WILLIBRORDWB W illibrordsheet SHEET

Issue 1. Autumn, MMXIX ISSN: 2633-416X

Writings, musings, and drawings on tangential and perpendicular approaches to theology and life Community as a Side Rosa Lewis, Antonia Weir, Johnathan Welch, Alex Long-Negrete , Kate Banks, Theodore Shack, Effect • Bergson, Gabriel Akamo, Various and unattributed. Sebald and Durée • What is Possible? • Editorial Willibrord Snippets Kate Banks & Theodore Shack • Love, Bridges and Prayer • Musings on “Let’s not complain that these are hard times, We are the times. If we a Suspicious Self • were better, the times would be Deeply Superficial better.” – St Augustine Andy Warhol • Poems he St Willibrord Fellowship is a group of friends Twho gather together to read, talk and pray. We • Illustrations • gathered first on a brumous night (the Feast of St Willibrord) in Autumn of 2018 to read a chapter of Holiness, Speech and Silence by Nicholas Lash. The Design by Theodore Shack & Antonia Weir objective was fairly simply to find community, in the Cover artwork by Kate Banks Community as a Side Effect disparate concrete Babylon of London, with those Cartoons and illustrations by Alex Long-Negrete who want to meander through the Christian tradition Antonia Weir together. Readings he Dietrich von Hildebrand article spoke about about changing the centre-point of community from a We meet each week to read a short passage from a Tpeople searching for community as though it group of individuals to God is that it no longer matters text to drink beer, wine and whisky, and to pray Lectio were an idea. The danger of an idea is that it too how bedraggled, tired or terrible company you feel Divina together. In this our first year, our mailing list has Over the past year, we have read extracts from the easily falls into an ideal such that those within a ‘living yourself to be, because it is not just company we are grown from an initial 15 to 50+, we have had theological following writers: film-screenings, gone for a four day retreat in the Lake community’ may not even recognise it as such, seeing there for. We are learning that love is the imperative. It Thomas Aquinas District, and are now hosting a series of colloquiums in only the differences, be they of opinion or manner, as seems that not having the creation of a community as Teresa of Avila London. disparate rather than natural. an endpoint in itself makes the creation of a good one Wendell Berry so much more possible. Hildebrand speaks of building a community through Lectio Divina means ‘reading God’ or ‘divine reading’; David Bentley Hart love. Here he sees Love as an active and engaged effort The interaction between whoever is there, the listening we start the evening by sharing a passage from the Hildegard of Bingen that is more than just interpersonal niceties. It is in some and hearing, sharing thoughts and wine seems to be gospel, reading it slowly aloud and sharing the silence, Bonaventure way aiming upwards, aiming to transcendence though it making something that is more than a sum of parts, time and space to encounter Christ through the Word. Carlo Carretto begins at an interpersonal level. This beginning may be more than just the people who are there at any given We practice shared Lectio Divina, a tradition used by Olivier Clément on a tiny scale but, little by little, can build to something time, but also completely dependent on people being the Manquehue, in this we give space to share our David Cloutier so strong and solidly real. Active love moves community there. The different parts of the body each bringing responses to the gospel with one another in prayer. Pseudo-Dionysius Andrew Davison beyond idea and ideal and creates a solid living way. something to the whole, opening up another narrow Following this reading with the heart, we go on to Gavin D’Costa road to explore. I feel truly blessed to be a part of this. reading with the head, sharing a short essay or excerpt This is what I have felt with Willibrord: that we have, Fyodor Dostoevsky And for those who have not yet arrived, it’s always an in the broadly theological realm (from Benedict XVI to over the past months been trying to make something André Dubus open door. Rowan Williams to Simone Weil, C.S. Lewis and John centred around God, and that the side-effect of that José Manuel Eguiguren Henry Newman), which we read aloud together and effort has been a community. The extraordinary thing Pope Francis then discuss furiously over food and drink. Thomas Gilby The Willibrord-Sheet is an informal coming-together Romano Guardini Poems of thoughts and reflections that have grown out of Dietrich von Hildebrand the discussions we have had. It has been wonderful Augustine of Hippo to discover how many bold and marvellous ideas we Rosa Lewis David Jones have touched upon in conversations over the past year Fergus Kerr gathering together in Christ. In theory, the Willibrord- Burnt Sienna Søren Kierkegaard Sheet is a space for the spill-over for these ideas, a Seashell Mind Nicholas Lash Christ's love growing in each place to write things out and in doing so work them out Jacques Maritain I've got a seashell mind Eyes lit from glowing embers - more beginnings to a conversation than final answers. Herbert McCabe On the inside Labyrinthine, where Together we are trying to discover more of the rich John Henry Newman Flannery O’Connor Breath by breath Every thought leads back to you. intellectual tradition of Christian thinking, to deepen Josef Pieper Pneuma our faith, and to help one another to make sense of Josef Ratzinger Word by word Open our eyes so that we might see living in our world today. We are beautiful, Alexander Schmemann Logos We continue to welcome people to join us. If you are We are yours. Fulton Sheen interested or would like to access our shared folder of You exhale us into being Brendan Smith The flames catch texts, please contact Kate at: And soon And we inhale your perfume Gerard Vann “Our life, our sweetness, The world will be on fire Without ever fully seeing. [email protected] Simone Weil and our hope” Rowan Williams

