Radical Reinvention: Matisse in New York

this is a review of MOMA’s ongoing Matisse exhibition I wrote for the China Daily’s Sunday edition

Most people know Henri Matisse (1869-1954) for his elegant, simple shapes in bright, optimistic colors. However, the exhibition Matisse: Radical Reinvention, a collaboration between the Museum of Modern Art and the Art Institute of Chicago, reveals a very different Matisse: This is Matisse at his boldest and darkest.

The exhibition’s premise is that between his return from Morocco in 1913 and his departure for Nice in 1917, Matisse took his art in an assertive new direction. His paintings from this period are experimental, increasingly concerned about the act of art-making itself, as opposed to art as representation of its subject.

This casts Matisse as a proto-expressionist, anticipating the work of the likes of 20th-century great Jackson Pollock.

The more than 100 works on display feature scratched-out paint, leftover pencil marks, and blatant signs of reworking which Matisse made no effort to conceal. Perhaps the best way to understand what he was doing is to compare these experimental canvases to his sculpture.

The curators have cleverly juxtaposed these with his canvases. Matisse frequently worked on several pieces simultaneously.

In the first gallery, Blue Nude (1907) hangs beside Reclining Nude (1) (1907) – both works feature women in repose, with the painting clearly modeled on the sculpture.

In Blue Nude, the numerous layers of paint indicate Matisse’s fervent reworking of the figure. The effect is that of a bold display of the process of painting. You can see where Matisse corrected himself, where he has decided to shift the figure, sculpting the paint as he would the clay.

Reinvention also reveals a darker Matisse than the one in popular imagination – the self-doubt and perfectionism which drives the constant reworking is evident everywhere, and the gray and black tones echo the difficulties he grappled with in this turbulent period – the dark cloud of World War I was approaching, and his art was often poorly received.

Portrait of Olga Merson (1911) is a deeply ambiguous painting of a woman with whom the artist was obsessed. Merson kneels on the ground in what seems to be a perfectly pleasant, placid figure. However, a closer look reveals that the left half of her face has been scraped off, leaving a skittering of lines, as though the artist was simultaneously creating and un-creating. Two large black arcs cross her torso and hip. Are they lines of definition or cancellation?

The remarkable Portrait of Yvonne Landsberg (1914) is even stronger in its use of radiating arcs, which seem to trace the energy of the subject rather than her form. Here Matisse has scratched out the arcs, and this lends the painting an energy and urgency – the result is powerful and textural.

One senses that Matisse was working with paint in a new way, layering it on, scraping it off, leaving the edges rough rather than polished.

To further underline the point, Matisse’s four monumental bronzes – Back I, Back II, Back III and Back IV – all female figures in more and more abstract form, range across the galleries, representing his move away from representation towards abstraction in this period.

Each of the Back sculptures was, in fact, a reworking of the plaster cast of the previous one, so here we can catch Matisse literally in the act of re-creation. A fascinating multimedia feature reconstructs this process, showing how the fleshy, realistic figure of Back I morphs into the monumental, almost architectural lines of Back IV.

If his Back series dominate the sculpture of the exhibition, then Bathers by a River (1909-10, 1913, 1916-17), hanging in pride of place in the final gallery, is its canvas counterpart.

This canvas was worked and reworked incessantly over nearly a decade, and serves as the focal point for the whole exhibition.

An informative video again reconstructs Matisse’s process – unearthed by an amazing slew of technological developments, including a delightful reconstruction of the 1913 state of the painting from photographs of Matisse’s studio by American photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn.

The new insights into Matisse’s process support the exhibition’s thesis, and the parallel observation in the Back sculptures: the naturalistic scene of 1909 gives way to four sharply divided panels, transforming the canvas from idyllic, Eden-like scene to something more modern and isolating.

However, it is The Piano Lesson (1916), also in the final gallery, that may be most intriguing.

In this large canvas, the painter’s son is depicted on the lower right at the piano. A female figure looks on from behind him. The whole left half of the canvas is a window, blocked out in gray, green and blue. The shaft of light that cuts through this piece is implied, and yet undeniable.

Matisse has captured a moment in time, and turned it into a monument.

What is perhaps Matisse’s most famous work, Danse I (1909), conveniently hangs just one floor below at the Modern.

Its five rhythmic female forms, gracefully dancing in a circle, have become an icon of 20th-century art. However, it is important to remember that when it was first exhibited, it drew lashings of critical vitriol.

Some may find the curiously clumpy, unfinished hand of the figure on the left crude. However, in the light of the Modern’s latest exhibition, this choice makes more sense.

Even in his masterpiece, Matisse has displayed a willingness to reveal his sleight of hand, to lay bare his process in a frank and telling gesture. It is refreshing, and yes, surprisingly postmodern.

published at China Daily,  26th Sept 2010, Sunday.

Seeing is believing but not understanding

It’s been nine years since September 11th, 2001. I have never seen the World Trade Center. By the time I got to America, they were gone. I’m leaving New York today, and I don’t know when’s the next time I’ll be back. But I wrote this piece last summer about Ground Zero, and thought it would be appropriate to post it today.

It’s our last day in New York. I still remember the first time I saw this city with my dad, right this time after freshman year. But it’s my mum’s first time. Tired of walking, she insisted on getting three tickets for the open-top tour buses, so here we are, traffic wind in our faces, trundling down Manhattan. We pass the much-abused Wall Street bull, even now bearing a troop of tourists on his bronze back, and the tour guide directs our attention to the next attraction. “People come to New York and they want to see two things,” she says, “the Statue of Liberty and Ground Zero. If you want to see Ground Zero, get off at the next stop and turn right.” True to form, my mum feels she must not miss the site of the Twin Towers. So we get off the bus and pick our way towards the massive, grating construction site.

There is something peculiar about an attraction defined precisely by its absence. It’s been eight years since 9/11, and that date has not lost its vivid nearness – perhaps because the year has dropped off the end of the date, perhaps because, in the wake of all that’s happened since then, it is necessary for it to stay a fresh, open wound. Ground Zero does seem like a wound, a great gaping hole in the bristling forest of skyscrapers. Three years ago I had been shocked to see it was still a hole, the cardboard timeline of events posted on the wire fence somehow inadequate for the tourists coming to pay homage to the fallen towers. This time around it is still a hole, the construction dust, the grating sound of machines at work a constant from three years ago. Metal cranes heave and creak purposefully in the mess of earth and concrete behind the chain-link fence. A couple of enterprising people have set up booths selling little pamphlets about 9/11, the burning towers superimposed on the statue of liberty on the cover.

