Skip to main content

Reimagining the sinister left.




A further recovery from a past blog: on reassessing the left-hand side.

"If the soul is looking into eternity with its right eye, the left eye must cease all its undertakings and act as if it were dead," counsels the Theologica Germanica that was published by Martin Luther in 1516.

It was a sentiment with a history as James Hall painstakingly demonstrates in his 'The Sinister Side: How left-right Symbolism shaped Western Art'. The right is robust, righteous and of God's otherworldly part, the left is weak, vulnerable, and sensuously attached to the transient world.

Thus, does Christ die looking to his right, right foot folded over left, with the good thief destined for paradise at his right side, the wound dispatching him plunged into this side, dispatching the redemptive blood into the world to the right...

When He returns in judgment, the saved stand stiffly to attention at his right hand, attendant on heaven, the damned are judged with his left hand that sends them fleeing back into hell, often with the left side of their bodies vulnerably exposed to view: the sides that led them to perdition now the future sight of their torment.

However, if the symbolism were as straightforward as this, one might soon tire of the book: you would get the point and could move on, but life is happily more complex. For one thing slowly, as time proceeds, and of which there have always been intimations, there is a re-evaluation of the 'left' - of the value of the world and of the body - and second, there is the matter of the heart, the center of felt life, that is, inescapably, located on the left. (Aristotle thought this was to compensate for the naturally cold landscape of the left as opposed to the right).

Thus, by the Renaissance there emerges a counter-vailing appreciation of the left: none more so than in the work of Michelangelo. Here Christ finds himself looking to his left, wounded to his left, and companioned by the good thief to his left - the assumption being that if Christ is truly the 'incarnate one' incarnation requires that he penetrate wholly and completely our vulnerability. He must take on the 'left' into his full humanity. The site of our fall must be fallen into by divinity in order for it to be redeemed.

This might suggest that the 'left' is still seen in a wholly negative light but, in fact, it is a witness to a new celebration of embodiment; and, Hall shows how it is accompanied by complex changes in the understanding of love, the relationship between the sexes and the values of mortality.

It is a book that will make you see art with both different and more detailed eyes; and, strikingly reminds you that in history cultures are not at all like our own: most pressingly here (in the Renaissance) by being lived out in grand narratives of shared meaning with many subtle reference points.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age...
13 comments
Read more

Luminous Spaces - the poetry of Olav H. Hauge

Don't give me the whole truth, don't give me the sea for my thirst, don't give me the sky when I ask for light, but give me a glint, a dewy wisp, a mote as the birds bear water-drops from their bathing and the wind a grain of salt. It began with a poem, this poem, in Mark Oakley's 'The Splash of Words: Believing in Poetry' - a wonderful series of meditations on particular poems, one each chapter. The poet is the Norwegian, Olav H. Hague (1908-1994). I immediately ordered, 'Luminous Spaces: Selected Poems & Journals' and was enjoying dipping until, at the weekend, recovering from a stomach bug, I decided to read them through and fell wholeheartedly for a new friend. Hague was born on a farm. His formal education was brought short by a combination of restricted means, an inability to conquer mathematics: and, a voracious diet of reading ranging beyond the confines of any confining curriculum. He went to a horticultural college instead an...
1 comment
Read more

Richard Hauser and the evils of Marx

Richard was a distinguished Austrian sociologist who had contributed to the Wolfenden report that led to the decriminalisation of homosexuality in England, Wales and Scotland in the late 1960's. I was remembering him on the plane today because I saw a reference to his wife, Hephzibah Menuhin, pianist sister of the violinist Yehudi and human rights activist. I met him after responding to an advertisement in the New Society. He lived in a house in Pimlico, a widower, with a clutch of young people, running an ill-defined (for me) social research/action institute, that I visited several times and to which Richard wanted to recruit me. I was never clear as to what my responsibilities might be and resisted co-option. He was, however, extraordinarily charismatic and as a Jew had fled Austria in 1938 not without receiving permanent damage to his hearing, courtesy of Gestapo interrogation. I vividly remember one story he told me that gives you an idea of his character. He was invit...
17 comments
Read more