Andrzej Sawicki - Clouds over Kamionna

As a small boy I loved to observe the sky. Through the camera obscura of my hands I watched the wanderings, transformations, and disappearances of the clouds against the azure background. Those were my first pictures; a bounteous, invisible hand painted them and it was enough to reach out for them with your sight. They illustrated the stories I used to read in those days, the stories I soon started to make up myself.Through my picture-frame there galloped knights in shining armour, there glided swans, there cantered the unicorn, there stepped tulle-clad princesses, and there flew good fairies (I can't remember any bad ones). The sky was for me in my childhood what the magic lamp is for Proust. For the wonderful world of fairy-tales to appear it was enough to cup your hands. They were the gate into that world, a magic crossing between the profane of every?day life and the sacred world of the fairy-tale. Dichtung and Wahrheit easily intermingled in my childhood; it was easy for me to cross over from one world into the other, and among the many friendly characters I would meet were angels and those who had died. Of course, I never thought at the time of "the sacred" or "the profane", for precisely that would have meant reaching out for the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. In the state of initial innocence I was like the people of the Golden Age, about whom Swedenborg writes that "they had no difficulty in talking with the angels, just as we today talk to each other." I hadn't yet read Swedenborg at the time, neither could I have imagined that I would have to leave my "Golden Age" to find myself in a world of sharp divisions, which has its only source in a mind that lays down theoretical order. I think, though, that the sense of intermingling of the sacred and the profane that my childhood has left me with is not uniquely my treasure, but has been shared by many people throughout the ages and in many lands. These peo?ple were not priests, they were artists.

II. Salisbury is a country town in the South-West of England, the capital of Wiltshire. Above the coloured roof tops of the old houses you can see the spires of the Gothic churches, dom?inated by the biggest one, 122 metres high (a record for Britain), on Salisbury Cathedral, a three-nave basilica built in 1320. Salisbury remembers Roman times but, when you drive out of it north just a dozen or so kilometres, you come up against an even remoter past. The huge bulk of boulder and stone, known as Stonehenge and built between 1900 and 1400 B.C., emerges. In its outer ring thirty massive pillars covered by horizontal blocks form as if a circle of gateways; the inner ring consisting of about 50 smaller stones is arranged in a horseshoe shape. No-one today knows the purpose of this weird and gigantic construction, which gives the impression of being an amphitheatre for the spirits. Many wild or not so wild suggestions have been proposed: that it was a landing-strip for vehicles, that it was a place where the Sun was worshipped, that it was a huge calendar. None of these hypotheses sounds convincing. But you sense that the edifice is one of a kind with the pyramids of Egypt, the Mayan temples, or the Gothic cathedrals, of which there is no dearth here or across the English Channel in France.What is the connection between these superficially so very different constructs? They are all forms built in line with the highest achievements of knowledge and science, and in the best faith, to bring into the world of dense matter the presence of subtle, ideal beings. Are there still any forms in the world that serve this purpose? Of course there are, they are the works of art. I'm talking about all the genuine works of art, not about those that, in view of their subject, are called religious art. A work of art's "sacred" nature is not a result, to my mind, either of its subject or of its location. There have always been disputes on that subject. Epiphanius of Salamis wrote in his letter to the Emperor Theodosius: "What bishop of olden times ever offended Christ by painting Him on a door-hanging?.. Moreover those who depict images of the Saints in various forms, according to their own whims, perpetrate lies."In speaking of religious art we do not have in mind art depicting a religious subject, or church decoration. The essence of sacredness seems to rest in something else: it is a ques?tion of an art that will make visible the invisible, that will incarnate the ideal beings in a material shape, making them accessible for the senses.At any rate, in the seventh century the Church was not convinced that the supernatural was not material. We find this confirmed in the following statement by John, Bishop of Thessaloniki: "As for the Angels and Archangels and the Powers that are above them and, I might add, our souls too, the Universal Church considers them to be spiritual, but not quite as un-body or invisible as you pagans say; the Church is rather of the opinion that they are possessed of subtle bodies of the nature of air, or fire, since it is written, "Who makes the spirits Thy messengers; Thou makes Thy servants a burning fire."Today I think that if we were to abandon the late, Post-Cartesian dualism which requires the strict separation of the spiritual from the material, perhaps it would be easier for us to understand the essence of art and it might be easier for us to tell between pseudo-artistic activities that simulate art, and real art, constituting - just like religion - a channel of com?munication with the world of the Absolute. The symbol for this channel, for the passing between the worlds of the known and the unknown, the natural and the supernatural, visible and invisible, the world of light and of darkness, the world of the sacred and the profane - is the gateway, the entrance, the door. It is no coincidence that this motif is so ubiquitous in the arts of various periods and contexts. A gate ajar discloses a climb into the ideal world. In the sixth century Procopius of Caesarea in De Adificiis wrote about Hagia Sophia, "who?ever enters it to pray immediately understands that this work was accomplished thanks to the grace of God, and not by the power or skills of man; and so the spirit of man soars upwards, towards communion with God, sensing that He cannot be far off, but that He surely must take a pleasure in residing in the place of His choice." The temples of all religions have always been treated as the dwellings of the gods, places of the presence of the supernatural in the midst of matter. Swedenborg says that matter is "saturated with the spirit like a sponge immersed in wine, that becomes saturated with the wine". Other masters of the esoteric dis?ciplines share this conviction, while modern physics has relinquished a view of matter as a concerted mass accessible to our senses. The physicists have a keener awareness than the philosophers that "extra-sensory" does not mean "non-material" and that "spiritual" need not necessarily mean "non-material". This last point, it seems, has been known to the the?ologians, too, for some time, as evidenced by the passage by Bishop John of Thessaloniki cited above.

