Ex-votos: “divine thanks for near misses”

Thursday, August 25, 2022

In Latin, the term “ex-voto”, is described as: a votive offering of thanks to a sacred entity for a miraculous act.

I first heard of ex-voto when researching the cartoonist Saul Steinberg’s bicycling habit. From the year 1992 in his chronology:

August, tells Aldo Buzzi that he fell off his bicycle but was not seriously hurt. “In my mind I see the disasters I avoided—teeth, bones, eyes—and I understand the concept of the Ex-Voto.” He makes an apotropaic drawing…

“Apotropaic” means “supposedly having the power to avert evil influences or bad luck.”

Here’s that drawing:

Note the brand names on all of his gear. In another letter to Aldo Buzzi, he wrote about his cycling commute:

Early in the morning, then, I’m on the bicycle to Amagansett, all of it uphill, and for a little bit along the ocean, etc. The return trip, downhill, much quicker. I wear a plastic helmet due to the danger from local yokels in their trucks, who hate cyclists and drive too fast and too close.

Here’s another ex-voto drawing of him on his bicycle from 1992:

I’m not sure when Steinberg first became inspired by ex-votos. There were votive paintings in his native Italy, but he also made several trips to Mexico, first in the late 40s with Hedda Sterne, who was down there hanging out with the great Miguel Covarrubias and others. He first started making his own around 1983.

Not too long after I saw Steinberg’s drawings, I was at the library and came across this book of contemporary Mexican votive paintings by Alfredo Vilchis Roque and his three songs, made from the 30s to the present day. The book is divided up into sections based on subject matter: “Parenthood,” “Relationships,” “Emigration,” “Urban Violence,” “Illness,” etc. My favorites were the paintings thanking saints for not getting caught cheating:

You can see why a cartoonist might be inspired by this form of pictures and words. Your typical ex-voto has a scene of a “near miss” or a miracle, with a saint or religious figure looking over the scene, and words underneath giving thanks. This caption reads:

I give thanks to Lord Jesus of Chalma that Joaquin was able to get away before my husband came in, avoiding a disaster. I offer Him this retablo, begging His forgiveness. I swear in remorse never to cheat [again], because my husband loves me and doesn’t deserve it. I will always be faithful to him till death do us part. I let myself get carried away by [Joaquín’s] youth and smooth talk, but this has made me appreciate my husband, as a man and a human being. Rosa H. J. This took place in Col. Condesa, Mexico D.F. February 14, 1990.

In the book Alfredo Vilchis Roque cites Frida Kahlo as one of his biggest influences, which makes sense because Kahlo and her husband Diego Rivera were avid collectors of ex-votos, decorating their house in Mexico City with hundreds of them. Here is an image I found of part of their collection:

You can really zoom in and get a look at some of these paintings in this photo.

It’s fun to trace the influence of ex-voto on Kahlo’s work in particular, and put some of her paintings next to ex-votos being made at the same time:

A 1934 ex-voto from Guadalajara, Mexico vs. Kahlo’s *A Few Small Nips*, 1945

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For more reading: “The Vivid Violence and Divine Healing of Ex-Voto Paintings”

Pandemic prayers

Monday, August 23, 2021

I made two batches of newspaper blackouts this weekend, the first batch made after seeing an article with the word “landlord” over and over.

Note that I didn’t say what the article was about — I never “read” the articles I black out, I just try to look at them as raw fields of words. (Here’s a video of this one being made.)

After I made the first batch, I remembered an article I saw about the pop singer Lorde, and I used that to make the second batch of “10 Short Poems”:

I’m often asked if I have an idea for what I want to “write” before I start. The answer is a big No. If I start out with an idea, it will be bad. It’s all about responding to the material. (For example, when “Swift” as in “Taylor” shows up.) Half finding the wave, half surfing it…

https://twitter.com/austinkleon/status/1429097945513828357

Related reading: How to make a newspaper blackout poem

Writing as a spiritual practice

Thursday, April 15, 2021

I took a break a few days ago to watch Paul Elie (author of The Life You Save May Be Your Own and Reinventing Bach) interview James Martin about his new book, Learning To Pray, and writing as a spiritual practice. (Read more my thoughts on prayer.) Video of the discussion is on YouTube.

