Constance Pierce RUACH HAKODESH The Epip

Ruach Hakodesh:
The Epiphanic and Cosmic Nature of Imagination in the Art of Michael Jackson
and His Influence on My Image-Making
Constance Pierce
Springer International Publishing 2016
Analecta Husserliana
The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research
Volume CXIX
Founder
Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, the World Phenomenology Institute, Hanover,
New Hampshire, USA
Series Editors
William S. Smith, Executive President of the World Phenomenology Institute,
Hanover, New Hampshire, USA
Jadwiga S. Smith, Co-President of the American Division, the World
Phenomenology Institute, Hanover, New Hampshire, USA
Daniela Verducci, Co-President of the European Division, the World
Phenomenology Institute, Macerata, Italy
Published under the auspices of

The World Phenomenology Institute
A-T. Tymieniecka, Founder
cpierce@sbu.edu
Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka Patricia Trutty-Coohill

Editors
The Cosmos and the Creative

Imagination
cpierce@sbu.edu
Editors
Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka
World Phenomenology Institute
Hanover, New Hampshire, USA
Patricia Trutty-Coohill
Siena College
Loudonville, New York, USA
Analecta Husserliana
ISBN 978-3-319-21791-8
ISBN 978-3-319-21792-5
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-21792-5
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cpierce@sbu.edu
Ruach Hakodesh: The Epiphanic and Cosmic

Nature of Imagination in the Art of Michael
Jackson and His Influence on My
Image-Making
Constance Pierce
Man is concerned with man and forgets the whole and the
flowing.
Ezra Pound
Abstract Rich and layered are the meanings surrounding the concept of Ruach
Hakodesh. The book of Genesis describes a rushing spirit of God over the face of
the waters. A brooding and hovering wind, the animating breath of the cosmos, a
Divinely disruptive force of inspiration and imagination are but a few possible flavors of poetic exegesis. In many cultures, dance is considered a sacred link between
the realm of the Divine and ordinary life. When contemplating these thoughts, I am
entrained by both the scriptural and poetic interpretations of Ruach Hakodesh and
how they may relate to the multifaceted creative imagination of artist and performer,
Michael Jackson. From my perspective as a visual artist, I offer reflections on
Jacksons archetypal gestures, his performance art aesthetic, and the unconventional
religious witness inherent in his creative process. For decades my art has been
devoted to the expression of spiritual experience through allegorical figuration.
Within that context, I also share images that were directly informed by the epiphanic and cosmic nature of the art of Michael Jackson.
For Paris Michael Katherine Jackson

In loving memory of Bess Leung
C. Pierce (*)
Constance Pierce Studio, 1000 Turtle Creek Blvd., Oxford, MS, 38655, USA
Visual and Performing Arts, St. Bonaventure University, Allegany, NY, USA
e-mail: cpierce@sbu.edu; constancepierce7@gmail.com
Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016
A.-T. Tymieniecka, P. Trutty-Coohill (eds.), The Cosmos and the Creative
Imagination, Analecta Husserliana 119, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-21792-5_9
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C. Pierce
Sketching in the Background

Multitudes are aware of Michael Jacksons phenomenal commercial successes,
such as those measured by platinum and gold records, top professional industry
awards, and record-breaking international concert tours. However, some question
whether it is possible to be known as the King of Pop and still be considered a
serious artist of profound and abiding cultural import. My contention is yes.
Testaments to this assertion abound.
Since the artists untimely death in 2009 numerous books, critical essays, and
peer-reviewed articles have emerged concerning aspects of the immense influence
Jackson brought to bear upon our global cultural landscape. In 2004 Jackson was
the sole subject of an academic conference at Yale University. More recently, however, symposia on Jackson have proliferated at several academic institutions including the Center for Black Music Research at Columbia College in Chicago, Berkeleys
Center for Race and Gender at the University of California, and New Yorks
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Jackson (in the after-life company of Beethoven, Liszt and Hendrix) was recently discussed by a panel on musical virtuosity in a presentation at the Louvre in Paris.
In addition, over the past 4 years, a number of university courses have emerged
from a surprising array of disciplines. Everything from Duke Universitys Michael
Jackson and the Black Performance Tradition, taught by renowned scholar, Mark
Anthony Neal, to an upcoming Clark Atlantic University MBA course, Michael
Jackson and the Business of Music, taught by veteran entertainment attorney James
Walker.
Jacksons presence is now found in college syllabi and academic journals in
departments as diverse as African American studies, musicology, performance studies, anthropology, sociology, literature, journalism, visual art, and cinema. An
intriguing course titled Fearful Innocence: Constructions of Childhood, taught by
scholar Joseph Vogel at the University of Rochester, explores the ethos of the realm
of childhood as expressed in literature, music and film. Jacksons art is examined
along with that of William Blake, William Wordsworth, J.M. Barrie, Lewis Carroll,
Oscar Wilde, and other visionaries of childhood.
In addition to Vogel and Neal, a plethora of scholars have illuminated and contextualized sundry incarnations of Jacksons complex and prodigious art with their
own particularity of vision. This assembly includes Clarence B. Jones of Stanford
University, Michael Eric Dyson of Georgetown University, Cornel West of Princeton
University, Sylvia J. Martin of the University of California, Susan Fast of McMaster
University, and Jason King of New York University, as well as noted contemporary
authors Armond White, David Dark and John Jeremiah Sullivan.
Texas Tech University librarians, Susan Hidalgo and Robert G. Weiner, have
compiled Wanna Be Startin Somethin: MJ in the Scholarly Literature: A Selected
Bibliographic Guide. The collection, culled from more than a hundred databases
spanning a surprising array of fields, was published in the trans-disciplinary Journal
of Pan African Studies in 2010. In addition, scholar Joseph Vogel introduced his
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online resource site, Michael Jackson Studies, which has grown exponentially since
its inception in 2011.
In 2012 the academic publication Popular Music and Society devoted an entire
issue to a compilation titled Michael Jackson: Musical Subjectivities edited by
Susan Fast and Stan Hawkins. In the same year Christopher R. Smit of Calvin
College in Michigan edited a new series of essays titled Michael Jackson: Grasping
the Spectacle that aimed at explicating complicated aspects of Jacksons art and life
through a rich array of eclectic perspectives.
Since his death, Jacksons short film Thriller became the first music video ever
archived into the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress, an honor
reserved for works of cultural and historical significance. Jackson was also inducted
into the National Museum of Dance in Saratoga Springs, New York, alongside other
architects of American dance history such as Astaire, Graham, and Balanchine. In
2012 acclaimed film director, Spike Lee, received critical accolades at the Venice,
Toronto, and Rio film festivals for his new documentary titled BAD 25 celebrating
the 25th anniversary of Jacksons albums release.
Jacksons lifetime music awards and honors are too vast to itemize here. The
above information is simply an attempt to map out the gargantuan territory currently
claimed by academic scholars, critics, and writers in coming to terms with who
Michael Jackson was, why his art and persona had such a profound impact on
twentieth-century culture and discourse, and the nature of the inexorably polarizing
emotions Jackson was capable of evoking (and provoking), with a pervasive intensity over several decades.
Writer James Baldwin reflected with precision on the cultural significance of
Michael Jackson in his essay, Here Be Dragons, where he expressed the
following:
The Michael Jackson cacophony is fascinating in that it is not about Jackson at all. I hope
he has the good sense to know it and the good fortune to snatch his life out of the jaws of a
carnivorous success. He will not swiftly be forgiven for having turned so many tables, for
he damn sure grabbed the brass ring, and the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo has
nothing on Michael. All that noise is about America, as the dishonest custodian of black life
and wealth the burning, buried American guilt Freaks are called freaks and are treated
as they are treatedin the main, abominablybecause they are human beings who cause
to echo, deep within us, our most profound terrors and desires. (Baldwin 1985, 689)
In the decades ahead, Jacksons art will likely continue to be the subject of symposia, as art theorists and historians consider the complex nature of iconic artists
within the context and profundity of their major works. Artists such as William
Blake, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Vincent Van Gogh, Oscar Wilde, and more
recently, Frida Kahlo (to name but a few), evidenced eccentricities or human frailties that only made more miraculous the far-reaching accomplishments of their finest art. Impugned, traumatized, impoverished, or imprisonedeven discarded into
a paupers gravethe magnitude of their artistry still resounds across the centuries,
long after their leave-taking.
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The strains of our deepest humanity have a way of obdurately surviving through
art. William Faulkner, another idiosyncratic artist, expressed this concept
elegantly:
I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he
alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul It is his
privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor
and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice. (Nobel Prize 1949)
It is my contention that Jackson inspired global multitudes to compassion and

endurance by lifting their hearts through his art. The artist also magnified his aesthetic intentions through actions. During his lifetime, Jackson gifted several million
dollars to the Nelson Mandela Fund, the American Cancer Society, the Jane Goodall
Institute, the NAACP, the United Negro College Fund, and the AIDS and Juvenile
Diabetes Foundations, among others. Jacksons own Heal the World Foundation
airlifted supplies to Sarajevo and donated millions to assist disadvantaged children
worldwide. The massive proceeds from his songs We Are the World and Man in
the Mirror were donated for hunger relief in Africa and elsewhere. Jackson evidenced a lived theology.
Petitioning the Cosmos

