An Old Man Teaches in Jazz

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By which I mean only that I have accumulated too much in my head over the years and lost enough faith that I know what is wise and what isn't, what has use and what doesn't, that my teaching is (oh in more ways than one) kind of like whale song, done in the moment for the joy of it, trusting to the sense of it and not always as embarrassed as I might be at leaving the kids to find the sense of it.

Yesterday in my review class, as we talked of the How, the If, the Must of meaning in the visual arts, it came to me to talk of the Piss Christ, which I really hadn't thought of in years and never knew quite what to think about it.

So today -- chasing my own lecture, as it were -- I'm emailing a PC picture to the kids and and some critiques. And then I stumble on this poem, from Slate.

And I like this poem very much.

If we did not know it was cow's blood and urine,
if we did not know that Serrano had for weeks
hoarded his urine in a plastic vat,
if we did not know the cross was gimcrack plastic,
we would assume it was too beautiful.
We would assume it was the resurrection,
glory, Christ transformed to light by light
because the blood and urine burn like a halo,
and light, as always, light makes it beautiful.

We are born between the urine and the feces,
Augustine says, and so was Christ, if there was a Christ,
skidding into this world as we do
on a tide of blood and urine. Blood, feces, urine—
what the fallen world is made of, and what we make.
He peed, ejaculated, shat, wept, bled—
bled under Pontius Pilate, and I assume
the mutilated god, the criminal,
humiliated god, voided himself
on the cross and the blood and urine smeared his legs
and he ascended bodily unto heaven,
and on the third day he rose into glory, which
is what we see here, the Piss Christ in glowing blood:
the whole irreducible point of the faith,
God thrown in human waste, submerged and shining.

We have grown used to beauty without horror.

We have grown used to useless beauty.

In Oakland California with the Homicide Philistine

Cover of Painted Word, The

Just read that's the kind of head to boost traffic, though I assume you'd get a lot of U-turns and not regular readers.

Today was a day well got through: During the morning, I put the final tearful touches on our tax forms and took them to our accountant, who explained we owe an additional $2,500.

Came home and wrestled with a busted computer and a useless router. That entailed phone calls to USF's own ITS (with two different problems), one call to D-Link (the router maker) and one to Comcast after all my other phone calls had resulted not in restoring wireless commune between my laptop and the Internet but in severing commune between the Internet and our old steam-driven desktop computer (which crashes every five minutes anyway).

Good news is Comcast told me how to hook up the Comcast line directly to the laptop, which is how I speak with you now. You can't 'hot sync.' You have to plug the ether net cable from the modem into the laptop and only then turn the modem off.

Turn it back on, and you've got the world on your string. Oh that's simple, and so am I.

Now, the Philistine part. Having finally gotten the computer running, I stepped away to spend time prepping for Arts Reporting and Reviewing tomorrow. At long last we start on "visual arts," the pure stuff without story to draw us in or direct pressure on our pleasure centers, as in the case of food or music. It is, perhaps, our greatest challenge in that it's so easy to retreat into definitions and art history, which make a Liberal Education so charming. Yes, when it comes to painting and sculpture, we insist you sample our bowl of crumbs.

I am a Philistine in that I still find Wolfe's "The Painted Word" a pretty good debunking of art that follows theory, the essence of those theories being their use in gilding the elites with delicate layer after delicate layer of refinement and superiority, each layer carefully moistened with contempt for those of lesser refinement and discrimination.

Ah, the glib, the glib, the glib. I swim in the glib like some lugubrious fish from down in the darkness with its glowing nose. The glib must not be a substitute for the obscure. I must try not to infect the student's with such inverse arrogance.

What I Meant Yesterday

That there are no aesthetic absolutes. When it comes to art, our standards are culturally determined. They are aspects of our evolved human nature.

That does not necessarily mean there are no aesthetic universals -- by which statement I do not concede standards that somehow exist beyond humanity, independent of humanity or previous to humanity.

There are aesthetic universals just as there are moral and/or ethical universals, the latter having nothing to do with the existence of god or some other overlord. Human ethics are a survival adaptation. (I think. Others don't, obviously.) So are aesthetic universals, though I am not sure exactly what such universals might be other than that they would certainly be broadly drawn and neither granular nor authoritative.

All universals are irreducibly human and broad to the point of caricature and thus, in application, individual, particular, idiosyncratic.

This assumption must change the tone of a good deal of criticism, would it not?

Possibly apropos, I think of the last lines of the Yeats poem "The Circus Animals' Desertion," written near the end of his life as his powers failed.

Those masterful images because complete

Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?

A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,

Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,

Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut

Who keeps the till.

Now that my ladder's gone,

I must lie down where all the ladders start

In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.