Christ on a coin. It is a 7th-century Byzantine piece, Solidus of Justinian II, gold, no doubt, but with red blotches on its surface, on the obverse side, on its head, on the head of Christ, and also above him, on his right, on his left, and near his heart.
“Christ in the heart.” It is the voice of Father Quintana, a character in the 2012 film To the Wonder, who also says, right before that, as part of the same voiceover fragment, “Christ before me. Christ behind me. Christ in me. Christ above me. Christ on my right. Christ on my left.”
Justinian II on a coin. On his left, inscriptions and fragments, and on their left, numerals in red. This is the reverse side—the tails—of Solidus of Justinian II.
Elizabeth II on a coin. On its left, on the floor, is the body of Neil Lennon, head coach of the Scottish association football club Hibernian FC. His face is red. He is in pain, and so is Zdeněk Zlámal, the goalkeeper who is playing for Hibernian’s Edinburgh rivals Heart of Midlothian. They were struck by coins tossed from the crowd.
Christ on a cross. But he is abstracted, distorted, blurry, and is blending into the background. This is how the painter Francis Bacon presents the ghastly figure in Crucifixion (1933). The writer Anne Carson on Bacon: “He wants to make us see something we don’t yet have the eyes for.”
Christ as a force. Joseph Beuys, the artist, uses this language to describe the “evolutionary principle” from which all art (and life: Beuys does not allow for an easy distinction between the two—for him, in the final analysis, “every human being is an artist”) emanates. What is Art? Beuys’s answer: “a way of working that says the inner eye is of much more vital importance than the external images that arise as a matter of course.”
Bacon and Beuys were devoted to an expression that constantly challenged and undermined the power of optical art. As was the designer of Solidus of Justinian II, whose name we do not know, and who once distorted Jesus’s figure by blending together the foreground and background of a gold coin, creating a haptic, or tactile, image in the process. This designer was a Byzantine, after all, and according to the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, “Byzantine art reverses Greek art by giving such a degree of activity to the background that we no longer know where the background ends and the forms begin.” Bacon’s paintings follow the same logic. In Francis Bacon: Logic of Sensation, Deleuze tells us that in Bacon’s work “the form and the ground, connected to each other by the contour, lie on a single plane of a close, haptic vision.”
Connections mattered a great deal to Deleuze: he activated and invigorated the philosophical concept of the “rhizome,” a nonlinear structure in which any two points can be connected. His approach was additive, dynamic, energetic. Beuys’s was the same. Pamela Kort, the art curator, argues that “Beuys’s aesthetic is embedded in the ideas of alignment, perpetuation, and addition. Rather than advocating invention, he believed it was the artist’s task to discover connections and expand upon them.”
In a 1980 lecture, Deleuze speaks of a “life work, a very modest work, but a very profound one.” In a 1980 lecture, Beuys, occasionally modest, often profound, speaks of the life, of the work, of the Lebenswerk of the Scottish gangster Jimmy Boyle in front of a small audience in Edinburgh. Boyle, who was once sentenced to life imprisonment, was a born-again artist.
The first entry in Beuys’s 1964 list-piece Life Course/Work Course is his birth. The first word in To the Wonder, the Terrence Malick film from 2012, is “newborn.” This film, nonlinear in structure, was a great risk by Malick, and in the loud eyes of many film critics, let alone the general public, this is where Malick started to lose the plot.
Storytelling is never a given, though—not all artists are fans. In “Variations on the Right to Remain Silent,” Anne Carson says that Francis Bacon “wants to defeat narrative wherever it seeks to arise, which is pretty much everywhere since humans are creatures who crave stories.” She points to the nonchalant “free marks” you can find in Bacon’s paintings, the accidents—a “whip of white paint,” for instance, that, here and there, disrupts the painting, and, by extension, any sense of plot. Carson builds on the work of Deleuze, who claims, in the book Francis Bacon, that “modern painting begins when man no longer experiences himself as an essence, but as an accident. There is always a fall, a risk of the fall; the form begins to express the accident, and no longer the essence.”