One way of perceiving Michael Jackson is as a ritual healer, a modern-day shaman,
a charismatic presence quickening millions of souls through his global touring performances that reached into countries few other tours ever visited. The artist and his
colorful troupe performed as bearers of creative and spiritual renewal, as modernday troubadours, in many ways echoing the tenor of traveling pageants and mystery
plays of old.
Yet, he also wasand still isan intensely polarizing figure. An immense
amount of shadow-material was projected upon him by a myopic and racist culture.
Throughout his life, Jackson became highly skilled at bearing this shadow-material,
aesthetically processing it, and thrusting it back at us (as maligned artists often do)
transformed into art.
The interior machinations of the artists creativity are intriguing and worthwhile
investigating. Jackson gathered together elements of his eclectic poetics and philosophy in a book he authored titled, Dancing the Dream: Poetry and Reflections. In
this personal archive he revealed significant spiritual dynamics inherent in his creative process:
People ask me how I make music. I tell them I just step into it. Its like stepping into a river
and joining the flow. Every moment in the river has its song. So I stay in the moment and
listen. What I hear is never the same the beat of my heart holds it all together. When you
join the flow, the music is inside and outside, and both are the same. (Jackson 1992, 70)
Jackson often expressed he felt uncomfortable claiming ownership of his music.

I wake up from dreams you hear the words, everything is right there in front of
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your face Thats why I hate to take credit for the songs Ive written Im just a
courier bringing it into the world. (Hirshey 1983) In Jacksons 1986 televised
Grammy acceptance speech he openly acknowledged his source. First, Id like to
thank God. Id like to say thank you for choosing Lionel and myself to create We
Are the World. (Grammy Awards 1986)
What Jackson shared about his interior process resonates with a religious concept I internalized long ago during my Catholic childhood and then usefully retained
during my later vocation as an artist. We are always surrounded by grace. This can
be conceptualized as a Blakean wellspring of mystic imagination. We simply need
to learn how to best open ourselves in order to be a recipient of its bounty.
As an artist, I believe I understand what Jackson meant by stepping into a river.
The metaphor is apt. I have faith in an intangible cosmic river of imagination where
creativity flourishes and flows in abundance, and where even the unsought is discovered. It is an intrinsic belief in something beyond the rational, a pragmatic confidence in what some refer to as the artists magical notion of synchronicity. At its
finest, like the proverbial loaves and fishes, such a wellspring feeds our creativity
through incomprehensible permutations.
However, it is also significant that Jackson noted such Divine gifts were offered
in unpredictable annunciations and not when he, as an artist, had planned for or
demanded thema familiar modus operandi in Biblical narrative. Jackson harbored
a sense of, and respect for, the timing of the Divine. Waiting on grace, one might
say.
Of course, as any authentically dedicated artist knows, one must be a prepared
receptacle for the synchronistic grace of imagination to pour in unhindered. Simply
put, one has to do the homework: extraordinary due diligence to rigorous and repetitive practice, practice, practicehoning and mastery. This concurs with what
Jacksons musical collaborators, spanning decades, have insisted. Jacksons work
ethic was legendary.
As a precociously gifted child, Jackson became a willing reservoir for receiving
extraordinary gifts of music specifically destined for his time. (I recall stories of
another musical savant who also suffered an importunate father parading him to
performances.) Not unlike Mozart as a young man, entire pieces of musicmelodies, harmonies, and vocal partscame to Jackson all of a piece, whole and complete, as he so often recounted. This process seems a sacramental reciprocity. Divine
creative force finds earthly embodiment while the artist discovers true voice and
purpose.
This aesthetically receptive process is channeled through a Divine grace that is
not the result of logical plan, objective perception or even the most skilled virtuosity. This is the place where imagination engages the cosmos and has agency to
release the epiphanic nature and archetypal poetics of Ruach Hakodesh. This mysterious spirit, this brooding and hovering wind, can issue forth an embarrassment of
creative riches. It is the fluidat times disruptiveforce of mystic imagination and
the animating breath of the cosmos.
Jackson revealed his personal theology while he was touring several African
countries, including Tanzania and Egypt, as well as attending his own coronation
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as King of Sani at a ceremony on the Ivory Coast. Im committed to my art. I

believe that all art has as its ultimate goal the union between the material and the
spiritual, the human and the divine I believe that is the very reason for the existence of art I feel fortunate in being that instrument through which music flows.
(Johnson 1992, p. 128) Echoing this imagery is a line from a poetic piece composed
many years later for Jacksons memorial service by poet Maya Angelou. He came
to us from the Creator, trailing creativity in abundance (Angelou 2009)
The concept of spiritual reciprocity may be expanded to embrace not only the
creative process, but also the content, embedded in Jacksons art. Author David
Dark in his essay, The Unbearable Lightness of Being Michael: The Religious
Witness of Michael Jackson, writes:
As a poetic and ethical summons, Jacksons work might be best understood as a form of
pubic service announcement, an experiment in making people aware and therefore mobilized toward compassion, toward seeing what their negligence was doing. The distance
between ourselves and the people we see in images of war and deprivation, he constantly
argued, is a construct that must be overcome. His call to see ourselves (and ineluctably
himself) anew is simultaneously a call to see poetically and to perceive reality as it is. Each
performance and, in some sense, his every pubic appearance were infused with the hope
that it might be understood as one more assertion of goodwill, a space-making enterprise in
which healing and renewed consciousness might occur. (Dark 2012, 186187)
Remembering back, if we try, we can still conjure recollections of the musically

astonishing little boy, one of ten children, born in the down-and-out mill town of
Gary, Indiana. This shy unassuming child, capable of radiant vocals and vertiginous
spins, would be fated to rise like a phoenix, glide across the global stratosphere, and
then right before our very eyes transmute into a thaumaturge, passing into a creature
of myth.
Decades later, before his leave-taking and while still reluctant to abandon his lost
boyhood, the dynamics of the mythos would render him humiliated and savaged by
the cacophony of a media-rabid culture that once adored him. Yet, through extremes
of both darkness and light, Jackson held on to his belief that a large part of his mission on this earth was to entrain millions of souls into synchrony with the Divine
through his music, voice, and performance art.
Jackson evoked the poetics and spiritual apotheosis of Ruach Hakodesh in his
words:
In the Gospels we read, And the Lord God made man from the dust of the earth and
breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living soul. That breath of
life to me is the music of life and it permeates every fiber of creation music governs the
rhythm of the seasons, the pulse of our heartbeats, the migration of birds, the ebb and flow
of ocean tides, the cycles of growth, evolution and dissolution. Its music, its rhythm. And
my goal in life is to give to the world what I was lucky to receive: the ecstasy of divine union
through my music and my dance its what Im here for. (Johnson 1992, p. 128)
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Closet Scholar and Humanitarian

