One of the spiritual exercises introduced by the Jesuit St Ignatius is the visualisation of stories from the New Testament. This form of meditative exercise urges us, on the way to drawing closer to Jesus, to set the intellect aside and instead come to know Jesus and his deeds through our senses and our imagination. St Ignatius gave Christians a technique that allows them a much more intimate contact with Scripture and with the life not only of Jesus but also of the other figures. To think, but above all to live through!
That is all very well, but what does it have to do with contemporary visual culture, the course for which this exercise was prescribed to us? Although Josef Šlerka sincerely confessed his own convictions to us, the religious subject matter is secondary in this exercise; rather, it was necessary to choose a story or visual material that would be fairly well known to everyone present (the semio-lab rats). The main aim of finding time for a meditation in which we switch off the intellect forever chattering in our heads and immerse ourselves in the space through our senses alone (in the order hearing, touch, smell, taste and finally sight) is to examine whether similar images, tastes or sounds can be found among the participants of this experiment, and if so, why that is?
Finding similarities in the visualisation of the scene from Mark 14:17–25 will certainly not be surprising; after all, we were all brought up in a similar, if not the same, culture; many of us have also seen da Vinci’s Last Supper. But what if we find correspondences where culture and the familiar images we have seen cannot be a sufficient explanation? Will these symbolic sensory data we have found not be the result of touching a global and shared field of rooted symbols and archetypes, that is, according to Carl G. Jung, the collective unconscious? One way or another, I am adding the result of my meditation, which is not a prepared description of the given chapter of the Bible, but a record of flashes of individual sensory data that I have tried to put together into a coherent narrative form.
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How inappropriate it must be that at this very important moment I am sitting with our Lord and the others of the twelve with my eyes closed, trying to imprint on my memory everything that flows through my senses. Surely the others are watching me in disbelief right now, wondering what lies behind my behaviour. Or could I be mistaken about their interest in my person? It is possible, for I hear only cheerful conversation. Hearty, full laughter comes from somewhere in front of me. But I hear more voices. Others are sitting on my right, whereas to my left I hear nobody speaking. The room in which we are feasting today must have windows, since the sound of stumbling and the bleating of sheep reaches us from the street, along with the muffled sound of the pasture bells with which their shaggy, soft necks are most likely adorned.
Still blinded by darkness, I feel the solid wooden body of the table and of the bench, which shakes whenever laughter breaks out or someone merely leans over abruptly. With the sandal on my left foot I explore the cold stone floor. I come across bits of hay that stick into my skin, and I have the feeling that something small and alive is scampering about under the table here. What it is I will find out when I open my eyes. But I do not plan to do that yet.
I smell and taste a thick vegetable soup and a slice of fresh bread.
The dance of the cutlery continues, and the longer I keep my eyes closed, the more detail I am able to notice in the busy, lively soundscape drifting in from the street.
I open my eyes and finally see the real outlines of the objects that my previous senses had so far been trying to describe imprecisely and in fragments. As I suspected, I am trying far too obsessively to relate everything happening in the world to myself; nobody is paying any attention to me; on the opposite side of the table four of the twelve are debating together in a jovial mood, their dark curly hair and their tanned, bearded cheeks completing their otherwise gentle faces. We are sitting at a table that reminds me of the shape of the letter “J”, but mirrored along its vertical axis, and instead of the rounded line one has to imagine sharp right angles. I am sitting with five others on the longer side of the J; opposite, on the projection, sit three more, and our Lord, of course, in the middle, in the part joining both sides of the table. There are not twelve of us; where are the others?
For a moment I tear my eyes away from our table and see that we are sitting in a spacious room whose floor and walls are of dressed pieces of stone and whose roof is of wood. The room is not hermetically sealed; on the contrary, fresh, cold air streams in to us through two rectangular openings. For lack of suitable words I must call them windows. They give me a view of the busy life outside on the road. On the right, over our Lord’s shoulders, I finally see a shepherd or a merchant holding his sheep close to his body. I turn over in my head how much he might have earned today in his business dealings, and at the same time I quickly feel the impropriety of this question. Since I am sitting facing the exit of this house and am not caught up in conversation with the others, I am the first and only one to catch sight of a very old woman, her face full of wrinkles from a quiet, poor life, slowly carrying a heavy stack of straw on her back. She stops in the corner of the room and carefully lays the stack of straw on the floor. At the same slow pace at which she came, she leaves the house. Ungreeted and instantly forgotten.
I said that I felt some little steps and movements on the floor. I was not mistaken. I bend down to look under the table, where I see a hunched chicken or a small duck; I am not quite sure, because comparing species has never been among my strengths. But the small, restless animal irritates me; I do not like it when something scampers about under my feet, let alone an animal I know nothing about. I look under the table again and try to kick the pest away with my sandal. At the last moment, however, I stop myself, realising that this act could cast suspicion on me of not being a peaceable man. Our Lord would certainly not approve. What is he doing anyway?
The whole time he has not spoken and has spent most of the time brooding over his soup. Was he trying to find something in it?
He rises from his chair and begins to walk about the room. He goes over to the stack of hay that the unknown old woman brought, and returns to the table. He sits down. Without raising his eyes, he announces to us that one of those present will betray him. The room falls silent. Everyone, even the Lord himself, is looking at me. They do not blink. The Lord stands up again and everyone turns their faces away from me.