She is gone. Look! The Light!, oil and spray paint on panel, 10 x 8″ (2014). Courtesy Hayley Barker

Mary—or what Barker calls “the longing to see her”—makes an appearance in every painting in Apparition Hill. Barker’s paintings contain explosions of color, layers and layers of paint, allusions to other paintings, palpable energy. The paintings are small, intimate; they are like icons, Barker said, that may or may not be empty. Take, for example, the painting She is gone. Look! The Light! The title (like almost all of the titles in the show) is composed from words the visionaries have used to describe Mary and their experiences in seeing her. These particular words—She is gone. Look! The Light!—come from one of the first sightings. “Mary disappeared and then a bright flashing light took her place,” Barker said. “I tried to convey something of that in the painting.” There are blues and greens, darkness, luminous spray-painted marks of yellow, a dash of red. I can see a figure, but as soon as I move close to the painting, she is, as the title suggests, already gone.

Szybist’s Incarnadine is also about “looking at longing.” In the book’s opening poem, “The Troubadours Etc.,” Szybist writes: “but the troubadours knew how to burn themselves through, / how to make themselves shrines to their own longing. / The spectacular was never behind them.” Szybist writes about a longing for Mary—what she calls “Mary hunger,” a desire for a female mother figure, a desire for nourishment, but also a sometimes unsafe desire for a figure that has done damage to women, who is offered as a vision for female beauty, as a model for behavior that is unreachable and often destructive. “I think it is hard to imagine a figure that has done as much damage to women as this one,” Szybist said. “She is an ideal that is part of patriarchal culture, an impossible ideal, and women suffer all the time when they are measured against it.”

I grew up Catholic and understood at a young age that representations of Mary’s body were designed to teach me something about my own body—whether that lesson was about beauty or purity or virginity or sacrifice or motherhood. Barker echoed similar struggles. “My womb has always been a pretty contentious place in my Catholically raised brain,” she said. Several years ago, after ovarian cancer, after surgery, facing her own mortality, Barker was questioning everything. Seeking comfort, she started going to Mass again. “It lasted for a few months,” she said. “But then I thought, there is no place for me here, for what is left of me. I don’t fit into this paradigm. And that was so upsetting. To feel this last resort was wiped away, which is when I started thinking, can I make Mary something else? Can I make her different? Can I rebuild her or find pieces and make a kind of Frankenstein Mary that is better?” Szybist was asking related questions when writing Incarnadine. “How do you deal with this ideal that so infects the imagination?” she asked. “If women are still valued for their status as virgins and mothers, and if I am neither a virgin nor a mother, then how will I be valued? How will I value myself? I was trying to come to terms with that. It was part of the impetus.”

For Szybist and Barker, making art—poems, altered souvenirs, paintings, drawings—is a way to deconstruct and reconstruct Mary. “People are hungry for her to be reimagined and reenlivened and relevant,” Szybist said. “Just ignoring this imaginative training (that comes via everything from religious doctrine to pop culture) doesn’t make it go away. You actually have to get in and remake it.” Szybist’s goal was not to get rid of one system and “create a whole new mythology.” Instead, she said, she wanted to “get out of the shadow of how singular she was in [her] imagination.” She did so by remaking multiple versions of Mary in order to “diffuse” her—so she would no longer be “such an overshadowing Platonic ideal.”

In Szybist’s poem “Entrances and Exits,” for example, the narrator moves between several scenes: a six-year-old girl’s visit to the narrator’s office; the story of a woman who is lost in the wilderness for two weeks and is then found at the bottom of a canyon because there are ravens circling above her; the experience of looking at Duccio’s The Annunciation (“The slender angel (dark, green-tipped wings folded / behind him) reaches his right hand towards the girl”); the day of conception in Russia when couples are “given time off from work to procreate”; and honeybees. Szybist writes, “Duccio’s subject is God’s entrance into time: time meaning history, meaning a body.” That is Szybist’s subject, too. All of the moments in her poem become possible incarnations—the girl at the desk drinking rice milk, the angel visiting Mary, the woman circled by ravens, the couples taking days off work in Russia—and, Mary Szybist, writing the poem.

Szybist uses a variety of aesthetic approaches for the poems in Incarnadine. There are poems with short lines and no punctuation; there are long-lined poems; there are prose poems; there is a poem with words arranged radially on the page and another poem diagrammed like a sentence. The multiple forms reveal the “desire to chip away at the icon, to reimagine in many ways, in many forms,” Szybist said. “It’s harder to own her. It’s harder to use her.”

