The Golem in the Attic, and Other Tales

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Buried deep in the New York Times this weekend, you might have noticed the article entitled, Hard Times Give New Life to Prague’s Golem. This would be scary were it true; a golem is, after all, a monster. Yet the golem is a unique and relatively recent monster, one of debatable bloodlust.

The inhabitants of Prague might now consider it a deformed patron saint of sorts, akin to Quasimodo in Paris, when they see vendors hawking little statues and images of it. The Golem is a historically Jewish monster with a long history. Mentioned once in the Bible, the instructions for fashioning one are in the Book of Creation, part of the Kabala, and involve forming it in clay and bringing it to life with words. What results is a strong creature with blazing eyes and an inability to speak. It will keep going on whatever task it’s creator assigns it until it is destroyed.

The most well-known story of the golem is connected to a Rabbi Loew, called the Maharal of Prague, in the 1500s. It was said that he created a golem out of clay to protect the Jewish community from blood libel and to help out doing physical labor. (Medieval inhabitants sometimes even planted children in Jewish houses to spur riots against the Jews who were ritually killing and drinking the blood of Prague’s children.) The golem acted as a protector of the Jewish community for a time.

Then the golem ran amok, threatening innocent lives. Rabbi Loew removed the Divine Name he had written on the golem’s forehead, rendering it lifeless. He saved the clay body in case it was ever needed again. It is widely suspected the golem is still lying in the attic of Rabbi Loew’s temple in Prague.

Whenever times are tough, and people need protection, the golem becomes more popular. Unfortuantely, as the legend shows, golems literal and dogged following of instructions often has bad results. So this odd hero/protector/monster is returning to populairty in Prague, according to the New York Times. If he mad more artistic debuts, we’d be lucky.

The golem has sprung up all over the arts for the past few centuries. He had appeared in early silent films (since lost) and even a ballet. (This conjures up images of the elephant ballet dancers from the movie Fantasia, so I can’t even imagine what it a golem would dance like.) The golem of Prague has appeared in more recent novels, such as Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, in which Josef Kavalier helps save the Golem of Prague from Nazi invasion, Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, and Dara Horn’s The World To Come, about the life of artist Marc Chagall. All three of these books are fascinating reads of historical interest with great storylines.

Statue of the Golem of Prague

Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poet/Priest

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I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird — the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
 Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.



Entitled The Windhover, you might, if you haven’t read Gerard Manley Hopkins before, not have seen some of the words he made up for this poem, like ‘sillion.’ The meter too is unique to Hopkins; he created his own that he called sprung rhythm. The uniqueness and innovation that characterizes his passionate verse set him aside from his contemporaries of Victorian England–it has even been said he paved the way for free verse.

He lived his life as anything but free. Hopkins (1844- 1889) was a sensitive, bright youth who did well at Oxford. He converted to Roman Catholicism in 1866 and became a Jesuit priest in 1868, when he was 24 years old. This decision set the tone of his unhappy life, which was a struggle to repress his poetic and (homo?)sexual urges. Taking on the life of a Jesuit, Hopkins traveled to many part of England and finally Dublin, Ireland to teach, where he found himself friendless, unrespected, and ill at ease. These years led to his so-called terrible sonnets, which express great personal anguish.

His artistic dilemma only exacerbated his unhappiness (today we might call it manic depression), for he was a devout man. Hopkins felt that to publish his poetry would be too egoistic for a Jesuit priest, and not to publish would limit his poetic ability. He lived a divided life. He burned much of his early poetry, and stopped writing poetry later in life. Aside from a few odd periodicals, he was never published. Instead of poetry, he began to fill journals of incredible prosody and imagery, as well as wrote for more practical, religious purposes. Yet to the end of his life he remained both a devout Christian and a devoted writer. One might say of his poetry, as he writes in God’s Grandeur:

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil.

Ah, Ravels in Review

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My fingers are relieved to take a bit of a break this week (perhaps you’re relieved not to be presented with a long, involved post ; ) . I’ve gotten into some topics I find super interesting.

We kicked off the week with a proposal against taking photographs of artwork in museums, which got some agreement, certainly some disagreement, and a lot of mixed feelings. It stuck in my mind, and I revised my opinion to allow that instead of being evil and stupid is was perhaps a sign of engagement with an artwork.

We played a game matching the artwork to its auction house estimate. Nobody won, so I’m keeping the $1M prize. In fact, even the auction houses didn’t win; they still have their two biggest works by Picasso and Giacometti.

I had the pleasure of seeing the musical South Pacific at Lincoln Center, and then having the song Honey Bun in my head for the whole week.

In fact, that annoying song is probably why I got a little contentious in my post on the Affordable Art Fair, contributing to my backhanded praise of the store Urban Outfitters for so cleverly following the pluralistic trends evident at the fair.

And my personal pick of the week was on the use of writing in painting, especially as it evolved during Modernism. Anyways, thanks for a fun week guys, and have a good weekend!