Sitting in the lecture hall thinking of Jesus

It's the Monday after Palm Sunday and I'm very quiet today.

Right now I'm sitting in my Baroque Art, Thought & Imaginations class. The Supper at Emmaus, Death of the Virgin, and other religious works in Rome (c.1601-1604). I cannot focus, too many thoughts in my head.

1601 - The Supper at Emmaus. The story of the supper amidst is a story from the Christian New Testament from Luke 24:13-35. a few days after Christ's death, 3 days after the fact, after Mary, Mary Magdalene and other feminine figures visited the tomb of Christ, they were visited by an angel saying that Christ is no longer dead and shall soon rise. The Apostles saw their friend dead, assumed end of times, but the text revealed that Jesus had in fact been resurrected from the dead. He had shown himself Divine, son of God. The passage describes two unnamed disciples who are traveling for reasons of their own... they were going to a village called Emmaus, 7 miles from Jerusalem, talking to each other over everything that happened-- that is to say, the arresting death of Christ. While talking, Jesus went and walked with them yet the disciples were blind in a blanket of unrecognition. The midst. 

"Did not the Messiah have to suffer these things and then enter his glory?” 27

The breaking of the bread is only when the disciples recognized Christ, realizing it is Christ himself, only realized the moment the bread is broken... A very characteristic story of an epiphany, a spiritual awakening like the tales of conversion often seen in the Baroque times. This story is essential to Catholicism as a whole, as the essential ritual of Catholic convergence is Communion. Communion meaning coming together, amongst a ritual table with the Mass coming from Latin Misa. But what after the Catholic Mass? The key action that takes place is The Eucharist [the Good Blessing]. The physical Body of Christ is then presented as Bread while the wine is physical Blood, Christ's transubstantiated sacrifice. The mass on a deeper level is Christ dying, Christ dying again and again-- every time his flesh is eaten, every time his blood is drunk, it is Christ's ritual death. Consumption is a cyclical fall over and over and over... These homely reminders of the physical pain being destroyed again in front of us, we all absorb it physically when participating, a moment we pass from incomprehension to comprehension. It is almost too carnal to be non-canonical. 

Transubstantiation. Think: An Oak Tree, Michael Craig-Martin. The object [bread, wine] while not changing in appearance to our senses changes in its substance, changes in the supernatural where our senses cannot understand. In a way, christ in The Supper is shown in a way that parallels the bread. Does he look like Christ? Did he sound like Christ? Did his suffered, mangled, starved body of sinew and wrapped bone 

The Christ they knew, the Christ whose body was boarded to the tomb, is that same Christ who is plump and true. Through spiritual awakening, the devoted saw Him. The same can be applied to the Bread. A story of two people who saw beneath the surface of physical reality, but it is also a story that leads every believer to the spiritual reality beneath the physical appearance. Light is very important here-- there is a strong directional light coming almost behind us casting strong shadows, particularly above the crown of Christ's head, mimicking his body as if to suggest what the disciples were seeing was the shadow. These people, sun-burned, weather, balding, real... Caravaggio asserts the reality even in the same moment he calls into question what we see of the reality at question.

The left-most disciple in the painting has his arms flown out, fingers spread-- so close, close to the frame. As if close enough to touch us. It feels we are about to be touched. We are so so very close... Christ's two front fingers are prominent, mimicking the stance of a Preist's blessing, The hand of Faith from which to See. The scene is intensely real, the detail of the sleeve of the disciple, his red shirt poking out, the rag that is wrapped around the left disciple's waist, wrapped and twisted and wrinkled. The waiter is an Outisder, he has no idea of what is happening, he simply came to bring the wine but has no clue why the disciples are acting in the way that they are.

In the basket there is a pomegranate that is burst open, used as symbol in the liturgical sense. Pomegranates were symbols of the Church in reference to the Virgin and the Child-Christ. In the basket, there are fruits that are ripe, overripe, in penetrating photorealism teetering on the table as though on breath from anyone could send the basket from falling. We have tension, tremendous tension, from a group of inanimate objects. I could talk so of the symbolism in the Great Caravaggio's choice of fruits. The bursting pomegranate-- as Mary had birthed him, does it represent his carnal figure ripped from the physical seems till its body could contain it no more? Could it be the Death of the Virgin? The feeling of rigor mortis setting in, stiffening the skin of the pom until the plague bursts free. The raw human tragedy of the death of the virgin, not the death of an immortal but the death of someone like us contained in the image of a fruit.

I've lost my point. Writing this gives the deathly painful feeling of losing someone you love. Whatever Mary was in life is then transformed into a body, a lifeless body, a known love turned into the randomness of death. Death isn't ideal. It isn't beautiful. Caravaggio circumvents all transactions of the supernatural, this tendency to bypass death itself, to leave it out almost as if we cannot contemplate that loss in the life of a virgin. This Human tragedy was a cause of suffering that not even a divinely touched woman can outrun. Without horrifying, or making the reaction to death glorious, we double over ourselves so shaken with grief that we gold into a fetal position to hide us from the world. Grief, that could be anyone's grief, is not part of any sacred story. It is shared by everyone.  it is nonrhetorical, nonthematic, not graceful. It is suffering. Trying to wipe tears from my eyes, full of tears. I do not want to look at death. 

I relate to the painting Supper at Emmaus. The disciples and I had no choice in whether or not we wanted to look at the truth of reality. They had not chosen to be blind to life, I had not chosen to be shown death. We were not given that option. That sense of being involved in great loss is felt on an individual level. There are no clouds bursting, no angels coming down to ascend into Heaven, as there was no great chorus of trumpets nor shining halo atop the head of Christ.

It is that physicality that is expected from Caravaggio. Everything in this painting is revealed to us, naked. I feel naked. The Catholic Church rejected a replacement painting made by Carlo Saraceni of the Virgin's death because her eyes were closed. She had chosen to be blind and was rejected. You see? This false illusion of choice? Being forced to blindness or sight? This weight has to come to rest. It conveys the heaviness of a lifeless body all within our eyelids.

Being as this is the most physical painting, it renders the most physical power, specificity, question of reality, of what we see in our reality in search of a higher reality that is revealed in Spirit.

In the Supper at Emmaus.

The truth is in the shadows, the truth is in what we don't see. To turn this light on ourselves, to suffer, to experience loss, to experience pain, and ultimately we cannot idealize that everything in our world will take from our own Humanity. That loving tenderness of empathy is what makes it all worthwhile. Love. In the end it was all about Love.