What We Are Looking At: Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness by Caravaggio.
Michelangelo Merisi, called Caravaggio (Italian, 1571 - 1610), Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness (1604)
Chin Up John
It’s been a long time. I wrote up this piece on Saint John the Baptist back on June 8th, but I wasn’t quite happy with it. I don’t know. But for some reason I just didn’t publish it. It was a mix of too much going on, imposter syndrome, and just not feeling it.
And then, like other certain half completed tasks, it started haunting me. Another failure to add to the growing list - like that farmhouse sink in the basement that maybe would work in the kitchen that I haven’t dealt with since before COVID.
But suddenly I am feeling better about failures. One of my favorite writers, Liz Cook over at Haterade, wrote that It's Okay to Be a Mediocre Cook, coming to the realization that “The best fried okra was never going to be cooked by a haggard Kansas City woman who had consumed nothing that day but a martini and a 16-ounce can of wasabi peas.”
Well here I am a haggard Kansas City man belaboring some art criticism that I do for fun. For FUN, I tell you.
And then another writer I like, Craig Calcaterra, took off on a two week walk across England. You can read about it here. But on about his last day his body failed him, as is the case of those of us who are about 50. Nothing drastic, a strain or something. I feel terrible for him.
It reminded me of a bike ride I took when I was 19. I rode my bicycle about 700 miles. About 1000 miles short of my goal of Tampa Florida. It was an odd failure. I didn’t even know what my goal was. What the hell was I doing on a bicycle on the blue highways of Delaware?
Caravaggio
They say you have to understand the Protestant Reformation and the Counter Reformation (the Catholic reformation as some call it) to understand Caravaggio. But, it seems to me you need to understand that Caravaggio murdered a man in a bar fight, was sentenced to death, fled the city, and died under unclear circumstances.
The man had his failings. And he hung out with a bad crowd. His models were kids from the street. Very Andy Warhol really. Caravaggio was into real people, real suffering and real joy. None of that ideal stuff of Michelangelo. That’s why people seem to think you need to know about the Protestant Reformation - which was a different kind of rejection of the Ideal.
The basic history is that around 1500 you have the peak of Renaissance culture with a rediscovery of Greek philosophy and the “ideal” human form. And the focus on the human ideal bread the liberal notion that we all had access to God. The Catholic priests didn’t like this, because they were no longer the gatekeepers on the relationship with God. That opened the flood gates, and people started getting ideas about new ways to organize society. And there were a lot of wars and burning people at the stake. That was the Protestant reformation. Then the Catholic reformers got going. They wanted a return to sacral experience and ending corruption of the clergy (no more selling forgiveness).
So within this framework of the Church trying to show it’s value to it’s adherents, the church started to commission works that reflected the imperfect human. The suffering human. The human who you didn’t quite understand. Humans that could, through the sacraments, find meaning in their relationship with God.
Now to our man Caravaggio. The man could paint some inner turmoil. I mean look at John, brooding, his thoughts elsewhere, shrouded in darkness. It’s so emo.
What makes Caravaggio historically significant in the art world is that he started painting in the darkness. It is wild to imagine, but up until then, your attention was only supposed to be what the painter put in the light. There was nothing in the dark. Was there no darkness?
The contrasting of dark and light, and of using the shadows to show the feelings of the subject was called Tenebrism. It signaled the beginning of the Italian Baroque style, which was a rebirth of Catholic faith with art that (according to Wikipedia) was meant to overwhelm the emotions.
What We are Looking At is a man going out to the garden to contemplate his fate. Does he foresee his death, his head brought in on a platter? Is he remembering his failures? He is torn, but not between options. Just torn. Like the light and dark that tears apart the image in a jagged line.
Whatever John’s thoughts, the painting takes us to a place of self reflection. There are things in the shadows that need examining. There are things in the darkness that can stay in the dark. There are flaws and reconciliations. There is light and dark.
There are Failures
I enjoy writing these little pieces. I feel like I was going to do one more. But I am not promising anything. Two of my favorite substack writers Liz Cook from Haterade and Jon Weisman of Slayed by Voices both ended up changing what they did on substack. Kind of in the middle of it.
I feel like whenever they publish something, I relish it. But as I write this, it feels like a failure of sorts. Something I want to do more of, but it’s hard. And it’s something that no one really wants to read anyway. A burden all the way around. And nothing anyone says can change how that feels. Even if I know you all like reading these lots of words. Because if you didn’t you would have stopped by now. I hope.
But I think about what I would put in this space if I wasn’t attaching it to works of art. And maybe if I continue to post, that is what I’ll do, just post whatever I want. But I have to admit, as a basic practice, I hate that sort of writing. Just me writing about what is happening in my life, right now. I’m glad to read about YOU, but ME is something else entirely.
So who knows what will happen. Right now, I feel like John, out in the wilderness thinking about things. If he’s like me, he is remembering his failures. And getting his strength back. Onward folks.
“Please, don't confront me with my failures, I had not forgotten them”
The Bike Ride
When I was 19 years old I set off to ride my bike from NYC down to Florida for a family reunion. I had flunked out of University of Colorado's Engineering program and spent the spring at The Catholic Worker House in Denver (It's a homeless shelter, but sort of different). I had a girlfriend I didn't want to get serious with and was hanging out with people I didn't like.
