Portrait as Medieval Carvings

  It is of course almost a cliché to say that the joy of medieval carvings lies in the way that they blend the profound and the profane. - An image of heaven, with celestial trumpets and a benevolent God, is juxtaposed with some lewd image of the devil doing something he should not over a half hidden organ. The holy and the base are juxtaposed and run together. One can spin all kinds of logics about such images (ideas abut a God who created a beautifully and yet painfully flawed world, or a social order that was so immovable or…); but in their theme of religious devotion there is something rather appropriate about such diverse images and sculptures being somehow caught up in the ritual of transubstantiation. That ritual, where the blood and flesh of God really appear in the holy communion – is one of those rituals, at once beautiful and profound and on the other ridiculous. To claim a real presence of God was to open up the chance that God himself might be mocked if the host was mistreated or allow other faiths (the Hussites or the Cathars and eventually the Protestants) to mock the one true religion. To bring in something beyond the world was then to risk opening up the chance that that which broke through might be rejected as nonsense or as merely a lewd idiocy or a lump of verbiage or empty lust.

  This is of course the problem that the Catholic Church very much finds itself within currently. The Church assumed that years of enforcing celibacy on the priesthood gave (on of course no scriptural authority) it the moral high ground to wage a war against modernity (and even more other faiths). It somehow was different it insisted, it was somehow special. The trouble was then that its priests ended up as a self-selecting group: namely that group who were happy to do without sex for their lives. Such a group no doubt included the saintly (whatever that might mean), and those who really could do without sex - and yet it also necessarily included those whose relationship with their own sexuality was actually rather complex and twisted: That is those who might have a very good reason for renouncing their desire and wanting to call on God and the power of an orthodoxy to fight the insipid lusts inside of themselves. This last battle was then one that the Church recognised so very well (as it was surely an allegory for their entire faith), and so such individuals were supported. And if they fell, often protected. Their struggles were seen as somehow special. A move that is only possible if one forgets those children, the boys and girls they abused. A forgetting that was no doubt all the more necessary because it went right to the heart of the other feature of the Catholic Church, its authoritarian nature. To question the relationship of a priest to children was to let some third party (or even the state) into the most intimate and important of relationships – the very foundingstone of the priest’s authority – his ability to wield respect in the neighbourhood. The result of course was that the Church endlessly brought individuals into temptation. It necessarily selected some of those most likely to be tempted by underage sex and then placed them into a role where that sex was possible and within the one organization that might hide it (in the name of fallen humanity, and to guard the sanctity of the priesthood). The result is then the current worldwide scandal, of a church which discovered far too late, that not only are its priests fallible, but that they are also lustful and manipulative; - And that even more than that, that open-ended redeeming is a problematic creed, as those who know that they can be redeemed if they only roll their eyes and say their Hail Marys, or feel guilt in the act, have no real incentive for not sinning. 

  The power of one’s own personal redemption very easily becomes hellfire for others. As the very act of allowing one mind to claim the transcendental allows all kinds of other poisons. Poisons that arise when individuals exploit the transcendental for their own purposes, or even confuse its nature for their own. Or when their power, their position, opens up within them also a new third eye of lusts and deception, an eye that then pollutes that power. The exchange that allows the world beyond, into this world, is one that always risks that beyond, which might never be the same again, as it mingles with the stuffs and desire of the flesh.

  It is surely this same very basic drama that is being played out again and again in the current election campaign, as politicians traipse around the country having coffee and shaking hands with ‘normal people’. In a thousand fractured conversations and odd awkward moments, the power of the transcendental is conjured before our eyes and placed at risk. And yet in this case the transcendental is of the oddest of kinds. Its roots lie in the double-headed power which a politician wields. Firstly there are the formal powers of the state to do this or that, make this or that law, have an effect (or claim to) on someone’s life. Politicians claim (and no doubt do) that they matter – that they make a difference to our lives. They become then a part of our mental furniture. This leads to the second power which the politician wields, the power of celebrity - to be recognised and to feel like they are already a part of our minds. The face, the mannerisms, are then already known to us. These are people who we have thought about, agreed with, and argued with - in our minds at least.

  Politicians transfigure the everyday relations of friends, family and work colleagues. They are individuals who do not know us, and yet whom we feel we already (in some sense) know, and who are always having an influence upon our lives. - Individuals who are caught up in the glamour and ritual of some kind of power. This might be a power that one rejects or wants to ridicule or dismiss, and yet as a power, remains something very real for us all. And yet this feeling is of course within a democracy an odd one. For this is the feeling which ought to be given to kings or at least priests. The very point of a democracy is that it comes up from the people is it not? It makes then no sense that politicians who are just like you and I, yet have that power. There is then a part of us that actually resents this transfiguration. We think then that they have no real right to such a power, or such an influence. They are merely after all jumped up commoners. We created them, and might then remove them. Thence the politician’s position in our mind, as our companions in thought, is somewhat tenuous. The logic that created these companions also allowed of itself the right to reject this companionhood, and renounce the politician’s image and humanity. The system then that makes us see the politician as a transcendent figure in all our minds, allows us very cruelly and very absolutely to insult and reject the human. We can hate our politicians and attack them, as we can with few other individuals whom we hardly know. We can be (and demand the right to be) personally cruel, but also prurient towards folk whom we do not know (and in a way that if we were to any other stranger, it would of course get us locked up).

