Kaleidoscope III 
There’s a reason why medieval cathedrals have gargoyles as well as steeples.
The steeple points ever upward, through the immensity of the sky, but the gargoyle unendingly laughs at its puny, show-off efforts, seeming to say, at least to me, that a human trying to understand God is like a dog listening to Chopin. He hears it but he doesn’t have the equipment to get it.
In a remarkable short story by Anatole France, a statue of the Virgin Mary in a monastery chapel is seen to weep. The abbot, interpreting the sight as a sign of heaven’s disappointment, calls the monks to get into the chapel and atone. One monk is a great psalmist and poet, another a fine singer of hymns, another a godly scholar who has read all the holy books in the world. Down the back is a little monk who in Civvy Street was a juggler. ‘I’m nothing,’ he thinks, ‘all these brothers are princes of piety and grace. I’m not a scholar, a psalmist – I’m not even a very good monk. But hey.’ Late that night, when all is quiet, he enters the chapel alone, and stands in the dusty moonlight, juggling. The statue stops crying.
My favourite religious parable is a joke, an example of a very old form of storytelling, but it’s also an important lesson in how to approach the whole matter of creative writing.
A poor man prays to win the lottery.
God says, ‘My son, I’ll grant your prayer this weekend.’
The weekend comes but the man doesn’t win, so he storms heaven again. ‘Lord, I’m down on my luck, help me out, let me win.’
God says, ‘This weekend, for sure.’
Again, the weekend comes and again the man doesn’t win.
‘Lord, are you listening?’ he says angrily. ‘Come to my aid. You promised!’
God says, ‘Meet me halfway. Buy a ticket.’
Good advice for the young writer.
Do your bit.
Buy a ticket.
Show up, learn your craft, put the hours in, do the work. Make the errors, correct them, rewrite, remake, throw it in the wastepaper basket, fish it out, start again, another blank page.
Buy a ticket.
I’ve been interested in the arts since I was about fourteen. I’m now sixty-one and I realise that the artists whose works I keep coming back to – among them Joyce, Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin, Patrick Kavanagh, Donne, Blake, Bob Marley, Toni Morrisson – have had one foot in the chapel and one in the alley. I love the cadences of the King James Bible and the luminosity of the blues; how those two elements combine in the work of Nick Cave and Patti Smith is so moving as to be almost transcendent. Without the immensity named God, though it has many other names too, there is no reggae, no Bach’s B-minor mass, no Sister Rosetta Tharp, no Mozart’s Requiem, no ‘John the Revelator’ by Son House, no Arvo Pärt, no Palestrina. Van Morrison’s shimmering, ethereal use of repetition as incantation never fails to bring to mind the reverence my grandparents had for the rosary. The Tallis Scholars singing Palestrina or William Byrd have given me more pleasure than almost any novelist has. Barbara Strozzi and Hildegard von Bingen are my self-medication. There’s no darkness like that of a blown-out candle and no light like the light of doubt.
When I hear Mahalia Jackson singing ‘Amazing Grace’, I cannot be an atheist. The hymn ‘Abide With Me’ with its gorgeous lyric (‘fast falls the eventide’) opens a silence I seem to need but can’t get to on my own. When the soprano in Handel’s Messiah sings ‘I know that my redeemer liveth’, I find myself meeting mystery halfway without wanting or trying to. I’ve very rarely had that experience while reading a novel or short story – Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ would be an exception - but most people have had something like it while awestruck by nature: a thunderstorm, a sunrise, a meadow-sized murmuration of swallows crossing the sky, the extraordinarily, unbelievably vast renewal of life that happens in a whale fall.
A few times it’s come to me through a painting.
Millet’s ‘The Angelus’ depicts two humble farmworkers stilled by the bells from the church in the distance across the field. Heads bowed, they must be praying. But perhaps they’re just listening. Listening is a form – perhaps the highest form - of prayer. No good writing is possible without it. I hear bell-song and birdsong when I look at that image, so powerful in its lack of ambiguities. Millet, a great draughtsman, often worked hard to strip out details, instead aiming to make outlines and shapes full of meaning.
Caravaggio’s ‘The Calling of Saint Matthew’ is in many ways the opposite. Arresting, dramatic, complex, resistant, it is the artwork that has come to mean most to me. The first time I saw a photograph of it, in school, in the autumn when I turned 17, I was drawn to it – interesting verb, ‘drawn’ – because of its almost gothic strangeness. Over the decades I’ve come to see the picture as an icon not just of faith but of art, an image of what it is to create.
Seeing it in real life is itself a sort of stage play. The painting is in the church of San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome, at the back, and is kept in darkness for its own protection. Tourists or pilgrims wishing to experience it put a coin in a slot and a light comes on for two minutes. It’s a wonderful way to experience a painting. Like reading a letter from a lover, you look hard. I tell my creative writing students to read everything as though reading a text from someone you’re in love with. That’s not always possible. Good to try, though.
Accompanied by an unexplained figure, Christ stands near the right border, deep in voluminously dramatic shadow, pointing to someone who is part of a group of males at a table on the left. Something in the point of the finger recalls the creation of Adam by God on Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling but Caravaggio knows it’s also a gesture you see every day in the streets of Rome, where, like all Italians, the people talk with their hands and fingers, as though words aren’t enough. Which they aren’t. The men on the left of the picture look raffish, a bit dishevelled, the worse for wear, as though they’ve been drinking or gambling or are backstage with the Stones. Some people learn a lot from reading the Lives of the Saints. This painting suggests that more is to be learned from the Lives of the Sinners.
Looking at Christ a bit disconcertedly, the man in the centre points to the nodding party-boy beside him, perhaps in hope that party-boy is the one getting called.
‘You can’t mean me,’ the man seems to be saying. ‘If you’re calling people, do us all a favour, call someone else.’
It’s the most wonderful thing about the paining. We can’t be totally sure who is receiving the summons.
Who is being called?
Why?
To what?
From what, also.
Where are we going?
For me, it’s the profoundest artwork about faith because it recognizes that faith and doubt are twin siblings, mirror images, but it’s also very radically about the making of art, one of the relatively few human activities in which Imposter Syndrome skips hand in hand with overconfidence.
It’s an image about light, shadow, making, setting out on a journey, shaping, editing, reworking from unpromising materials, trying to come up with the new. It says faith is a question – ‘who, me?’ – not an answer, and art is a pointing finger. It’s in fact the most charged and accurate metaphor for the work artists and writers do. Confronted by the never-ending realities of the world, we select, amplify, point. John McGahern said that what every writer needs first is not a style but ‘a way of seeing’.
I have a postcard of the painting pinned up beside the desk in my workroom, so I see it every day as I sit down to write. And even though seeing a postcard-sized reproduction is not seeing the artwork itself, I get glimpses and recollections of what is unique and powerful about the original. Perhaps all great artworks are themselves reminders of other presences; perhaps the feeling evoked in us when experiencing them is a sort of recognition.
Caravaggio the storyteller has taught me a lot about my craft, and about other settings-out too. What’s striking and lasting is that he knows there are some truths that cannot be taught. That’s why we have art. To honour them.
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Kaleidoscope III