Rising on Nothing

(Marc Chagall, Over the Town, 1918, Public Domain)

“Hope” is the thing with feathers -

That perches in the soul -

- Emily Dickinson

Marc Chagall painted people flying. Flying like we might in our dreams, floating over rivers or rooftops, released from gravity’s pull. Chagall lived to be 97 years old. Maybe his artistic vision was lit by the trials of a life that spanned many of Russia’s darkest moments. Born Moishe Shagal, he grew up in Russia’s Pale of Settlement, not permitted, as a Jew, to live outside the area. Chagall was 16 when a three-year wave of pogroms began to sweep through Russia killing thousands of Jews, wounding more, and destroying their homes. While Chagall moved to Paris in 1910 to pursue his art, he returned to Russia in 1914 to marry Bella Rosenfeld. They planned to return to Paris together but were unable to leave Russia when WWI began and the borders were closed.

Chagall was in Russia when Tsar Nicholas II was forced to abdicate and later assassinated along with his wife and five children. He was in Russia during years of unrest and protest when the Bolsheviks overthrew the provisional government in 1917, and when Russia became the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1922. He was again able to return to Paris in 1923. But in 1940, the Vichy government began cooperating with the Nazis to send French Jews to German concentration camps. Before Chagall and his wife were able to get out of France safely, they were stripped of their French citizenship and arrested. They were rescued along with other prominent artists and brought to the US. Chagall again returned to France in 1947, but without his beloved Bella who died in 1944.

These experiences of war, prejudice, and persecution must have had Chagall imagine escaping earth’s bonds and dreaming of flying. Sometimes he painted himself and Bella flying in their kitchen, sometimes flying over their small Russian village. Like Chagall, we often long to shake off the weight that holds us and rise to something glorious.

In her poem “Crude Angel,” Suzanne Cleary describes an angel mounted above a church door. The angel “waits outside the church” because she’s made of stone. The angel has wings but:

My angel drags itself to the door
of this church it will never enter. 

The angel is so much like us. It’s as if we, being made in God’s image, also have wings – the Spirit of Christ in us – but we hover, too, outside our true home, heaven, the place we long to enter.

Like us, consigned to earth with heaven in our hearts the poem’s speaker laments:

my angel exhausted by the weight 
of the stone of which it is made, 
as we are exhausted by the stone 
 
of which we are made,

Maybe Chagall fought this heaviness with his fanciful imaginings. He painted others flying, a clown, maybe to emphasize the joy of laughter; a flying beggar, maybe pointing to something lofty in the spirit of the downtrodden. Flying symbolizes our desire to escape our troubles and, like Chagall flying with Bella, exult in our joys.

We relate to the moored angel, we have “useless wings,” yet these wings give us new vision:

that make us imagine
rising, on nothing
one can see with the eyes.

Like Chagall, we have a God-instilled hope that lifts us and sustains us above the weighty bonds of earth.

(My thanks to Suzanne Cleary for granting me permission to feature her poem in this essay. “Crude Angel” is from Cleary’s collection of poems titled Crude Angel and was published by BkMk Press in 2018.You can read the poem here.)