Recently I read a review of “Midnight in Paris” the latest Woody Allen movie that noted, “Many a writer or artist has longed to travel back in time to the sizzling Paris of the 1920’s to sip absinthe with Hemingway at Les Deux Magots ,” and that got me thinking. What other famous people were patrons of this famous restaurant through the years? Albert Camus is one of those gentlemen and he is the one I am looking at today. 

I am really reaching at this point. Up until this point I have really been trying to only talk about the characters that Woody Allen referenced in his latest movie “Midnight in Paris.” However, now I am stepping over the line and talking about famous philosophers who ate regularly at Les Deux Magots which is featured in the movie. So be it.

Les Deux Magots (French pronunciation: [le dø maɡo]) is a famous^[1] café in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés area of Paris, France. It once had a reputation as the rendezvous of the literary and intellectual élite of the city. It is now a popular tourist destination. Its historical reputation is derived from the patronage of Surrealist artists, intellectuals such as Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, and young writers, such as Ernest Hemingway. Other patrons included Albert Camus and Pablo Picasso.

The Deux Magots literary prize has been awarded to a French novel every year since 1933.

The name originally belonged to a fabric and novelty shop at nearby 23 Rue de Buci. The shop sold silk lingerie and took its name from a popular play of the moment (1800s) entitled Les Deux Magots de la Chine (Two Figurines from China.)^[2] In 1873 the business transferred to its current location in the Place Saint-Germain-des-Prés. In 1884 the business changed to a café and liquoriste, keeping the name.

Auguste Boulay bought the business in 1914, when it was on the brink of bankruptcy, for 400,000 francs (anciens). The present manager, Catherine Mathivat, is his great-great-granddaughter.

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Albert Camus, (1913-60)

• Life in AlgeriaAlthough born in extreme poverty, Camus attended the lycee and university in Algiers, where he developed an abiding interest in sports and the theater. His university career was cut short by a severe attack of tuberculosis, an illness from which he suffered periodically throughout his life. The themes of poverty, sport, and the horror of human mortality all figure prominently in his volumes of so-called Algerian essays: L’Envers et l’endroit (The Wrong Side and the Right Side, 1937), Noces (Nuptials, 1938), and L’Ete (Summer, 1954). In 1938 he became a journalist with Alger-Republicain, an anticolonialist newspaper. While working for this daily he wrote detailed reports on the condition of poor Arabs in the Kabyles region. These reports were later published in abridged form in Actuelles III (1958).
• The War YearsSuch journalistic experience proved invaluable when Camus went to France during World War II. There he worked for the Combat resistance network and undertook the editorship of the Parisian daily Combat, which first appeared clandestinely in 1943. His editorials, both before and after the liberation, showed a deep desire to combine political action with strict adherence to moral principles.During the war Camus published the main works associated with his doctrine of the absurd–his view that human life is rendered ultimately meaningless by the fact of death and that the individual cannot make rational sense of his experience. These works include the novel The Stranger (1942; Eng. trans., 1946), perhaps his finest work of fiction, which memorably embodies the 20th-century theme of the alienated stranger or outsider; a long essay on the absurd, The Myth of Sysiphysus (1942; Eng. trans., 1955); and two plays published in 1944, Cross Purpose (Eng. trans., 1948) and Caligula (Eng. trans., 1948). In these works Camus explored contemporary nihilism with considerable sympathy, but his own attitude toward the “absurd” remained ambivalent. In theory, philosophical absurdism logically entails total moral indifference. Camus found, however, that neither his own temperament nor his experiences in occupied France allowed him to be satisfied with such total moral neutrality. The growth of his ideas on moral responsibility is partly sketched in the four Letters to a German Friend (1945) included, with a number of other political essays, in Resistance, Rebellion, and Death (1960).

• RebellionFrom this point on, Camus was concerned mainly with exploring avenues of rebellion against the absurd as he strove to create something like a humane stoicism. The Plague (1947; Eng. trans., 1948) is a symbolic novel in which the important achievement of those who fight bubonic plague in Oran lies not in the little success they have but in their assertion of human dignity and endurance. In the controversial essay The Rebel (1951; Eng. trans., 1954), he criticized what he regarded as the deceptive doctrines of “absolutist” philosophies–the vertical (eternal) transcendence of Christianity and the horizontal (historical) transcendence of Marxism. He argued in favor of Mediterranean humanism, advocating nature and moderation rather than historicism and violence. He subsequently became involved in a bitter controversy with Jean Paul Sartre over the issues raised in this essay.Camus wrote two overtly political plays, the satirical State of Siege (1948; Eng. trans., 1958) and The Just Assassins (1950; Eng. trans., 1958). It can be argued, however, that Camus scored his major theatrical success with stage adaptations of such novels as William Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun (1956) and Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed (1959). He also published a third novel, The Fall (1956; Eng. trans., 1957), which some critics read as a flirtation with Christian ideas, and a collection of short stories noteworthy for their technical virtuosity,Exile and the Kingdom (1957; Eng. trans., 1958). Posthumous publications include two sets of Notebooks covering the period 1935-51, an early novel, A Happy Death (1971; Eng. trans., 1972), and a collection of essays, Youthful Writings (1973; Eng. trans., 1976 and 1977)John Cruickshank

How Should We Then Live  Pt 7

T h e AGE OF NON-REASON

I. Optimism Of Older Humanist Philosophers:

The unity and true knowledge of reality defined as starting from Man alone.

II. Shift in Modern Philosophy

A. Eighteenth century as the vital watershed.

B. Rousseau: ideas and influence.

1. Rousseau and autonomous freedom.

2. Personal freedom and social necessity clash in Rousseau.

3. Rousseau’s influence.

a) Robespierre and the ideology of the Terror.

b) Gauguin, natural freedom, and disillusionment.

C. DeSade: If nature is the absolute, cruelty equals non-cruelty.

D. Impossible tension between autonomous freedom and autonomous reasons conclusion that the universe and people are a part of the total cosmic machine.

E. Kant, Hegel, and Kierkegaard and their followers sought for a unity but they did not solve the problem.

1. After these men and their followers, there came an absolute break between the area of meaning and values, and the area of reason.

2. Now humanistic philosophy sees reason as always leading to pessimism; any hope of optimism lies in non-reason.

III. Existentialism and Non-Reason

A. French existentialism.

1. Total separation of reason and will: Sartre.

2. Not possible to live consistently with this position.

B. German existentialism.

1. Jaspers and the “final experience.”

2. Heidegger and angst.

C. Influence of existentialism. 

1. As a formal philosophy it is declining.

2. As a generalized attitude it dominates modern thought.

IV. Forms of Popularization of Nonrational Experience

A. Drug experience.

1. Aldous Huxley and “truth inside one’s head.”

2. Influence of rock groups in spreading the drug culture; psychedelic rock.

B. Eastern religious experience: from the drug trip to the Eastern religious trip.

C. The occult as a basis for “hope” in the area of non-reason.

V. Theological Liberalism and Existentialism

A. Preparation for theological existentialism.

1. Renaissance’s attempt to “synthesize” Greek philosophers and Christianity; religious liberals’ attempt to “synthesize” Enlightenment and Christianity.