I don’t know what it is about all this that was unsatisfying. Everything about the place seems to say, “move along now – nothing to see here”, and yet at the same time it has the look of a recent catastrophe, too recent for anyone to begin to grapple with yet. But we kept on walking along the fence, as though expecting something more substantial – a museum, a memorial? – to appear, even my dad and I, who had been here before. We got to the entrance of what had been the subway station, where a middle-aged black man in a blue windbreaker howls at the passersby – tourists and locals alike, gesticulating wildly – “How many buildings was there, I ask you?” he yells, “Some of these people calls themselves New Yorkers an’ they don’ know! I ask you, how many buildings? How many buildings was in Ground Zero?” His eyes are wide, and he holds in his hand a folder filled with photographs and clippings, which he flips through wildly as he accosts first one and then another group of people, who mostly shuffle away as if to avoid catching the crazy. Around his neck he wears a navy lanyard with “9/11″ printed on it over and over again. I wonder if it’s a uniform he’s given himself – I wonder if he’s out here yelling every day. Something about his crazed fervor makes my parents swerve away from him. Most people give him wide berth, as though craziness, or even passion, can be infectious. But I want to hear what he has to say.
“How many buildings were there here, sir?” I ask. “How many do you think there was?” he asks back. “Two? The twin towers?” my dad ventures. “No, no, no! They always say the twin towers! The twin towers issa nick name, that’s what, look at this picture here…” he flips through his file. “Look, there was seven! You see, seven, but they don’ tell you that, do they? They don’ tell you that! It was like a whole family, you see, with the little ones – ” Sure enough, he has a couple of aerial shots of the World Trade Center before 9/11, and a whole cluster of buildings, now vanished, rise eerily in the shadows of the twin towers. “There was more than just two towers! You see these people, they call themselves New Yorkers, but they don’t know! You see that building there?” I shield my eyes and look up at the tallest thing one in sight. It looms above me. “You look at it here, it’s the same building as here – you see how big the towers was?” he says, showing me a picture of that same building dwarfed by the towers, more than twice its height. Height, I reflect, ceases to mean anything after a certain point, much like the way ten trillion and twenty trillion sound much the same to me. After a certain point, the brain simply ceases to register it and abdicates to infinity. Did the fact that the twin towers were twice as tall as this one make their fall twice as tragic? “So my mum asked me, if I had gone to work that day, and I work in security – how long would you have stayed in there helping people get out? You think about it – one hour, one hour and a half hour – that was not enough time, and the buildings, they just come crashin’ down.”
Happy to have our attention, he goes on to describe the horrors of the facts he’d gathered. He wasn’t working that day – his boss said to take the day off – he was taking his kid to school three blocks down when it happened. He shows us a picture of his son, smiling with the World Trade Center framed behind him. Then he shows us an aerial shot of the collapsed buildings, tells us about the man who was flying a helicopter past that day, who was puzzled to see a whole crowd drift towards the towers instead of away from it, until it dawned on him that they must have been following the first guy in front – blindly, like a lost herd, right into the heart of their deaths. He’d wanted to fly down, to warn them, but knew that the dust rising up from the site would simply sink his helicopter – that all he could do was watch.
“How many people you think died in that buildings?” he goes on, gaining momentum as he flips frantically through his clear folder of newspaper clippings, of photographs – “How many?” There was a list, wasn’t there? A list of missing people… “Yah, there be a list, but what about the little people? What about the illegals? The Mexicans mannin’ the doors? Wha’ about the cleaners? Dey ain’t got no paperwork – and dey died too – No one knows! No one even knows! Their families, they can’t claim insurance! They can’t claim nothin’! No one knows!”
All I could do is watch. I didn’t know what to say. This man had a mission. I don’t know what sort of price he was paying with his family, without his job, just to stand in that street corner however many days it was he stands in that street corner – but something changed in him the day the towers fell, just as something changed in me the day the towers fell. My dreams of America fell that day too, the moment the war machine ground open to a start. The America of Disneyland, of power and strength and generosity and commerce that had lived in my mind, was suddenly substituted for a far more dangerous leviathan. This man’s heart was ravished by the horror, compelled by something strong to tell the truth. A tiny, perhaps unimportant slice of the truth – but nevertheless, the truth. The least I could do was listen.

Two Attempts at Evangelism

While they were at Lystra, Paul and Barnabas came upon a man with crippled feet. He had been that way from birth, so he had never walked. He was sitting and listening as Paul preached. Looking straight at him, Paul realized he had faith to be healed. So Paul called to him in a loud voice, “Stand up!” And the man jumped to his feet and started walking.

When the crowd saw what Paul had done, they shouted in their local dialect, “These men are gods in human form!” They decided that Barnabas was the Greek god Zeus and that Paul was Hermes, since he was the chief speaker. Now the temple of Zeus was located just outside the town. So the priest of the temple and the crowd brought bulls and wreaths of flowers to the town gates, and they prepared to offer sacrifices to the apostles.

But when the apostles Barnabas and Paul heard what was happening, they tore their clothing in dismay and ran out among the people, shouting, “Friends,^b why are you doing this? We are merely human beings—just like you! We have come to bring you the Good News that you should turn from these worthless things and turn to the living God, who made heaven and earth, the sea, and everything in them. In the past he permitted all the nations to go their own ways, but he never left them without evidence of himself and his goodness. For instance, he sends you rain and good crops and gives you food and joyful hearts.” But even with these words, Paul and Barnabas could scarcely restrain the people from sacrificing to them.

Acts 14: 8 – 18, NLT

What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you

- Paul, Acts 17:23, to the Athenians

I have been making my way through the book of Acts, and this story, with its attendant picture of Paul and Barnabas waving away people determined to sacrifice to them has never failed to tickle me. Paul’s brief speech upon being mistaken for Hermes, messenger of the Greek gods, reveals a mixture of exasperation and dismay. And apparently, Barnabas must have been an older bearded fellow, because he got to be Zeus. Of course, the incident is at the same time deadly serious – just read on to the next paragraph and you’ll find out the consequences of miscommunication. But what I find most fascinating about Paul’s little speech is this statement: “In the past he permitted all the nations to go their own ways, but he never left them without evidence of himself and his goodness. For instance, he sends you rain and good crops and gives you food and joyful hearts.”