Barker, too, uses a multiplicity of aesthetic approaches in Apparition Hill—altered prayer cards and souvenir bags, paintings made with oil paint and spray paint, chalk pastel drawings, and infinite references within each painting to other artists Barker admires. Barker wanted her work to contain both multiplicity and fragmentation, in part because people who saw Mary on Apparition Hill saw her in fragments. “She kept appearing in pieces,” Barker said. “At first her hands would appear and then her face. Or the little cloud that she would eventually show up on.” Though the visions of Mary were simultaneous, Mary looked different to each visionary. Barker wanted to reflect these differences in her art, “to not fix [her] in one place or time or style or mark, but to make [her] diffuse or faceted,” she said.

“Visible, permanent, and indestructible” (Neon Green Mary with Tape), gouache on paper souvenir bag, 7 x 3 1/8″. Courtesy Hayley Barker

The process of what Szybist called “chipping away at the icon” is most visible in Barker’s altered souvenirs. “Visible, permanent, and indestructible” (Neon Green Mary with Tape) is a small white paper bag from a gift shop. Barker has painted over the image of Mary on the bag, leaving just the shape of her. For “She does not touch the ground” (Pray the Rosary Daily for World Peace), Barker altered a prayer pamphlet with gouache. Gone is Mary’s face, and gone are the words underneath her. Instead, Mary floats in a sea of blue.

Having a religious experience is often thought of as faith confirming. Though the experience may be impossible to explain, though it may be unspeakable, it is often assumed that it helps people enter a different kind of knowing, a more secure faith. Not so for Barker. While on Apparition Hill, she had a religious experience—and, as a result, Barker said, she has never had more doubt than she does now.

“I saw the sun pulse at 6:40 pm, the time when Mary supposedly shows up every day for the visionaries. Focusing on the sun, with a crowd of international pilgrims,” she said. “I saw the ‘luminous phenomenon’ three times. The first time was the most overwhelming and it totally filled my vision and it lasted for about seven minutes. I was staring at the sun, but it didn’t hurt. I looked away and there was a burning in my forehead. It was amazing.” Barker couldn’t sleep that night. “It was upsetting and beautiful. It wasn’t what I thought it would be. I thought if something like this would happen, I would feel changed and filled with love and transcendence or ecstasy or wonder—and instead I was just like, that was some power. That was some serious power and I don’t understand it. It makes no sense to me that we are all here on this hill looking at this thing take place. And I don’t know what this is.”

The experience filled her with questions: “Why this place? Why me? Why the sun? Why did it look that way? What does this have to do with Christianity? And does it have anything to do with Christianity? Is it about just the sun and my body and chemistry and matter and soil and history? Is it about weather and geography?” Szybist added her own questions to Barker’s list: “What is human? What is divine? What is nature? What is sight? What is insight?” For Barker, her paintings “witness failure.” She said, “Religious experience is impossible to represent, so from the very beginning they are not going to succeed. So even through trying, they’re doomed for failure. That said, this is also the juiciest question I can think of to work on in a painting.”

Szybist’s poems focus on the annunciation, which could be understood as a religious experience for Mary, a moment of incarnation. What interests her most about the annunciation—especially how it is represented by visual artists—is the space between the figures. “What’s at the center of [annunciation paintings]? Absence really. It’s the space between. That’s the subject.” Szybist continued, “We can’t really reach each other on some level, in some ways.”

The space between—which can be both a space of doubt and a space of faith—is central to both Szybist’s poems and Barker’s paintings. Szybist is interested in “the question mark.” She said: “When we think we’re connecting with the divine, what’s actually there? And when we think we’re not, same thing.” She continued, “I think there is a longing to say what can’t be said. I think there is also, for me, the longing for there to be something unsayable.”

