1402
Eclipses are a time for surrender to serendipity. But eclipses are also empirical, and completely predictable. It is what happens in the context of them that is serendipitous. (8/2017)
Digital gleanings on pilgrimages on the eve of the total eclipse 4/8/2024:
Back in June of 2021 I had listened to a talk by Rupert Sheldrake about pilgrimages. He was saying that tourism is the new form of pilgrimage. A lot of well-meaning people that go to various places either as a pilgrim or as a tourist must realize that there are things in that location that they might not agree with but go because of its numinous effect, or simply as a bucket-list event. People visit the Alamo for different reasons based on the various myths that are woven into its history, People make pilgrimages there because it is somehow sacred, laying flowers for those that died and not fully knowing why. The idea of going on pilgrimages, either for secular or spiritual reasons, is a "vibe", but is it a true vibe, and if you really learned what went on there would the vibe change? [Interesting that the Alamo will be a total eclipse location].
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From Brian Eno diary: "Meanwhile, on the religious news this morning - which everyone should listen to if they want to glimpse the far horizons of human nuttiness - an item saying that the Iranians are now claiming that the sighting at Fatima was actually of Fatima - who is apparently a Muslim saint. There is now an international incident brewing because the Portuguese government is refusing visas to Arabs anxious to make pilgrimage to the place."
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The scene about the Highway 61 album cover—People are wont to suspect that there is a secret code or message that’s being given to them (the God idea— the Virgin Mary’s image on a moldy grilled cheese sandwich); ironic that “freedom” was found in Greenwich Village, defined through freedom in art, sexuality and culture, in marked contrast to the country’s current definition of freedom.
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Diary entry 4/23/2005: There’s a water stain on the concrete wall at the Fullerton Avenue underpass that people have been flocking to because it resembles the Virgin Mary. Some people think it looks like a woman with a veil. (We see what we believe what we should see, or that things up here before us as being suffused with meaning, i.e. there are no random events). But why would the”Virgin Mary” want to depict herself as seepage--or even on a grilled cheese sandwich? I don’t think she gives herself enough credit.
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"With Pollock and Koons, albeit in obviously different ways, we are on the threshold of returning to an art “made without hands,” a phenomenon known since antiquity as acheiropoieton. It is a medieval Greek word defining several categories of images or signs appearing without human intervention. Considered miraculous events, all have been subjects of veneration at different times. An early example is cited in the Old Testament (Daniel 5) when, suddenly, an ominous warning appeared on the palace wall during a great banquet given by the sacrilegious King Belshazzar. The inscription was “written” by a disembodied hand, a non-human manifestation that struck terror in the assembled company. Of such otherworldly occurrences, by far the most renowned is “Veronica’s Veil,” represented in countless versions from early medieval times. The story of the female saint is well known: she followed Christ on the way to Calvary, providing comfort by wiping His blood- and sweat-stained face with a cloth on which His likeness was miraculously transferred. The tale does not appear in the canonical Gospels but is a composite of apocryphal texts known as the “Acts of Pilate.” The saint’s very name has been said to be a fictitious construct of “Vera” and “Ikon” (True Image), also known in Italy as “Volto Santo” (Holy Face), venerated as Christ’s “portrait.” https://newcriterion.com/issues/2020/12/acheiropoieta
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Possibly the most famous and controversial acheiropoieton is the so-called “Shroud of Turin.” A fifteen-by-four-foot length of flax fiber textile woven in a herringbone pattern, it bears a faint but quite recognizable double image of a naked man. The ghostly figure has been seen as visual testimony of Christ’s likeness in burial. There is a first mention of the puzzling relic in France in 1354, after which it eventually came into the possession of the Dukes of Savoy. Whether the holy cloth enriched the spiritual life of Turin and its ruling dynasty is uncertain. It surely contributed significantly to the history of European Baroque architecture, for, in 1688, Duke Charles Emmanuel II of Savoy commissioned the renowned architect Guarino Guarini to build a suitable sanctuary for the precious Santissima Sindone (Most Holy Shroud). The result was an unrivaled masterwork, still universally admired for the complexity of the building’s geometry, ingenious fenestration, and innovative use of materials. It connects directly to Turin’s royal palace and, until relatively recently, was still under the jurisdiction of the Savoy family. https://newcriterion.com/issues/2020/12/acheiropoieta
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4/2/2005, Saturday: Pope John Paul II dies. Massive pilgrimage to Rome. His death now eclipses the Terri Schiavo case. Dynaxiom: When you see the long view, it helps you decide whether you believe in God or not.