I grew up with stories about European missionaries, recounted in church during sermons, mentioned in the same breath as Paul and Barnabas and with the same kind of reverence and awe. They were incredible stories of bravery and adventure, and the prevalent image of missionaries being boiled in a pot by cannibals in pop culture helped perpetrate the idea of the white man bringing light to dark continents. The more we learn about these cultures, however, the more nuanced a picture we get about the motivations of those who killed Christian missionaries – local politics, the actions of their fellow Europeans which were blatantly exploitative, cultural taboos that were unwittingly broken. But the fact remains that these were brave men and women who ventured into the unknown to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ, and some paid the ultimate price for it.

However, these stories were also always laced with the sense of Western cultural superiority – they are imperial tales, of the same world as Kipling’s white man’s burden. In these narratives, the white man is always right, and the native is always wrong; the white man comes bearing the Promethean torch of religion, civilization, sanitation, and stiflingly stuffy European clothes which turn you into buckets of sweat in the tropics; the natives live in hopelessly benighted conditions, half-demon and half-child. It is hardly surprising that many missionaries in the age of colonialism were sweeping in their condemnation of local culture, determined to brand anything that offended their own sensibilities – wearing less clothing, for example – as inherently sinful. So you get old films about missionaries bringing the gospel to small pacific islands, and leaving all the natives in crinolines by the end of the film, thoroughly Christianized. So what’s remarkable about Paul’s statement is that while he is firm that the revelation from Jesus is true in a way that the Greek religions are not, he insists that, on some level, these people already know God – “he never left them without evidence of himself and his goodness”.

In fact, I would go so far as to say the people of Lystra were right that the gods had descended to walk among them. After all, Paul and Barnabas were indwelt with the divinity of Christ. And it was Christ’s power through them that enabled them to perform the miracles that caused the people to declare them gods. It is incredibly moving that the Greek religion provided a point of cultural contact, a means for understanding the gospel: it opened them to draw a conclusion (divine revelation) from empirical evidence (Paul’s miracle): “These men are gods in human form”.

From the sound of it, Paul and Barnabas did not capitalize upon this point of cultural contact; it sounds rather as though they were caught off-guard, and didn’t know the best way to react. Although Paul’s speech is sincere, he was not particularly successful in getting these people to understand the gospel, and, before we know it, the window of opportunity shuts and a faction of jealous Jews turns the adoring crowd into a mob that almost kills him. This is purely speculative, but perhaps if Paul had, instead of rebuking their beliefs as “these worthless things”, said they were partially right – that God did walk among them, but only through human beings, he might have stood a better chance of getting them to understand.

A rather more successful attempt at proselytizing occurs at Athens. Perhaps a little better at this now, Paul ascends to the Areopagus, the centre of debate where the Athenians famously debated new schools of thought and religions, and this time he finds an inroad into their worldview. “Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. For as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with the inscription, ‘To the unknown god’. What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.” This gets their attention. Notice he dwells on the positive – he acknowledges that these are open-minded people, spiritual people, who are “very religious”. Even if he thinks their gods “worthless things”, he doesn’t say so. This is not mere sophistry – if you want to be heard, you need to speak the language of the people you are talking to, not close all channels of communication by belittling what they hold dear. Paul even goes on to quote Athenian poetry – “Yet he is actually not far from each one of us for “‘In him we live and move and have our being,’ [from Epimendies of Crete] even some of your own poets have said, “‘For we are indeed his offspring.’ [from Aratus' poem "Phainomena"]“.

Now I don’t know about you, but I would have found this second speech a lot more palatable, and in fact, far more intriguing, than the first, if I were a first century non-Christian. It is respectful, knowledgeable about the local culture, presented in an appropriate context, and most importantly of all, it doesn’t start out with an insult. What worries me most about cookie-cutter evangelism, in which you prepare a one-size-fits-all speech to rattle off at opportune moments, is that I can only imagine a very few social contexts in which it would be convincing. The gospel message is simple, yes. But it also needs to be truly communicated in love – which means listening as well as talking. Where is the other person coming from? What do they already believe? What does their culture say about God that is similar to what you believe about God?

The gospel, after all, is not something you as a Christian need to get off your chest, as quickly as possible in a formulaic paragraph. It is something with its own life, its own magnetism, and God has already prepared all the inroads in all peoples and all cultures to receive it – in fact he’s guaranteed that all the nations will be present at his throne. But it takes a willingness to learn and listen on the part of Christians to understand where non-Christians are coming from. This means a genuine attempt to understand their worldview, not just their religion but their particular relationship (or lack thereof) with God. And I don’t think that a conversation about Jesus should necessarily always be steered towards say, saying the sinner’s prayer with someone. While that would be a wonderful moment to share, it isn’t always our place or time to do it, and forcing it isn’t respectful of the person you have the conversation with. After all, we are in the business of helping and loving people on behalf of Christ, not trying to string up a headcount, like so many shrunken heads on a necklace to be accredited to us on the last day!

Also at the Harvard Ichthus

Do not Fear; Fear God

If there arise among you a prophet, or a dreamer of dreams, and giveth thee a sign or a wonder, and the sign or the wonder come to pass, whereof he spake unto thee, saying, Let us go after other gods, which thou hast not known, and let us serve them; Thou shalt not hearken unto the words of that prophet, or that dreamer of dreams: for the LORD your God proveth you, to know whether ye love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul. Ye shall walk after the LORD your God, and fear him, and keep his commandments, and obey his voice, and ye shall serve him, and cleave unto him. – Deuteronomy 13:1 [Moses]

Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man. – Ecclesiastes 12:13 [Solomon]

The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.
- Proverbs 9:10 [Solomon]

“Do not be afraid,” says the angel to Mary when he appears to her with the news of Jesus’ birth. “Do not be afraid,” says Jesus to the apostles as they stare at him in abject terror when he walks past their boat on the Sea of Galilee. “Do not be afraid,” says the angel to the women who are shocked to find an empty tomb three days after Jesus’ death. “Fear not,” says Jesus to John in Revelation, when he appears to him in a vision in blazing finery, causing John to fall down “as though dead”.