It is meaningful to consider that the particular richness of Jacksons art, at least in
part, was informed by a lifelong appreciation of classical music. Jackson often
shared with others that his all-time favorite composers were Tchaikovsky, Debussy,
and Copland. Over the decades he composed numerous unreleased original orchestral pieces. At the time of his death, according to the Baltimore Sun, the renowned
film composer and conductor David Michael Frank was collaborating with Jackson
to arrange and produce an all-instrumental album of these compositions with a
major symphony in London. This promising collaboration was cut short by Jacksons
death, but many have faith in the eventual emergence of the artists orchestral pieces
in coming years. (Smith 2009)
Literature was another element contributing to the artists rich inner life, deeply
nourishing his imagery and his creative process. Though Jackson was largely selfeducated, he was a voracious reader from his earliest years. In Man in the Music:
The Creative Life and Work of Michael Jackson, by scholar Joseph Vogel, the author
paints a portrait of the artist as a young man steeped in Romantic and Transcendentalist
literature. Jackson accumulated a massive personal library (featured in Architectural
Digest) of well over 10,000 volumes including texts on art, literature, history, music,
poetry, biography and philosophy, as well as numerous classics in rare first editions.
He frequented a number of favorite bookstores through after-hour arrangements.
Vogel recounts the following:
Jackson read about African American slavery and the civil rights movement, about Edison
and Galileo, about religion and spirituality. He read novels by J.M. Barrie and Charles
Dickens. He read Blake, Emerson, and Wordsworth. He famously forced his staff to read
the biography of P. T. Barnum and frequently quoted passages from the biographies of
Michelangelo and Albert Einstein he was drawing from an immense mental storehouse.
It was a diverse, vibrant world of imagination that to Jackson was just as real as his life, if
not more so. (Vogel 2011b, 68)
Jacksons self-education propelled him into becoming a philanthropist of significant import. In his eloquent 2001 address to the Oxford Union of Oxford University
in England, Jackson clearly bore witness to his overriding humanitarian concerns.
His lecture suggested an inner theology with spiritual overtones of Franciscan
philosophy:
In a world filled with hate, we must still dare to hope. In a world filled with anger, we must
still dare to comfort. In a world filled with despair, we must still dare to dream. And in a
world filled with distrust, we must still dare to believe So that love will finally be restored
to a desolate and lonely world. (Oxford Union 2007)
Considering Jacksons spiritual poetics, as well as the breadth and depth of his
self-education, I was not at all surprised that the artist was familiar with the ancient
concept of music of the spheres that is often credited to the Greek mathematician
and philosopher Pythagoras. Jackson embraced the ancient hypothesis that the stars,
the planets, and the galaxies resonate, as if engaged in a mystical symphony. It
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seemed he desired the finest of his art to embody and radiate this concept throughout
his life and long past his death. In an interview, Jackson disclosed, Deep inside I
feel that this world we live in is really a huge, monumental symphonic orchestra. I
believe that in its primordial form all of creation is sound and that its not just random sound, that its music. Youve heard the expression music of the spheres? Well,
thats a very literal phrase (Johnson 1992, 128).
In 1988 Fisk University awarded Michael Joseph Jackson an honorary Doctorate
of Humane Letters.
Rumination, Epiphany and Sudden Splendor

The grace of Jacksons artistry and the nature of his metaphorically expressed theology inspired my image-making soon after his death in 2009.
At this point I should disclose I was a latecomer to apprehending the import of
Jackson as an artist, composer, and humanitarian presence in our global culture. If
someone on June 24th, 2009 had told me that Michael Jacksons art and unconventional theology would affect me in life-altering ways, I would have been incredulous. For two decades I had been deeply engaged with academic responsibilities,
creating and professionally exhibiting my work as an artist, and (most importantly)
raising a son as a single parent.
On June 25th of 2009, Jacksons sudden death impacted me in ways unexpected
and hard to verbalize. It seemed as if a portal opened and I was suddenly able to
translate the archetypal poetics of his music and the emblematic gestures in his
performance art. I witnessed the artist as a complex tapestryan irradiating, elusive, and radically sentient being. Unfortunately for me, it was in proverbial hindsight that I was able to apprehend this alchemy and began to fully understand how
his art had fed the souls of multitudes.
Moreover, Jacksons art wasand still isa reverberating force for building
community, but community building on a global scale. The spirit of Ruach
Hakodesh, as the animating breath of inspiration and imagination, as well as the
concept of dance as a tangible bridge between the realm of the Divine and ordinary
life, found a fused incarnation in the oeuvre of Jacksons art.
As a visual painter-printmaker, my primary language is imagery. The rumination
of my conscious mind, and the archetypes surfacing from my unconscious imagination, have always been pondered through the language of imagery. Perhaps it is
childlike, this wordless cognition. Yet, it has been my personal ritual of processing
consciousness in a way that satisfies and fulfills my soul. For decades my art has
been primarily focused on the expression of spiritual experience through allegorical
figuration.
Working with my hands transforms the silence of my art studio into a richness of
solitude, a kind of cloister. Then my images reveal to me my interior life and its
innate connection to the sacred whole. This process becomes an avenue of Divine
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play, often an experience of spiritual reciprocity. At its best, it may be a creative

form of lectio divina.
The first series I conjured, directly inspired by Jacksons art, was titled Epiphany
and Loss. I began to sketch the vestige of figures through minimal pencil-gesture
and then fleshed out the images with fluid overlays of watercolor wash. I hoped to
engage the forms of dance as a symbolic, yet sensual, bridge between the Divine
and ordinary life. I also wanted to entice the mesmerizing spirit of Ruach Hakodesh
the animating breath of the cosmosthrough a polarity of emotions informed by
Jacksons theology of dance (Figs. 1 and 2).
Fig. 1 Constance Pierce, Epiphany (watercolor), Art on Paper 2011, Museum of Art, Toyota City,
Aichi, Japan
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Fig. 2 Constance Pierce, Death of the Dancer (watercolor), Art on Paper 2011, Museum of Art,
Toyota City, Aichi, Japan
Through the mellifluous feel of watercolor, I attempted to incarnate the radiance

of the human body in the epiphany of dance and also the gestures of the human soul
in a solitude of suffering. I hoped to illuminate the transcendent aspects of life,
especially those experiences where we are entrained by a grace beyond ordinary
perception.
The Epiphany and Loss watercolors traveled to Japan for exhibition in 2011 and
subsequently went on to university galleries in the U.S. as a featured series in three
solo exhibitions. I also experimented with choreographing a video sequence of the
watercolors splicing in other related figuration (Pierce YouTube 2009). Jacksons
lesser-known personal writings also deeply informed my art. In Dancing the Dream
he employed poetic imagery to bring to life the concept of imagination engaging the
cosmos and expressed the epiphanic nature of his own creative process:
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Consciousness expresses itself through creation. This world we live in is the dance of the
creator. Dancers come and go in the twinkling of an eye, but the dance lives on. On many
an occasion when Im dancing, Ive felt touched by something sacred. In those moments,
Ive felt my spirit soar and become one with everything that exists. I become the stars and
the moon. I become the lover and the beloved. I become the victor and the vanquished. I
become the master and the slave. I become the singer and the song. I become the knower
and the known. I keep on dancing and then it is the eternal dance of creation. The creator
and creation merge into one wholeness of joy. (Jackson 2009, 1)
High Drama: Harvesting the Chaos

In Jacksons most apocalyptic work, Earth Song, he viscerally ignitesand then
embodiesa personified image of conscience crying out from a world of chaos, a
world gone awry. This piece effectively paraphrases the Biblical voice crying in
the wilderness.
In his nearly operatic drama Jackson unleashes a wrenching plea for environmental consciousness and for a last-chance redemption of humanity in the face of
our cultures dystopian greed, genocide and environmental indifference. Joseph
Vogels book, EARTH SONG: Michael Jacksons Magnum Opus is a volume dedicated to the exegesis of this singular work. Vogel presents Jackson as a radical
visionary:
the call and response form featured so prominently in Earth Song is a continuation of
a long heritage in Black America that began with field hollers and spirituals In addition
to giving voice to this shared suffering, call and response has often been used as a form of
resistance to oppression: by representing the voices of the people and their struggles, it
allowed them to perform solidarity and gave them the strength to take action. Nietzsche
argued that it was in the bosom of this Primal Unity that human beings found deliverance
and redemption Like Greek and Shakespearean tragedies, it dramatizes the human struggle against fate. Yet Jackson re-presents this struggle, not from the perspective of royalty or
heroic figures, but from the planet itselffrom life as a collective ... (Vogel 2012, 6567)
Just days before his death, Jackson said, nature is trying hard to compensate
for mans mismanagement of the planet. The planet is sick, like a fever. If we dont
fix it now, its at the point of no return Its like a runaway train (This Is It
2009)
As a visual artist, my reflections on Earth Song gravitate toward the aesthetic
body-gestures Jackson employed. During live performances, Jackson was often dramatically lit while engulfed in a Baroque convolution of drapery and raised high
against the night sky on a cherry-picker apparatus. Hovering above his massive
audience, the illuminated drapery of his silken cape unfurling, Jacksons mesmerizing presence gathers the thousands below him into a participatory aesthetic, a
performance art ritual.
The on-stage spectacle of this choreographed arrangement swiftly escalates into
a call and response phenomena. Candles are lit and a torrent of arms lifts in unison. The gesture of passion embodied in Jacksons performance of Earth Song,
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both iconic and transcendent, burns itself into the collective consciousness of the
twentieth century.
Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective
Joy, reflected on the anthropological and sacramental power of a danced religion:
Dance was a ubiquitous theme of ancient Greek art. Dancing figures commonly graced their
vases, and the great dramas of classical times were musical performances in which the
chorus danced as well as sang To an extent we can only guess at today, the religion of
the ancient Greeks was a danced religion As Aldous Huxley once observed, Ritual
dances provide a religious experience that seems more satisfying and convincing than any
other It is with their muscles that humans most easily obtain knowledge of the divine.
(Ehrenreich 2006, 3233)
Jackson intuitively comprehended this bridge to the Divine, as he facilitated a

