Vermeer

There was a time when I found Dutch art completely uninteresting. After connecting some of the historical dots between hermeticism and the art of the European Renaissance, my view changed. And just after that I fell in love with the work of Johannes Vermeer.

The symbols Vermeer's work are the things that get me. His work reminds me of hieroglyphics or ancient Christian icon painting, except with more dimension and detail. I like that he incorporates lutes and other kinds of stringed instruments that allude to love, poetry and the creative muse. I appreciate the windows that have the eight-pointed stars making reference to the light that comes from knowledge as well as the throne-like chairs ornamented with lion’s heads because they seem to speak of Sekhmet, neter of wisdom. I find it intriguing that he used the camera obscura to add precision to his work. And I adore the periodic appearance of that electric, azure blue.

Much of the reason Vermeer gets my respect is because of how he advanced some of the messages of antiquity into his own time, place and culture. To me he is a wonderful example of the way that Old Europe was not the cultural bunker that many people of today imagine it to be. It was and remains a place of cultural transfer. A crossroads in a most magnificent sense. A place where domestic and imported ideas, philosophies and dreams flowered and converged. Like so many other parts of the world, Spain and Portugal were places where there was an amazing overlapping of traditions—Moor, Christian, Jew and so many others. This coming together laid the foundation for the Spanish Golden Age. This time of Spain being on top, of course, led to various colonization campaigns. One place they colonized was Vermeer’s native land, now called the Netherlands. And then eventually there came a Dutch Golden Age which came just on the heels of the Dutch ousting their former Spanish colonizers. It seems that a lot was channeled in to the Netherlands through Spain (as earlier much had been channeled into the Iberian peninsula from elsewhere) especially when it came to art and science.

Though I also like The Astronomer, Christ in the House of Martha and Mary as well as The Geographer, Woman Holding a Balance is probably my favorite Jan Vermeer painting. I like it because of the way that it connects to the ancient Egyptian concept of Ma’at.

In Woman Holding a Balance, the central figure is a pregnant woman of apparent material means. Hanging on the wall to the woman’s right is a painting of the Last Judgment, the descending figure of the Savior illuminated in a ball of light. The light in this Last Judgment painting is similar to the light that comes from a window above the woman’s own head. In this woman’s right hand is a small scale. Her delicate left hand rests on a table in front of her large belly. On this table she has emptied the contents of a jewelry box and unbundled a bolt of cobalt blue cloth. On the wall directly in front of this woman is a mirror and just above that mirror is a window that lets the subtle glow of daylight into the shadowed room. Underneath her blue coat with its fur that seems to allude to clouds, the woman’s dress is the same saffron-gold color as the sun. The woman does not look in the mirror. It is not hard to imagine this woman silently reciting some version of the 42 Declarations of Innocence as she keeps her gaze fixed intently, yet gently on leveling her scale.

In visual art as well as literature, no symbol goes to waste. The artist includes everything for a reason. So, it seems that this main figure reminds the viewer that each must stand in front of the mirror of her soul in an act of self reflection. In every life there must be a personal day of reckoning. To know God, we must heed the advice of the ancients and know ourselves before we can expect to bring anything meaningful into being.

I like the story this artist tells about how she used Vermeer's painting as a reminder of the need to balance material with spiritual as well as the hauntingly beautiful film, Girl with a Pearl Earring.

Want more? Check out these links:

Essential Vermeer

Ma'at

Metropolitan Museum Islamic Art and Geometric Design

No Such Thing As a Still Life

I walk in harmony, heaven in one hand, earth in the other. I am the knot where the two worlds meet. "The Knot of Isis" from Awakening Osiris

I once heard a scholar named Beatriz Morales, when speaking on the Abakua of Cuba, say that her devotion to scholarship was not motivated by a desire to accumulate knowledge. Her probing, traveling, lecturing, documenting and the like were more a kind of spiritual practice. Morales is one of the only people I have ever heard to say this outright. And though I'd never made that exact connection between scholarship and spiritual practice, I'd say that in many ways the same is true for me.

Rummaging around in my books and papers, I recently rescued notes from a talk given by filmmaker/writer/scholar Trinh T. Minh-ha at Agnes Scott College back on September 27, 2007. At that time, I was still a (mostly) stay-at-home mother doing all that needed to be done to tend to the needs of my new baby and my new self, a self that had changed in some extremely uncomfortable ways. To make myself feel connected, I'd done number of things including start this blog, get involved with some online communities and sign up for newsletters.

One social connection that I plugged in to was Agnes Scott College's events calendar. They often brought in prominent artists and, even better for my SAHM budget, many of these events were free (Sandra Cisneros and Nawal el Saadawi were two that I had previously seen courtesy of ASC). The Trinh T. Minh-ha event was one of several that stood out on the calendar. I recognized her name from bell hooks’ Sisters of the Yam which I'd read back during the end of undergrad when I was living what I think of as my Magical Maiden phase of life-- mind expanding, blooming, curling tendril like in every direction it could fathom. Deciding to go to the talk was, in some bizarre way, like me trying to get in closer touch with an old self who completely believed in the power of art, beauty and culture to transform the individual and the community.

I prepared for the event kind of like others might preparing for a day trip, mindful to pack dinner for Jared and a snack for myself. I also bathed my baby (ignoring protests of having him out in the "night air") and dressed him comfortably in his pajamas, which my mother advised I do whenever I thought I might be out late, which these days meant past about 7 or 8 p.m.

