Technicians of the Sacred

Peter Greenaway was trained as a fine-art painter. Unlike Glassie's hero, William Morris, who longed from his beautiful house in an industrializing England for a return to simple virtues, natural hierarchies, and graceful economies, Greenaway does not hate the Renaissance,20 but loves it for the alchmical cauldron of change that it was. The sixteenth century saw an ex-priest, Martin Luther, utterly re-form an old and powerful theological worldview. It saw Isaac Newton, Galileo Galilei, and Johannes Kepler, create physics and astronomies that worked another kind of magic on our place in the universe. It saw the publication of the prophecies of Michel Nostradamus, a French Jew, whose visions were grounded in ancient celestial sciences, mathematics, and medicine. It saw the pirate Francis Drake, the mystics John of the Cross and Giordano Bruno, the first chamber of commerce, the first hand grenade, the advent of the use of forks, and the plague. Much as in our own day, in which the labors of poor people create monuments to capitalism's pharaohs and technologies are mistaken for truths, it was a galaxy of worlds in collision. And yet the age contained the continuities that always and everywhere enable human beings-beggars and princes alike-to recognize themselves, enjoy themselves, challenge themselves, and adapt themselves to new environments: family and the larger community, tradition, love, work, and art.

In 1991, Greenaway finished a film called Prospero's Books and released it into the alembic of our collective Want. It tells a story about the spiritual materialism of the European sixteenth century, enacted within the dichotomous frames of political power and intrigue and, an even older one, the frame of effective magic. The story, first told by an English playwright of the times, is better known to us as The Tempest, the last of his thirty-six plays.

In the past, anonymity, one of the great cornerstone categories of Folklore, was loosely associated with the moral virtue of humility. Today we wish to know the name of the artist: named work can be evaluated in its situated context with the methods of performance theory far better than can anonymous artifacts. Today the signed work of folk art indexes a kind of pride in mastery; the life story of its maker is important as a move in protecting the artist from sentimental academic and economic oblivion. Had not William Shakespeare's friends, the community of actors who played out his dreams, gathered up his plays and had them published in 1623, you and I would not know his name. His work might have survived anonymously, and hence be of more interest to folklorists than it is, but we must be satisfied with the historical reality that the two elements of friendship and print technology coincided to preserve his name along with what are arguably the most excellent examples of verbal art in the English language. Without these two, he would be Homer.

Shakespeare wrote for people who had to deeply mine their visual imaginations to create the vivid scenes that his words conjured. Greenaway writes books, paints, draws, creates operas, mounts museum installations, and directs films, all with the aim of bringing his personal, manifest vision into the common view. But with fame the director's name, like Shakespeare's, is no longer a simple index of subjectivity. As is the case for many artists, the name is also an icon to marketers and consumers of Art. To some it signals a warning: stay away at all cost. This art is too cerebral, too contrived, too wearying, too difficult to understand. The artist has no anonymity to protect him from charges such as these. The autograph warns people away from Shakespeare and from Greenaway for the same reasons, and so for the same reasons they are not safe. However, for some, these singular names are not stop signs, but invitations to participate in richness and strangeness and complexity, to engage in common dreams articulated, common aspirations realized. In Glassie's terms, they combine the ideology of social responsibility, a marker of the "folk," with genius, a marker of the "fine."21

Film/Text/Breath: Magic is Mundane

Maya Lin, the architect of the Vietnam War and Civil Rights Memorials, the most evocative pieces of sculpture that Americans have the privilege to inhabit, tells us that "art is always about something not quite familiar."22 Like anthropomorphic and zoomorphic figurines resting on Buddhist, Hindu, Voudon, Shinto and other shrines all over the world (called murtis in one of Glassie's culture-areas, Bangladesh), they mutely carry part of what we are for us, provide seats for the best that is in us. Thus embodied, the terrifying ineffable becomes available for communication. Other artists use words to provide temporary sites of hierophany. But like murtis and Maya Lin's Wall, words have real power only when fully inhabited, actively engaged. Embodying the transcendent in a work of art requires a willing suspension of disbelief: exactly like a religious Bangladeshi craftsman, the irreligious film director Peter Greenaway can say, "I know that I made this thing; I know that it came from my hands; and yet because it did, I can view it as arriving from outside of myself. It makes me available for communication."