  It is against the backdrop of all these fires of love and hate that the politician’s General Election walkabout occurs. It is the moment that the politicians come face to face with individuals, the moment at which the myth, the figure from afar, falls into people’s lives, and appears to be their friend (or foe) as beefy reality, and not merely airy effect. Its power, and significance is then critical in the modern democracy. For these are moments when the mythic is forced into genuine human relations, relations that then actually decide the fate of politicians. - As we will make all kinds of judgements based on how they handle this most awkward of social situations. Judgements about how they are relating to the power which we have allowed them to form in our minds – the power to transcend normal relations. We come to define then, in these stilted conversations and snatched (and witnessed) moments – exactly how we should view their power within our minds: Should we accept it, and go along with what they say, or reject it out of hand? Both are at stake in this exchange.

  In short this is a kind of auto de fe: a trial through ordeal. The ordeal in this case being that the politicians must attempt to find from God knows where in their personality, enough sanity to appear to be genuine in their hopes and fears for people. (Campaigning involves pretending that your hopes and fears match that of everyone you meet – surely an endemically mad situation?) An ordeal which itself has two distinct aspects. On the one hand (and moving towards the transcendental and the abstract), it humanizes their policies. Policies are of course large-scale abstract creations concerning laws and numbers. They are very removed from everyday life. And yet the policies which one pursues also reflect one’s worries and fears for oneself but also for others. In these day to day exchanges, in old people’s homes or hospitals or occasions in the street, these relations are then laid bare. We see the caring or at least the face behind the policies; Or at least we are invited to believe that we see them! On the other hand the politicians in the living room, provide then the missing link in our minds. – As here is the person we have in us as if they were a friend or foe in the flesh and blood. They are there as a living presence for us all to see and talk to. What was previously transcendental – i.e. the individual known only to us though our own gut reactions, becomes the stuff of here and now, becomes real.

  At which point the medieval logic of the transcendental kicks in. There is a real risk in this miracle. On the plus side, the politician might be up to ‘living the dream’, or perhaps even better, of transforming it. If we look on them and see the good bloke or the individual like ourselves, or our mothers or fathers or whoever, we suddenly feel also pity or compassion or love for them, and modify our view of who and what they are. Being an individual, and placing individuality and humanity at stake is a powerful moment of potential alchemy; the moment that the fleshed out human becomes in their emotions, real and vivid. And yet of course there is a real risk that this does not happen. Here there are real dangers. First and foremost there is always the danger that the politician will not be able to play the difficult social situation in such a way that transforms or transfigures their role within it. If they merely assume that their position in our minds is a natural one and take it for granted (in any way or other) or try to ignore their significance for us (or appear as if it does not really to matter to them) we will invariability assume that they are arrogant, and reject them out of hand. The game of these meetings is then a lie. They have to pretend that their importance for us matters to them as if we were individuals and not merely another tick in the democratic ballot box.

  Secondly there is also the risk that the entire artifice of visibility collapses. The point of the walkabout is that it is visible not only to those who are there, but also to that wider audience, the one peering in from television screens and computers. This wider audience must be made to feel a part in the exchange, but also to not be too aware of all the rehearsal and rigmarole that goes into producing this manufactured inclusion. Once again medieval ritual really understood this. In the most violent of acts, the public execution of individuals, the criminal could defy the system (and their death lead to riots) if they spoke well, and if the gears of power that produced that criminal death were too creaky and too inefficient. Likewise (although in a totally different sense), there is nothing funnier or more destructive to a career then the sight of a politician rehearsing in some way or too obviously appealing to the camera. We want it all to be natural, even as we in demanding the right to look in, make that naturalness actually impossible for all sides.

  Finally, meeting folk is of course always a gamble, they might dash the divine aside, and pollute the heavenly host. That is they might respect the trappings of modern power, or they might mistake the individual of flesh and blood before them, with the image which they have of them in their mind, and behave accordingly – with the proverbial Prescott punch, actual or verbal. To be out and about is then to be a focus for all the feelings that one has probably rather unwittingly created in a thousand breasts, feelings that can always boil over and react. The politician’s own reactions are then judged according to how they handle such a situation (and endless tired jokes and laboured allegories drawn). Politicians are asked for so much as they go about their day to day affairs, where individuals treat them not as common folk, but always as something ‘other’ – something peculiar; a peculiarity though, that cannot speak its name, and in which the rules of the game demand the politician themselves ignores as they understand.

  The game of politics in a world which is all too televisual is little more than a living medieval relief. Endless characters of the blessed and divine are placed before our somewhat startled gaze, and we are demanded to judge between them as we choose then not policy or fools or leaders, so much as between moments of transfiguration, moments of character where something very other tumbles into being and becomes constellated as a reality. Election campaigns are therefore as much as anything else the fabric within which these living sculptures are fashioned, for our delight or for our damnation.