a tale of two apples

Medieval monks, living far from the hustle and bustle of worldly life, were, amidst all that solitary stillness, threatened by “acedia”. They were advised to combat the bane of acedia through a strict ascetic discipline of study and labor.
The 19th C & early 20th C urbanite upper classes , exposed to the full competitive stress of a busy society life, were rather prone to “neurasthenia” . Thus diagnosed, neurasthenic ladies & gentlemen were sent off for rest cures in sanatoria on the seaside or in the mountains (that is, if they were lucky enough not to fall in the hands of an electro-shock experimenter or, perhaps worse, of some Freudian quack).

But let it be clear that neither “acedia” nor “neurasthenia” are still in official use as scientific-medical terms. Which is excellent!!! It means we can let therapists, psychiatrists and the entire pharma-industry earn their living by futilely grappling (1) with ‘official’ ailments such as stress, burn-outs (= neurasthenia) and bore-outs (= acedia) , etc.

And we (2) , on the other hand, can calmly claim “acedia” and “neurasthenia” as ours, allowing us to wallow undisturbed in a rich Saturnine history stretching back to Aristotle.
We can thus seek the imaginary company of famous melancholiacs, hypochondriacs, neurasthenics, .... We can surround ourselves with heavy tomes of no scientific medical value whatsoever but whose humanistic erudition and mere bulky presence offer solace : Burton’s "The Anatomy of Melancholy" , : “Saturn and Melancholy” by the illustrious trio Klibansky, Panofsky & Saxl . We can languorously heed the ancient advice to hide in sweet musicke .
And instead of abusing painkillers to deal with multifarious aches, we will bravely endure while reciting Proust: “la neurasthénie est un pasticheur de génie”. ("neurasthenia is a genius of pastiche") As to existential anxiety attacks, they can of course be countered by following (again) Proust into the a-temporal realms of Art & Memory : “situé hors du temps, que pourrait-il craindre de l’avenir?” ("being outside time, what could he fear from the future?")

Since neurasthenia is a nervous exhaustion associated with the continuous onslaught of ugliness, pettiness and discordance (both mental and material) in a competitive & materialist society (3) , it is not surprising that rest would be recommended as a remedy. But since one also has to avoid succumbing to boredom or acedia, listlessly lying on a deckchair in a mountain sanatorium (see 19th-20th C remedies above) is not the cure I personally favor.

I much rather pack my bag and board a train for a French provincial city, say Bordeaux. The appeasing effect of the French sense for aesthetics and savoir-vivre is amazing. You already feel stress seeping away when you step out of the train into a beautiful old station hall, which comforts your senses with honest materials such as glass, brick & iron and with just the right sort of relaxed travelers’ bustle. And isn’t it wonderful that you can actually leave the Bordeaux-station without being instantly assailed by the roar of cars. Instead you can sip un verre de rosé on a terrace and savor the muted city sounds while watching sleek silent trams gliding by.
You can then explore the city by tram or by foot , your headaches vanishing thanks to the sheer soothing harmony that oozes from the city; from its lovely squares, its churches (going from sturdy Romanesque over Gothic to ecstatic Baroque) and its many neo-classical buildings, with their beige stones warmly glowing in the autumn sun.

Neurasthenics can also travel on to nearby Poitiers to challenge their delicate decadent broodings by a dose of ardent medieval Christian aesthetics.
The sheer tear-jerking shock of it ….. to turn a corner and to suddenly look up at the stone façade of Notre-Dame-la-Grande, so white & robust against a pure blue sky. Not the soaring heights of a gothic cathedral but all the awesome sturdiness of a Romanesque church. And never mind the icy winds on the square, one stands there gaping and staring, staring & gaping - completely in thrall to the utter abundance & variety of sculptures on the façade – there are grimacing beasts and monsters, stern old testament prophets, engagingly human scenes out of the life of Mary, and, ah, the never failing grace of an Annunciation angel.

There are still many other churches and museums in Poitiers and Bordeaux to delight the heart and the senses. But perhaps, during this trip, I have been moved most by a simple act of random kindness.
Getting hungry from all the walking in Poitiers I had gone into a small grocery shop to buy two apples. The grocer took the apples from me, saying, with all the loving appreciation of the connoisseur: ah des reinettes…. While weighing the apples on a grocer scale, he inquired whether I wanted to eat them right away. Upon my nodding confirmation he said oh, but then I’ll wash them for you, and off he went to the back of the store. When he handed me back the apples, still dripping with water, I could only mumble how very kind he was. (4)

And truly, when I will be reluctantly engaged again in the routine struggles of a competitive & materialist world (5) , I will, even more than the consoling harmonies of art, cherish this memory of the humble washing of two apples.

more mumbling in the notes

(1) Disclaimer: this post should not in any way be construed as doubting the need for professional aid in cases of severe mental turmoil. At the very most this post might aim to lighten the workload of the over-stretched psycho-medical profession by keeping mild cases of spiritual discontent out of medical waiting rooms and away from anti-depressants.
(2) “we”: assuming there is a community of combative melancholiacs
(3) Since I said I’d claim “neurasthenia”, I may coin my own definition
(4) If I could only gratefully mumble, it was because my more articulate & philosophical self was utterly dazzled by this proof of the existence of altruism. I mean, you see a one-time tourist sauntering into your shop to buy apples worth 90 cents. Someone whom you’ll never see again, someone who can’t even recommend your store to the shopping masses. And you kindly take the trouble to go & wash those apples. Your only reward being an astonished (albeit grateful) look and a mumbled thanks.
(5) We all know human nature has been molded by the selfish struggle for survival and reproduction. We all know that success in our world is not only a matter of autonomous talent or skills but also [alas] of being able to use one’s resources as efficiently as possible while relentlessly competing amidst peer pressure. We all know that there is no such thing as a free lunch. And then, there is the true “otherworldliness” of goodness. “Otherworldly” in the full Arendtian sense because [the] “specific character of goodness” [is that it is] being done for nothing but goodness’ sake”. “Good works, because they must be forgotten instantly, can never become part of the world; they come and go, leaving no trace. They truly are not of this world." Re-reading the startling Arendt-passages about the un-worldliness of goodness, I realized yet again how incisive (though sometimes depressing) her analysis of the human condition is. Disinterestedly kind Poitiers grocers will indeed never reap public fame & material riches in this world of ours. At the most they’ll receive a fond anonymous tribute in a futile, unworldly blog. (But I suspect – I hope - that disinterestedly kind Poitiers grocers are well loved and lead rich, loving lives)

reading Hegel on Sunday

Sundays (and all holidays for that matter!) are a challenge for the combative melancholiac. Because too much peace & quiet lulls the combative reflexes into sleep. And oh oh the dull drowsy depths a non-combative melancholiac might sink into! Not to mention the endlessly ruminating reflections he or she might engage in!

It is thus in keeping with age-old remedies for “acedia” that on a grey Sunday morning combative melancholiacs can be found, not contentedly snoring away in bed, but straining their brain to fathom , say, Hegel’s philosophy of art.
A paradoxical occupation , this stern philosophizing about art. Because isn’t art precisely the domain where we want to escape from all this “somber self-concentration of thought” ? Don’t we (1) seek in art the sensuous immediacy of imagination, rather than the twists and turns of an “intelligence devoid of plastic shape” ?

We need art to “drag our hearts through the whole significance of life” , without resorting to scientific analysis & deduction. We have a “cherishing interest for the art object” because it represents universal, intangible thoughts & feelings via the most individual, sensuous existence .
A reconciliation of senses, heart and mind in one living synthetic intuition, yes that’s what art achieves. And that’ s why it offers such a reprieve for all those who have either despaired of meaningless sensual pleasures or have tired from the dry “abstract endlessness of reflective thought”.

But of course our dictatorial ruminating reason cannot ever be content with the mere concrete evidence of our actual pleasure in art, and demands a serious theoretical justification. Hence the whole discipline of Philosophy of Art! Now of course, one can always trust Hegel to produce page after page of serious theoretical thought, also in his very ponderous introductory lectures “On Art” (2) .

And yet, doesn’t he get closest to “the meaning of art” when he lapses from dry theoretical discourse into metaphor? (3) And isn’t the power of metaphor in fact related to how art functions: conveying a truth through a sensuous image which induces the happy collusion of imagination and understanding. Now I wonder, dear reader, whether you spotted Hegel’s lovely evocative sentence (already furtively inserted above) [art] “drags our hearts through the whole significance of life” . And indeed; whether we’re watching a film, listening to music, contemplating a painting … : although we’re not actually engaged in living action, our heart is being dragged through the whole range of feelings that make up the significance of a human life.

Fortified by these theoretical insights, my combative inner self thus decided to engage in some Sunday-afternoon art therapy (4) . Regular readers of this blog may now sigh and think they’re in for yet another ode to ancient Madonna’s and Crucifixions – but no! Even an un-postmodern, contemplative flâneur does participate in contemporary art events (5). And so, on this windy greyish afternoon I cycled to a former warehouse, now converted into a space for 'creative interventions'.

I do like wandering around in these old buildings, with their bare walls and floors, their sturdy brick and iron, their many rooms & stairs & corridors, all full of disorderly traces of past occupations. And thus deambulating I am ready to suspend all disbelief and to let random artists try out on me whatever installation or performance they see fit.

Like that room where I first stood hesitating on the threshold, because a woman was lying in bed, and only at a second glance I spotted the notice which invited individual visitors to take off their shoes and join the woman in bed to swap “scar stories” . (7) As I read afterwards in the artist’s (Michel Yang) statement: “Scars whether physical or emotional mark the presence of the external (past or present) [..] unlike birthmarks which are innate. What were those external events? The story of the scar is inscribed in the scar. I propose to take an intimate look at our personal physical scars. We will describe and reproduce/rewrite our scars. And in doing so, leaving traces of the events behind.”

On the wall of the room-with-the-woman-lying-in-bed, white paper sheets were pinned with the typed out scar-stories of anonymous previous guests. There were cute childhood stories, there were banal stories, there were scary and there were moving stories ,…. Tales of the many little catastrophes lives are littered with, and which usually attract no public attention at all. But pinned here on the wall, these ordinary scar stories acquired some broader interest, appealing most powerfully to our senses, our imagination, our heart….