2. Religious liberals denied supernatural but accepted reason.

3. Schweitzer’s demolition of liberal aim to separate the natural from the supernatural in the New Testament.

B. Theological existentialism.

1. Intellectual failure of rationalist theology opened door to theological existentialism.

2. Barth brought the existential methodology into theology.

a) Barth’s teaching led to theologians who said that the Bible is not true in the areas of science and history, but they nevertheless look for a religious experience from it.

b) For many adherents of this theology, the Bible does not give absolutes in regard to what is right or wrong in human behavior.

3. Theological existentialism as a cul-de-sac.

a) If Bible is divorced from its teaching concerning the cosmos and history, its values can’t be applied to a historic situation in either morals or law; theological pronouncements

about morals or law are arbitrary.

b) No way to explain evil or distinguish good from evil. Therefore, these theologians are in same position as Hindu philosophers (as illustrated by Kali).

c) Tillich, prayer as reflection, and the deadness of “god.”

d) Religious words used for manipulation of society.

VI. Conclusion

With what Christ and the Bible teach, Man can have life instead of death—in having knowledge that is more than finite Man can have from himself.

Questions

1. What is the difference between theologians and philosophers of the rationalist tradition and those of the existentialist tradition?

2. “If the early church had embraced an existentialist theology, it would have been absorbed into the Roman pantheon.” It didn’t. Why not?

3. “It is true that existentialist theology is foreign to biblical religion. But biblical religion was the product of a particular culture and, though useful for societies in the same cultural stream, it is no longer suitable for an age in which an entire range of world cultures requires a common religious denominator. Religious existentialism provides that, without losing the universal instinct for the holy.” Study this statement carefully. What assumptions are betrayed by it?

4. Can you isolate attitudes and tendencies in yourself, your church, and your community which reflect the “existentialist methodology” described by Dr. Schaeffer?

Key Events and Persons

Rousseau: 1712-1778

Kant: 1724-1804

Marquis de Sade: 1740-1814

The Social Contract: 1762

Hegel: 1770-1831

Kierkegaard: 1813-1855

Paul Gauguin: 1848-1903

Whence, What Whither?: 1897-1898

Albert Schweitzer: 1875-1965

Quest for the Historical Jesus: 1906

Karl Jaspers: 1883-1969

Paul Tillich: 1886-1965

Karl Barth: 1886-1968

Martin Heidegger: 1889-1976

Aldous Huxley: 1894-1963

J.P. Sartre: 1905-1980

Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper: 1967 

Further Study

Unless already familiar with them, take time to listen to the Beatles’ records, as well as to discs put out by other groups at the time.

Albert Camus, The Stranger (1942).

Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception (1954).

Rousseau, The Social Contract (1762).

J.P. Sartre, Nausea (1938).

Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be (1952).

Following Rousseau, the exaggeration of the delights and the pathos of nature and experience which marks Romanticism may be sampled in, for example, Wordsworth’s poems, Casper David Friedrich’s paintings, and Schubert’s songs.

J.G. Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation (1968).

J.W. von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther (1962).

Erich Heller, The Disinherited Mind (1952).

Camus, The Fall, and the Question of Faith

By Jimmy Maher

The Fall is a work absolutely drenched in Christian, particularly Catholic, symbolism. The title is an obvious reference to the Biblical story of Adam and Eve; the novel’s setting of Amsterdam is a stand-in for Dante’s Nine Circles of Hell; and the work is structured as an extended confession of the narrator’s sins, with the reader playing the role of the priest. Yet the novel was written by Albert Camus, a man generally considered a leading light of the atheistic French existentialist movement of the mid-twentieth century. By taking a closer look at Camus’ life and thought, we may discover that there really is no contradiction here. The literary establishment has a constant tendency to lump thinkers together into easily digestable categories. I believe that Camus was, at least partially, a victim of this lust for simplicity.

Camus never expressed the same contempt toward religion as Jean-Paul Sartre and other prominent existentialists. This marked lack, so unfashionable in the French literary circle in which Camus traveled, was perhaps partially due to the fact that Camus never had a religious upbringing to rebel against. Although the young Albert went through certain polite motions of Catholicism, such as first communion, the religion was not taken particularly seriously by anyone within his extended family. Biographer Oliver Todd notes that Albert’s grandmother’s typical response upon learning of someone’s death was, “Well, he’s farted his last” (12). With no family coercion to react emotionally against, Camus exhibited an intellectual, if not spiritual, interest in Christianity from a young age. Indeed, his first work to attract attention in the world of letters was entitled “Christian Metaphysics and Neoplatonism: Plotinus and Saint Augustine.”

Lack of hostility toward Christianity does not of course imply acceptance. Camus throughout his life was very much a secular philosopher. One is thus left wondering what to make of The Fall, steeped as it is in Christian imagery and thought, and positively crying out for the sort of spiritual redemption that Catholics would say can only be found in the confessional. Perhaps as he reached middle age Camus was questioning the relentlessly amoral, self-centered worldview of the existentialists, along with their notion of an essentially meaningless universe devoid of absolutes. To paraphrase Nietzsche, the existentialists had killed God, yet they offered nothing to replace Him, thus leaving a guilt-ridden man like Jean-Baptiste Clamence with nowhere to turn. Clamence desperately wants to confess his sins to a higher power, but the intelligentsia, with their pseudo-sophisticated chattering about relativity and modernity, have taken that option away from him. And so he turns to his only alternative, his fellow man. The Fall documents the sick results of Clamence’s compulsion. He talks and talks to us, confessing sin after sin over the course of several long evenings, yet never achieves the redemption he craves. He is left exhausted but not redeemed, able to take satisfaction only in the notion that he may have dragged the reader down to his own level of empty spiritual misery. Clamence seeks redemption, yet redemption is not something that mortal man can provide.

The issue that Clamence, and by extension Camus, is wrestling with here is hardly unknown to those who have rejected metaphysics. The problem is implicit in our language itself. When it comes to the really important matters, to life and death and love, the secular man finds that words fail him. The old words, much as he would love to dismiss them as outmoded, superstitious nonsense, are the only ones that fit. Faced with a death, the atheist has no alternative that resonates in the same way as the “God rest his soul” of the man of faith. Similarly, a guilt-wracked secularist like Clamence can find no solace in confession, because he does not believe anyone is qualified to hear him and wash him clean. And so the stain remains, and devours him. Religion remains such a potent force in society, against all the evidence of science and rational thought, because it offers something those things cannot. If one would discredit religion, one should perhaps be required to offer something other than empty rationalizations to replace it. I do not know what that something might be, of course, and, for all of his intellectual brilliance, neither did Camus. His novel provides no answers, only painful, almost desperate questions.

