The Twisted Path to the Olympic Opening Ceremony

It was one that led through the desecration of France's greatest cathedral.

Some things are so painful that one instinctively shrinks from thinking about them. For me the fate of Chartres Cathedral is a case in point. I had the privilege of visiting that unique marvel on two occasions prior to 2009, when the so-called restoration got under way that was to turn it into a blanched carcass of its former self. Based on those visits I can identify with the responses of two of the most famous architects of recent decades. Philip Johnson’s comment: “I don’t see how anyone can go into the nave of Chartres Cathedral and not burst into tears”. And Frank Gehry’s: “If you go into Chartres, it drops you to your knees”.

Now, however, it is hard to see how someone who knew and loved the old Chartres could do anything, on entering its virtualised facsimile, but turn on his heel and run out of the place in horror. Not that I’ve made a return visit myself, nor do I have any intention of doing so. Put it this way: if a loved one were brutally raped and murdered you might find yourself legally obliged to go to the morgue to identify the corpse. But there is no legal obligation on me to revisit Chartres, and so I prefer to stay away.

Fortunately there is no legal obligation either, at least not yet, to view spectacles such as the recent Opening Ceremony of the Paris Olympic Games. Actually I don’t believe I've ever watched such a ceremony, it’s just not my kind of thing, especially in an age as crass as the present one. But of course I saw the images afterwards, and found them slightly worse than I would have expected: they still just about manage to outdo themselves, don’t they? As the sound and the fury have died down, however, I’ve been prompted to juxtapose the two things, the two places, Paris and Chartres, and have sensed through them a hidden connection, an unfolding pattern at work.

One common denominator between the two is the role of parody in both instances. Certainly the Opening Ceremony was parodic throughout, its mockery of Leonardo’s Last Supper being only a more obvious case in point. But the downpour that accompanied the show, and with a bit of luck some cleansing gusts of wind afterwards, will hopefully serve to wipe away the memory of the whole grotesque spectacle. Nothing, however, can erase what happened to Chartres, because its desecration, or restoration as it is officially called, meant the effective erasure of the cathedral and its substitution within the same walls of a standing parody of itself.

Back in 2015 I wrote an article about that premeditated and tortuously executed crime. My focus then was on the economic incentives prompting the transmogrification of the once-great cathedral into a postmodern fantasy palace. I still believe that such a focus was valid, but I’ve also come to feel that there was more to it than that. Behind the grubby financial incentives for the makeover, I have become convinced that the job done on Chartres was motivated also by some pretty twisted subjective impulses - peevish resentment at the very least, if not downright hatred directed against the original edifice.

Think of the gaggle of experts tasked with the makeover, loaded with credentials and self-importance, and compare them with the humbly anonymous architects, master craftsmen and labourers who wrought the original with all the devotion of their hearts as an act of worship. Would it be so surprising to find among the makeover team a concealed enmity for these nameless and likely illiterate builders who could create something so breathtaking, so awe-inspiring, while their 21st century pygmy successors could manage only to travesty what they accomplished?

Not that there’s much need to speculate about motivation, for there is always the more direct criterion: “by their fruits ye shall know them”. Anyone contemplating the fruits of the restoration must surely ask whether it was an act of love born out of reverence for the great edifice, or an act of conceited overreach, whether consciously hateful or not it hardly matters. Read my article about the makeover - I’ll be posting it here shortly - or investigate the matter for yourself, and come to your own conclusions.

But then below this level of egoistic resentment there may be something else even more obscure, something which the Opening Ceremony nevertheless cast up unashamedly to the surface. Here we enter shadows which are elusive to the rational mind. Failing to understand them, it inevitably misjudges the surface appearances they produce, no matter how brazenly the latter advertise themselves.

One characteristic of this distorted shadow world is a hatred no longer just for this or that expression of beauty but for beauty as such, prior to whatever manifest form it may assume. It is hatred for beauty as a divine attribute, or in non-religious terms, for beauty as an immanent quality of the Universe as such. Against this quality are pitted ugliness and deformity, which nonetheless have no immanent nature, existing as they do only through the parody of the beauty which they loathe and resent. Hence their invariable aim is to sully, travesty and destroy what is beautiful, whether it arises out of nature or is the work of human hands.

A great deal of the destruction of beauty in our world, whether human or natural, is carried out at the behest of crudely utilitarian interests, and that in itself is a terrible thing, yet some justification can still be advanced for it, however specious and inadequate it may be. Yet surely we have all witnessed, on a scale large or small, some kind of defacement of beauty which fails to make sense even within the cramped terms of the utilitarian mindset; a defacement which is gratuitous, without any rationale, and hence inexplicable except as an expression of a twisted hatred for beauty itself.

In such an attitude I believe we see nothing less than the flaunting of ugliness as a counter-principle to beauty, just as that which is misshapen attempts to mock the well-formed, yet in doing so only manages to stigmatise itself still more. Since the contrast was fairly thrust in our faces ten days ago, let’s take a closer look now at this phenomenon.

All of the great cultures of humanity have had a sense of the close association between truth and beauty. It is an association summarised in the threefold Vedic formula Satyam Shivam Sundaram: God (Shiva) as the essence of Truth (Sat) and Beauty (Sundaram). Or to put it another way, Beauty is the natural flowering of the Truth of the Divine Nature. This has been understood, as much intuitively as intellectually, by all the great cultures of humanity, and expressed as such in their art, whether sacred or profane, each after its own fashion.

What then of ugliness? In the best of cases it indicates a failed attempt at beauty; next, a sheer indifference to beauty, which is the most common case in the modern epoch, as its typical urban environments will confirm; and finally, at its worst, it represents a deliberate mockery of beauty, a travesty of the beautiful and a flaunting of the misshapen and the grotesque.