And, in fact, our dear solid Hegel would have very well grasped the artistic intention of this performance. In his analysis of romantic art he speaks of “aspects of external existence committed to contingency and left at the mercy of freaks of imagination” and “whatever can find room in the human heart […] can make its appearance in the realm of art, if only it [is endowed] with affinity to thought and feeling”.




anti-theses buried in the notes
(1) “we”: assuming there is a community of likeminded, ponderous people , who are saved from the perils of auto-ruminating by the grace of sensuous aesthetics
(2) Quoting the title of the first chapter should suffice as proof of the serious laboriousness of this Hegel-lecture: “DIVISIONS OF AESTHETICS AND REFUTATION OF SOME OBJECTIONS AGAINST THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART”. The second chapter’s title is promising too! “SCIENTIFIC WAYS OF TREATING THE BEAUTIFUL AND ART”. But my favorite (sub-) title is to be found in the third chapter: “The Historical Deduction of the True Concept of Art”.
(3) I can easily disprove the need for lyricism or metaphor to “explain” art: Kant explains art brilliantly in his critique of aesthetic judgment . And what he writes there about the beautiful and about taste is as dull and dry as analytical thought can get, and yet never have I gained more understanding about how peculiar the disinterested aesthetic judgment is for a human being otherwise ruled by “appetitive interests” .
(4) not that my heart really needed any more dragging around, it already being the scene of very live emotional turmoil over the past weeks. But that’s of course the whole soothing and redeeming point of art: its form, its beauty, its purely imaginary presence may allow us to come to terms, if only in the imagination, with emotions and events under whose stress we crumble in real life.
(5) I said I would refrain from an ode to ancient art in the body-of-the-post, but notes are obviously not held by that promise. And how to forget that only yesterday, I stood rapt with attention in front of a 15th century Annunciation (by Rogier VanDerWeyden or his workshop). Cherishing the magical presence of a detail, painted with painstaking attention: a little glass flask with the light refracting in the liquid it contains, the dull gleam of the glass itself modulated by the soft shades of its ribbed texture and the shadow thrown by the little flask on the wall almost liquid in its fleetingness. In the presence of this little glass flask, so lovingly painted (6), how could I not but lament the West’s relentless drive for creative destruction, having made us wantonly dismiss representative painting. But Hegel, expert in all things of the Mind and the Spirit, of course foresaw the West’s evolution to abstract and conceptual art, an evolution which was to emancipate Thought and the Ideas from the fetters of unreliable, material aesthetics. “The reflective culture of our life of today […] is not favorable to art [and misleads the artist] into putting more abstract thought into his works themselves” […] the spiritual has withdrawn into itself out of the external and its immediate oneness therewith. For this reason, the sensuous externality of concrete form is [regarded] […] as something transient and fugitive. […] For this external element no longer has its notion and significance, as in classical art, in its own sphere .”
(6) ah precious echo of one of my favorite Proust-passages in which Bergotte, ignoring health problems, goes sout to see again a Vermeer painting he loves. Standing in front of it, while enthralled by a brilliantly painted detail (“le petit pan de mur si bien peint en jaune”) , he questions his own fundamental choice of having always preferred art to life... ("Dans une céleste balance lui apparaissait, chargeant l'un des plateaux, sa propre vie, tandis que l'autre contenait le petit pan de mur si bien peint en jaune. Il sentait qu'il avait imprudemment donné la première pour le second")

(7) no, I did not myself climb into bed to tell my own scar stories : a question of holes in my socks (so I could not take off my shoes!), natural reserve (gosh, public display of my scars!?) and a self-imposed interdiction to look back (because there are scars and scars and not all scars merely evoke innocent accidents)
(8) a passage from George Eliot’s Middlemarch, on how we don’t pay much attention to the calamities that are not momentous and unique, but rather all too frequent and usual in life, even though they may be the very stuff of suffering : “That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency , has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk well wadded with stupidity”

meditations on a "problematic quote"

A. signalled the following “problematic quote”, found in Hannah Arendt’s “On Humanity in dark times: Thoughts about Lessing”:

"All this is another way of saying that the humanitarism of brotherhood scarcely befits those who do not belong among the insulted and the injured and can share it only through their compassion. The warmth of the pariah people cannot rightfully extend to those whose different position in the world imposes on them a responsibility for the world and does not allow them to share the cheerful unconcern of the pariah. But it is true that in "dark times" the warmth which is the pariahs' substitute for light exerts a great fascination upon all those who are so ashamed of the world as it is that they would like to take refuge in invisibility. And in invisibility, in that obscurity in which a man who is himself hidden need no longer see the visible world either, only the warmth and fraternity of closely packed human beings can compensate for the weird irreality that human relationships assume wherever they develop in absolute worldlessness, unrelated to the world common to all people."

A problematic paragraph indeed, one that can be linked to Arendt’s alleged lack of compassion (one of the more controversial aspects to be found in her writings). It is a troubling paragraph, but chilling and incomprehensible only at first sight.
Because Arendt’s apparent shrinking from compassion and from “the warmth of the pariah” becomes altogether less revolting when put in the context both of her writings about the political consequences of marginality and of her revolt against being denied a place in the world.

One of Arendt’s first books was the intensely idiosyncratic biography of Rahel Varnhagen, a “meditation on marginality” as it has been called. (1) Varnhagen, a Jewish woman living in early 19th C Berlin, had a brilliant mind and personality, but her race, gender and lack of wealth condemned her nevertheless to a life on the fringes of official society. Cut off from solidly sanctioned means to express her talents in the public sphere, she ultimately had to “live her own life altogether inwardly”(2), escaping into ‘worldlessness’, frequent flights of fancy and in convoluted, self-pitying introspection.

Arendt, also a brilliantly intelligent Jewish woman, living in the inimical Germany of the 30s, profoundly identified with Varnhagen and seems to have taken her life as a personal cautionary tale. Arendt did not want to get trapped in the “inner consequences of marginality”(1) which at best might gain “sympathy of the compassionate observer”(1), but would not ever permit one to claim one’s rightful place in the world.

In this light one can understand how Arendt proudly adopted a tough morality and upheld, for herself and others, strict standards of ‘hardening oneself against self-pity’ (not wholly unlike the Nietzschean aristocratic pride...).

Arendt's shrinking from sentimentality and compassion can also be traced back to the quite valid political insight which she gained from the Jewish plight in Europe: ‘soft’ human rights are not enough, compassionateness is not enough to guarantee people’s dignity. Political action is required to obtain full civil rights and full citizenship. For Arendt “soft” qualities such as warmth, empathy or even sympathetic art can not be a substitute for ‘hard’ political justice. Thus Arendt is very sceptical about the capacity of fleeting sentiments, however lofty or compassionate, to form a durable basis for either moral or political justice.

In “The Origins of Totalitarianism” (3) Arendt picks up again the theme of societal marginality and its consequences, and describes how “defamed people and classes” are not granted a place in the world as a matter of fact but are forced to make a gruelling choice: choosing the way of either the pariah or the parvenu.
The choice between on the one hand “the privileges of pariahs [...] : humanity, kindness, freedom from prejudice, sensitiveness to injustice” and on the other hand “the qualities which the parvenu must acquire if he wants to arrive – inhumanity, greed, insolence, cringing servility, and determination to push ahead”. And Arendt wistfully concludes “Since Rahel Varnhagen’s unique attempt to establish a social life outside of official society had failed, the way of the pariah and the parvenu were equally ways of extreme solitude, and the way of conformism one of constant regret” .

So Arendt’s insights into the plight of pariahs is not about revolting callousness as opposed to compassionate understanding, but rather about a revolt against being marginalized and cast out of the world. It is about claiming the right to play a role in the world, also for those who do not belong to the dominant societal “castes”.

“Humanity in the form of fraternity invariably appears historically among persecuted peoples and enslaved groups [...] This kind of humanity is the great privilege of pariah peoples; it is the advantage that the pariahs of this world always and in all circumstances can have over others. The privilege is dearly bought, it is often accompanied by so radical a loss of the world [...] that in extreme cases [...[ we can speak of real wordlessness”. (4)

And to understand why Arendt thinks this “loss of the world” so catastrophic, we only have to bring to bear upon the discussion Arendt’s love of the “world”, her “amor mundi”.
She attached a supreme importance to the world as a public sphere where people in all their diversity meet, act and compete as equals. Against the sheer transience of human organic life she posited this relative permanence of the world.
The world - with its political institutions, its public space, its cultural artefacts and manifestations – offers an “interspace”, i.e. a realm which, precisely thanks to the distance it puts between people, permits constructive interaction between a variety of viewpoints and people who, in all their diversity, meet as equals.
But to appear and act in this world, in this ”interspace”, one needs a certain measure of courage, the courage to abandon the safety of one’s private life amongst loving family and soul-mates.

In fact, in her depreciation of the private sphere vàv the public sphere of the world, Arendt goes perplexingly far (which, just as her alleged lack of compassion, is one of the more controversial aspects of her work).
And thus it remains one of the fascinating paradoxes in Arendt’s oeuvre how her career of writing and thinking about politics, action and about the World as a public 'interspace' is framed by, at the outset, the biography of Rahel Varnhagen ( “a meditation on marginality”) and, at the end, by an impressive tribute to “The Life of the Mind” .

Notes

(1) Peter Baehr – Introduction to the Portable Hannah Arendt
(2) Hannah Arendt – Rahel Varnhagen, The Life of a Jewess
(3) Hannah Arendt – The Origins of Totalitarianism
(4) Hannah Arendt – On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts about Lessing

« J’aime, j’aime la vie » (Antwerp, Summer & Fall 1986)

At 20 one can still blithely ignore the lure of blazing summer days. And thus, on that sunny Saturday-afternoon in July , I found myself, deprived of any direct sunlight, lazing the day away in a ground floor flat somewhere in an Antwerp suburb. Lounging about in bed, reading Agatha Christie and with on the background the radio playing again & again the Belgian Eurosong winner of that year : “j’aime j’aime la vie”.

I had arrived there at 7 AM , with a girl I had befriended only a few hours before in a shady nightclub. Amidst the smoke & noise & general drunken bawdiness we had bonded at the counter over lines of tormented poetry we had been scribbling on stained beermats. Scribbling instead of reciting had been in order because of the thumping music, which forced my newly found friend to switch off her hearing aid if she wasn’t to be tormented with unbearably screeching sounds.

At closing time of the night club, we had left together, blinking at the bright morning light, and headed for the tram stop where decent early rising citizens were already gathering. She had asked whether I liked chicken and coca cola for breakfast, assuring me she still had plenty in supply at her place. So, instead of taking a lonely train back home after my night out (I lived in Louvain at the time, some 60 km from Antwerp) I joined her on a local tram, enjoying the rattling ride through early morning streets where I had never been before.

While seated at our 7AM meal of cold chicken and coke, she had happily explained she had to go to work in a store at 10 AM, but that I was very welcome to stay at her place until her return later in the afternoon. This capacity of hers to live through an entire weekend, fuelled only by chicken and coca-cola, ice-cold showers and the shortest of naps, never ceased to amaze me and surely contributed to my admiring fondness of her. Ah yes, she did seem to have so much surer a grasp of the good life than I had, but then, after all, she was already 25!

So there I was, lounging about on that summer Saturday, quite content with life, though slightly dazed for lack of sleep , waiting for her to return. I started exploring discreetly my surroundings, browsing books (lots of suspense novels, but also geography), looking at the photos placed on cupboards. Photos of friends, family and of herself at different ages. Funny how different she could look , depending on the haircut at the time of the snapshot , now brash & tomboyish with a short crew cut, then again sweet & girly with longer hair.

Having got bored with Agatha Christie and with “j’aime la vie” on the radio, I did venture outside the flat for a short while, looking for a store to replenish the coca cola reserves. Clutching the key she had entrusted to me, I strolled through unknown streets, dazzled by the white summer glare . But soon I took refuge again in the cozy semi-darkness of her flat, where the only light came in through French doors which opened to a small walled court.

Wanting to make myself useful I had done the dishes and was just clumsily vacuuming when with a start I heard the front door opening. She seemed happy to still find me there, laughing at my zealous, though rather incompetent, dash at household tasks. That night we did not go out again, but instead stayed in, drinking coke and talking, talking, talking the hours away.

