What is Sin?

18h century parchment by Jekuthiel Sofer

“More sinned against than sinner, “ goes the old expression, but what is sin and what the relationship of the sinner to the sinned? In some ways it sounds a little like the phenomenological notion of intention. The subjective individual can have intention to the object, but inanimate objects have no intention and express no volition. “An immoral act considered to be a transgression against divine law, “ is how sin is defined by the on-line dictionary, but you don’t sin against the self-same table or chair and a table or a chair certainly can't be guilty of any sins. You don’t sin against objects and objects cannot sin against you. You sin against people who possess their own intentions and in so doing are sinning against God, if you happen to believe in one. Thus my intention is to live, but when you decide to kill me, you eradicate my ability to fulfill my goal. The same is true of the biblical injunction about coveting they neighbor’s wife. The neighbor wants to be married and enjoy the company of his wife, but you get in the way of that when you covet and then have the wherewithal to actually commit adultery. “More sinned against than sinner” thus conveys the nuance of two bodies in motion, two individuals who have equal and opposite intentions, one of which is sinful and the other of which may contain sinful elements, but is in the end less sinful. The married man may be guilty of the sin of lust, yet the neighbor who commits adultery with that man’s wife may be deemed even more sinful to the extent that he moves from an idea to an action. Still there's something ambiguous about all of this. After their fall from grace, Adam and Eve, by definition, lived in a state of sin, since they had lost their innocence. Adam and Eve represent mankind as we know it, filled with sin and hiding their nakedness because of their sense of shame. But to quote Orwell in Animal Farm “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” Individual men may seek to prove the notion that they have found grace a la the Protestant ethic that Max Weber talks about. Yet there are no absolutes. It depends from what point of view you are looking and with what intention, when you set out to reach a verdict. Sin is more consonant with relativity theory than Newtonian physics considering its more rigid view of space and time. Jurors are perpetually faced with these kinds of situations. A crime or sin may have been committed, but the person against whom the action took place may have been sinning themselves, as in the case of the wife who in a moment of rage kills her abusive husband. In cases like this jurors must adjudicate who is the sinner and who the one sinned against when the facts are open to differing interpretations.

The Illiteracy

  

The ILLITERACY is the state of mind occupied by all the people in this country who are either functionally or de facto illiterate. Sure there are those unfortunates who really can’t read. However, a good part of this modern nation state communicate freely and express their outrage and fantasies to one another on social media. So they're definitely capable of reading and writing. But the majority of this increasingly large demographic have been deprived of any sense of history. A large proportion have never heard of The New York Public Library, Shakespeare or Beethoven, the Cold War or utopia. Expressions like parliamentary democracy, economy of scale and conspicuous consumption are totally foreign. They have never heard of Pyongyang and hence have no idea that it's the capital of the insular and rogue state of North Korea whose youthful leader Kim Jong-un has made lots of wild threats. They may have heard that Syria is on fire but they don’t know why and they certainly have never heard of Mr. Assad or could care less. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Manhattan Project, Werner von Braun, Einstein and certainly Niels Bohr all fall under their radar. Queen Victoria sounds familiar due to Victoria’s Secret, but no, they never have heard of Nelson Mandela, much less Woodrow Wilson, Lenin, Trotsky, Gandhi or FDR. And no they didn’t read The Catcher in the Rye in high school and they never heard of  “Trane,” John Coltrane that is. They never got polio because they were vaccinated, but they never heard of Jonas Salk and certainly not Alexander Fleming, whose invention of penicillin spared them from infection. Ask a member of the Illiteracy, who is our current Vice President? If they fail ask about earth and what galaxy it’s in and failing that ask, if there is any truth to the fact that it was created in six days (and nights) and that on the seventh God was finished and took a rest.

