Architectural Indigestion

The last two Sundays, when I turned on NPR after church in the evening, the story I tuned into was on both occasions relevant to things I had been contemplating that day. This is not a blog about religion, but the topic does come up every now and then - if, I freely confess, primarily to blame the Calvinists for everything I can't blame on the Beats.

Today just before leaving, I was preoccupied with the topic of sacred architecture and, to a lesser extent, religious art, ornamentation, and sacramentals within a church building: in other words, the totality of the physical presence of a constructed sacred space. There are as many schools of thought on this as there are believers, non-believers, architects and art-haters. But there are two traditional purposes sacred architecture strives to fill: to present an invitation to the faithful and to the stranger, and to provide a physical, lisible symbolic representation of the individual's journey from the profane to the sacred. Now, NPR's story when I was driving back was about reconceiving and refashioning the newsroom not the chapel, but what it illustrates is that architecture is important, it can serve or hinder its putative goals, and that we, the victims or beneficiaries of an architect's design, do notice and are affected by the space.

What got me on to it first was writing about some of the perhaps surprisingly numerous shared beliefs of the Friends and Catholics. While every Christian church has some genetic resemblance to all others, there is not only serious doctrinal difference to address in comparing them, but also the subtler distinctions in emphasis among all the various ideas they still share. In other words, it's not just huge things like 'faith v. works' or literalness v. historicity, but how much stress is put on certain tenets at the expense of which other ones.

Now, the anti-clerical Friends may seem to be the furthest from the hugely organized Catholic Church - and yet in reality they both place tremendous emphasis on the need for individual discernment. Encyclicals and other writings, with increased vigor after Vatican II, insist over and over on the importance of an informed, passionate, and active laity, the need to question and to search for answers, and the importance of being an activist when convinced of the appropriateness of that course. Both churches, as well, lay tremendous stress on justice, including social justice, which is conceived in both traditions as emanating from and being necessitated by the fact of utter, radical equality among all people. The language is different, but the message is the same.

As fascinating as all that is (to me), one place there is a huge difference is in how meeting spaces are viewed by the two groups, which makes sense as they are meant to do different things. And I have no intention of going into that in any depth. But a Quaker meeting-house does not strive to invite, as do churches of most other Protestant and Catholic traditions, nor does it attempt to lay out a narrative or an argument, except of simplicity and the concept of the inner light within all present and all without. Friends would say we glorify God through our actions, and too many, or too-richly-decorated, things around distract us from the real issue, which is 'what are we going to do/ what does God want us to do?' Friends likewise assert that, rightly lived, life is worship, and if simplicity is integral to one's life, this value should of course carry over into meeting halls and the worship meetings within them.

I haven't given much of an explanation there, but it makes sense in a Quaker context. It does not make sense in the context of regular Protestantism, or in Catholic or Orthodox traditions, where the physical church is meant to inspire awe, create an atmosphere of reverence and solemnity, and lead us to contemplate the glory of God, a glory which exceeds that of the gilt and the plainchant, but which can be symbolized by them - by things we can apprehend through our senses and intellect. This, too, has an elegant and coherent logic, to which I'm also giving short shrift.

Additionally, in their beauty, churches, temples, mosques, and cathedrals are meant to invite the sinner in, that he might be led through beauty to Beauty. Again, part of the logic is that the place one worships God should celebrate His wonder through the highest efforts of human labor, and that being drawn to beauty is a noble and God-given trait - but since it is also true that humans like sparkly things, offering them a few in the place of worship is one way to help them keep coming back, in the hope that eventually more substantive things and a more mature understanding of the fullness of the religion will serve the same purpose.

However, even if you are not a beginner, there is something to be said for a holy space that looks like a holy space (unless you belong to a faith like the Friends within which this would make no sense). And I don't care if you believe in God or not, if you enter the Blue Mosque or the Hagia Sophia, a Thai temple or a Zen garden, the results of the care taken to evoke the majesty of the unknowable and the ineffable makes you believe in something. We were given our senses in the same package as we were given our minds, and unless you follow Mani or Mr. Calvin, I fail to see why punishing those senses in worship is necessary.