The artistry of Beuys, Bacon, and Malick begins from a moment of commitment to accidents, to mistakes, to, dare I say, ugliness even. In the works of Beuys and Bacon, beauty is extinguished stylistically: Beuys used a lot of repellent brown paint, while Bacon’s figures are, from a superficial perspective, unsightly. For Malick, on the other hand, the sort of ugliness he is interested in depicting is spiritual in nature: he is interested in people’s interiors, in their moral compasses, not only when they are directed towards some sort of light-source, but also when they are pressed-in by darkness on all sides.
In To the Wonder, we are privy to the struggles of Father Quintana, a priest played by the actor Javier Bardem. “Where are you leading me?” the priest asks God. One must imagine the same question being asked by a chorus: the viewers of To the Wonder; the readers of Gilles Deleuze and Anne Carson; a person staring at a Francis Bacon painting; the thirty people or so who attended Beuys’s lecture in Edinburgh in 1980. These five artists—yes, that’s what’s at stake here: art—believe in the importance of forming linkages. And their faith in connection-forming, that’s a risk: they might be sentenced to outsiderness.
And yet the alien is full of generosity—that generosity of spirit is what I find in certain manifestations of nonnarrative and nonsense. The works of Carson, Bacon, Deleuze, Malick, and Beuys, these difficult works, stand for an ethics of choice: it is on the person reading, listening, viewing, thinking, to play an active role when engaging with art. And yet we often “fear to choose,” as Father Quintana says. “Jesus insists on choice,” Quintana adds. “The one thing he condemns utterly is avoiding the choice. To choose is to commit yourself. And to commit yourself is to run the risk, is to run the risk of failure, the risk of sin, the risk of betrayal.”
Intensity and sincerity are easy to laugh at. This is the challenge that Terrence Malick’s films and Joseph Beuys’s pieces have to navigate, given their spiritual and metaphysical themes. They are childlike, carefree, devotional, and that intimidates some people. They are serious works, and boy does that scare.
To intellectualize is to maintain a distance, to stay cool—it is also to hug the fence, or, at its worst, to become a statue. (I cannot imagine a more terrible death than becoming fixed.) Francis Bacon had little interest in the safety that comes with such distancing. “When you’re outside of a tradition,” he tells his interviewer David Sylvester, “as every artist is today, one can only want to record one’s own feelings about certain situations as closely to one’s nervous system as one possibly can.” Immediacy, the gut, instinct, intuition—all that is supreme. “Never let anybody shut down your instinct,” Malick once told Olga Kurylenko, who plays a leading role in To the Wonder, “because it’s the most important thing you have.” Beuys agrees. He considers intuition to be the highest form of knowledge, the domain of the spirit, the domain of humans—yes, that’s what’s at stake here: human beings.
Acceleration is nothing short of an ethical position: to move fast is to stick to the facts, Carson tells us, via Deleuze, via Bacon, and the idea is that, for the truth-seeker, nothing should matter more than evidence. So we are encouraged to move. That’s the reason Bacon uses white arrows in his paintings, and it’s why Malick’s cameras are always restless. That’s why Carson is fascinated by how Bacon “speed[s] your eye,” which is exactly the effect left by Deleuze’s schizophrenic writings and Beuys’s frantic drawings. Take a look at his Evolution (1974), for instance. There is but one demand here: don’t be still.
The dynamism of this drawing mirrors the work of the philosopher Henri Bergson, who was the major influence on Gilles Deleuze’s development. Ideas that were first introduced in Creative Evolution (1907), one of Bergson’s towering works, are overwhelmingly present in Beuys’s oeuvre. In this text, Bergson places the notions of intellect, intuition, and instinct on the same table, positioning them side-by-side, tossing and turning them, until a new way of thinking is revealed, a “philosophy in the wake of Darwin.”
In What is Art?, Beuys, in a very elusive fashion, posits that “the old form of evolution has now ended.” He, too, is thinking of Darwin. And his conclusion, what he calls the Christ force, bears striking similarities to Bergson’s concept of élan vital, which roughly means vital impetus, a new way of thinking beyond natural selection. In his book Bergsonism (1966), Deleuze gives this notion a second life, stripping away a lot of the mysticism but staying with the impulse: that a creative force, a drive, exists, and that newness plays a vital role in it.
