Rendering
the Body in Poetry, Art, and Medicine
Brian Volck, MD, MFA, Cincinnati Children's Medical Center
John Volck, BFA, Visual Artist
Joel Shuman, STD, PhD, Kings College
M. Therese Lysaught. PhD, Loyola University Chicago (Moderator)
The Christian doctrine of the Incarnation – that God became human in the person of Jesus Christ – grants the body unique importance and signifying power in Christian liturgy, art, literature, and practice. The early Latin Church father, Tertullian, wrote, “the body is the hinge of salvation.” The Seventh Ecumenical Council (787 CE) proclaimed that God is rightly venerated in icons because, even though the eternal nature cannot be represented, God can be depicted by virtue of taking a material body in the Incarnation. Thus, with rare historical exceptions, Christians have been readier to depict the human body, especially in visual art, than Judaism and Islam. This panel considers how the body is rendered (from the Latin root, reddere, “to give back, return, or restore”) in three disciplines not usually considered together: poetry, visual art, and medicine.
Poetry: Presented by Brian Volck, MD, MFA, a practicing pediatrician and writer, co-author of Reclaiming the Body: Christians and the Faithful Use of Modern Medicine, (Brazos, 2006), and the poetry collection, Flesh Becomes Word (Dos Madres, 2013), illustrated by John Volck.
Drawing on the Orthodox poet, Scott Cairns’, thoughts on “sacramental poetry,” I will explore how poems can have “real presence,” making an experience available to the reader rather than denotatively memorializing that experience. The writer – and particularly the poet – appeals to a multiplicity of senses through words. The meaning of a poem is not separable from the poem itself, as an ear of corn from its husk. Verse that can be fully stated in some other form than itself is not poetry, but a kind of propaganda.
I do not consider poetry and medicine as unrelated endeavors, but parallel practices illuminated by and directed toward my life in Christian community. As an attending pediatric hospitalist, I pay attention to the bodies and stories of a child, interpret what I see and hear, and act (responsibly, I hope) upon those interpretations to restore the child to health. As a poet, I pay attention to bodies, stories, and situations, interpret what I see, hear, taste, and feel, and let the reader respond. Both practices call me to deeper engagement with rich Christian theologies of embodiment and Incarnation.
As Simone Weil writes in “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View of the Love of God”: “…prayer consists of attention. It is the orientation of all the attention of which the soul is capable toward God.” Pediatrics and poetry are not themselves forms of prayer. They do, however, school my meager powers of attention in ways that serve my prayer life.
I will show how, in my own work, I draw on scripture, narrative, and sensory – especially visual – detail to attentively render the human body in words, and why I wanted the collection illustrated by my brother. I will read several poems from Flesh Becomes Word, particularly those most concerned with the human body, with attention to how form, content, and image work in concert.
I will conclude with some remarks on the theological implications of rendering the human body in words and suggest some works of poets and writers for further reading.
Visual Art: Presented by John Volck, BFA, a visual artist and illustrator of Flesh Becomes Word.
I paint and draw the figure because I am a storyteller. The early masters used the figure extraordinarily well to tell stories. They understood that humans naturally look where other people are looking. Pictures encourage us to look where and how the artist is looking.
I will discuss how rendering the human body through the practice of applying materials to a two dimensional surface is much like touching or tracing one’s fingers over a body. The artist draws the planes of the body in a gentle visual caress, not to recreate the body, but to react to it and to encourage an emotional response in the viewer.
I study as many views of my subjects as possible to understand who this person is and to discover the story in that person’s features. The artist may not go below the skin, but nevertheless suggests, through the rendering, what lies beneath the visible.
Drawing the living form is drawing life. The image ideally has a presence, like an icon. It is a door to the interior. The artist doesn’t know what the result will be until it’s done. At some point the image takes on its own life or direction that the artist must follow and serve.
My teacher, Barry Moser, says that the illustrator must serve the book. There is a point of reverence in the act of drawing and painting. Like prayer, the practice is a combination of obedience, attention, and service.
I will describe my collaboration with my brother in illustrating the Flesh Becomes Word and share my images for the book, with attention to how I have rendered the body. I will also suggest artists and works for further consideration.
Medicine: Presented by Joel Shuman, MTS, PhD, a professor of theology, a former physical therapist, and author of The Body of Compassion: Ethics, Medicine, and the Church, (Westview, 2009), and co-author of Heal Thyself: Spirituality, Medicine, and the Distortion of Christianity, (Oxford, 2003) and Reclaiming the Body: Christians and the Faithful Use of Modern Medicine, (Brazos, 2006).
Michel Foucault, in The Birth of the Clinic, explores how the medical gaze separated the patient’s body from the patient’s identity. This gaze afforded physicians in the late 18th and early 19th century a new, quasi-mystical power of perception and understanding. The anatomists that lived on either side of this episteme’s emergence, such as Morgagni and Bichat, not only looked at (regarded) the bodies they studied, but described in words and portrayed in figures what they saw.
Medicine continues to claim special power to see, describe, and control the body, claiming to use this power to the benefit of individual patients so they may achieve, maintain, or return to health. Yet the ways in which medicine renders the body into smaller and smaller functional units further separates that body from the patient’s identity.
I will briefly discuss how medicine renders the body today, comparing and contrasting that rendering of the body with the Church’s. I will show how modern medical understandings of the body as an individual, autonomous mechanism are at odds with the Christian understanding of the body as communal, interdependent, and ensouled.
I will conclude by mentioning some practices that Christian communities might engage in to properly render the body in their shared lives.
The panel session will conclude with time for questions and discussion.
