Review

Confession

Culture

Grenfell disaster

Penitence

7 May 2023

7 min read

Watching Grenfell: the lost art of penitence

As the Grenfell Inquiry reports, Graham Tomlin recalls a remarkable film that brought home the horror of what happened

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

An aerial view across West London towards Grenfell Tower

Courtesy the artist - Steve McQueen, Grenfell, 2019, via Serpentine Galleries.

The camera looks down over fields, the green and pleasant land of England far below. It moves slowly over the landscape until gradually it begins fly over the streets and parks of North London, past Wembley Stadium with its well-known arch, curving into the sky and back down again, and finally, as the urban sounds grow louder, it begins to home in on a small dark rectangular spot in the centre of the screen. As it gets closer, the familiar outline becomes clear. It is Grenfell Tower.

Today when you go past the Tower, just off the Westway, a major road artery into central London, the Tower, or at least the remains of it, is covered in white plastic sheeting. It’s a kind of compromise between those local people who can’t bear to look at it every day, and those who want it to remain visible as a stark monument to the injustice and greed that led to the fire that killed 72 people in June 2017.

Steve McQueen is a Londoner, a well-known filmmaker, Director of 12 Years a Slave and winner of the Turner Prize. As the plastic sheeting was about to go up to hide the grim nakedness of the Tower, he wanted to ensure the story of Grenfell was not forgotten, so filmed the building in January 2019 just as the ghostly shroud begun to creep up the side of the building. His remarkable film, simply called Grenfell, has been showing at the Serpentine Galleries in Hyde Park. He recently voiced dismay that few politicians had come to see the film, despite being invited. They really missed something.

As the camera revolves around the Tower, there is no sound, no commentary at all, as if there are no words to describe what happened here.

The camera homes in on the tower, and gradually begins to rotate slowly around it. We peer into the rooms of this tall, charred block, standing like a black cliff face, a literal tomb in the heart of London. Behind it, there is the gleaming shining face of the Westfield shopping centre, cars driving up and down the slick dual carriageway that flows past it, but the focus is relentlessly on the horror of the Tower in front of us. The camera goes round and round, occasionally drawing out, but then being drawn back in, mesmerised by the blackness, the darkness, the shell of the Tower and the ghosts of the lives it destroyed.

Watching it brings on a mixture of fascination and nausea. Nausea from the relentless circular motion of the camera. Fascination at the details – pink plastic bags of debris in what was someone’s living room; the remains of a kitchen cabinet that had somehow survived the inferno. And for me personally, as the Bishop of Kensington at the time, memories of being there on the day, watching the tower burn; talking and praying with dazed survivors, evacuated from the blocks around Grenfell; listening to firefighters with the agonising dilemmas of trying to reach the highest floors, with breathing apparatus that wouldn’t allow them to get there. As the camera revolves around the Tower, there is no sound, no commentary at all, as if there are no words to describe what happened here. We see into the flats that were once homes, with kitchens, bedrooms, toys and family mementos. We look into the haunting floors at the top of the tower in which many of the victims died, pushed upwards by the flames and the advice to stay put until help came, but of course none ever did.

It doesn’t annul the pain, doesn’t offer easy, facile optimism, pretending that the awfulness doesn’t matter. Yet it makes contemplating it bearable.

Watching the film reminded me of standing before a medieval painting of the crucifixion, such as Grünewald’s famous Isenheim altarpiece. Pilgrims would stare for hours at such paintings to bring home to their hearts and minds the consequences of their sins, and to help them resolve to live differently. We don’t do penitence well in our culture. This is a penitential film, and it’s what the politicians who didn’t turn up to watch it have missed.

an altarpiece depicts the crucifixion of Christ.

The Isenheim altarpiece

Steve McQueen, just like Matthias Grünewald, wants us to look hard at the reality of what we have done - innocent life lost in the most horrific way. The altarpiece focuses on the intense suffering of Christ, the stretched sinews, the blood pouring from the wounds, the agony of those helplessly watching on. Just like this film that keeps your eyes fixed on the shattered shell of a building, the painting doesn’t let your eyes stray from the grim reality.

Yet there is a difference. Just faintly in the dark distance of Grünewald’s painting are the glimmers of dawn. On the horizon, the sky lightens, just a little. It is of course a reference to Resurrection, just around the corner. It doesn’t annul the pain, doesn’t offer easy, facile optimism, pretending that the awfulness doesn’t matter. Yet it makes contemplating it bearable. It allows you to focus on the revulsion, yet makes it endurable by offering the hope of Resurrection. And as Christian thinkers and pray-ers have insisted over the years, you only get to Resurrection through death, not by avoiding it.

At the time of the fire, I remember doing numerous media interviews with news outlets from across the world, with journalists hungry for some words to satisfy the global fascination with this tragedy. What could I say? What could possibly make sense of such a thing? I resolved that in every interview I would try to acknowledge the dreadfulness of what had happened, but also to strike a note of hope - that that despite what had happened, lives could be rebuilt, a community could find healing, then there was a road out of pain, one day, to peace – all because I am a Christian, and therefore have to believe that resurrection follows death.

