Writing about Homer made me think: what's the art that doesn't just astonish us but actively heals us?
I don't mean comfort, I mean that it has a subconscious effect that you only notice later. These are almost religious rituals that bring you back into balance with the world: they remind you that life is about more than us and that whatever excitement we feel, we have to be brought back into balance if we're going to exist in harmony with our worlds. If we're really listening or watching, our problems afterward seem proportional to how bad they actually are.
Three categories:
Core Healers: Brings you back to balance.
Healing through Contemplation: Changes how we perceive reality so that experience becomes more meaningful.
Healing through Memory: Teaches that even if it seems that we do, reality always retains what's made our lives meaningful.
You all might consider this incredibly pretentious but... **** you!
Literature:
Core Healers:
Homer
The Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Samuel, Isaiah, Ecclesiastes, Psalms, Proverbs
Dante Divine Comedy
Shakespeare late romances and high tragedies
The Mahabharata
Aeschylus: the Oresteia
Virgil: Aeneid
War and Peace
Brothers Karamazov
Wordsworth: The Prelude
Leaves of Grass
Healing by Contemplation:
Eliot Four Quartets
Rumi
Gerard Manley Hopkins
John Keats
Emily Dickinson
Czeslaw Milosz: late poems
Wislaw Szymborszka:
Boris Pasternak: Poems
Seamus Heaney: Postscript
Healing by Memory:
In Search of Lost Time--also known as Remembrances of Things Past by Marcel Proust
Doctor Zhivago
Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman
Thomas Mann: The Magic Mountain, Joseph and His Brothers
Virginia Woolf: The Waves, To The Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway
Thornton Wilder: Our Town
Carol Shields: The Stone Diaries
Gerard Murnane: The Plains
George Eliot: Middlemarch
Maybe?
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment, The Idiot (Dostoevsky)
Ulysses
Les Miserables
The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (Jose Saramago)
Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)
The Ramayana
Zhuangzi
The Tale of Genji
I hope to write about so many of these some day, but I need to fill in my gaps. My unfortunate literary habit (not with Homer) is that when I'm bored, I skip ahead twenty-one hundred pages (or more...). You are free to do the same until it's time to set your thoughts down on the thing in itself.
Movies:
Core Healers:
Ordet
Tokyo Story,
Late Spring
Andrei Rublev
The Tree of Life
The Apu Trilogy
The Decalogue
Healing through Contemplation:
2001
Yi-Yi
Wild Strawberries
The Sacrifice
The Immortal Story
Ugetsu
Sansho the Bailiff
Healing through Memory:
Ikiru
Fanny and Alexander
A Matter of Life and Death
The Searchers
Maybe?
Ran
Winter Light
The Thin Red Line (sigh)
The Straight Story
My Neighbor Totoro
Diary of a Country Priest
The Flowers of St. Francis
The River
Days of Heaven
Art:
Core Healers:
Michelangelo: Sistine Chapel, Last Judgement, Pieta
Piero della Francesca: The Resurrection, The Legend of the True Cross, Madonna del Parto
Rembrandt: Return of the Prodigal Son, late self-portraits
Andrei Rublev: Trinity
Hagia Sophia (Istanbul)
Chartres Cathedral
Ise Grand Shrine (still never been)
The Parthenon
Donatello: Mary Magdalene
through contemplation
Turner: The Fighting Temeraire, Rain Steam & Speed, Light and Colour, Angel Standing in the Son
van Gogh: Olive Trees, The Sower, Wheatfield series, Cypresses
Vermeer: Woman Holding a Balance, The Milkmaid
Caspar David Friedrich: Monk by the Sea, Abbey in the Oakwood
Cezanne: Monte Saint-Victoire, the late bather paintings, late still lifes
Jean Simeon Chardin: The Ray, Soap Bubbles, The House of Cards, The Kitchen Maid
Zen gardens
Gothic cloisters
Islamic courtyards
Buddhist Sculpture
Gandharan Buddhas
Greek Classical Sculpture
through memory:
Bruegel: The Harvesters, The Census at Bethlehem, Tower of Babel
Titian: Pieta, Flaying of Marayus
El Greco: Burial of the Count of Orgaz
Piazza San Marco
Medieval Tomb Sculpture
Funerary Monuments
Maybe?:
Leonardo Notebooks
Fra Angelico: San Marco Frescoes
Rothko Chapel
Chinese landscape painting
And then there's music....