She told how it had taken years before her incipient deafness had been recognized as such. As a child she had long lived in her own bubble, quite puzzled by the world and the people around her, who in their turn were puzzled by her strange ways, thinking she had autistic tendencies before at last discovering that hearing troubles were at the root of her isolation. In a very matter- of- fact tone she explained how she had learned to navigate the world with its speech and its myriads of sounds, using a combination of lip-reading and hearing-aids of ever increasing strength to match an ever declining hearing ability.

She was very attached though to the sounds that she did capture – I remember how she always got all excited when catching the far-off drone of a plane, she would interrupt whatever she was doing and run out into the little court, scouring the sky for a glimpse of that plane. And on her night-table she had a huge black ghetto-blaster alongside piles of Mike Oldfield music-cassettes. “Tubular Bells” – that was the music apparently best tuned to the reach of her hearing aid.

And all through our talking, she also listened intently to me, not ever getting impatient with me, not even when, as the night wore on, I got lost in over-cerebral ruminations about life, philosophy , Bach and the universe. She explained that she loved watching my face and eyes while I went on like that, thus gauging my genuine love of all I talked about rather than being concerned with the increasingly abstruse quality of my ranting. Which was really a very sweet thing of her to say to the naive -ponderous person I was (and still am).

Oh, we sure saw a lot of each other that summer! Broadening the roaming circle of our nightly escapades also to other cities and other dubious venues. We would for instance take the last train to Ghent together, spending the night there, a night full of encounters with other youthful nighthawks. And sometimes extending our night-city-trip into the day. I remember us walking about bleary-eyed In Ghent, on a Sunday morning in August, only barely escaping arrest by a overzealous policeman when doing something foolish with a national flag we had been prying loose. Sometimes we would be lounging about until the afternoon, basking in the sun on crowded terraces, fending off exhaustion with an extra dose of greasy fries.

In September I went for a 3-week holiday in Portugal with friend. So contact was broken for almost a month, though never was she nearer to me than when I was watching a small boy playing alone on a pier in some port-city in Portugal. It was not just his blond crew-cut that reminded me of her, but also the intense concentration of this little boy, his passionate self-absorption in his lone playing - very much, I think, like the lonely kid she had been.

And then came the new academic year in Louvain with its much dreaded stress of both a hostile curriculum (economy) and a set of particularly intimidating bourgeois fellow-students. In the meanwhile, she, having broken her leg (I can’t for the life of me recall how and when) went to stay with her parents for a while.
So circumstances didn’t facilitate our communications, it moreover still being the era of slow letters, with their unnerving tendency to fatefully cross each other. Thus it happened that, once upon a very cold weekend in late November, I went to Antwerp only to find she wasn’t home.

Still having her key, I let myself in. The flat was cold, a half-empty thermos and a coffee-cup trailed on the table. How strange it was to be alone again in her flat, full of traces of her habits which I had come to know so well. I stayed there for the night, laying awake most of the time - partly because of the cold ( not knowing how to light the gas radiator) and partly because I was so alert to any noises, vaguely hoping to hear her coming in after all.

The next morning I left a note on the table and took the tram to the center of Antwerp to have breakfast in a riverside-café.
Drinking cup after cup of coffee I watched the gray foggy river, with a boat slowly sailing by, accompanied by screeching seagulls. Peering into that gray expanse, wondering about a blank future, I could not know that many years later I would be shocked by someone saying with a shrug about a withered friendship ” oh well, people come and go”.
And still less could I know that, even more years later, I myself would have come to terms with this coming and going of people, not out of cynicism, but because I would have learned that at least in our memory these transient human relations enjoy some relative permanence.

on reading a "treacherous, deceitful and pernicious book"

Ooopps, it was not a pastiche!

Well, am still recovering from the shock that I may have spent some summer time in the company of a “treacherous, deceitful, and pernicious book” [which] “ manufacture[s] a narrative that will enable and justify the global arrogance of [a] predatory empire and its pathetic claim to civilizational authority.”

Have I been manipulated by a horrendous sadistic neo-conservative careerist? Hamid Dabashi, a Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York City, certainly thinks so:

“ the author of RLT is a well-known, well-connected, and well-funded neocon, employed by the principle doctrinaire of neo-conservatism Paul Wolfowitz [...], endorsed by the most diabolical anti-Muslim neocon alive Bernard Lewis, and promoted by a scandalous PR firm like Benador Associates, and many other similar indications are all entirely tangential to the substance of my critique which as you read in my essay is the tenor and diction, message and narrative of RLT itself -namely the portrayal of a figment of imagination called "the West" as the arbiter of truth and salvation, and the dismissal of "non-Western" cultures as banal and diabolical” (1)

The above quote concerns the book “Reading Lolita in Tehran”, a semi-fictionalized memoir by Azar Nafisi (an Iranian professor of English literature), who left the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1997 to settle in the US. In her book she recounts her personal experience of the momentous events in Iran and of daily life under a fundamentalist Islamist regime. Her tale focuses on a group of female students who come together in a sort of clandestine weekly book-club to discuss novels by writers such as Nabokov, Henry James and Jane Austen.

Nafisi then contrasts the complex moral climate of novels (full of ambiguities, giving a voice to everyone, focusing on individual happiness and unhappiness, putting empathy first) with the cruel oppression of individual freedoms (in particular those of women) by a totalitarian society that imposes the commandments of a single religious morality on all.

Frankly, upon first reading Dabashi’s review I thought it was a pastiche on the typical jargon of post-modern deconstruction of the dominant imperial discourse. The review definitely excels in drowning any possibly valid points in preposterous venom.

But still, in the light of the catastrophic consequences of the politics of the ill-famed American neo-conservatives (the war in Iraq…), further investigation of the charges against RLT is warranted. Also, I can't wait to unleash on my unsuspecting blog-readership my very first public attempt at deconstruction! (2)

Deconstructing “Reading Lolita in Tehran”

There’s no denying that in RLT the complexity and freedom of mostly Western works of fiction are opposed to only Islamist totalitarianism. And there’s no denying either that Nafisi is steeped in American culture and that she displays woefully little critical attitude vàv American power politics.

But the book doesn’t depreciate Persian culture, quite the contrary as I recall (I was moved by its glowing paragraphs on Persian poetry). And Nafisi does start her tribute to the imagination with a reference to “ Scheherazade [who] breaks the cycle of violence by choosing to embrace different terms of engagement. She fashions her universe not through physical force, as does the king, but through imagination and reflection.”

However, the question remains – does Nafisi act as a “native informer” on behalf of the US by contrasting the liberating joys of Western literature with the sorrows of an Islamic Republic? Is Nafisi some sort of "colonial agent" who wrote her memoir to promote American-style democracy and to justify an Iranian regime-change brought about by US military means?

Ah yes, definitely, she does promote democracy! ! Let’s bring to the witness-stand following incriminating paragraph from her book:

“A good novel is one that shows the complexity of individuals, and creates enough space for all these characters to have a voice; in this way a novel is called democratic – not that it advocates democracy but that by nature it is so. Empathy lies at the heart of Gatsby, like so many other great novels – the biggest sin is to be blind to others’ problems and pains. […] A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and evil. “

Hum, well, surely US warships will not be deployed in the Persian Gulf to defend the honour of “the good novel”, “empathy” and “the complexities of life” ? And, really , these days, how many of the western power-brokers in command of the economic and military apparatus give a damn about the “civilizational authority” of Henry James...?

Ok, but still, but still – let’s not let Nafisi that easily off the hook. Does her book show the full complexity of individuals she advocates? Does she create enough space for all these characters to have a voice?

No, indeed, I must admit, she does not always.

Actually, she’s not a consummate novelist. In this semi-fictionalized memoir she does not always manage to give true depth to all of her characters. Some of them are clearly fabricated to represent different points of view in a rather artificial (& thus superficial) way. She is for example rather clumsy at representing different viewpoints regarding the headscarf. And she doesn't brim with empathy to render the possible inner motivations of for example members of revolutionary Islamic groups. (3)

But frankly, this book does not need any cunning deconstruction, because what you see is what you get: you see a (self-avowedly Americanized) Iranian Professor of English literature, who is not a novelist, who's more inclined to reading & teaching than to political analysis, who eventually flees to the US and who then writes a memoir centered around her genuine love of English novels and of teaching. And who in the process tries to give meaning to this love of novels against the background of the oppression of individual liberties by the Islamic Republic.

So of course you’ll get then a relatively biased work. And of course you’ll get a memoir that itself is not always fully up to the literary standards of complexity and nuanced polyphony which it celebrates in the great novels. But you will get some great literary criticism!

Deconstructing my own summer-reading experience of “Reading Lolita in Tehran”

While recognizing its flaws, I still must say I have loved reading this book. And, obviously, not as a manifestation of American "civilizational superiority". But nor, to be honest, as the subtlest of novels. Nor as the most balanced of documentaries about life in Iran. Though it is an interesting, and at times moving, account of life in an Islamic republic, as described by an intelligent and sensitive woman.

But most of all, I must confess, I loved it for a host of subjective and aesthetic-subversive reasons. The kind of reasons often “condescendingly called ‘bourgeois’ and ‘decadent’”.

So I’ll duly deconstruct the full suspicious set of my motivations:

I) firstly I loved RLT because of its thoughtful, old-fashioned analyses of a handful of novels (4)

RLT has for instance offered me insights into the ambiguities of Nabokov’s Lolita which have at last helped me to come to terms with my own profound ambivalence vàv this book. With great nuance Nafisi shows how the book Lolita is a study in cruelty and blindness to others, which are the crimes committed by Humbert, Lolita's disgusting & yet sophisticated protagonist. I came to understand how Nabokov's Lolita potentially exposes that same selfish & cruel arrogance in some of its readers who might revel in Humbert's sophistication, with all his witty depreciation of a certain sort of common way of life, and take it as a justification of his hideous behavior. (5)

Also to mention in literary analysis- department: thanks to RLT’s discussion of Henry James's novels, I have now finally mustered enough patience to actually read a Henry James novel, to keep up with all its intricacies and subtleties, and with all of its affectations, right through to page 425! ( and even enjoying it!) (6)

II) Secondly, and perhaps mostly, I loved reading RLT because, admittedly, it catered to my naïveté : the sentimental naiveté of the non-professional, non-academic, non-post-modern art-lover ( a naiveté shared perhaps with those numerous other readers?)

It is the naiveté of one who needs the beauties & complexities & harmonies of art to make up for the prevailing shallowness & dissonance & ugliness . The naiveté of one who has grown up in a milieu where novel-reading was considered as a sheer waste of time, and of one now working in a milieu where art is simply dismissed as irrelevant. For such a naïve art lover , this book, RLT, with its unashamed celebration of the useless novel, does come as a most welcome vindication of all that one cherishes.

And if Nafisi pitches in her book the consolation of novels against the “texture of life in a totalitarian society, where you are completely alone in an illusory world full of false promises”, then I confess that I transplanted that consolation to my own circumstances, living in a highly materialist Western society, in an “illusory world full of [materialist] false promises” .

