hail mary: the secret language of words

Very contrary about this Mary story. Religion, refugees claimants and hipsters. the congregation is convened. Was there a second sitting for the Last Supper? Can Albrecht Durer’s Virgin and Child with Saint Anne be termed “religious trivia” within the context of judicial hearing on the purity of a claimant’s Catholicism? Call it a pot luck mish mash of church and state. No room for the abstract. Just the obtuse.Durer’s work is often a composite of the erotic, the humanistic and the sexual, lending the Catholic narrative something of a body English, and that not considering those Pagans and their golden boughs from the grove in Alba. Poor claimant. Being grilled by a post-modern version of the Spanish inquisition maybe choosing to confess heresy under being water boarded on a February morning in Saskatoon. If it works on wiry Jihadist youth whose teeth can chew through the gristle of an old goat….

Read More: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2002/nov/30/art.artsfeatures1 ---Jones:But there is more than vanity to Dürer's self-portraits. From an early moment in his life, he was aware of himself as a genius, as an inspired creator. One interpretation of his Christ-like self-portrait is that it champions the artist as demiurge, possessing divine power to create worlds. Dürer came to be recognised - even by the grudging Italians - for a mighty flow of ideas and images.

And to lose claimant status and expose oneself to the risk of deportation over a communion wafer. Thats tough. With his pagan leaning and expansive ego, perhaps the claimant in feigning ignorance was taking the moral high ground in the face of his interlocutor. Perhaps the pro-bono Catholic expert was a fallen angel, a derailed saint on the express lane to Dante’s Inferno. But, it does pose the question of whether faith can exist in the absence of knowledge, or whether the study of religion is totally irrelevant to faith. After all,in many instances, almost preponderant, is not Christianity not about the religion of Jesus but about Jesus, Judaism about Yahweh but not the religion of Yahweh, Islam about Mohammed but not the religion…… the cult of celebrity and appearances?

Adrian Humphrey:The task of separating the devout from the fraudsters among those claiming refugee status in Canada for religious persecution cannot be divined by peppering someone with “trivia” questions, the Federal Court has ruled.The judicial chastising of the way an Immigration and Refugee Board adjudicator tried to ferret out bogus refugees stems from the case of a man who fled China saying he fears persecution for being a Roman Catholic. He was refused because of his answers to questions about Catholic tradition….

Image: Met. Read More: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2002/nov/30/art.artsfeatures1 Jonathan Jones:The 16th-century Florentine art chronicler Giorgio Vasari, though sniping at his style, had to praise his "extravagant imagination", and acknowledged that designers and painters all over Europe "have since availed themselves of the vast abundance of his beautiful fantasies and inventions". The distorted, psychoerotic figurings of mannerist artists, the fantastic heroic visions of the baroque and, beyond that, 20th-century surrealism, delved happily into Dürer's imagination. And yet that fecundity was poised on a cusp between the middle ages and the Renaissance. Dürer was a learned and progressive man, a humanist intellectual, credited in his lifetime with bringing the proportion and perspective of the Italian Renaissance to northern Europe. The same taste for the latest fashion that made him such a clothes horse made him long to be intellectually up to date. Together with his best friend, the Nuremberg intellectual Willibrand Pirckheimer, he explored topics from Egyptian hieroglyphs to the humanist theology of Erasmus.

…The Federal Court of Canada expressed dismay at the level of knowledge expected from the recent convert, who knew Mary was the mother of Jesus but didn’t know Jesus’ grandmother’s name; and who knew Jesus was baptized by John but didn’t know John’s mother’s name. (The answers are Anne and Elizabeth, respectively.) “He had little knowledge of the Bible’s characters,” Rose Andrachuk, an IRB adjudicator who previously was chairwoman of the Toronto Catholic District School Board, concluded following the quiz she gave Mao Qin Wang, prior to the court’s intervention….

Mr. Wang, 26, says he turned to religion after his father was seriously injured in an accident and a friendly Catholic said he was praying for him. When his father improved, he started attending his friend’s underground church in 2007, he says. When he was a lookout at an illegal service in 2008, Chinese police raided the gathering, he told Canada’s immigration officials. He fled, but the next day police went looking for him, accusing him of engaging in illegal religious activities, he says. He came to Canada in 2008 after paying a smuggler $30,000, settled in Toronto and filed for refugee protection, claiming he fears arrest, jail and maltreatment because of his religious beliefs if returned to China.At his hearing before the refugee board, Mr. Wang was asked several questions about Catholic liturgy and history, through a translator.

Read More: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2002/nov/30/art.artsfeatures1 ---The title, Melencolia I, is engraved on the wings of a bat, a creature associated with night fears; even Melencolia's dog, usually an emblem of loyal energy, shares her disconsolate, down-at-heel wistfulness. It is slyly comic. While sanguine, choleric and phlegmatic types get on with their lives, as dictated by the medieval theory of the four temperaments, Melencolia just sits and thinks. Thinks pointlessly, hopelessly. Imagination gone mad, fantasy run to seed. Around her are scattered a chaotic variety of tools: geometrical instruments, pens, a bellows. On her head is a pathetic wreath of watercress to moisten her dry spirits. She has wings she doesn't use. She has a set of compasses she holds limply. Melencolia I is a revolutionary declaration of the mysterious, ambiguous nature of the psyche, and the heroic suffering of introspection. If to think is to be melancholy, to be melancholy is to think. Widely disseminated, it created a new archetype, that of inspired and creative melancholy, the introspective, uncontained imagination. Portraits gave their sitters the troubled eyes and cheek-resting-on-hand pose of Melencolia I; melancholy became a fashion. It was the beginning of modern subjectivity.