The Fall has the feeling of a deeply personal book. One senses somehow that the questions that torment Clamence are the questions that also torment the author. Certainly many commentators at the time of the book’s publication took it as direct description of Camus’ state of mind, circa 1956. Its note of questioning dissatisfaction led many to conclude that Camus was himself on the verge of embracing Christianity, not just intellectually but also spiritually. Speculation on this point is now rather pointless, of course. Camus may just as likely have been casting about for some new value system that could fill the void of traditional religion. Most likely, he had little idea of his own future. We certainly cannot know where Camus’ thoughts would eventually have taken him had he not died so soon after The Fall’s publication, but we do know that he was growing increasingly critical of the existential philosophies of Sartre and others. He wrote shortly after completing the novel that “far from leading to a decent solution of the problem of freedom versus authority, [existentialism can only lead] to servitude” (Oliver 346).

Up to this point, I have been equating Camus very closely with his novel’s protagonist, Clamence. One might question the wisdom of doing so. It is after all a truism in literary criticism that a novel is not a work of autobiography. In the case of The Fall, however, I believe that drawing a close parallel between the author and his protagonist is justified. Certainly there is much circumstantial evidence supporting my case. Clamence is forty years old; Camus was forty-three at the time of the novel’s publication. Both men were socially adept, both were notably polite and patient, and both were quite generous with their money. Both seduced women seemingly effortlessly, but shied away from serious involvement with their conquests. Todd notes in his biography that “when he slept with a woman, and she insisted on further involvement, Camus would explain that his real attachments were elsewhere. …brief sexual adventures posed no problem for him” (345). The similarities are rather striking.

That is not to say that Camus is Clamence, or vice versa. While Camus seems to have drawn from his own psyche in constructing the character, there is no reason to believe that he ever reached the state of bitter despair that marked Clamence. One proof of this might be the fact that the novel exists at all. If one accepts the premise that the creation of art, even deeply tragic art, is fundamentally life-affirming, one has to conclude that by the very act of writing The Fall Camus has transcended Clamence’s existential nihilism. Certainly Camus denied, repeatedly and vehemently, that he and Clamence were one. Some of this may have been self-serving, for no one would want to be too closely associated in the public mind with such an unpleasant character as Clamence, but nevertheless those who remember Camus generally describe him as a fundamentally gentle person, a far cry from the reprobate Clamence has become by the end of the novel. We are on much firmer ground in saying that Clamence, while an individual distinctly separate from his creator, represents the consequence of certain aspects of Camus’ psyche taken to their extremes.

The Fall feels like a transitional work to this reader. Unfortunately, we never got to see where that transition would eventually lead Camus, for his life was cut short in the middle of his stream of thought. Having rejected Christianity, at least as a workable belief system for himself personally, very early in his career, and now having rejected Sartre’s brand of existential atheism, he seems to be searching for some third, better path. If he found it, he never had the chance to share it with us. This gives The Fall an unsettled feeling of incompletion. We are left in limbo, waiting for some sort of answer to the dilemmas it poses, an answer that will of course never arrive. There are no happy endings, and certainly no redemption. We have only some of the most difficult questions one can ask, accompanied by a protagonist who is the very definition of existential angst. Clamence is a martyr for the modern, smugly sophisticated, secular man embodied by thinkers like Sartre, and, yes, his sometimes friend and sometimes enemy Albert Camus himself.

Works Cited and Consulted

Brée, Germaine, ed. Camus. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1962.

Bronner, Stephen Eric. Camus: Portrait of a Moralist. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1999.

Camus, Albert. The Fall. Trans. Justin O’Brien. Vintage: New York, 1991.

Rhein, Phillip H. Albert Camus. New York: Twayne, 1989.

Todd, Oliver. Albert Camus: A Life. Trans. Benjamin Ivry. New York: Knopf, 1997.

Decoding Woody Allen’s ‘Midnight in Paris’

Roger Arpajou/Versitil Cinema & Gravier Productions, Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics

Owen Wilson, left, is Gil, who travels back in time to 1920s Paris, and Marion Cotillard is Adriana, a fictional mistress of Picasso’s who catches Gil’s eye. More Photos »

By JOSEPH BERGER

Published: May 27, 2011

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I just got finished watching Woody Allen’s latest movie “Midnight in Paris” and I loved it. In that movie there are several famous writers and artists that appear in the film. I am doing a series of posts that takes a look at this great writers and artists. There is a scene when Salvador Dali, Luis Bunuel and Man Ray all get to visit with Gil in the film “Midnight and Paris.” He tells them that he traveled through time and they all believed him!!!

Size of this preview: 800 × 523 pixels Salvador Dalí and Man Ray in Paris, on June 16, 1934 making “wild eyes” for photographer Carl Van Vecht

Man Ray (August 27, 1890 – November 18, 1976), born Emmanuel Radnitzky, was an American artist who spent most of his career inParis, France. Perhaps best described simply as a modernist, he was a significant contributor to both the Dada and Surrealist movements, although his ties to each were informal. Best known in the art world for his avant-garde photography, Man Ray produced major works in a variety of media and considered himself a painter above all. He was also a renowned fashion and portrait photographer. He is noted for hisphotograms, which he renamed “rayographs” after himself.^[1]

While appreciation for Man Ray’s work beyond his fashion and portrait photography was slow in coming during his lifetime, especially in his native United States, his reputation has grown steadily in the decades since.

In 1999, ARTnews magazine named him one of the 25 most influential artists of the 20th century, citing his groundbreaking photography as well as “his explorations of film, painting, sculpture, collage, assemblage, and prototypes of what would eventually be called performance artand conceptual art” and saying “Man Ray offered artists in all media an example of a creative intelligence that, in its ‘pursuit of pleasure and liberty,'”—Man Ray’s stated guiding principles—”unlocked every door it came to and walked freely where it would.”^[2]

[edit]Life and career

[edit]Background and early life

From the time he began attracting attention as an artist until his death more than sixty years later, Man Ray allowed little of his early life or family background to be known to the public, even refusing to acknowledge that he ever had a name other than Man Ray.^[3]

Man Ray was born Emmanuel Radnitzky in South Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA in 1890, the eldest child of recent Russian Jewish immigrants. The family would eventually include another son and two daughters, the youngest born shortly after they settled in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, New York, in 1897. In early 1912, the Radnitzky family changed their surname to Ray, a name selected by Man Ray’s brother, in reaction to the ethnic discrimination and anti-Semitism prevalent at that time. Emmanuel, who was called “Manny” as a nickname, changed his first name to Man at this time, and gradually began to use Man Ray as his combined single name.^[3][4]

Man Ray’s father was a garment factory worker who also ran a small tailoring business out of the family home, enlisting his children from an early age. Man Ray’s mother enjoyed making the family’s clothes from her own designs and inventing patchwork items from scraps of fabric.^[3] Despite Man Ray’s desire to disassociate himself from his family background, this experience left an enduring mark on his art. Tailor’s dummies, flat irons, sewing machines, needles, pins, threads, swatches of fabric, and other items related to clothing and sewing appear at every stage of his work and in almost every medium.^[5] Art historians have also noted similarity in his collage and painting techniques to those used in making clothing.^[4]

Mason Klein, curator of an exhibition of Man Ray’s work at the Jewish Museum entitled “Alias Man Ray: The Art of Reinvention,” suggests that Man Ray may have been “the first Jewish avant-garde artist.”^[6]

[edit]First artistic endeavors

The Misunderstood (1938). Collection of the Man Ray Estate.