So, what I personally retain from RLT is its ardent plea for an immersion in the slow, attentive world of great novels, its acknowledgment of the desire for beauty and of the need for an “ affirmation of life against the transience of life, an essential defiance, [..]” .
What I retain is its portrayal of reading as “ an act of insubordination against the betrayals, horrors and infidelities of life. The perfection of beauty of form rebels against the ugliness and shabbiness of the subject matter”.

Thus I did not even primarily take this book as a grand showdown between liberating Western literature and oppressive Islamist fundamentalism. And if some see RLT as "a literary raft on Iran's fundamentalist sea" (Margaret Atwood), then I personally cherished this book, including its flaws, as a small token of the immaterial, useless things I value , a token not yet swallowed by the sea of Western materialism.

III) And then, lastly, I loved reading RLT because of these two paragraphs when she discusses Henry James (and for the quoting of which this entire laborious post may merely have been an excuse) :

• One paragraph, about how personal empathy trumps more traditional concepts such as heroism:
  
  “Thus, Dr Sloper commits the most unforgivable crime in fiction – blindness. Pity is the password [..] This respect for others, empathy, lies at the heart of the novel. […] This, I believe, is how the villain in modern fiction is born: a creature without compassion, without empathy. The personalized version of good and evil usurps and individualizes the more archetypal concepts, such as courage or heroism, that shaped the epic or romance”

• And another paragraph, which gives the notion of “ integrity” its full due , recognizing the value of this sense of personal integrity, even if you, in the end, have nothing to show for it to a disparaging world: no material rewards, nor even a triumphant happiness.
  
  “A hero becomes one who safeguards his or her individual integrity at almost any cost. […] so many of [James’s] protagonists are unhappy in the end, and yet he gives them an aura of victory. It is because these characters depend to such a high degree on their own sense of integrity that for them, victory has nothing to do with happiness. It has more to do with a settling within oneself, a movement inward that makes them whole. Their reward is not happiness […] What James’s characters gain is self-respect.”

So there, the full extent of my sentimentalist, individualist and utterly naïve engagement with art has now been woefully exposed…

notes under deconstruction

(1) I confess to selective quoting. I chose to relegate the following quote to these obscure notes so as not to completely de-credibilize Mr. Dabashi. ---- “I have said before and I have argued that here is an organic link between what Lynndie England did in Abu Ghraib and what Azar Nafisi did in RLT -and what holds these two underlings in the service of George W. Bush's war on terror together is no over-riding ideology, but a mere Kafkaesque careerism” --- The "organic link" Mr Dabashi posits there is pre-posterous and banalizes the horrors of torture and humiliation at Abu Ghraib. One would almost suspect Mr D to be a neo-con agent bent on undermining all authority of anti-american discourse through his ridiculizing inflation.

(2) "Can we please deconstruct deconstructionism as a male, Western invention and be done with it?" if I had found this post earlier , I could have skipped the deconstructing and instead have spent the sunday-afternoon reading in the park ....
(3) It was breathtaking to see how the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, in his novel “Snow”, was able to evoke all those different strands & perspectives in a society grappling with local or traditional customs versus western ones, in a society boiling with a variety of political sentiments ranging from political islam, over traditional-nationalist, over leftist-communist to westernized-bourgeois.
(an aside : not that it helps, you know, helplessly understanding all points of view, sometimes it merely exposes the intense tragedy of the condition of human plurality)
(4) it took me quite some time to find a blog focusing on the quality of literary criticism in RLT

(5) RLT has thrown light for me on one of those never fully clarified scenes of my own teenage years: the encounter with a stylish 35 year old man, well read and well travelled, dazzling me with his cultivation and paying me lavish attention while professing his love both of the book Lolita and of teenage girls. A man using the book Lolita as a tool for the seduction of inexperienced, impressionable teenagers. At that time, luckily, my natural reserve and a vague sort of alarm have kept me out of harm’s way, but only now have I understood how intellectual & artistic sophistication can go hand in hand with cruelty and abusive, selfish lust.

(6) I am so grateful to RLT for drawing my attention to the pathetic but intensely moving human type of the "perfectly equipped failure", as introduced by Henry James in "The Ambassadors"

a very short guide to Frankfurt (not for business travelers)

Lazy August heat mollifies even the busiest financial centers , so I noticed with relief, walking out of the Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof. Not that the numerous bank-skyscrapers had lost any of their towering arrogance (1) , but they could now be treated as a mere backdrop for the soothing spectacle of people loitering & cycling & licking ice cream cones. And they made for a nice skyline too, looking up from one’s book, sitting on a terrace on the river bank.

It is not a beautiful city, Frankfurt. Too much of an architectural hotchpotch with its 50s Wiederaufbau buildings, its restored pseudo medieval Altstadt architecture and its aggressively soaring high-rises. And its extensive pedestrian areas, devoted to gaudy chain-store shopping, are oppressively consumerist.

The lone literary pilgrim may also feel slightly abashed by Frankfurt’s Goethehaus: the visiting crowds are all too efficiently processed in a modern entry-hall crammed full with Goethe-merchandising , and the same crowds then march (but certainly don’t wander) through the painstakingly restored but oh so sterile rooms of the Goethe-family. (2)

But still, it is an interesting city, Frankfurt, with many a redeeming feature. Of which the river Main is certainly not the least, giving air and space to the city and offering a most pleasant river bank for walking, cycling, reading & the drinking of Apfelwein. It is also near this riverbank that the museums and art galleries are located which were a sufficient reason for my imagination to make me book a Frankfurt-bound train. (3)

And my imagination was not disappointed – on the sturdily-elegant Museumsufer I found those grand bourgeois mansions that I love, dedicated to the arts with an earnest 19th C devotion. Special thanks go to the Städel-museum for generously offering space and time to contemplate that magnificent Poussin painting – a large and darkly brooding painting of nature in the violent throes of a thunderstorm, with a tumultuous sky shot through by lightning bolts, with humans fleeing in all directions – all echoing the fore-ground drama of a tragic death (as told by Ovid in his Pyramus & Thisbe story).

My wayward imagination had however more difficulty to adjust itself to the prosaic reality of the Spa-resort of Bad Homburg . I guess I had been imagining a dignified grandeur déchue, a somnolent elegance. Or at least a whiff of imperial or aristocratic romance. But Bad Homburg was merely sleepy & only moderately cute. No romantic decay, but just a badly maintained spa illusion: a Kurpark with benches in synthetic materials! A Kurpark- grand café with plastic chairs!
At least the map of the park could still stir my imagination with its little drawings of the baths, of the casino, of the golf-courts and of classy monuments ( amongst which a Siamese temple offered by the king of Siam who was a Kurgast there in 1907).

I didn’t manage either to fully penetrate the mysteries of Wiesbaden. Surely the wealthy spa-patrons live their lives far from the gazes of casual visitors. But here at least I could bask in some of the splendid Spa-architecture I had been hoping to see.
Stately grand hotels where Magic Mountain guests might gather for philosophical discussions or amorous intrigues... And, behind tall dark-green pines, one could catch a glimpse of glaringly white mansions where discreet waiters would serve calming quellwasser to despairing duchesses …

Oh well, how much of the joy of travelling isn’t just about chasing in reality some of the images the imagination has long cherished?

just a few notes ( slightly melancholy)
(1) will then nothing humble “the industry that failed”? No near-collapse? No humiliating state bail-outs? Nothing??
(2) but the lone literary pilgrim will have to qualify her harsh judgment later, softened by the ‘pathos of the past’. For instance when peering into a glass display, somewhat hidden in a corner: a 1944 photo of the devastated street with a pile of rubble where once the Goethehaus was, and a 50s photo of the proud re-opening of the restored Goethehaus. Further softening takes place in the rooms with paintings from Goethe’s contemporaries, filled with so much longing for an ideal, antique arcadia and with Goethe quoted as having said about his Italianische Reise that he later never had found again the happiness of that journey (“nie mehr so vollkommen glücklich gewesen” ).
(3) I sometimes suspect that the true goal of my trips is to find suitable trains & (outdoor) cafés for reading. Unless my true goal is just to be moved by the transience of travelling (to which, as a combative melancholiac, I am as sensitive as to the above mentioned 'pathos of the past'). Ah yes, the transience of travelling, which sometimes yields the oh so precious & poignant kindness of strangers or the amazing grace of an instantaneous affinity with someone you will never see again.

memorial

A memorial, according to the dictionaries, is something that keeps remembrance alive. It can be a monument or a commemorating ceremony. It can be a record, a memoir.

“Memorial” is thus a very apt name for a human rights organization which aims to record the Soviet Union’s totalitarian past, to keep alive the memory of its victims and to monitor the present human rights in the area.

Natalia Estemirova worked for “Memorial” in Chechnya , documenting cases of abductions and murders by (allegedly) government backed militias. A friend of the murdered Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya , she was quite aware of the dangers of seeking to elicit and record the truth in that brutal region. But she stubbornly continued to investigate human rights abuses, not wanting them to be ignored and forgotten . On July 15th Natalia Estemirova was abducted and murdered herself.

Any daily reader or spectator of the world news is continuously exposed to stories of abuse and suffering. Often one would want not to know what one is thus forced to know. Often one feels utterly enraged and powerless. But most often in fact, we just take all those human catastrophes in our stride and get on with our lives.

But some stories hurt and connect, some stories continue to haunt. And one feels that the very least one can do is to remember the story, to commemorate the human suffering and the courage of which it speaks.

Like the story of Natalia Estemirova… How can one not be haunted by it?
With quiet but breathtaking courage she “only” wanted to document, to record, to remember, thus restoring some justice – she didn’t carry any arms, she didn’t pose a physical threat to anyone. On the photo in the paper, against a background of bombed out, bullet-riddled houses you see a woman of calm, unpretentious authority, with sad gentleness smiling a half-smile.
And this gentle courageous woman was murdered. Brutal violence prevailed (“Memorial” said it was compelled to suspend its operations in Chechnya in view of the threats to its collaborators.)

Stories that hurt …. stories that haunt … I shall not recount all of them here. But there’s this one story ( totally unrelated to the Chechnya story) that keeps troubling me. I read it in a NYRB article by Caroline Moorhead about human trafficking and forced prostitution.
The journalist told the story of a young, well-educated African woman, who after having escaped Hutu-killers in Rwanda fell victim to a trafficker and ended up being prostituted in the UK, (almost inevitably) contracting HIV. She eventually did manage to be released and to get hold of a false passport. She was even able to find a job and to get antiretroviral medicine. But upon discovery of her false passport she is sentenced to some time in jail. I now quote these harrowing paragraphs from the article:

“Mary was arrested and sentenced to eight months in jail. What followed she told me, was not so bad; it was something like boarding school. She worked hard, studied computing and information technology and felt secure”
“When she was released [she unsuccessfully applied for asylum, staying in the UK being crucial to continue to have access to the antiretroviral drugs] She had no choice: she went underground, dropped out of sight. Today she has a job, for which she is paid in cash, no questions asked. Desperately anxious to draw no attention to herself, she makes no friends, talks to no one, lives alone. If stopped by the police, she knows that she will be deported.
” I live,” she told me when I met her in July in London, “from day to day.[…] I don’t know any longer what to hope for””

How could one not be haunted by this story? How could one not be haunted by this woman speaking of prison as a place where she felt secure, working and studying. By this woman, living the most solitary of lives, so as to avoid extradition.

