My dear Barlow,
I am having the same aches and pains. We are the same age, after all. But it is a mistake to think that God merely sympathizes with us, God who “passed through every stage of life, restoring to all communion with God.” It is true that Christ died long before our old age, that he never faced senescence. And yet… was he not arthritic in some way on the cross? Those hands on the Isenheim altarpiece… And even the plague sores there, which after all he never actually suffered on his body—except that in one sense he did.
Perhaps we are no older than him; perhaps he aged the first part of a human lifespan in thirty years, the middle part in three years, and the last part in three days or even three hours. His features can be found in the faces of the five- and the twenty-five-year-old, surely, but also of the seventy-five-year-old; also of St. Adam in his 930th year, meditating on his deathbed upon the fruit of his youth.
“No young man believes that he shall ever die,” wrote Hazlitt in 1827, a little more than six years after Keats was no more. “Death, old age, are words without a meaning, that pass by us like the idle air which we regard not.” How otherwise it was for Keats, who had seen and endured plenty of death when he petitioned in Sleep and Poetry, the capstone of his debut volume, “Oh, for ten years, that I may overwhelm / Myself in poesy” (pp. 96-97). This was written in late 1816, published the next spring. Not granted even half this span, he still achieved a remarkably full poetic life, seeming in brief years to “write old” — so Elizabeth Barrett Browning measures the amazing intensity:
By Keats’s soul, the man who never stepped
In gradual progress like another man,
But, turning grandly on his central self,
Ensphered himself in twenty perfect years
And died, not young, – (the life of a long life
Distilled to a mere drop, falling like a tear
Upon the world’s cold cheek to make it burn
For ever;) by that strong excepted soul,
I count it strange, and hard to understand,
That nearly all young poets should write old.Long life distilled into a burning drop is a perfect conceptual biography, beautifully figured by the embrace of parentheses.
But the Serbo-Byzantine frescoes are unquestionably more naturalistic and far more literary. In looking at some of these at Neresi there came back to me the phrase of Bourget, “la végétation touffue de King Lear,” they are so packed with ideas. One presents in another form the theme treated by the painter of the fresco in the little monastery in the gorge; it shows the terribly explicit death of Christ’s body, Joseph of Arimathea is climbing a ladder to take Christ down from the Cross, and his feet as they grip the rungs are the feet of a living man, while Christ’s fect are utterly dead. Another shows an elderly woman lifting a beautiful astonished face at the spectacle of the raising of Lazarus: it pays homage to the ungrudging heart, it declares that a miracle consists of more than a wonderful act, it requires people who are willing to admit that something wonderful has been done. Another Shows an Apostle hastening to the Eucharist, with the speed of a wish.
But there is another which is extraordinary beyond belief because not only does it look like a painting by Blake, it actually illustrates a poem by Blake. It shows the infant Christ being washed by a woman who is a fury. Of that same child, of that same woman, Blake wrote:
And if the Babe is born a boy
He’s given to a Woman Old
Who nails him down upon a rock,
Catches his shrieks in cups of gold.She binds iron thorns around his head,
She pierces both his hands and feet,
She cuts his heart out at his side,
To make it feel both cold and heat.Her fingers number every nerve,
Just as a miser counts his gold;
She lives upon his shrieks and cries,
And she grows young as he grows old.It is all in the fresco at Neresi. The fingers number every nerve of the infant Christ, just as a miser counts his gold; that is spoken of by the tense, tough muscles of her arms, the compulsive fingers, terrible, seen through the waters of the bath as marine tentacles. She is catching his shrieks in cups of gold; that is to say, she is looking down with awe on what she is so freely handling. She is binding iron around his head, she is piercing both his hands and feet, she is cutting his heart out at his side, because she is naming him in her mind the Christ, to whom these things are to happen. It is not possible that that verse and this fresco should not have been the work of the same mind. Yet the verse was written one hundred and fifty years ago by a home-keeping Cockney and the fresco was painted eight hundred years ago by an unknown Slav. Two things which should be together, which illumine cach other, had strayed far apart, only to be joined for a minute or two at rare intervals in the attention of casual visitors. It was to counter this rangy quality in the universe that the little monk had desired to maintain contact between his devotions and their objects. His shining eyes showed a faith that, bidden, would have happily accepted more exacting tasks.