No Rest for the Pious

August 2017.  In the Book of Isaiah Anne Carson writes:  ‘There is a kind of pressure in humans to take whatever is most beloved by them and smash it.  Religion calls the pressure piety and the smashed thing a sacrifice to God.’  Even God is susceptible to that particular pressure.  One time he smashed Isaiah.  Isaiah called him on it and they came to an agreement.  Performance artist Marina Abramovic is also susceptible.  She smashed her own body.  No agreement was required.

It’s evident that humans feel a lot of pressure.  A lot of piety.  I mean, there’s an awful lot of smashing going on.  A word of warning:  be careful about making yourself too beloved.

Michelangelo made a sculpture and named it for this pressure.  The Pieta.  Actually not so much the pressure as its resulting sacrifice.  If the pressure is called piety, the result is called pity.  Grief.  Lamentation.  There’s the mother holding her dead son.  Her smashed son.  God’s son.

And to what end, all of this?  What drives a pressure named for such a thing as piety?  As duty?  This is not easy to understand unless there are high stakes involved.  Unless there is skin in the game.

Easier is the impulse toward expansion and transformation which Abramovic speaks of.  This expansion comes to her as she smashes her own body and moves through the door of physical pain to a higher consciousness.  Transformation also arrives for Carson’s Isaiah who is sweet-talked by God and given a new contract.  Suddenly ‘milk pours from his breasts.  He forgets about righteousness and as he feeds the milk to small birds and animals he thinks only about their little lips.’

Someone asks Isaiah the question:  ‘what is an idol?’

Isaiah answers:  ‘an idol is a useless sacrifice.’

The nation responds:  ‘how do you know which ones are useless?’

Good question.  Consider God’s sacrifice of Isaiah on behalf of the nation.  Centuries later Isaiah is rolling around the nation talking to people and scaring them, nothing left of him but a big forehead by this time.  (Puts me in mind of Philip Guston’s big eyeball.)  The nation calls a secret meeting and votes him out.  So much for that.

And how do you know which pressure is piety and which impiety?  You might intend to perform your duty to the gods, people and country but get it wrong.  Socrates did.  Antigone.  They were smashed.  Became sacrifices, not by being beloved but by aligning themselves with the wrong pressure.  I suppose in the end it doesn’t make much of a difference to the sacrificial victim.  Right or wrong, beloved or not.  Smashing is smashing.  I doubt that God’s son had a good time arriving at his last moments.

My collage contains three pietas.  They’re all at some remove.  All dishonest.  Arranged.  Theatre. There’s no real piety here.  No lamentation.  Instead, a kind of representation that’s open-ended.  Or more likely emptied out.  I‘m fine with that actually.

At the same time, there’s something in this business that delivers, say, for a person like Abramovic.  According to her, in order to achieve a goal you have to give everything until you have nothing left.  And then it will happen by itself.  For her a kind of smashing seems essential.  Sacrificing inevitable.  As for Isaiah, I suppose the fact that milk poured from his breasts is impressive, and according to the scriptures a sign of prosperity and peace.

Carson ends her book.

Isaiah sleeps.  

God obsesses.

Abramovic starts an institute.

Develops a method.

I’m off to buy some wallpaper.

Orange and yellow floral.

Perhaps blue.