Man Ray displayed artistic and mechanical ability from childhood. His education at Boys’ High School from 1904 to 1908 provided him with a solid grounding in drafting and other basic art techniques. At the same time, he educated himself with frequent visits to the local art museums, where he studied the works of the Old Masters. After graduation from high school, he was offered a scholarship to study architecture but chose to pursue a career as an artist instead. However much this decision disappointed his parents’ aspirations to upward mobility and assimilation, they nevertheless rearranged the family’s modest living quarters so that Man Ray could use a room as his studio. He stayed for the next four years, working steadily toward being a professional painter, while earning money as a commercial artist and technical illustrator at severalManhattan companies.^[3][4]

From the surviving examples of his work from this period, it appears he attempted mostly paintings and drawings in 19th-century styles. He was already an avid admirer of avant-garde art of the time, such as the European modernists he saw at Alfred Stieglitz‘s “291” gallery and works by the Ashcan School, but, with a few exceptions, was not yet able to integrate these new trends into his own work. The art classes he sporadically attended—including stints at the National Academy of Design and the Art Students League—were of little apparent benefit to him, until he enrolled in the Ferrer School in the autumn of 1912, thus beginning a period of intense and rapid artistic development.^[4]

[edit]New York

Living in New York City, influenced by what he saw at the 1913 Armory Show and in galleries showing contemporary works from Europe, Man Ray’s early paintings display facets of cubism. Upon befriending Marcel Duchamp who was interested in showing movement in static paintings, his works begin to depict movement of the figures, for example in the repetitive positions of the skirts of the dancer in The Rope Dancer Accompanies Herself with Shadows (1916).^[7]

In 1915, Man Ray had his first solo show of paintings and drawings. His first proto-Dada object, an assemblage titled Self-Portrait, was exhibited the following year. He produced his first significant photographs in 1918.

A Night at Saint Jean-de- Luz (1929).
Collection of the Modern Art Museum of the City of Paris

Abandoning conventional painting, Man Ray involved himself with Dada, a radical anti-art movement, started making objects, and developed unique mechanical and photographic methods of making images. For the 1918 version of Rope Dancer he combined a spray-gun technique with a pen drawing. Again, like Duchamp, he made “readymades“—objects selected by the artist, sometimes modified and presented as art. His Gift readymade (1921) is a flatiron with metal tacks attached to the bottom, and Enigma of Isidore Ducasse is an unseen object (a sewing machine) wrapped in cloth and tied with cord. Another work from this period, Aerograph (1919), was done with airbrush on glass.^[7]

In 1920 Ray helped Duchamp make his first machine and one of the earliest examples of kinetic art, the Rotary Glass Plates composed of glass plates turned by a motor. That same year Man Ray, Katherine Dreier and Duchamp founded the Société Anonyme, an itinerant collection which in effect was the first museum of modern art in the U.S.

Ray teamed up with Duchamp to publish the one issue of New York Dada in 1920. Man Ray expressed that “dada’s experimentation was no match for the wild and chaotic streets of New York, and he wrote “Dada cannot live in New York. All New York is dada, and will not tolerate a rival.”^[8] Man Ray moved to Paris in 1921.

Man Ray met his first wife, the Belgian poet Adon Lacroix, in 1913 in New York. They married in 1914, separated in 1919, and were formally divorced in 1937.^[9]

[edit]Paris

In July 1921, Man Ray went to live and work in Paris, France, and soon settled in the Montparnasse quarter favored by many artists. Shortly after arriving in Paris, he met and fell in love with Kiki de Montparnasse (Alice Prin), an artists’ model and celebrated character in Paris bohemian circles. Kiki was Man Ray’s companion for most of the 1920s. She became the subject of some of his most famous photographic images and starred in his experimental films. In 1929 he began a love affair with the Surrealist photographer Lee Miller.

Salvador Dalí and Man Ray in Paris, on June 16, 1934 making “wild eyes” for photographer Carl Van Vechten

For the next 20 years in Montparnasse, Man Ray made his mark on the art ofphotography. Significant members of the art world, such as James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Jean Cocteau, Bridget Bate Tichenor,^[10] and Antonin Artaud posed for his camera.

With Jean Arp, Max Ernst, André Masson, Joan Miró, and Pablo Picasso, Man Ray was represented in the first Surrealistexhibition at the Galerie Pierre in Paris in 1925. Works from this period include a metronome with an eye, originally titled Object to Be Destroyed. Another important work from this part of Man Ray’s life is the Violon d’Ingres,^[11] a stunning photograph of Kiki de Montparnasse,^[12] styled after the painter/musician, Ingres. This work is a popular example of how Man Ray could juxtapose disparate elements in his photography in order to generate meaning.^[13]

In 1934, surrealist artist Méret Oppenheim, known for her fur-covered teacup, posed nude for Man Ray in what became a well-known series of photographs depicting her standing next to a printing press.

Together with Lee Miller, who was his photography assistant and lover, Man Ray reinvented the photographic technique ofsolarization. He also created a technique using photograms he called rayographs, which he described as “pure dadaism”.

Man Ray directed a number of influential avant-garde short films, known as Cinéma Pur, such as Le Retour à la Raison (2 mins, 1923); Emak-Bakia (16 mins, 1926); L’Étoile de Mer (15 mins, 1928); and Les Mystères du Château de Dé (27 mins, 1929). Man Ray also assisted Marcel Duchamp with the cinematography of his film Anemic Cinema (1926), and personally manned the camera on Fernand Léger‘s Ballet Mécanique (1924). Man Ray also appeared in René Clair‘s film Entr’acte(1924), in a brief scene playing chess with Duchamp.

Duchamp, Man Ray, and Francis Picabia were friends as well as collaborators, connected by their experimental, entertaining, and innovative art.^[14][15]

[edit]Later life

Man Ray portrayed by Lothar Wolleh, Paris, 1975

Later in life, Man Ray returned to the United States, having been forced to leave Paris due to the dislocations of the Second World War. He lived in Los Angeles, California from 1940 until 1951. A few days after arriving in Los Angeles, Man Ray met Juliet Browner, a first generation American of Rumanian-Jewish lineage; a trained dancer and experienced artists’ model.^[16] They began living together almost immediately, and married in 1946 in a double wedding with their friends Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning. However, he called Montparnasse home and he returned there.