Is there a contradiction between the fact that Christians are called to be bold and courageous, are told repeatedly in the Bible not to fear when they are in the presence of God, and the fact that King Solomon, the wisest man in the history of the world according to the same Bible, says that fearing God and keeping his commandments is the chief end of man? It may seem perplexing, but I think there is really no contradiction. The people who are told not to fear were fearful – that’s the whole point. In the face of the full glory of God, seeing Him in person, the natural response is fear. Just as the natural, and right response to a hurricane, a tsunami, a lightning strike, is fear. Why is it natural and appropriate? Because a hurricane or a tsunami is incredibly powerful and has the potential to wipe you out entirely. It has the potential to destroy you. It is big, huge, overwhelming, and there is absolutely no way you can placate it. Almost anyone, faced with the immediate prospect of being snuffed out by a natural disaster, prays a prayer of some kind. It’s some feeble attempt to placate a thing bigger than you. On a smaller scale, you would be very frightened if a powerful warlord came round and held you at gunpoint, or even simply controlled an area near yours. Because he could, at any time, take a liking to your house or your children or your possessions, and he would have the arms to back him up if he should decide to seize it. In the absence of law enforcement, he could get away with murdering you. In those situations, fear is an appropriate response.

Penitence, acrylic on bamboo plate. By Larry Poncho Brown.

So why shouldn’t it be the appropriate response to THE power behind the universe – the one who gave life, the one who takes it away, the one who sets the rules, the one whose standards matter? If He indeed exists, and is all-powerful, omniscient, and just, and you have done something to hurt another human being, and that human being is precious to him, wouldn’t you be scared? What more, if apparently your wrongdoing was responsible for the utter humiliation and murder of this great monarch’s son – what if the King Himself had disguised himself as a commoner for an evening, and you had kicked him on the side of the road and spit on him for a laugh, not knowing who he was? What if, to your horror, you are called up to the court, and you recognize the face of the beggar in the face of the monarch? Wouldn’t you fall down on your face and beg for mercy?

The people in the first paragraph – the disciples, Mary, John, the women – they were counted as the “righteous” – people who walked with God. Mary was even the wisest woman in the world – the one chosen to bear God’s son. And yet they were afraid, because they knew that before God, they were all sinners, completely unworthy to be in His presence. Yet God, in His mercy, condescends to speak with them, and He gently tells them not to be afraid. Why? Because He loves them. This is an overwhelming message. It’s improbable, counter-intuitive. Why a great power should care about you, not to mention love you, has nothing to do with His greatness – it is an unexpected attribute. After all, wouldn’t you be surprised to hear that your president or prime minister has a personal interest in you and loves you, even though you’ve never met them? God is bigger than that – and yet He has revealed that He does love us.

You see, Fear in itself is not a bad thing. Fear is a reaction to power. We know we are limited in our power, and so anything that has greater power is worth fearing. But the thing about the Christian is she does not need to fear anything other than God, because nothing is greater or more powerful than God, and if we fear Him and keep His commandments – if we have thrust ourselves under His protection by accepting the sacrificial atonement of His Son, then He is on our side. To have the all-powerful, omniscient and victorious God, the one who made everything, preserves everything, permits everything and will redeem everything, on our side truly means that there is nothing that we need to be afraid of. And that is the source of courage and boldness – “And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose. For whom He foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the firstborn among many brethren. Moreover whom He predestined, these He also called; whom He called, these He also justified; and whom He justified, these He also glorified. What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us?”  says Paul, in Romans 8:28-31.

Am I trapped by fear of other things – of the future, of potential sin, of loneliness, of rejection – sometimes? Of course! I am often seized by fear – it comes out of nowhere, a sudden wave of it, and I feel completely thrown for a loop. But the thing is I know I should not fear those things – my fear should be reserved only for the Lord. The thing about the emotion of fear is, like all other emotions, it comes and it goes. I cannot control my emotions, but I can control my response to them. And I can choose to respond: No. I will not fear you. I fear God, and I will keep in lockstep with him, as faithfully as I can. I am more afraid of being apart from Him than I am of any of those terrible scenarios, and if He decides to thrust me into those valleys, I know He will be by my side, and that Jesus has endured them to a far greater extent than I can imagine, and He knows that we can bear them together. I can choose to believe in the God who has been nothing but good to me. I can accept humbly His promise that He loves me and wants only the best for me. I can accept that what I want isn’t necessarily what’s best for me, and that I will eventually come round to His point of view, even if it takes a while, even if it doesn’t happen in this lifetime. I have been bold to Him, I’ve wrestled with Him. I haven’t treated Him with reverence – I argue with Him and disagree with Him. But whenever I demand that He show Himself, I am always struck by fear, and accept that that isn’t really what I want. That it would be like annihilation to see the face of God as a mere mortal. And most curiously of all, whenever I get to that point, I feel at peace. It is an answer from God: it’s a demonstration of His power. And I am so glad that this infinitely powerful, infinitely merciful God is my God.

God’s Grace: Delectable, Unforgettable

“O taste and see that the Lord is good : blessed is the man that trusts in him.”

–Psalm 34:8

You know the feeling. The first bloom has died off. What you thought would last forever has withered away. Summer has gone on for quite a while now, and the sultry heat is starting to make you feel weary, rather than excited about yet another day of the beating sun. You feel lethargic, tired, testy, or dull. You’re not even really talking very much anymore. When you talk, you’re not that sure he’s listening. It isn’t as though you’ve gone through a big crisis or anything – in fact something like that would be quite galvanizing, exciting, even, though it might be difficult. Instead it’s more of a windless drift, like a tall ship marooned on the glassy sea without wind. There’s a restlessness to it, and yet it would seem tetchy of you to complain, so you keep quiet. After all, there isn’t anything wrong, is there? It’s not like you can put your finger on it – there isn’t anything to complain about.

But God doesn’t quite seem to be as attentive to your prayers, or maybe you simply go through the motions because you’re sure he couldn’t possibly be interested in the dull, plodding little things you have to say. And a little worm of doubt starts wiggling in your mind – maybe he is distant, after all, more like the absentee watchmaker than the “personal Savior”. Maybe he’s not that interested. Maybe he doesn’t really care. Maybe you’re supposed to get on with your life without him.