Actually one of the characteristic distinctions to be drawn between the modern and postmodern periods relates to the shift from the second kind of ugliness to the third. It consists in a move from the routine and indifferent ugliness of the modern to the in-your-face parading of ugliness characteristic of so much postmodern spectacularity.

The series of vulgar freak shows put on display at the Olympic Opening Ceremony are not just bizarre in themselves but also in historical terms are almost without precedent. There have certainly been times in the past when the grotesque has enjoyed considerable prominence - in the Middle Ages for example - but always as a foil to beauty, never as an attempted substitute for it. Going back to the case of Chartres, we find there the demonic depicted quite naturally in an ugly guise, but only to point up the human dignity against which it wages war.

Now, however, we are confronted by a situation in which the grotesque, the ugly and the misshapen present themselves as the new norm. This is the significance not just of the Opening Ceremony in Paris but of similar presentations at the Eurovision or the Grammy Awards. Ugliness is no longer something unfortunate or accidental, but positively vaunts itself as a counter-principle to beauty, with the latter being denigrated, parodied or simply destroyed wherever possible.

Think of Satyam Shivam Sundaram again. If Sundaram, Beauty, is being shoved aside by Ugliness, what is likely happening to Truth, to Sat? Is it coincidental that the ascendancy of the Ugly is paralleled by that of the Lie, not to mention the fact that the one at every point supports the other? And if this is so, what about the term between them? Taking God as the middle term between Truth and Beauty, who would you expect to find enthroned between Falsehood and Ugliness?

There is a further distinction to be drawn here which could be summed up as follows. Beauty reveals itself; the ugly and the shameless puts itself on display. Old Chartres was a constant, inexhaustible revelation, of light out of darkness, of meaning distilled to the measure of one’s receptive capacities out of the beyond meaning of the Whole. New Chartres, by contrast, is merely a display, one that invites nothing more than a wow, snap snap, next thing.

Old Chartres elicited grandeur out of humility, the onlooker awestruck, feeling his smallness, yet out of that feeling exalted into the breathtaking and barely perceived Unknown above him. New Chartres, as already remarked, is laid out to be inspected. It asks nothing of the onlooker, and offers nothing beyond some moments of pseudo-aesthetic stimulation and the mementoes of a selfie or three.

Beauty in its self-revelation is brought forth as a blossoming; display in the flaunting of itself comes out as an excrescence. The latter in its very mode of expression is already a parody of the former; this is the case before we even get to the “content” of what is being put on display. The tragedy of Chartres is that the diploma-entitled gang who worked it over without let or hindrance for over a decade have “succeeded”, in large measure, in turning it from one of the greatest blossomings of the human spirit into an overgrown temple to excrescence, a prize feature in the French Ministry of Culture’s portfolio of monetised assets.

Coming from such a “culture ministry” background, can we be surprised by anything that was put on display at the Opening Ceremony ten days ago? Surprised, hardly, and yet there is one further development here worthy of note. In the case of Chartres the parody of the old by the new is still implicit; it cannot be otherwise, for the new remains, in spite of all, superimposed on the old, having some kind of dependence on it, however parasitical.

With the Opening Ceremony, however, the excrescence was on display without any such limiting conditions. It had free rein. And precisely because this was so, it could do no other than display its inner emptiness, its sheer lack of meaning, to a new level of blatancy. In that sense the extravagant means placed at its disposal only gave it more rope with which to hang itself - or in the case of the Marie-Antoinette parody, with which to decapitate itself.

Crass, foul, ignorant, vulgar - it was all those things. And yet in a curious way I was glad to see it, as I’ve been glad to see the lurid displays of a similar “aesthetic” at the Grammy Awards, the Eurovision and so on. (I mean “glad to see” in a cognitive sense; of course I haven’t actually watched any of this crap).

The reason for this gladness is that it shows that matters are coming to a head. That could well mean that things will get worse before they get better, for all the signs are that the excrescence is metastasising, thereby threatening the very survival of the host organism. Fortunately, however, the host is at last showing signs of a reaction to this hostile growth. That’s a good and necessary thing, yet it should be far from taking up our whole attention. For our task is not merely to fight the cancer in the hope of returning to a status quo ante which for sure can never return. Rather we must bring forth out of ourselves the new blossoming, more difficult perhaps yet incomparably more rewarding, for it will make us grow in directions that remain as yet unknown to us, developing potentialities of which we are hardly yet aware.

The healthy growth will happen in its own unforeseeable way, if only we devote ourselves to it unswervingly. This is what the anonymous builders of Chartres understood so well: humbly and with total dedication, a miracle without precedent took shape through them and rose towards the heavens. Likewise the great artists that the Opening Ceremony mocked and travestied, as indeed also the great historical events on which it left its paw marks. These things once had depth and scope of meaning, and will have it again once the meaningless charade of the spectacular slinks back into the shadows.

New miracles, presumably more modest initially, can emerge out of us also. Or maybe they will not be so modest. For an awakening has started, and is beginning to make itself generally felt, if only faintly at first. And so it could be that the hostile forces are achieving exactly the opposite of what they set out to do. Their proddings and goadings, rather than reducing us to a state of servitude, have already prompted many to awaken from their slumbers. But still the ugliness flaunts itself as never before, unable to do otherwise, so that we can hardly pretend that we don’t know what we’re up against.

From here it could go either way: either we could slide into the abyss or we could start climbing the heights as never before. The one thing that for sure is not going to happen is some kind of compromise or middle course between these fateful alternatives. That means that the future hardly looks attractive for anyone wishing for a quiet life and a normal way of living it. But for those undaunted by the challenge and who feel what it stirs within them, this could yet be a great time to be alive.