Inventing Abstraction

"Artist Network Diagram" from Inventing Abstraction

“Abandon all hope, ye who enter here is,” are the lines that adorn Dante’s entrance to Hell. At the entrance to Inventing Abstraction, 1910-1925 at MOMA are the following lines written by Kandinsky in l911, “Must we not then renounce the object altogether, throw it to the winds and instead lay bare the purely abstract?” The curators leave Picasso to answer the question in their commentary accompanying his “Woman with Mandolin,” an exercise in analytic cubism from l911, “There is no abstract art. You always have to begin with something.” Move on in the exhibit to Kandinsky's “Impression III.” The work is offered up as an example of how the great painter, noted for his famous work on abstraction, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, has foresworn the object. However, without being juridical, where would the painting be formally or in terms of so-called “content” without the Schoenberg concert on which it was based? By the way according to the exhibit, abstraction was not invented by a person, but a network and it begins with a family tree emphasizing connectivity. At the top are Alvin Langdon Coburn and Duncan Grant and at the bottom the futurist Marinetti. In between those who are connected to at least 24 others—Picasso, Kandinsky, Stieglitz, Leger—are highlighted in red. It looks a little like a weather map, but has the net effect of defeating the the larger concept being espoused. If everything is interrelated, then every subject has an object on which he or she has gazed. So what, you might ask, is the object of Malevich’s "Suprematist Composition: White on White” (1918)? You might also ask “what is reality?” Perhaps it’s not the nature of the object that was changing but the definition of what an object was a la quantum mechanics and relativity theory. Consider that the so-called invention of abstraction was coeval with Einstein's The Theory of General Relativity which was published in l916. “Duchamp seemed to intuit immediately that the emergence of abstraction spelled the demise of painting as a craft and its rebirth as an idea,” is another of the questionable bit of curatorial commentary that appears during the course of the show. Even accepting the notion that abstraction harbingered the death of the object, this is clearly not the case, unless one accepts the view that action painting was merely an ideology. And who says abstraction was invented in the first place? It’s a dubious art historical premise. History and particularly primitive art is rife with it. Still, Inventing Abstraction is only on view until April 15 and even if an objectionable premise has been the occasion to bring these seminal works together, they are well worth seeing.

Ian McEwan's Unified Theory

If Einstein never succeeded in creating a unified theory, we can take solace that we at least have Ian McEwan. His latest New Yorker story, “Hand on the Shoulder,” (4/30/12) accomplishes just that. The tale told from the vantage point of the present by his protagonist Serena Frome describes how she as a gorgeous young Cambridge student was recruited into British intelligence in her final year. All this information is communicated in one pithy sentence. We then move on to the anatomy of the sexuality of her lover Jeremy Mott. McEwan writes about sexuality like a pathologist doing an autopsy. And right away the MI5 connection and the sex are established. Jeremy is wonderful lover, but never has orgasms. “Did he want to to smack my backside, or have me smack his? Did he want to try on my underwear? This mystery aroused me when I was away from him, and made it al l the harder to stop thinking about him when I was supposed to be concentrating on maths.” Serena eventually takes up with Jeremy’s 54 year old history tutor, Tony Canning, whose age group she generalizes about thusly, “The body’s largest organ, the skin, bears the brunt—it no longer fits the old. It hangs off them, off us, like a room-for-growth school blazer. Or pajamas…Tony had a yellowish look like an old paperback, one in which you could read of various misfortunes—knee and appendicitis operations, a dog bite, a rock climbing accident, and a childhood disaster with a frying pan, which had left him bereft of a patch of pubic hair.” And it’s not only sex, Tony cooks porcini with olive oil and pancetta and they “...ate them with polenta…This was exotic food in England in the seventies.” Later, the reader is introduced to "akrasia  “which was, Tony reminded me, the Greek word for acting against one’s better judgement. (Had I not read Plato’s Protagoras?)” McEwan’s prose is painterly when it isn't emblematic, shifting between the micro and macro worlds. The realism of his bodies recalls Eakins’ "The Gross Clinic" and "The Swimming Hole" and the looming menace of history that hangs over the agglomeration of minutiae brings to mind great apocalyptic drawings and paintngs like Goya’s "Disasters or War" and Picasso’s "Guernica."