For Mrs. Eddy, Jesus was a healer; indeed she believed that she herself had been miraculously healed after injury from a fall. Her treatise on faith healing, Science and Health (1875) taught that there is no devil or sin and that evil and good are unreal illusions. Further, she asserted that “matter, sin and sickness are not real, but only illusions”, that “life is not material or organic” and that “true healings are the result of true belief’.22 Each of these propositions was acceptable to Joseph and Robert cornell, although never to their disapproving mother. Joseph was especially taken with the high-minded idealism of Christian Science which was akin to the American Transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. He inclined more to the Transcendentalist doctrine of God immanent in harmonious material nature than did Mrs. Eddy, as we will see in considering his view of nature. But he certainly subscribed to the teaching of “mind over matter”, of higher spiritual states being able to surmount bodily suffering. Thus, until his final illness, Cornell did not consult physicians or take medications but sought the consolations of Christian Science practitioners. His art is suffused with the otherworldly aspirations of a sufferer who knew that physical discomforts and disordered moods yielded to Mrs. Eddy’s daily discipline and instructions for maintaining health. The influence on Cornell’s art is present but not obvious; for instance, Pharmacy is a shadow box assembly of 1950 which is not about drugs but about esthetic and spiritual restoration to health. An earlier journal entry predicts what Cornell would have in mind when he made Pharmacy: “THEN I was in the House on the Hill working like an herbalist or apothecary of old with these sweet scents in my own fashion. This discovery of making boxes so like a bird’s own nest was inexpressibly satisfying in such a warm and redolent atmosphere” (p. 117). Cornell the artist was an apothecary of the mind.
Less is said in the journal about the benefits of Christian Science than about the mood-lifting effects of nature as Cornell was quick to assimilate such teaching into his own esthetic sensibility. He was never a thinker, let alone a critical one, more a gatherer and synthesizer of visual sensations useful towards artistic products. Nonetheless, statements of gratitude for healing are readily found in the journaclass="underline" “a persistent tenseness relieved fully for the moment with the realization of the significance of Christian Science in its supreme power to meet any human need” (p. 155). Elsewhere he testifies that Mary Baker Eddy’s “sermon on TRUTH” brought “that much needed lift from a tendency to depression” (p. 273). Nothing is said about specific applications to creating boxes, which is more likely to be mediated by the “cosmic consciousness” sometimes induced by nature. He was hypersensitive to the changes in bird life in his garden and to a beloved Chinese quince tree under which he frequently sat. The “triggers” to altered consciousness were simple natural sights and sounds of which most people are oblivious.
Cornell’s devotion to gardens and to nature began with his mother: “gratitude to Mother for such a tradition of beauty as she gave us especially now ‘of flowers’—quince & forsythia about to bloom after a ‘day’ getting out early before this special feeling passes...”. His garden was a small arcadia. Significantly, he adds a note regarding his spiritual mother: “kitchen reading Mrs. Eddy’s poem ‘Flowers’” (p. 365). Cornell was a sort of Wordsworthian, experiencing “spots of time” or, in Virginia Woolf s phrase, “moments of being” induced by nature. But as these were transient and limited, spiritual aspiration appears to have led him towards what Richard Maurice Bucke called called “cosmic consciousness”, an evolutionary stage beyond the limitations of self-consciousness. Religious seekers and artists of many traditions are known to have experienced higher awareness, beyond any church doctrine or theology. From Jacob Boehme to Walt Whitman, Bucke’s quotations show that “Like a flash there is presented to his consciousness a clear conception (a vision) in outline of the meaning and drift of the universe .... He sees and knows that the cosmos, which to the self-conscious mind seems to be made up of dead matter, is in fact far otherwise—is in very truth a living presence.... He sees that the life which is in man is eternal, as all life is eternal....”23 Had Cornell read Cosmic Consciousness (1901), he would have understood it perfectly, despite the book making no reference to Mary Baker Eddy. He had in fact read many of the poets and writers cited by Bucke and they helped him on his way towards a spirituality not limited by the church to which he adhered. There was, however a counter-pull to the mystical and pantheistic in Cornell’s life: obsessions with dancers, film stars and young girls, which both excited and distressed him to the point of self-imposed disciplines of a healthier sort.
“Moments of being” often conflicted with intense, but unactable, erotic desire when “cosmic consciousness” gave way to urges to pursue in the streets some attractive young girl. Remain an artist he must, as Cornell could never become a saint. Physical exertion was used to control wayward energies. Writing to the poet Marianne Moore in 1944, he noted, “I have been using some of my time lately bicycling around our banlieus and discovering such unexpectedly breathtaking landscapes as I never dreamed existed within a rock’s throw” (p. 113). He writes further of “many trips made by bicycle gathering dried grasses of different kinds ... the transcendent experiences of threshing in the cellar, stripping the stalks onto newspapers, the sifting of the dried seeds, the pulverizing by hand and storing in boxes. These final siftings were used for habitat (imaginative) boxes of birds, principally owls”. He adds, “This discovery of making boxes so like a bird’s own nest was inexpressibly satisfying ...” (p. 117). Cornell was paralleling natural processes, which he also induced in himself with the “highs” of bicycle riding and visionary glimpses amidst the most ordinary of natural scenes. As noted, alcohol or drugs played no part in the altered states he sought and sometimes realized to the full. Often these states have the ring of authenticity found in far more gifted writers than Cornell. A lyrical journal passage from 1945, beginning: “the lush sunny meadow grasses made musical by the lazy drowsy afternoon symphony of insects/ the fields vibrating with incessant cricket song ...” (p. 126) sounds like the ecstatic prose meditations of Thomas Traherne in the seventeenth-century, a writer he reported reading in later years (p. 316).