MMXIX Oct , Is. 1 Willibrord Sheet 1 Bergson, Sebald and Durée What is possible?

Johnathan Welch Gabriel Akamo

“Memories lie slumbering within us for months and years, quietly After Kareem Parkins-Brown proliferating, until they are awoken by some trifle and in some strange I’m told that I am well-connected. way blind us to life” - W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, 1995 To Omar, I'm always in conversation with God. I’m not sure how far that makes me spiritual or just a very good liar. There was a time when the thought of a lie was a thorn in my crown. eacting against the Newtonian Absolutism that reducible to isolable units that can be added up. Durée Now I've learned to convince myself Raffirmed time as a mere container for events is qualitative, and not quantitative time. of the things I want others to believe. and the Kantian notion that all we may extrapolate I am an actor trapped in character long after the curtain has dropped, As the French poet and philosopher Charles Péguy from this truth is what it tells us about our minds And it’s getting harder to run from the fact that I’ve always been playing myself. states, our access to the external world is not simply (that time is a condition of thought; that because I tell myself I outgrew my asthma, by observation and representation, but through the we cannot but perceive the world temporally, we fail truth is I fell off the habit of breathing, immediate indwelling of its processes, which permits to establish any objective standpoint over against that is, I kept slipping and staggered until one day I didn’t get back on. a sympathetic resonance with all other finite beings. 2 time, and consequently can make no real assertions), The plans I make get weaker by the word, The interpenetration of past and present reveals the Henri Bergson, along with the spiritualist movement every ​right now​ has morphed to ​by the end of the day nature of being as such, and not merely the nature of of the late 19th Century, advanced a ‘pan-psychic’ become ASAP​ the human mind. position that whilst the mind is at the centre of all that faded into an as​ soon as I think I can​. exists, this leads not to a simple opposition between Bergson holds that memory is joined with perception mind and matter but reveals rather the reality of the in both directions – perception is shaped by memory, I think my version of adulting is eroding my integrity like time and water do stones. mind and the truth that matter is itself already an and memory is formed simultaneously with perception. I fear one day it will vanish like my father’s hairline, expression of mind. Bergson seeks to re-acquaint our We may therefore say both that there is no perception shrink mental activity with finite reality, which is the living of the present other than that which is already formed to a twinkle on the horizon out of time. Participation in eternal truth is genuine, by the past, and that there is no present which will pass with the glint of a headtop polished bald. immediate and intrinsic to lived experience – it is into oblivion: no forgotten remainder is left behind in Sometimes, my old inhaler gives me the same look of doubt that mirrors do. not extrinsic (Cartesian); in fact it is attentiveness to either direction. Last week, my eyes set to my forehead, my scalp showed the strands of me I’ve weathered by promising too much, human experience that reveals truth as knowable. Any moment of time experienced is not simply a and sometimes I think what’s possible is only a decision away and soon I’ll be the change I used to tell For Bergson, the lived experience of time offers not fraction, it is not isolable. It is a moment of duration myself I was. only an interesting subjective and private narrative, but and has a spacious quality which points outwards from