Theology is, by definition, about what can’t be said, about what can’t be captured—and for me, God is not the only uncapturable thing. There is, rather, a part of every person (every tree, every animal, every rock) that is uncapturable, unsayable, irreducible, resistant, free, unknowable. And because it is unknowable, you cannot name it or depict it or colonize it or paint it or photograph it. It will not fit. In her book Precarious Life, Judith Butler argues that this unknowable part of the other makes a claim on her. “It comes to me from elsewhere, unbidden, unexpected, and unplanned,” she writes. “In fact, it tends to ruin my plans, and if my plans are ruined, that may well be the sign that something is morally binding upon me.”³

The more I teach, the more I write, the more convinced I become that what good art and good theology have in common is embracing failure. In Performance Theatre and the Poetics of Failure, Sara Jane Bailes frames failure as a kind of resistance, of refusal—a way of challenging capitalism, oppression, and violent representational practices. Bailes uses the word “poetics” to highlight “the idea of making, [to call] attention [to] the principles and techniques that constitute a practice . . . where failure underlies the activity.”⁴ Influenced by my work with Kaufman, I claim failure as an ethical resource. Kaufman argued that the words humans use to talk about God are human words, “infected with our [own] limitations, interests, and biases.” Words about God always, by definition, fail. People must engage, therefore, in relentless criticism of faith and its symbols, always knowing we might be wrong.⁵ Kaufman used to put it this way: Just because your version of God is not God, that doesn’t mean you can’t stake your life on it. But it does mean you can’t kill someone over it.

In Vibrant Matter (a book Barker referred to as her “favorite” during our conversation), Jane Bennett writes, “We knowers are haunted . . . by a painful nagging feeling that something’s being forgotten or left out.” She is referring to Adorno’s nonidentity, that “which is not subject to knowledge,” the “discomfiting sense of the inadequacy of representation [that] remains no matter how refined or analytically precise one’s concepts become.” The ethical challenge, Bennett writes, is not to eliminate this “discomforting experience,” but to “accentuate” it. Bennett reminds her reader of the origin of the word absolute: ab means off, and solver means to loosen. The absolute, she writes, is that which is loosened off; it is on the loose—and she argues that it would be a mistake to think “the absolute” refers only to God.⁶ For Bennett—and for Barker, Szybist, and me, too—everything is on the loose.

Szybist’s poems are filled with a world on the loose—clouds, cornfields, cows, thunder, bees, girls, grass, umbrellas, curtains, skirts, hems, cupboards, tea, yoga mat, books, milk box, fruit, puzzle piece, houseboat, chairs, breath—and it is charged, vibrant. The world is in Barker’s paintings, too—in the paint itself. “I think the paint is the ground and the alchemy and the history of organic and nonorganic matter coming together with my body. . . . It is an incarnation to me.” She continued, “Art is an assemblage of all of the forces that we live in and through, in time and space.”

In painting and poetry, Szybist and Barker open up possibilities for thinking about the entire world as a potential site for incarnation. For Szybist, the annunciation is one moment when “the world changes”—and the change happens “through the female body.” Part of what Szybist embraces in Incarnadine is the idea that there could be other encounters in the world that might also be considered incarnations. “I thought it was a question worth taking up imaginatively,” she said. “What encounters are happening and what are they engendering? What are they making or not making incarnate in the world?” What would it mean to think about encounters between endangered species as incarnations? What does the endangered right whale incarnate? What would it mean to think about war as an incarnation? Technology? Drones? “That’s part of what Jane Bennett writes about so well in Vibrant Matter,” Barker said. “If you do believe that matter is life, all matter, whether it is a plastic bottle or a cigarette butt, then we have to also believe that how we live in the world, piece by piece, has some kind of ethical or ecological repercussion. I like thinking of the potential life between things. I think the world is full of more potentials than we commonly allow it to be.”

I have always been drawn to the image of Moses breaking the tablets. Shattering what was written in stone seems to me the most faithful action he could take. It is a gesture of failure, of transcendence, a way of saying there is more to God than anyone will ever know, a reminder not to mistake our words for God’s words, an invitation to use fragments to make something new. Barker and Szybist pick up where Moses left off. Their work is both shattering and generative. It is an invitation to transcendence. A reminder that there is always more.

In The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry calls what artists create—sentences, paintings, performances, photographs, videos—“fragments of world alteration.”⁷ She argues that by making fragments of world alteration, artists practice the total reinvention of the world. In her National Book Award acceptance speech, Szybist said, “I think often of the words of Paul Connolly who said, ‘I believe it is not arguing well, but speaking differently that changes a culture.’ Poetry is the place where speaking differently is the most prevalent. Speaking differently is what I aspire to.” Speaking differently, painting differently, imagining differently, writing differently—this is the work of theology, too. What would happen if more theologians were to understand themselves as artists and their work as art? What change might be possible? What new world might be made?