I was talking with a friend last Sunday who was living in doubt. Like me, he felt that he had been called by God at some point for some thing – had received a distinct call, a moment of revelation. Like me, he was feeling a little bit lost. Both of us keep going back to that moment and wondering if it really happened. As in, really really happened – wasn’t some kind of self-induced delusion of grandeur, or the effects of the weather and digestion, or some kind of foolishness best abandoned rather than entertained.

We beat around a little, depressing track of what-ifs. What if we made it up? What if God doesn’t really work like that? (He kind of does, though, too often to be dismissed, as recorded in the Bible) What if God was sort of tricking us? What if he really wanted us to go through some really arduous roads, and if we did something wrong they’d just get longer and more treacherous? What kind of God is he, anyway, who one moment seems so close and the next so distant? Then my friend said, “But then, once you’ve tasted something, you never forget it. Somehow your palate just never lets you forget it.” And I thought, that’s right. You never do….

image credit by Bruce Tuten

It is a good analogy. As a foreign student from the culinary mecca that is Singapore – like many Singaporeans, I have a very patriotic stomach – I have experienced a craving for food I can’t get all too often while tiding out the grim winters of Boston. There’s times when nothing but laksa will do, when I really want some fish soup noodles with that wonderful milk and wine soup from that particular store near my mother’s workplace, and thinking about it is just maddening because I’m a couple continents away, and whatever I can come up with is just a pale substitute.

And then there is the unmistakable phenomenon where you go to a favourite restaurant, and order your favourite dish from there, only for it to come and something’s off – the standard has dropped, some ingredient has been replaced by another, or omitted to cut costs, and you resolve never to go there again, in honor of the lost culinary experience that now can never be had again. Yet that sensory experience – that barometer for what you expect – is retained by your taste buds, otherwise you couldn’t have made that judgment. Nothing else will make the cut, even if it’s been decades since you last ate it. And it is so sweet to be able to taste again something from your childhood, even if it was something you didn’t even particularly like at the time. It brings back a flood of memory – ah, yes – those were good times.

There was a point when I grew suspicious of so-called Christian “mountaintop experiences” – often induced by retreats or particular spiritual conversations: those concentrated periods of Christian fellowship that produce a kind of lovely glow in the consciousness, but which very predictably wanes after a couple weeks of the daily grind. I didn’t want to accept that the glow would fade, so I decided it’d be better to avoid the glow in the first place – a kind of emotional Keynesian economics, if you would – evening out the fluctuations so you don’t get as great a trough for a corresponding peak. However, the problem with this approach is what you end up with isn’t a nice little line in the middle – what you end up with is all trough.

Now I recognize I can’t have all peaks with no troughs – after all, that’s actually just the same thing. Either way, I’d never learn. God’s project, after all, isn’t to make us blissfully happy all the time. That would be faintly disturbing, if not downright creepy in a world of pain. Think of a community that is always bursting with happiness no matter what happens, and you get the Stepford Wives – a phony kind of thing that denies the brokenness of the world. He calls us to be joyful even in times of trial, not constantly vibrating with good feelings. And he promised to be faithful to us, even when we are faithless – for he cannot deny Himself.

Chasing the experiential is as dangerous as chasing the intellectual – if it becomes the ultimate barometer of God in our lives, that would be the opposite of Faith. Faith is, after all, being certain of the thing we do not see – or feel, or understand. Amassing a lot of spiritual highs, like amassing a lot of intellectual knowledge about God, can be the mirage that makes us swerve off the narrow path, rather than keep faithfully on it. After all, we were not given an intellectual idea of Jesus, or a Jesus happy pill that makes us immune to pain, but Jesus himself, fully human, fully God, who, on the cross, felt so far from God that he cried that He had forsaken him.

You see, being faithful is pretty much one of the hardest things we are called to be. God berates Israel for having an adulterous heart every time it turned away from Him – which was, by the sounds of it, at least once every fortnight. For myself, it’s probably several times every hour. I’m dismayed by how easily distracted I am on a daily basis. There are things I ought to do, and yet it’s the easiest thing to find something else that is more compelling for another five minutes. It’s the same way with my heart. Somehow it’s a herculean effort just to crack open the Bible once a day, or to read it with real attention, rather than go at it as though earning a lot of brownie points to be redeemed later.

This is why it’s so good to remember, and so helpful that Jesus instituted the holy sacrament – to be taken “in remembrance of me”. Take, eat – and remember when you took and ate. Savor it, when you are in that blessed place of grace. Remember the contours of His goodness: how His provision meant such bread, such wine. Remember the Lord your God, who delivered you out of Egypt, out of slavery. Remember when you were in the pit, and He rescued you. Remember when you almost toppled into the abyss, and He snatched you from the brink.

Remember when He loved you through your family, your friends, who were wonderfully there for you just when you needed them. Remember te kindness of strangers, who had no reason to help you. Remember His goodness, and his tender mercies. Remember that the Lord your God is good, and he does not forsake the ones he calls by his name. Remember it’s His name on the contract, His blood that was the down payment, remember the very dear price He paid for you. Does He love you? Of course! I can taste it, and I trust it.

Also at the Harvard Ichthus

The Great Fire

Break, blow, burn and make me new

- John Donne, Holy Sonnet: Batter my heart

“I baptize you with water for repentance, but he who is coming after me is mightier than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and gather his wheat into the barn, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”
-  Matthew 3:11-12 (ESV)

I was standing on the roof of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, that great domed wonder, looking down upon the city when I met an old man whose name I forget – he was the security guard. He was also looking out onto he city, and he asked me where I was from. “Singapore”, I said, and he smiled.

“Sir Stamford Raffles, 1819,” he said, “Independence in 1965…” He proceeded to rattle off an impressive concise history of my country. I was surprised, and gratified – most people have vaguely heard of the place, but I was glad that this man, at least, had taken care to know about my far-flung bit of what used to be the British Empire. I mean, I suppose the whole reason I had made the pilgrimage to St. Paul’s was to see the legendary cathedral which John Donne ministered in, the place where Donne gave his sermons, where he wore his red vestments as Dean of St Paul’s, and administered the sacraments, was kind of because I had done my GCSE ‘A’ levels on his poetry and fallen in love with it. And I had been taught my ‘A’ level subjects by British men in a program that groomed young Singaporeans to go to Oxbridge on government scholarships. Which, in turn, is all traceable, in a way, to that fateful day that some Scotsman stepped foot on my little island, drew up a treaty and planted a flag. History is funny like that.

