Truth Beyond the Binary
October 22, 2023 Leave a comment
“The Gleaners” (1857), by Jean-François Millet, depicts women picking up loose grain in the field. Without words it relates the hardships and the dignity of everyday workers. The painting connects us to our own human story. We recognize something of ourselves in this glimpse of reality. We understand a day’s slog and strain. We empathize with the workers.
The painting’s aesthetic realism, its naturalism and unromanticized imagery draw us in. We like that it rejects idealization and artificiality. “The Gleaners” portrays ’us’ as we are. And the subject’s universality – women doing manual labor – is a catalyst for imaginative truth.
We empathize with the subjects as we project ourselves into their perspective. We imagine what it must be like working in a field under the hot sun. We imagine constantly bending over to pick up left-over scraps of the grain harvest so that poor women and children could live on them. We imagine ourselves in 1857.
We find ourselves stepping out of our world and connecting with history – mankind has been doing manual labor since the beginning of time. We find ourselves connecting not just with the women, but with all of humanity, a humanity that shares the work, burdens, and cares of life. And, our imagination wants to know more of the wordless ‘story’.
We cannot see the women’s faces. Are the women young or old? Are they talking to pass the time? Singing? Are they married? Have children? Do they work from sun up to sun down? How do their backs feel at the end of the day? Are their hands dried out and cracked from handling the grain?
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Anton Chekhov’s stories are noted for their ‘naturalness’ – the ability to show ‘exactly what a little piece of life’ is like. Like with Millet’s realistic painting, his prose provides down-to-earth characters, details and a setting that, though with Russian aspects, is universal in its close-to-home familiarity.
Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov, in his Lectures on Russian Literature, described Chekhov as writing “the way one person relates to another the most important things in his life, slowly and yet without a break, in a slightly subdued voice”.
Chekhov, a practicing doctor, observed everyday life and ordinary people as he made house calls and treated patients. He wrote with a concentration on the daily lives of individuals using natural detail. We connect with the subjects in terms of shared experiences, emotions, and challenges that are common to all human beings.
You won’t find sanctimony or moralizing or happy endings in his stories nor heroes in the conventional sense. Chekhov had nothing to prove, no ideology or politics to promote, and he created all his characters equal.
And though Chekhov’s stories seem to go nowhere, his ‘close to home’ imagery mirrors our own situations. Life often goes on unchanged or less than we had hoped for. Life often goes on without resolution. And that is the case in a touching story by Anton Chekhov – “On Easter Eve” (1886).
A brief introduction: “The narrator describes his moving experience of attending an early-morning celebration of Easter Eve in the countryside after crossing a river in flood in the middle of a very starry night, admiring the fireworks and listening to the boatman’s account of the sudden demise of the church deacon while composing Easter hymns.”
The ferryman, a novice monk, grieves the loss of a brother. Nikolai, a sensitive soul enraptured by words, was skilled at writing Akathists. (Akathist or “unseated hymn” is a type of hymn usually recited by Eastern Orthodox or Eastern Catholic Christians. It may be dedicated to a saint, holy event, or one of the persons of the Holy Trinity.)
The passenger (narrator) listens to the ferryman recount the death of his best friend Nikolai and about the gift Nikolai had for writing hymns of praise. “And Nikolai was writing akathists! Akathists! Not mere sermons or histories.” The passenger then asks “Are they so hard to write then? The ferryman responds “Ever so hard” and goes on to describe what’s involved, including the following:
Everything must be harmonious, brief and complete. There must be in every line softness, graciousness and tenderness; not one word should be harsh or rough or unsuitable. It must be written so that the worshipper may rejoice at heart and weep, while his mind is stirred and he is thrown into a tremor.
Just one more quote to invite you to be with the narrator and ferryman “On Easter Eve”.
