Those dark mirrors

I've never been a big fan of Paul.  You know Paul, right?  The guy who wrote all those letters.  The ones in the Bible?  That Paul.

Despite my general distrust of him, I always liked this painting depicting him.



That's Caravaggio's The Conversion of St. Paul which hangs in a small chapel in the back of Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome.  I'm a little bit of a freaky fan of Caravaggio.  He's always seemed, well, funny to me.  Don't you just get the sense the the horse is looking at Paul like, "What the hell are you doing on the ground?  You know I poop down there, right?"

I spent a semester in college in Rome and wandered around from church to church with my very worn Michelin guide to the city.  Always a bit of a completest, I saw every Caravaggio in the city.  It wasn't a singular obsession, I also saw every Borromini church in the city.



That's St. Ivo della Sapienza.  I like how wavy it is.

Anyway, back to Paul.  I don't much like to say what he has to say about women, among other things.  I should note that I come by my dislike of him perhaps somewhat organically.  An ancestor of mine was so enraged (relatively late in his life) about the Pauline perspective that he resigned his ordination to the ministry and began writing books trying to debunk the various epistles written by Paul as heretical.  The demand to publish these tracts was rather small, as you might expect.  So, he opened up a vanity press to publish them himself and kept it going with others' projects of the same type.

Despite my dislike of Paul, I've always liked one verse.  Really, half of one verse.

"For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face."  That's 1st Corinthians 13:12, if you want to know.

That was the King James version.  Here's the New International version:

"Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face."

Same basic idea, though the "through a glass darkly" is the bit I like the best.

I've always connected it to the Platonic allegory of the cave.

"Behold! human beings living in an underground den, which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all along the den; here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads. Above and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised way; and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen which marionette players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets."

The difference, really, is that Paul makes promises.  He suggests that at some point, we will see clearly.  Which gets me back to not liking Paul--how can I believe in the clarity when the rest of it seems so suspect?

So, art, ancestors, philosophy, and religion aside, what's my point?

I don't like how what sometimes goes on in my head seems disconnected from reality.  I keep trying to turn my head to see what's reflected, but it's always just out of view.