the means of understanding the nature of time as such: itself. Past, present and future are not just relatively I’m learning to forgive myself, time is not knowable through detached or speculative different points according to position on a single scale, to stop seeing this body as a mess of unguided flesh. analysis. Nor may one arrive at an account of time as they would appear to be in a spatial representation, which rings true by focus on the mere chronological but instead have an inherently different ontological I don’t know whether the silence that follows prayer is nothing measurement of time which, Bergson argues, remains quality. The past is not simply a past present moment, or angels putting me on hold. always reducible to spatial measurement – i.e. the way but is absolutely past as spiritual memory: there is that measuring a minute is reducible ultimately to no no present moment at all without this memory trace What is possible is that I am both the dialing tone more than the movement of earth in relation to the and its continuously habitual influence. Similarly, the and hold music, the answers to the questions I keep asking. sun, and thereby measures nothing more than the future is more than just a future present moment that

movement of objects within the spatial sphere. will eventually be over, but is also the real horizon of A voice used to speak from heaven in my dreams. eschatological promise, of hope, and of the always Here Bergson develops an account of durée, duration: Now they all feature waking up incomplete. something wholly different to ‘clock time’. Duration to realise I’m still asleep. explains the flow or interpenetration of past and The Bergsonian inheritance passes to Marcel Proust, These times lucid dreams involve me trying to fly present elements that make up time – which is not Walter Benjamin and onwards to the German writer but failing to get off the ground, discrete moments (which are themselves mere spatial W.G. Sebald, whose masterpiece Austerlitz is charged and God fades everything to eyelid markers) but instead must have a qualitative dimension. with sensitivity to ‘involuntary memory’ – the felt the moment I realise what is possible. Time is not simply a linear movement of discrete experience of durée: experience that is less the product isolable presents but occurs, as Gilles Deleuze (a great of facts firmly anchored in memory and chronology Bergsonian acolyte) put it, “less by succession than by than of a convergence within memory of accumulated coexistence”.1 Our most fundamental mental processes and frequently unconscious data; synthesis of diversity the true horror and the dissonant unreality of evil can be WILLIBRORDare experiences of felt intuition where non-quantitative into meaning, discovery of hidden correspondences, gestured towards, without the need to give a systematic When analysed, Sebald’s sentence structure appears multiplicities merge, intertwine, and mutually develop the forming of a montage. This ontology drives Sebald’s account or grant evil a problematic ontological place. unusual – making frequent use of hypotaxis: sentences within us. An oft-cited analogy is the experience of music composition which, like that of Proust, reveals the If the deep-rooted rot of the cultural movements composed of unequal parts. This slows down the – one does not listen to a succession of discrete isolable pattern of connectedness and even design behind our that prepared the way for the horrors of the 20th prose, and with it the reader. Without such predictable notes, but rather the notes permeate one another so lives glimpsed only from time to time, and for which century resulted from triumphalist narratives, from the syntactic structure, the reader finds himself always that when we listen to the music, an organic whole is we yearn all our lives. For Sebald, this connectedness is myths of teleological and immanently achievable civic already in the midst of the text. This aids empathy, formed. Durée, this sense of time as experienced with not merely experiential, standing outside the sphere of outcomes, which could then serve to justify all and any an uncanny familiarity and generosity, which fits all its layered and textured resonance is, like music, not action: it is instead thoroughly moral – and the failure means, Sebald’s riposte simply refuses to embark upon so sensitively with the subject matter (if indeed an properly to attend to the temporal value that infuses the project of plot-writing in a conventional sense. extended metaphor with no statement of its ground the material world leads ultimately to destruction. 