"Nature herself does not speak her final word."

We are not satisfied with what nature freely offers to the observing mind. We feel that, to produce the vast variety of her creations, nature uses driving forces that she initially conceals from the observer. Nature herself does not speak her final word.  Our experience reveals what nature can create but not how that creation takes place. The means for unveiling the driving forces of nature exist in the human mind itself.  It is here that ideas arise that throw light on the way nature brings forth her creations. What the phenomena of the external world conceal manifests within the human being. What we think through as natural laws is not invented as an addition to nature; it is nature’s own inner constitution. The mind is simply the theater in which nature allows the secrets of her creativity to manifest. What we observe is only one aspect of things. The other is what then wells up within our minds. The same things speak to us from outside and from within us. We realize the complete reality only when we join the language of the outer world with that of our inner being. True philosophers throughout time have desired nothing but to proclaim the essential nature of things—what those new things themselves express when the mind is offered as their organ of communication. 

--Rudolf Steiner

Poem of the Week- One Day Late

 The Tables Turned

(An Evening Scene on the Same Subject) 

Up! up! my Friend, and quit your books;
          Or surely you'll grow double:
          Up! up! my Friend, and clear your looks;
          Why all this toil and trouble?

          The sun, above the mountain's head,
          A freshening lustre mellow
          Through all the long green fields has spread,
          His first sweet evening yellow.

          Books! 'tis a dull and endless strife:
          Come, hear the woodland linnet,                             10
          How sweet his music! on my life,
          There's more of wisdom in it.

          And hark! how blithe the throstle sings!
          He, too, is no mean preacher:
          Come forth into the light of things,
          Let Nature be your teacher.

          She has a world of ready wealth,
          Our minds and hearts to bless--
          Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health,
          Truth breathed by cheerfulness.                             20

          One impulse from a vernal wood
          May teach you more of man,
          Of moral evil and of good,
          Than all the sages can.

          Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
          Our meddling intellect
          Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:--
          We murder to dissect.

          Enough of Science and of Art;
          Close up those barren leaves;                               30
          Come forth, and bring with you a heart
          That watches and receives. 

-William Wordsworth,           

To Portray Rather than Explain

"I did not paint it to be understood but I wished to show what such a scene was like." 

--J.M.W. Turner

The NY Times on "Cellar Door"

The fantasy writer J. R. R. Tolkien, who was also a philologist, might well be the linguist she had in mind. He mentioned the idea of cellar door’s special beauty in a speech in 1955 and is often given credit for it. Other supposed authors abound; the story is tangled. But Tolkien, at least, can be ruled out as the originator. He was, after all, just 11 years old in 1903 when a curious novel called “Gee-Boy” — which also alludes to the aesthetic properties of cellar door — was published by the Shakespeare scholar Cyrus Lauron Hooper. Hooper’s narrator writes of the title character: “He even grew to like sounds unassociated with their meaning, and once made a list of the words he loved most, as doubloon, squadron, thatch, fanfare (he never did know the meaning of this one), Sphinx, pimpernel, Caliban, Setebos, Carib, susurro, torquet, Jungfrau. He was laughed at by a friend, but logic was his as well as sentiment; an Italian savant maintained that the most beautiful combination of English sounds was cellar-door; no association of ideas here to help out! sensuous impression merely! the cellar-door is purely American.”

"You have not experienced Shakespeare...

until you have read him in the original Klingon."

Ken Robinson: Schools Kill Creativity

On Recollection

"Ideas may become as vivid and distinct, and the feelings accompanying them as vivid, as original impressions.  And this may finally make a man independent of his Senses." 

--Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Poem of the Week—“Epilogue”

Epilogue

Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme--
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?
I hear the noise of my own voice:
The painter's vision is not a lens,
it trembles to caress the light.
But sometimes everything I write
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot,
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened from life,
yet paralyzed by fact.
All's misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?
Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave to the sun's illumination
stealing like the tide across a map
to his girl solid with yearning.
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.

  --Robert Lowell

Who Would Want to Eat Cézanne’s Apples?

 
Just as I was planning this post, a similarly themed post appeared in Jonathon Jones' art blog for The Guardian.  Jones reviews The Hoerengracht, an installation that depicts prostitutes in Amsterdam's red light district, and he asks why the installation fits so well at Britain's National Gallery in close proximity to Caravaggio's Boy Bitten by a Lizard and Bronzino's Venus and Cupid.  He concludes that "it's simply wrong to think that high European painting - the tradition this museum displays so well – is always spiritual and lofty.  A great painting can be shockingly carnal.  It can be pornographic.  Oil painting is the greatest come-on ever devised, and that makes The Hoerengracht a telling, intriguing visitor in these hallowed halls."


I agree with this sentiment but not wholeheartedly.  I believe that there is a distinction to be made between the pornographic and the carnal or erotic.  My original plans for this post involved discussing a picture that I do not like much, one that makes me uncomfortable.  I could think of nothing quite so squirm-inducing as art that threatens to be taken as pornography so I chose Caravaggio's Boy with a Basket of Fruit and found myself looking squarely at what first seemed to be my own prudishness but later revealed itself to be closer to empathy and a deepening understanding.


Almost every time I look at Boy with a Basket of Fruit, I see something different.  My sympathy for the picture shifts with my sympathy for the human race.  I see it through the eyes of my many selves, wanting at times to take it as adoring, at others as exploitative.  There is no denying that the painting is baldly erotic.  It seems clear at first viewing that it is an enticement, a come-on, so I began by challenging myself to articulate the essential (rather than the obvious) difference between that picture and this one. 