And no, I have no answer to the question what to do with those stories. Join Amnesty International? Contribute to human rights organizations? Well maybe, yes , maybe that is indeed the only way a powerless individual can react.

aesthetic notes on cathedrals, café-interiors and a BlackBerry

On Friday, a softly somber summer day, I rose with considerable resolve (1) : this was my day off and I was going to a cathedral, oh yeah (2). It was to be the Tournai-cathedral, that wondrous, awe-inspiring building, combining Romanesque gravitas with Gothic splendor. From a previous visit I still remembered the sheer delight of that silent space, a space rhythmed by pillars & arches, and shot through by dancing diagonal shafts of light.

But it was an overcast day without any frivolous sunrays. So in the train I had already shifted my aesthetic expectations from limpid luminosity to muffled hues, if only to better appreciate the somber greens and inky grays of the landscape outside.

Tournai was as muffled and subdued as the weather, and as provincially quiet any town can get. But nothing, no banal red-tiled roofs, no trite baskets of red & white flowers on poles in the shopping street, no commercial neon signs, not even the pervasive provincial ennui could diminish the ominous power of those spires. Yes, walking those streets, it was impossible not to look up, not to succumb to the pull of those spires, so immemorial and harsh against a stern grey sky.

But as immemorial as the cathedral might seem, it was obviously not immune to the ravages of time, and thus still subject to a vast restoration program. So not only did the overcast weather preclude any picturesque shafts of light, the extensive inner scaffolding also woefully obscured the grace of columns & pillars.

So I had to renounce my cathedral-spaces-yearnings, and seek pleasure elsewhere. Such as reading complex Borges on a bench in a provincial park, near an old, but still vigorously spraying, fountain, surrounded by tired red roses.

However, Tournai did yield an unexpected aesthetic insight – signaled by the one moment that I instinctively halted and drew my camera before I knew what I was seeing .
It was a café interior, a simple empty café interior, which I spotted through an open door. A tiled floor, wooden tables and chairs, a dark-green plant in the corner, a bench and wainscot with old-green upholstery. All equally & un-dramatically lit by a pale light. A sturdy & solid still life, in muted browns and greens. Utterly uneventful and unassuming, but somehow so striking in its quiet, authentic solidity.

And if I was struck by these muted browns & greens, by the humble solidity of that interior, it was undoubtedly thanks to Chardin, the painter of simple sensuous still lifes without a trace of ostentation. (3) (4)

more about Chardin & BlackBerry in the notes

(1) Please note that I do rise each day, but with varying degrees of resolve – on workdays the rising is done with dutiful resolve : thou shall make thyself useful, in accordance with prevailing rules of usefulness (but not necessarily in accordance with your own impulses).
(2) a desperate longing for cathedral spaces had engulfed me earlier in the week, while facing a very angry colleague at work. He was deeply hurt and indignant, not about the latest round of redundancies at our company, but about the fact that he hadn’t yet been awarded a corporate BlackBerry . And the worst of it was that I knew I had to suppress my annoyance with his gadget-obsession, since his longing to possess this state-of- the- art tool is in fact far less misplaced in productive company life than my own shameful contemplative longings.
(3) Later at home, I gazed for a long time at a couple of Chardin-reproductions. And realized how immensely subtle his hues are, how tangible his atmosphere, and how his unobtrusive light refracts rather than reflects. His humble, muted still lifes are a far cry from the richly attired, scintillating 17th century Dutch stil lifes with their opulence of silver & crystal & lobsters & fruits. And yet, Chardin’s world of simple durable objects possesses a suggestive richness of texture and tactility which our own disposable world of synthetic materials utterly lacks. Who would ever lovingly contemplate the picture of a BlackBerry? (see above)
(4) Too good an occasion not to quote Proust on Chardin: « prenez un jeune homme de fortune modeste, de goûts artistes, assis dans la salle à manger au moment banal et triste où on vient de finir de déjeuner […] L’imagination pleine de la gloire des musées, des cathédrales, […] c’est avec malaise et ennui [qu’il observe ] la banalité traditionnelle de ce spectacle inesthétique. […] Si je connaissais ce jeune homme, [je l’emmènerais au Louvre et] je l’arrêterais devant les Chardin. […] il serait ébloui de cette peinture opulente de ce qu’il appelait la médiocrité, de cette peinture savoureuse d’une vie qu’il trouvait insipide »

Summer Soapbox Series, part 1: respect for human diversity

binary reasoning ignores human diversity

It ‘s always neat of course, to be able to classify entire variegated populations in a simple binary opposition: such as “male” versus “female” . And this binary gender opposition is then all too often fed into an equally binary intellectual debate : biological determinism ( biological sex completely determines gender behavior) versus cultural determinism (there are no biological differences, only cultural ones) . All of that binary thinking only serves to woefully reduce the potential richness of a highly diverse humanity.

Biological and cultural factors interact in the most complex ways to produce what is then perceived as either “male” or “female” behavior. Take for instance an important biological factor: the influence of testosterone on brain-formation and behavior. Yes, “on average” a human male body will have higher testosterone levels than a human female body. And, yes , testosterone plays a role in how the brain functions.
But speaking of “average” testosterone levels masks the fact that “the overall [testosterone] ranges for males and females are very wide, such that the ranges actually overlap at the low end and high end respectively” .

So even strictly biologically speaking, any purely testosterone driven cognitive and behavioral differences are not strictly binary (either male or female) , but are situated on a continuous scale.

Furthermore, this testosterone level is not an entirely endogenous biological phenomenon causing certain behavioral effects, the testosterone level itself can be influenced by social & cultural factors . For instance, in a male who has been defeated in battle, testosterone levels will subsequently drop, while they will rise in the winner.

And then, importantly, the brain itself is not only formed by endogenous biological factors. To a certain extent the brain is plastic : human experience and learning will modify existing neuron connections or form new ones. “thinking, learning, and acting actually change both the brain's physical structure (anatomy) and functional organization (physiology) from top to bottom”. “new findings [suggest] all areas of the brain are plastic even after childhood”

So there we have humankind in all its diversity, with male and female humans possessing varying doses of biological determinants coding for so-called “masculine” or “feminine” behavior. And the wide range of possible dosages makes that instead of all men and women naturally displaying respectively either “100% masculine” or “100% feminine” behavior, individual men and women are rather dispersed on a continuous gender-scale, with quite some behavioral overlap between the sexes.
Also, the members of this diverse human species are not once and for all formed by immutable, inborn biological factors, they will continue to evolve in function of their diverse experiences, surroundings and education.

totalitarian patriarchies squash human diversity

Totalitarian patriarchal societies relentlessly squash this human diversity in a two-step process.
First, a totalitarian patriarchy will allow for only one single all-encompassing definition of respectively masculinity and femininity. These definitions will then uniformly regulate all forms of permitted behavior for men and women, be it in the public or the private sphere. All natural overlapping and ambiguity is suppressed : “average masculine characteristics ” apply to all men and “average feminine characteristics” apply to all women, always & everywhere. It is also crucial to note that all characteristics leading to autonomy, power and authority will be the strict preserve of men.
No woman can ever be a judge or a doctor or an engineer, or be passionate about sports and no man can ever be selflessly caring or not like football. This merciless conditioning obviously strengthens the binary definitions and becomes self-fulfilling.

In a second step, the totalitarian patriarchy (*) will then further depreciate any typical “average feminine characteristics” vàv the “average masculine characteristics”. And thus it permits persistent oppression not only of women as individuals (who in 'step one' were already denied any of the highly praised "masculine characteristics") but also of “feminine characteristics” in general. This oppression takes place, again, both in the public and in the private sphere and it can range from simple disrespect and scorn for “feminine”, ”soft” qualities such as kind-hearted sympathy, to outright economical & political repression, and to private violence and unpardonable cruelty vàv women.
In some of these totalitarian regimes women, only because of their sex, are denied freedom of movement and expression, are denied access to education, are denied economic independence, are denied political voting rights – women are thus in effect stripped of personal, political, civic and economic rights, in short: deprived of essential human autonomy.

a moral appeal ….

And it is a continuing moral disgrace for our times that these crimes against individual women, these crimes against human plurality in general, are not denounced with more vigor, neither locally nor on the international political scene.

Why is the battle against the persistent systematic sexual violence against women in DR Congo, in Sudan, (and elsewhere … !) not placed higher on the world political agenda? Why is the persistent violation of human rights in Saudi Arabia not a matter of UN action? It is of course depressingly instructive that the above two questions definitely sound politically naïve.

(*) In the “Origins of Totalitarianism” Hannah Arendt describes a crucial totalitarian feature: “total domination”. “Total domination, which strives to organize the infinite plurality and differentiation of human beings as if all of humanity were just one individual, is possible only if each and every person can be reduced to a never-changing identity of reactions” . “The problem is to fabricate something that does not exist, namely, a kind of human species resembling other animal species whose only ‘freedom’ would consist in ‘preserving the species’” --- It’s the kind of total domination to which fundamentalist patriarchies indeed subject half of their population ….

A couple of things I wanted to say about cities & rivers & trains & trams, but didn’t bring up during the conversation.

We’d only met 2 hours before, at a Sunday matinee-concert. And during after-concert -lunch with our mutual friends we had not really spoken to each other, though we did share a few indecently boisterous laughs.

It was still early afternoon when our party broke up and after the general goodbyes I headed back home on foot alone, enjoying the touristy bustle of the city-centre and looking forward to an undisturbed afternoon of reading.

But when I heard running steps behind me, the fast click-clacking of high-heeled boots on cobble stones, I knew it was her even before I turned.

She chattered happily along - about the National Geographic documentaries she watched late at night, about the importance of fresh vegetables for a healthy stomach-tissue , about the parties at which she liked to dance till dawn - often making me burst into helpless laughter by the utterly unexpected humorous associations she’d make.
And though we hardly knew each other and though I could only relate to the fresh vegetables story (being neither a National Geographic addict, nor a party-goer, but quite partial to fresh tomatoes), the fact is that we walked those streets in a merry, companionable aimlessness.

Spotting from afar some intriguing allegorical statues we wandered into a small park, facetiously speculating about the Egyptian & Roman symbols on display. And when upon passing the Musée des Beaux Arts I mentioned my predilection for its 19th C entry-hall, she promptly made us veer off for a quick improvised visit, so that we found ourselves arguing in front of a grand but rather uninspired painting of the 1830 Belgian Revolution (I thought it was so endearingly 19th C pompous, she found it merely so idiotically pompous).

Now for all our impromptu shared enjoyment & delightful connectedness, it was truly amazing how little we had in common qua interests and likings. In the highest of spirits we subsequently discovered how we disagreed about a stunningly wide range of topics : be it about the merits of different cities (Antwerp versus Brussels versus London versus Paris) , or regarding our penchant for early or rather for late rising, a fondness of trains & trams versus one of cars, the importance or not for cities to have a resident river, ….

Now obviously, at the speed we were walking & talking, and with only little time left before we had to go our separate ways – I could not really go into all the subtle ramifications of my taste for trains, trams and city-rivers. Neither do real life conversations allow for footnotes to back up one’s arguments. Hence the present blog-post as an indispensable afterthought to make my point with all due elaborateness.