I honestly had no idea whether my somewhat unpredictable little Jared would sleep or stay awake. If he stayed awake I didn't know how kindly he'd take to the two of us sitting still. Why didn't I get a babysitter? Likely, I couldn't find one. Despite the fact that Jared was born into a fairly large African family, they rarely volunteered. This made me often seek the help of a teenager who lived a couple of doors down from us. I would call on her when I really needed an extra pair of hands, had the money and when her schedule would permit. This was probably one of those times when she was studying or had volleyball practice or something. Part of me considered canceling my plans while the other (satisfied as she was with the blessing of getting time to spend and bond with her baby) stubbornly refused insisting that she was bound and determined to get some air-- city air!

I had become the poor soul so outing-deprived that she’d take her wailing or chattering baby to a movie or concert, trying her best to ignore it as others cast her dirty looks living, as I did, out in the burbs with Jared's father/my in-laws. For one reason or another it was hard to make face-to-face or telephone contact with friends. Though I did get out of the house it was usually to grocery or clothing shop for the baby, both things that I enjoy but both of which can also get old. And quick. Often, the baby and I would go for walks around the neighborhood, and we had begun hunting for good neighborhood parks. Sometimes I'd make a big deal out of taking us to the Fiesta Mall on Buford Highway hoping to catch one of those parking lot carnivals, a mariachi band or simply soak up the festive atmosphere.

What all of this amounted to was that I often felt seriously isolated and sought ways to do something about it. So, I took my chances as well as the advice I'd heard passed down from so many artist-academic elder mamas: wrap your baby on your back and tend to your business as women of color have done for ages. You serve as an example when you love, support and nurture your interests right alongside those of your child. (As it turned out, the baby fell asleep in car and ended up sleeping soundly in his stroller as I wheeled him across campus and to the auditorium. He slept through the talk and woke up, as if on cue, exactly at the end.)

After all of the effort it took to get there, I admit to initially being underwhelmed by the presentation. Trinh was not a dynamic presenter like, say, Robert Farris Thompson. He's such a showman that few can compare, so I don't think that that is what I expected. But I did come in search of a particular thing. Don't ask what. An anecdote or candid reflections on artistic process, maybe. No dice. Her manner was formal, and she read from carefully prepared notes that outlined complicated ideas that had me contemplating easing out of the door within the first ten or fifteen minutes of arrival. As is often the case, I wasn't in much of a mood to translate dense, lofty Academese. (Completely nonsensical seeing as how I was at a talk given by a scholar on a college campus, I know. Maybe I thought that her presentation would pitch a tent somewhere between the lands of Artist and Intellectual.) I also admit to being a little taken aback by what sounded to me like dismissal of a metaphor or image that is dear to me: that of earth as mother and giver.

What ended up being really cool and made the event well worth the effort was that once I really settled in and held my mind steadily in the moment, what Trinh had to say became more profound and absorbing, something like the gradual breaking of day. I found that she does belong to the sisterhood whose work blurs the line between what we know of the mind and what we know of the soul. I needed simply to be still to receive or witness what she was working up to.

She spoke about light and movement as they relate to her film Night Passage, film inspired by Kenji Miyazawa's late 1920s novel Night Train to the Stars as well as, she acknowledged, Antoine Saint Exupéry's The Little Prince. We humans lie somewhere between the machine world and the spiritual world, she said, and we live in a time when the crossing of boundaries of land and sea is so much a part of what we do. This kind of traveling is important yet should not be seen as more important thatn paying attention to what's going on in the space in which we're standing. We must take the time to "traverse the snare of illusion," or simply look at ourselves and at life in such a way that we can sort out what is real, and I would add, worth our attention. So much that we think is important is not; what remains here after we have traveled on is that which is intangible. She said that Night Passage speaks most importantly to the idea of time and asks questions: In the flash of emergence and vanishing, what will you put in the story space of your life? What will your pose be?

This tied in to her speaking about the dance of opposites and it being best to use opposing forces as complements to one another. She echoed a thought put forth by the Dalai Lama in his talk "Spirituality and Nature" when she eloquently cautioned that science without conscience does no good and that technology without poetry does little to empower. She named the middle, the place of neither extreme, as the true place of freedom. There was talk of music, which made sense being that it is essentially the child of light and time. (I later learned that she was originally trained as a music composer and taught at the National Conservatory of Senegal.) She gave something of an affirmative nod to notions of sound healing held by dancers, musicians, metaphysicists and even some hard-nosed acoustic scientists when she went on to speak about the importance of sound vibration, mentioning that the body that is out of sync takes a while to attune to its instinctive bio-rhythms.

Trinh spoke about the slow but steady "speed of the flowering mind" and called attention to the notion that, philosophically speaking, there is "no such thing as a still life" in Asian art. Life is always moving and changing, and if we sit still and mindfully observe it for long enough we see that even a mountain changes-- be it in the plant life that grows upon it, the animals that graze upon it and so on.

I took away from the talk what was useful to me and found that like so many teachers connected to ancient Eastern traditions, her very manner of presentation reminded me of something important: being fully present allows us to perceive the life that vibrates within us, through us, all around us at all times.

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Abakua URL: AfroPop Worldwide "Voice of the Leopard: Ivor Miller talks to Ned Sublette"

Dance images depict traditional Balinese and Indian Bharatanatyam dance. For more on Indian story dance, see the 74 minute India Blooms: Stories in Motion , a program of the Chicago Opera Theatre.