Out of all the interesting subjects they discussed, I think I was most taken by Father Martin’s explanation of how his vow of poverty affects his writing. Martin is “editor at large” at America Magazine, and as he explained it, he basically has the freedom to write about whatever he wants. The same goes for his books: All of his royalties go to the magazine, so he’s mostly unconcerned about sales. He also said his purpose in writing, always, is not to achieve literary greatness, but to “help souls.” So his mission and his vow of poverty takes away most of the common pressures of publishing. Writing, for him, is never a struggle.

See previously: Learning to Pray with James Martin and Mary Karr

Learning to pray with James Martin and Mary Karr

Wednesday, February 24, 2021

A few nights ago I had a glass of wine and doodled while I watched Mary Karr interview James Martin about his new book, Learning To Pray:

Once upon a time, before Martin’s newest book, I asked Karr for a reading list on prayer and she obliged:

The Cloud of Unknowing
James Martin, The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything: A Spirituality for Real Life
Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain
Thomas Merton, Seeds of Contemplation
Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace
Simone Weil, Waiting for God
Dalai Lama, The Art of Happiness
The Way of a Pilgrim
Thich Nhat Hanh, The Miracle of Mindfulness: An Introduction to the Practice of Meditation

On praying, whether you believe or not

Thursday, April 23, 2020

“For me writing has always felt like praying…”
—Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

“Playing is like praying. It’s a sacred act. It shows the ultimate reverence for life.”
—Vince Hannemann (aka The Junk King)

“Why do we pray? We pray because the bell rings.”
—Joan Chittister, Benedictine nun

I realized the other day, after reading Nick Cave’s wonderful thoughts on prayer, that Keep Going contains at least two prayers — the first being The Dunning-Kruger Prayer, the second being the “paper prayer” at the bottom of this post.

I find it annoying how much better Cave is at putting my thoughts into words than I am.

“The act of prayer is by no means exclusive to religious practise because prayer is not dependent on the existence of a subject,” he writes. “You need not pray to anyone. It is just as valuable to pray into your disbelief, as it is to pray into your belief.”

He continues:

A prayer provides us with a moment in time where we can contemplate the things that are important to us, and this watchful application of our attention can manifest these essential needs. The act of prayer asks of us something and by doing so delivers much in return — it asks us to present ourselves to the unknown as we are, devoid of pretence and affectation, and to contemplate exactly what it is we love or cherish. Through this conversation with our inner self we confront the nature of our own existence.

I grew up saying lots of prayers. The creepy ones (“now I lay me down to sleep…”) and the great ones (“forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”) I was often asked, at family dinners, to deliver the blessing. (I have always liked to talk and spin words and show off my ability to do so.) Of the things I keep in my life from my church-going days, prayer is top of the list.

When I pray, it’s because my world is so beautiful and I want to express my gratitude, or because there is a great disconnect between how my world is and how I’d like it to be. (Almost always both.)

It’s for these exact same reasons that I make art. I see something so beautiful that I want to amplify it, or I see something so broken that I want to repair it.

One of the great disconnects between me and my evangelical dad is that he wants so badly for me to believe, and if there’s one thing I believe, it’s that belief is overrated.

What I believe in is the practice, the rituals, the things to do. I know my dad fears for me and my salvation, but here I am, doing the things I learned from his example and our religion: loving my family and my neighbors as best as I can, working, saying thanks, devoting myself daily to connecting to something larger than myself, etc.

I am no theologian, but what difference does it make what I call it?

This spills over, of course, into my beliefs about art: There are those who say, “You must call yourself an artist first, and you’ll be one.” This does not work for me at all. For me, it’s best to forget the noun completely, and do the verbs.

Because my other belief is that it is through practice that we best come around to belief.

The best proselytizing I ever heard was Mary Karr: “Why don’t you pray for 30 days and see if your life gets better?”

Someone asked me recently if I could boil down my books into one piece of advice. I thought for a minute and said, “Try sitting in the same place at the same time for the same length of time every day for a month and see if something happens.”

A daily devotional.

A prayer.