Right, okay, so this is important, but what does it take to be new? In “Peanut Butter,” a poem, Eileen Myles, the poet, writes, “All / the things I / embrace as new / are in / fact old things, / re-released.” This gesture of renewal floods Eileen Myles’s pages, from their collection I Must Be Living Twice (2015), in which their old poems are literally re-released, to their book Evolution (2018), where you can find the poem “Dream 2” right after “Dream,” and the poem “You” right after another “You.”
What I find in Myles’s writing is what Deleuze finds in Bacon, and what Carson finds in the presence of Joan of Arc: a “rage against cliché […] a genius.” Sit with Myles’s poem “Joan,” for one, and you’ll find some examples of their singular expression. It begins like this: “Today, May 30th, Joan / of Arc was burned.” From the start, the poem is accelerating: the lines are short, freefalling, hugging the left margin. (A more extreme example of this can be found in the poem “Angel,” from Evolution, in which each of the following words—this, different, fear—takes up a single line). By the time Myles writes that Joan “saw angels / in colored glass,” halfway through the poem, we’d already been introduced to multiple levels of visions or hallucinations, depending on who you ask. The most pronounced image is that of the dove(s) flying out from Joan’s mouth. It is repeated three times, and it is how the poem ends.
Joan—saint, hero, genius, an ill person, depending on who you ask—was creative. That’s what Carson sees in her responses and silences: a force. In her discussion of Joan of Arc’s interrogation, Carson writes, “Joan despised the line of inquiry and blocked it as long as she could. It seems that for her, the voices had no story.”
Story
About a poet
you might
say—he’s really
good at
being alone.
You might lie
low with your
head hanging
down
or look up at a shirt
on a door
that smells of her
& say she’s gone
you might cry
either way
but one feels
better. I don’t see
it that way, she said
on the phone
it’s the truth
I said
I’m vanishing
— Eileen Myles
Writing begins with presence. The blank page, like the white canvas on which Francis Bacon painted his 1933 piece Crucifixion, is always already-full. Thoughts, sensations, and all sorts of associations are primordially available to the writer before she commits to typing the first letter in her document. Here’s how the philosopher Gilles Deleuze articulates this idea: “The painter has many things in his head, or around him, in his studio. Now everything he has in his head or around him is already in the canvas, more or less virtually, more or less actually, before he begins his work.”
Writing begins with the letter W, which Deleuze associates with absence. “There is nothing in ‘W’,” he once told his interviewer Claire Parnet, who responded by saying, “Yes, there’s Wittgenstein. I know he’s nothing for you, but it’s only a word.” Though Deleuze considers him an opponent, an assassin, a source of meanness, Ludwig Wittgenstein is a sibling of Deleuze in one meaningful sense: he also believed in connective analyses, in the “understanding that consists of seeing connections.”
“Writing,” a poem by Eileen Myles, begins with a presence, an “I” that can “connect / any two / things.” I’ll say this once, with no promise of returning to it—I’m not sure I can return to it to—a shirt—on a door—that smells of her—& say she’s gone—you might cry—either way—but one feels—better. I don’t see—but I’ll propose this: connections, when handled properly, they are always new. Carson says that “we resort to cliché because it’s easier than trying to make up something new.” But I do not think newness needs to be made up: things can just be moved around.
In the Winter 1983 edition of The Paris Review, the poet John Ashbery tells his interviewer Peter A. Stitt “I think I am more interested in the movement among ideas than in the ideas themselves, the way one goes from one point to another rather than the destination or the origin.” In it he also says “I am assuming that from the moment life cannot be one continual orgasm, real happiness is impossible, and pleasant surprise is promoted to the front rank of the emotions.”
