014. Faith(less) Reliquary
Hello friends,
A couple of poets I follow on Twitter began posting about faith this week, the ways in which we discuss faith in literature and in poetry, the very language we rely on to describe our spiritual experiences. I began to see 'faith' everywhere shortly after, in magazines and in poems, my Instagram Explore page thick with pictures of saints, pages from illuminated manuscripts appeared as I scrolled through Twitter.
For this week's letter, I'm thinking about faith not just through the lens of religion, but faith in social systems and ideologies. In a way, I'm thinking about Neil Gaiman's book, American Gods, the way in which things like beauty trends or social media become sacred to us as a society. I am thinking about not just the possession of faith but the absence of it, disillusionment with the evidence you have been presented with. Faith as both an act of hope-making and an active tool for continuous scrutiny and critique. Enjoy.
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TOUCH
Thank you to my dear friend, Sophie, for letting me borrow her book, Full of Secrets: Critical Approaches to Twin Peaks. This book is comprised of different essays centered around the show, from the soundtrack of Twin Peaks to its relationship to television soap operas and the way it breaks away from traditional detective narratives. It's definitely a mixed bag, with something in there for everyone whether you're a die-hard fan or only seen a few episodes. In keeping with this week's theme, I thought I would mention two essays from the book I personally enjoyed the most: "The Canonization of Laura Palmer" by Christy Desmet and "Double Talk in Twin Peaks" by Alice Kuzinar. Desmet's piece focuses on Laura and the way her character becomes complicated over the course of the show, the way in which female murder victims are oftentimes deified for their beauty (oftentimes perpetrated by the male characters on the show). Kuzinar's essay deals with the actual vocal language of the show, the ways in which Lynch disorients and isolates us through the distortion of speech and dialogue. If you want to talk about faith, the cult following of Twin Peaks is a good place to start. You can read them in the Google Book here.
I have two pieces from the most recent issue of the New Yorker to share (one of the perks of coming home for break). The first is "Beauty is Justice" by Jiayang Fan. Fan looks at the technology company Meitu, and its technological innovations in the world of beauty enhancing apps, what that means for China's millennial generation (although Fan focuses on China, many of these ideas have crossed the ocean too), as well as issues of plastic surgery and what it means to craft and cultivate an online celebrity persona. Fan does a great job of untangling the complicated interactions between modern beauty standards and technology with her far-reaching narrative analysis.
The second piece is Zadie Smith's short story "Lazy River". As a former frequenter of water parks, I really enjoyed reading it. I think she does a great job of not only describing the experience but moving beyond that, dipping into a vacation in Spain and the various people the narrator comes into contact with centered around this water attraction. "But once you have entered the Lazy River," she writes, "with all its pliability and ease, its sterilizing chlorine and swift yet manageable currents, it is very hard to accept the sea: its abundant salt, its marine life, those little islands of twisted plastic." She moves through this story with a delicate ease, picking at our ideas of what a vacation should be and what it means to drift aimlessly. A nice read if you're enjoying your own winter vacation.
One show that I started and finished this past week is Mindhunter. I'm a huge true crime fan (if you couldn't tell already) but I had been putting off this show because I wasn't sure what to expect. I was pleasantly surprised. Without wandering into spoiler territory, I'll just give a brief synopsis: we watch how the FBI's behavioral science unit is established, through interviews with serial killers and the analysis of their actions. Fincher keeps the show tightly choreographed, the camera always following the characters through each episode, making us aware of every behavior and gesture as though to mirror the role of these FBI agents. The show dissects toxic, white male masculinity, actively complicating and scrutinizing our social expectations of heteronormative gender roles. What more could you ask for?
Lastly, I finished Certain Magical Acts by Alice Notley this week. This is the first book I've read by her and I was blown away by the sharp, imaginative quality of her poetic writing. In this particular book, she examines mythology, mortality, the transcendent role of the poet as narrator. Despite being less than 200 poetry pages, this collection is rich with beautiful, contemplative writing. Notley moves through the condition of human living and metaphysical ideas of divine power in a continuous epic poetic narrative, causing you to reflect and be awe-struck with each turn of the page.
LOOK
One photography series I saw a while back and recently revisited is Miwa Yanagi's "My Grandmothers". For this project, Yanagi asked a group of young women to imagine who they might be fifty years from now. Yanagi's photographs are beautiful, at times lighthearted, crafting a kind of elderly woman that exists outside of social expectation. I love how unique each fictional grandmother is, the way their personalities come across through the photograph. In a world where a woman's short window of youth is seen as the 'prime' of her life or the moment when she is most beautiful, Yanagi's series is a refreshing detour away from those norms.
