Plus he’s hot. He’s a hot Catholic priest who, in my mind, I was picturing Joe Alwyn the whole time.
I want to see the portraits Wyeth makes of him. Ugh, I bet they’re beautiful.
The book was almost called “Black Portrait of a White Man,” but then I decided, no, no, no, that’s too much. Keating in many ways exists in the book to destabilize everything that Wyeth thought he knew about his life, about his motivations for art-making, about desire, about faith, about God—to offer him a chance to reëncounter his life, maybe.
Ex-Protestant Americans tend to think of learnedness and faith as being at these complete cross purposes, to the point that somebody having a serious crisis of faith seems unserious. It’s, like, Oh, no, we all went through that, and that’s when you become an atheist and have good politics or something.
Not to socialism-cite here, but Louis Althusser talks about this in “Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses,” where he is giving the example of how people who have ideologies don’t think they have ideologies. And to illustrate this point, he’s, like, “Well, if you were talking to Christians and you are an atheist, you would think, Oh, but fellas, you don’t take this really seriously. We all know that it’s a joke.” And Althusser’s point is that to the Christians it’s absolutely not a joke. But it seems like a joke to people who don’t share those truths.
That moment that you’re describing is when Wyeth is, like, “Oh, you’re serious about this whole God thing. Oh, oh, oh, I’m sorry. You’re so serious about it.” Then he has the choice that many people have in that moment, which is, O.K., am I going to humor this person? Am I going to give them that in a condescending way, or am I going to really acknowledge that as a truth equally valid to my own that I don’t share, but that I respect and can see means a great deal to them? So do you condescend or do you try to understand? He’s not a perfect guy. I didn’t want to write a book where he just immediately gets it and he’s just, like, “Oh yeah, I respect you.” Honestly, that’s not real. Some people are that good, but not all of us are that good.
You’re reminding me of when my partner was trying to explain to me that transubstantiation is actually not a metaphor. I was, like, “Yeah, it’s like his body or whatever.”
There have been wars over that, Lauren. People have gotten killed over this. Isn’t that one of the main differences between . . . ? I forget which branches. I think maybe it’s one of the differences between Lutheranism and Calvinism, actually, is whether or not you believe it is or if it’s kind of like. For Catholics, it is decidedly not a metaphor.
Not even close.
It is his body and his blood, and it is present everywhere on earth simultaneously. End of discussion. Again, I don’t share that truth, but I see and respect it.
I think it’s why many do still stand in awe of the Catholics, because they’re, like, “No, we mean that shit.” In the way that a nondenominational, queer-friendly Church—
I call it jeans-in-church culture. And I just think, Do I want to worship a God who thinks it’s O.K. for me to wear shorts into a house of worship? I don’t know. I think I need a mean sky daddy. I think I want there to exist consequences wherein God would love me slightly less if I wore shorts to church. I was raised with a very strict, very mean God. I need rules, credit-debit. I need to know where I stand.
How do you hope, or fear, that your book will be interpreted?
I feel like I wrote a whole book about how I fear the book will be interpreted.
Fair. Very fair.
I hope the book does provoke people to talk about questions around Black subjectivity and the things that go through the minds of Black artists and Black people just trying to get through the day as a perceived being with agency and subjectivity. I hope that people aren’t bored by it, and that they fire off some takes. That would be my ideal. If people are firing off takes about it, I would be, like, Oh, I’m so honored to have fired up the discourse machine. ♦
