Poetry and Modernity

“Any civilization or culture is itself a vast dynamic interpretation or, we could even say, a vast dynamic work of art.”

One of my earliest memories of an image painted by Hieronymus Bosch, the influential fifteenth-century Dutch painter, was the paperback cover of Jerzy Kosinski’s novel The Painted Bird.  The cover consisted of a detail from the central panel of Bosch’s The Last Judgment: a hooded bird’s head on a blue man’s body on crutches striding purposefully, while carrying a basket on his back. Out of the basket pokes a young man’s head and a dark-skinned demonic creature. I never felt much need to try to analyze or explicate this uncanny image; all I know is that it resonated with my reading of the novel, and it has resonated in some part of my mind ever since.

In more recent years, I find myself turning more and more to the imagery of Bosch and other artists from around his time, including Pieter Bruegel and Albrecht Dürer. There are probably many reasons for this, not the least of which is my own evolving understanding of the nature of modern society and modern thinking. Far from finding Christian imagery and mythology irrelevant, I find them increasingly relevant for understanding who we are—and how the modern world works.

In our “Age of Unbelief,” we like to think of our education and skepticism as a kind of prophylaxis against the dogmas of traditional belief systems, but, in recent years in particular, we frequently hear the language of religious conflict. When dealing with our own cultural conflicts, we find ourselves resorting to the language of our tortured Christian past: “heretic,” “orthodoxy,” “inquisition,” and “persecution,” as if we are reliving a past we have largely forgotten. Paradoxically, the more fervently we, secular humans, denounce our Christian heritage as superstition and dogma, the more we seem to be in its grip. Roberto Calasso, a great interpreter of the world’s great myths and religions, goes a step further:

“Secular society is the one that turns out to be less secular than any other, because secularity, as soon as it extends to everything, assumes within itself those hallucinatory, phantasmal, and delirious characteristics [found] in religions in general.”