communal call and response through the passionate gestures of his body in dance.
In The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western
Worldcoincidently released the year of Jacksons deathliterary scholar, Iain
McGilchrist ruminates on the place music once commanded in our world culture:
We might think of music as an individualistic, even solitary experience, but that is rare in
the history of the world. In more traditionally structured societies, performance of music
plays both an integral, and an integrative, role it is above all a shared performance, not
just something we listen to passively. It has a vital way of binding people together, helping
them to be aware of shared humanity, shared feelings and experiences, and actively drawing
them together. In our world, competition and specialisation have made music something
compartmentalised, somewhere away from lifes core. (McGilchrist 2009, 104)
Jacksons aesthetic enactment of an unconventional theology through the art of

dance (both protean and adaptive) graciously offered the poetic abstraction of Ruach
Hakodesh a habitation and a human embodiment. Through his music and dance the
artist wished to rebind and heal wounded souls, to reconstruct a sacramental bridge
to the Divine, and to reopen the channel of our core capacity for communal joy.
Jackson magnified the mutual poetics of our humanity in conversation with the
cosmos, a spiritual reciprocity.
Not unlike Picasso, among twentieth-century artists, Jackson possessed a genius
for integrating eclectic influences in innovative ways. Vestiges of African-American
charismatic revival, American musical theater, Delta Blues music, Cameroon
Makossa, historic minstrelsy, military cadence, urban hip-hop, orchestral symphony, and even the vertiginous intensity of a whirling dervish in ecstatic trance,
were selectively synthesized, fused, and transfigured into the ritual of Jacksons
on-stage performance art.
Jackson had a profound influence on the classical world of dance. On the day
after Jacksons death, international journalist and cultural critic, Germaine Greer,
wrote in the Guardian:
Ever since Dionysus danced ahead of his horde of bloody-footed maenads across the rocky
highlands of prehistoric Greece, dance and song have been the province of boys It is time
now to salute the miraculous boy who will triumph over death as Dionysus did, becoming immortal through his art No choreographer of the last 30 years has been unaware of
Jacksons achievement. He rewrote the vocabulary of dance for everyone, from kids
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competing in talent shows to the royal ballets of Europe His shapes, his moves were
everywhere His concept of the dance was utterly 20th century, extravagantly multidimensional Nijinsky may have been the greatest Spectre de la Rose, Nureyev the greatest Corsair, but these two candles pale in the light of Jacksons blazing star. The surprise is
not that we have lost him, but that we ever had him at all. (Greer 2009)
Perhaps now, in merciful hindsight, we may gain an increased capacity to decipher the semiotic gestures of his music and dance, as well as the anomalous humanity inherent in his message. We may be better able to perceive his art as a passionate
clarion call radiating across disparate cultures without regard to race, age, gender,
or religion. In the artists absence, we may learn to apprehend what once was
present.
Call and Response: Communal Joy

It is a blessing Jacksons leave-taking occurred during the era of YouTube. A touch
on an iPad or smart phone and resurrection is ours. One can choose between myriad
variations of classics such as Billie Jean, Man in the Mirror, and Black or
White, as Jackson performs them live in Munich, Barcelona, Bucharest,
Gothenburg, Sydney, Yokohama, or New York. Reviewing these videos, it is also
easy to see that Jacksons global tour audiences grew increasingly massive, often
reaching well over 70,000 in a night. Most of his audience chose festival-seating,
meaning no seating at all, but simply standing close together in a kind of enraptured
call and response community. His audiences kneweven attentively anticipatedhis every move, while offering a response to his every call.
Often near the beginning of a concert or between songs, Jackson would simply
call out vocally nuanced sounds, both familiar and iconic, to his audience. The participants, spreading out in undulating human waves before him, responded in kind
and on key. Jacksons affectionate non-verbal vocal gestures were a means of intimate communication. In those moments, he almost seemed to symbolically metamorphose into an archetypal maternal persona, in wordless communication with a
child. The communally received aural intonations were powerful connectors, as
intense as the drama of his gestures in dance.
Through the various colorations of his music, lyrics, improvisational vocal gestures and the physical body-gestures of his dance, Jacksons live outdoor concerts
became a carnivalesqueyet paradoxically sacramentalperformance art ritual. A
bond was engendered between the offerings of the artist and the highly receptive
communal soul of his audience. What one notices though, and what is so stunningly
idiosyncratic about this massively orchestrated spectacle, is that it also evidenced a
sense of chilling intimacy.
The art of Jacksons dance was animated through the fervor of his lyrically
sweeping gesturesa fluid mercurial body-calligraphyat times suggestive of the
brooding hovering wind of Ruach Hakodesh. Often, after twirling and spinning as
if seized in the trance of a whirling dervish, Jackson would choose to finalize his
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choreography in the contrary state of absolute stillness. His outstretched arms

spread wide and wing-like, his spine arched, and his head thrown suddenly back and
upward toward the night sky. This is performance as art signaling to a higher consciousness (Fig. 3).
Through the architecture of his pose, Jacksons body in space became a work of
Neomodern intent. Yet, paradoxically, aspects of this gesture were also reminiscent
of the ancient and archetypal. The artist seemed to bask in a rapturous energy emanating from the cosmos above. This particular poseindicative of exultation in
(and abdication to) a higher cosmic forcerecalls the figures of eighteenth-century
mystic poet and painter, William Blake. Whereas Blake utilized his brush, pigments, and printing press to create his epiphanic visionary figurations, the aesthetic
tools of Jacksons on-stage art were located in his body. It became a tangible vessel
of signifiers (Fig. 4).
Though invisible to the eye that force of cosmic energy, entering into the artist
from the night skies above, was experienced by Jacksons spectators (now turned
participants) as exultationeven spiritual euphoria. The vast communal body facing him, in this gesture of catharsis on stage, metaphorically became his beloved. In
that moment, Jackson seemed to morph from the earlier mother/child archetypal
motif, as intimated through his vocal gestures, into a lover/beloved archetype, as
expressed through his visual body-gestures. The energy was livid, tangible and
decidedly communal.
A Dionysian spirit prevailed in Jacksons performances. Thus the artist was often
able to entrain his followers into a kind of enchantment that went far beyond entertainment. The deft sorcery of his music, voice, dance, and body gestures were
Fig. 3 Michael Jackson, US Tour, 1989 (Photo credit: Neal Preston)
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Fig. 4 Detail of page with