Though I wouldn’t want to rob anyone from “their car = their freedom” and though I (grudgingly) acknowledge the existence of a kind of “route 66” car-travel romance, I myself do stubbornly stick to the romance of trains.

Trains are so solidly part of the world and yet so inspiring for the imagination: undauntedly spanning their railway-network over the globe, generously offering grand stations as both destinations and places of transit. What would the unpractical, contemplative (but restless & combative!) melancholiac be without their faithful logistic support?

Ah, how grateful I am for the urgency and the sense of purpose that trains offer to eternally doubting would-be travelers ( 1) : punctually leaving at a particular hour for a particular destination along a particular track, while at the same time firing on the imagination with a tantalizing list of possible stops and transit-combinations.

And the caring solicitude of trains! yes, you may read a book, yes, you may dream, you still will be brought to your destination. And don’t worry about catering and hygienic stops, each station is a harbor providing for all possible needs. Not to mention the irresistible train-aesthetics: I so love the sights & sounds & smells of trains, tracks and stations. And also, obviously, I like the fact that they are so intimately linked with cities – yes, stations are eminently representative of their cities (2) .

And trains, however banal, still ooze the glamour of the great traveling adventures of a bygone age. Even their modest urban cousin, the tram, retains something of this particular traveling aura (3) (which neither individual cars nor collective urban buses posses)

So I wonder, has it something to do then with the fact that trains & trams are wedded to tracks? These tracks shooting off into teh distance, don’t they combine the re-assurance of purposefulness and of being embedded, with the promise of dizzying vistas…? Yes, aren’t train-tracks like rivers, flowing in a bedding?

Which, at last, brings us to rivers, and how important it is for a city to have one. In fact, in my inner atlas cities are referenced by their rivers, stations, cathedrals & art galleries. Cities of course are in continuous transformation, many an urban landmark does not even span the lifetime of a mortal (4) .
But then there is the immemorial permanence of a river, and the relative permanence of cathedrals, museums and stations. ( And the deplorable self-destructive character of Brussels is pitifully illustrated by its having torn down its magnificent 19th Century ‘Gare du Midi ‘ and its burying underground, as were it a vulgar sewer, of the river Senne.)

But so, a river – yes a river does grant an immemorial dignity to a human settlement. Apart from all commercial motivations for communities to settle alongside rivers, what remains is their sense of history, of openness, their promise of escape to far-off destinations, even a whiff of the great vast oceans. And the great bridges spanning them, so intimately related to the history of the city….

And their soothing streaming movement, whether or not it carries ships…... Seducing the wanderer to keep walking along the shore, hoping to attain some far-off vista. Or inviting the weary city-dweller to sit down on the quay and watching it flow, to sit down and be dazzled by the light sparkling on the water …

A couple of quotes I couldn’t bring up during the conversation
(1) Proust – « Noms de pays: le nom » : “J’aurais voulu prendre dès le lendemain le beau train généreux d’une heure vingt-deux dont je ne pouvais jamais sans que mon cœur palpitât lire, dans les réclames des Compagnies de chemin de fer, dans les annonces de voyages circulaires, l’heure de départ : elle me semblait inciser à un point précis de l’après-midi une savoureuse entaille, une marque mystérieuse à partir de laquelle les heures déviées conduisaient bien encore au soir, au matin du lendemain, mais qu’on verrait, au lieu de Paris, dans l’une des villes par où le train passe et entre lesquelles il nous permettait de choisir ; car il s’arrêtait à Bayeux, à Coutances, à Vitré, à Questembert, à Pontorson, à Balbec, à Lannion, à Lamballe, à benodet, à pont-Aven, à Quimperlé, et s’avançait magnifiquement surchargé de noms qu’il m’offrait et entre lesquels je ne savais lequel j’aurais préféré, par impossibilité d’en sacrifier aucun.
(2) Proust : « L’opération mystérieuse qui s’accomplissait dans ces lieux spéciaux, les gares, lesquels ne font pas partie pour ainsi dire de la ville mais contiennent l’essence de sa personnalité de même que sur un écriteau signalétique elles portent son nom »
(3) Amélie Nothomb – « Biographie de la faim » : « […] Bruxelles. C’était une ville remplie de trams qui quittaient le dépôt à cinq heures et demie du matin dans un crissement mélancolique, croyant partir pour l’infini. »
(4) Baudelaire : « la forme d’une ville change plus vite hélas que le cœur d’un mortel »
(5) Stefan Hertmans – “Steden, verhalen onderweg” : [Steden met een] “stroom in hun binnenste gesloten” [of] “steden die zich langs de stroom hebben geschaard” . [Rivieren die ]“openheid bieden in beslotenheid”. [steden] “zien door hun hectische bezigheden een ader stromen die zuurstof aanvoert, een vergezicht, een bron van wereldbewustzijn en geschiedenis, een altijd voorhanden zijnde mogelijkheid om te ontkomen - zowel voor de reiziger als voor de thuisblijver een geruststellende gedachte”
“cities with a stream enclosed in their centre or cities ranging themselves on the side of a river. […] rivers offering an openness in the inner-city. […] right through their hectic activities streams an artery providing oxygen, a vista, a source of world consciousness and history, and an always available possibility to escape – a reassuring thought both for the traveler as the sedentary local”

Milan, October 2004

It’s not the worst state to explore a city in, the flu-feverish one. It’s a state which warps the imagination and hones the sensitivity.

In normal 37°C body-temperature conditions, would that Bellini Madonna have drawn tears from my eyes? Would an Italian night porter have managed to break my heart...?

My arrival at Milan-airport, with a headache & a deep fatigue, didn’t augur too well. And then that spooky underground, with its flickering neon-lights hardly relieving the darkness, and with its sickly green signs fostering sea-sickness. Add to that a London-like fog and Parisian-style traffic above the ground , and only the strictest flâneur- discipline could keep me from getting straight into bed upon arriving at the hotel.

So I walked and walked these bustling Milanese streets, to the rhythm of intense traffic. Cars competing with motorbikes in narrow passageways, incongruously old-fashioned streetcars grinding their way through the city. But most stressful perhaps were the lavish shopping streets, with the throngs of fashion-conscious shoppers hurrying by.
My head was buzzing, exhaustion washing over me , I was craving for some peace & quiet, when, all of a sudden, at a chance sideways look through an arched entrance, a fata morgana appeared: a lush palazzo-garden with a peacefully murmuring fountain.

Apart from these delightful palazzo’s strewn all over the city, there are also the many churches to offer relieve to weary travelers. Most of them are of the thick-walled, low-ceilinged Romanesque sort. And more than any triumphantly soaring cathedral, these semi-dark & brooding churches are a harbor for lost & confused souls . They offer protection, like a Madonna della Misericordia spreading out their heavy cloak over the huddled pilgrims…

Though the fog didn’t ever dissipate that first day, the greyness was redeemed when at night the lights came up. Coughing & sneezing I marveled at this Milan by night. The foggy haze had turned a mysterious blue grey, pairs of street-lamps started glowing like little moons, light refracting a hundredfold on the wet pavements and a smell of wet autumn leaves was released by the drizzle.

I stayed at a small hotel on a piazza, where the friendly welcome had soothed my feverish nerves. The grey-haired woman at the reception desk, perhaps the owner, had that friendly-aloof look of one who, though without remaining illusions about the world we live in, has not succumbed to cynicism but has developed instead a wary compassionateness.

I had a corner-room, fully exposed to the roar of a busy Milanese crossroad. In the evenings, exhausted after a full day of roaming, I usually collapsed on the bed, turning on the TV-set to drown out the traffic. So there I lay, leafing through the Brera Pinacoteca catalogue, contemplating thoughtful, unsmiling Madonna’s while every once in a while I glanced up to the TV-screen where quite another kind of feminine appearance – shrieky, bosomy & scarcely-garishly clad- was flaunted .

In the mornings I rose early. While early-rising is obviously a typical trait of the combative melancholiac (who has learned to fear the consequences of sleeping-in: indolence & sinful sloth), I must admit that during this stay in Milan there was another motivation to get me at the breakfast table before 7.30 AM ...

Breakfast for early guests was served by the hotel’s night-porter, who was dark, tall and elegant. . .

But however graciously and obligingly breakfast was served by this night-porter, I was at first mostly struck by the attitude of cautiousness and reserve vàv the clients (who were single business men & happy couples), as if they needed to be screened for possible bad reactions.

So handsome a person, moving about with such grace and dignity! And yet no doubt daily exposed to reactions ranging from curiosity to contempt, or worse. Because he was a she, or she was a he, or someone in-between. Her tall build and strong hands did betray “biological maleness” . But the way she moved & spoke, her sheer way of being was of a delicacy “usually identified as ‘female’” .

(rhetorical aside : isn’t it rather instructive, and a pity, that not more men have claimed “traditionally female prerogatives” in the wake of women tentatively seizing “traditionally male prerogatives”?).

But mind you, she displayed none of the over-the-top feminine camp often associated with transvestites. No, she was merely, discreetly & elegantly ( and quite attractively indeed) , being her vulnerable unclassifiable self.
And yes, meeting her was quite heart-breaking, though perhaps not in the conventional romantic sense ( but then, breaking hearts are quite beyond conventions, aren’t they - well, my breaking heart is in any case).

I suppose there was an element of mutual recognition – different variations of androgyny? (mine is just the run-of-the-mill tomboyish one) . Or perhaps, as a lone Bellini-chasing traveler, I stood out as much amongst the business men and happy couples as she did? Or was it the sight of all these Madonna’s and Pietas in churches and galleries, which had sharpened my empathy? Anyway, we did connect and there was something about her that moved me deeply.

But apart from smiling “buongiorno’s”, meaningful glances and exchanges regarding tea to be served with or without lemon we didn’t even speak till Sunday, my last day in Milan. I was up early again and this time no business men were around.
When I walked in, she looked up and positively beamed at my ‘buongiorno’. We eyed each other nervously , discussed again the tea and then I read on in my “Proust à propos de Baudelaire” while she shuffled some papers at the desk in the entry hall.
I was cursing myself for my silence, but then she came back into the breakfast room, clumsily busying herself with this and that, looking my way. So I finally mustered enough courage to speak to her, enquiring about her night duty, about her life... We spoke for maybe 10 minutes, until her colleague for the day shift came in.
And then we shook hands (hers a quite manly handshake), looking each other questioningly in the eyes. And she wished me a good day and I wished her a good night.

And that was that. That afternoon I flew back to Brussels.

(about three months later, waking dismally early on a Sunday, I looked up the phone-number of the hotel, and … dialed the number. But again & again, the line was engaged . So it was not to be.)

sundry appropriations & reflections

First, the appropriation (1) : Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), founder of the essay-genre, was the first blogger! (2)

Because blogs, really, are nothing but variations on the essay-genre: private persons’ honest attempts to make sense of their miscellaneous observations. Blogs, just as essays, espouse a personal viewpoint to examine the many perplexities spawned by our daily intercourse with the world (and with ourselves). In fact they are dialogues, with the self and with the world, strewn with quotes & links & tentative insights.(3)

Montaigne was both modest and confident about the purport of his essays. He “only paints himself” (4), he says , for the sake of friends and family, oblivious of glory, proposing “an unimportant life without luster”. But still, he deems himself a worthy subject to write about, since “each man carries the entire form of the human condition”. He blithely confesses that he knows nothing, “que sais-je” , but that should not keep him from writing about “matters that he does not understand, because it is not these matters themselves but his ignorance of them that is his real subject”. (5)

Montaigne did love to quote his ancient authors – his collected essays could well carry the subtitle “quotations for all occasions”. And the fact that these quotes are in Latin bestows an irresistibly grave authority upon them:

“Calamitosus est animus futuri anxius” .

