Pope On a Rope, or a Journey to Delphi

Ann Parker. Boys Playing Marbles, Delphi, Greece. 1957 | MoMA. The Museum of Modern Art.

I've been photographing churches lately. When I think of it, I've always been photographing churches and holy places, or seeking them, earnestly. Even as a youth, on field trips with my class or with family, I'd be seeking some communion with the past that holds some essential truth, pointing a disposable single use camera at replicas of George Washington's teeth (the wooden ones) for example (for certainly there would be truth found there). The seeking comes with an abundance of fuel, just like the warmth from the sun, with total, nearly limitless potential. Of all the subjects though I like to go and pilgrimage to a church or a monastery and instead of flogging myself in penance, I try to experience some sense of holiness there, to dig up evidence that it has been there since the desire to build the thing was just a seed, since consciousness developed to a point of knowing God or God's reflection. Every artist knows this, atheist and agnostic ones too (believing atheism is functionally impossible). Or, as in an equal measure, in the wilderness, away from human influence where God is expressed in absolute rawness, in absolutes of growth. The flogging still happens in these places, just internally, in spirit, in the seeking, in the pain of traverse, in the pathways. I like the places because of their total immersion and total intention as a place to go, a place to go and worship, a place that holds desire from its very foundation, a place to go and have a destination to sustain spirit, willingly, for that which created me as a possibility and as an individual entity, the same thing that created you. It's the ultimate 'real', it's honor. Worship feels like a foundational thing, it IS a foundational thing, it's the ultimate expression of relations, relationships, the opposite of control, willingness, freely given. The absence of worship I find boring, as in some personal sense or individual belief that provides relief to one and just the one seeking. There's no communing with it because 'it' is a malleable concept and subject to corruptions, unlike the natural world which doesn't alter it's rules, to the very end, to the ceasing of corporeal forms, like when a mountain lion hunts, kills and eats your flesh and then the birds, insects and worms pick what's left before a winter and the snow falls, covers and preserves the remaining bone until the seasons shift and the sun warms it once again, exposing the remnants of what was once you. At first these desires to commune with the power of one are 'feelings' and then with some time and focus they become something solid and in the act of looking become a picture, an evidence that will also fade eventually but has the same potential as the structure to endure. It feels archaic and gone and possible but not real, like flat earth theory or bones, when the bones are no longer supporting any weaker fleshy thing. Just the strong inner pieces. If I come into a church or leave it, the structure is still there, unmoving, staying, waiting to receive, cold and prepared to wait more so than it is prepared to receive. It can wait a long time, longer than you will live for certain, but not an eternity. Eventually the same lasting and eternally unchanging truth that is our lawful and certain world will erode it too back to dust. It is only in our willingness to seek it (the spirit) that the structure is preserved. It's also the foundation of art and what gives art it's power, for those looking to it's power to reveal and preserve some piece of spirit in all the possibility that the spirit presents.

I've looked for wisdom also in the art world and most recently with critics I admire. Almost without exception, every public figure in the art world and educators in the arts I have admired or had the occasion to be connected with has spent a significant portion of their social media output commenting on the American President (I've made a commitment to not say the name). The best minds reduced to public debates with the most high, the power of the moment. So I began looking, not in judgment, just observing, at the value of the content of those people I most admired more precisely. I also looked at mine critically. Also the other side of those being criticized, villianing and villianized, the base response to reflections and perceptions of power to see what I may learn. Being the youngest sibling there is a natural tendency to wait for wisdom from above, it almost turned into a lifetime of it, until these foundational places provided a resonating force to consider the mirror of the soul, or more precisely the condition of the soul. I'm finding what used to serve as some deeper insight as a way out of the old school, unfashionable and otherwise undesirable antidote to the fading passé of the belief in God or any equivalent that employs it's mention. If there has been no 'there' in belief or any value in the traditions (for we are taught in liberal arts, actively, to demolish them in the pursuit of truth) then there is equally no value to it's replacement, it's future, it's technologically possible present. If I had any idols left, they are dead now. It's just the Equine Magistrate, God's fool, and God, who remains present and provides, as promised, answers when asked, loves when sought, responds to any question and helps for any query. This is not true of the human equivalents, not in wisdom anyway. I'll have to 'commune', to see what's possible here, from Delphi, Greece, this week, under layers, centuries, foundations on foundations, of communing, of seeking to commune, of pilgrimaging for communion. To that which started the journey. For you as much as anyone.

Self. “Stacked ruins at Delphi.” Delphi, Greece, 12 Mar. 2019