3 There is no strong narrative that drives the text along, can be called ‘subject matter’). This outlook undercuts the Kantian conception of nor a strong and graspable purpose that leads the The book, and the narrator, wanders and sometimes experience as immediate auto-affection, and Sebald’s character, Jacques Austerlitz, towards his next goal or almost sleepwalks from one place to another – often writing goes further still: drawing our attention to the endeavour. Instead, the prose permits itself to be led by unconnected – except through the integrity of the accelerating destruction of traditional mediations of nothing more than the attentive and often bewildered prose. Wholeness is not found through resolution of unconscious memory by warfare, rapid industrialisation, conscience of the narrator. plot as such, but by the integrity, unity and continuity of hugely increased mobility. We might broadly then posit The narrator wanders from fortress to nocturnal the narrator and main character’s attitude: melancholy, Bergson and Sebald as exemplifying a response to zoo, from a haunted train station, to a jail and insane charitable, attentive. the externalisation, rationalisation and reification of asylum. The meandering text circles, physically and time that has come to dominate industrial societies Amongst the hallmarks of Sebald’s prose is the lack of temporally, gesturing towards something so dark that with its strict time management in the factory system an omniscient narrator who controls and pushes along it cannot perhaps itself truly be encountered or spoken and railway network, the standardisation of time the plot, and who works behind the scenes to effect an by observer or narrator: the concentration camp. To zones, and the annulment of temporal difference outcome. From his critical essays, there is suggestion this, the prose and characters never get closer than through instantaneous communication, beginning that Sebald considered the domineering literary style to the holding camps and train stations. This is the dark with the telegraph. Through the gradual unification be compromised morally and stylistically: a chief aspect centre of all the referents drawn together in the text: and standardisation of quantitative temporalities, our of this being the tendency towards strong, thrusting the bafflingly dark nullity at the centre of 20th century sensitivity to the possibility of qualitatively different plots and omniscient narratives – something that leads, Europe, itself gesturing towards the final and ultimate temporalities has been blunted, and so in turn have we perhaps, in the direction of systematic accounts of problem – the problem of evil, a black hole within peoples and places, and programmatic pronouncements “Alexa, ring the bells for compline” arrived at the so called “homogenous empty time of sensible discourse. Its substance does not merely fall capitalism”. 4 on visions of human community and meaning, and the at one end of the rational and affective spectrum, it possibility of fascistic totalitarian power. Sebald never Sebald re-sensitises us by presenting seemingly drains the rational and sensitive capacities as such. presents the content of the novels from an imagined disparate historical or chronological moments as It cannot be described, but only gestured towards. objective position. Instead, his approach is and remains somehow contemporaneous: blended together such Indeed, to approach it is itself necessarily a kind of periscopic: all content within the prose is mediated and 1. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, Trans. P. Patton. New that the sense of time as a series of discrete fragments haunted madness. The prose awakens the reader to the is no less true for being so. A dispositional attentiveness York: Columbia University, 1994 is all but obliterated; felt time refuses to bow to mere conscience of the narrator – to their own sensitivity: by is the route that allows experience to be the beginning 2. Charles Peguy, Notes on Bergson and Descartes, translated by linear progression. The temporal modus – coexistence Bruce K Ward, Cascade Books, 2019 reference, not direct confrontation. of revelation. rather than succession – is unmistakeably Bergsonian. 3. Deanne Blackler, Reading W.G. Sebald: Adventure and The figure of the walker in literature enables an Disobedience, 2007 Not only does this approach ring true to felt experience 4. Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880-1918, Harvard attentiveness that belongs uniquely to a walking pace. University Press, 1983 of time, it also creates a sensitive space in which both SHEET2 Willibrord Sheet Is. 1 , Oct MMXIX Love, Bridges and Prayer Willibrord Snippets