III. Clouds float over the sky: it is a question or nature. But when my sight catches hold of them in the camera of my cupped palms they become pictures. As Athanasius says, "It is not the material that gives shape and divinity to art, but art that shapes the material and makes it divine." The clouds captured in my hands become my own. My imagination and intelligence join shape and meaning. They are my pictures, not "reproduced by the hands of artists" in my soul, but rather comprehended as a presence in the world. Between my cupped hands I see a phenomenon different from the natural reality. Perhaps it is the one that can be observed between the gateways of Stonehenge, or the one which we are seg?regated from, or connected with, by the iconostasis? The reality of God, about Whom St. Teresa says, "Thou art the beauty containing all the beauties." Is the visible world linked with the invisible only through the person of the Creator, or through the phenomenon of art too? In the twentieth century, bedazzled by the potential of the human mind, art has been reduced to one of many functions of the brain, though admittedly a little analysed one. The painting, the sculpture, the symphony, a can of tomato soup, a bottle drier, a chattering television screen, a water closet have all found themselves next to each other in a collec?tion called "works of art". As a result of a rather inane, and probably unilaterally accepted convention that anything the artist cares to designate as art automatically becomes a work of art. I can't quite understand why the contents of a soup can designated by an artist should be anything else but the originally intended tomato soup. I can't understand why the packaged excrement of one artist should be considered the equivalent of another artist's pieta. It's one of the clouds that has made the mind, so worshipped in our century, fog?bound. So when I am talking about works of art in this paper, I am definitely rejecting this kind of definition. I'm just as critical about a less absurd but never very restrictive approach to art, treating it as a kind of communication, message or "text" composed by the artist and used for communication with the "recipient". Such simplifications leave aside what is most important in art. In all art, regardless of the material used, the fundamental fac?tor is spirituality, without which only imitations of art may be made, and not art itself. There is, and there can be, no art without transcendence.Pawet Florenski writes, "In view of its unavoidable symbolism, every depiction reveals its spiritual content only through the process of our spiritual ascent `from the picture to the orig?inal"... Then and only then does the material sign fill up with the life-giving fluid, there?by, though still inseparable from the original, becoming the first impulse, or one of the first impulses evoked by reality." In this way we may understand art not merely as a "window" on the spiritual world, but as a part of that world, made present through the material sign. A work of art never comes into existence by accident, because it comprises an important constituent of the harmony in the world, a web spun out of spirituality linking man with the Absolute. How close that comes to prayer: the only difference between art and a mystical experience is that the latter does not need a material catalyst. Wiestaw Juszczak once, dur?ing a debate on the sacred, entitled his beautiful contribution "Does mystic art exist". Answering that question in the most laconic way, "Yes, exclusively." Any other human activi?ty that is based on the fashioning of a material should be returned its older and appropriate name of "craft".

