``..I'm not sure your "secularism" necessarily sees the crucifix in a way my "atheism" can't comprehend. I may have had a very unorthodox Christian training,..'' Catherine Driscoll
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Secularism, atheism, non-belief or disbelief... somewhere in there. I had a traditional exposure. I wouldn't call it training, quite. As a kid I tried to fantasize my way through some of it. But it didn't work. I could engage or play back or tell myself or imagine, that is fill in with images some stories and ideas, but mostly they were awkward, didn't make sense, or were too strange, even as pretend. The experience was something like trying to make sense out of a foreign language (maybe because some of this was presented in a foreign language?). There was something nasty or ugly or not-nice about the whole package. Maybe it wasn't consumer friendly---a pretty toy that bites your finger?
``..Want to talk about symbolizing virginity in Christian art and I'm your girl. I've only seriously thought about the exposure of genitals in relation to Madonna+Child images -- her breast, his penis, that kind of thing...''
That's another one of those strangenesses. What's the virginity angle? I had already decided the whole thing was bullshit and a kind of mean spirited bullshit at that---before I even grasp what virginity was.
I got the don't beat-off message, but oddly or tellingly, that wasn't linked in my mind with virginity. The Christian package was collapsing as anything to be interested in at exactly the same time as sex was beginning to loom in my mind. When I finally figured out what a virgin was, it made absolutely no sense at all. Why? I couldn't answer that question. Why worry about that kind of thing so much? Well, naturally I was, how shall I put it, denying the redeeming features of my faith in every filthy act I could imagine, so naturally the idea of going straight to hell for all that was absolutely out of the question.
I think I would rate Michaelangelo's Madonna and Child among the most sensual of all that period's sculpture. Right up there with Donatello's David. The reason is the plasticity of the flesh and cloth. The high finish and plasticity combined as a quality became enhanced in later work by others and turned into a mannerism by Bellini I think(?).
But symbolizing virginity is a difficult thing to do. I mean how to you show, what is not? How do you depict what hasn't happened? This is one of those mysteries. The kids in Mexico were very hung up on this issue, but I missed the full brunt of that because we moved back to the states just in time. In Mexico, worship of the Virgin was almost an independent thing from regular Church, but I wasn't old enough and didn't stay long enough to really get what was going on. It was as if women, especially old women had a god of their own. It is hard to remember without too much later overlay.
More later, gotta go to work
Chuck Grimes