And that is my main point: the 1960s were regrettable. The 1960s were painful. The 1960s should have stuck to social reform and left style and design alone. That era is my proof that reincarnation does not happen, as I can attest that had I lived before, I would have done so much good in my life that not only would I not have been born when I would have had to witness the horrific legacy the decade wrought in the arts - but I would have taken every prophylactic precaution possible to ensure that my karma be so great that none of it would even have been perpetuated! So, since I'm here now, I wasn't here then, and the best I can do is to try to avoid imagining those puffy ladies' hats, those square ladies' suits, the clunky low heeled parsons' pumps with squared-off toes and ridiculous buckles, and the hideous architecture that evoked not so much the Great American Century as the Supreme Soviet. If I want to worship, I don't want to do it in a place that looks like the People's Recreation Hall and Refectory at Reeducation Center 29! There is a fairly crappy YMCA up the road, and a disastrous, menacing Albertsons a bit further on; I can always go to one of those if I need to savor a bit of Stalinist-gymnasium ambiance. I don't need to do it at church.

Have You Seen This Inner Child?

I blame it on the Beats. That is unsurprising if you know me, as I blame most of everything on the Beats, from unpremeditated 'poems' of testosterone-ridden admiration hastily scribbled on cardboard bar coasters, to white men in dreadlocks, to women in public in sweatpants, to shorts on adults, sneakers as shoes, Dockers as dining attire, sexagenarian playboys, and restaurant place settings without knives. I blame blogs on the Beats, for heavens' sake: they are evidence of the now pandemic delusion that everyone, anyone, can write -- and therefore, what's more, should. But at least we are not getting paid for our self-indulgent drivel. And it is not being forced upon anyone, as is sadly the case with barroom panegyrics and their unwitting subject/victim, as well as the sight and sound of long-haired middle-aged men in sportscars blaring Korn or Dave Matthews or some indefensible 1980s girl band from their convertibles.

Yet I digress. While all those symptoms and disorders share a common etiology, and while I could digress far more in innumerable concentric circles about all of it until I bored even myself, what they also have in common is what I wish to lament here: a renunciation of the Civility clause in our social contract, the subsection that stresses that your rights end where mine begin. Now, only an adult can understand that concept; an infant doesn't even know that he stops at any point, and a child has great difficulty seeing beyond his immediate desires and their quick satisfaction --much like the Beats, and their latter-day progeny unswerving in their resolve to 'let it all hang out,' 'chill,' 'listen to their inner children,' and 'find themselves.'

I for one have yet to wonder where, or who, I am. (At least in the sense they intend, and for other, more practical, senses I have GPS, and the invaluable Google Maps on the Blackberry, not to mention the nice officers who pull me over and ask if I know where I am going, which is something, even with the above, that I sometimes cannot answer affirmatively.) It used to be common wisdom that if one had questions about this, the answers were predictably to be found in a youth hostel in India or Western Europe at the age of 18 or 21. Those failing to encounter an integrated self by that time, and to choose an appropriate superego congruent with this self, were quite rightly deemed insane and offered antipsychotics at government clinics.

Now, of course, it's quite different. One can realize at 70 that there is a gaping hole where instead a Whole should be, of personality, tastes, goals, desires, values, and dreams. A void where for years all those components of a self, of a Gestalt, were ignorantly presumed to have been resident. And nobody gets medicated, or lobotomized, or ridiculed. Divorced, perhaps, but then marriage or 'heavy' relationships are just one more instance of the hand of the Man keeping a free spirit down. A free spirit who could instead be occupying himself with penning boozy free-form verses with a Sharpie over several months' worth of Chimay stains on paperboard about my felid eyes and porcelain cheeks and sangria lips of oranges and sunshine and the endless day and hair black as rainwashed Dougfir in the misty gloom of the blackblack forest gloom. Or something.