IV. The name of "work of art" is ascribed to an object, for ease of conversation. Studying the morphology, properties, and classes of such objects, and arranging them in order according to aesthetic qualities, material, techniques applied, we say that we are conduct?ing studies on art. In the lack of linguistic precision the essential sense has been lost. The work of art is not a synonym for art. Art is revealed through works, to which artists give a form determined by mass, space and time; but the true home of art is beyond our material dimensions. Let us refer again to Florenski; "If the artist has not accomplished his objective, either at all or as regards a particular spectator, and his picture nowhere transcends his own limits, then there can be no question of a work of art." In the same way a few lines on a page are not a poem, neither are a few notes on a stave a symphony. Anyone who approaches a Gothic cathedral from the point of view of building materials, construction, and specific features of the style will not understand it. For a Gothic cathedral is a cosmod?rome from which the human spirit starts on its journey towards the secrets of eternal truth. Many researchers have read assiduously in the volume of the Gothic cathedral. But perhaps Panoffsky and von Simon have best depicted the metaphysical sense of the physical work...It was windy day when we arrived at Amiens. Multi-storey, spherical clouds, that you can encounter only in Northern France, were crossing the sky, hiding and then disclosing the sun again and again. I was sitting in the light-filled, high nave of the Cathedral, observing the light bursting in time again into the edifice. I couldn't help thinking of Pseudo-Dionysius with his metaphysics of light. The sense of beauty and elevation pervading me made me recall St. Bernard of Clairvaux admonishing his monks, "Do not persist in the ignorance of beauty, since otherwise ugliness will subdue you." Perhaps it was here that, with a remarkable dis?tinctness, the common root of the religious experience and of the artistic experience made itself manifest to me. I understood that what was united in reception had a common source, too. The cathedral - the icon - the picture - the gateway between the worlds. An open gate?way, which will not be reached only by those who have stumbled on appearances, who "discern everything separately". Then in Amiens I felt a great surge of happiness coming from the realisation of the unity of the world of religion and art, of their simultaneous roots in the human soul, and of the world's saturation with both these elements. Some time later I experienced another joy when my intuition was vividly expressed by Wiestaw Juszczak: "Art and religion, similar precisely in this respect, are distinct from many other aspects of human thought and activity in that they do not belong to the temporal order because they are sub?ject to the spiritual order."

V. In St. Augusfine?s Confessions we read, "The beautiful works that the soul moulds by the hands of artists have their source in that beauty which is higher than the souls, and for which day and night my soul yearns." In the most superficial interpretation the influence of Platonic ideas might be noted in these words. But I am quite convinced that behind them there is a genuine experience linking religious ecstasy and aesthetic rapture. St. Teresa of Avila also equated God with the supreme beauty. She, too, through mystic communion with God, saw her "inner world like a magnificent, rich palace". Art that does not draw on the depth or the height of spiritual experience is a vacuous game, a pointless fashioning of mat?ter. Malraux says that "in the mediaeval depicted world there is never anything that could not exist, but only what exists by the work of God." But this applies to every authentic, that is not simulated, art in all ages. For the imagination engrossed in matter with its sequence of cause and effect, relentlessly proceeding time, and its laws of physics, loses its power of creating forms for spiritual communication. There is no such thing as the sacred art and the profane art. There is just art and the absence of art.

I am sitting outside the house. I see the dark blue, afforested brow of Kamionna Hill. I view them through the gateways of Stonehenge, or through the rose windows of Chartres or Amiens, or through the iconostasis - through the camera of my cupped hands. The pictures are mine, eternal, fleeting... "When between the sun and the landscape the clouds are set, then the green of the forests is not of so dark a hue, and the differences between the light and the shadows are not so distinctive as regards degree of brightness and darkness." That's what Leonardo wrote about my clouds.