Here the narrator describes Easter Eve at the Russian Orthodox Church, reminding me of the swollen river he had just crossed:
One was tempted to see the same unrest and sleeplessness in all nature, from the night darkness to the iron slabs, the crosses on the tombs and the trees under which the people were moving to and fro. But nowhere was the excitement and restlessness so marked as in the church. An unceasing struggle was going on in the entrance between the inflowing stream and the outflowing stream. Some were going in, others going out and soon coming back again to stand still for a little and begin moving again. People were scurrying from place to place, lounging about as though they were looking for something. The stream flowed from the entrance all round the church, disturbing even the front rows, where persons of weight and dignity were standing. There could be no thought of concentrated prayer. There were no prayers at all, but a sort of continuous, childishly irresponsible joy, seeking a pretext to break out and vent itself in some movement, even in senseless jostling and shoving.
Juxtaposed “On Easter Eve”: great sadness and great celebration, life and death, light and dark. Chekhov captures common shared experiences. There is nothing lofty, sarcastic, or judgmental in the story. There’s just a truthful and loving portrait – a ‘gleaning’ – of humanity at its most authentic moments.
Enjoy this heart-tug of a story.
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“French painter Jean-François Millet, whose humble manner of living stands in stark contrast to the impact his work had on many artists who succeeded him, saw Godliness and virtue in physical labor. Best known for his paintings of peasants toiling in rural landscapes, and the religious sub-texts that often accompanied them, he turned his back on the academic style of his early artistic education and co-founded the Barbizon school near Fontainbleau in Normandy, France with fellow artist Théodore Rousseau.” Millet Paintings, Bio, Ideas | TheArtStory
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Margarita Mooney Suarez shares about beauty and the liberal arts. (We need more women like her.)
Beauty and the Liberal Arts, with Margarita Mooney Suarez – Teaching in Higher Ed
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Cindy Wity 
Towering Babel-ist in America
February 12, 2012 Leave a comment
I would like to think that the American voter is trying really hard to make a go of it in this oppressive economic climate created by Obama and the Democrats. I would like to think this is the case but I have also come across another kind of voter: the life’s victim-voter.
This victim-voter, because of their constantly reinforced victim status, is basically mush – a supine non-thinker who asks government to bail them out of life’s difficulties, out of life’s pain and losses. Instead of pursuing happiness though hard work this voter demands that government guarantee that their life will be easy and trouble-free. They say to themselves: “Life is hard. If God won’t take away our pain we’ll make government do it.” They may also argue, “Others are doing it why don’t I.”
It is this same victim–voter who continually seeks the balm of government hand-outs. The same victim–voter will instantly and freely give up their liberty for the license to be a perpetual needy victim. And, at the same time, this type of voter will seek to impose government restrictions on others thus fulfilling their need to keep others under control and/or paying the bill.
Now I wonder, do these same voters just want to go about their lives doing their art, taking self-photos to post on Facebook, watching crap TV and movies, surfing the internet, smoking, drinking, tattoo-ing and living a life apart from the having to deal with reality? (I would like to write about other things but our nation is being dismantled by Obama and the progressive movement.)
Now, why is Obama telling you and me what to do? Why is Obama, as announced recently, giving us a compromise regarding contraception? Why is he involved at all in this very personal conversation? He and the Dems need to get the hell out of our lives. They are absolutely intrusive, overreaching and becoming more totalitarian by the minute.
Ask yourself: “Why is Barack Obama involved in my personal stuff? ”
Why does the government need to be intimate with the details of my medical records? Of my earnings? Of my life?
Why is BHO telling me how much I can have?
Why did Barack Obama tell the world that we are not a Christian nation?
Why does Obama pick and choose who wins and who loses? (think car companies, unions and big banks)
Why is Barack Obama trying to create a climate of discontent? A climate of covetousness? Of envy?
Why does Barack Obama conflate Scripture (“to whom much is given, much is required”) with class warfare? (Why, brother Obama, sow discord and disharmony among the brethren? Perhaps you are a wolf in sheep’s clothing!)
Why is AG Eric Holder allowing the Black Panthers a pass on voter intimidation? Or, allowing guns to be sold to drug dealers which in turn kill our own officers?
Why is Michelle Obama telling me what I should eat?
Why did Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats pass a national health care bill and then say “we had to pass the bill to find out what was in the bill?”
Why are dictatorial judges (think 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, San Francisco) ignoring the Constitution in their legal decisions? Why are the rules changing for special interest groups?