In 1963 he published his autobiography, Self-Portrait, which was republished in 1999 (ISBN 0-8212-2474-3).

He died in Paris on November 18, 1976 of a lung infection, and was interred in the Cimetière du Montparnasse, Paris. His epitaph reads:unconcerned, but not indifferent. When Juliet Browner died in 1991, she was interred in the same tomb. Her epitaph reads, together again. Juliet set up a trust for his work and made many donations of his work to museums.

[edit]Quotations

[edit]By Man Ray

• “It has never been my object to record my dreams, just the determination to realize them.” (Julien Levy exhibition catalog, April 1945.)

• “There is no progress in art, any more than there is progress in making love. There are simply different ways of doing it.” (1948 essay, “To Be Continued, Unnoticed”.)

• “To create is divine, to reproduce is human.” (“Originals Graphic Multiples”, circa 1968; published in Objets de Mon Affection, 1983.)

• “I paint what cannot be photographed, that which comes from the imagination or from dreams, or from an unconscious drive. I photograph the things that I do not wish to paint, the things which already have an existence.” (Undated interview, circa 1970s; published in Man Ray: Photographer, 1981.)

• “I have been accused of being a joker. But the most successful art to me involves humor.” (Undated interview, circa 1970s; published in Man Ray: Photographer, 1981.)

• “An original is a creation motivated by desire. Any reproduction of an originals motivated by necessity. It is marvelous that we are the only species that creates gratuitous forms. To create is divine, to reproduce is human.”

• “Of course, there will always be those who look only at technique, who ask ‘how’, while others of a more curious nature will ask ‘why’. Personally, I have always preferred inspiration to information.”

• “I do not photograph nature. I photograph my visions.” ^[8]

[edit]About Man Ray

• “MAN RAY, n.m. synon. de Joie jouer jouir.” (Translation: “MAN RAY, masculine noun, synonymous with joy, to play, to enjoy.”) — Marcel Duchamp, as the opening epigram for Man Ray’s memoir Self-Portrait, 1963.

• “With him you could try anything—there was nothing you were told not to do, except spill the chemicals. With Man Ray, you were free to do what your imagination conjured, and that kind of encouragement was wonderful.” — Artist and photographer, Naomi Savage, Man Ray’s niece and protégée, in a 2000 newspaper interview.

• “Man Ray is a youthful alchemist forever in quest of the painter’s philosopher’s stone. May he never find it, as that would bring an end to his experimentations which are the very condition of living art expression.” — Adolf Wolff, “Art Notes”, International 8, no. 1 (January 1914), p. 21.

• “[Man Ray was] a kind of short man who looked a little like Mr. Peepers, spoke slowly with a slight Brooklynese accent, and talked so you could never tell when he was kidding.” — Brother-in-law Joseph Browner on his first impression of the artist; quoted in the Fresno Bee, August 26, 1990.

[edit]Selected books by Man Ray

• Man Ray and Tristan Tzara (1922). Champs délicieux: album de photographies. Paris: [Société générale d’imprimerie et d’édition].
• Man Ray (1926). Revolving doors, 1916-1917: 10 planches. Paris: Éditions Surrealistes.
• Man Ray (1934). Man Ray: photographs, 1920–1934, Paris. Hartford, CT: James Thrall Soby.
• Éluard, Paul, and Man Ray (1935). Facile. Paris: Éditions G.L.M.
• Man Ray and André Breton (1937). La photographie n’est pas l’art. Paris: Éditions G.L.M.
• Man Ray and Paul Éluard (1937). Les mains libres: dessins. Paris: Éditions Jeanne Bucher.
• Man Ray (1948). Alphabet for adults. Beverly Hills, CA: Copley Galleries.
• Man Ray (1963). Self portrait. London: Andre Deutsch.
• Man Ray and L. Fritz Gruber (1963). Portraits. Gütersloh, Germany: Sigbert Mohn Verlag.

[edit]

Man Ray portrayed by Lothar Wolleh, Paris, 1975

_____________________________________

The above clip is from the film series by Francis Schaeffer “How should we then live?” Below is an outline of the 8th episode on the Impressionists and the age of Fragmentation. Attention is also given to Surrealism which is what Man Ray was involved in. Also he spent a lot of time working with Marcel Duchamp and Dali who are also mentioned in this film series. 

AGE OF FRAGMENTATION

I. Art As a Vehicle Of Modern Thought

A. Impressionism (Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, Degas) and Post-Impressionism (Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Seurat): appearance and reality.

1. Problem of reality in Impressionism: no universal.

2. Post-Impression seeks the universal behind appearances.

3. Painting expresses an idea in its own terms as a work of art; to discuss the idea in a painting is not to intellectualize art.

4. Parallel search for universal in art and philosophy; Cézanne.

B. Fragmentation.

1. Extremes of ultra-naturalism or abstraction: Wassily Kandinsky.

2. Picasso leads choice for abstraction: relevance of this choice.

3. Failure of Picasso (like Sartre, and for similar reasons) to be fully consistent with his choice.

C. Retreat to absurdity.

1. Dada , and Marcel Duchamp: art as absurd. (Dada gave birth to Surrealism).

2. Art followed philosophy but came sooner to logical end.

3. Chance in his art technique as an art theory impossible to practice: Pollock.

II. Music As a Vehicle of Modern Thought

A. Non-resolution and fragmentation: German and French streams.

1. Influence of Beethoven’s last Quartets.

2. Direction and influence of Debussy.

3. Schoenberg’s non-resolution; contrast with Bach.

4. Stockhausen: electronic music and concern with the element of change.

B. Cage: a case study in confusion.

1. Deliberate chance and confusion in Cage’s music.

2. Cage’s inability to live the philosophy of his music.

C. Contrast of music-by-chance and the world around us.

1. Inconsistency of indulging in expression of chaos when we acknowledge order for practical matters like airplane design.

2. Art as anti-art when it is mere intellectual statement, divorced from reality of who people are and the fullness of what the universe is.

III. General Culture As the Vehicle of Modern Thought

A. Propagation of idea of fragmentation in literature.

1. Effect of Eliot’s Wasteland and Picasso’s Demoiselles d’ Avignon

compared; the drift of general culture.

2. Eliot’s change in his form of writing when he became a Christian.

3. Philosophic popularization by novel: Sartre, Camus, de Beauvoir.

B. Cinema as advanced medium of philosophy.

1. Cinema in the 1960s used to express Man’s destruction: e.g. Blow-up.

2. Cinema and the leap into fantasy:

The Hour of the Wolf, Belle de Jour, Juliet of the Spirits,

The Last Year at Marienbad.

3. Bergman’s inability to live out his philosophy (see Cage):

Silence and The Hour of the Wolf.