“It’s beautiful,” I said, looking out at the city spread out like a map before us. “Can you tell me what’s your favourite cathedral, other than this one? Maybe one that most people wouldn’t know about?” He pointed a few of them out, which I duly took note of to visit later. “You like cathedrals, then?” “I think they’re very beautiful.” “Sir Christopher Wren built quite a few – in fact, a whole lot of them, you know.” “Yes – he built this one, didn’t he?” “Yes, after the Great Fire of London.”

“1666,” I said, remembering the hysterical Puritan father in Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver, who stood in the flames of the city and laughed with a certain vindicated glee, for he had thought it would be the year of the end of the world. “Yes, indeed – the year of the devil, as they say.” “It was the year of the plague, wasn’t it?” “Yes, 1665, the year of the plague. Then 1666, the great fire.”

And I remembered what I’d read about the bubonic plague – the despair, the corpses lining the streets, how mysterious it was, how prevalent, how inescapable. It must have seemed like the end of the world, I thought. It really must have seemed like it. I imagined wooden carts on the streets below me, wheeling little hills of corpses out into the further reaches of the city, and shuddered. They didn’t know it was the fleas on the rats, I thought. They had no explanation. They fled one city, and they simply brought the horror with them. People wouldn’t receive them. The doors were barred against them. They were locked inside their own houses, a red X marked on their doors, condemned to live or die – and who knows if it was better to live than die, amongst all that rotting human flesh? It must have seemed inescapable, incurable, it must have seemed like some divine judgment – judgment on a city that did not care for its poor, that left them wallowing in dirt and filth, that abandoned them to disease with its muddied water, its stinking streets.

And then the fire. Two thirds of London was brought to the ground by the great fire. The thing is, only the fire could rid the city of the plague. Plague and fire – like divine or infernal twins, razing the city to the ground. And everything that is shoddily built, everything cobbled together of wood is consumed, is razed to the ground. But only the fire could rid the city of its great disease – the fire purifies, knocking down everything that was not built to withstand it. And the fire disinfects – it eats up the bodies, rids them of their plague. And it raged and raged, and the city went up in flames. But in due time this also fades to embers, and fear gives way to mourning. What was burned down is cleared away; those who had died are mourned. Those who survive are amazed – having stood through plague and fire, they slowly decide it is their task to rebuild. The city must rise again, like some enormous phoenix, renewing itself out of the ashes. Despite the despair, out of the dust, here is something new – a new chance to build a new vision of a city, a city that will have better fire safety, a city that has better sanitation, that will house its poor better.

And among the builders was Sir Christopher Wren, charged with planning the architecture for the new churches that would be raised. As King’s Surveyor of Works in 1669, he was personally responsible for the building of 51 churches, many of which still stand today – among them St. Paul’s Cathedral, that beautiful dome I perched on, surveying the great city I have always loved, long before I had ever seen it.

“The Germans didn’t touch it during the blitz,” said my new friend. “Even though they tried. It was a kind of miracle,” he said. “A great big dome like that. Of course it was a target. It was bombed twice, but each time it missed, or was defused.”

“And it’s your job to protect it,” I said.

“Well, mine and His,” he said, and smiled again.

Also at the Harvard Ichthus

Elephantine

The Leveler -

entry in The Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges, trans. Andrew Hurley

Between 1840 and 1864, the Father of Light (who is also called the Inner Word) afforded the musician and pedagogue Jakob Lorber a series of protracted revelations concerning the humanity, the fauna and the flora of the celestial bodies that make up our solar system. One of the domestic animals that those revelations apprised us of is the Leveler, or Tamper-Downer (Bodendrucker), which renders incalculable services on the planet Miron (identified by the current editor of Lorber’s work as Neptune).

The Leveler is ten times larger than the elephant, which it greatly resembles. It has a shortist trunk, long straight tusks, and pale green skin. Its legs are very thick, and they are conical; the points of the cones seem to fit into its body. The Leveler is a plantigrade animal that labors for bricklayers and builders to level the ground: it is led to a plot of uneven ground, and with its legs, its trunk, and its tusks, it levels it.

The Leveler feeds upon grass and roots and has no enemies, save a few species of insects.

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Illustration of the Leveler by Peter Sis. Photo by Judith Huang.

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I have been fascinated by elephants for a long time. I am slowly amassing a collection of representations of the elephant. I’ve gotten up to four so far.

This fellow is from Ghana. It was given to me by my friend Lois who was a reporter there for a summer. It’s made of wood.

This little guy was blown out of glass by a third-generation glassblower in Murano, Venezia. I remember this guy because he is a True Artist. We had a long conversation and he showed me his best piece, which he doesn’t even bother displaying, which is of a little deer being carried off by an eagle while his mother watches on in panic – a scene from Bambi. He has loved Disney movies since he was a child, and so this fellow was modeled after Dumbo. He doesn’t like tourists, and literally ducked onto the floor when he saw a crowd pass by the store so he wouldn’t have to serve them, as he preferred to show me how he made the glass baubles he was working on. His brother, who makes jewelry a few doors down, is better at earning money than him, but he isn’t too bothered. He is very annoyed that crass little Disney figures made in China are displayed all along the storefronts that are closest to the main island. He has promised, if I’d like, to teach me glassblowing if I should ever return to Venice.

I can’t for the life of me remember how I got this elephant.

This colourful fellow was carved out of wood in San Martin Tilcajete, Oaxaca, Mexico, a village that specializes in the craft. The little figures are called alebrijes.  The wood is extremely light. I also have a really big wooden tiger from one of the artisans there who looks like something out of Picasso. The state of Oaxaca is a puzzling and delightful demonstration of the goods and ills of specialization. You have one village specializing in red pottery, one village specializing in black pottery, one village specializing in a carpets, one in wooden animals, one in cochineal dyes. And you have to wonder if this is the secret to the preservation of craft. The problem is, when the economy is down, craftsmen’s livelihoods are precarious. They pour into Oaxaca City to sell their wares in the market, they turn up in D.F. – Mexico City, and just the word “Oaxaca” is enough to give them instant credibility, a kind of brand signifying quality. But can one rely entirely on tourism?