Theodore Shack Various and unattributed

o I love God? I am doubtful whether this is the Beauty and Goodness. very clear line of communication to build a relationship right way to begin, but I want to talk a bit about with God (insofar as that makes any sense) – we can at D This is what is meant by saying a task can be a prayer, love. The image I have in my mind is that of blowing least, in paying attention to them, seek to know Him. gardening is a prayer, a walk is a prayer, a dinner party ‘Do not walk in front of me Lord, through a handful of grain, the wheat abides and the even is a prayer, a painting is a prayer. For all these Importantly, God as love, become incarnate, is very for I may not follow. Do not walk chaff floats away on the wind. What abides? are of the language of praise for God through our active. It is a love of action, not merely a feeling, indeed behind me, for I may not know I was originally going to say that this metaphor is how encounters with His creation. They give means and having no account of Jesus’s inner train of thought I look back on life, the chaff blows away, the finite, form to our instincts for praise. The desire to take a (Christ on the psychiatrist’s couch), we have only his the right way. Instead, walk beside and what sits and abides is the moments that are walk after lunch to see the world is a prayer. The longing example of love in action. The rule is ‘love one another me Lord, so that we may be touched with the infinite. But I realise now that what for sunshine in Spring is a prayer of praise. The desire to as I have loved you’, the example is not a thought or a friends.’ characterises these instances of the infinite is love, not have a delicious meal in good company is also a prayer feeling but a person’s whole life - this is our example. in the exclusive meaning of the word often used but of praise. These things praise the goodness of life. The We can only experience God’s love in His actions, words rather in its huge all-encompassing definition, the kind instinct for prayer is so deep, it is so human, and we are and deeds, which is also a good clue to us and how we that we use when we say that God is Love. given the opportunity to pray so often. ought to see and do and be loving in our own lives. And so what abides, once we open our hands to look This is why Simon Weil considers it a sacrilege to So it is in some ways true or at least helpful to say: ‘Love and let the chaff blow away in the wind is the solidity destroy a metaxu, a bridge, something that is a pointer is not a feeling, it is a playing out, a doing, an activity, an of love. for somebody. To destroy a food-lover’s love of food action’. for example or to squash the creative impulse of a This is what I think Paul means when he says that love is In truth, love is also a feeling, although in one form as a passionate young painter. For this is equivalent to what remains. It is also what he means when he says ‘if feeling, it is very much the fruit the actions. depriving somebody of oxygen, it is to take away from I have faith to move mountains and prophecy etc, and them their bumptious means of praise, their prayer-life Even more radically, Love is not an additional have not love, I am a clanging cymbal.’ in a sense. requirement or a goal to be attained, it is quite literally The love comes in many forms, love of friends, love of the bottom line, the very minimum standard. Christ This is why it is also something sacred to be able to food, love of a place, love of beautiful things, love of says: ‘You must love one another’. make a pointer, a sign, a creation, a metaxu that points family, love of a smell, a sensation (Proustian), and also another towards God. The evidence of love as an action is a relieving hand up love of a romantic kind. Love of the infinite charity also, from this demand, which might otherwise have been love of care, love despite yourself, love of a stranger, ‘If you don’t love, you’re dead and troubling if love was solely a feeling: ie. if ‘you must love’ good Samaritan love. ‘Standing in the full blazing meant ‘you must have this mushy feeling that we call if you do love, they’ll kill you.’ Love is stronger than death. How? Because it abides light of God’s love is like love’. The instinctive response in most circumstances longer, it has the measure of the infinite about it. Death encountering an ocean of is merely ‘I can’t / I don’t have it so what now? Do I sit is not the end, the the love we shared remains when we outside the gate? Maybe this just isn’t for me’. go, and the love that we are capable of only grows once water after knowing only The reality is that we are ambitiously called to have love ‘Only Grace can obtain things we stand in the full blazing light of God’s love, which is kitchen sinkfuls.’ in action in our words and deeds, and this is more easily by contradiction. Grace can give like encountering the ocean after knowing only kitchen possible to respond to, for we can say and do things sinkfuls. courage whilst leaving sensitivity that we do not yet feel. The feeling is the fruit of this Every garden, building, painting, poem and home has intact.’ How do we love God? the capacity to be such a pointer. And as such, every through Grace. 1. In Creation, we see and experience Him through the opportunity for creation should be seen in this light. wonders of what he has made. [ie. not just ‘not all architecture has to be beautiful, this is just housing, it is a background]. Because not 2. In Christ. ‘Through Christ you encounter ‘Christ gives us a language and even housing need be merely a background, it can be a 1 metaxu. And this is why we must be careful. And this is the absolute in friendship rather actions. Praise and penitence. why we have a responsibility, because too much dross You are given the words to The beauty of the world that surrounds us, the than just in philosophy.’ will stop people seeing or reading or hoping for beauty. complexity of plantlife, trees, the song of birds, even the speak’. And this is why artists have an especial responsibility, work of human hands, the paintings, art, celebrations as and an especial opportunity. they are of the way in which we are made in God’s image, as creators also. These are encounters, interactions and But in truth, we are all artists, we are all sign-makers, ‘Failure of being love, not failure as such are the building blocks of a relationship with whether our signs are sculptures or how we arrange of an act of love’. ‘Artifice is the made thing. Reality WILLIBRORDGod (insofar as this is even remotely conceptualisable). our bedroom around us, or how we present ourselves The things we see and love in the world are signposts, or talk with our friends or choose our language. is discovered through making. In the things we make (‘work of human hands’), these also 2 ‘Hope is not about the future, it’s the act of making, we discover are signs, they point somewhere. Simone Weil calls reality’. these bridges or metaxu – they are sacred because In Christ we have a very tangible sight of what God is about not wanting to be alone.’ they bring us out of ourselves and point us towards like as a person, human. The Gospels record this, and the Divine. To our encounters with God through Truth, the encounter with Christ’s words in the Gospels offer a