Another artist whose work I've admired lately is that of painter Duane Slick. Slick, who is Meskwaki, produces dream-like photorealistic paintings across canvases of glass and fabric. His work not only explores Indigenous lore and deconstructs the glorified myth of America, using these materials to explore both spiritual and historical conditions. His canvases are layered, his subjects never fully realized, as though recovering the traces of an ephemeral subject. In his artist statement he writes, "In narrative traditions, to tell the story of tragedy one must always begin by telling the ending first." You can check out more of his breathtaking work here.
I recently came across the work of Laura Aguilar. Aguilar examines her Mexican-American lesbian identity, the way in which her body is rendered as both invisible and highly visible in American society. I love the way she composes these landscape photographs, incorporating her body into the terrain, creating an interplay between stone and skin. She uses her camera to draw attention to communities that are systematically excluded from the art world, showing that she too belongs to this conversation on identity and precarity. There is a retrospective of her work going on now at the Vincent Price Art Museum if you're in Southern California until February.
LISTEN
99% Invisible is one of those podcasts that very rarely bores me or tempts me to skip an episode. One episode which I've returned to time and time again is "The Pool and the Stream". This episode is about a swimming pool, more specifically the drained kidney bean-shaped swimming pools of Los Angeles which gave rise to today's skateboarding culture with its smooth, undulating form. It's a fantastic episode about an idea having an unexpected impact on society, and the way in which a piece of good design can come to symbolize an aspect of our culture. Give it a listen whether you like Thrasher shirts or not.
An album I've been enjoying is Gil Scott-Heron's The Revolution Begins. His spoken-word music is brilliant, rich with poetic lyricism and rhythms pulled from blues and soul. He sings (talks?) about racism in America, historical disenfranchisement, and the need for social change. One of his most famous jazz pieces "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" challenges the relationship between white supremacist politics and the mass media. "Home Is Where the Hatred Is" talks about the systematic poverty of the black community and disillusionment with the American Dream. Very important music to listen to right now. You can check out the rest of his discography here.
My friend Juliet recently released an album titled Rehab. Her songs smolder with a lyrical honesty. Each song is an absolute gem, full of tender love and longing, aware of past sadness yet she keeps looking to the future. You can listen to the 6-song album here.
Anne Sexton is one of the poets who occupies a warm spot on the lawn of my heart. Many of her poems examine one's relationship to religion and mythology, what might fail or is eaten away in glory. I particularly enjoy her poem "With Mercy for the Greedy" which was written in dedication to "Ruth, who urges me to make an appointment with the sacrament of confession". It' amazing to hear Sexton read this piece aloud and, courtesy of The Poetry Archives, an interview follows after the reading about Sexton's relationship to religion. You can listen to the audio file here.
LICK
PBS's Art Assignment has a really great video series on "Art Cooking", recipes cooked by artists (such as Frida Kahlo, Georgia O'Keeffe, or Gordon Matta-Clark from a previous letter). Their most recent episode is on Salvador Dali. In 1973, Dali published Les Diners de Gala, a collection of international recipes and gorgeous food photography he and his wife collected from various French chefs. Dali would host elaborate dinner parties, and believed that gastronomy was a form of high art and the book itself is "devoted to the pleasures of Taste". In this video, they attempt to make Bush of Crayfish in Viking Herbs and it's a wild adventure of crayfish architecture and delicious artistic cooking. Perhaps, it'll inspire you to experiment in your kitchen.
Clarice Lispector has always been an elusive literary figure, to say the least. To this day, the only footage that exists of her ever being interviewed is from TV Cultura in Sao Paulo, when the station director asked her for an interview while she was there to participate in a show about film. That same year she would die of ovarian cancer. This 22-minute interview is full of insights, not only about Lispector's own life but about the practice of writing as an art form. When talking about writing as a teenager, she says: “Chaotic. Intense. Entirely outside the reality of life...I went with enormous shyness—but the shyness of someone daring.” Watch it here.
Coming home for winter break, I always find myself revisiting the music I listened to back in high school. Recently, I re-watched all 11 music videos from Marina and the Diamond's 2011 album, Electra Heart. Marina is a very underrated pop singer, and it was fun to look back on the songs I was dancing around my room to when I was younger. Not all of the songs have stayed with me as I've grown older, but I still enjoy the way in which she plays with feminine tropes in pop culture, the expectation of female gender performance (Diamandis says that she was inspired by Cindy Sherman's hyperreal cinematic self-portraiture). A sugary sweet throwback, you can watch a mix with all of the music videos in chronological order here.