figure from Jerusalem by
William Blake, copy E,
c. 1821, Yale Center for
British Art, New Haven,
CT
capable of transporting his audience into a place of ecstatic ritual. We are literally
ex stasisoutside of ourselves.
When I teach gesture to my intro drawing class (with a live model) I am aware
of how foreign this concept feels to beginners. Often the first impulse is to draw
dark outlines on the paper bordering the figure, as if to trap it. However, I coax them
to feel the pose by sketching with cosmic-like swirling strokes, tracking the energy
deep within the figure. Through gesture-sketching the artist seductively entices
the animating spirit from within the subject before any authenticity can live in the
outer contours. Some artists reveal this process in their final work and others do
gestures as prep-studies. For example, Picassos massive anti-war painting Guernica
was conceived as a quick gesture-sketch the size of an index card. I recall this
micro-piece hanging next to Guernica at the Museum of Modern Art in New York
before the pieces were returned to Spain in 1981. In that minuscule gestural script,
the monumental soul of Guernica took life. Animating the spirit, through gesture,
feels unpredictable and risky, but it often leads to truth. As author Eudora Welty
once wrote with regard to her first career as photographer, Every feeling waits
upon its gesture (Welty 1996, 12).
Following Jacksons death, Jason King, Artistic Director of New York
Universitys Clive Davis Department of Recorded Music, wrote about the artist, I
always felt Jackson had to dance out of necessity of sheer ecstatic release But
when he danced, he did so with fierceness, with creative risk. It was as if his life
depended on it (King 2010, 38). One of Jacksons peerless gifts was his ability to
embody the animating spiritthe breath of the cosmos. For global multitudes, the
experience of witnessing him perform in concert may have been the twentieth-century
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equivalent of experiencing the frenetic whirling stars of Vincent Van Gogh or the
apocalyptic flames and figures of William Blake for the first time. The words of
Psalm 139:14 come to mind, Fearfully and wonderfully made.
In many of Jacksons nubile gestures, and preternatural dance moves, there was
a hint of the Divine erotic that permeates much of Renaissance religious art, as
well as finding its way into the writings of Dante. Spiritual rapture and human sensuality, in their higher forms, seem twin beauties and not the enemies in opposition
that fundamentalist religiosity would have us believe. For example, one has only to
contemplate the Baroque imagery of seventeenth-century Gian Lorenzo Bernini. In
his marble sculpture, Transverberation of Saint Teresa, she is pierced with the palpable bliss of Divine communion, yet also appears suffused with an erotic passion
as she capitulates amid the undulation of her drapery.
From another perspective, Jacksons sentient vulnerability also rendered him
alluring. Due to the self-disclosures in his autobiography, Moonwalk, and his writings from Dancing the Dream, his audiences were well aware of Jackson as a
wounded soul. Ironically, this very fact substantiated his humanity and reified the
core of his charisma. But Im only human he sang out to us.
The media, however, also became aware of his vulnerabilities and exploited them
at every turn. By this time, mass media had become symptomatic of the treachery
that our culture, at its worst, was capable of; it was a culture that could not bear the
consequences of vulnerability in its own repressively shadowed soul.
In the manner of a master storyteller, Jackson recounted his lost boyhood in the
song, Have You Seen My Childhood. His story offered a sense of validation to a
somewhat lost generation haplessly entangled in a dehumanizing, abstracted, and
self-destructive world. Many experienced Jackson as a Peter Pan, a puer aeternus
persona, who offered rescue. Through a mesmerism of music and mime, he symbolically transported them out of the night window of an earthbound and myopic
culture. Second star to the right and straight on till morning! as J. M. Barrie put it.
Jackson psychically spirited them away to a Neverland where innocence, goodwill,
and youth would ever prevail.
The ceremonial components of his performance art ritual powerfully encoded
this message. Thus the artist insisted that cruelty and evil need be no more, if only
we would rediscover our shared humanity, our compassion for each other, and our
innate capacity for communal joy. This seemed at the heart of his efficacious charisma. But a less childlike metaphor may actually be truer. On stage, in that moment
in time, the artist transmuted into the ancient archetype of the wounded healer and
a shamanic ritual unfolded.
Shamanic Presence: A Reliquary of Gifts

Drama professor at Marylhurst University in Portland, Oregon, Elizabeth Watzke,
introduces the concept of shamanic dimensions into her class on theater practice.
She includes Jackson as one of her examples and remarks, This aspect of my
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course is grounded in performance and theater, and how it may give us an experience on a healing and precognitive level that crosses all cultures and histories. So far
this seems to fit MJ like a glove. Referencing the work of Rachel Karafistan on
shamanic elements in theater practice, Watzke lectures on Jackson as fitting the
archetype of the wounded healer. She says:
The shaman experiences a journey, an initiation, through suffering. He then knows rebirth
and returns with newly acquired knowledge, often risking health or sanity for the sake of
community. The shaman has the ability to transport others out of ordinary reality for catharsis. To be a shaman is to be the mirror, and to know and bear shadow, so to become a
wounded healer Rhythm, drumming, music, chant, sound, light, dance, masks, costume, movement and body-gesture become part of staging the spectacle or the drama as
ritual. The purpose is to engender a connection to, and an awareness of, a Onenessof the
interdependence of the universe. (Watzke 2010)
Jacksons stage presence very often seemed to infuse the atmosphere with a kind
of surreal magnetismalmost like a palpable scenta sweet incense inhaled by his
audience. When Jackson embodied his iconic stance bathed in a particular chiaroscuro of lightarms flung open and head thrown far back facing the night skyhe
seemed to intimate both a crucifixion and resurrection allegory all at once. He
offered an image of suffering and transcendence in the final heartbeat of a performance. On a subliminal level, his audience did not miss this charged symbol.
During the art of performance, Jacksons physical body often transformed into a
kind of symbolic, elegant calligraphy wherein the Divine may channel gestures of
explosive emotion or intimate compassion. The artist becomes shamanic, taking on
our massive cumulative shadow and sweeping it whole into the light.
His series of gestures, as in his live performances of Will You Be There, often
became mnemonic bearers of messageand hean archetypal message-bearer.
The poetics of Ruach Hakodesh are released.
Jackson was also a wise artist. Similar to the aesthetics of the mythical figuregestures of William Blake, Jacksons physical gestures resonate within the deepest
core of human experience. By means of an idiosyncratic use of the human form,
such artists speak universally with a gravitas that transcends verbal language barriers and works to syncretize eclectic cultural mythologies. Often misunderstood in
their own time, they eventually become definers and reshapers of visual culture.
Jacksons message regarding a restoration of our humanity was profoundly
embedded into the consciousness of his global audiences. As a shamanic performer,
he embodied an experiential theology, a concept intimated earlier through the imagery of Barbara Ehrenreich. In this context, Jackson leaves behind a reliquary of
gifts. His performances opened the door to a beneficent reconciliation with our
repressed capacity for communal joy. We are awakened, if only briefly, to discover
our place in the Dance of Life, once joyously painted by the Fauve artist, Henri
Matisse.
As Jackson stated during his address to Oxford University, We have to heal our
wounded world. The chaos, despair, and senseless destruction we see today are the
result of the alienation that people feel from each other and their environment.
Jackson may have shared a similar intent, within his own heart, as that of author
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Eudora Welty who wrote, my continuing passion to part a curtain, that invisible shadow that falls between people, the veil of indifference to each others presence, each others wonder, each others human plight. (Welty 1996, 12) Whereas
Eudora parted that curtain through the unfolding of characters within her stories,
Jackson parted that curtain through the performative personae he embodied in his
dance and music on stage.
Exploding Binaries and Beatific Agencies

Georgetown University scholar and professor of sociology, Michael Eric Dyson, in
his essay, Michael Jacksons Postmodern Spirituality, writes:
Jackson strikes a deep, primal chord in the human psyche, fascinating us, perhaps, because
he so easily and eerily represents us, even mirrors us (all of us) at the same time. Thus, if he
is not a Nietzchean Ubermensch, he is a Promethean allperson who traverses traditional
boundaries that separate, categorize, and define differences: innocent/shrewd, young/old,
black/white, male/female, and religious/secular Perhaps, this is also why he frightens us
Jackson celebrates the dissolution of Yeatss center and exults in the scamper for the
edge. If at times his pace to the uncharted is dizzying, his achievements in the wake of his
pursuit are dazzling, and at times monumental. (Dyson 2004, 444)
In any serious study of Jacksons music, writing, and performanceeven of his

life-storyone becomes aware of the prevalence of opposing dualities. This interplay of paradoxical states once again calls to mind the visionary artist and poet,
William Blake. Both artists viscerally elucidated experiential contrary states, then
linked and fused them through their art. Their creative process resulted in exploding
binaries in startling ways.
Summarizing Jacksons words, we are reminded that he offered insight on the
dualities of life, the conjoining of opposites, and a beatific sense of his personal
theology when he wrote, When Im dancing, Ive felt touched by something sacred
I become the lover and the beloved the victor and the vanquished the master and the slave the knower and the known. I keep on dancing and then, it is the
eternal dance of creation. (Jackson 2009, 1)
In a similar vein, the poet William Butler Yeats expressed his thoughts regarding
the beatific vision of William Blake, imagination was the first emanation of
divinity the imaginative arts were therefore the greatest of Divine revelations
imagination divides us from mortality by the immortality of beauty, and binds us to
each other by opening the secret doors of all hearts. (Yeats 2007, 85)
Since my student days immersed in art history, I have been intrigued by the compelling figurative poses employed in painting and sculpture throughout the centuries. I have noticed gestures from Renaissance art that were direct quotes of classical
poses. Considering Jacksons well-documented love of fine art, it would not be surprising if he had paraphrased gestures in his performances that he initially discovered within his own comprehensive art library.
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Though Jackson was likely inspired by a number of figurative painters, William

