A Journey in Fragments
[Image Credit: Ben Guerin]
The Irish sky was darkening into evening. The silver of the clouds faded to a dark, universal blue. The air was damp and piercingly cold. The monks, wrapped in the shadow of dark robes, glided up the nave and took their positions behind the altar. They began to chant, their voices deep and mellifluous, as somber and eternal as the old stone of Glenstal Abbey itself. The voices echoed in the nearly empty church. Latin words climbed and fell, sustained through long vowels, and descended formlessly into prayer, touching each stony corner, each lofty arch, each darkly-hued stained-glass window. I felt small.
The Book of Kells lay open beneath security glass in a dark chamber. It is Ireland’s treasure, the greatest of the illuminated Gospel books, a work of such infinitesimal detail that it seems to radiate impossibility. The room was so dark that I wasn't able to make out the shimmer of gold that had once washed over these pages. It was the ultimate protection: from light itself.
Entombed beneath the library of Trinity College Dublin, the chamber felt like a modern cocoon, a carefully constructed egg made of wood and glass, resistant to time. The dim yellow light bulb, reminiscent of the ancient candle flame by which monks had penned the work, deepened a sense of timelessness like a warm, sustained twilight.
The thirteenth century historian Giraldus Cambrensis described the book as “the work, not of men, but of angels”. The image on the page demonstrated its inhumanity. The eight-circle cross: a lattice of interconnected circles inscribed inside a rectangular frame, an unnervingly precise mystic seal. Inside each circle, with fractal desperation, lie smaller circles organized in triads (a Trinitarian allusion, no doubt), each circumscribing smaller triads. The spaces between the circles were filled with vine-like spirals, Celtic knots, gargoyled mouths. There was something mechanic about the precision, as though these were the blueprints to some microscopic medieval machine whose gears and springs were smooth, whose inner movement — perfect as it was — would fail to overcome the static nature of those eternal configurations.
I read Joyce's Ulysses and I was convinced by the beauty of style, the fine-tuned word, the polished image, the strange music that gathers from the prosody of letters. Notice, for example, the music of the letter m in this passage: “The boots to them, them in the bar, them barmaids came. For them unheeding him he banged on the counter his tray of chattering china.”1 His writing was senseless and dreamlike, the molecular attention to language enchanting and mysterious. It was like reading a mystical book, a gnostic text, one that promises: Keep the practice, do the reading, perform the rites, and knowledge and understanding will come.
It was later, in that dark chamber, staring down at the eight-circle cross that I realized that stylistic obsession was not a Joycean trait, but an Irish one. The spirals and the galaxies (not) turning inside each circle were like Joyce’s verbosity, a richness which threatened to overspill, to become redundant if not for that Irish monastic patience which corralled chaos into order.
“How much is it going to cost?” my mother asked when I told her I was going to Ireland.
“I got a scholarship,” I said without answering her question.
“Why there?” she asked.
“That's where Joyce is from.”
“Who's Joyce?”
In a Dublin pub, there was a picture of Samuel Beckett, and I missed my mother.
Hegel said in his Lectures on Art that “the Beautiful of Art stands higher than Nature. For the beauty of Art is beauty that is born and born again of the Spirit; and as the spirit with its productions stands higher than nature with her phenomena, so does also the beauty of art stand higher than the beauty of nature.”2
Similarly, the mystic believes that a mental, spiritual pilgrimage, a journey, will produce the ecstasy which is union with the One. Perhaps true beauty exists inside, in the small reaches of our willing mind, where Spirit festers.
Silence, meditation. That was what I wanted. I was alone much of the time I was in Ireland — I had time to think. I went there to find out if I could write — I found that anyone could write.
I lived on the topmost floor of a residential building in Cork. I’d hear the patter of pigeons’ claws on the metal drainpipe. They’d coo and warble all morning unless they were mating. Magpies would come and crow and bump them off the pipe. In the distance, on a high bank over the River Lee, was a Celtic stone cross. It had a crack, and moss grew there, and it felt real and terrifying.
At the University College Cork there was a copy of Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae. The gargantuan work was split into two volumes, pages thin as dragonfly wings bound in thick blue leather. The text was printed in two columns on each page, small as the crawl of ants. In true scholastic manner, it reads, “What is truth?”3; followed by preliminary arguments like the statements of older authorities such as Augustine or Boethius; then Aquinas’s own position; finally, his response to the authorities. The set of questions go on and on and touch all aspects of Catholic philosophy and theology.
Some scholars call it a cathedral of sorts, a grand oeuvre as vast as it is intricate. Like a Cathedral’s vaulting ceilings, the scope of its investigation is cosmic. And, as in the cathedrals at Chartres or Amiens, in whose entrances one may see entire Biblical episodes tightly sculpted on the arches and tympana, the Summa is replete with infinitesimal detail. Though vast pages may separate sentences and arguments from one another, they resonate together like entangled electrons. The gazes of sculptures in a cathedral. The spirals in the Book of Kells. The cadences in Joyce’s Wake.
I went to a mass in Cork because it was in Latin. I figured I could learn a little. There were booklets on the pews. An older lady smiled at me in greeting beneath a lace veil. I sang with her in Latin from the booklet. It was very early in the morning and I hadn’t eaten. I probably had bad breath. Still, I liked the Latin vowels in my mouth.
There was turbulence somewhere over the Atlantic. The plane rattled and I had to grab the hand of the person next to me. I felt their knuckles, also gripped tight in anxiety. For a second, I didn’t care about finding beauty.
Is beauty prior or posterior to the subject? Have I sought it out as if it were before me? Or have I only understood a thing as beautiful after I’ve found it?
By the Christ Church Cathedral in Dublin, there is a sculpture by Timothy Schmalz. It is of a bench on which a homeless man sleeps. His body is covered by a blanket or shroud, but for his feet, which are bare. On them, the stigmata.
I thought it was beautiful. Or is it the idea of the sculpture that I found beautiful?
The sculpture itself is of colorless bronze, its aim obvious. No technique is particularly striking, and it is only by a sort of coincidental recognition of this shrouded man’s identity (what if I hadn’t seen the stigmata?) that I stopped to admire the piece. It is meaningful to me because I know a story in which this man is a god. Yet, here he sleeps on a bench in the Dublin cold.
Again, is beauty before or after the subject?
I have never sought art that I knew was beautiful. All beauty I have ever found has been spontaneous. Perhaps spontaneity is part of the experience of beauty, such as in poetry or transcendent prose wherein a well-placed figuration makes the text beautiful because it is surprising and unexpected, just as its opposite, the cliché, makes it detestable.
There is a bit of truth to Hegel, I think, in his centering the source of beauty in the ideal, in the developing Spirit. Perhaps beauty is sheer creativity itself, a becoming of originality — the process, the blooming forth of the imagination which does not seek being finished, to mean anything: an imagination whose beauty is its own process of activity.
Are Jackson Pollock’s abstractions more beautiful than the green Andes? It took a transatlantic journey to realize the answer.
1) James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Random House, 1992), 258.
2) Hegel, The Philosophy of Art, trans. William Hastie (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1886), 4.
3) Aquinas, Summa Theologica 1.16.3.
Julian Santiago is an adjunct instructor at Miami-Dade College. He studied at the National University of Ireland and is currently working on securing representation for his novel.