The Problem With Peace

Seeking a Liturgy of the Wild, (Part 34)

Make peace with yourself, and both heaven

And earth will make peace with you.

– St Isaac the Syrian

I’ve always liked pebble-in-the-shoe art. I like the grit as much as the oyster. I like a wee bit of restlessness in my artists of choice. I meet plenty of peaceful people, and I may admire them, but I don’t read their books or look at their paintings. Everything’s resolved, quest-less, settled. I get much more from Willem De Kooning losing his stirrups in a post-war New York loft than I do a rococo angel.

I confess I enjoy aggression, ambition, grief and desire smeared about in the almighty dust-up required to make something worthy of the word art. Much of the art I love would not be described as Christian, but certainly human. The – as Lorca would call it – Duende end of the lived experience is what I chime with. Fat little fellows on harps in the clouds say nothing to me about anything at all. But that’s partially just taste. Some see Cy Twombly’s late Bacchus paintings and think their child could have done it. Good luck with that.

So for the good of my art, I’ve vamoosed when harmony is mentioned. Harmony’s seemed oddly un-generative, flaccid, unsexy. No one would have used the adjective ‘peaceful’ to describe me in my younger years. Restless, searching even, but not peaceful. It’s been fine to be an eternal scatterling, fine to burn the joint to the ground and shuffle on, fine to lash out and devil take the consequences. To the victor the spoils, said I. Harmony seemed generic, beige, buttoned up, uncreative, fearful even. A thrill-free zone.

And then I became a Christian.

Whilst I still love all the artists I just mentioned, there’s a much deeper issue at hand. A necessity to take harmony seriously, specifically the consequence of me not having much. There’s a legacy in my life I previously smudged over, but can’t now. I’ve hurt people in my polyphonic approach to truth and harmony. There’s corrupted fault lines through many old relationships. And the fault was mainly mine. I was oblivious. I can’t be any longer. I have to deal with my problem with peace.