Like a murti-and unlike Shakespeare's bare stage-a film provides images brought into the world not by its willing receiver but by its inspired maker. A great film, one that tells us something we didn't already know, manifests images so evocative that the visual imagination is freed up in sufficient measure for its receivers to fully devote their energy their hearts-to it, to the strange, rich best that is in them, as embodiment rather than mere vision. When I first viewed Prospero's Books in the company of friends out for an evening's entertainment, one of them felt it her duty to occasionally nudge me to determine if I was still breathing. More than once during the course of the film-as had happened once in the presence of a sleeping construction crane-I was not. As Glassie writes, "Every work of art is the same. It gathers out of the world those who understand its intentions."23

John Gielgud, a revered magus of the twentieth-century stage, wanted a chance to play the sixteenth-century magus, Prospero.24 In executing their common desire, Greenaway took text itself, the spell that is words, fitted it to Gielgud's voice and a fine Renaissance calligraphic hand, and wreaked strange new forms of technology upon it. With the help of hundreds of working artists, he interleaved and illuminated the Bard's pages, bringing them to life with what he imagines for us to be the essences contained in books. The Duke of Milan, having given over his political power in favor of intellectual absorption, will need the aid of many.

There would need perhaps to be books on navigation and survival, there would need to be books for an elderly scholar to learn how to rear and educate a young daughter, how to colonise an island, farm it, subjugate its inhabitants, identify its plants and husband its wild beasts. There would need to be books to offer solace and advise patience and put past glory and present despondency into perspective. There would need to be books to encourage revenge. Twenty-four volumes might be enough to cover the information needed-bestiaries, a herbal, cosmographies, atlases, astronomies, a book of languages, a book of utopias, a book of travelers' tales, a book of games. There may have been books whose immediate practical purpose was not fathomable-a pornography, a book of motion, a book of love, a book of colours and a book of 'Architecture and other Music'. In the event, all of the twenty-four volumes not only kept Prospero and Miranda alive, well and sane on their island but also made Prospero so powerful he could command the dead and make Neptune his servant. 25

Technologies of the word have always been imbued with magical power. They, like the plastic arts, are acts of making the invisible visible. The brushstroke of the Japanese calligrapher does not describe reality, it creates it. It brings a world into being in much the same way that speaking a spell from a grimoire is intended to do. The bija (seed) syllables of Indian mantra practice, the aum, the ah, and the hum, brought into being by the calligrapher's pen, are objects of veneration; they illustrate nothing but are everything. Gielgud's Prospero writes the words of Shakespeare in the manuscript cursive of the Italian artist, Arrighi, a fifteenth-century calligrapher-printer, upon whose style Morris based his efforts at restoring the graceful art of penmanship at his Kelmscott Press.27 As Prospero writes, his pen and voice shape his utopia and everything that happens in it. He speaks/writes/spells its characters: Miranda, Ariel, Cailiban and the rest will refrain from using their actors' voices until Prospero relinquishes his Art, his will to power, and gives them their freedom from Want.

We are caught by words, held by them. A kind one, a blessing, can save a life; a severe one, judgmental even if just, is a curse and can kill. This is technology. This is effective magic. When Shakespeare gives us the words that make a tempest, or those that make the magical masque in celebration of Miranda's engagement to Ferdinand, he doesn't just spell them out for us, he situates them within their magical spheres of influence; he conjures with them. And as Shakespeare's-Gielgud's-Prospero's words literally perform, so does Michael Nyman's luminous music, and Greenaway's color saturated, magnificently framed filmic displays and video-inset overlays of high resolution HDTV, computer generation, and watercolor, all working to give voice to song, rhythm to dance, vision to text, and texture to flesh. The film-script describes Prospero's twenty-second book, A Book of Motion.

