THE PREGNANT EMPTINESS AT THE CENTRE OF KUNTUNKANTAN AND THE CAVE OF MYSTERY




The depth at the centre of Kuntunkantan becomes for Atua Kofo the matrix where the splinters of this Face are encountered.The play of darkness in Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks becomes an expression of the notion of Blasphemy at the heart of existence, but blasphemy, not as a defiance of the sacred but as an affirmation of a mode of being that is totally Other in terms of the criteria by which human understanding of order is organised. The lady at the extreme right of the painting, supposedly St.Anne, purportedly pointing at the Child Jesus, to Atua Kofo, has an angularity of posture that suggests that beneath the elegant folds of the exquisitely coloured drapery is hidden, not the body of a woman but the body of a centaur, having the body of an animal but the face of a human being, as attested by the animal crouch of the body, or at least something that only seems to be human but in reality is something that if we were to see in its true nature, would repel sight with an abhorrence at its strangeness, its fundamental difference from human expectation of what is expected exist in nature.

The dark space into which the creature with the face of a beautiful woman points, becomes, therefore, not the space between her and the Child Jesus, implying that she is not pointing at the Divine Child as is traditionally understood , but to a Blasphemy, an abomination, which in its obstruction of sight, its NonLight, its impenetrable darkness, is a Void to which the Divine Child himself does obeisance as He kneels with His hands cupped in front of Him in devotion, a space to which the other child, traditionally identified as St. John, also points , although he is traditionally understood as pointing to the Child Jesus, for whom he acted as a forerunner, an announcer of his coming. So, all these figures are in dynamic action around the dark, impenetrable space that is at the level of the waist of the figure traditionally identified with the Virgin Mary and whose hand hovers delicately over the same enigmatic space, a space impenetrable to the eye but pregnant with suggestive power/evocative possibility. The most unusual setting for what is supposed to a depiction of/an encounter between the Lord of Light, the Child Jesus, his forerunner, St. John, his mother, the Virgin Mary and St. Anne, the mother of St. John, in the depths of the earth, thereby placing an iconographic tableau central to the images of a faith that is not identified with nature, that, in its scriptures, identifies the depths of the earth with the abode of the devil to which Jesus later descends to liberate souls, is most unusual and succeeds in evoking undertones of the uncanny[1].

To Atua Kofo,the entire atmosphere generated by the cave, consisting mainly of thick darkness broken by shafts of light, the structure of the painting, leading the eye from the figures in partial light at the centre of a dark space to partial illumination beyond the thick rocked roof of the cave, drawing the sight of the viewer from the interior where the strange tableau is taking place, to cliffs and mountain ranges in the receding distance, is a chthonic habitation that is closer to evocations of earth goddesses than to the conventional associations of the Son of God in a religion whose scriptures are significantly nonmaterial in their understanding of ultimate value, which orient human life towards the otherworldly, a religion in which God is rigidly masculine and not identified with any aspect of nature but is understood as transcending nature.

It seems we are here in the realms of Baudelaire’s transgressive evocations of the feminine that is resistant to the taming efforts of humanity, or Rilke’s evocations of the angelic which inspires both terror and awe.

[1] See literature on the Uncanny,including todorov and Freud relate these realte to Otto'sonept of the numinous.

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