No need to understand Latin to be impressed by such thunderous, calamitous wisdom! (compare this to the pedestrian admonition “Miserable is the mind which is worried about the future”. (6))

But so, there we have Mr. de Montaigne, withdrawing from family and public obligations into his private castle-tower-with-library. Surrounded by a thousand books, conversing with the great authors of antiquity, meditating and thinking. All very private and individual, these ruminations, bound not to leave a single trace, if he had not arrested these most fleeting and perishable thoughts, and had not tried to give them some relative permanence in his essays. Now isn’t this, in one way or another, what most bloggers attempt to do too? (7)

But speaking of fleeting & perishable things – this spring outside…., oozing the sheer bliss of being alive, this blazing sun, mocking the very idea of either essays or blogs. (8) Time to let myself out – there’s this twisting path in the forest, cutting through ferns in a deep shadowy vale. With a suddenly accelerating slope, where you have to release all gears on your mountain-bike, stand upright on your pedals, and keep furiously moving, moving, else you’d slip & fall.

Exit.

Notes
(1) Appropriation: “to take or make use of without authority or right” – this is, by the way, the blogging dilettante’s main vice
(2) we moderns & post-moderns are só self-centered and conceited: praising the past for its supposed “modernity” whenever we spot some trait deemed characteristic of our own age. If we were humbler, we'd rather bemoan the lack of originality of our 'modern' age, and we'd just sigh “nothing new under the sun”.
(3) The potential interactivity of the blog also confers to it some aspects of the “salon” (credits go to Antonia for this insight) - the salon! that lovely societal realm, somewhere in-between the private and the public, a realm where speech reigned .
(4)"[dans ce livre] je ne me suis proposé aucune fin, que domestique et privée. Je n’y ai eu nulle considération […] de ma gloire. [...] Je l’ai voué à la commodité particulière des mes parents et amis : à ce qu’[…] ils y puissent retrouver aucuns traits de mes conditions et humeurs, et que par ce moyen ils nourrissent plus entière et plus vive, la connaissance qu’ils ont eu de moi. […] car c’est moi que je peins. […] Ainsi, lecteur, je suis moi-même la matière de mon livre : ce n’est pas raison que tu emploies ton loisir en un sujet si frivole et si vain. "
(5) Charles Rosen in his Feb 2008 NYRB article « The Genius of Montaigne»
(6) quite true!
(7) “we only see what we look at” – I’m aware of my own tunnel-vision, enthusiastically zooming in on any contemporary incarnations of humanist dignity. There’s of course nothing Montaign-esque about the millions of techie-blogs and specialist blogs out there. And also, obviously, most of us do not have a “castle-tower-of-our-own” nor the unrestricted leisure of the gentleman-essayist. What we have at our disposal is, at best, the spare time of the animal laborans.
(8) Am avidly collecting Spring quotes these days: here’ s one from Baudelaire: “Et le printemps et la verdure , Ont tant humilié mon cœur” – “Spring and greenery, have so humiliated my heart”

magically murky moments (1)

Let me first express my gratitude to nuruL H: the sheer zest of her buoyantly alliterative posts & titles is justification enough for alliteration, this lovely linguistic mannerism (in which I too like to indulge).

In many contexts, however, alliteration has a bad reputation (just as rhyme has): it is considered as frivolous & superfluous. A silly ornament, distracting from the message.

I’m of course quite used to accept humbly society’s strictures on the aesthetic (2) , but as far as language is concerned, I do beg to differ, & to grumble: there’s more to alliteration than a silly play!

Looking for a smack of serious science to back this up, I found a reference to the
memory-enhancing benefits of alliteration. Which may suggest that our brain not only stores words as symbols or signs, but also according to their sound. (3)
But of course I would prefer alliteration to be just a bit more than a cerebral storage & retrieval trick, I would want it to have meaning!

Daniel Tammet (a high-functioning autistical savant, with extraordinary fluency in both numbers and language) claims just that: words are no mere arbitrary conventions to denote reality. Words, or more precisely, how words sound, have intrinsic connotations .
It is no meaningless coincidence that following words start with “b”: ball bean bubble balloon.

But I must admit, my objective judgment in these matters is totally compromised by my own love of language which is so intimately bound up with my longing for meaning. So of course I would project magical meaning in alliteration.

Anyway, it gives me a good excuse to quote (again) Adam Kirsch, from his wonderfully insightful article about Walter Benjamin’s poetic longing for meaning.

“Of course, secular reason holds that human languages are purely conventional, but Benjamin would not countenance the idea that words are arbitrary. […] The vision of language that Benjamin advances here is moving precisely because it is beyond logical proof, and because it expresses so eloquently his longing for meaning in a world that usually presents itself as mere chaos. [..]

“Quod in imaginibus, est in lingua” . How crucial the notion was to Benjamin’s thought […] he felt that names and things belonged together, that a rhyme had revealed a reality."

Notes
(1) In fact, this post was just going to display the two photos. Evoking some dear moments, filled with ambiguous light: one taken once upon a spring evening, lost in thoughts on a train and another, coming home from work late, rejoicing in the magical mix of artificial and natural luminosity ( “l’heure entre chien et loup”). But then the ‘murky moments' title popped up and then there was nuruL’s ‘may messages’ post. Too many signs to ignore – hence the mutation into a ponderous post about alliteration.
(2) I always have to run a thorough alliteration-purging check on memos I produce in a work context, since the merest hint of playfulness would of course ruin the memo’s credibility.
(3) It never ceases to amaze (& depress) me how different the conventions of “efficiently communicating a message” in a business context are from the conventions of “conveying meaning and insight” in the artistic & philosophical realm.
(4) Personally, I’m significantly more inclined to exuberant alliteration in English than in my mother tongue. Perhaps because I’ve acquired so much of my English by looking up words in an alphabetically organized dictionary? And that would be why my brain has stored the word “fragment” quite close to the word “frivolous”?

pathologies of walking (1)

ah, such an ominous title! And yet, this post was prompted by an utterly pleasant Sunday-walk, firmly within the bounds of social propriety.
It was a Brussels- Brontë walk – tracing the literary steps of Lucy Snowe , the not-so-heroic heroine of Villette (Charlotte Brontës great novel about an English girl at a Brussels boarding school (2)).

I’m rather a late convert to group- literary- walks, having always “dearly liked to think my own thoughts” , to imagine my own scenes from books and, obviously, to take my own steps. But now I find these literary walks utterly endearing and uplifting: a group of people of different nationalities and coming from diverse walks of life, having in common only their love of a novel written more than 150 years earlier, taking together a real life walk in the pouring rain around the few surviving landmarks mentioned in said novel.

Thus, for the love of a novel, our little group undauntedly opened its umbrellas, and walked up & down a stretch of wet cobbled street where Lucy/Charlotte may have walked. We piously pored over a map pointing out the “then and now” location of streets. We stood shivering, but alert to the guide’s words, on the windy forecourt of a church where Lucy Snowe/ Charlotte Brontë may have confessed. And we gathered ceremoniously under very green trees dripping with spring rain, close to a kiosk in the park where Lucy/ Charlotte went to an open air concert.

And yet, there ‘s this crucial walk which the little group of Brontë- devotees did not take – the walk which is perhaps most evocative of poor lonely Lucy Snowe’s state of mind. But it’s of course the kind of walk one cannot reconstruct – the aimless walking of one who has no purpose, no companion …. The feverish walking of one who can no longer bear to stay amongst his four walls … who needs to go out, to escape from his inner ruminations. The walk of one who kicks himself out of the door, into the city, to hurl himself amongst strange people & sights, to walk himself into oblivion…

Villette may well be one of the first novels to describe this pathology of walking – pathology...? well, no doubt this kind of obsessive walking is part therapy too: the immersion in movement, the company of streets to drown out the inner buzzing.

So imagine now a long hot summer vacation .... and a shy girl remaining all alone in a boarding school in a foreign city, when everyone else has returned home for the holidays ...:

“At first I lacked courage to venture very far from the Rue Fossette, but by degrees I sought the city-gates, and passed them, and then went wandering away far along chaussées, through fields, beyond cemeteries, Catholic and Protestant, beyond farmsteads, to lanes and little woods, and I know not where. A goad thrust me on, a fever forbade me to rest; a want of companionship maintained in my soul the cravings of a most deadly famine. I often walked all day, through the burning noon and the arid afternoon, and the dusk evening, and came back with moonrise. “

Another more recent expert in both the pathology and the therapy of city-walking (and also the deft chronicler of its hallucinations), is Paul Auster (3) – who even manages to write sentences with the feel of a meandering walk:

“Each time he took a walk, he felt as though he were leaving himself behind, and by giving himself up to the movement of the streets, by reducing himself to a seeing eye, he was able to escape the obligation to think, and this, more than anything else, brought him a measure of peace, a salutary emptiness within. The world was outside him, around him, before him, and the speed with which it kept changing made it impossible for him to dwell on any one thing for very long. Motion was of the essence, the act of putting one foot in front of the other and allowing himself to follow the drift of his own body. By wandering aimlessly, all places became equal, and it no longer mattered where he was. On his best walks, he was able to feel he was nowhere. [….]

There remained the problem of how to occupy his thoughts […] Quinn was used to wandering. […]. Using aimless motion as a technique of reversal, on his best days he could bring the outside in and thus usurp the sovereignty of inwardness. By flooding himself with externals, by drowning himself out of himself, he had managed to exert some small degree of control over his fits of despair. Wandering therefore, was a kind of mindlessness. “

Compulsion or seduction of walking? Difficult to say…. But for those who are anxious to determine where the frontier between healthy and pathological walking lies, do take WG Sebald’s advise : watch your shoes….. (4)

more about shoes in footnote (4)
(1) pathology
Main Entry: pa·thol·o·gy
Function: noun ; Inflected Form(s): plural pa·thol·o·gies ;Etymology: New Latin pathologia & Middle French pathologie, from Greek pathologia study of the emotions, from path- + -logia -logy
2: something abnormal: a: the structural and functional deviations from the normal that constitute disease or characterize a particular disease b: deviation from propriety or from an assumed normal state of something nonliving or nonmaterial c: deviation giving rise to social ills
(2) Lucy Snowe, an unlikely heroine … Compared to Jane Eyre, brazenly braving all adversities, Lucy Snowe may seem very passive indeed, with all her pondering & pining, her watching & observing. Both Brontë characters do traverse periods of loneliness and isolation, but whereas Jane Eyre bustles with passionate resolve to wrest her share of happiness from a hostile world, Lucy Snowe’s melancholy & sensitive nature rather suffers in resigned solitude. Ah how anguished and paralyzed poor Lucy Snowe is…, and yet how true to herself, how courageously honest and how sensitive … So which is my favorite novel? Well, Jane Eyre has of course the combative spirit of passion & adventure going for it, and the attraction of a proud self-reliant heroine. But it is Villette which I love best , even now still rereading some passages every once in a while. Because Villette is, as its sleeve-jacket rightly says, “one of the greatest fictional studies in our literature, not of self and society, but of self without society.”
(3) The quote is from “City of Glass”, but it’s a recurring theme with Auster
(4) WG Sebald: Vertigo – All’estero “ Early every morning I would set out and walk without aim or purpose through the streets of the inner city […]Although at times, when obliged to lean against a wall or seek refuge in the doorway of a building, I feared that mental paralysis was beginning to take a hold of me, I could think of no way of resisting it but to walk until late into the night, till I was utterly worn out.[…] and I cannot say whether I would ever have come out of this decline if one night as I slowly undressed, sitting on the edge of the bed, I had not been shocked by the sight of my shoes, which were literally falling apart. "

The combative melancholiac’s guide to Spring in general and to the Easter Weekend in particular.