Ms. Andrachuk was dissatisfied with his answers. “The claimant was asked whether the consecrated wafer or the bread represents the body of Jesus or whether it is the body of Jesus. The claimant responded that it represented the body of Jesus, which is incorrect,” she wrote in her IRB decision. Read More:http://www.nationalpost.com/news/Name+Mary+mother+other+tests+refugee+claim/5427322/story.html

The other issue, is the visual language. We do not understand the language of a Pieter Bruegel, Hieronymus Bosch, Da Vinci, Van Eyck etc. And that was only five hundred years ago. There is a loss in translation. If the roots of the Judeo-Christian tradition extend to deep antiquity, those original meanings, he so-called sou

may not be irretrievably lost, but they are a long way from home…

ADDENDUM:

Dürer might have wanted to be recognised as a theorist and a handsome man, but he was best known as a fantastic visionary of gothic excess. When Vasari praised his “extravagant imagination” he was referring to a specific work: Dürer’s woodcut Apocalypse, published in 1498. This savage yet sophisticated work, executed in a very large format alternating 15 prints by Dürer with the text of The Apocalypse of St John, transfixed the European imagination, uniting backwoods, superstitious Germans and urbane Italians alike in their awe at Dürer’s Four Horsemen riding machine-like over the earth, blind and dispassionate, crushing burghers beneath them….

Van Eyck. Ghent Altarpiece. Lower center panel detail. 1432. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ghent_Altarpiece_D_-_Adoration_of_the_Lamb_2.jpg

…Graphic art – drawings, woodcuts, engravings – is where Dürer’s imagination is at its most fantastical. That is why the exhibition at the British Museum is one everybody should see. Printmaking was the necessary medium of German popular culture just as it was the essential, international conduit of Renaissance iconography and ideas. It was a hybrid offspring of the printing press. The invention of printing proliferated the word – and made it possible to reproduce the image. Woodcuts in particular could be cheap, and everyone could see them, nailed up at inns, sold by wandering hawkers.

Dürer was perhaps the first to realise the freedom this mass medium offered the artist: he could design, publish and sell his own woodcuts and engravings. That is, he could be what that self-portrait as a god wants the artist to be – an untrammelled creator, a divine fount of images.

Dürer’s printed images tap into the new knowledge he got from Renaissance Italy – not just perspective but the rediscovery of the classical nude and pagan myth – and fuse it with older, lower sources, making an art that deploys Renaissance aesthetics to some pretty populist ends.

The print The Sea Monster might look like a classical myth, an illustration of Ovid. It depicts a swimming, bearded male figure – like a Triton, except that in addition to a scaly body he has antlers – abducting a nude woman who doesn’t seem too bothered; she poses Venus-like on his back, while the people from the walled town on shore scream and wave their arms impotently. It is a troubling, wondrous image of the erotic; Dürer’s art is very sexual. But it has nothing to do with classical myth. It almost certainly illustrates a sensational news story of the time: a series of women on the Adriatic coast of Italy were abducted by a sea monster. Finally it was killed and put on display at Ferrara.

ADDENDUM:

Another fish head in the dustbin
Another loser in the queue for the soup kitchen
Another reason for a visit
We think you’d better come down
Another nigger on the woodpile
Another honky on the dole
Another trip from off the 15th floor
The greatest story ever told
Was so wrong, so wrong
‘Cos you promised milk and honey
With an everlasting life
And we listened with our ears closed
And a blindness in our eyes
But we heard them as they nailed you
And we saw you crucified
The second coming of the Holy Ghost
We need a pocketful of miracles

Two thousand years and he ain’t shown yet
We kept his seat warm and the table set
The second sitting for the Last Supper
Another Guru in the money
Another mantra in the mail
An easy way from rags to riches
God’s little acre’s up for sale
The time is right for ressurection
We think you’d better come down
The church don’t ring with hallelujahs
You haven’t been for so long
So long, so long
Two thousand years and he ain’t shown yet
We kept his seat warm and the table set
The second sitting for the Last Supper

Read more: 10 CC – THE SECOND SITTING FOR THE LAST SUPPER LYRICS http://www.metrolyrics.com/the-second-sitting-for-the-last-supper-lyrics-10-cc.html#ixzz1a7QWprZV
Copied from MetroLyrics.com
—————————————————-
The story of Lo Shu is basically one of a huge flood in ancient China, whereby sacrifices to the river god — to calm his anger — seem ineffective. Each time a turtle came out of the river and walked around the sacrifice, as if to suggest that the river god had not accepted the sacrifice. Until a child noticed a curious figure on the turtle shell — in effect, the 3×3 magic square shown above. On this basis, the people realized the correct amount of sacrifice to make, and thus appeased the river god.

Apparently, these ancient Chinese believed in the magic!

In 1514, Albrecht Dürer created an engraving named Melancholia that included a magic square. In the bottom row of his 4×4 magic square, he placed the numbers “15” and “14” side by side to reveal the date of his engraving.

16 3 2 13

5 10 11 8

9 6 7 12

4 15 14 1

Read More:http://www.halexandria.org/dward090.htm

This entry was posted in Art History/Antiquity/Anthropology, Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>