The Iconography of my Window

It’s snowing tonight: white glimmers piecing off from a crumbling white sky. If you look closely, and for long enough, your eyes go beyond the flakes in the lamplight and pass into the gray beyond, where you become more and more receptive. You feel yourself changing.

I once participated in a guided meditation that went something like this: Start with your feet. Imagine them bursting into flame. The flame grows hotter and hotter, changing colors as it heats from orange to red to blue and finally to white as the blaze becomes hotter than fire is capable of becoming, transcending itself, passing brightly through the threshold. The conflagration then reaches from your feet to your abdomen and spreads upwards throughout your body until your whole self is a single white flame, immaculate. And now the space beyond your body catches fire as well. And the process repeats itself. It’s as if the world is falling into you, and, through your gaze, is converted also into a pure white inferno. All the universe is white. It empties.

The idea behind icon painting is that the image being depicted isn’t merely a likeness of something else and thereby intended to make the reality and the majesty of the original object present. Icon painting, in the words of Ivan Illich, “is understood as a threshold between two incommensurable worlds, from the perishable and provisional to the imperishable and eternal; from the world of death into the world of life.” As such, unlike the secular image, the religious icon takes on a peculiar sacredness all its own, one that isn’t cast off from another source but which exists within the image itself, as a vision of invisibility. The icon isn’t merely an imitation or copy or even an expression of sacredness but something through which the eternal light radiates directly into the viewer’s eye, an image both borne and conveyed by intrinsic holiness, which holds life and death in its expression.

Western art, by contrast, in attempting “to hold the mirror up to nature,” assumes a certain inevitable poverty in the image. No matter how precisely the image is depicted, it remains a copy, an inferior to the original. And after nature itself, the original original, is successfully converted through the forces of civilization into a commodity, into yet another representation, another image—when nature itself becomes a mere embodiment of its pseudo essence, of the ‘spirit’ it contains, then the entire world becomes a prison from which we futilely struggle to escape. Nothing we see is whole and separable, and the world of dearth that imprisons us, becomes, like suicide as a means of escaping one's fear of death, our hope for salvation. We look to the spectacle to lead us away from the spectacle.

In such a world, the very essence of self implies a neediness. The self becomes a scarcity—something with tangible and real needs and that begs for fulfillment. The world becomes a problem that has to be solved, except that to solve it would destroy creation, because the world can’t exist except as a problem. One helps one’s neighbor because one’s neighbor has needs that one can fulfill, weaknesses that can be compensated for, and the self looks to the outer world to grow not more complete (that’s impossible in a world of duplicating selves) but larger and more resolved, more alien and more invincible. Since everything mirrors something else, satisfaction can never be achieved, even in a world exclusively dedicated to need fulfillment. The original, which is itself a copy, forever reaches back to the form that gave it birth, a form that doesn’t exist. Consequently, our ‘real’ faces are worn like masks while we wait for the right actual mask to be covered by, and we look for love the same way that we look for a new television—by shopping. Relationships become exchanges. Once the world has been reified—once everything becomes a symbol for something else, and once thought (“I think therefore I am”) and the contingent idea of the mind as ruler and creator, becomes the foundation of existence, then the whole world is unified, with only one reality. Everything is borne of the one great law, product of the great mind, and subsequently, as shards reflecting shards, the other, mediated to us by specialists, loses her otherness. No one, including one’s self, is real; one merely symbolizes the real. And the sacred is forever diverted, like endless reflections in opposing mirrors.

The Medieval icon painters never bothered with new techniques such as perspective, the Golden Ratio, or foreshortening techniques, because they weren’t motivated to approximate an outer reality. The simplicity of the image was important because the image was meant to inspire contemplation, a meditative gaze through which a new reality could be entered and explored, and thereby required a certain amount of undefined space and a minimalist formation. The image wasn’t about something, after all. It was the thing itself—and asked not to be interpreted but cherished.

As I stare outside at the snow, I’m thinking about the way Zen Buddhists begin each meditation session with the chiming of a bell: a loud clang that expands and slowly ebbs into silence, empties, like white glowing from out of the darkness and falling again on white, extinguishing itself.

I remember when I was twenty one years old and I had just come back to Utah after a six month long internship in Washington DC. I was forced to stay with my parents until I found a new apartment, and, one night, as I had done throughout my childhood, I pulled the trampoline up next to the glass doors of my bedroom, and I slept outside. But I didn’t enjoy it the way I did as a child. The stars that used to amaze me and keep me awake for hours were no longer so appealing. They were still beautiful, but they were just stars, silent deaf stars that only the right interpretation could make meaningful. They didn’t look back at me.

Twenty years later, as I look out my window and watch the snow fall, I’m learning how to see again.