Why did Ruth Bader Ginsburg (now in the SCOTUS) say that Egypt should have a different Constitution than the Constitution of the most free and Democratic republic in the world? Does RBG not like the Constitution under which she is to make her rulings? She should recuse herself and retire Jan 2nd, 2013.
Obama and the Dem’s progressive overreach: Health care, contraception, faith, marriage, the family, earnings, investments, inheritance money, what you eat, omnipresent and oppressive regulations and…
“Hope and Change.” These words, verbal promissory notes to the militant Left during the 2008 presidential campaign, are code words replacing “Progressivism and radicalism.” The 2008 election of BHO, as I see it, became the beginning of the end for America, an America once of the people, by the people and for the people. Our country is now being radicalized, being rewired into a dystopian matrix of parallel connections all wired and channeled to a small political ruling class of elites. (Think Obama’s czars. Think the EU – the European Union.)
Why would BHO trash America? Because he and those like him believe they have a better way for you to go – a hopey and changey pablum kind of way – a way we are told that transcends God, the church, race, gender and economics. We are told that this “better way” transcends everyone and everything and for your own good. The inference being here that we the people are too stupid, too inept and out of control (read free) to live our lives without the better “Way.”
The Hope and Change Lie has been told and re-told. Those who voted for Obama in 2008 believed that the world would be a better place (?) if BHO was in the White House. Without a denial of the facts, the effect of his presidency and the Democrat majority Senate has been the destruction of our nation’s economy, an encouragement to blatantly disregard the American Constitution, the torching of American exceptionalism (read flag) and the implementation of a scorched earth ideology that replaces everything in its path with the word “Fair” – fairness as defined by an elite group of people.
You, the voter, get a say for now but soon your say will be silenced by this political ruling class and the increasing murmur of illegal immigrants entering our country. The value of your own interests or concerns, once your own business, will soon be decided by the Obama government. Remember, you are thought to be too stupid to act for your own good. Sadly, I think there are, as I have mentioned above, victim-voters who quickly acquiesce because they don’t want to think about what it takes to live this life. They, instead, want Obama and the Democrats make their life decisions for them.
We are repeatedly told by the Obama-led progressives that we need this change so that we as a nation of diverse people and needs can get along fairly, equally. BHO sees himself as the champion of the little guy. He will, in fact, promote himself as such for the 2012 presidential campaign. But, you should know that he is walking up the ladder of ascendant power on the backs of the little guys.
What I have also seen is that Barack Obama seeks to create strife among the races (race “carding” any dissent; think Al Sharpton, MSNBC and the media); strife among economic groups (class warfare), strife among workers (union and non-union); strife among church and state; strife among people of every stripe and color. He does so in order to promote himself as the gentle, wise old black man (a Morgan Freeman-like narcissistic typecasting) to help the poor embattled nation (now at odds in its Barack Obama-incited civil war). Obama creates the problem and then reveals himself (the “level-headed” One) as the solution to the problem. And, it is this One who wants to bring “peace and harmony” to the nation ala Abe Lincoln (more narcissistic typecasting). Barack Obama is politically motivated to play you and this nation at every level in order to build his tower of Babel overlooking his constructed world. Many let him do it. But why?
What is now truly transcendent is the totalitarianism of Barack Obama and the federal government. And, the over-reach continues: Obama will feign moral high ground when he opines professorially “we (the political elite) know best, we are above the bickering.” This is the Hope and Change Lie re-packaged to encourage supine surrender to the elitist tyranny.
The voter must be ever vigilant against the totalitarianism of sincere motives in the hands of a few. Some of you bought the lie in 2008. It is almost too late. The Lie, with its ring of totalitarian power, must be thrown into the fires of Mount Doom and be forever destroyed.
(I have flavored this post with plenty of metaphors in hopes of giving the reader a bitter taste of what is happening to our liberty under Obama.)
There is hope, though:
And, this video tells it like it is:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXsrajvFGk8&feature=player_embedded#!
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Filed under 2012 election, essay, Life As I See It, Political Commentary, Politics, Progressivism, prose, social commentary Tagged with Daniel Hannan, Media Matters