Steve McQueen's brief film is compulsive watching. If you get a chance, you really should see it as something that brings home the horror of Grenfell more than anything I have seen. It is Grenfell’s Good Friday. Grenfell’s altarpiece. Watching it with Christian eyes, however, I kept looking for the glimmers of dawn.

Grenfell has been subject to a huge amount of commentary since the fire. There are those on the left who see it as a monument to corporate greed and capitalist rapaciousness. They demand Justice for Grenfell, which for many, means locking up or punishing the guilty. There are those on the right who see it a simply a dreadful accident that could have happened anywhere. One side calls it a crime. The other calls it a tragedy. Which was it?

The Left is perhaps rightly consumed with anger, demanding justice, legal convictions as resolution. Many on the Right look for a while, yet eventually avert their gaze, thinking it of it as one of those things, just an awful tragedy. I remember a Council official saying to me: “Well, one day, we just have to move on from Grenfell.”

What happens beyond lament? It is one thing to grieve those who died. It’s also something else to critique the failures that lead to it. Issuing prison sentences to the guilty may satisfy the desire for justice, but doesn't in itself bring about a new, hopeful, common life that renders simply unimaginable the pattern of moral compromise and sheer carelessness for the safety of others that led to Grenfell. On the other hand, simply consigning it to the category of awful accidents doesn't take seriously the grievous sins that led to the fire, and fails to give due recognition to the suffering of those who died.

Neither left nor right can offer us a sure way forward. That is where we are short of vision at the moment. An event like Grenfell easily falls off the radar of public attention because we don't want to look at it. Any maybe that is because we're not sure it will ever get any better. We need a way to keep looking at something painful until it is healed. That is the point of penitence - to go back to painful places in our lives to find healing. Yet you can only really do that if you believe healing can be found, that death ends in life, not the other way round.

The Christian story that holds together death and resurrection, Good Friday and Easter Sunday enables us to look at death and tragedy and horror full in the face as this film so eloquently enables us to do. It enables penitence to be hopeful, not hopeless. Yet, it also enables us to bear it, because alongside it, it says that there is a reality beyond both crime and tragedy, that is not just retributive justice but a deep underlying trajectory of the world that is headed for life not death.

Of course, the Resurrection is not a political solution. It doesn’t convict the guilty or dictate future housing policy, important as those are. But it points us to the deeper reality - that perhaps what we need today is not so much political but spiritual renewal. We need a deeper vision of life and death that gives us a reason to hope, that offers a future. We need a bigger story, a story that kindles hopefulness, that can stir hopeless hearts and the glimmers of dawn, even in the darkness of a world filled with so much pain.

Review

Awe and wonder

Books

Culture

Poetry

10 October 2024

6 min read

Charles Taylor on how poetry seeks cosmic connections

The philosopher yields an array of luminous insights.

Paul Weston

Paul Weston is a Fellow at Ridley Hall, Cambridge.

At dusk, three people sit on a field edge and look at the stars emerging.

Rad Pozniakov on Unsplash.

Charles Taylor, Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment

At just shy of 600 pages, philosopher Charles Taylor’s latest book is not for the faint-hearted. At the heart of the book are fascinating questions. What kind of language should we use when we encounter ‘beauty’, or experience ‘wonder’ which seems to take us into a new kind of space, or make time stand still? It could be the sight of a breathtaking landscape. It could be a piece of music. It’s that sense of ‘connection’ with something bigger than ourselves. What might it mean? More particularly, how do we express what we intuitively feel to be real and deeply significant about such things when our usual language fails to capture it?

Taylor says that his latest book ‘is about (what I see as) the human need for cosmic connection . . . one shot through with joy, significance, inspiration’. And his hypothesis is that ‘the desire for this connection is a human constant, felt by (at least some) people in all ages and phases of human history’, even if ‘the forms this desire takes have been very different in the succeeding phases and stages of this history’. The book explores these questions by focusing on late-Romantic European poetry and traces its development through the work of later poets including Goethe, Rilke, Wordsworth, Hopkins, and T. S. Eliot.

The background to Taylor’s explorations is the ongoing impact of the Enlightenment on our language and understanding about ‘truth’ and ‘meaning’. Those familiar with his 2007 book A Secular Age will find echoes of it here, particularly the way in which post-Enlightenment language tended to develop the language of control. This, he argues, became increasingly dominant in Western modernity ‘because it is linked to a practical stance which is basically instrumentalist; we seek out the efficient causal relations in our world with the aim of discovering handles which will enable us to realise our purposes’. In reaction to this narrowing of possibilities, the Romantic poets focused on ‘the experience of connection, and the empowerment this brings: not a power over things, but one of self-realization’. And a key element of the Romantic movement was the recognition that a poem (alongside the wider arts) uncovers deeper meanings: it ‘reveals to us, brings us into contact with, a deep reality which would otherwise remain beyond our ken’.