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In the future, we would ideally be more conscious travelers – aware that we were on a search for places that could deliver psychological virtues like ‘calm’ or ‘perspective,’ ‘sensuality’ or ‘rigour’. A visitor to Monument Valley wouldn’t just be in it for a bit of undefined 'adventure', something to enjoy and then gradually forget about two weeks later; travelling to the place would be an occasion fundamentally to reorient one's personality. It would be the call-to-arms to become a different person, an 8,000 mile, £3,000 secular pilgrimage that would be properly anchored around a piece of profound character development. http://www.theschooloflife.com/blog/2014/08/travel-as-therapy-an-introduction/
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Wiseman’s superbly analytical documentary provides a living illustration, in images and sounds, of what Jean-Luc Godard is waving goodbye to in his new film, “Goodbye to Language.” Docents deliver well-meaning, knowledgeable, witty, enthusiastic pronouncements to viewers who stand or sit in a state of stunned passivity—or who wear headphones and zone out to the museum’s recorded tour. Anyone who has made a long-awaited pilgrimage to an exhibit or a room in a museum only to find the room filled with viewers listening to a guide whose talk—for all its knowledge and enthusiasm—fills the room even more and impedes the desired concentration and contemplation will find “National Gallery” as much of a trial as I did. Much of the movie’s three-hour running time is filled with such discourse. The resulting exaltation of the interesting, of anecdotal curiosity and secondary knowledge, makes me want to run and see people running. http://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/frederick-wisemans-relentless-museum-talk
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Wanderlust, p. 216: the street is democracies greatest arena, the place where ordinary people can speak, and segregated by walls, unmediated by those with more power. It’s not a coincidence that media and mediate have the same route, direct political action in real public space may be the only way to engage in on mediated communication with strangers, as well as a way to reach media audiences by literally making news.… Public marches mingle the language of the pilgrimage, and which one walks to demonstrate ones commitment.
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Billy Gibbons on ZZ Top's LaGrange: "I think that it would be safe to say the unspoken rite of passage for most Texas guys was to make a pilgrimage to LaGrange...if you were asked if you've been to LaGrange we know where and what you were going to do in LaGrange but the song came together we had this nice Boogie beat believe it or not one of The Inspirations came from Buddy Holly who had a big hit with Peggy Sue..the lyrics of LaGrange it says there's a rumor spreading around in that Texas town about that Shack outside LaGrange and I hear it's right most every night but I might be mistaken..."
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We are also honored with a useful section on “redemptive fatigue”—the soul-cleansing result of pilgrimages and other acts of penance, undertaken either barefoot or in shoes that were, as Vigarello says, “usually made of one piece of leather.” You have to admire the Count of Flanders, Guy of Dampierre, who died in 1305; skillfully covering his bets, he left the huge sum of eight thousand pounds in his will to anyone who would walk to the Holy Land on his behalf. All of the shriving and none of the blisters. Job done.
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Through pilgrimage, cathedrals were great engines of mobility. An astonishing 100,000 pilgrims came to Canterbury in 1171, inspired by the murder of Thomas Becket the year before. As Wells notes, the mobility these buildings inspired wasn’t merely temporal. They were built to embody the celestial city itself whilst also transporting the faithful towards it. Moreover, pilgrims also made cathedrals into engines of the divine: St James produced just eight recognised miracles in his first thousand years. Nonetheless, by the first decade of the 12th century his productivity rocketed to one a year. Cathedrals weren’t merely places where God’s grace could be found; they were places where it happened. https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/march-2023/a-window-into-the-medieval-mind/
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The Journey of Transformation: Santiago Campostello pilgrimage routes--a pilgrimage is a difficult journey undertaken with intention. There can be a "pilgrimage of the soul", a spiritual "Wizard of Oz".
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If an eclipse was an event in Sebald's The Rings Of Saturn it would have been in the form of a daydream. Eclipses are in fact a brief "daydream". It is a completely empirical coincidence imbued with the idea of an inflection point for your own life and/or the collective.
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Diary entry 1/20/2009: Obama inauguration. 2 million people make pilgrimage to the National Mall to witness history. At this point you are always reminded of the arc of the civil rights movement--from point A to this point B, but other milestones are approaching.
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Art Pilgrimage: Can you imagine experiencing a total eclipse at Roden Crater, Lightning Field, or Spiral Jetty, or even in Marfa Texas? They are "shrines" to which a lucky few can make pilgrimages.