For further information on the collaborative work, Flesh Becomes Word, see:
http://www.dosmadres.com/shop/flesh-becomes-word-brian-volck/ ,
http://www.johnvolckart.blogspot.com, and http://www.brianvolck.com/press/
John Volck, BFA, Visual Artist
Joel Shuman, STD, PhD, Kings College
M. Therese Lysaught. PhD, Loyola University Chicago (Moderator)
The Christian doctrine of the Incarnation – that God became human in the person of Jesus Christ – grants the body unique importance and signifying power in Christian liturgy, art, literature, and practice. The early Latin Church father, Tertullian, wrote, “the body is the hinge of salvation.” The Seventh Ecumenical Council (787 CE) proclaimed that God is rightly venerated in icons because, even though the eternal nature cannot be represented, God can be depicted by virtue of taking a material body in the Incarnation. Thus, with rare historical exceptions, Christians have been readier to depict the human body, especially in visual art, than Judaism and Islam. This panel considers how the body is rendered (from the Latin root, reddere, “to give back, return, or restore”) in three disciplines not usually considered together: poetry, visual art, and medicine.
Poetry: Presented by Brian Volck, MD, MFA, a practicing pediatrician and writer, co-author of Reclaiming the Body: Christians and the Faithful Use of Modern Medicine, (Brazos, 2006), and the poetry collection, Flesh Becomes Word (Dos Madres, 2013), illustrated by John Volck.
Drawing on the Orthodox poet, Scott Cairns’, thoughts on “sacramental poetry,” I will explore how poems can have “real presence,” making an experience available to the reader rather than denotatively memorializing that experience. The writer – and particularly the poet – appeals to a multiplicity of senses through words. The meaning of a poem is not separable from the poem itself, as an ear of corn from its husk. Verse that can be fully stated in some other form than itself is not poetry, but a kind of propaganda.
I do not consider poetry and medicine as unrelated endeavors, but parallel practices illuminated by and directed toward my life in Christian community. As an attending pediatric hospitalist, I pay attention to the bodies and stories of a child, interpret what I see and hear, and act (responsibly, I hope) upon those interpretations to restore the child to health. As a poet, I pay attention to bodies, stories, and situations, interpret what I see, hear, taste, and feel, and let the reader respond. Both practices call me to deeper engagement with rich Christian theologies of embodiment and Incarnation.
As Simone Weil writes in “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View of the Love of God”: “…prayer consists of attention. It is the orientation of all the attention of which the soul is capable toward God.” Pediatrics and poetry are not themselves forms of prayer. They do, however, school my meager powers of attention in ways that serve my prayer life.
I will show how, in my own work, I draw on scripture, narrative, and sensory – especially visual – detail to attentively render the human body in words, and why I wanted the collection illustrated by my brother. I will read several poems from Flesh Becomes Word, particularly those most concerned with the human body, with attention to how form, content, and image work in concert.
I will conclude with some remarks on the theological implications of rendering the human body in words and suggest some works of poets and writers for further reading.
Visual Art: Presented by John Volck, BFA, a visual artist and illustrator of Flesh Becomes Word.
I paint and draw the figure because I am a storyteller. The early masters used the figure extraordinarily well to tell stories. They understood that humans naturally look where other people are looking. Pictures encourage us to look where and how the artist is looking.
I will discuss how rendering the human body through the practice of applying materials to a two dimensional surface is much like touching or tracing one’s fingers over a body. The artist draws the planes of the body in a gentle visual caress, not to recreate the body, but to react to it and to encourage an emotional response in the viewer.
I study as many views of my subjects as possible to understand who this person is and to discover the story in that person’s features. The artist may not go below the skin, but nevertheless suggests, through the rendering, what lies beneath the visible.
Drawing the living form is drawing life. The image ideally has a presence, like an icon. It is a door to the interior. The artist doesn’t know what the result will be until it’s done. At some point the image takes on its own life or direction that the artist must follow and serve.
My teacher, Barry Moser, says that the illustrator must serve the book. There is a point of reverence in the act of drawing and painting. Like prayer, the practice is a combination of obedience, attention, and service.
I will describe my collaboration with my brother in illustrating the Flesh Becomes Word and share my images for the book, with attention to how I have rendered the body. I will also suggest artists and works for further consideration.
Medicine: Presented by Joel Shuman, MTS, PhD, a professor of theology, a former physical therapist, and author of The Body of Compassion: Ethics, Medicine, and the Church, (Westview, 2009), and co-author of Heal Thyself: Spirituality, Medicine, and the Distortion of Christianity, (Oxford, 2003) and Reclaiming the Body: Christians and the Faithful Use of Modern Medicine, (Brazos, 2006).
Michel Foucault, in The Birth of the Clinic, explores how the medical gaze separated the patient’s body from the patient’s identity. This gaze afforded physicians in the late 18th and early 19th century a new, quasi-mystical power of perception and understanding. The anatomists that lived on either side of this episteme’s emergence, such as Morgagni and Bichat, not only looked at (regarded) the bodies they studied, but described in words and portrayed in figures what they saw.
Medicine continues to claim special power to see, describe, and control the body, claiming to use this power to the benefit of individual patients so they may achieve, maintain, or return to health. Yet the ways in which medicine renders the body into smaller and smaller functional units further separates that body from the patient’s identity.
I will briefly discuss how medicine renders the body today, comparing and contrasting that rendering of the body with the Church’s. I will show how modern medical understandings of the body as an individual, autonomous mechanism are at odds with the Christian understanding of the body as communal, interdependent, and ensouled.
I will conclude by mentioning some practices that Christian communities might engage in to properly render the body in their shared lives.
The panel session will conclude with time for questions and discussion.
For further information on the collaborative work, Flesh Becomes Word, see:
http://www.dosmadres.com/shop/flesh-becomes-word-brian-volck/ ,
http://www.johnvolckart.blogspot.com, and http://www.brianvolck.com/press/