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  • Eschata-LogosWord and Ruin
  • Erik Ehn (bio)

A few thoughts on spirituality and religion as they relate to art as I see it, in terms of practice and topic:

Creation is catastrophe Sin and safety Prayer is writing Performance is prayer Writing is performance Prayer is prayer The Way of the Fake Catholic

To go a bit further:

Creation is Catastrophe

I had a student, Jackie Knox, who died in a car crash just before the start of the past school year. I owed her a paper; she had made a comparison of Beckett’s Catastrophe and Gambaro’s Information for Foreigners. The paper had gotten into the wrong pile—meaning the pile right in front of me on my desk, the pile marked “urgent” in my head but somehow remote from my priority on a momentby- moment basis (“to do the really important things first I’ll need to do this and then this . . . Then, oh my native mind will be restored and with fresh will I’ll . . . Then the car flips”). I owed her comments. From her conclusion:

Beckett’s Catastrophe and Gambaro’s Information for Foreigners create atmospheres of cruelty and control, evoking feelings of frustration and shame in the audience. Beckett’s immobile, focused world of metaphor culminates with a gaze of challenging realism. Gambaro envelops the audience in a frenetic atmosphere of shock and parody. Cruelty exists; hope lies in witness. We witness a method of creative subtraction parallel to classical catastrophe, where a protagonist is cast down. Creation is catastrophe. Pleading eyes challenge the witness to question acceptance and hopefully yearn to break the cycle. Lines between performer and spectator blur. The unsettling feelings of shame [End Page 44] and frustration, the forced intimacy these plays evoke, is intended to ignite action in life to eliminate cruelty. When fully processed these scripts are glimmers of hope. Hope that witness, through acknowledgement of cruelty, will somehow act out to initiate its termination.

Creation is making space; space was invented by the first act of creation, and creation developed by dividing thing from thing, all in chained relationship with the indivisible unity that is responsible for sustaining all this division. A play is a problem. It is an accident that through the vehicle of wanting, separates us from what we want, and creates a lapse, error, anxiety, or strobing insanity that will be healed only when grace flows through and separates (through an act of creation) ourselves from our new possessions—our misery, or strange giddiness (both applying in their way to comedy and tragedy):

Rumi: The wave named “Am I not your Lord” has come, it has broken the vessel of the body; And when the vessel is broken, the vision comes back, and the union with Him.

Psalm 78: He split the rocks in the wilderness and gave them abundant drink like the ocean depths. He brought forth streams also from the rock and caused waters to run down like rivers.

She gets an “A” for fuck’s sake. Jesus. I mean literally, Jesus.

That which separates myself from urgency is masked as competency (the successful satisfaction of responsibilities without long range impact). Wakefulness to creation eschews competency in favor of broken rocks, broken waves, broken langue, broken students, and the inflow of mercy beyond rational credibility. Jackie says.

A play is a way of asking for mercy. A play is a way of getting into a crisis of faith (interpretation) so severe that only mercy can assuage it. I like tragedy, but the same applies to comedy (“stop, stop—you’re killing me”).

Sin and Safety

Sin is that which we interpose between ourselves and God (thumbnail: why does God allow suffering in the world? God looks at the world and sees only Christ; there is nothing between God and God). If we are the material with which God works, if we are in love when we are surrendered wholly to the act of God’s creation, and if creation is catastrophe (a breaking and a flowing forth), then sin (turning from God) is at root: withholding oneself from catastrophe. Clarity and inevitability are static. It is the responsibility of a poem...

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