that they are. I know myself that I have a habit, a desire Musings on a Suspicious Self. to ‘endgame’: to get to the end before the process is done, to jump over the ‘doing’ to get to the result, to Antonia Weir move as fast as I can from the particular moment to the ‘God is the complexity, not the universal in the hope/ need that I am working something reduction, it is to acknowledge The people who love you will know your face better than you ever will. bigger out. But the universal and the particular are not connected like that. They are not linear such that one n a self centred society it is curious that perhaps we decoding as though you will find a final answer is the there is a question. Still wonder’. moves to the next. Rather one has to be living into the are seen more clearly by others than by ourselves. opposite of what Wittgenstein and Williams argue I particular, dealing in that moment, with that person at That what I think of as ‘me’ is sometimes more for. In their eyes and the eyes that I want to put on, that instance, living, doing and being as an incorporated ‘We create our authentic selves. It accurately seen by someone outside of me. it’s about the leading on, the working on a profoundly person, to be able even to sense the universal. And superficial level. What I say to you, how I behave with is not an unveiling. Embodied.’ Rowan William’s article on ‘The suspicion of suspicion’ moreover, that universal when sensed is not a full you, is a cue for how we are to continue together. We caught me because of how inward-looking I am. For a picture, an answer, but rather something to reflect back work things out (never final things) in the possibility long while I lived in a constant search for my true self into the particular. It is a following and a joining on and of asking the questions; in the acknowledgement that following as sense that if I excavated deep enough, through. what we provide as an answer is only ever a partial ‘decoded’ and ‘probed’, I could unzip my ‘true self’ – the interpretation, a permeation or bringing to light of The conclusion of ‘The Suspicion of suspicion’ spoke most authentic self that is waiting somewhere inside all something (not the whole thing). about taking time: the need to have the time to know the less true selves, ready to be uncovered. that when you feel you do not ‘know yourself’ it is more Their interpretation changes the way that we need to Yet this is a misconception. We do not find an ‘honest’ a case of ‘I don’t know yet what to say.’ In my life I seem regard ourselves and others, moving away from fixing self, only the self we agree to find or that I agree to, the to flee from that which I know to be good. I talk about each other in set boxes to a place of wider and deeper interpretation that I latch onto and say ‘yup, that’s the ‘relation’ and then shy away from it when it does not possibility. As with a poem, when I know the person, real me’. We find a comfort in fitting to archetypes - be provide a clear and solid answer. My tendency is to that does not mean that I have decoded them like a they Freudian, Jungian or horoscopes – a comfort in know and have done with knowing but that destroys robot, it means that I have a sense of what they say and not being alone as ourselves having to work through the purpose of life which is to be lived, life where we how they act. I may speculate as to the reasons for that. the world moment by moment in all its complexity. can never aim to know or have done with destiny. Yet I know that my speculations are just that. They are “I thought I discerned the right order” There is something in the interpretations which can be Please help me to live more in the not knowing, the not masks of the truth, the end point, the answers as “I am still discerning” neither proved nor disproved that gives us a sense of puzzlement, dialogue and questions. Not to rush to the it were. “Is your costume from the sixth movie?” finality, of solidity. That this is who I am. Done. Enough. end-point, not to yearn for the finish, be that in distance And yet, how easy it is to simplify enough to believe Yet that is simply not the case. This decoding and or time, but to be here, now and in relation. SHEETMMXIX Oct , Is. 1 Willibrord Sheet 3 Deeply Superficial Andy Warhol

