https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=UlDcsJuo9Oc
Say that again, Mark. What were you saying about Bob Dylan? Yeah, so Robert Barne has a really interesting scene of Dylan, say, like a rolling stone, where he thinks about the character who loses it all, and that’s actually the moment of their ultimate freedom. It’s just what you described made me think of that song and maybe why I like Dylan so much. So now you’re bringing us, believe it or not, into the epic of the Grail. Now, okay, now. Now, this row of cooking. Go get the beer. Now you see, Parsifal, Parsifal only ever, it’s very important in our lives that at certain crucial moments, we fail to ask very important questions. At a very important moment with the Grail, Parsifal is brought into the presence of the ailing Grail King and is speechless. And the second half of that story is this question of how, by an act of will, do you rediscover something that by an act of grace was offered to you in the first part of your life? And of course, you sort of can’t. Grit alone is not going to do it. But in a way, when I hear the Rolling Stones song and I think about, I mean, I don’t know what it’s like for you men, but in my life, limit is very important. Limit is important. It’s the difference between growth and depth. And I think, again, with the tyranny of choice that we’re presented with, growth within a mythic understanding of the world is not that you can be anything you want, it’s that you’re meant to be something quite specific. And the only ground to really pay attention to is that little prayer mat underneath your feet. But for most of us, the trance state of modernity, for me anyway, was so much until a lot got taken away. Until you’re on your knees, you’re not in the appropriate physical position to look at the universe, I suppose, something like that. Do you see that the grail story as something related to this longing that we mentioned in terms of Odysseus? Because it seems the grail is about losing something. Yeah, you know just as well as I do that the grail is everywhere and nowhere. Interesting, it’s just occurring to me as we’re thinking now. We know, don’t we, that the Garden of Eden is on a kind of a mountain or a hill. That’s right, isn’t it, because it’s got the rivers coming out of it. Well, in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s version of Parsifal, the grail castle is also on a hill. It’s called Mount Pavage or Wild Mountain. And I think it’s absolutely connected with longing. And the interesting thing is when Parsifal in the second part of his life is looking to find the grail, the interesting detail is that to the rest of the world he still looks like a very successful knight. He still goes to tournaments, he still wins everything, but by now he’s a machine. And at night it’s this longing, it’s this horriest, it’s this nostos that he carries in his chest. That it is only when he meets a holy man who sits down and says, you know what, you’ve made an innu… He says, you’ve made an art of failure. Ouch. You’ve made an art of failure. And in this little mossy chapel, Parsifal very quietly, and there’s no other way for it, repents. He repents when he’s damaged. And I always say when I’m telling that story, that is the moment when something grandiose died and something great was born. And from then on, the trackway back to the grail opens up. But I think you’re right, Jonathan, and I think it’s the difference between longing and desire. When I was younger, I knew a lot about longing. I mean, I knew a lot about desire, but as I get older, the strange thing about longing is that sometimes you long for something that in a tangible sense you think you will not receive, but actually there’s always a return message. There’s a poet called Rumi, and Rumi says, the ache in your heart is the voice of God speaking back to you. So as soon as you are actually open to longing, the return message has already begun by the physical sensation in your chest. I think that’s something to do with it. Do you know about there’s recent Orthodox kind of spiritual idea of keeping your mind in hell? I don’t know if you’ve read about this idea that we should somehow live in hell in the sense of Hades, like we should keep our mind in Hades. And I think it has something to do with longing, something to do with that, which is that in some ways, almost alien, exiling yourself on purpose almost, like exiling yourself from paradise is one of the proper positions in order to maybe it has something to do with what you’re saying, that that longing almost has the answer inside it. Here’s a notion as one artist to another, you must, you know, as well as I do, that a lot of great art is made under the conditions of longing. You know, I think of the poet Ted Hughes or Robert Graves. I think of, you know, endless poems and stories. To be honest, when I meet people that are absolutely soporyphically happy, I find their art dreadful, absolutely dreadful, by and large. What I love is, you know, I’m telling the truth. And we’re back to Dylan again. And that’s what I admire actually about Robert Barron, because Robert Barron talks about albums by Dylan where he most definitely was not an ostensibly a Christian. He talks about an album called Desire, another album called Street Legal. These are difficult, mystical, knotty things. But I always felt, and forgive me, all my Christian friends disagree, that good art was kind of part of the care package for leaving Eden. We can glimpse it. See us, Lewis. But you’ve got to, it’s there actually in the Bible. You’re not making it up because, yeah, after, when Adam and Eve fall, they get chased out of Eden. And then Cain kills Abel and is chased, let’s