Banksy interpreted

I'm enjoying better nights of sleep these days, as my wound closes and heals. Less discomfort, pain and irritation, and I can sit properly for much longer as well. Somehow the change leaves me more relaxed, not so driven by the impulse to survive and cope with normal everyday living. This may sound odd, but it is what I have realised is a consequence of the easing of stress on the vagus nerve system that runs through the body from top to bottom and drives fight/flight reactions. With a wound so close to the core of this, it isn't surprising that that the body physically reacts to this as a threat. Ancient iconography portrays the devil poking his pitchfork into the backside of the condemned to drive them into hell. With good reason. Any impact on one of the most sensitive parts of the body is experienced as an evil threat,

I took the funeral of an ex-professional soldier this lunchtime at Thornhill Crem. Although the family hadn't given much attention to this aspect of his life, I asked if Elgar's Enigma variation 'Nimrod' could be played after the eulogy. Also I spoke the allocution 'They shall not grow old...', as I thought this was appropriate. Afterwards, the lady who provided the material for the eulogy expressed appreciation for this. It seems the deceased had mentioned this to his in his last days as something he'd like at his funeral, but she hadn't remembered this in the rush to prepare the service.

I arrived home to find that Clare had returned from her study group and had just put lunch on the table, although we'd agreed to have a snack and cook this evening. That was a nice surprise. Then I went to the bank and continued with a walk down to Blackweir where I took some more photos of the resident heron, standing fishing in the same place as yesterday.

Before supper, I recorded the components of Thursday's Morning Prayer and Reflection and edited them together afterwards. I can produce the final version with slides for upload to YouTube tomorrow.

An excellent two hour long documentary about street art on the Sky Arts channel later in the evening, much of it about the career of Banksy, though not exclusively. It's not often you can sit through a serious programme about art, and spend much of the time laughing at what you see. So much of Banksy's work is a humorous insightful commentary into the contemporary world and a critique of accepted values. As the early part of the programme charted his nurture in the alternative creative Bristol scene of graffiti and hip hop music, it portrayed a city we know well and lived in as students and when I was a Parish Priest in St Paul's. 

In those days I was more into reggae and black artistic development and hardly aware of what was emerging in the neighbouring inner city white working class barrio of Barton Hill. Owain was born in St Paul's, and now lives the other side of Barton Hill in Redfield, a rising gentrifying multi-cultural place, less deprived than his birthplace. It's fascinating to look back on our time there after forty years, and how everything has changed since.

It occurred to me that Banksy's work is challenging and critical of contemporary values in a way which prophets of ancient times would have understood. Although words and sentences often appear in his art, it's always in a visual framework juxtaposed with images that make you think. Prophecy is associated with declarations of God's Word in poetic oracles. Sometimes these oracles describe a visual metaphor. In Banksy's work the prophetic Word is expressed primarily in revelatory images. I'm trying to figure out if this is innovative, or if I've just missed something in my view of twenty centuries of art history.