IV. Only on Christian Base Can Reality Be Faced Squarely

Well, Mr. Allen, it would appear you still have the ability to surprise and delight me.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve enjoyed plenty of your recent movies, particularly the ones with Scarlett Johansson. And it’s not just because I love Scarlett Johansson–though I suspect we have some very similar thoughts on the lady (and not just the obvious ones that most people think; my readers can be so bourgeois!) You’ve had several very good films in the last six years, and a few merely okay ones. Even the good ones, though, are what they are. They hit a certain predictable level, they never took me unaware. Not like Midnight in Paris.

Now, granted, I maybe walked into those movies armed with a little more foreknowledge as to their plot. How I managed to avoid learning what Midnight in Paris was really about is beyond me, particularly given my affinity for some of the details you include in your love letter to the legendary city. I knew it starred Owen Wilson as a man engaged to Rachel McAdams, and that Wilson’s character, Gil Pender, was more romanced by Paris than his fiancée. I also picked up that Michael Sheen represented a kind of threat to this young couple, that he was, shall we say, more intellectual and sophisticated, than his neurotic rival. At the same time, Gil’s head would be turned by more than architecture, and likely, the whole thing would be a criss-crossing examination of commitment and dreams and the reasons couples go together in the first place.

Again, this is Woody Allen territory. No surprise there. You can get that from just a cursory glace at the trailer. Sharp viewers might even be able to figure it out from the poster. That poster also promotes the fact that Adrien Brody, Kathy Bates, and Marion Cotillard are in the film, and had I been pushed to guess, honestly, Marion Cotillard would have to be Owen Wilson’s temptation (and I’d have been right). The funny thing is, those three aren’t in the first fifteen or twenty minutes of Midnight in Paris, which is exactly how long my uninformed impressions of the film held true.

And then…whammo! Here comes the curveball.

I feel like I should say “spoiler alert” here, but that seems kind of silly since I am faking a conversation with the guy who wrote and directed Midnight in Paris, to whom none of what I am about to say should be a surprise. I also have a feeling that later trailers must have given this stuff away. I mean, how long did you keep it a secret that Jeff Daniels steps out of the movie screen in Purple Rose of Cairo? That’s what the movie is about! And given how similar the flights of fancy are between your older movie and this new one, and how this fictional conceit ends up informing the life of the character to whom it happens, comparisons between Purple Rose of Cairo and Midnight in Paris are inevitable. That should be on the poster. “From Woody Allen, the man who brought you Purple Rose of Cairo.”

Regardless, SPOILER!

As it goes, I’m just sitting there watching Owen Wilson be sad because Rachel McAdams wants to hang out with annoying people and fails to see the magic in the rich creative history of Paris–or, for that matter, the creative present of her husband-to-be. Gil is a writer who has wasted his talent on cheap Hollywood screenplays and is now trying to complete his first novel. It’s a book about a man who runs a “nostalgia shop,” named Out of the Past, presumably after the old Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer movie, because that’s just what a guy who sells memorabilia from eras long gone would do. Obviously Gil’s protagonist is just an analogue for Gil, a man who believes he was born in the wrong time, who longs for an idealized past, which is exactly what Gil is thinking about when a classic Peugeot turns the corner and stops in front of him. The people in the car motion Gil over, convince him to jump in, give him champagne, and take him to a party.

And, oh, what a party it is! Cole Porter music, conversation about the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald, the works. The catch is, that’s really Cole Porter at the piano, and that’s really Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (Tom Hiddleston and Alison Pill) that Gil is talking to. He has been transported back in time! The rest of the movie is Gil taking full advantage of whatever temporal anomaly he has stumbled into. At midnight, he climbs into the car and goes back in time to meet his idols; in the morning, he returns to his disappointing present. In between, Gil must sort out what is happening to him, relating it to the themes that he is exploring in his novel, and then relating that further to what it means to him as a person. It’s a scenario too good to be true, every one of his literary and artistic heroes turns out to be exactly as he expected them to be–but then, this is his fantasy, isn’t it? You wouldn’t travel back in time to meet Muhammad Ali just to sit on the couch and watch him eat potato chips. You’d want him to talk in rhyme and shadow box right in front of you! Likewise, you’d want Ernest Hemingway (Corey Stoll for Law & Order: Los Angeles) to talk in clipped prose about bullfighters and give you writing tips.

I mean, that’s what I’d want, Mr. Allen, and that’s what you deliver. Midnight in Paris is a delightful, witty movie. It even gets poignant in its final scenes. Owen Wilson is surprisingly good playing the motormouthed stand-in for yourself, and all of your supporting actors are so perfectly cast. They latch onto these bygone personalities and refuse to let go. All the performers are clearly having fun. Alison Pill is absolutely train-wreck charming as Zelda Fitzgerald–though, the implications of Gil giving her valium are a little weird–and Corey Stoll attacks the Hemingway material like an unstoppable elephant. Maybe the most fun, though, is Adrien Brody, who only has one full scene, but he pretty much steals the whole movie. “Dali!”

Marion Cotillard is also extremely charming and she is easy to buy in the role of the ineffable muse. If I had one complaint, it’s that I wish there had been just a tad more romance here. The scenes with her and Wilson play it safe, and we never get to see her be the volcano she is once described as being. There is no agony in the choice Gil must make, it’s pretty obvious how it’s going to go–that’s the lesson he must learn, after all–and if you learned anything from the writers you are portraying, it’s that the drama comes out of the choice being too difficult. Rachel McAdams is adorable, but let’s be honest, the character she plays is rotten, start to finish.

It’s not enough of a complaint to have ruined the warm glow I had after watching Midnight in Paris. I just don’t want to overdo and pretend it’s a perfect movie–even if it is perfectly wonderful to watch. Like the myths of the city it depicts, Midnight in Paris is its own inscrutable thing. It couldn’t happen anywhere else, and it could happen with anyone but you, Mr. Allen. My hat is doffed in your direction.

Jamie S. Rich is a novelist and comic book writer. He is best known for his collaborations with Joëlle Jones, including the hardboiled crime comic book You Have Killed Me, the challenging romance 12 Reasons Why I Love Her, and the 2007 prose novel Have You Seen the Horizon Lately?, for which Jones did the cover. All three were published by Oni Press. His most recent project is the comedy series Spell Checkers, again with Jones and artist Nicolas Hitori de. Follow Rich’s blog at Confessions123.com.

I have really enjoyed going through the characters referenced in Woody Allen’s latest movie “Midnight in Paris.” Today I am going to discusss T.S. Eliot.

T.S. Eliot
Modernist poet
Friday, August 8, 2008

“The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre—
To be redeemed from fire by fire.”

The man who wrote the most despairing poem of the twentieth century is today mostly remembered as the author of doggerel verse made popular in the hit musical Cats. Besides his poetry (the serious, the light, and the profoundly Christian), he produced literary criticism and drama so fine he was awarded the 1948 Nobel Prize for Literature and the British Order of Merit.

