The Silence of the Sun
The Silence of the Sun
On the image, on knowledge, and on the center that goes dark
The woman who taught me to look at paintings and to enter churches did not believe in Jesus. I learned to look by watching her look, standing before images that meant nothing to her and that she nonetheless could not stop contemplating. Something of that way of hers stayed with me, and it outlasted her. For the painters we learned to look at together were of another species than the painters of today.
The medieval painter barely existed as an individual: he was a hand within a body. He belonged to a guild, was trained in a workshop where the craft kept its secrets and passed them from the old to the young without entrusting them to paper, for books were dear and rare, and what mattered traveled from mouth to ear. He did not sign what he made because he had not thought it: the image obeyed a design that came from higher up, from the patron, from the theologian, from a knowledge that others had accumulated, not he. The genius was not his; it belonged to the body he served.
The Renaissance opens that body and lets a single man step out of it. Suddenly the artist has a name, and the name knows things: Alberti measures light, Piero writes on perspective as one writes geometry, Leonardo opens cadavers to understand how an elbow moves. The anonymous craftsman has become a scholar who debates as an equal with the philosopher and the astronomer, in courts that were small universities where men spoke of love and of death, of the order of the heavens and the chaos of the earth, and above all of the destiny of the soul. The one who once executed a cosmos belonging to another now thinks it.
The contemporary visual artist, by contrast, was formed elsewhere: in isolation and in pure technique. He turns his eyes to nature and gives back an impression of it, or a political wound, or an idea about art itself; rarely anything that exceeds his own sensibility. The center of gravity has sunk inward, and the work has ceased to be a map of the world and become the record of a gaze. Compared to the scholar of the Renaissance he is, in the exact sense of the word, an ignoramus, not for any lack of gift, but because he was born in a time that no longer asks the image to sustain a world, nor to explain it, nor to know anything at all. What came afterward (the gaze broken into pixels, the image born already to circulate, to go viral, glimpsed in haste and sold) produces sensation, but not understanding.
At its extremes, the art of today does not even retain the image. A banana fixed to the wall with duct tape sells for millions of dollars; an invisible sculpture (a box of air, nothing) fetches thousands of euros. There is no need to take offense: it is enough to say it quietly. It is the end of a long emptying-out. When the work no longer carries a world, the last thing left for it to carry is the sarcasm of a gesture and its price. The medieval altarpiece held an entire cosmos within it; its present-day descendant holds a joke and a figure. It is not the opposite of that tradition: it is its exact reverse, the cosmos reduced to nothing and put up for auction.
Of the canvas of today we ask that it sustain a sensation. Of the ancient canvas it was asked that it sustain the world. It was not a window opened onto a scene: it was a diagram of the whole, where each figure concealed a concept and each place a doctrine, the architecture of heaven and of earth folded into a single rectangle of painted wood.
The Sun and the Moon: the two witnesses
Among those images there is one that repeated itself for nearly a thousand years: the Crucifixion with the Virgin and Saint John, Christ at the center, the mother on one side, the beloved disciple on the other. From a Byzantine reliquary around the year 800, to Raphael's Crucifixion at the beginning of the sixteenth century, the scene scarcely changes. The painters did not invent a picture; they passed from hand to hand a structure that did not seem to belong to them, sometimes adding other figures but always the Virgin Mary on the left, Saint John on the right, and Jesus crucified at the center. And there is a detail the eye crosses without seeing until someone names it: a Sun and a Moon, high up, on either side of the cross. The Sun above Christ's right hand, the Moon above his left. Two lights, two witnesses, day and night summoned to the same death.
The pairing is old and has traveled far. The two lights already flanked sacrifices long before they rose to the cross: in the tauroctony of Mithras, repeated in his temples between the first and fourth centuries, the Sun burns above the god's right hand and the Moon appears at his left; and throughout Mediterranean antiquity they watched over sacrifices and apotheoses, as an established way of saying that the whole of heaven was present. It is the same arrangement the cross will inherit: the Sun to Christ's right, the Moon to his left. The Sun and the Moon do not adorn the scene. They situate it.
But the curious thing about the arrangement is where the lights fall. With the exception of the Rabbula Gospels (sixth century), the Sun is always above Christ's right hand, on the Virgin's side; the Moon always above the left, often with John. Those who came after recognized in that arrangement a figure they would name again and again: the Sun is the red work, the fire that transforms; the Moon is the white work, the vessel that receives, the silver that keeps and reflects rather than burns. By everything one would expect, the mother of God (she who conceives without stain, she who keeps things in silence) ought to stand beneath the Moon. She does not. She stands beneath the sun.
And here it is worth pausing. Little is what the gospels record of the Virgin, so little that it almost invites us to imagine her as inert matter. But no one is ever wholly passive. The Virgin's stillness is not the stillness of stone. It is the stillness of one who has spoken a single word (Fiat, let it be done) and in it has made her own will coincide with a greater one. The Fiat, then, is not surrender: it is the instant in which one's own willing ceases to struggle against what is coming and aligns itself with it, not out of renunciation, but because it finds in that alignment its freest form.
