Are We Never Coming to the Kernel - Giacometti's Small Sculptures

In my mind’s eye, I see Alberto Giacometti sat before a model and a mighty slab of clay. Slowly he pulls away at the slab in search of something true - something irreducible. As he continues to peer at his model he continues to peel away until, like the wonky table shortened by shaving down first one leg then the other and so on, all that is left is one tiny scrap of a grasping at the truth.

Looking at these characteristic often tiny sculptures reminds me of one of the great images in Ibsen’s Peer Gynt. Our hero, now old, has spent a life in search of his true self and finds himself in a field of onions. He begins peeling away at the skin of the vegetable;

“Here's the passenger layer, scanty and thin;-
Next underneath is the gold-digger ego;
the juice is all gone - if it ever had any.”

He keeps on peeling off what in Kabbalistic terms we call Klippot (literally husks) in search of the irreducible truth of his existence - the Ikkar. But to no avail.

“There's a most surprising lot of layers!
Are we never coming to the kernel?
There isn't one! To the innermost bit
It's nothing but layers, smaller and smaller.”

And he throws the layers and, his life’s work, away.

It turns out this isn’t, as a matter of record, how Giacometti, records his intent, in these tiny sculptures. But in these posts, I’m after religious insight, not academic verisimilitude. And certainly, Giacometti did a great deal of searching for truth, and a great deal of peeling back the layers of falsity. I’ve also seen photos of the floor of his studio - there’s a lot of Klippot discarded on the floor. Bear with me.

The problem, as it so often seems to be, is looking in the wrong place. You can’t find irreducible truths of existence in the bones and flesh of humanity. The bones and the flesh of humanity are Klippot in their entirety. Our true essence is other than material. The point is most powerfully made in an awesome passage in Talmud Niddah, where the Rabbis discuss the embryo in the womb; “There are three partners in creation,” they record, “The father, the mother and the Holy Blessed One.” The father and mother provide the white stuff and the red stuff - the flesh and bones - and God provides that which cannot be seen and cannot be touched, “the spirit and soul, the luster of the face, the eye’s sight, the ear’s hearing...” I’m not making a point about evolution or biology, but religion. Religion is a training in bringing attention to the non-material, it’s a space to reflect on what cannot be seen and held by a lump of clay.

Perhaps this is at the heart of Judaism’s wary relationship with sculpture - it’s too easy to present clay as if it does capture a true divine essence - that would be an idol. But since clay can never capture ultimate truths any such presentation would, by necessity, be a deceit. Cue the Marxist theoreticians who would tell us that such presentations are designed by the bourgeoisie to extract obeisance from the workers. But religious insight is not found in clay. At all. It’s found in ‘not-clay.’ To find religious insight you can use clay - for me art is a great pointer in the direction of deep truth, but ultimately we need to transcend all material, corporeal stuff. A person needs to open a space in which to feel the contribution of that third partner in creation - God. 

And it’s not just clay that is a problem.

To open to the possibility of religious insight a person has to put down the phone, stop checking social media, stop talking about the stock market, or the football or the latest cultural offerings. As a faith, we even make the call for a person to leave behind food and drink - for one day - to leave behind, truly, the material plane to which we are so tightly bound. To open to the possibility of ultimacy a person needs to sit, still, in silence or in response to the ineffable miracle of existence. That’s why there is so much sitting and responding to the ineffable in our faith, at this point of the year in particular.

To search for irreducible truths of existence in the material stuff of the world is to be like the drunkard who seeks their lost keys in the pool of light thrown by the streetlamp - since this is the only place where they can see. It doesn’t mean the keys are there. They almost certainly aren’t. 

On the appeal of Fascism - Thoughts on Charlottesville and Deuteronomy

David Runciman, a political scientist at Cambridge, coined the term ‘dictator envy’ to articulate the way in which those who wish to live in a democracy look at a complex problem and wish someone strong and powerful would come along and sort it out. It’s not, said Runciman, that we actually articulate the desire to live in a dictatorship - but we harbour a desire that something or someone could save us the trauma of having to deal with complexity ourselves.

I first came across the phrase ‘dictator envy’ in an 2013 article. I wonder how Runciman reflects on its creation today. It might be that last November the greatest democracy of our age gave in to the desire to have a strong leader ‘just come along and sort it out,’ in the process damning the democratic deficit such a decision left in its wake.

That certainly seems to be the appeal of the Alt-Right/neo-Nazi absurdities witnessed in Charlottesville. ‘They won’t replace us,’ the marchers chanted; prompting liberal voices to pour scorn on the simplicity of their mantra; ‘who’s the “they”?’ ‘Replace as what?’ Scratch the surface of the neo-Nazi rhetoric and it descends into either gross-oversimplification or such a democratic deficit as to terrify anyone who values human equality.

And so to the Torah; ‘If a prophet should appear in your midst, giving you a sign, and the sign, they spoke about, came to pass, if they call you to worship other gods, do not listen to the voice of that prophet.’ (Deuteronomy 13:2-4 abbreviated)
Accept, for a moment, that the Torah’s understanding of, ‘worshipping other gods,’ equates to the greatest of any sin (as Maimonides would wish us to do), and the point becomes clear. When a charismatic leader, or force, appears and seems to capture a moment - don’t listen to that voice when it’s a voice that leads one to a path of sin. Don’t be misled by charisma, apparently accurate prognostication, or even the successes of short-termism. The right and the good thing remains the right and the good thing even if the signs of the moment suggest otherwise.

Now, perhaps, revisit the notion of ‘worshipping other gods.’ An idol is the infinite rendered in finite form, the incomprehensible presented as comprehended. Idols are the simple solutions to the problems of a world we cannot fully understand. This is both the reason idols are wrong - as in doomed to fail, putting aside any moral or faith-based issue with statues of gods - but also the reason idols prove so attractive. Complex solutions to complex problems aren’t as sexy as a simple solution. That doesn’t make the simple solution correct. Indeed it might be that the simple solution can be immediately discounted simply because of its simplicity.

The answer has to be that we train ourselves to resist the appeal of the simple now understood as the idol. The answer, perhaps, lies in allowing ourselves to believe in the radical monotheism of our faith. We believe in a god without form, beyond our ability to control or even comprehend. True monotheism is, or at least, ought to be, a training in an existential humility. Faced with a complex problem, and the problems facing the Neo-Nazis in Charlottesville are the same complex problems that face all us, we need to train ourselves to abstain from the charismatic appeal that calls us towards evil. We need to resist the calls of the false prophet.