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Cappuccin Crypt
One of the places that I visited on a previous trip to Italy was the Cappuccin Crypt, beneath the Church of Santa Maria della Immacolata Concezione, in Rome. It was two years ago today, in fact. This is a positively fascinating place. It's difficult even to know what to make of it. Let me show you some photos to give you some idea of this place:
As you can see, there are a lot of bones in this crypt! Notice that even the designs and ornaments are made of bones (little ones). Skulls, skeletons, and some things that are just wall or columns or stacks of bones. I guess all these corpses of monks had been decomposing below the church for years and years when some monk got the bright idea of building these unique displays. I do have a hard time imagining this conversation as the junior monk goes to the head of his order: "So, you know all the monk corpses beneath the church? Well, I have this fabulous idea to clean up the basement..."
At the last station of the crypt is a sign that reads: "Quello che voi sete noi eravamo, quello che noi siamo voi sarete. / Was ihr seid sind wir gewesen; was wir sind wardet ihr sein. / Comme vous nous etions; come nous vous serez. / What you are now, we used to be; what we are now, you will be."
Wow. Talk about a downer, eh? Granted, this is coming from a religion that has a ceremony replicating cannibalism (eating the body and blood of Christ--particularly as many have believed in the elements becoming literally Christ's body) and uses a symbol of painful torture as an object of religious devotion. Clean it up for 20th century sensibilities, shift the emphasis to love, but you still have a religion--like all religion, I suppose, like all deep-thinking philosophy--that's fixated on the fact of death. And this is fair: it's the one true certainty. Say what you will about taxes, there have been individuals and groups in the past and no doubt will be in the future, for whom the certainty of taxes was no such thing, but we have no recorded cases of true, extended failure to die, so it's a pretty relevent fact of life to consider in any belief system. Christianity likes to remind us of our mortality in order to minimize the importance of this life in favor of the next. And, of course, presuming there is such a life and that it really is eternal, this is a fair move. It's just that it's not so obvious that there is such a life, while it's painfully obvious that this life we're living does exist.
So I thought a bit more about the monks' warning: "What you are now, we used to be; what we are now, you will be." Obvious, right? You're alive and doing all those living things, and we used to do them too; now we're dead, dry, lifeless remains, and some day you will be too. So get right with God and all that. Let's look at it another way, though. I'll take the first part at face value, we're alive, so were they, but the second part I'd like to examine a bit more. What these dead monks are now is art. As unnerving as it might be at first, there really is something beautiful and aesthetic about the arrangement of these bones in their spaces. Now there's a rather less horrifying thought, isn't it? I could be art! Really, that would be excellent! I could bring wonder or insight or something to someone else through my aesthetic qualities!
In fact, I think this is how we should live our lives: as an art form. Art can bring beauty, wonder, awe to people, and so can we if we choose to live that way. Art can make things click, can make things make sense, can dazzle with insight, and so can we if we choose to live that way. Art can effect people down through the generations, and so can we if we choose to live that way. Also, art is not, strictly speaking, right or wrong. It can be good or poor, it can be enlightening or entertaining, thought-provoking or emotionally evocative. It can be effective or ineffective and to various degrees. But all art doesn't have to do the same thing in order to be valuable: it is what it is, it does what it does, and one being beautiful, moving, wonderful doesn't prevent another from being all of those things in a completely different way. There's no one way to make art (though there can be some lousy or mediocre ones) and the same is true of a life: there are many ways of living valuable, excellent, beautiful, wonderful lives.
Still, a work of art is, by definition, the product of an organizing intelligence, and so we are both art work and artist, choosing how to create the art work. And so my advice, such as it is, is to live life like an artform, to be the best whatever-sort-of-art-it-is-that-you-are that you can be, to choose your own way to it and make it what you want it to be. Live your life aesthetically.