Tradition calls that meeting coniunctio. The Sun is the red work, the active principle, the fire that acts; and it stands above her because her will, in the moment of the fiat, is no longer divided. How does this differ from the certainty of the psychotic, of the one who believes that every gesture of his is moved by God and therefore nothing can be wrong? In that the Fiat does not suppress the question of whether one acts well; it suppresses the other, the one that paralyzes: whether, in speaking, in moving, in consenting, one interferes with a design that exceeds him. The Virgin does not cease to choose; she ceases to keep watch over whether her choice coincides with a secret script. That distance which closes is not between her and God, but between her and the part of herself that was spying on her. The Sun does not crush her: it shows her at work without that spy. An agency that no longer spends itself certifying its own validity acts with greater seriousness, because all the energy that went to surveillance now goes to the act.
The Moon above John sustains the other half. The disciple lives on borrowed light, on the light that does not arise in oneself but gives back what was received. He is the witness. But the Sun does not. The Sun burns from what is its own. It does not wait for anyone to kindle it, it does not ask to be looked at in order to exist. It gives, and in giving it spends itself. This is why the Sun can give itself until it goes out: because it needs no one in order to be a sun. She who stands beneath it learns the same. She does not shine in order to be seen. She consents to the fire in silence. It is not that this is enough for her: it is that she has ceased to wait for anything to be enough.
It is worth recalling what it is we are looking at. The Sun did not accompany the Virgin throughout her life like a lamp fixed above her head. What stood above her from the moment she said Fiat was a posture (the silence, the acceptance, the alignment) sustained in the invisible for years. The painter did not follow her day by day: he chose the one hour in which that posture could be seen put to the test, and there, on the wood, he placed the Sun to make it visible. The cross is not where she receives the sun. It is where the painter shows it. And he shows it going out.
For there is one more turn, the one that makes the silence almost unbearable. The Sun grows dark. The gospels tell that the sky blackened at the sixth hour; the painters knew it, and many paint it: the disc on the Virgin's side extinguished, eclipsed, a Sun in mourning. The light that visits her is putting itself out. The fire that was to transform her is extinguished just as it touches her. And this is the secret, pressed into two small discs of paint: the union occurs in the instant in which that which gives fails. The Sun completes its work precisely when it ceases to shine. The Virgin receives the fire at the moment the fire turns dark, and this (not the radiant noon, not the triumphant blaze) is what transforms her. The hour of the picture is no different from the hour of the Fiat: it is the same yes, spoken now with the light extinguished. Anyone consents to a light that illuminates and guarantees. She holds to the same consent when the light to which she said yes turns black.
But there is something more to see in that darkness, and it is what gives its name to these pages. The Sun did not go out by accident, nor as a punishment for the alignment. It went out because that is what the Sun is: that which burns and consumes itself, that which gives until it has nothing left to give. The Virgin did not say yes to a light that promises to last and then, unfortunately, fails. She said yes to a light whose whole nature is to burn and be extinguished. The painter knew it when he placed the disc above her head: he did not place it to shine triumphant over the cross, he placed it so that it would go out. The two lights stand together in the picture precisely because one of them was about to disappear. This is the structure the ancient canvas keeps and that the eye crosses without seeing it: the alignment is not with a principle that endures. It is consent to the nature of what one loves, which is to give itself and spend itself. This is why the silence of the Sun is not the silence of one who has been abandoned. It is the silence of one who knew from the beginning that the fire to which it said yes would be consumed. Anyone aligns himself with what promises. She aligned herself with what spends itself.
I know this because I have lived it, though on a scale without glory. First came the sadness, nothing more. Months before my work and my most significant relationship broke apart at once, I felt finished. Each day weighed more than the one before and I did not know why. I had no reason at hand; only the weight. The explanation came later, when there was already distance enough to understand: that terminal feeling was something in me reading two simultaneous endings before either had been spoken aloud. The manager who said "no" without reasons to what I proposed; at home, a coldness that likewise went unnamed. This is usually called intuition or foreboding, and the word serves if one cleans it of magic: it is not a voice that arrives from outside, it is the unconscious adding up signs that consciousness still refuses to sign off on, because the conclusion proves unbearable. The knowledge was not in articulated reason; it operated in the silence of the unconscious.
But I do not want to give it an order it did not have, for that knowledge is a poor oracle. It hits the mark as often as it lies: sometimes it reads a real ruin, and sometimes it is the mood that manufactures the ruin and then believes it had foreseen it. How do I know that I was reading two true endings and not that fear was inventing reasons to feel finished? I do not know, and I distrust anyone who claims to know.
Perhaps the Virgin lived like this, quieted. I did not. I lived with anxiety, with fear of what I did not know and could not name. Her movement (this is the order the image teaches) was stillness and then act, with certainty absent. Mine was fear and act all the same. I quieted nothing; I went on trembling, and went on: went on proposing, went on wanting, with my eyes open, perhaps hoping to be wrong, perhaps awaiting a miracle. And here the sweetest trap lies in wait: to tell this as if having felt it coming had proved me right, as if the blow proved that I saw clearly and they did not. No. Having read the trajectory (if indeed I read it) spared me neither the blow, nor absolved me, nor proved me right about anyone. It only made the act my own. That is what it is to stand beneath the Sun that is already going out: to feel what is coming and not use it as a way out, nor afterward as a trophy.
Of this inversion (of the Sun set where the Moon belonged) the painters kept silent; they let it stand and teach alone. The Virgin does not answer the mystery: she embodies it. She moves, she lives, she sustains it with each act that remains to her. And the sun, dark above her head, does not explain, does not ask, does not wait. It burns, it gives itself, it is extinguished. And this, which no one applauds, is the only thing that transforms.
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