Kate Banks

owan Williams’s essay ‘Suspicion of suspicion’ Warhol crashes into this trend with a force baffling (Transubstantiating the Culture: Andy Warhol’s Secret ‘Making is like a conversation with Rpresents an opposition, considered by to critics and interviewers. The silk-screen process ,James Romaine) Wittgenstein, between two ways of understanding and other mechanical tools Warhol used to create his creation’. As Williams puts it, there is a profundity in surfaces. personal identity: one being a now mainstream notion artwork radically insist upon an encounter with surfaces Marilyn Diptych may appear to unimaginatively repeat that the authentic self is a solitary inner subject (or - in a way mimicking this automatism but at a complete ‘We can only understand grace & a known iconic image again and again through the ‘private self’) lurking deep within the subconscious remove from notions of sublimated libido and self- mechanical process of silk screen printing, but it is not the supernatural by the fact that and in need of decoding; and the other, an affirmation expression. Any attempts in interview to delve beneath just another image of Marilyn Monroe. It presents the of the self within the actions, gestures and encounters to some more substantive self-discovery in these works it is incarnate’ part of this human being that became a repeated image, with material reality, a sense that the unity of the self were famously blocked by Warhol: on screen or in magazines, and holds in it a certain is always outside the field of vision, or that you can in Cavalier: ...Mr. Warhol, have you, like many other posthumous irony or eulogy when its original is no some senses be better known from the outside. The artists today, ever been in analysis, or taken any longer to be found in the flesh. Much has been written first of these Williams associates with those influential hallucinogenic drugs? about it beyond what I have the skill or the space to thinkers who have followed on from that Cartesian Announcements elaborate on here except to quote Warhol’s recent suspicion of the outward presentation of things (Marx, Andy Warhol: No, I think I face everything straight biographer, Wayne Koestenbaum: Mr D D Hitchens and Ms A R Owens Nietszche, Freud), whereas the latter, as Williams puts on. “we remember the electric chair, and remember it, grows out of a certain faith in the ‘profundity of Or again: “If you want to know about Andy Warhol, just The engagement is announced between Daniel Warhol’s final Last Supper paintings, with Elijah’s surfaces’. It is this phrase which brought to mind an look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, David, elder son of Mr Peter Hitchens and Mrs vacated Passover seat their necessary shadow… alleged Warhol quotation - “I am a deeply superficial there I am. There’s nothing behind it.” (Andy Warhol Eve Ross Hitchens, of Oxford, Oxfordshire Warhol’s images can seem stupid, mute, until person”. When I first came across it, I had a niggle that Prints, 14) and Amy Rose, elder daughter of Mr Adrian you stare at them long enough to travel through there was something of Warhol’s Catholicism in this. Owens and Mrs Jocelyn Owens of Newburgh, stupefaction to illumination, to understand that It loosely looped up in my head with part of one of Lancashire. Stewart Lee’s stand-up sets: a chair, too, conveys the ominousness of a body’s premature departure from earth...In every work and The happy event took place in Oxford “What I really like about medium, he tries to solve the conundrum: what does (Oxfordshire), buoyed by the ordination of a it mean to exist in a body, next to another person, certain Toby James Lees which took place the Catholicism … probably my who also exists in a body?” (Andy Warhol) same day, Saturday the 7th September, 2019. favourite thing about it , is the The only edit I would make to this final sentence would way that it combines a search be ‘with a body’, because I am inclined to read Warhol’s comments on surfaces as a kind of tenacious anti- for profound spiritual meaning dualist affirmation. Warhol’s faith was liturgical, one in the universe with a love of that recognised the divine movement in matter. In the Mass, whatever ineffable transformations occur within kind of inane seaside tat.” the secret of your soul, it is the divine Body and Blood which are received into your guts. Somewhere in both of these quotations is distantly Presenting surfaces affirms an integration of every represented that defiant integration of the spiritual and level of contact with what is before you in the flesh, in the mundane, which once caught my eye in Christianity “So that’s one adult and one authentic self…” which the superficial (or the material or the mundane) when Eastern religions were otherwise more enticing is not to be got-past to some