After all, the sadness of Venice is that there is almost nothing else.

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Treatise on the Prosepoem

by Judith Huang

But it was Baudelaire who launched the genre, giving it a local habitation and a name. Of course, we had to do that visionary work of appropriating that old and sagacious institution – the sentence, and make it our own: The New Sentence, like the New York or the New England. The New Sentence is the Liberated Sentence in prose that works like poetry. Not a unit of logic. But an Independent. Entity that relates. To the sentences before. And after. (In multiple, complex, and ambiguous ways.) But then, like all appropriated things, before long we had to set it loose. We had to let it stride in long strides across the continents. The sentences became a paragraph, and dwelt amongst us. It was akin to the elephant, that most sagacious of beasts, humble enough to be funny and princely enough to be beautiful. It now roams the earth upon its pillared legs, its huge heart spanning acres of cedars, falling in its mellifluous gallop.

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Basically one of my ambitions in life is to grow up to be an elephant. I’m working on it.

Tribute to the Cosmopolitan

Masters of the modern universe search for authenticity

By Judith Huang

image from Ethos Books

The Proper Care of Foxes
Wena Poon
Ethos Books (2009) / 200 pages / SGD20

In an age in where “I friend you” has morphed from Singlish schoolgirl olive branch to globally recognized verb phrase, where young executives are whipped from one metropolis to another in the space of a week, and where the geeks inherit the earth, Wena Poon’s luminous prose provides a voice that helps us make sense of it all.

Her concerns are timeless – love, death, kindness, cruelty, friendship, family and loss. But her voice is distinctive: defiant, confident, quirky and devastatingly, relentlessly hip. In her latest collection of short stories, The Proper Care of Foxes, she seems to be self-consciously transnational – an intention immediately obvious from the shopping list of the world’s major cities on the contents page. If her debut collection, the well-received Lions in Winter, was a tribute to the Singapore “heartlander”, then Foxes is its natural companion: a tribute to the “cosmopolitan”.

Here is a writer who is fluent in the feel and thought of an impressively broad range of worldviews – the dim cynicism of the expatriate photojournalist, the despairing decadence of the scion of New England Brahmins, the frenetic workaholism of the high-flying Hong Kong accountant, the cosy antiquarianism of the middle-class English retiree. Despite their closeness to stereotype, her characters defy easy classification. They have the weight of authenticity – instantly recognizable from cursory experience, and yet infused with depth and compassion.

Poon’s narrators are most often on the winning side of history – they are the savvy survivors in a world where the illiterate, the old, the unconnected, the unmoneyed, are left in the dust, as it were, of a frenetic, furious new world order. Hers is unmistakably a voice of the new: a Mrs Dalloway on speed, Ecstasy and a host of as-yet-unmixed drug cocktails, fingers flying on three keypads to contact 20 social networks to all corners of the pulsing ecosystem of humanity. But her allegiances are far more complicated. Her title, after all, invokes care – and “proper care” – a kind of embrace offered gingerly to something swift, dark and subtle. Her cosmopolitan empathy is also catholic: although her project in this volume is not to narrate for the dispossessed, her self-assured characters identify with them, however briefly.

In “Vanilla Five”, a bored, privileged housewife with literary ambitions and a larger-than-life philandering novelist husband momentarily superimposes on her Japanese shopkeeper neighbour the Japanese soldiers who “killed women by jamming Chinese fireworks up their cunts and lighting them”. She does this not because she has anything against her mild-mannered neighbour, who has an unexplained white son, but because “she knew so little about Japanese people and Asia” that it was the first thing that flitted into her mind when she saw him.

And she is unflinching when she writes about evil.

Prostitutes have more freedom. At least you’re not bonded to the client for years. You don’t live in his house. He hits you, you leave. But the Filipina maid. She can’t leave. Some of them are practically under house arrest, and nobody checks on them. Nobody. Think about the possibilities. I’d like to have power over someone like that. In my house. What’d I do to them. I wouldn’t trust myself.

rants MacGregor, the jaded British photojournalist, on the Filipina maids in Hong Kong and Singapore, comparing maid abuse in the comfortable apartments of middle-class Asians to the Senegalese supermodel he photographed at a Hermes show, who spoke of her experience with female circumcision. Where the outrage of war had ceased to move him, the “horror lurking in boring places” is what draws his lens, and the author’s pen.

Poon seems determined to write a different kind of story – fully confident in itself, but poised defiantly against the kinds of writing the mainstream offers about Asia. Worshipful Orientalism, embodied in the prancing tranny New Hampshire billionaire Siegfried, is continually brought down to earth by his no-nonsense nose-to-the-grind Hong Kong university roommate Regina: the classic odd-couple story updated into a 21st-century strange dorm room encounter with the third kind. MacGregor, who laconically describes his job as “photographing scenic poverty”, and who, tellingly, flees the banality of developed Asia, still finds himself galvanized in defense of abused Filipina maids when he finds cruelty lurking unexpectedly in the pristine lives of upper- middle class Singaporeans.

And yet, Poon’s stories never tip over into the territory of the angry young Asian woman of the “empire writes back” variety. Her frustrated divorcee, Alison, says of her successful novelist husband, “I’m sick of Langley and I’m going to write a story that Langley and other stupid male authors like him, who have first names which were really last names, can never write. I am going to write Langley and his Men’s Club out of my life”. But the revenge that Poon has planned for her is far more subtle, and far more exquisite – Alison gets to run away with a sweet, confused white Japanese punk-rocker neighbour who could pass for a 22-year-old, in defiance of her social pack of “upstate Radcliffe-educated women who no longer worked”.

And, where there has been misunderstanding, she is careful to unwrap, quite deliciously, the appreciative core at the heart of the misunderstanding – for example, watch what she does with Orientalism in this particularly sublime moment in “Siegfried & Regina”. Siegfried, naked, long-haired and illegal, stands rapturous in the middle of an empty French theatre in Hanoi:

Despite the architecture there was no way she would have believed she was anywhere but in Southeast Asia. Every molecule of air was bursting with the scent of the jungle…

He turned to [Regina]. ‘The flowers in the air smell like Chanel No. 5. You think this is a replica of the Opera Garnier and of Paris, but perhaps the Opera Garnier and Paris are but a replica of this. The flowers for their perfumes came from here. This is the real thing, Reg. Not France.