Today was my first time hearing of Pamela Kort, the art curator I mentioned earlier, who wrote that Beuys “believed it was the artist’s task to discover connections and expand upon them,” but not of John Ashbery or of Ashbery’s 1962 collection The Tennis Court Oath—nor that Ashbery once said of the poet William Carlos Williams, “I like him very much. In fact in my early years I went through a period of being enchanted by his work”—nor that William Carlos Williams once wrote, “Somebody dies every four minutes / in New York State — / […] / It’s on Long Island sound / […] / tennis […] golf, etc.”
Today, for the first time, I learned that somebody dies every four minutes in America from a stroke, and today, for the first time, I heard of Bill Longua, of Long Island Tennis Magazine, who once wrote that there are “four hints to better [tennis] strokes […] movement is number one.”
I got to know Beuys as a nomad. That is really how he was. His entire spiritual and mental underpinning was nomadic. His sense of being came out of motion, out of being on the move, of looking for a home on Earth but in certain circumstances not being able to find it. — Johannes Stüttgen
For Anne Carson to place the poets Homer and Hölderlin, as well as Francis Bacon and the writer Virginia Woolf on the same plane as an individual like Joan of Arc might seem sacrilegious to some, but most certainly not to the philosopher Émile Chartier, who was popularly and affectionately known as Alain, and who once wrote, “Genius in the arts and in thought lies above all in the will; it is of the same nature as heroism and saintliness; there is no profound distinction between the man of thought, the man of action, and the artist.”
Andrei Rublev, the 14th and 15th-century icon painter, who was Joan of Arc’s contemporary—albeit briefly, and living in an entirely different land—was famous as an artist, but he is also a Russian Orthodox Church saint. We don’t need to go that far back in time to find examples: John Coltrane, the 20th-century jazz musician, is also a saint according to the African Orthodox Church. And his contemporary—albeit living briefly, and mostly in an entirely different land, in France, where Joan of Arc lived, but also briefly in New York City, where John Coltrane lived—Simone Weil was considered a saint (of outsiders) by many of her peers.
Rublev was taught by the Byzantine painter Theophanes the Greek, Simone Weil by Alain. Rublev and Weil both led ascetic lifestyles, they were both rigorous, and, in a sense, they were both nomadic. In Andrei Rublev, a 1966 film by Andrei Tarkovsky, which tells a tale that is loosely based on the painter’s life, Rublev is constantly traveling, searching, sifting, trawling, both on the outside—moving from a place to another—and on in the inside: overextending himself to arrive at spiritual solace. Weil wasn’t any more restful: although she resists being summarized, she’s been labeled as a philosopher, a Marxist, an anarchist, a mystic, and an individualist, and she has lived in Paris, London, in different parts of Spain, and, as I’ve previously mentioned, in New York City. She was, at different times, in different places, an activist, a laborer, a thinker, and a teacher.
In the posthumously released 1951 text Waiting for God, Weil speaks of a “silence which is not an absence of sound but which is the object of a positive sensation, more positive than that of sound.” This brings to mind the vow of silence that Andrei Rublev takes in Andrei Rublev, an act of renunciation that coexists with his decision to stop painting. When he witnesses the grand bell-making ceremony at the end of the film, he is still silent.
“She heard these voices / in the bells” Eileen Myles writes of Joan of Arc in “Joan.” Unlike the case of Andrei Rublev, silence was not an option for Joan. As Anne Carson tells us, “had silence been a possibility for her, Joan would not have ended up in the fires.”
Virginia Woolf heard voices as well, but in her case they didn’t result in what Carson finds in Joan of Arc, namely a religious apprehension leading to gods. This is the sort of vision that Virginia Woolf had: “Behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we—I mean all human beings—are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.”
This is, strangely, a Beuysian attitude, despite its irreligious spin. It is an evolutionary claim, and a vibrant one at that, one that places the human in the foreground. It also recalls Deleuze, who was a philosopher of networks, rhizomes, and webs. Woolf’s statement is, after all, in her words, “what you might call a philosophy.”