core healers:
Bach: St. Matthew Passion, B-Minor Mass, The Art of the Fugue
Beethoven: Symphony no. 9, Missa Solemnis, late quartets
Mozart: The Magic Flute
Wagner: Parsifal
Mahler: Symphony no. 3
Sibelius: Symphony on. 7
Haydn: The Creation
through contemplation:
Bruckner: Symphonies 8 and 9
Debussy: La Mer
Ravel: Daphnis et Chloe
Vaughan Williams: The Pilgrim's Progress
Beethoven: Piano Concerto no. 4
Mozart: Piano Concerto no. 27
Schubert: String Quintet
Bach: Goldberg Variations, Well-Tempered Clavier, Violin Sonatas and Partitas, Cello Suites
though memory:
Beethoven: Pastoral Symphony
Sibelius: Symphony no. 5, Tapiola
Mahler: Das Lied von der Erde, Ninth Symphony
Schubert: Piano Sonatas D. 959, 960
Brahms: Clarinet Quintet, Intermezzi for Piano op. 117
Elgar: The Dream of Gerontius
Bach: Lutheran Chorales
Maybe?
Beethoven: Sonata op. 111
Arvo Part: Tabula Rasa, Te Deum, Passio, Fratres
Mozart: The Marriage of Figaro
Olivier Messiaen: Eclairs sur l'au Dela, La Transfiguration de Notre Segnieur Jesus Christ, Des canyons aux etoiles
Palestrina: Missa Papae Marcelli
Tomas Luis de Victoria: Officium Defunctorum
Thomas Tallis: Spem in Allium
Josquin: Missa Pange Lingua
Janacek: Cunning Little Vixen
Bach: Christmas Oratorio
Honorable Mentions for religious music:
Black Spirituals
Jewish Cantillation
Haftarah Trope
Gregorian Chant
Byzantine Chant
Renaissance Polyphony
Georgian Sacred Polyphony
Qur'anic Recitation
Persian Sufi Music
Vedic Chant
Dhrupad
Tibetan Chant
Shomyo
African-American Spirituals
Gospel
Palestrina
Orthodox Chant
Quranic Recitation
Sufi Singing
Whirling Dervish Music
Vedic Chant
Pop Candidates.... MMMMMMaaaaaayyyyyybe?
Abbey Road (side 2)
Astral Weeks (Van Morrison)
Pet Sounds
Hijira (Joni Mitchell)
Spirit of Eden (Talk Talk)
Aerial (Kate Bush)
America IV (Johnny Cash)
You Want It Darker (Leonard Cohen)
A Love Supreme (John Coltrane)
Sacred Concerts (Duke Ellington)
Dark was the Night, Cold was the Ground (Blind Willie Johnson)
Mahalia Jackson (all of it...)
Aretha Franklin (only gospel)
The Stanley Brothers (most of it...)
Carousel
The King and I
Fiddler on the Roof
Porgy and Bess
The Carter Family
Into the Woods
...I don't know shit about dance....
what it means:
Again, all three categories are the kind of ritual experiences that approach what you get from spirituality or religion. They're more than exciting, they're more than moving, they bring you into balance. They reorder your soul and make your inner monologue quieter.
You don't have to like all of these. I don't, but they are the kind of spiritual experiences that change lives.
...I'm going to drag all my friends to art kicking and screaming even if it k*lls them....
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