It was time to get away from Colorado, a place I loved, but had come to despise as a tourist attraction for rich people. It was a perfect place for the birth of a tech economy that made pretend that it was a functioning community.
So I drove my bike to visit my sister in The Bronx and she set me off on the side of the New Jersey Turnpike, and I headed for blue highways. An odd detail, but I remember a girl I had met at the University of Colorado asked me, "Aren't you afraid of the New Jersey Devil?"
Looking back on it, I wonder if I was afraid of anything at all? Such a strange place of privilege from which to start. I was generally afraid of property rights, and getting shot by a farmer - or run off the road - but one thing I was not afraid of, was the New Jersey Devil.
It was back before phones and gps and online guides for everything. I just biked south, through a state or federal forest, and put up a little tent in the trees. I would go about 50 miles from dawn until about 11am and then I would start my slow process of finding a place to camp that was free and out of sight. I was basically a homeless kid, on a bike, who had money.
I ate a lot of canned soup that I didn't warm up because I didn't want a fire to attract attention. I went through the Jersey Pine Barrens, down to Cape May, took the ferry to Delaware and camped on the beach. A few times I even paid to stay at a campground with a shower and a fire ring.
I biked through Washington DC and got a hotel in Alexandria (because the people I had hoped to stay with were out of town). I biked with another guy for 2 days. He was doing this in a professional old man manner. That dude had a plan. He also introduced me to the concept of knocking on someone's door to ask to sleep in their yard. This worked to secure us a great spot outside Richmond. I never ended up adopting the practice on my own.
I had to leave him because he liked to spend a leisurely morning. And like I said, I liked to leave at dawn. I would get 50 miles in before breakfast. So I went on. Never even wrote down his name.
It took me about 2 weeks to get down to the Outer Banks of NC. I met a young couple at a campsite and offered to buy them dinner. We grilled fish over the fire with some sort of vegetables cooked in tin foil. And drank wine.
A day or two later, I decided I was done. I don't remember why. Part of it was that I was low on money and didn't really have a way to get more from my parents. So I had to decide, take a bus home now, or use this $100 to make it another 2 weeks.
But it was probably that I was just over it. Over what, I'm not exactly sure. I don't even know why I did it. The obvious answer was some sort of "finding myself" expedition. But I think I knew going in, that I am just not that type of person. I'm not into Zen. I enjoy a nice view, but it doesn't make me sure of a divine creator.
I think maybe I was just looking for an adventure. And I realized that the adventures that would be found riding a bicycle by myself on the blue highways of the American East Coast, were the same adventures that could be found working with homeless people in Denver. It's just life.
So I bought a bus ticket in a military town. Newport News? Virginia Beach? (I just looked it up and they are basically the same town. And it means I had to bike the wrong direction to go get the bus. I think I wrote this all down somewhere, but it was in the days before limitless free cloud storage. So it's in a notebook, maybe. Let's hope.)
The bus people insisted I "pack" my bike. So I wrapped it in my tent rain cover and secured it with lots of packing tape. It put a hole in my rain cover.
So I got on the bus with no money and two days to get back to Kansas City. I remember the bus driver asked if it would be ok to say a prayer. No one objected and he prayed for a safe journey to wherever we were going to switch buses. On the second bus, a guy saw me eyeing his fried chicken. I was accustomed at this point to not eating much. And I might have been more annoyed with eating on the bus than actually wanting to eat it. But when he offered it to me, I gladly ate it. He seemed like an old man. But he was probably 35 years old. I wish I could remember his accent.
After I got back to KC, we were having a family event - I don’t remember the occasion - and my uncle Bill, a psychiatrist, asked me if not making it all the way to Florida was the first time I had ever failed at anything.
It was a patently absurd question. I had just flunked out of school. I had a litany of private mistakes that I hope are common to lots of young people getting from 17-19 years old.
And I think it was a half joke. I certainly laughed at it. But it stung just the same. It was a goal of my own creation - with a purpose that had nothing to do with the planned route. The failure, if there was one, is that I didn't get the next great American Novel out of it. That I realized then, that the story of privileged young white men, just isn't that interesting any more. Fitzgerald, Elliot, Joyce and Salinger be damned.
The failure was much more profound than my uncle or even myself could understand. I spent a year putting weight back on - and it is absolutely still my plan to lose weight again by biking for 2 weeks and only eating cold canned soup. (Maybe it will be the fad diet for the stars?!). Eventually I went to school in NYC. And here we are.
Thanks for reading.
That was very enjoyable Frank, thank you
A couple of months ago, I noticed my folder where I filter save these until I have time to read them had not seen any incoming action, and that made me sad. I've been enjoying learning about the art - it's something I have no experience with. And the bike story was great - I went from high school to college and almost flunked out, saved only by a girl who provided the motivation to get my shit together while I was on academic probation before I failed out. I've been married to the girl for 32 years so that was apparently a good decision. But we went from college to married to kids etc. etc. etc. and I never did anything crazy like even start to ride my bike across the country. Just starting that trip put you in the 1%, the rest of us never even tried.