would start cramming his spaces with plasticky splatches. In fact, it doesn’t even resemble anything else by Lucas that I recall seeing. Maybe it’s a quite wonderful one-off?

Hell is harrowed. Happy Easter!

He is risen: the angels roar!

Happy Easter! And here’s a woodcut by Karl Schmidt-Rottluff:

 

An imperishable inheritance

While we are still re-living WW1, something apposite for this Easter Day – David Jones’s 1937 frontispiece to his In Parenthesis.

He is risen indeed. Alleluia!

The gardener’s clothes

David Jones ‘The Resurrection’, 1924

“She turned round and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was him. He said to her, ‘Woman, why are you weeping? Who are you looking for?’ Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, ‘Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him.’ Jesus said to her, ‘Mary.’ She looked at him and said, ‘Rabbi!’ “

What had Jesus found to wear immediately after his resurrection? Why, the gardener’s clothes, of course.

He is risen indeed! Alleluia!

Babylon is fallen, to rise no more!

Easter Day! Yay! Wooo! Babylon is fallen, and He is risen!

There has to be a Greater Narrative, and the Christian narrative of Redemption is the greatest. So we construct our own small narratives, and at a certain point they break through, make contact with the reality of the Thing Itself. What starts in a garden ends in a city, and the City of God is Babylon recreated, made new.

In the car I’ve been listening obsessively to Babylon’s Fallen by The Trumpeteers, which turned up on a cheapo golden age gospel compilation in the wreckage of the HMV Blue Cross sale. It’s on YouTube, here. After about 30 seconds it takes over your brain completely.

Seems to me that this is essentially a survival of the chorus of Babylon is Fallen, a Shaker hymn that went into the four-part shape note (Sacred Harp) repertoire, as revived here:

Tune your harps ye heavenly choirs, shout ye followers of the Lamb.
See the city all on fire, clap your hands and swell the flame.
Now’s the day of compensation, hope of mercy now is o’er.
Babylon is fallen, is fallen, is fallen.
Babylon is fallen, to rise no more.

Though in a ‘seventies beardy folk version by Swan Arcade, it’s claimed that the song originated with the Parliamentarian armies and passed across the Atlantic. Apparently it used to be sung at Sealed Knot re-enactments. If so, it’s impressive that something first sung by the Levellers eventually found its way into the context of deliverance from slavery. Interesting though that while the white version is triumphant, the black version is simply joyful.

The modern Sacred Harp revivals are wonderful, but somehow don’t quite touch the Alan Lomax archive recordings, like this. (Though the image here is out of period, and not of the singers.)  Listen and tremble!

My Love, the Crucified, hath sprung to life this morrow

William Roberts, 'The Resurrection', 1912