Blake persists in my minds eye. Perhaps, this is partially due to time I spent
immersed in researching original pages from Blakes prophetic books in the sacristy
of the Yale Center for British Art, the Department of Prints and Drawings. It was
here I first viewed Blakes Jerusalem, arguably his greatest book. Yale holds the
sole extant original color edition of this work so aptly described as visionary theater. To better ponder Blakean figuration, I created a little paraphrase sketchbook
that remains with the archives. (Yale Collections 2012)
Because of my study, I noticed gestures by Blakeand by Jacksonthat seemed
to be overlaying pentimenti on the same master sketch. Both artists staged symbolic
dualities by juxtaposing biomorphic figure-gestures in opposition to geometric
boundary-settings, as demonstrated by Blakes exquisitely drawn borders and
Jacksons various and sundry proscenium set designs while performing.
Both artists lived in a world of rich inner myth and revered the state of innocence
as personified by the realm of Childhood. Northrop Frye, in his book Fearful
Symmetry: A Study of William Blake, noted that for Blake childhood seemed the
best incubator of imagination:
Childhood to Blake is a state or phase of imaginative existence, the phase in which the
world of imagination is still a brave new world and yet reassuring and intelligible. In the
protection which the child feels from his parents and his evening prayer against darkness
there is the image of a cosmos far more intelligently controlled than ours It was to the
same vision that Jesus was appealing when he put a child in the midst of his disciples. (Frye
1974, 236)
Scholar Joseph Vogel, who has a background in Blakean scholarship, shared the
following impressions with me during our conversations regarding aesthetic similarities between these artists, born centuries apart.
Like Blake, Michael Jacksons project was nothing less than re-imagining the world. Both
viewed their respective roles as prophetic with the intent of liberating, harmonizing and
healing the world. Yet they could also be apocalyptic, as they assessed a world on the verge
of complete self-destruction. Both Blake and Jackson were multi-media artists, whose very
aesthetic choices demonstrated the dissolution of old hierarchies and rigid barriers. Genres
and mediums were to be fused, not isolated. Both rejected the passive good, the mindforgd manacles of the status quo, while offering an alternative rooted in physical and
mental emancipation. (Vogel 2011a)
The contrary states of innocence and experience are reflected in the words and
visual imagery of both artists. In Jacksons enactment of his cruciform/resurrection
pose he projected an expansive vulnerability and generosity of spirit. Antithetical to
this, in his famous crouched/crying gesture, he expressed a psychic wound, a paucity of joy, and an anguish born of the harshness of lifes realities. These contrary
poses incarnated the spiritual cycles of darkness and lighta vast and paradoxical
cosmic reality. The Tibetan concept of Samsara is intimated. The opposing states of
Yin and Yang, darkness and light, intimate and infinite are woven, not only throughout the complex tapestry of Jacksons art, but also through the versothe raw and
exposed of his life. On stage, however, the artist was able to achieve release and
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Fig. 5 Body gestures: Michael Jackson, 1989 (Photo credit: Neal Preston) and detail from The
Book of Urizen by William Blake, print date 1818, Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of
Congress, Washington, D.C.
catharsis, exploding binaries by means of convergent expressions through the unifying gestalt of his performance art (Fig. 5).
Mythic Shape-Shifter
Jackson intuitively understood the potent emotive power inherent in visual shapes,
forms, and figures. As a visual artist, with an earlier involvement in theater, I have
always been intrigued by the morphing of shapes and forms in aesthetic expression.
Jackson became a mythic shape-shifter in reality. I never felt repelled by, or afraid
of, Jacksons changing visage. I perceived it as a creative choice. Perhaps, unconsciously (or even consciously) Jackson experienced his physical body as living art.
Many cultures throughout world history see things that way. Modifying ones color
through face or body pigments, as well as the intentional transmogrifying of the
body, are well known to anthropologists. Physical transmutations and shapeshiftings are also present in the oldest of human literature and inherent in most all
world mythologies.
In M Poetica: Michael Jacksons Art of Connection and Defiance, academic
Willa Stillwater writes, If the goal of the artist is to unsettle us, to challenge our
perceptions and beliefs and force us to see ourselves and our culture in new ways,
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then Jacksons most provocative work of art was arguably his own evolving body.
(Stillwater 2011, p. 51)
In a wayperhaps inadvertentlyJackson presented us with a truth. We are not
one face. Psychologically we are an assemblage. The multiple personae buried
deep within us are legion. Most often they secure residence in our shadow-side and
are denied exposure to the light by a domineering ego. No wonder Jacksons alterations were frightening or intolerable to some. The artist unwittingly triggered a
subliminal terror of the menagerie of personages residing in their own psyches.
Perhaps, by recoiling from him, due to changes in his visage or color, they then did
not have to acknowledge the multiplicity within themselves and could project onto
the otherindulging xenophobia. In addition, although a difficult truth to accept,
lifes experiences of sorrow, illness, accident, or aging will shape-shift us all, to
greater or lesser degrees, in the end.
Related to this, it is meaningful to remember that Jackson suffered second-degree
burns early in his career requiring brutally painful treatments for decades. He also
endured auto-immune diseases, vitiligo and discoid lupus, irrevocably affecting his
pigmentation. Perhaps, because of this, Jackson seemed to bear witness to another
truth. Human respect and inclusiveness should not be constrained by bodily appearance, reconfiguration, or skin color. Throughout his travels on world concert tours,
Jackson set aside time in each city to visit orphanages and hospitals with child burn
victims, as well as children with chronic illnesses and disabilities. Through his
actions, the artist exemplified that a disfigurement of the body does not mean a disfigurement of the soul.
Drapery Drama and Fine Art

Jacksons artful use of drapery may be considered a particularly unusual vehicle for
aesthetic expression. However, utilization of drapery drama is a classic device that
has been employed by painters and sculptors for centuries. The movement of drapery, as an element of visual language, enables the viewer to read the emotive subtext
of the work. Jackson intentionally employed the aesthetic use of drapery in versions
of Earth Song, as well as his iconic dance-without-music in the cinematic short
film, Black and White. There are many other examples. At times, the artist seems
to have co-opted a sketchbook page from a master of Renaissance painting, or perhaps from Blakes apocalyptic illustrations for Dantes Divina Commedia, both of
which I am sure he was well aware.
Jacksons drapery, whether a flowing silken cape or languid shirt, would often
undulate from around his body facilitated by an artificial wind source out of view
when he was on stage. The dramatic gesture of his drapery aroused a visually sensual paradox of concealing and revealing. Looking back on centuries of master
paintings and drawings, one can appreciate how an artists use of drapery (or to
similar ends, billowing clouds or convulsive flames) can fully provoke an emotional
tenor sympathetic with the subject of the work.
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Contrary to this, surging and swelling drapery may also infuse an unspoken subtext into the artwork that is not evident in the title, or even in the literal narrative. In
other words, an emotive editorial comment by the artist issues forth. Oscillating
drapery may also engender an emanation of glory or heroic aura to the composition.
The curling, convoluting motion stirs our primordial senses in a deeply aesthetic
way. Jackson, similar to Blake, was an artist who intuitively comprehended the
impact of visual mystery made possible through the aesthetic empowerment of
drapery drama.
Related to fine art, it is significant to note that evidence of Jacksons visual acuity
and extensive historical knowledge of painting, drawing, and sculpture abounds.
The artist painted on canvas and kept numerous sketchbook diaries, even in childhood. He had distinctive artistic talent and a passion for drawing throughout his life.
In fact, a Santa Monica airplane hanger, that Jackson secretly utilized as his art
studio, was recently revealed to the public. (Duvernoy 2011)
His portfolio of artworks, including an over-sized graphite portrait drawing of
Martin Luther King once displayed by Oprah Winfrey, evidences extraordinary skill
and empathy. Also, remarkable is the stunning scene design Jackson conceptualized
for part of his planned London concerts in 2009, and which later materialized in the
film, This Is It. Jacksons steel-girder, sky-scraper concept was a personal homage
to photographer Lewis Hine and his iconic series on the construction of the Empire
State Building. It is worth noting that another photographic series by Hine was
instrumental in U.S. child labor reforms. Perhaps, this is what initially attracted
Jackson to Hines oeuvre. (Wiseman 2009)
Jacksons love of art inhabits the often repeated story of his visit to the Louvre
with his young children. The curators remembrance was poignant. When he liked
a picture, he was so moved he started to cry When facing the Mona Lisa, we all
had to take a break for him to recover.
Our Better Angels

