Wood Faileth

The Met is the greatest museum in the world. My apologies to the Louvre. But it is. Abstract Expressionism moved the center of the art world from Paris, where it had held court for 4 centuries, to New York City. One can never exhaust the Met. The Picasso retrospective. The African art to Modernism exhibition. El Greco’s Toledo. The Ilya Repin. The High Pagan sculpture.

The Whitney is my sentimental favorite museum. Oh, that it had never moved from the glorious Breuer building on Madison. I stumbled into the Biennial circa XX, and life shifted. The (NSFW) Forrest Bess showing and the single greatest exhibition of all time, Singular Visions. You will never see Calder’s circus such again. Go now before it closes. Or wait for the Lichtenstein retrospection (I can’t wait).

The Frick is the greatest venue of art in the world. It is an absolute pleasure, and most visitors – unlike those of other museums – are mercifully civilized. The El Greco of St. Jerome, the Titian mannerisms, the Piero della Francesca, the Bellini St. Francis. And that new bar. Vermeer and Vermeer and Vermeer. And then Monet.

MoMA is my museum, my therapist, my best friend. One could blind fold me and give me half a bottle of scotch, and I could still give a tour of its entirety. Cezanne, Seurat, Van Gogh, Gauguin – the initial exhibition and still the glittering image in the heart of Midtown.

The Morgan Library is the choice of the connoisseur. The Just opened Caravaggio and Bellini. The 12th century chalice. The first edition Pickwick Papers.

Soir Bleu, not considered one of Edward Hopper’s masterworks, is among my favorites and unquestionably is a preeminent example of High Modernism. The painted clown, tired from the performance, wonders how it came to this? The painted whore, perhaps similarly tired, questions the same. We all paint, and the question of High Modernity is indeed how did it come to this? Modernity takes no issue with Providence. It is just scandalized by the material inequality. Soir Bleu brings the scandal to the perceptual, in which moderns, exhausted from their performance, stare into the abyss. And smoke.

“What were the main influences of your school days, Sister Helena? Were they literary or political or personal? Was it Calvinism?” Sandy said: “There was a Miss Jean Brodie in her prime.”

The “prime” of one’s life is the pinnacle at which the deathbed “but what did I accomplish after all?” will be answered. Prior to one’s prime all is prepatory; post prime comes denouement. The prime, we are assured, is very important, and Miss Jean Brodie is in her prime. We can consider Miss Jean Brodie something as an anti-Auntie Mame. Mame, like Miss Jean Brodie, certainly has a prime; however, very much unlike Miss Jean Brodie’s, Mame’s prime is an always and never-ending right now. If Auntie Mame bursts at the seams of life, Miss Jean Brodie contracts all of life into a ferocious laser beam, her prime. And yet Miss Jean Brodie, reigning in her prime, is betrayed by one she loves best. Miss Jean Brodie, no longer in her prime, then dies. “Who betrayed me out of my prime?” Auntie Mame and Miss Jean Brodie offer two differing approaches to life, approaches which, interestingly to me, track American and British sensibilities, respectively. As one who is a bit of a Mame in a dour Miss Jean Brodie world, I’ve made my choice. However, this is not say there is no prime of one’s life. I imagine there is. But it is to say that, as Miss Jean Brodie shows us, one’s prime is a serious discovery and very precarious. Your prime is not your own.

I’ve written a fair amount here regarding my hatred of mid century modernist literature, a casual example of such writers being J. D. Salinger, Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, Walker Percy, and Barry Hannah. Even my beloved Faulkner, at his worst, isn’t immune. That an editor at the Bananasphere wrote an essay rehabilitating the odious Holden Caulfield should have been my sandal-shaking epiphany. Morbid fascination with sexual pathology, nascent therapy and abortion culture, far FAR too much self-introspection, that distinctive “golly-gee-whickers” nihilism as Creedence Clearwater Revival jams “Fortunate Son” in the background: these are the hallmarks of cant. Forrest Gump is barely tolerable. What strikes me as interesting on further reflection is how noticeably male the group is, and how many midcentury modern female writers both are seemingly inoculated against the disease and are among my most treasured contemporary artists. The ladies’ works would happily include The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, Delta Wedding, Ariel, and The Bluest Eye. Perhaps related to a Girls Just Wanna Have Fun feminism, the women works tend to burst at the seams (and seems), refusing to believe life is meaningless after shucking the purported shackles of patriarchy. They worked too hard burning bras to be welcomed to the club with just a pat on the head and a handful of Prozac. We’re all beats now, and it is interesting how much the epigenetics abide. Today’s young men despair while today’s young women are concerned. Men wake up to find the world they were born into gone, and they go away sad. Women wake up and vote harder. I have more to say about this when we discuss Clarissa. But if all I’m offered from my cultural vapors is pagan secularism I’ll take mine bursting at the seams instead of flocking to franchise.

“Conscience is the aboriginal Vicar of Christ.” – St. John Henry Cardinal Newman, quoted in Catechism of the Catholic Church no. 1778

Conscience – each man’s particular conscience – is an authority, morally commanding man’s will. The fallibility or infallibility of man’s conscience has famously interested Catholic theology. (As an aside, how remarkable is Providence in that St John Henry Newman, our newest Doctor of the Church and one who had a somewhat checkered enthusiasm with papal authority, is associating such papal authority with that one of Everyman’s, whose own purported infallibility would also “checker” more than a few theologians.) Perhaps instead of thinking of conscience as fallible or infallible, we would be better served considering an individual conscience as a good authority or an undermined one. Conscience, as an authority, morally compels us; and yet we are not only not required to follow an evil command, we are categorically commanded by the Lord God to resist it. The whirling dynamic and abyss of the soul. It is a horrible, horrible thing to be subject to a wicked authority. And it is a horrible, horrible thing to have authority over a wicked people. This is especially so when both king and peasant are You.

Undermining authority does not mean to destroy authority. The lecherous father still commands curfew. Undermined authority is an authority which is more challenging to morally obey. And since authoritative commands are morally obliging, undermined authority is a horrible situation in which authority’s children may more easily sin. Scandal is so very terrible because it tends to tempt the weakest into evil.

If you’re explaining, you’re losing. It won’t be surprising to anyone familiar with this blog that I find most of the “mass wars” discussion instructive more generally apropos authority. Setting aside the thorny issue of the dogmatic status of the Gregorian Rite’s Canon – I both understand the bigness and sharpness of the thorn while also coming down against the traditionalist side here – I’ll note that a man with authority is not limited by his own positive law. He may be limited by another orb’s positive law, and he categorically is – as we all are – limited by the natural law. Anyone who has found himself in a position of sufficient authority should know that categorical statements – “We will always and everywhere do this thing right here.” – are not pronounced lightly. And the more specific the pronouncement as well as the greater longevity of the throne make fraught such pronouncements. One cannot see into the future, and there may be prudential reasons for the authority to set aside his own “always and everywhere” pronouncement. No matter how prudent the decision backed by the gravity of the particulars, such settings aside tend to undermine authority. This is especially so given the raving nutcases, balancing the books of the insane asylum we call “modern society,” who have already abandoned themselves to heretical anti-authoritarianism.

There is no objective quantity of cash beyond which to have it would place folks in a state of sin. But there is an objective amount of cash beyond which if I have it I would be sinning.