‘Poetry goes beyond creating a mood, an atmosphere of feeling, and claims to give access to the inner force in a thing, not by describing it, but by making it palpable’

Charles Taylor

The book focuses on the variety of forms that this reaction took amongst Romantic poets. A unifying desire for ‘connection’ led to differing ideas about how poetic language makes this possible and what kinds of meaning are revealed. But the central belief remained constant: that poetic language was the key to addressing a prevailing cultural atmosphere of ‘disenchantment’, in which the desire for cosmic connection had been sidelined.

On the English side of the channel, Taylor finds in Keats’ poetry, a new form of expression summed up in his statement ‘Beauty is Truth and Truth Beauty’. In Taylor’s words, ‘Art raises the object to a new unity and intensity, which constitutes Beauty. But this is not something which just exists in the mind of the artist (or reader); it has reality, and hence Truth, even though this reality is partly brought to fruition by artistic (re)creation’.

Similarly, for Gerard Manley Hopkins, the form of poetic language itself can become a means of ‘connection’. As Taylor puts it, in Hopkins’ work, ‘Poetry goes beyond creating a mood, an atmosphere of feeling, and claims to give access to the inner force in a thing, not by describing it, but by making it palpable’. His poetry embodies this in that it ‘renders the rhythms of the being itself through the “sprung rhythm” of the verse’.

The second half of the book looks to poets of the last 200 years who have navigated parallel pathways towards this ideal of experienced fullness – in the face of increasing industrialisation and disenchantment. Baudelaire longs for the experience of fullness, but finds it barred by a state of melancholy that he described as ‘Spleen’. It is a melancholy brought about by the endless repetitions of mundane and urbanised life. Baudelaire’s attempt to find release from our imprisonment in trapped time is to face Spleen head on and to transform it through poetic contemplation.

T. S. Eliot’s poetry similarly aims to evoke the sources of a fuller life in a culture of decay by means of the ‘continual surrender’ of the poet to something more significant and valuable. In Eliot’s case this resolves in a more-or-less traditional sense of Christian order, but Taylor notes that his poetry doesn’t necessarily require this. Miłosz on the other hand, amidst the social and political upheavals in Poland, sought a higher form of poetry: a poetry that could rise above the discord of social turmoil in order to define a moment and clarify the path that needed to be taken.

‘The work of art opens for us a new field of meaning, by giving shape to it’.

Charles Taylor

At times, the weight and detail of Taylor’s exposition threatens to overwhelm the reader, but he offers an array of luminous insights along the way, and he is largely successful in keeping an eye on the broader questions and themes. Perhaps the most important here is his belief that the human desire for ‘cosmic connection’, with its yearning for joy, significance and inspiration is perennial. The book is in this sense an elaborate historical worked example of this desire, understood – perhaps imperceptibly – as a sense of ‘loss’ or ‘longing’. It is this ‘central aspiration of the Romantic period’, he concludes, that ‘remains powerful today’.

My own experiences of talking with people today seems to amply confirm Taylor’s view. And the search for language to describe the desire for this sense of connection (or the longing for it) continues to thrive even within a so-called secularised culture (most likely because of it). It too seeks language for expression and sometimes struggles for some of the same reasons that the Romantics identified. Taylor’s phrase ‘the immanent frame’ (from his A Secular Age) powerfully evokes a sense of being held on a restricted rein, unable to name or explore the realms of ‘beauty’ or the ‘transcendent’ beyond perceived cultural boundaries. Connected to this is the still commonly held belief that any supposed knowledge derived through the arts doesn’t put us in touch with anything other than ourselves.

Taylor convincingly transcends the supposed dichotomy between these so-called ‘subjective’ or on the other hand, ‘ontological’ possibilities. ‘The work of art’, he says, ‘opens for us a new field of meaning, by giving shape to it’. Moreover, it can ‘realize a powerful experience of fulfillment . . . of connection which empowers’. And Taylor backs his theory with autobiography. In Goethe’s ‘Wanderer Nachtlied’, he says, ‘There is a kind of rest/peace which I long for. I don’t fully understand it, but now I have some sense of it’. Or broadening the artistic field, he finds that listening to Chopin’s Fantasie-Impromptu in C sharp minor ‘opens me up to an unnameable longing’, or that when he listens to Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony, he feels ‘a striving upwards, an expression of praise and thanks, straining to reach some higher addressee (for me, this would be God), but I can imagine that someone else, feeling the ascending movement, would imagine another destination’).

Here then is a book that shines a light on the possibilities of ‘cosmic connection’. Taylor affirms our desires, reassuring us that we should not feel strange to share the same longings for ‘fullness’, for ‘transcendence’, for ‘joy’ and for ‘connection’ as did the Romantic poets. Our recognition of these desires may well have been evoked by the kind of poetry or music that Taylor talks about here. But for all of us, it is good to be reminded that in a western world still heavily influenced by the climate of secularisation many today are still searching for the sense of cosmic connection that Taylor describes.

Charles Taylor’s Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment is published by Harvard University Press.