Haela Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix, the musician, once said, “Deleuze prophesied that before long it would be no longer to simply write books of philosophy — there would have to be some other way of philosophizing or reaching a pre-philosophical plane using gestures, the poem, images, sound.” Hunt-Hendrix’s band, Liturgy, is part and parcel of her philosophical thought—it is an undeniable extension of it. Like Beuys’s idea of the life-artist, the different domains of Hunt-Hendrix’s output blend together, foreground falling into the background, background crashing into the foreground.
Haela Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix, the artist, once said, “I like Beuys’s unflinching fusion of art, ethics, politics, pedagogy and spirituality for one. And his utter lack of interest in things like institutional critique and so on is a relief. There is this naivete in his work… old fashioned use of symbolism, the desire to save the world by means of art, and to live every moment as art.”
Haela Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix, the philosopher, once said “[I] hope to make something that really matters in some kind of ethical way rather than just sort of finding a slot in the canon.” I feel the same.
In June 2023, the two Scottish football clubs Partick Thistle and Ross County faced off in a playoff match that should have had an extra coin toss, since, at the end of extra time, the score was 3-3, a draw, but there only the flip at the start of the match, the one that determined which side played on which end of the field, and the one that decided who kicked the ball first. Chance wasn’t involved because the police were too afraid. The specific wording of the rules is as follows: “Unless there are other considerations (e.g. ground conditions, safety etc.), the referee tosses a coin to decide the goal at which the kicks will be taken, which may only be changed for safety reasons or if the goal or playing surface becomes unusable.”
Sometime in the early 1980s, the two Scottish brothers Jim and William Reid flipped a coin to determine who would be the lead singer of their band The Jesus and Mary Chain. “I didn’t want to do it. I lost the toss,” says Jim, “and became the singer. We were both absolutely horrified at the very thought of it.” The brothers would go on alternate vocal duties throughout their career, but Jim was mostly the frontman.
Not that William was ever playing second duty: all it takes is a few seconds of listening to a song off of their debut album Psychocandy (1985) to realize that all the distortion, fuzz, and left-field mixing creates a sonic world in which any preconceived notion of we might expect to find in the foreground (the vocals) and the background (the guitars) is disrupted. The song “Never Understand” is one example. “It’s So Hard” is another.
Meaning is secondary to noise for The Jesus and Mary Chain, especially on the songs that feature what Jim Reid describes as “straightforward kick-in-the-face mayhem.” This effect can also be found in Liturgy’s music. Take the example of the song “Glory Bronze,” off the album Aesthethica (2011). If there’s a musical equivalent to what Virginia Woolf calls “that very jar on the nerves before it has been made anything,” to Francis Bacon’s “brutality of fact,” to Anne Carson’s reading of the presence of “chaos” and “catastrophe” in Bacon, Joan of Arc, and Hölderlin, it is here. This is Bergsonian immediacy in a sub-7-minute format.
In listening to “Glory Bronze” you encounter the three aspects of Liturgy’s early music that made their sound so unique: Hunt-Hendrix’s burst-beat guitar playing, her shrieking, unintelligible black metal vocals, and the drummer Greg Fox’s rapid method of playing. Like Francis Bacon’s Crucifixion (1933), The Jesus and Mary Chain’s Psychocandy (1985), and the image of Christ on the coin Solidus of Justinian II, “Glory Bronze” is a haptic environment, one in which traditional meaning and value systems are flipped on their head. All we are left to work with, if we are receptive listeners, is Ashbery’s notion of the pleasant surprise.
I am now staring at a Coin Depicting a Dove, a bronze piece that dates back to a point in time between the late 3rd and the early 2nd century BCE. What fascinates me is the haptic quality of this coin, which is either Greek or Roman, there is no clarity on that, in the same way there is no clarity in Liturgy’s lyrics—in the same way that there was no clarity in Joan of Arc’s answers—or in Eileen Myles’s poem “Writing”—or in their poem “Joan,” which ends with this image in the final line: “A dove leaped right out of her mouth.”
And it is still here, right in front of me, on my screen, on this coin, bronze, no doubt, with no red blotches, just a dove flying into the background. Dove on a coin. Dove in the heart. Dove right across. Dove as a force. Yes. That’s what’s at stake here. Freedom. That’s right.
05 November 2023