continued Extracts from Ecstatic Notebook by Duncan Ward:
I saw the ecstatic smile on the face of a Chola idol whom centuries of anointing under honey, milk, water, ashes, and sand had worn down the metal of, making the features soft. The priests’ hands had rubbed these substances down over so many times that the eyes of the statue, open at the start, had closed; and when the artisan had come to re-carve the faded features he had kept them in their closed position, chiselling along the single line at the bottom of the eyelid – only on the left eye did the pupil very faintly peep through to show that the eye had once been open. The smile in those eyes was something remarkable, unmistakably the smile that is smiled when the face is anointed in milk, sand, water, ashes, and honey. It can only have been achieved by slow increments, too delicate for any craftsman to carve first time, the smile emerged from a long process of submergence, gradually sweetening, rising up more radiantly every time from under each shower of liquids.
It struck me as being a fine way to treat a statue, to treat it to baths such as this (I understand that the idols are often bedecked in flowers too). I want to be bathed like this – we don’t anoint enough in this culture. My parents are not religious, but they took me to the church to have me baptized when I was born: merely out of formality, or a sense of tradition. The ceremony was not spectacular. A culture shows a deplorable restraint when it thinks it can baptize its citizens with an eggcupful of water over the forehead – a tepid gesture.
I saw another smile, on the Apollo di Veio, at the Etruscan Museum in the Villa Borghese, Rome. Nando Espositi sent me to see it, my friend’s father and a more committed atheist than me. He told me that if he had to believe in a god it would be this one, this god that does not sit in the clouds looking down upon men but who looks you in the face instead, and smiles. And he was right to send me to look at this god because here again was another remarkable smile, magical in its aliveness, beaming benevolently out of a quizzically cocked head. I could see why Nando, worldlier than me, found special appeal in that communicative smile – more gregarious than the enraptured expression on the Chola idol. But both of these smiles were clearly touched with ecstasy: the one gave itself over to ecstasy unsparingly, while the other bore the ecstasy inside it in a more modest manner and kept up a simultaneous dialogue with the world of earthly men even as it glowed with unearthly fire.
People harp on about the Mona Lisa’s smile but why bother with such an anaemic enigma when mystery comes also in expressions of such elevated joy?
