[This is a new edition of a post that on another blog of mine, but since I am trying to commit to seriously writing this one, I am moving in by decorating with a few things I like.]
Artifacts in Question:
Revolve
Bible Illuminated: The Book
Let's not open the fashion magazine quite yet. There on the cover we already see it: The Beautiful Person. Their shoulders are square to the corners of the magazine, though their eyes may laugh upward or blush down. Sometimes one shoulder or the other kicks up in a gesture of sass, but a flip-book of all fashion magazine covers would show the beautiful person jittering only slightly, looking around as if bored by us, but always with their shoulders flat against the glassy screen of a glossy cover. They press against our vision like the wings of a pinned moth or the shoulders of a hieroglyphic Pharaoh.
The beautiful person leans as close to the viewer as it can, meeting us halfway. If the flip-book of all fashion covers ran forward in time, we would see little signs popping up, denser and denser, around its body like the little sign under the moth or the writings around the Pharaoh. These are the near ends of trails that lead down and in, maybe a dozen golden threads that we can follow into the maze of the beautiful person. These paths are labels on the beautiful organs: refined tastes, timely interests, sexual talents, morals, beaded chains that we can follow inward as we peel the beautiful person open and figure out what is inside of them.
This is how we learn to be beautiful. We buy fashion magazines and go spelunking within the bright caverns of the beautiful person. We follow twists of words like threads, strings running in from the words on the cover, through tables of contents, page numbers, chained sentences, onward and inward, splitting through internal reference and holding the bright images together like chains of pearls. Maybe this is what one might mean when they say that an image has "depth."
Consider two efforts to take the Bible and make it a work of depth [this is not news, per se, but I thought I would share]: The first, Revolve, published first in 2003 by Thomas Nelson, presents the beautiful person as a young woman in the company of laughing friends, and offers several paths down and through the New Century Version which is the raw material of her body. Paths like "Guy 411" and "Caught in a Sin Spiral?" in this year's edition, or "Relationships 101: Keep the friends, lose the drama" and "Rock your outlook" in last year's draw the biblical text together into chains beaded with pictures and clasped with sidebars.
The second, Bible Illuminated: The Book, published by the Swedish company "Illuminated World" in 2008, resembles a fashion magazine on the inside, now building pearly cords from the Good News Translation following cryptic headings: "A Good Investment," "If Love Gets Cold," "All Power Comes to an End." The glaring difference, though, is that the beautiful person here has been refigured entirely. We are not peeling back the sides of a body presented with squared shoulders, but a single beautiful eye that watches us askance and over heavy mascara. The beautiful person here has perhaps been crying, maybe finally walking out of a nightclub, giving one last look to someone who will remember them desperately. Perhaps the beautiful person is waking up in the dark, having fallen asleep exhausted after some bit theatrical part, still in garish stage makeup. But it is not looking at us. The eye here has its own concerns. The beauty here is of a gaze to be seen, but not one that we can return: just sight, sight without seeing. The trails down and in will take us into a Bible, but we cannot know if we are looking at a beautiful believer that we should dissect to better impersonate, or if this is the beautiful, obscure body of God crying off her liquid eyeliner.
These books are the same, of course: If the letters of the Bible are cells, both draw them into tissues, organs, and systems by tracing trails in and down off of the shiny cover. Both are moralizing works that push hard to explain how our own bodies might become beautiful by being filled with ribbons of Bible.
But they are as different as their covers. The beautiful person in Revolve faces back, calling for the simple impersonation against which we have defined art. Evangelical Christians retain a fraught relationship with Bible-as-literature, and we see one solution here: the Bible which cannot be held at an artistic remove. We can work at a reflective reconstruction, reassembling our bodies into meaningful, Biblical chains, by staring back along that gaze, as easily as learning wisdom from Cosmo, or using a mirror to retrain facehair.
The moralism of Revolve comes up from the Book of Revelation, up from the end of time, back across the text toward the cover, and out into the reader's body with the random variation and inexorable straightness of bubbles rising from deep water.
But the beautiful person on Bible Illuminated: The Book refracts. It bends the text into a series of complex exchanges, curved lenses and not flat panes. We don't know whose components we are learning here, whether someone like us or God herself. That eye could be not looking back glassily and drippingly for any number of reasons, and the titles offer no clue.
In some ways the beautiful person of Bible Illuminated recalls the great work done by the word "art." Since Kant, art has been the engagement with indifferent beauty. One does not fuck art or eat it, or touch it, or get excited by it. One might become motivated by art, but not aroused. Art, then, is created by injecting distance into the unavoidably desirable. Thought itself is desirable, and it becomes coldly exciting across panes of glass and empty space. What we call "reflection" happens in the gap between the velvet rope and the Mona Lisa.
But, then again, Bible Illuminated presents not merely distance, but distraction. Aversion. The beautiful person on this cover traces downward as in any fashion magazine through trails of images strung together with trails of text. But the beautiful glance aside fissures each chain into a tangle. Even the apparently thick cords of images, Revelation illustrated with heartrending photographs of environmental degradation, or Acts with photos of the celebrity activists and philanthropists, never tie in a simple way. To know whether the young Black men paired with the description of the three kings are representations or contrasts would first require making a function of that beautiful eye, making those eyelashes God's or our own.
If you would be curious to read a Bible recomposed into chains of the most complexly moral, reflective and obscure photography, and to undertake the recursive and paradoxical work of remaking your insides to resemble after beauty of such a process, you can see the whole thing online.
Do.
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