Church Times review - Edmund de Waal: Library of Exile

My latest review for Church Times is of Edmund de Waal's Library of Exile at the British Museum:

THE wisdom of the world is found in words and images and held in containers of space and containers of thought. Edmund de Waal’s Library of Exile gives us architecture, art, and literature combined in one habitable installation, where the inside and outside provide different responses to human learning and creativity ...

Outside this temporary structure, we see destruction recorded; inside, we view, review, and remember; and, when removed, the memories contained in covers will revitalise and renew the rebuilding of a restored thought container.

In the Psalms, in de Waal’s “Psalm”, in this library, in all libraries, we still ourselves and “navigate the space between the silence of things and the silence of people”.'

Other of my pieces for Church Times can be found here.

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My Morning Jacket - Librarian.

How beautiful and simple God's plan for humankind is

"How beautiful and simple God's plan for humankind is! ... Friends, who love, who suffer, who search, who see God's joy, who live in the glory of God; and all around them, the world which does not understand that it too is Proverb, which does not find the Lord's joy, which seems to seek to self-destruct, which despairs of rising above material things. That wants to destroy itself in the fire, despairing that it can soar above material things."

Thomas Merton, writing to Jacques Maritain about Raïssa's Journal (The Courage for Truth: Letters to Writers)

Evilution

"Civilisation has greatly benefited from man's infinite capacity for research and invention: a capacity that is frequently harnessed for the destruction of others, the full horror of which can manifest itself at any time."

So writes Roy Ray, the artist behind the ongoing Evilution project, a project which is Ray's personal response as an artist to this evil phenomenon and its innocent victims in relation to the times in which he has lived, the people he has met and the events he has witnessed.

For this purpose, he is using constructions, collages, photographs and video together with writings which include those drawn from numerous childhood memories. The first phase of the project focusses on examples for which a single name is synonymous with the mass destruction of innocent lives by the corrupt use of science and technology.

Five panels from this first phase of the project, each measuring 5ft x 2ft, have been on display at Coventry Cathedral throughout 2010 and are "memorials to the millions of innocent men, women and children who became victims of conflict by the corrupt use of science and technology: many because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time or from the wrong country or wrong race." The panels have been exhibited as a group with the title 'Where their footsteps left no trace' and each panel represents a place, the name of which is synonymous with this evil phenomena:

"Every single one of those people meant something to someone and should not be forgotten ... The lowest part of each panel has the common denominator of ash and rubble common to each of these places of Evilution and symbolising the destruction of people and places."

The next phase of the project will deal with the Western Front during the 1914-18 War which destroyed a generation of young men who were the victims of innocence. Regular updates of the Evilution website will deal with future phases and other aspects of the Project, one which is likely to occupy Ray for the forseeable future.

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T Bone Burnett - Earlier Baghdad (The Bounce).