As an artist, Jackson operated, in large part, on a deeply intuitive level. There is
ample evidence that he was an empath, someone with a paranormal ability to
apprehend the mental or emotional state of other human beings. Author and human
rights advocate, Reverend Barbara Kaufmann expresses this in her essay published
by Voices Education Project, a global organization dedicated to a humanitarian
agenda through education, literature and the arts. Kaufmann wrote:
He felt the absence of expressed human glory. And he knew we were capable Most of
Jacksons work asks us to be emissaries of change and the evolution of human consciousness. The man leaves in his wake, an unparalleled humanitarian legacy, planetary midwifery and the alchemical power of the Bodhisattva used to enhance humanity and the
planet Heal the world, make it a better place. (Kauffman 2010)
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Through the salient prosody of Jacksons music, and the charged visual calligraphy of his dance, another archetype surfaces. The Seer bears witness to humanity,
struggling in the throes of painful self-awareness, as it attempts to listen to its better
angels. In Jacksons emotionally escalating piece, Man in the Mirror, the artist
presented a metaphoric looking-glass in which our later twentieth-century culture
could see its own reflection. Staring back was the dark shadow-side of our cultures
eschewed values. Through Jacksons art many came to apprehend, perhaps for the
first time, the ineluctable facts regarding the loss of our humanity, the loss of our
global environment, and the loss of the child within us that facilitates our capacity
for collective joy.
For some, however, that mirror-reflection, in conjunction with the artists perceived idiosyncrasies, was too much to bear. The messenger had to be destroyed.
Jackson suffered years of extortion, social assassination, and persecution by a nefarious media that eventually resulted in his physical death.
Journalist Deborah Ffrench writes,
Only the most imperceptive would deny that Jacksons insomnia was undoubtedly the result
of a life massively traumatized. Even for someone used to living in the glare of uber fame,
the level of stress, abuse and cruelty Jackson had to deal with, went far beyond what any
individual could healthily be expected to cope with Years of self-serving media narrative
will certainly take time to be righted. But the journey back has begun, and it has begun in
earnest. (Ffrench 2011)
Deus Ex Machina
During the months following Jacksons leave-taking an unexpected phenomena
played out in my life. I began to connect with others regarding the artist in various
parts of the country, and eventually internationally, in such diverse places as
Australia, Berlin, Bucharest, Hong Kong, and the Netherlands, among others. Some,
including myself, had previously been only peripherally aware of Jacksons art, yet
we began to share remarkably similar experiences as a result of his sudden death.
Many whom I spoke with about their new awarenessthe significance of his art and
philanthropyused the same descriptive words. I felt struck. To better define this
experience utilizing imagery, one might say it was a sensation not dissimilar to the
emissary-annunciate exploding through the ceiling in the drama, Angels in America.
At first, a baffling surprisea Deus ex machina moment.
Multitudes, spanning all walks of life, including professionals and academics in
such diverse fields as literature, art, theater, cinema, anthropology, medicine and
law, found themselves entrained in the artists wake during that remarkable summer
of 2009. The twenty-first-century concept of networking is an everyday pragmatic
occurrence. However, the type of networking I was experiencing reinforced what I
had long suspected. There are some modes of communal knowing, not driven exclusively by Facebook, Instagram or Twitter, that are mysteriously empowered by the
spiritual forces of synchronicity and grace.
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As an artist, I harbor a core consciousness embedded within that is not dominated by the rational, where mystical poetics such as Ruach Hakodesh can flourish,
and where my imagination routinely looks toward the cosmos for its creative source.
From that place most all of my image-making emanates.
In late June of 2009 I began to seriously contemplate the vast emotional scope
evident in Jacksons art. I found a cache of startling imagery embedded within.
Jacksons body of work fleshes out the crevices of the human psyche from a beatific
transcendent lightan illuminosa in aeterna sensationto the solitary places of
personal anguish, loneliness and psychic danger, as expressed in his haunting piece,
Stranger in Moscow.
Jackson was not merely a songwriter, but through his lyrics and related cinematic
works, he was a creator of fictional narrative. In short-story mode he served up
characters as compellingly unorthodox as some conjured by William Faulkner or
Flannery OConnor. These include the six disparate marginalized souls in his short
film for Stranger in Moscow, the predatory Susie in Blood on the Dance Floor,
the iniquitous mayor in Ghosts, and one of the most recognized fictional characters of the twentieth century, the enigmatic Billie Jean, among so many others.
The existential black-and-white cinematic piece Jackson produced for Stranger
in Moscow calls to mind the constructs employed by Biblical Psalmists. The six
unrelated characters give voice to the alienated and to the self-induced loneness of
modern man. The films symbolic imagery of a sudden downpour allows the prescient falling water, and the wordless response of Jacksons characters, to reinstate
humanitys connection to the poetics of its own soul.
New York Times critic, Jon Pareles, called the piece lavishly melodic. Especially
moving is the orchestral version of Stranger recorded by the Moscow Symphony
after Jacksons death. As one of the artists most significant works, Stranger in
Moscow is performed by symphonic orchestras internationally.
In the months subsequent to Jacksons death, I was compelled to begin gestural
studies initially executed to process my own private thoughts. A series of drawings
emerged that were informed by Jackson as an avatar of contemporary Psalmist
expression. I soon discovered I was emotionally impaled by the spoken-word epilogue of the full version of his composition, Will You Be There.
In this particular version, Jackson selected a classical prelude featuring the
Cleveland Orchestra and the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus performing a portion of
Beethovens Symphony No. 9, a dramatic lesser-known segment of his Ode to Joy.
This classical introduction is followed by a chorale interlude after which the Andrae
Crouch gospel choir continues throughout the remainder of the piece backing up
Jacksons vocals.
The lavish amalgamation of prelude, lyrics, orchestration, choreography and
final epilogue, call to mind the essence of Old Testament Psalms, for the soul is crying out to the Divine for intercession. Jacksons composition expresses a thirst for
spiritual rescue from the turmoil of inner doubts and fears, as well as the escalating
angst of postmodern man, ever entangled in his disasters of war, poverty, and environmental diminishment.
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127
I noticed a particular word Jackson sings out that is not among the published lyrics. One example appears in the recorded version of Will You Be There from the
Dangerous World Tour. The word Kyrie seems to be a spontaneous improvisation
following his line, Carry me boldly. Kyrie may initially sound like a vocalization of Carry me, and so may be missed. The word, from the Biblical Greek
Kyrios, is a prayer in Christian liturgy and an invocation in the celebration of the
Mass. Numerous composers, over centuries, have set the Mass to music and included
a Kyrie movement. As a devotee of classical music the meaning of Kyrie must have
been very familiar to Jackson.
The word is emblematic of an entire short litany beginning with Kyrie, eleison or
Lord, have mercy. That particular phrase is also associated with the ancient Jesus
Prayer that permeates J. D. Salingers, Franny and Zooey, internalizing the concept
to pray without ceasing. This brief liturgical allusion may underscore a core
meaning in Jacksons Will You Be There. For those familiar with the Latin Mass,
or with works such as Mozarts Requiem in D minor, his exigent calling out of
Kyrie may well be experienced as a charged symbol splicing an ancillary religious subtext into the layers of meaning profuse in Jacksons composition.
Jacksons imagistic on-stage performance of this piece, as in the Bucharest concert in Romania, finalizes with a classic Deus ex machina tableau. Here he visually
demonstrates that the soul, after all, is salvaged through a Divine intercessor who
responds by sending forth a spiritual emissary to rescue and comfort. I believe
Jackson was distinctly aware of this ancient theatrical device originating as far back
as the Greek dramas of Euripides. Deus ex machina enthralls spectators because it
alludes to that liminal threshold where the Divine enters ordinary life.
My drawings for this series were not conceived in the genre of realism, nor were
they meant to illustrate Jackson, or anyone, in a representational mode. The drawings are allegorical. During my creative process I was casting about for a personal
yet universally attunedexcavation of meaning through figurative expression.
Lines from Jacksons spoken epilogue (not in original sequence) deeply informed
my images and then became titles in the drawing series (Figs. 6 and 7).
In my trials and in my tribulations
In my violence and in my turbulence
Through my fear and my confessions
In our darkest hour
In my deepest despair
Will you be there?
My hope, in commencing this drawing series, is that the archetypal images will
bear witness to the afflictions of the world, to the turmoil of interior anxieties, and
to the ubiquitous consequences of conflict and greed. But my images also mean to
bear witness to the presence of ministering emissaries upon the earth. I placed an
angel, or spiritual intercessor, within each of the travails depicted. Although these
envoys may not always have agency to immediately alter our circumstance, by their
steadfast willingness to witness and companion, they provide a yearned-for consolation and an expectation of eventual enlightenment.
cpierce@sbu.edu
128
C. Pierce
Fig. 6 Constance Pierce, In my trials and in my tribulations (graphite), Art on Paper 2010,
Museum of Art, Toyota City, Aichi, Japan
My Will You Be There image series is ongoing. The initial drawings were displayed in Art on Paper 2010, an international exhibition at the Museum of Art in
Toyota City, Aichi, Japan. They were subsequently featured in solo exhibitions in
the U.S. at Notre Dame College in Ohio, Seton Hill University in Pennsylvania,
and Regina A. Quick Center for the Arts in New York. A published print series of
the art was recently displayed at the Divinity School of Yale University. Other venues will follow as the drawing series expands.
Through my art I explore images of pilgrimage, betrayal, lamentation, transcendence, and rebirth because those themes flesh out parable and reveal to me the
ancient stories reborn in our world of dissonance and division. Those narratives, in
their mythic and consuming drama, are played out deep within our own interior
cpierce@sbu.edu
129
Fig. 7 Constance Pierce, Through my fear and my confessions (graphite), Art on Paper 2010,
Museum of Art, Toyota City, Aichi, Japan
journey. The moment of betrayal or resurrection is not ancient history, but is enacted
anew within each soul.
Michael Jackson, as artist, was able to engender an eschatological questioning of
the Divine in his piece, Will You Be There. He also composed an apocalyptic
anthem for the survival of our planet in, Earth Song, and asserted demands for
social justice amid racial conflict in Black or White. Extending far beyond popular culture, Jackson left behind a vast reservoir of treasure in his wide-ranging oeuvre as a serious artist. We are the beneficiaries of a legacy of art that is startlingly
innovative and revelatory. In addition, one may characterize Jacksons art as being
spiritually empowered, for his work awakens in us a truer consciousness of our own
joy and suffering.
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130
C. Pierce
Lacrymae Rerum
To finalize my reflections I orchestrated a small chorus, albeit verbal, of a few voices
resonating on aspects of Jackson as an artist of enduring cultural import.
John Jeremiah Sullivan, contributing editor to Harpers, reminds us in his essay,
Back in the Day, of what we forgotor never knewhow it all began:
How do you talk about Michael Jackson unless you begin with Prince Screws? Prince
Screws was an Alabama cotton-plantation slave who became a tenant farmer after the Civil
War His son Prince Screws Jr., bought a small farm. And that mans son, Prince Screws
III, left home for Indiana, where he found work as a Pullman porter He had two daughters Katie gave birth to ten children, the eighth a boy, Michaelwho would name his
sons Prince, to honor his mother, whom he adored, and to signal a restoration.
(Sullivan 2009)
Clarence B. Jones, Scholar-in-Residence at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Institute

