all kinds of furor<\/a><\/u> when she performed what seemed to be an anti-Catholic routine at the American Music Awards earlier this year, and today, when chided by chirpy Ann Curry about why her see-through shirt, leather bra, hot pants, and fishnets were so monochromatic, said \u201cI don\u2019t know, something just said black to me for some reason.\u201d No mention, of course, that it\u2019s Good Friday, except in a brief note that the stock markets are closed.<\/p>\nI find myself longing for the respectful quiet of the earlier Good Fridays in my life. I know that Church and State were, if anything, even more clearly separated when I was a child, but in the Catholic (with occasional threads of Bulgarian Orthodoxy) ghetto of our little neighborhood on the seamy side of Hollywood, you wouldn\u2019t know it. The TV, the radio were shut off for the day. We could play, but quietly, and not between noon and 3, the Tre Ore<\/i> when Jesus hung on the Cross for us. We didn\u2019t spend that time in church, like some Catholics did, but we sat quietly and thought about the meaning of the day. And we always noted that, no matter how the day began, clouds rolled in and the sky darkened for those terrible hours.
\nToday, there seems to be no escape from the world, the flesh, and the devil. not even during the holiest of hours for the country\u2019s religious majority. But that is as it always has been, I guess. The poet W H Auden, in \u201cMusee des Beaux Arts,\u201d steers our Good Friday eyes to painters like Brueghel, who recognized that the Crucifixion happens in the midst of our dailiness, not apart in some quiet corner:<\/p>\nAbout suffering they were never wrong,<\/span><\/div>\nThe Old Masters; how well they understood<\/span><\/div>\nIts human position; how it takes place<\/span><\/div>\nWhile someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;<\/span><\/div>\nHow, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting<\/span><\/div>\nFor the miraculous birth, there always must be<\/span><\/div>\nChildren who did not specially want it to happen, skating<\/span><\/div>\nOn a pond at the edge of the wood:<\/span><\/div>\nThey never forgot<\/span><\/div>\nThat even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course<\/span><\/div>\nAnyhow in a corner, some untidy spot<\/span><\/div>\nWhere the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer\u2019s horse<\/span><\/div>\nScratches its innocent behind on a tree . . .<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Art and poetry are, for me, a way to climb inside the meaning of this day. And though I respect the traditions\u2013from the Spanish Gothic to The Passion of the Christ<\/i>\u2013that emphasize the pain and the blood of the Crucifixion, and know that many find these deeply prayerful, I have always been drawn to the cooler but no less moving poets and painters. Andrea Mantegna\u2019s The Lamentation Over the Dead Christ<\/i>, for example, speaks loudest to me of the horrible humanity of the death of the Son of God, perhaps because I was struck to the heart, standing at the foot of my father\u2019s deathbed, at the similarity of the body marked by suffering even at rest.<\/p>\n
Caravaggio\u2019s Entombment of Christ<\/i> is another silent symphony of grief. The way the figures wheel forward in a descending arc toward the sharp finality of the stone slab, around the fulcrum that is the stunted Nicodemus, almost hurts to look at. It is beautiful and terrible at the same time\u2013like this day. Nicodemus makes eye contact with us, his battered features numb with guilt and loss, as if to say, \u201cWe did this, you and I. All of us. We\u2019re in this together.\u201d Below the stone, a green plant springs up in hope.<\/p>\n