And so, Siegfried and Regina, archetypes of the Decadent West and the Industrious East, somehow ventriloquise something essential about authenticity – that it is found where beauty is, that there is, really, nothing new under the sun, and to have seen it once is to have seen it all, but that it does not preclude the need to keep on seeing.

To keep on seeing seems to be Poon’s ultimate project: though unflinchingly honest, she is, at heart, optimistic that through the thicket of BlackBerry chatter, real connection – real love, real friendship, can and does come through. Poon herself elucidates this phenomenon best – in the title story, a lonely English executive wonders at the bittersweet one-night-stand he had with his Malaysian Cambridge tutorial mate:

Edward marveled again at the random connectivity of life, the enormous consequences of tiny blips of electronic mail pulsing, faster than the speed of light, through the wide world. For the past few weeks he had felt intermittently, the terror of the void. And yet the void had sent him back something: her smell, her flesh. Out of eternity he had redeemed an hour; out of the unknown he had experienced a sudden consummation in which for a few seconds the universe contracted into the smallest possible ball of anguished joy.

And so once again, the oldest questions still have the oldest answers.

published at  QLRS Vol. 9 No. 3 Jul 2010

Real Artists Ship

“Culture making requires shared goods. Culture making is people (plural) making something of the world – it is never a solitary affair. Only artifacts that leave the solitude of their inventors’ studios and imaginations can move the horizons of possibility and become the raw material for more culture making. Until an artifact is shared, it is not culture. In the pithy words attributed to Apple Computer founder Steve Jobs when his engineers were tempted to put off the release date of the first Macintosh: “Real artists ship”. Jobs was willing to flatter his engineers, with their attention to detail and passion for perfection, by calling them artists – but he also was calling them back to the fundamental requirement of every software developer, to “ship” a working product to a wider public.”

- Culture Making, Andy Crouch.

I have pretty much spent my entire life trying to figure out what a real artist does. I am slowly coming to believe that to a far larger extent than people are willing to admit, we are all artists. It comes with the territory of bearing the image of God – an undeniable aspect of the Imago Dei. I’m not just playing with definitions here – every kindergartner, given a crayon, can, and will, draw. There is something wonderful about children’s drawings – Quentin Blake, the distinguished British illustrator, once had to produce drawings of dinosaur machines that a young boy would have drawn as part of a picture book. He was pleased when a critic praised them as being “so good they could almost have been drawn by a four-year-old”.

Quentin Blake, my hero, in a self-portrait

Now, I remember being frustrated when I made those very charming drawings as a child. I suspect most of the time, it isn’t a child’s project to produce something cute. They are all trying to be accurate, and are infuriated that their chubby hands are unable to draw something that looks more like the real world. At least, that’s how I felt. Also, there is that tiresome insistence on the part of kindergarten teachers that drawing is an intrinsic part of childhood. So we try, try, and try again. But time passes, and as our skills improve, as drawing class becomes more advanced, and eventually dropped out of the curriculum, most adults give up the original project of mimicking the real world, leaving it to the “real artists” to master perspective, light, shade, and these days, high concepts, while they relegate themselves to the vast majority of people who “don’t understand art”. Just as insistent as the kindergarten’s philosophy is the adult world’s message that drawing ends with childhood – anyone who stubbornly continues to pursue it into adulthood is considered mad, or at the very least, childish, selfish and foolish.

As I’ve been traveling around, I was surprised and saddened by how many people I met who confidently, and even proudly, said that they hadn’t the least interest in poetry or art.

Full Article at the Harvard Ichthus

China’s Navy

Generally, when a large, powerful country starts sending a fleet of explorers to unknown places or places that have not been in contact for a very, very long time, the natives better watch out, c.f. Spanish, Portuguese, Brits, Dutch, French, Germans (1) [sic]. American naval presence is at a height now, too. There are, of course, various ways of consolidating power among your farflung nations: “soft” power (cultural, economic, diplomacy), “hard” power (conquest, administration, formal colonialism), “old skool” (tribute, threat of military decimation, puppet governments).

Statue of Zheng He in Malacca, from Wikipedia

Well, the Chinese did it 600 years ago, at the height of the Ming Dynasty, through Admiral Zheng He, whose 7 naval expeditions took him at least to the Cape of Good Hope, as well as Southeast Asia. The final two journeys’ destinations were recorded then destroyed by the Ming emperor (intriguing – I wonder why that information was dangerous…), leading to rampant speculation by amateur navymen-turned historians that they possibly “discovered” America before the Europeans. They certainly had the technology, though. The question is whether they did, which thanks to the burned records, is hard to prove one way or another.

ship rounding the Cape of Good Hope from “India”, image from Wikipedia

“About the year of Our Lord 1420 a ship, what is called an Indian junk [Zoncho de India], on a crossing of the Sea of India towards the Isle of Men and Women, was driven by a storm beyond the Cape of Diab, through the Green Isles, out into the Sea of Darkness on their way west and southwest. Nothing but air and water was seen for forty days and by their reckoning they ran 2,000 miles and fortune deserted them. When the stress of the weather had subsided they made the return to the said Cavo de Diab in seventy days and drawing near to the shore to supply their wants the sailors saw the egg of a bird called roc, the egg being as big as a seven gallon cask, and the size of the bird is such that from the point of one wing to another was sixty paces and it can quite easily lift an elephant or any other large animal. It does great damage to the inhabitants and is very fast in its flight”. – Fra Mauro World Map (1450), Italian

We have traversed more than 100,000 li (50,000 kilometers) of immense water spaces and have beheld in the ocean huge waves like mountains rising in the sky, and we have set eyes on barbarian regions far away hidden in a blue transparency of light vapors, while our sails, loftily unfurled like clouds day and night, continued their course [as rapidly] as a star, traversing those savage waves as if we were treading a public thoroughfare…
—Erected by Zheng He, Changle, Fujian, 1432. Louise Levathes

17th century Chinese woodblock print possibly of Zheng He’s fleet, image from Wikipedia

(1) Originally read: (Germans were even landlocked!)
NB. The Germans are NOT landlocked. Sorry.