Perhaps the muse, like love, is blind and finds a route to the heart that is open and waiting. My eyes saw the open eyes of the woman on the Sistine Ceiling looking at me. I stared back. But to my dismay much later I would discover the eyes I stared at are empty, flesh-coloured sockets. Originally, however, Michelangelo had given her open eyes, visible in earlier ceiling photographs, which alas were removed during the recent restoration process. What we think and what we believe can become our truth, and with it comes an imperative and a power that moves us into action. We awaken to our Muse.
Through engagement with the ceiling by means of this poem I unexpectedly became obsessed (happily) with what took me back through decades of discovery, self-discovery, and ambiguities – in a life caught up in those ‘entanglements of faith and reason’ which society and home provided for in abundance. But not without later perspectives and vantage points. After abandoning Maynooth where I had been heading for priesthood, I found myself in ‘flight to Africa’, to quote Austin Clarke, whose collection of that name I brought with me to Tanzania’s remote southern region in 1965, where new encounters and realities opened.
Teaching has always been a source of satisfaction and growth for me – perhaps a family trait – but I was to find via Yeats, Eliot, Clarke, Kavanagh and Kinsella, and others (all in my luggage to Tanzania) that poetry can root in this oddly unstable world of increasing yet dying motion, and of emotional ambiguities. We spiral rather than circle round questions, hoping, foolishly, if inevitably, for a laughter that might hide the night.
The 1960s hinged the universe. I was caught between the mechanistic sensibilities of a pre-digital era where belief had supplanted knowledge and this digital age where there seem few barriers to the acquisition of knowledge and no resolution for belief. Yes, we deceive, we hide, we kill in the same moments that we ‘venture bravely to be beautiful’ (a phrase from verse 179). Perhaps we believe in beautiful-ness, but repeatedly find torrents that need crossing.
The Sistine Chapel is the epicentre of the Holy Roman Catholic Church, the birthreligion I long since abandoned. Ironically it was my ‘vocation’ to the priesthood that had led to agnosticism and then atheism. In my second year in Maynooth, resident in Logic House, I had the good fortune to be roomed beside a John Cullinan from Waterford. John introduced me to a literature I had not known; he gave me TS Eliot’s The Waste Land and Albert Camus’ The Outsider (L’Étranger), two books that startled many of my generation out of cultural and philosophical complacency. Hitherto my vocation had been predicated, and openly cherished by me. Priesthood was my chosen destination. Now however, I grew metaphysical wings, or at least nodes. God died. Re-birthed, political, literary, cultural and artistic sensibilities were stirred in me.
Poetry was not the purpose or the reason for my 2009 visit to Rome. I was there to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of a friend’s ordination. Visiting the Sistine was for the art and a nostalgic reconnection with a previous visit made in 1967. The then sombre darkness of the pre-restoration ceiling imagery had remained my most persistent recollection.
In the crowded chapel with its painted ceiling, I needed a place to sit and stare. The single long bench against the south wall was occupied, so I hung around until someone left and I took the space. I was drenched in colour downflows and the brightness and complexity of the pigment, and energised by the inspiring figures.
I became aware of that one figure on the ceiling who stared down at me; a woman in a green jacket, hunkered in a white pseudo-architectural triangular frame. Her open eyes, as I saw them, held mine, and the word ‘gaze’ arrived.
She is one of the ‘Ancestors of Christ’, a sequence that underpins and grounds the ceiling’s majesties. As I stared she seemed to dare me to converse. After about forty minutes, I walked through the bustling floor and conversation hum – eying all those faces tuned to the high ceiling – to exit the chapel through the entrance door. Before leaving the Vatican, I climbed the 551 steps to the top of Michelangelo’s great basilica dome. Just to sense an edge or boundary, to settle.
Some four months later, one Monday morning I sat at my computer and the phrase ‘The Sistine Gaze’ made its way to the blank page, and an opening line:
Up here my craned neck seeks solace where none can show
light.
My fingers tremble on the lip and my arse,
like god’s in wayward pre-existing skies,
bares to mankind a sphincter of expectation.
I can hear vertebrae and muscles creak
and feel their pain as I readjust, twist, undo
my glances, strains and wiles beneath that high
risen weltanschauung. Hear me.
It is not surprising the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel should be a fruitful field of images (god’s ‘arse’ does indeed appear high up there!) and metaphors to route and fuse poetic narratives, thoughts and feelings. Here is great, great art, fields and fields of it.
And it was popes who commissioned (indeed compelled) Michelangelo—master in sculpture, drawing, painting, fresco, architecture, engineering and poetry—to paint the Sistine. But he had his problems with the church too. Although his frescoes for the ceiling were a song of creation, and that song is embellished and informed by Judaic traditions, the ‘ceiling’ bridges different faiths, cultures, times, sexualities and the human body. However, on completing it in October 1512, the artist wrote in anger to a friend:
Here they make helmets and swords from chalices
and by the handful sell the blood of Christ;
his cross and thorns are made into lances and shields;
yet even Christ’s patience still rains down.
But let him come no more to these parts;
his blood would rise up as far as the stars;
since now in Rome his flesh is being sold;
and every road to virtue is closed.
(The Poetry of Michelangelo: an annotated translation. Trans. by Saslow. Yale UP, 1991)
I owe Michelangelo an irrepayable debt for giving me a muse who led me into this ekphrastic epic, and through it. And though the writing, reading and research I undertook with The Sistine Gaze took me six years, that work and the ‘Gaze’ filled my time with great satisfaction and pleasure. I am glad now that it is done and on its way to find readers who might venture into a long, long poem.
[ Salmon PoetryOpens in new window ]
The poem is being launched in Dublin at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland on Tuesday, September 22nd, at 6.30pm, with an event bringing together art, anatomy, books, film, image and music. Thomas McCarthy will talk about his own encounter with The Sistine Gaze, and Cashman will read extracts from the poem. Clive Lee, Professor of Anatomy, RCSI , will talk about Art and Anatomy – a subject that he lectures on annually at the School. The event will also include the screening of a short film by Peter Salisbury about Cashman and his life with The Sistine Gaze.
Seamus Cashman founded Wolfhound Press in 1974 where he remained publisher until 2001. He has three previous poetry collections: Carnival (Monarchline 1988), Clowns & Acrobats (Wolfhound Press, 2000), and That morning will come: new and selected poems (SalmonPoetry, 2007). He co-edited the now classic anthology, Irish Poems for Young People (Wolfhound Press, 1975, 2000); and in 2004 compiled the award-winning Something Beginning with P: new poems from Irish poets (The O’Brien Press)