This is a book that at the most simple level describes how birds fly and waves roll, how clouds form and apples fall from trees. It describes how the eye changes its shape when looking at great distances, how hairs grow in a beard, why the heart flutters and the lungs inflate involuntarily and how laughter changes the face. At its most complex level, it explains how ideas chase one another in the memory and where thought goes when it is finished with. It is covered in tough blue leather and, because it is always bursting open of its own volition, it is bound around with two leather straps buckled tightly at the spine. At night, it drums against the bookcase shelf and has to be held down with a brass weight. One of its sections is called 'The Dance of Nature' and here, codified and explained in animated drawings, are all the possibilities for dance in the human body. 28

How many of us have imagined that books have lives of their own, that they whisper quietly among themselves when the lights go out, that they share their ideas and dreams with one another as with us? Something happens to the heart/mind when we witness these illusions in a darkened room. When we look at a useful object freshly, whether a stoneware pitcher or a construction crane, a table or a tabernacle, it stirs us freshly when it looks back. It communicates from the heart and hands of its thaumaturgical maker-the artist is always a synthesis of technician and mystagogue-to our individual and communal experience of being in the quotidian world. It draws us in and presents us-gifts us-with its reminder that this illusion too, the one about the validity of our perceptions, our hard-won knowledge, our solid, permanent existence, will please us for a while, but then it will also end. The play of these images, briefly shaping themselves on the palimpsest that is human consciousness, reminds us-forcefully, if we are paying attention-that the serious struggle of existence is also a game, lila, the play of the gods.

Greenaway's Prospero finally drowns all of his books, just as the words of the play-Shakespeare's lila-dictate, and by dictating, perform. After Caliban is forgiven, and thus made more human, but before Ariel and his music return to the upper airs, Gielgud hesitates: two undrenched books remain in his hands. A thick book of thirty-six plays, its initial pages blank and its cover embossed with the initials W.S., and a slim volume entitled The Tempest. He finally makes his decision and throws them into the deep, where they too will undergo a sea-change.

This moment in which the humanly constructed, durable text is relinquished to the fluidly enduring element-the very element that makes up most of our mass-is the gift of four magicians, Shakespeare, Prospero, Gielgud, and Greenaway, who, together with the hordes of working artists who supported their efforts, gave us Prospero's Books. This film, like our lives, will necessarily come to an end. The social exchange that is a prerequisite for art (reception is necessarily indivisible from creation) is here not obviously realized as transacting in the marketplace, but less obviously in that permanent-ephemeral moment that religionists call the sacred. While commodity consciousness is free to founder on the reefs of capitalism run amok, time, duration, is the environment of human life; time and time passing, with its unmonumentalized moments of real understanding and insight devoid of the will to power, are the magicians' gifts. "The gift is property that perishes."29

The spirit of a gift is kept alive by its constant donation. If this is the case, then the gifts of the inner world must be accepted as gifts in the outer world if they are to retain their vitality. Where gifts have no public currency, therefore, where the gift as a form of property is neither recognized nor honored, our inner gifts will find themselves excluded from the very commerce which is their nourishment. Or to say the same thing from a different angle, where commerce is exclusively a traffic in merchandise, the gifted cannot enter into the give-and-take that ensures the livelihood of their spirit.30

In other words, the time of film can become, in the hands of a great artist, sacred time. Time is film's medium, just as it is the medium of our dwindling lives. It is also the film's medium of exchange: our time is what we pay for this art with. At twenty-four frames per second, Greenaway's film is running far more slowly than the speed of the mind. We take in its devastatingly beautiful illusions through our eyes and still have time to mix them with our life stories, interpret and evaluate them, all the while barely aware that, for an instant, our breathing has stopped. Paleolithic Neanderthal communities built their ossuaries as monuments to the moment when aspiration-with all of its nuances-ceased. Today we gather up the bones of our lives on film. Regardless of the medium in which it is carried, in the presence of the real, the body shares in revelation.