Timeline
1867	The Dominion of Canada is Established
1876	Alexander Grahm Bell invents the telephone
1882	Formation of Standard Oil Company
1888	T.S. Eliot born
1965	T.S. Eliot dies
1966	Chinese Cultural Revolution

Brooding masterpiece
Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis to a family descended from New England stock. There was no smoking or drinking in the Eliot household, and the literary-minded family—Tom, his brother, five sisters, and mother—would gather around his father, a wholesale grocer, as he read Dickens aloud. In fact, frail Tom spent much of his childhood curled up in a big leather armchair reading.

He was sent to New England to private schools and was accepted at Harvard University, where he studied under the likes of philosopher and poet George Santayana and completed his degree in three years. Though naturally shy, he gained a reputation as a dancer and party-goer, and when he decided he was too puny, he took boxing lessons.

Eliot won a traveling fellowship to Germany in 1914; he barely escaped getting caught by the war and made his way to Britain. It turned out to be a long stay. He never returned to take his oral examination, which was all that stood between him and a Harvard Ph.D.

After a year at Oxford University, then a stint at teaching history, Latin, French, German, arithmetic, drawing, and swimming in English schools, he became a banker with Lloyds of London. Later he became an editor with Faber and Faber (where he eventually became known as a prolific writer of blurbs for book jackets).

Meanwhile he brooded over the crumbling of European civilization.

His first masterpiece, the first “modernist” poem in English, was “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” a portrait of an aging man reviewing a life frittered away between timid hopes and lost opportunities:

For I have known them all already, known them all
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons …

With the publication of “The Waste Land” in 1922, he came to international attention. The poem begins,

April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

It expresses the disillusionment and disgust after World War I, portraying a fearful world pursuing barren lusts, yearning desperately for any sign of redemption. It is considered by many to be the most influential poem of the twentieth century.

Redeemed from fire
Eliot’s despair, however, was short-lived. After reading agnostic Bertrand Russell’s essay “A Free Man’s Worship,” essentially an argument that man must worship man, Eliot decided its reasoning was shallow. He moved in the opposite direction and in 1927 was confirmed in the Church of England. The same year, he also gave up his American citizenship and became a British subject.

His faith became more widely known with the publication of “Ash Wednesday” in 1930, a poem showing the difficult search for truth (“Where shall the word be found, where will the word / Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence”) and the discovery of a faith that will last, expressed in the repeated phrase, “Because I do not hope to turn again.” Though criticized sharply by the literati for his turn to Christianity, he continued to express his faith in his poetry.

Eliot believed his finest achievement was writing the broadly religious poem “Four Quartets” (1943). It deals with the themes of incarnation, time and eternity, spiritual insight and revelation, culminating in an allusion to Pentecost:

The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre—
To be redeemed from fire by fire.

In The Idea of a Christian Society (1939), as well as other works, Eliot argued that the humanist attempt to form a non-Christian, “rational” civilization was doomed. “The experiment will fail,” he wrote, “but we must be very patient in awaiting its collapse; meanwhile redeeming the time: so that the Faith may be preserved alive through the dark ages before us; to renew and rebuild civilization, and save the world from suicide.”

He didn’t believe society should be ruled by the church, only by Christian principles, with Christians being “the conscious mind and the conscience of the nation.”

Eliot turned to writing plays in the 1930s and ’40s because he believed drama attracts people who unconsciously seek a religion. The year 1935 saw the premiere of Murder in the Cathedral, a play based on the martyrdom of Thomas Becket, in which Eliot reiterates that faith can live only if the faithful are ready to die for it. It was followed by The Family Reunion (1939) and The Cocktail Party(1949), his greatest theatrical success. In his plays, he managed to handle complex moral and religious themes while entertaining audiences with farcical plots and keen social satire.

Verse to the postman
More personally, Eliot’s first marriage was a disaster: his wife became increasingly unstable until she had to spend her last days in a mental institution. He then shared a flat with writer-critic John Hayward (who was almost completely paralyzed) until he married again in 1957.

Eliot enjoyed children, was a fan of Sherlock Holmes detective stories, addressed letters in verse (“Postman, propel thy feet / And take this note to greet / The Mrs. Hutchinson / Who lives on Charlotte Street … “), and made up rhymes about cats, which turned into his Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939). He was an Anglican of Anglo-Catholic persuasion and served for a time as church warden at his local parish.

_______________________________________

The impact of T.S. Eliot’s Christianity on his poetry

By Barry Spurr

ABC Religion and Ethics | 16 Aug 2010

By the time that T.S. Eliot, aged 39, was baptised and confirmed in the Church of England in 1927, his reputation as the leading Modernist poet had been secured by the publication of the revolutionary collection, Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) and The Waste Land in (1922).

These presented confronting analyses of the human condition in contemporary Western society which was emerging from the bloodbath of the Great War, in which the opposing sides had claimed the support of God.

Eliot focused on individual lives (in the monologues of such despairing figures as Prufrock, in his ironically-titled “Love Song,” and Gerontion, the little old man in the poem of that name). But he also criticised civilisation at large in the epic range of The Waste Land, where the title introduces the principal metaphor of the hopelessness it describes.

Eliot presented a post-Christian world, despairing of human and divine love or redemption from its despair. The best expression of this diagnosis, in his verse, came in “The Hollow Men” (1925), where Eliot’s speakers are discovered hopelessly – but, paradoxically, with an extraordinary lyrical beauty – on the brink of Hell.

Here was a poet, according to Eliot’s contemporaries, who had evoked the nihilism of modern lives and societies. Phrases from these poems still resonate powerfully, nearly a century later: “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons,” “This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper,” “After such knowledge, what forgiveness?” and so on.

It might have been expected, after Eliot’s conversion a few years later, that his recognition of the promise of salvation which Christianity proposes would have been reflected in revolutionary changes in his poetic subjects and techniques.

Instead, it is the consistency of Eliot’s poetry, from 1927 onwards, with what he had been writing before that most often strikes us.

Several powerful metaphors remain, such as, for example, that of the journey (which we encounter, for instance, in “Prufrock” and in the quest-motif in The Waste Land).

Indeed, Eliot’s first “Christian” poem is called “Journey of the Magi” (1927). What is notable about this work is the perilousness of the undertaking (“A cold coming we had of it”), underlined by the contingency of the outcome and the lack of final resolution as a single Magus meditates upon the journey at the end.

These wise men, while recalling the biblical figures who were drawn to the Christ-child, are more tellingly interpreted as the worldly-wise men of modern life – people much like Eliot himself – who must struggle to reclaim the experience of faith and cannot even be sure of the character or implications of that experience when they have had it.

His Magi travel backwards through time, past the scene of suffering at the crucifixion (dimly represented as “three trees on the low sky”), to the baby at Bethlehem.

It is an encounter with the source of faith – “it was (you may say) satisfactory,” they note flatly – apprehended after intense and protracted personal and universal suffering and attended by the ever-present temptations of worldliness (“silken girls bringing sherbet”) and in the face of contemporary, irreligious derision – “with the voices ringing in our ears, saying / That this was all folly.”

This was precisely how Eliot’s conversion was regarded by many of his friends and literary associates in these years.