at Stanford University, facilitates our thinking about a heros journey:
The English philosopher Joseph Campbell has described the classic heros journey in
literature A hero can be flawed but still a hero Some stories end nobly without ending
happily Much of America and the world honor Jackson as a flawed hero In the end,
it seems he represented hope, inspiration and the celebration of life however unorthodox his
own life may have been. (Jones 2009)
New York cultural critic and uncompromising truth-teller, Armond White, in his
collection of essays, Keep Moving: The Michael Jackson Chronicles, postulates:
Inherent in all the MJ trailblazing is beliefproofthat the Civil Rights era promises of
equality are realized in the open and creative expression of group and individual feelings.
Artists confide a special faith in their public expression: that what they have to say will be
heard and understood. (Beat It changed more hearts than the Iowa Caucus.) That flash
of emotional truth in MJs art makes it possible to set aside scandal. What genuine artist
has avoided it? As the soulless media returns to its routine of hateful recrimination, this
cultural fact remains: We all live, dance and cry in Michael Jacksons shadow (White
2009, 100101).
Columbia Law School alumnus and journalist, Matthew Semino, expresses concerns about the danger of our media-rabid culture in the Examiner:
As history progresses and Jacksons symbol and work are analyzed in conjunction with the
unfolding of human events, the important cultural relevance of his persona will be uncovered. Like a piece of classic Greek literature that embodies timeless themes of human striving and suffering, Michael Jacksons canon and celebrity will come to hold a similar place
in the modern day cultural pantheon. Why then was it necessary to shoot the messenger?
(Semino 2010)
American poet, Maya Angelou, upon the artists death, wrote in part:
Beautiful, delighting our eyes
He raked his hat slant over his brow and took a pose on his toes for all of us
He gave us all he had been given
cpierce@sbu.edu
131
Today in Tokyo, beneath the Eiffel Tower, in Ganahs Blackstar Square, in Johannesburg,
in Pittsburgh, in Birmingham, Alabama and Birmingham England, we are missing Michael
Jackson
But we do know that we had him
And we are the world. (Angelou 2009)
Fellow artist and professor of drawing and painting at Amarillo College in Texas,
Stephanie Jung, also expresses her thoughts poetically:
You were a lightening rod for love, hate, and power
We loved you, then we laughed at you.
Then we hated you, and attacked you.
You kept knocking at the door, and when you left, we opened it again
You floated in a liminal space, somewhere between black and white, male and female,
adult and child, lustful and chaste, beautiful and ugly, hated and adored.
Finally, you came to exist in a space between life and death
But your music rose, like a phoenix
And for some of us, the veil fell way. (Jung 2010, 141142)
Paris Jackson was only 11 when her fathers memorial service was broadcast live
on July 7th, 2009 via television and the internet. The child, kept carefully protected
from the public eye by her father, now unexpectedly shared her loss with nearly a
billion global viewers tuning in that afternoon. Ever since I was born, Daddy has
been the best father you could ever imagine. And I just wanted to say I love him so
much. (People 2009)
As for myself, Jacksons artistry has offered me a merciful beauty and grace during difficult times, in shining opposition to the pragmatic gravity of the din and
dross of life. The expansive gestures of generosity and creativity that I apprehend in
his music, dance, writings and philanthropic work have enriched my life in immeasurable ways. His artistic presence has illuminated new dimensions in my own art
regarding the universal themes of suffering and transcendence. For all of this, I am
grateful.
Jackson was an admirer of Michelangelo. He often quoted the sculptor when
expressing thoughts about his own mortality. I know the creator will go, but his
work survives. That is why to escape death, I attempt to bind my soul to my work.
And so it is.
Perhaps, if we are now able to more carefully discern creative imagination
engaging the cosmos as expressed by this artistseeing beyond the media that savagely mischaracterized himJackson will finally be revealed as an artist in synchrony with the empyrean poetics of Ruach Hakodesh and as an epiphanic visionary
of our time (Fig. 8).
Grace is grace, despite of all controversy.
Measure for Measure (Act I Scene 2)
William Shakespeare
cpierce@sbu.edu
132
C. Pierce
Fig. 8 Michael Jackson in concert

Note: Artist retains all reproduction rights to her images (Figs. 1, 2, 6, and 7)
The other illustrations (Figs. 3, 4, 5, and 8) are utilized under Fair Use: scholarly and educational
commentary or criticism.
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Constance Pierce RUACH HAKODESH The Epip

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Published under the auspices of

Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka Patricia Trutty-Coohill

The Cosmos and the Creative

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015957437

Ruach Hakodesh: The Epiphanic and Cosmic

For Paris Michael Katherine Jackson

Sketching in the Background

It is my contention that Jackson inspired global multitudes to compassion and

Petitioning the Cosmos

Jackson often expressed he felt uncomfortable claiming ownership of his music.

as King of Sani at a ceremony on the Ivory Coast. Im committed to my art. I

Remembering back, if we try, we can still conjure recollections of the musically

Closet Scholar and Humanitarian

Rumination, Epiphany and Sudden Splendor

play, often an experience of spiritual reciprocity. At its best, it may be a creative

Through the mellifluous feel of watercolor, I attempted to incarnate the radiance

High Drama: Harvesting the Chaos

Jackson intuitively comprehended this bridge to the Divine, as he facilitated a

Jacksons aesthetic enactment of an unconventional theology through the art of

Call and Response: Communal Joy

choreography in the contrary state of absolute stillness. His outstretched arms

Fig. 3 Michael Jackson, US Tour, 1989 (Photo credit: Neal Preston)

Fig. 4 Detail of page with

Shamanic Presence: A Reliquary of Gifts

Exploding Binaries and Beatific Agencies

In any serious study of Jacksons music, writing, and performanceeven of his

Though Jackson was likely inspired by a number of figurative painters, William

Drapery Drama and Fine Art

Our Better Angels

Clarence B. Jones, Scholar-in-Residence at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Institute

Fig. 8 Michael Jackson in concert

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