No, I encounter myself every day, whether I want to or not. I'm the only reason I have ten red suit jackets. I'm the only excuse for buying aspirin by the case and for putting ice cream into the refrigerator. I can look to no one else for a rationale for the absurd bed, or the driftwood arrangement by the bathtub, or the highly idiosyncratic wine selection, or the dying houseplants. It's down to me and me only that there are bottles of unfinished perfume around, miles of sari cloth, hairstyling products in the wine cabinet, and socks in the tinned-goods-organizer in the kitchen. It's me with the tailor on speed dial and the phobia of hairdressers, and me with the books under the covers on the passenger side of the bed. Everywhere I turn, ever since I had a sense that there was in fact a me to speak of, I haven't been able to get rid of her. Even when I look in the mirror, it is chilling how deep a resemblance my reflection has always borne to me, and me alone.

So I don't get it. How does one wake up, in the midst of being an adult and decades after crashing triumphantly past Piaget's goal line, to find that that the hole one so recently discovered is a hole with a shape that can only be filled with Burning Man, or rabbit hunting, or arena rock shows, or casual sex, or over-the-road trucking? Genuinely, it strains my mind. Additionally, what makes it all the more grievous is that the vast majority of such cases do not 'realize' they have 'always wanted' to join the seminary, or start an NGO; instead, their epiphanies as regards this previously missing 'self' tend to focus on the need to tend to the needs of that neglected self, not to others. This in its turn leads to a convenient discursive loop, as the neglected self, being neglected, is always presumed to be in some child state, if not the dread Inner Child itself, thus excusing all manner of base and self-indulgent, if not overtly puerile, pursuits.

Which is where the Beats and the Social Contract come in, if only out of convenience rather than painstaking logic, since I am becoming quite cranky with thinking of all this, and have a long week ahead in which I will have to muster my usual charming self repeatedly. The painstaking logic can come later, if I feel like the taking of pain might for some reason be pleasant at that point. For now, the Beats and their popular lionization, quite simply, are handy scapegoats for the existence of the near-ubiquitous reverence for the supposed virtues and, indeed, necessity (for the 'self,' of course) of a perverted, solipsistic, jejune freedom over the adult responsibility necessarily implied in acknowledging the worth of others around one, one's fellows in society. Acknowledging that we are a part of a group, and that the group consists of other individuals with their own desires and needs, perforce constrains behavior. If one can manage to accept that it's improper to murder members of this brotherhood, I fail to see it as a great cognitive leap to acknowledge as well that respecting them in other ways is in order.

And etiquette is nothing but respect and consideration for others. It is not about proving to (or lording over) others that one knows the proper utensils to use for jellied consommé or oysters or bacon; it is instead at base an attempt to create and foster an environment of mutual respect. In other words, I respect you by not sonically resembling in any way a giddy aye-aye with an egret's egg as I eat my consommé, and by not air-guitaring 'Stairway to Heaven' as you pray with your congregation and by not ruining the coming week for you by blasting inane 'dance music' out the opened windows of my Porsche or forcing you to witness the horror of my deformed toenails and crusty heels in 'flipflops' or a topographical map of my cellulite through mangy sweats because I was, yes, rude, that is the word, and so is immature and so is tiresome and so is inexcusable after the age of three and in my rudeness wore Inside Clothes outside because my Inner Child wanted to.

Perhaps at this point we are too far gone in our stoned and Xanaxed and liposucted solipsism for one to expect that we might credit our peers with having existences, wills, and souls of their own. But if we are intent on becoming children ourselves, it is not unreasonable to suggest that we put into our service that much-vaunted 'childlike imagination' we thus have again at our disposal and, for the purposes of sustaining an at least marginally livable world, pretend that they do and accordingly put behind us the stringy grey ponytails, the shorts when not on the water or holiday, the adolescent pop music, the sweat pants and track suits outside the gym, and, in the name of all that is holy, unsolicited spontaneous 'poetry' of any stripe.