The Magi return from their encounter with the Incarnation to a now-alien people, “clutching their gods.” Incompleteness closes the poem as one of them yearns for a further dying to worldliness – “I should be glad of another death.”

For all its negativity, the poem is rich in Christian symbolism and, for the first time, there is at least the sense that the journey is not absolutely pointless, but, rather, a challenging experience.

Moreover, as it is undeniably focused on the Lord’s birth, it presents, in Eliot’s first recognisably Christian poem, that emphasis on the Word made flesh – the doctrine of the Incarnation – which is central to Anglo-Catholic theological, liturgical and spiritual life.

From this still point of “intersection of the timeless / With time” (as Eliot was later to put it, in Four Quartets) was derived the richly sacramental rule and practice of faith which dominated the rest of Eliot’s life, particularly in the Mass and in recourse to the sacrament of penance.

In “Journey of the Magi,” there is the symbol of a “water-mill beating the darkness.” It speaks of rejuvenation, conquering the darkness of sin and, sacramentally, of baptism. It has the potential to revive the desert landscape of The Waste Land where there “is no water.”

In 1930, in his most liturgical poem, Ash-Wednesday, Eliot presents an extended meditation on that aspect of spirituality which inspired his own quest for transcendence of the world of the wastelanders and the hollow men, and which had its source in his own abiding sense of unworthiness. This is his preoccupation with sin and purification.

In the liturgical calendar, Ash Wednesday is the first day of the penitential season of Lent. So, in this Lenten poem, Eliot’s speaker embarks on yet another journey – but this time, of renunciation and penitence.

Again, in its six sections, there is the dominant sense of the difficulty of the process, in the midst of worldliness, a condition characterised here as a “time of tension between dying and birth.”

One of the reasons that Eliot’s poetry of his “Christian” period speaks as strongly to the contemporary world as his earlier nihilistic works – which seem more aligned to its values – is that he never imagines that religious belief, or the behaviour which that belief entails, makes life or the acceptance of oneself, with all its demons, easier.

On the contrary, it is a more difficult journey. In Ash-Wednesday, scepticism about faith and lack of faith in the penitent’s own ability to rise to the demands of belief dramatically bedevil him as he makes his painful way through those several weeks to Easter and the mystery of the resurrection.

Typically, the poem only looks forward to this theological resolution, finding its centre, rather, in “this brief transit where the dreams cross,” the temporal dispensation of past, present and future which the speaker aspires to transcend now that he has recognised a higher reality beyond that dreamtime.

His glimpses of the beatific vision – Ash-Wednesday is much indebted to Dante for several of its references – encourage the speaker at the end, in quotation from the old prayer, Anima Christi, to plead, “Suffer me not to be separated / And let my cry come unto Thee.”

This “cry” is a prayer coming out of suffering. Such was Eliot’s faith.

Barry Spurr is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Sydney. His most recent book is “Anglo-Catholic in Religion”: T.S. Eliot and Christianity (Lutterworth, 2010).

Below is an excellent article from Breakpoint.org:

A Costly Journey

By Diane Singer|Published Date: November 29, 2010 Now after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, behold, wise men from the east came to Jerusalem, saying, “Where is he who has been born king of the Jews? For we saw his star when it rose and have come to worship him.” -–Matthew 2:1-2 Before he became a Christian in 1927, Nobel laureate T.S. Eliot wrote poems – such as The Waste Land and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”– which characterized the despair, disillusionment, and nihilist spirit of the post-World War I period. But not long after his conversion and his confirmation in the Anglican Church, Eliot published “Journey of the Magi” [1] – a poem which imagines events from the viewpoint of one of wise men who followed the Christmas star in search of the king of the Jews. Eliot used the form of a dramatic monologue to reveal what the magi endured as they made the arduous journey toJudea, and how their encounter with the Christ child impacted their lives. In the first twenty lines, the speaker is remembering – and not fondly – the difficult trek from their home in the east (tradition says they came from Persia) to Bethlehem. It’s a litany of complaints about the cold, the long distance, the stubbornness of the camels, the unreliability and crudeness of the camel drivers, and the filth and corruption they found in every village and town they passed through. On too many nights and days, they had good reason to regret their decision to undertake the journey, and reason enough to call themselves every kind of fool for leaving “the summer palaces” and “silken girls bringing sherbet” back home. Email This Article Print This Article Share This Article Send us your comments In the second stanza (lines 21-31), the speaker describes their disappointing arrival in Bethlehem. Despite the warmer climate, their mood is somber and puzzled because none of the locals seemed aware that something momentous has just occurred, the arrival of their long-awaited Messiah (Genesis 3:15; Jeremiah 23:5-6; Micah 5:2; Daniel 9:25). Significantly, Eliot packs this section with images that foreshadow not the birth of Christ, but the agony of His death, such as “three trees on the low sky” and “[s]ix hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver” – images which remind readers that Jesus was a newborn destined for a very particular kind of death (Psalm 22:17-18). And it is this juxtaposition of birth and death which leaves the speaker, decades after he sees the baby Jesus, longing for his own death. In the last stanza (lines 32 -43), the setting shifts from the distant past to the aged speaker’s present as he mulls over the journey and tries to puzzle out what it meant. Rather than glowing words expressing joy, as we might expect, his words are uncertain, tentative, even pained. They found this infant’s birth “[h]ard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death” (ll. 38-39). Though they left their gifts and returned to their homeland, they never again felt at home: “We returned to our places, these Kingdoms, / But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation, / With an alien people clutching their gods” (ll. 40-42). He then ends his musings on a sigh, a longing: “I should be glad of another death” (l. 43). “The Journey of the Magi” is an unusual Christmas poem in that it lacks the seasonal cheerfulness and celebratory mood that we generally expect from such fare. Instead, Eliot’s poem reveals the paradoxical nature of our Lord and of our own faith journey. While Jesus is the Prince of Peace (Isaiah 9:6) who came to reconcile God and man through His death on the Cross (Colossians 1:19-20), He is also the One who brought “a sword” (Matthew 10:34-39) that inevitably divides families, friends, and peers – as Eliot discovered when he converted, much to the disdain of his fellow members of the intelligentsia. While Jesus offers His disciples abundant life, it comes at the cost of our old life, our old way of thinking, and our old values. And while He guarantees us a heavenly home, He leaves us with a nagging sense of alienation in our earthly ones. Therefore, like the magi, we may one day look back on our journey of faith and see much that disappoints and confuses us. But also like the magi, we can anticipate the day we will die and come face to face with our Lord. Then, we will understand that though it was a costly journey, it was well worth the price. For more insight to this topic, get the book, Christians at the Cross, by N. T. Wright, from our online store. Or read the article, “The Humanity of Christmas: The Nativity Story,” by Charles Colson. [1] The poem may be found at http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoem.do?poemId=7070 where you can both read the text and hear Eliot reading the poem. Comments: All comments are approved before posting.

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