inner authentic self, but and generally more socially acceptable. an integrated part of a whole. I include in this the ‘inane Following Wittgenstein, Williams challenges the notion There is, of course, a playfulness in these responses. seaside tat’ of Catholic devotion. This is the ‘profundity of ‘authentic inner self’, suggesting that it presupposes In the context of interviews, Warhol classically evaded of surfaces’ in relation to personal identity: the people a kind of dualism, our true selves being ‘contained in nearly every question. Yet there is a truth here: for who love you know your own face better than you do. Warhol, surfaces are good. For Warhol, you begin with some kind of shell or husk of flesh’ (Wrestling with Williams says as much when recounting the struggle of surfaces. The immediacy of Ethel Scull Thirty Six Times Angels, 186). Freud is presented as a key proponent of Bonhoeffer, imprisoned at Tegel, to reconcile his inward or Two Hundred Campbell Soup Cans or 129 Die in Jet! “What would you suggest to release my inner this habit of thinking in his suspicion of that which is sense of fear, weakness and flight with his outward has something to say about the ‘face’ of the world. spark, detach my soul from my earthly body, manifested or on the surface. The truth of who you are image of calm, confidence and optimism: ‘My unity as There are good reasons not to try too hard to look and combat all demiurges in this dark shadow - by this account - is hidden, obscured by consciousness a person is always outside my field of vision (I can’t see behind it before you have looked it in the face. We live of a world?” and in need of decoding. my own face), just as the divine condition for there in an all too suspicious world, that wants to read behind being fields of vision at all, for there being a world or André Breton imbued Surrealism with this Freudian the surface before it has really understood what the worlds, is outside my field of vision (I can’t see my own dualism, believing the process of automatism - ‘the surface is. dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised origin)’ (193). There is no denying that Warhol was a man of Hope by reason and outside all moral or aesthetic concerns’ Bonhoeffer writes in his Letters from Prison, ‘I’ve come hiddenness, including that curious secret which he kept (Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto) - to reveal hidden or to understand more and more the profound this- Theodore Shack throughout his life: his constant faith, only revealed to repressed truths. Such a dualism is made explicit in worldliness of Christianity ...it is only by living completely the world by John Richardson at Warhol’s funeral in Into the dark I gently grope works such as The Communicating Vessels (1928, the in this world that one learns to have faith.’ title of which refers to the process of psychoanalysis 1987. Warhol attended a Roman Catholic Mass nearly Do I detect a drop of hope? through which the oneiric vessel communicates with everyday. Richardson’s very words were: Or is it just a jar of dust the pragmatic vessel of consciousness) as well as Trust Andy to have kept these activities in Full of flies and broken trust? The Surrealist Manifesto (1922). Ultimately, Breton the dark. The knowledge of this secret piety ‘One material (apples) becoming Dispel the darkness of this night! and the Surrealists contributed to the mammoth rise inevitably changes our perception of an artist another material (paint): Dispel the gloom, put dreams to flight! of the Abstract Expressionists for whom art almost who fooled the world into believing that his transubstantiation’ Smash through this dreary dreichet fog that exclusively involved the struggle to manifest or bring to only obsessions were money, fame, glamour, makes us weep, the surface this hidden authentic self. and that he could be cool to the point of Sing to our hearts now strongly softly from the callousness. Never take Andy at face value deep.

“Whoever therefore is not illuminated by the splendours as great as those to be found in created things is blind; whoever fails to praise God on account of all these things is mute; whoever does not turn from such great signs to their first principle is a fool. Therefore, open your eyes, rouse the ears of your spirit, release your lips, and apply your heart, that you may see, hear praise, love and worship, magnify and honour your God in all creatures, or else perhaps the whole world may rise up against you.” - St. Bonaventure

“I am escaping from this house and this garden. “Darling, he is doing it again.” In my enlightenment I now reject you, mummy “Helen, it’s ok. He is just going through his gnostic Have a good day and God bless. and daddy, your goodness and omnipotence as phase”. my creators”.

4 Willibrord Sheet Is. 1 , Oct MMXIX