say, further out into no man’s land. And then it says that Cain founded a city. And then Cain’s descendants create music. And then it says that from that time, people started calling upon the name of the Lord. And so Cain’s descendants create music. They create all the arts, which are actually born out of the fall and out of distance from Eden. Wow. Now I can, I’ll match that in a way with another image from the Odyssey. You will remember that Odysseus on his way home, he is passing the sirens who sing the music of the spirit, divine music. And he’s tied to the mast. And he says, you know, don’t, everyone else put beeswax in your ears, but I want to have the experience of that primordial divine sound. And he pays the price for hearing eternity. But they say in the story, they say for the rest of his life, the sound of human music was like a shield thrown on a stone floor for Odysseus. Interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that you use that, you use that, that, because it’s something, there’s a relationship between artifice and war and weapon making, you know, like a clear relationship, especially in the line of Cain in the story. But what happens actually in the scripture, which is interesting in terms of art, is that God covers this fall with glory is a good way, best way to say it. And so pain creates the city, creates the arts, creates all of this. And then later, God uses the same arts to create the tabernacle. And the name of the one who made the tabernacle, Bezalel, means something like the darkness of God. And he’s called an artificer, which is the only place in the Bible, except for Cain’s descendants, Jubal Cain, that is named an artificer. The two only characters in the scripture, Jubal Cain and Bezalel, are called artificers. And so you have this sense in which this distance creates the arts and then God covers it once it happens. And you can understand, actually, if you want to understand some, a lot of the actions of God and relate it to this idea of alienation or of longing, you know, this, this memory of God from a distance. Think about like Jonah in the belly of the whale, remembers God in this distance and then repents. And then God kind of covers that distance. And I think that that has to do with some with the arts. There’s an image of that in the arts. And then then that ends with the with the heavenly Jerusalem as the final kind of uniting of the inside and the outside of the garden in the city. All these things kind of come together in the eschatological vision. But in the story, you see, I think, this kind of distance and covering, which is what makes the arts possible. Beautiful. A lot of Orthodox Christians don’t like when I say that because it because it’s because I’m because they like the idea that the arts are just positive, right? That we create beautiful things. But I think that I think that if we see both sides, we have a deeper understanding of why the arts look the way they do. They do. And I mean, like like like all of us, there are very degraded, very degraded forms of expression masquerading as modern art. There are. And at the same time, there is this this phenomenal genius play all the time. You see it. It rises unbidden. And the artist are barely often barely knows what they’re creating. For me, I was tremendously moved by a group of painters after the Second World War. The abstract expressionists came out of New York. You’ve got Rothko Pollock, all of that. And and at a certain point in my life, I profoundly needed that kind of raging abstraction. And then I find at this age, there are other things going on for me. I want to look at Caravaggio. I want to look at Goya. I want to go back. The world of iconography, you know, Orthodox iconography is now something completely absorbing to me. But it was I have to say, until I until Christianity announced itself in me, I couldn’t see it. See it. And it’s like it’s it’s like suddenly going from a meal that you don’t care for to a meal that you suddenly realize is filled with nutrition. It’s very strange. Yeah, I I agree. It’s funny because I’m the visual artist here, the literary figure. But one of the things that that brought me back, I would say, to kind of insight into Christian understanding was reading Portrait of the Artist by James Joyce. That really shook me because I could see the way he was patterning these images in the story and how he’s creating these deep, deep analogies. And and the same even even reading Samuel Beckett. I remember in my 20s reading Beckett, the unnameable and having this weird intuition about apophaticism, which which is like, obviously, it’s like almost like a reverse apophaticism that he has in that text. But it awoken me something like definitely it definitely woke up something. And there seems to be in modernism, there seems there is a strain of modernism, which is a very, very deep looking for meaning, like a very, very deep looking for a purified meaning, both in painting, I think, and in literature. So so I think that that’s something which a lot of Christians have either can I say this have either integrated to superficially and just imitated. So it’s like you have Christian abstract painters, which usually make horrible, just horrible, not just nothing, nothing of the raw energy that you would see, you know, in a de Kooning, for example. But but there I think there are ways to kind of integrate these these languages into and I think that the way that you’re doing kind of retelling of mythological stories and kind of diving into the, you know, the, yeah, the grit of the mythological story, I think, is a way of of taking. Yeah, of taking the best and just kind of pointing it in the right direction. Yeah.