In The Image: A Tiny Echo of God
Introducing a New Bimonthly Column on Art and Faith
Welcome to the first ever installment of In The Image — a bimonthly guest column on the intersection of faith and the arts, written by Matthew J. Andrews. In addition to serving as a previous poetry editor for Solum, Matthew is a private investigator and writer. He is the author of the chapbook I Close My Eyes and I Almost Remember and the full-length collection The Hours, which is a forthcoming Solum publication.
A Tiny Echo of God
Whenever I finish a book, there’s this moment where I close it, place it in my lap, and then just sit in silence as I let the echoes reverberate. Sometimes this pause is brief, perhaps imperceptible to an outside observer, while other times it lingers for a few minutes. Of course, there are also those special books, the ones that never really settle, pinging around in the back of my mind for days, years, maybe my whole life.
I suspect this is something many can relate to. Whether it’s a book, a film, a song, a painting, there’s this moment where we stop and assess the strange relationship we’ve formed with the art we’ve consumed, where we take stock of what kind of future there is to be found together.
This is a column about art, faith, and their sacred intertwining, and I want to get started by dwelling on those experiences with art that never stops talking to us, that continuously whispers in our ear like restless ghosts. Perhaps there is no better place to start than Antkind, a bizarre and meandering debut novel from acclaimed screenwriter Charlie Kaufman that not only earns the distinction of being the chattiest piece of art I’ve encountered this year, but in many ways is about that very chattiness.
Antkind tells the story of B. Rosenberger Rosenberg, a thoroughly unlikable film critic, and his chance encounter with Ingo Cutbirth, an amateur filmmaker who has spent nine decades making a stop motion film with a three-month runtime. B. watches the film and considers it to be a masterpiece, as well as his ticket to the respect he feels he has not earned from his peers. Ingo dies during the viewing, and despite strict order for the film to be destroyed should this happen, B. packs up the film to bring home with him, only for it to catch fire in a fast-food parking lot, leaving only one single frame as evidence of its existence.
So far, we have the framework of what, in the hands of another author, could be a punchy novella dressed up as a parable. But this description covers what is essentially the book’s prologue, with the remaining 600 or so pages devoted to B.’s efforts to remember the details of the film, which seems to be actively evading comprehension. Scenes from the film float ungrounded, their characters and settings shifting with each recollection. There are also long intrusions of disconnected storylines: murderous comedy duos, a meteorologist inventing a device to see the future, a superintelligent ant who exists long after humanity has perished. All of this is to say nothing of the increasingly surreal circumstances in B.’s personal life: he physical shrinks; he encounters (and murders) a doppelganger; he can’t seem to stop falling down manholes; he communes with an anthropomorphic mountain; he takes to living in a cave with other remnants of humanity after an apocalyptic war. This is but a small sampling of the sort of oddities that become more pervasive as the story moves forward.
One might be forgiven for losing faith on page 400 or so, for thinking that this is another postmodern romp through the fields of meaninglessness. Kaufman himself doesn’t do the reader any favors when he interjects halfway through to bemoan how he’s lost control of his main character. But by the end of the novel, it’s clear there’s something more here. The line between the film and B’s life begins to blur, culminating in a moment when he sees his own skeleton in a scene taking place well into the future. He and the film have fused, and by the book’s end, it’s not quite clear where one ends and the other begins.
Peppered throughout the story are references to a future technology called Brainio, an interactive art form in which a movie plays in your head and changes based on your response to it. It’s here where I think we arrive at what this novel wants to say: that there are no subjective perspectives of art, only intensely personal ones. Depending on what one brings into the experience, Antkind can be about identity, comedy, racism, commercialization, politics, art, obsession, or whatever else you want it to be about, depending on which of the many threads you are inclined to pull. It prioritizes the lenses we use, making each work of art a sort of diamond that shimmers differently depending on how you hold it.
In one of those accidents of juxtaposition, my reading of this book overlapped with the start of lent. Though I have given up many things over the years, with varying levels of devotion, this year I instead adopted a daily practice of lectio divina, a discipline I adore but rarely make time for. Latin for “divine reading,” lectio divina is a sort of guided listening in which a small passage of the Bible is read aloud multiple times, with spaces of silent reflection in between. In preparation, you are asked to forget everything you know about the passage, to leave your analytical mind behind and experience it anew, to latch onto words or phrases that appear to puncture your heart, to listen for the soft calls of invitation.
I have done lectio divina in small groups of a dozen or so people, and I have been amazed at how each person will share something different that they heard from the text. In those contemplative moments, the words hovered among us and somehow found a way to speak uniquely to every person in the room. Each one of us brought our experiences and expectations, our faults and our virtues, and experienced our own sacred union with the text.
Some may find it crass that I am holding a spiritual discipline designed to better hear the voice of God and a novel in which an army of robotic Donald Trumps fight the foot soldiers of a fast-food empire up next to each other to see the similarities, but I think there’s a connection to be made. One of the tenets of our faith is that we are uniquely formed in the image of God, that while we can never aspire to be what God is, we at least share some resemblance. One way we show this is in our own acts of creation; we are all individual works of art, each with a special relationship to the divine, and like God we make our own art to interact personally with our brothers and sisters. When we speak creatively, we speak a tiny echo of God, and when we see something beautiful, we hear that same whisper.
So when you finish reading a poem that seems to cut you until you bleed, or when the last scene fades to black on a film you will never forget, take a moment to pause, to listen. Consider taking off your shoes; you’re on holy ground after all.
I enjoyed this. Antkind is now in my Amazon shopping cart. I might delete it, save it for later, or pull the trigger and buy it. Currently, its main competition is Stephen King's 11/22/32. Thanks for sharing your perspectives on how we interact with and create art. Somebody once said, "To create is divine."