In his "The Way of Art," Joseph Campbell distinguishes true art from the didactic, a work made to induce the viewer to loathe the subject, and the pornographic, a work made to induce the viewer to desire the subject.  To illustrate this distinction, he explains that no one would want to eat Cézanne's apples.  One could, therefore, make the argument that the photograph we are considering is pornographic because there is no question that the model is presented as an object of desire.  If one detects a vulnerability in his pose, it is because it is difficult to seduce without betraying some vulnerability.  (Without the possibility of rejection, it would not be seduction but rape).  The observation of the model's vulnerability, then, is of more anthropological than aesthetic interest.  There is nothing ambiguous about the offer the photo is making.  The audience stands as proxy to the photographer and there is no mystery about what the photographer chose to see. 


What are we to make, then, of Caravaggio's painting? Has it been designated as art simply because generations of viewers have chosen to pretend that the picture's gesture is not a seductive one? It seems to me that Campbell's guidelines must mislead when desire itself is the true subject of the painting. Even someone who finds nothing sexually attractive in Carravagio's model must acknowledge that we are being invited to look as if through lustful eyes.  We are being invited to empathize with both the seducer and the seduced, invited to look and to look at ourselves looking. We are presented with an opportunity to step inside our own human tendency to objectify. 


The way that I am looking at it today, there seems to be much that is ambiguous about the come-on in Boy with a Basket of Fruit.  The way the boy clutches the basket to himself suggests an understandable ambivalence about his own ripeness (he was, after all, even in more heartless centuries, still acknowledged to be only a boy) and there is something about the tension of the muscles in his neck, as if it is not clear whether he was consciously displaying his features to advantage or had simply found himself frozen mid-beckon, asking himself if he really wanted to go through with it.  This ambiguity is not what essentially distinguishes the Caravaggio from the photo, however.  A reluctance to seduce does not negate the act of seduction.  It merely reveals that seduction can be a messy affair (and some people like their affairs a little messy).  No, to be regarded as erotic rather than pornographic, it is not necessary that the work's gesture should be unambiguous but it is necessary that it should never be unironic.  Its surface no deeper than the surface of our everyday lives, we must look within it for the truth.  
 
Here, for example, there may be something moldering and sad about the stance Titian's Venus of Urbino has taken, something distasteful in her indifference to the rest of the world, but her purpose of the moment seems completely straightforward.  Here, in The Maja Clothed, the subject revels in a sexual appeal that garments cannot conceal and here Antiope (or Venus) seems merely unashamed in her untroubled sleep, neither inviting nor turning away the appraising look. What we learn from these paintings is that, whether it is reluctant or enthusiastic, desire is always complicated. 


To allow us to look upon the erotic and truly see it, to invite us to see desire itself for all that it is, a picture must present us with desire in more than one of its aspects. (Klimt's The Kiss, for instance, is too tender to be erotic. It shows us love uncomplicated by the truly carnal).  Erotic art must not shy away from desire's natural complications.  In pornography, the deeper complications get in the way, empathy is a hindrance, but empathy is the raison d'être of the erotic in art.  Of course, as Lewis points out in An Experiment in Criticism, one may use any work as pornography but only an evocation of desire that invites us, not to use, but to appreciate may properly be considered as art. 


Our modern sensibilities tell us that a healthy depiction of sex is one that presents the sexual as an unqualified good.  This is because we are learning to fear our restraint more than our animality but the animal—even if, in itself and in its natural balance, it is always at least ugly-beautiful-- is not always pretty.  One does not have to be a prude to acknowledge that there is possessiveness in desire, that there is, in seducing and being seduced, a need to appropriate.  We look upon the desired with exclusively animal eyes but, when we look upon the beloved, we see with eyes that are animal, human and sometimes divine.  The shift in consciousness that erotic art asks us to make, even when its subject is depicted in a moment of debasement, is from seeing the desired, to seeing the beloved.  

When we see something with the fullest empathy, we see it as it is in itself and we cannot help but love it.  When we see ourselves seeing, and see all of the complicated emotions this arouses, we are encouraged to apply this empathy to ourselves.  This moment—when the unifying aesthetic heals the fractures that divide the carnal, the psychological and the spiritual—has more power than all of the frankly clinical discussions in the world to bring us to love both the animal and the human in all of us.


 

Coleridge on Allegory and Symbol

Now an Allegory is but a translation of abstract notions into a picture-language which is itself nothing but an abstraction from objects of the senses; the principal being even more worthless than its phantom proxy, both alike unsubstantial and the former shameless to boot.  On the other hand, a Symbol is characterized by a translucence of the Special in the Individual or of the General in the Especial or of the Universal in the General.  Above all by the translucence of the Eternal through and in the Temporal.   It always partakes of the Reality which it renders intelligible; and while it enunciates the whole, abides itself as a living part in that Unity, of which it is the representative.  The other are but empty echoes which the fancy arbitrarily associates with apparitions of matter.

--Samuel Taylor Coleridge from The Statesman's Manual

Inklings Blog

I was fortunate enough recently to stumble upon this blog.  It appears to have been in operation for many years and I plan to relish my time spent in the archives.

The most recent post consisted of the following quote from Lewis' The Abolition of Man:

We do not look at trees either as Dryads or as beautiful objects while we cut them into beams: the first man who did so may have felt the price keenly, and the bleeding trees in Virgil and Spenser may be far-off echoes of that primeval sense of impiety. The stars lost their divinity as astronomy developed, and the Dying God has no place in chemical agriculture. To many, no doubt, this process is simply the gradual discovery that the real world is different from what we expected... but that is not the whole story. It is not the greatest of modern scientists who feel most sure that the object, stripped of its qualitative properties and reduced to mere quantity, is wholly real. Little scientists, and little unscientific followers of science, may think so. The great minds know very well that the object, so treated, is an artificial abstraction, that something of its reality has been lost.

Link to Poem of the Week

"Figures in a Landscape"