From Marfa, pp. 75-79: Marfa is also a site of pilgrimage for some. A pilgrimage is defined as "some form of deliberate travel to a far place intimately associated with the deepest, most cherished axiomatic values of the traveler."14 Traditionally, pilgrimage refers to a spiritual quest, but secular pilgrimages can follow the same structure as traditional religious ones. A religious pilgrimage is sacred only because its followers have previously defined the destination or journey as sacred. Hence, any journey can be defined as a pilgrimage, depend-ing on how the traveler views the destination. To some travelers to Marfa, the place has a sacred element, whether it's the sacredness of the art found at the Chinati Foundation or the sacredness of the landscape. The focus of a pilgrimage may often be on the journey itself and not necessarily the destination. The longer and perhaps harder the journey, the more rewarding the trip becomes.
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On Relics Of Power
Since the Middle Ages, Christian relics have been destinations of pilgrimage, and they remain objects of veneration. Being near or – better still – touching objects related to a sacred person was and is believed to carry merit, or even to have miraculous effects. Most famous perhaps is the Shroud of Turin, a linen cloth with an image in negative of Jesus. Despite the fact that all evidence indicates that it is a 14th-century forgery, and its lack of official recognition by Vatican officials, the shroud is honoured by millions of devotees during short periods on display. Other relics alleged to help the modern-day believer relate to Jesus are fragments or nails of the ‘True Cross’, objects containing metal from these nails, or the seamless garment of Christ, claimed to be the possession of both the Cathedral of Trier and the parish church of Argenteuil in France.
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Rings Of Saturn, p. 159
Dunwich, with its towers and many thousand souls, has dissolved into water, sand and thin air. If you look out from the cliff-top across the sea towards where the town must once have been, you can sense the immense power of emptiness. Perhaps it was for this reason that Dunwich became a place of pilgrimage for melancholy poets in the Victorian age. Algernon Charles Swinburne, for instance, went there on several occasions in the 1870s with his companion Theodore Watts-Dunton, whenever the excitement of London literary life threatened to overtax his nerves, which had been hypersensitive since his early childhood.
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Architecture Pilgrimages
The site of the Eames House, one of the most famous houses in Los Angeles, has been open to visitors since 2005. Charles and Ray Eames were perhaps best known for their eponymous chair and other furniture, but in the architectural world, their house, otherwise known as Case Study House 8, is singular. Visiting the home, just off a bluff overlooking the ocean in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles, feels like making a pilgrimage.
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More than 23,000 people signed an online petition to have the piece preserved in its current, profanely post-Giménez form. In a more or less textbook illustration of postmodern irony, the Church of the Face-palm Fresco became a site of tourist pilgrimage, a sacred location beyond the event horizon where ridicule becomes veneration. “The truth,” as one local small-business owner put it in a television-news interview, “is that we should be thanking her because of how much it has helped catering trade in the town. We were having economic problems, and now, thanks to this woman, we are recovering.” https://medium.com/failure-inc/27e5a6447f55
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GP I’m fascinated by the idea of pilgrimage, again going back to that idea that in a virtual world you want to experience the real thing. I think pilgrimage is more popular now than ever, whether people know it or not. When I rocked up at Santiago de Compostela on my bike, they gave me a form and it said, “Is your purpose spiritual, cultural or sport?” If you put “spiritual”, you got a really elaborate certificate, but I put cultural and sport so I got a much cheaper, more prosaic one. I loved the fact that it was so banal.
BE If you’re making a new place of pilgrimage, how do you make it seductive enough for people to want to go and spend time there? What do you call upon if you haven’t got religion?
GP I think one of the things people always do is have their photograph taken in front of something now. You’ve got to kind of think about what is realistic behaviour for modern people. When we were on the road to Santiago, I saw loads of people who were more likely to be there because of Paulo Coelho’s book than the Bible. I said, “I bet when we get there, you can get a bong with a Santiago St James shell on it” – the logo –and you could. Increasingly, contemporary art overlaps so much with religion. If you look at all the art centres being built over the past 20 years in Britain, they’re all trying in a way to build pilgrimage sites so they can get the tourists in. It’s a good tourist dollar, in a middle-class, organic-quiche-eating way.
BE But so many of the things we like doing really fall under the umbrella of surrender. That’s sort of what a pilgrimage is, isn’t it? We like putting ourselves into situations where we let go of some control and we’re swept along by something. You’re told what to do and you’re told that when you get there – or in the process – something will happen to you. If you think of sex, drugs, art, religion, they all actually offer you the chance to be taken over, or to let go. http://www.newstatesman.com/2013/10/internet-has-taught-us-we-are-all-perverts
