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"

On Feelings and Magic

(image source)

It is not in his personal emotions, the emotions provoked by particular events in his life, that the poet is in any way remarkable or interesting.  His particular emotions may be simple, or crude, or flat.  The emotion in his poetry will be a very complex thing, but not with the complexity of the emotions of people who have very complex or unusual emotions in life.  One error, in fact, of eccentricity in poetry is to seek for new human emotions to express; and in this search for novelty in the wrong place it discovers the perverse.  The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.  And emotions which he has never experienced will serve his turn as well as those familiar to him.  Consequently, we must believe that "emotion recollected in tranquility" is an inexact formula.  For it is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor, without distortion of meaning, tranquility.  It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration, of a very great number of experiences which to the practical and active person would not seem to be experiences at all; it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberation.  These experiences are not 'recollected,' and they finally unite in an atmosphere which is 'tranquil' only in that it is a passive attending upon the event. Of course this is not quite the whole story.  There is a great deal, in the writing of poetry, which must be conscious and deliberate.  In fact, the bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious.  Both errors tend to make him 'personal.'   Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.

This passage from T.S. Eliot's "The Sacred Wood: Tradition and the Individual Talent" put me in a mind of Charles Williams' novel, Shadows of Ecstasy.  (Eliot, as it happens, was a great champion of Williams' work).  Shadows of Ecstasy is a puzzling novel.  It would be easy to spend a lifetime determining where one stands in relation to its characters.  As Thomas Howard points out in his Novels of Charles Williams, it is as if Williams sympathized a little too much with the antagonist for the comfort of most readers.  The antagonist, Nigel Considine, is a man of extraordinary self-discipline who, because he feels things deeply, requires little to satisfy him.  His aesthetic sensibilities are sharp and drawn from deep within himself and, because of this, he is able to use them to develop what one could call a science of the aesthetic as opposed to a science based in analytic knowing.  He, then, applies what he has learned in a kind of technology with which he hopes to attain everlasting life and impose his will upon the world.

The good guys abound in this novel.  There is a devout priest who embodies faith, an African king who embodies royalty, a cheerful humanist who embodies the practical and an adoring wife who embodies, well, the feminine, or Williams' feminine ideal of heartfelt abundant generosity that wants nothing for itself—the nurturing universe.  The husband of this peerless female is a professor of poetry who finds enough in a single energetic line of Milton, "And thus the Filial Godhead answering spake," to point his whole being beyond itself, leaving him restless and dissatisfied with his mundane life.   It stands to reason that it is the professor who is most drawn to Considine.  Here, he contemplates what might be possible if Considine's world were to come to pass.

Who could tell what wonders waited then, when emotions were full and strong and sufficient, no longer greedy and grasping, when the senses could take in colour and essence and respond to all the delicate vibrations which now their clumsy dullness missed, when deprivation itself should be an intense means of experiencing both the deprived self and the thing of which it was deprived, when...

This vision leads him almost to the point of following the antagonist to his inevitable (if ambiguous) end but, if we return to Eliot's passage above, we can begin to see why there were some places that our professor could not ultimately allow himself to go.

Perhaps the greatest virtue of the scientific mind is its commitment to consistently apply rigor to experience.  For the mainstream scientist, this means, among other things, excluding whole categories of experience such as the sensuous and emotional because these seem irretrievably resistant to discipline. Emotions exist within us, the scientist would claim, and we project them onto the world.  There is nothing verifiable, nothing reliable in what one feels on the inside, nothing that tells us anything about anything other than our own fallible selves.  In Eliot's understanding, however, there are emotions that are not personal.  There are "feelings which are not in actual emotions at all."  The key to understanding this lies in what Eliot calls "passive attending."

Most of us understand the world always, or almost always, in terms of our smallest selves, in terms of what we could call the ego.  Our egos are possessive entities and use emotions to appropriate all that they survey. Tolkien remarks on this fact in "On Fairy-Stories" and points out that, when we appropriate everything we see, we hardly see anything at all.  As soon as we have made up our minds about something, whether we like or dislike it, desire or fear it, we need give it little more of our attention for itself.  I know that I like the taste of mushrooms so it is a delicious (or disgusting) dish of mushrooms, indeed, or perhaps an extraordinary hunger that causes me to bother with truly tasting the particular mushrooms on the plate before me. Instead, I recapitulate a generalized mushroom experience, one that I have been through many times.  I do not have the experience; it plays in me like an old recording.  In doing this, I have, not only deprived myself of the subtleties of all the mushrooms that will ever be presented to me, but I have tricked myself into thinking that I have learned something about mushrooms when, in fact, I have only discovered something, and not a particularly riveting something, about myself.

There are emotions, or as Eliot would have it "feelings," that are proper to each phenomenon but these feelings do not come from us; they come through us.   It is our job to get ourselves, our "greedy and grasping" selves, out of the way. These feelings, the exuberance of the sunrise, for instance, and the quiet reflectiveness of the sunset, are "full and strong and sufficient."  They are so full and strong that they may frighten us and they are sufficient because they tell us everything that we could ever need to know about the world and about ourselves.  When we truly understand a "thing," we understand our relationship to it and because nothing exists except in relationship—there would be no differentiated phenomena, otherwise—we see ourselves as we are, only when we see the world as it is.  It is appropriate to call this seeing, this knowing, aesthetic.  It knows things as they fit together.  It would disdain to take them apart because that would render them meaningless, broken examples of what they were meant to be.   (Gandalf's rebuke to Saruman in The Fellowship of the Ring: "He who breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom." )

The example of Nigel Considine teaches us, however, that even aesthetic knowing can be disgracefully misapplied.  In a letter to his publisher in which Tolkien takes on the mammoth task of communicating the gist of his great creative works, he explains that there are two kinds of Magic.  The destructive kind, the kind that seeks to shape the world to the will of its user, can also be called The Machine. The productive kind is the Magic of the Elves.  It is a subcreative magic.  It is a Magic that seeks to know a thing for itself then to allow the thing to go on expressing itself through the craft of the subcreator.  This is the Magic of true art.  It is also the Magic of true science.  It is, if we value our souls and the soul of the world, the only kind of Magic in which we should allow ourselves to partake.