FREEING ‘SACRED’ FROM RELIGION
For clarity I want to offer a definition, perhaps just for this essay. The definition lives outside of the Oxford Dictionary.
For the word ‘Sacred’ my thesaurus offers: ‘blessed’, ‘consecrated’, ‘hallowed’, ‘revered,’ ‘sacrosanct’ and the antonym ‘secular’. Not much breath for anything outside of religion.
A SECULAR SACREDNESS
I claim the use of the word ‘sacred’ in a secular space where our responses to beauty are found. This idea of the sacred deserves a powerful non-religious sense in which it addresses concerns about human experiences: those which are profound, deep, rich, truthful, relevant, meaningful and transformational; not religious. It not only addresses but encourages and mends our better instincts for kindness, love and peacefulness, without religious bunkum* assigned to the word.
For me, the creation and gift of beauty opens doors of truths about meaningful human experiences, revealing new perceptions and greater sensitivities - revelations which can only be described as sacred.
This kind of experience underlines our common humanity and leads us to a better moral space. This is why beauty and therefore the arts are so vitally important to children as they develop and to society as a whole.
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FASCISM AND THE ARTS
If the above is true, it exposes why the rising tide of fascism, religious manias, ultra-conservatism and simple-minded pragmatism across the world, drains nations funding for the arts, reduces or eradicates the arts from their school’s teaching programmes, arrests poets and rails against artist’s anti-religious or anti-establishment attitudes.
Of course the establishment despise the arts and artists** because their religious leaders and their pet intellectuals tell them that the arts are inherently dangerous to social stability. And they are right, because beauty touches the best in us, underlining our shared humanity. This leads invariably to the notion that we should live in a world without corporate and political corruption, rather in a world of equality, of total justice, with empathy, kindness and concern for our children and the wellbeing of the planet; a world in which the state and the economic system serves the people rather that the people serving the state and the corporations.
Further and even more threatening, this nexus of culture-creativity-the arts-beauty- truth-and this sacred human experience, is magical, another threat to the establishment.
MYSTERY
Art and its sacred centre are not quantifiable, nor can they be sufficiently psychoanalysed nor sociologically defined. When the natural sciences usurped magician’s knowledge and influence in society, when the newly arising European nation states decided to use the church to destroy the wise women (supposed witches), their efforts were to drive all mystery out of society***, to make all things quantifiable and therefore taxable by their bureaucrats, lawyers and doctors. They drove mystery to the hinterlands of our minds where the irrational may lurk. Indeed, the very fact that irrationality is at the heart of the poetic process means it is unquantifiable and also means in its unknowableness it may offer people hope for a better world, an offer truly threatening to the established order.
Poets and other artists know that only carefully crafted and inspired words and images can expose the sparks that give meaning to the nature of life and love. They cannot be reduced or defined by diagrams, management schedules, rules or Ai digital configurations. Their ‘yes/no’, ‘one/zero’, ‘black or white’ categorising cannot account for the myriad particular sparks that give rise from the deep history of human experience. It is a place of intuition, unaccountable to Ai or bureaucracies. These sparks are filled with awe – the sense that somehow the artist has been able to touch our deepest needs to give meaning to our lives.
PETER BROOK
Peter Brook, one of the great innovator/directors of 20th century European theatre wrote, “When man loses his sense of awe, life loses its meaning…”
I have come to realise over the years that when I photograph, I have been searching for that spark of being that defines the moment and its meaning in a specific lifeful way. This also means that when photographing I cannot simply shoot shoot shoot because that leads to recording generalisations rather than (what I have written of before) the Decisive Moment. At that moment when my mind says ‘now, hit the trigger’, perhaps my intellectual processes play a role along with experience, but for certain, I know something instinctual has occurred.
NOTES
*religious bunkum: for centuries, ever since religion and religious institutions became enmeshed in the power structures of rulers and states, it has attempted to control the poor and uneducated peasants and workers to accept their horrible/underpaid/endlessly exploited conditions on earth as a stage towards entering a beautiful afterlife. It is no coincidence that the religious leaders were and are so often from the landowner and merchant’s classes, sons and brothers to the inherited wealthy.
Or, as A.C.Grayling referred to it as, “an affliction in human affairs…”
** And of course they will embrace their entertainers, decorators as proper manifestations of their culture.
*** in Russia, when Boris Ratnikov, the head of the FSB, the secret service, stated that he knew the then American Secretary of State, Madeline Albright believed Siberia should not belong to Russia, when asked for proof he stated that one of his agents had read Albrights mind and intercepted her thoughts. Magic has not been totally driven from use by ruling elites.