I've been trying to learn how to read tarot cards for quite a while. I got a new deck over the summer but as the semester got chaotic, I let my interest in tarot fall by the wayside. Recently, I decided to download the Golden Thread Tarot. It's an app that not only gives you tarot card readings every day (you get a single card each day and you have several options if you want to do larger or smaller spreads), but it actually teaches you about the major and minor arcana, the significance of each card. It's been very helpful and the app also lets you log each card reading or spread you do, allowing you to keep track of card patterns in your readings along with your emotional response (either positive or negative) to the cards you 'draw'. This is perfect if you want to learn tarot but you don't have the time, or don't feel confident in doing readings quite yet.
CLICK
How does typography influence ideology? This is the question posed in Ariela Gittlen's essay "How Feminist Artists Reclaimed Futura from New York's Mad Men". This essay traces the history of the font itself, from its earliest designs to its uses during World War II, print advertising, and even NASA's mission to the moon. This piece looks at how feminist artists like Barbara Kruger, who worked as a graphic designer at Conde Nast, began to use the font to draw awareness to feminist and anti-capitalist issues. A really fun piece to read especially if you're interested in the power of typography.
If I'm going to talk about faith (or rather the absence of faith), I've found that poetry is the best medium for that kind of spiritual contemplation. Once such piece is John Berryman's "Eleven Addresses to the Lord". Berryman writes about his relationship to God, various components of the Bible, with graceful, gorgeous lyrical imagery. "Unite my various soul, / sole watchman of the wide & single stars".
Another such meditative poem is Sohrab Sepehri's "The Water's Footsteps". Sepheri writes of his practice as a Muslim, touching at his family history. He meditates on knowledge and religion, spirituality and isolation, drawing from his observations. This poem is so beautiful, the kind that knocks the breath out of you with lines like "Scent of solitude in the alley of seasons" and "I saw a child who sniffed the moon".
One essay I've enjoyed is Lisa Besner's "Dinner Theater". In her piece, she writes about meal kits, and our ideals of the perfect family and adulthood centered around homemade meals and sitting around the dinner table. I love how she traces the history of home cooking and the TV dinner, what they've come to symbolize over the years. A really piece about social expectations through modern cuisine. "If becoming an adult is learning to parent yourself," she writes, "meal-kit delivery imagines that parent at sea in the overwhelming churn of an unmoored and unrecognizable life". You can read it here.
A short, yet striking, poem is Lucille Clifton's "The Astrologer Predicts at Mary's Birth". Clifton challenges the archetype of the virgin mother and the poem lingers on your mind after you've finished reading. If you're not familiar with Clifton's work, I'd pair this with "Clifton's Mary", an essay by Priya Mishra about Clifton's poetic scrutiny of mainstream Christian views of motherhood.
When I was looking for material for this week's letter, I came across The New Inquiry's newest issue centered on "Bad Faith" (purely coincidence, I swear). You can read the editors' note here: "This is a system that has been built on falsehoods from its inception". 'Bad Faith' comes to signify the belief in failing and/or failed political, economic, and social systems, an awareness which can fuel social change. If you want to read this fascinating, wide-ranging collection of essays, reply to this email and I can send you the pieces since I've recently treated myself to a monthly subscription.
Spencer Reece, an ordained minister, is one of my favorite contemporary poets who write about religion and religious experience. I couldn’t make this letter without including one of his poems. I present to you "San Sebastian". This piece bites at you, stains the golden gleam of sainthood: "My torso a sort of hotel. / Martyrdom bores me." Read it here. You can also check out his discussion of religious poems on the Poetry Foundation's Poetry Off the Shelf podcast. // What does it mean to have faith? Not just the belief in a system, religious or not, but to trust or have confidence in someone or something. Then what does it mean to lose faith? Is it truly gone? Or has the power transferred to another, greater force? It's something we are always in possession of ("to have" faith), but something we're never quite able to throw out to others as one might a tennis ball or a pool noodle.
Although I went to church when I was little and I am descended from priests on my father's side of the family, I never grew up particularly religious. Instead, I became fascinated in religion in a broader sense, the historical formation of both contemporary and ancient belief systems, the origins of language through myth, the multitude of ways in which we interact with spirituality. In the question of faith, I have no real conclusion or answer. I guess that's part of the very nature of faith, you never quite get the resolution you want or expect. Over the years, faith has come to signify a kind of reliance that can be felt at my knee joints or in the squeeze of my throat, something I can depend on for nourishment beyond the biological. I have faith not so much in religion as an institution but in poetry, in the expressive mediums of art and film, the voices of others that uplift and motivate me. Just as much as faith can be lost, it can be found again, and never be afraid to doubt what you think you already understand.
Stay warm, all of you caught in throes of snow and dagger-sharp winter winds. Until next week!
Love,
Ellie