Rogier van der Weyden\u2019s Descent from the Cross<\/i>\u00a0(shown at the top of this post) is more polished and distant, more gorgeous in its color and pattern, but no less a meditation on the way we incarnate grief in our bodies. This was the first northern European painting to depict what is known in Italy as the spasimo<\/i>, the swoon of Mary. Supported by St John and by the other two Marys\u2013Mary of Cleopas and Mary Salome, whom medieval legend calls the Virgin\u2019s half-sisters\u2013she faints from grief. Her posture is echoed at the other side of the composition by the standing swoon of Mary Magadalene, whose right arm is bent upward at a painful angle in order to fit within the grouping\u2019s shallow plane. Joseph of Arimathea (in red) and Nicodemus (in sumptuous cloth of gold) support the body of Jesus. A servant (I think he might actually be intended to suggest an angel) descends the ladder from the cross\u2013which is T-shaped to suggest a crossbow, because it was the crossbowman\u2019s league that commissioned the altarpiece\u2013while another stands next to Mary Magdalene, holding the alabaster jar of ointment that is her attribute. The diagonal line of hands from Christ\u2019s curved left hand to Mary\u2019s curved right hand is an arrow that points from the cross to the skull of Adam, a kind of close-parentheses on the power of sin. Every detail, even the jewel-like tears of Mary of Cleophas, speaks sorrow.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/2.bp.blogspot.com\/-48N4gCFoAEY\/T38KFYGvE3I\/AAAAAAAAAf8\/0nB5Tjll_zk\/s1600\/280px-Weyden,_Rogier_van_der_-_Descent_from_the_Cross_-_Detail_women_(left).jpg\")
<\/a><\/div>\nThere are a thousand other ways to escape into art today, but the world goes on. So, terribly, does the Crucifixion. In war-torn Syria and Afghanistan and Sudan, in famine-scourged West Africa, in the ever-embattled Holy Land, on the drug-and-gang-ridden streets of Mexico and our own cities, mothers swoon over the bodies of their dead children. In Uganda, mobs cry for the blood of homosexual persons. In darkened clinic rooms, life is snuffed out legally. We want to turn away from Nicodemus\u2019s accusing eyes, from the sculpted tears and the wounds and the keening. We want to go about our business, go on like dogs with our doggy lives, anesthetize ourselves with gossip and fashion and Martha Stewart\u2019s recipes for perfect Easter brunches.<\/p>\n
But we look away at our peril. To turn from this death is to condemn ourselves to terminal sickness of the soul. In Part IV of \u201cEast Coker,\u201d one of the Four Quartets, T S Eliot says it best. With health care imagery chillingly appropriate this year, and with a complete absence of chirpiness, Eliot tells Ann Curry the real reason this is a good Friday:<\/p>\n
The wounded surgeon plies the steel<\/div>\n
That questions the distempered part;<\/div>\n
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel<\/div>\n
The sharp compassion of the healer\u2019s art<\/div>\n
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.<\/div>\n
Our only health is the disease<\/div>\n
If we obey the dying nurse<\/div>\n
Whose constant care is not to please<\/div>\n
But to remind of our, and Adam\u2019s curse,<\/div>\n
And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.<\/div>\n
The whole earth is our hospital<\/div>\n
Endowed by the ruined millionaire,<\/div>\n
Wherein, if we do well, we shall<\/div>\n
Die of the absolute paternal care<\/div>\n
That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere.<\/div>\n
The chill ascends from feet to knees,<\/div>\n
The fever sings in mental wires.<\/div>\n
If to be warmed, then I must freeze<\/div>\n
And quake in frigid purgatorial fires<\/div>\n
Of which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars.<\/div>\n
The dripping blood our only drink,<\/div>\n
The bloody flesh our only food:<\/div>\n
In spite of which we like to think<\/div>\n
That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood\u2014<\/div>\n
Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.<\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cIt\u2019s a good Friday, for lots of reasons!\u201d Ann Curry chirped on the TODAY Show this morning. The reasons? An exclusive interview with the British woman who\u2019s getting international guff for complaining about how tough life is when you\u2019re beautiful. Another exclusive with Kim Kardashian, who also chirps as she explains how cuddling with Kanye […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1086,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-62","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
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![\"\"](\"https:\/\/3.bp.blogspot.com\/-906skcpeFJY\/T38JEVM0WpI\/AAAAAAAAAfc\/owdSp7Xpo3I\/s1600\/500px-El_Descendimiento,_by_Rogier_van_der_Weyden,_from_Prado_in_Google_Earth.jpg\")
<\/a><\/div>\n