Out of the depths I cry to thee, O Lord. (Psalm 130)

In the Old Testament the depths often refer to the depths of the sea (Psalm 69:2, 14; Isaiah 51:10; Ezekiel 27:34), and are a figure for imperilment, or even death. In this psalm, the unfathomable oceans signify the profound (but unspecified) sea of troubles from which the psalmist cries out to God.

Michael Arad and Peter Walker’s Reflecting Absence in Manhattan’s Memorial Plaza marks the absence of the Twin Towers, destroyed in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. It does so by siting two square voids on the footprints of the lost towers. Both of these vast and cavernous spaces (200 x 200 ft and 35 ft deep) are surrounded by dark polished walls of granite. On the lip of the walls are inscribed the names of those who died in the attacks, as well as those killed in the bombing of the towers in 1993: 2983 in total.

Down these walls, the water falls in thin veils to the pools at the bottom of each void, out of which the waters drain and disappear into two further square spaces (void within void, depth beneath depth)—as if vanishing into nothingness.

The two pools simply but, given their scale, very dramatically, represent what unfathomable depths of loss and despair are opened up by the experience of arbitrary and untimely death. From depths like these, and through seemingly unstanchable waterfalls of tears, human voices may find themselves in the psalmist’s company in reaching up toward the heavens.

The original design for the monument placed the pools in a bare, bleak, and vast plaza, but that scheme was modified at the instigation of the 9/11 Memorial Jury by the planting of a grid of some 400 trees. The addition of the trees, without detracting from the solemn statement made by the abysmal pools, places the absences they proclaim in a context of growth, renewal, and rebirth—for the voice of lament affirms life in the very act of mourning, even if it cannot presently find words of hope.

The dance marathons of depression era America posed Psalm 130’s question ‘who could stand?’ (v.3) in a quite literal way. Competitors, tempted in their poverty by cash prizes—suggested here by the $1000 bill held out by a skeletal hand at the upper left of the picture—would sometimes dance for weeks on end, with whoever was left standing the winner.

The contest depicted here is in its forty-ninth day (so the sign to the right of the band declares), and surely its very final stages. The woman in red in the foreground is propped up by her partner, but is close to collapse, as are the other dancers. It is only a matter of time—and not very much time—before the last dancers collapse onto the floor with the others.

Conservative moralists criticized these dance marathons as encouraging illicit liaisons (Burns 2016: 117). But notwithstanding the skin-tight clothes of the participants, their exaggerated make-up and musculature, and their abandoned embraces, the picture suggests death throes more than the throes of passion.

The design of the floor that Philip Evergood shows us echoes the pattern of a spider’s web, and the painter seems as interested in drawing attention to those who have woven this web, as to those caught in it. In the left and right foreground (places where in a medieval or Renaissance painting we might find representations of a work’s donors), we catch a glimpse of two spectators. On the left, a woman’s hand, with its bright-red nail and a gaudy bangle at the wrist, grips the rail surrounding the arena, as she is presumably gripped by this display of suffering and degradation. To the right, a man with a fat cigar stuck in his mouth, and absurdly blonde hair, advances a podgy hand with stubby fingers—as if to receive a share of the proceeds.

But these witnesses of the scene do not, as in devotional pictures of the past, look on piously or pityingly at what is before them. Rather, they leer at a spectacle animated by that other and deathly hand holding out the $1000 bill, under whose presiding spell no one really stands.

References

Burns, Sarah L. 2016. ‘Death, Decay, and Dystopia: Painting the American Wasteland in the 1930s’, in America after the Fall: Painting in the 1930s, ed. by Judith A. Barter (Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago), pp. 116–143

Martin, Carol J. 1994. Dance Marathons: Performing American Culture of the 1920s and 1930s (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi)

Rembrandt van Rijn treated the story of the prodigal son several times, imagining him at the beginning of the story carousing in a tavern with a harlot as ‘he squandered his property in loose living’ (Luke 15:13), and at the end, returning to his father’s forgiving embrace (Luke 15:20ff). In this drawing of c.1650, however, Rembrandt depicts him at the prodigal’s lowest point, which is also the story’s mid- and turning point.

The prodigal is down on his luck—on his knees, as we say, and here literally so. He has been reduced to caring for swine and is in such straitened circumstances that he would gladly share their food (Luke 15:16). The prodigal’s days as a riotous playboy are far behind him—he is boney and emaciated and, like an old man, seems to need his stick for support as much as for herding his charges. He is, however, so turned in on himself that he seems hardly to notice the pigs, lost in his thoughts as they are intent on their food.

With the greatest economy and delicacy, Rembrandt seems to have depicted the very moment when, from the depths of abjection, the possibility of forgiveness and so of hope dawns on the prodigal’s mind. On his knees, as if in prayer, he appears, hesitantly and tentatively, to entertain a thought like the psalmist’s: ‘there is forgiveness with thee’ (Psalm 130:4). We observe, perhaps, the very dawn of hope. But it is like the first signs seen by those who watch for the morning (v.6), no more than a glimmer—for hope, after all, need have no ground beyond the very barest intimation of possibility. We sense that the prodigal may rise from his knees.

Whether he will then be able to ‘stand’ (v.3) remains to be seen. From the depths, however, the prodigal, like the psalmist, has dreamt of forgiveness.