We face the same disruptions here in the so-called latter days that men and women faced in Wagner's day and throughout time. Newer technologies challenge the goodness and efficacy of the older ones we have come to trust, and in so doing they challenge us to continue seeing human goodness in the world in which they serve us. They challenge us to experience ourselves as more fluid than we thought, more fragile and more flexible than we thought, in order to locate and describe ourselves to ourselves, to somehow fix our being in the flux of time. As Glassie wrote, "It is the purpose of art [...] to disturb simple thought and move the mind beyond the senses into a totalizing experience."31

Prospero's books are not, however, merely fixed in optical imagination. Not satisfied with illusions however compelling, Greenaway physically manufactured them. They actually exist.32 You could pick them up, smell their leather covers, smudge their brass clasps with a greasy finger. To make them tangible was his choice, based in his respect for lived reality, the one in which our human being necessarily makes its home. The powerful illusions spawned from them as his gift-to make mirrors for us, seats for the sacred and strange that is in us-do not negate the world from which they arose.

Greenaway is a profoundly moral man and not a Religious one; his enacted vision of the sacrality of lived experience is in no way reductionist.29 As it works to bridge the chasm between the body and the mind, the flesh and the text, his film expands us beyond mere dogma to connect us with the world in which we actually live-whether characterized as "traditional" or "technologically complex"-or it is not art. The folk never wholly abandon the old technologies of the sacred in favor of newer ones. All are adapted, incorporated, and remembered in the technologies of each member of the cultural body who chooses to appreciate, appropriate, and inhabit them. And while the distinctions between the folk and the fine may continue to delude us when our anxieties seek to overwhelm us with nostalgia, they must finally dissolve when the sacred rides out and into our next breath.

Footnotes Page 3

20. "Morris hated the Renaissance. The Mackail biography states that around 1873 Morris rejected a proposal to visit Rome with these words: "Do you suppose that I should see anything in Rome that I can't see in Whitechapel?" Anderson 1969, p. 182.

21. Henry Glassie (lecture, October 1, 1996), Bloomington, IN

22. "Maya Lin: A Strong, Clear Vision," POV, PBS in December 1996.

23. Glassie 1989, p. 68.

24. Greenaway 1991, p. 9

25. Ibid., pp. 9-12

26. Gell 1992, p. 58

27. Anderson 1969, pp. 121 and 194.

28. Greenaway 1991, p. 24.

29. Hyde 1979, p. 8.

30. Ibid., p. xiv.

31. Glassie 1989, loc. cit., footnote 12, supra.

32 Steinmetz and Greenaway 1995, p. 113

33 From Greenaway's remarks on an earlier version of this essay, imparted to me by filmmaker Bari Pearlman of NYC, who took the trouble to ask about his reaction to it.

Works Cited

Ben-Amos, Dan. "Toward a Definition of Folklore in Context" in Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 84, no. 331, pp. 3-15. (1971) Austin: The American Folklore Society.

Doctorow, E.L. (1997) "The Politics of God," delivered at B'nai B'rith International on September 30, 1997 in Los Angeles' Skirball Cultural Center, broadcast by C SPAN on December 26 and 27, 1997.

Dundes, Alan. (1980) "Who Are the Folk?" in Interpreting Folklore, pp. 1-19. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Originally published in Frontiers of Folklore, ed. William Bascom, 1977. Boulder: Westview Press.

Ellmann, Richard and Charles Feidelson, Jr. (1965) The Modern Tradition: Backgrounds of Modern Literature. New York: Oxford University Press.

Gell, Alfred. (1992) "The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology" in Anthropology, Art, and Aesthetics, eds. Jeremy Coote and Anthony Shelton, pp. 40-63. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Glassie, Henry H. (1989) The Spirit of Folk Art. New York: Harry N. Adams, Inc.

Greenaway, Peter. (1991) Prospero's Books: A Film of Shakespeare's The Tempest. The film-script. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows.

Hyde, Lewis. (1979) The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. New York: Vintage Books.

Steinmetz, Leon and Peter Greenaway. (1995) The World of Peter Greenaway. Boston and Tokyo: Journey Editions.[el1]20

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