Innocent, naïve sensuousness - that’s the best attitude to deal with April’s cruel mixing of memory and desire (1). So, nothing like going cycling on a balmy spring evening, along the park gates, dazzled by the brilliant green leaves poking through the rusty , mossy bars. And with the sky a deep luminous grey, promising spring rains to stir any remaining dull roots. (it’s a grey so soothing, so lenient…., offering such a calming complement to all those exciting shades of green (2))

Safe immersion in Spring’s relentless blessings can also be achieved during the day, on a sunny lawn, by taking off one’s socks and gently dipping two sets of pale winter toes into the luscious grass. The ensuing (sensuously wriggling) relief forms, together with the obvious sense of ridicule, a sure remedy against any Spring melancholia.

Thus inocculated against malicious Spring stirrings, one can then savor the summer-like release that lets the city unwind on the eve of a long Easter weekend. The streets much emptier than usual and flooded with Spring’s lazy evening sun, people nonchalantly loitering at traffic lights instead of impatiently waiting to cross, music coming from cars’ open windows. The local shop owner sitting at his till, basking in the last sun rays falling through the open door, humming along with a feverishly languorous Arab song on the radio while serving the few customers still having to stock up for the weekend.

Melancholics should however not push their luck during those early Spring days, which may awaken many an unfulfilled and (worse!) unfulfillable longing. For instance, trips to crowded, wired up Easter Holiday destinations (sunny sea-resorts, April in Paris, …. ) are to be advoided. On the other hand, staying at home listening to Bach’s Mattheus-passion may be a very honorable & rewarding occupation but should not be repeated each year (a bi- or even tri-annual frequency seems optimal)(3). Pleasant social intercourse, especially when combined with some healthy outdoorsy activity, is of course highly commendable but should definitely not take up the entire 4 days of a long Easter weekend. (4)

Some travelling however should be done, preferably by train (5). And preferably to a friendly city with a river, an unpretentious city not needing hordes of Easter-tourists to be alive. For combative melancholics living in the Lowlands & vicinity, Liège/Lütttich is an excellent choice.

(I tried it out myself last Saturday, and I can confirm that, even in slightly adverse personal circumstances (5) Liège proves to be forthcoming. It had been a few years since I last had been there, so the arrival came as quite a shock. The old station was simply gone and replaced by an ambitious new high-speed terminal under construction. Impressively soaring perspective lines & vanishing points galore, on the ground & up there in the roof – but the whole concrete & metallic construction did seem a tad megalomaniac. And not really concerned with offering travelers a cozy space.

But I enjoyed the shock of the new, and doted on the multiple endearing improvisations to accommodate travelers during the construction works: from temporary iron bridges, over wooden planks to provisional office-containers sporting incongruously old- fashioned wooden doors-with-handles.
Leaving the terminal-construction site I felt slightly dis-oriented at first, wandering along heaps of rubble of the old station buildings, before recognizing somewhat further off the re-assuring remnants of the old station neighborhood, with welcoming open air cafés.

So there I indulged in this foremost sunny spring activity : sitting on a café terrace, sipping from a drink, pretending to read but meanwhile observing all the goings about. The travelers hurrying to the station loaded with suitcases, the locals sloshing to the convenience store to get their Saturday newspaper and their cigarettes, the quarreling couple, ..... And a few meters further, a man and woman, clad in black leather, speaking American, lazing about, looking very cool & relaxed, surrounded by air travel suitcases including musical instruments cases (one for a bass apparently): black jazz-musicians having played a gig at one of the excellent Liège jazz-joints I presumed. (Which was confirmed when a trendy goatee-beard sporting man crossed the street, shaking reverently the couple's hands and saying admiringly “hey, you were good last night! When are you going back to Chicago? ”) )

But ahum, I digress, back to my Easter travel tips for melancholiacs! When in a friendly city, do program a visit to a local friendly museum. (7) And assuming combative melancholiacs often have a large measure of humanist geekiness, I can warmly recommend an ancient art museum. One where you can eruditely revel in Spring, gazing lovingly at a small, elegant, dancing figure, sculpted in bronze in the 2nd Century AD or so. A swinging figure with liberally fluttering antique draperies, representing a "hora" (seasonal goddess). A figure probably not unlike one of the examples having inspired Botticelli when painting his Prima Vera. (8)

Also, dear combative melancholiacs on an Easter city-trip, do take a stroll around the fountain in one of the local parks! And for the humanist geeks, preferably one with a passable copy of an ancient statue. (The Liège park has a creditable go at the Laocoon, against the background of a lovely spraying fountain).

And my advice regarding brisk river walks in the city of your choice? Well, you being a melancholiac, you will end up near the river anyway …. Walking & walking, gazing at the apartment buildings on the other side of the river, wondering how it would be like to live there. And wistfully gazing along that glistering stream, to the far off hazy horizon, wondering how it would be to walk & walk & walk, all the way up there….

a mixture of motley notes
(1) Ok, so I have already quoted TS Eliot-on-April back in January, so what? The Waste Land
(2) It’s my litmus test for landscape painters throughout the ages: how sensitive are they to greys & greens. Pity the painters indulging brilliantly blue skies only! They miss out on a whole palette of deliciously delicate color combinations. Some examples of painters that do pass the test: Claude Lorrain (he has the additional merit of having introduced luminous grayish haziness in landscape painting), Watteau (with silky greys & greens) , Daubigny, Boudin, Corot, Pisarro, Cézanne. (As to contemporary photographers, I’m of course keenly keeping track of the greys & greens in Roxana’s work )
(3) So please refer to last year’s Easter post for heartfelt ruminations about the Passion.
(4) In all their laudable zeal for well-adjusted sociable behavior, combative melancholiacs should be careful not to overdo the jolly sociability! They should not forget that they do need (and are entitled to) their dose of solitary wandering & contemplating (for which Easter weekends offer the precious free time). Hence, one day of social immersion should suffice.
(5) Train rides of course are replete with memories & desires (& their potential cruelties) ….. – so let me suggest some unfailing stratagems to avoid looking wistfully out of the window for the duration of the entire trip: in my experience one can confidently rely either on the naïve-sensuousness- method ( as evoked at the start of this post) by reveling in the train’s rhythms & smells & sounds & visions. Or on the companionship of an engrossing book (eg Oliver Sacks’ ‘Musicophilia’ ) or of some CD's (eg Magdalena Kozena singing Händel arias, or Fairuz .... yes, to assuage memory & desire's potential cruelties, Fairuz may be the best choice).
(6) Suffering from a mild gastric flu (undoubtedly picked up at work to spoil the weekend) I arrived at Liège station, feeling quite poorly & feeble. So blessed be the “Pharmacie de la Gare” with its highly competent pharmacist, who instantly alleviated my distress by dispensing not only effective anti-flu tablets, but also her genuine concern.
(7) And really, you could do much worse than going to the newly opened Liège museum ‘le Grand Curtius’, which matches the new high speed train terminal in ambition but far outdoes it in user-friendliness! It brings together (and to the light) the collections (which often were not even on display) of several old musty Liège museums (which had their charms though ...). In any case, their riches are now pleasantly presented & with all due art historical care. And the staff, newly hired, is on its best behavior, endearingly enthusiastic in its eagerness to please the visitors.
(8) yep, am reading Aby Warburg right now - so am having a keen eye out for any antique pathos formulae (& for vigorously fluttering drapes in particular!)

Brooding about Byzantium : a dilettante confesses

Unrepentant dilettantism

Perhaps it’s only in art history & aesthetics that dilettantism has been granted a status beyond dubious dabbling. (1) Many a non-academic ‘connoisseur’ looms large in the art world. And the great art historian Panofsky admitted that the “synthetic intuition” needed to grasp art’s intrinsic meaning “may be better developed in a talented layman than in an erudite scholar” .
Because, apart from factual knowledge and erudition , appreciating and understanding art always requires an act of imaginative recreation, which is subjective.

But alas, give people a license to dabble without diligence (2), and they will abuse it. Therefore , also in the art world, earnest art historians have come to detest the exalted devotion of blithely ignorant aesthetes who wallow in their own intuitive sensitivity. (3) (4)

But, despite humbly acknowledging dilettantism’s limits, it was as an unrepentant amateur (5) that I took the train to London to indulge in one of my most cherished but unsubstantiated dilettante obsessions: Byzantium…. (6). And on that train I was defiantly reading Walter Pater, the patron saint of 19th century exalted aestheticism, who wrote so seductively and so misleadingly about art history.
As it has been put aptly: “in the uncertain twilight of Pater’s scholarship cultural history became imaginative misrepresentation”. (7)

"Imaginative misrepresentation"

Imaginative misrepresentation ….. how much of the consoling elegance and cohesion of art history itself is not due to imaginative projection, which offers a pleasing synopsis ex post? How much of the beguiling attraction of art history does not lie in the fact that, using the remaining mute artifacts as props, it pretends no less than to tell us the story of the life of the human mind (“Geistesgeschichte” )?

Winckelmann , the ‘first art historian’, having come under the spell of the "noble simplicity and quiet grandeur" of the rare remaining Antique statues, and despairing at how much was irrevocably lost , wrote:
“ […] contemplating the collapse of art […] we […] have as it were only a shadowy outline of the subject of our desires remaining. But this arouses so much the greater longing for what is lost, and we examine the copies we have with greater attention than we would if we were in full possession of the originals. In this, we often […] believe [we] can see something where nothing exists. […] One always imagines there is much to find. “(8)

And then, Byzantium….! If ever there was a candidate for imaginative misrepresentation! This twilight Roman-Christian empire, flourishing in the Greek East in the wake of the fall of ‘old Rome’. A 1000 years shrinking empire now best known for its defeats: in 1204, the brutal sack of Constantinople by Byzantium’s barbarian westerns cousins who were on a crusading rampage ; in 1453, the pivotal date we all learned at school : Constantinople conquered by Ottoman Turks.

Luxurious Byzantine Byzantium.... Byzantium of the Byzantine Icons….., of which so many, (maybe the best?), were destroyed during 100 years of ruthless iconoclasm, or got lost due to human neglect & vandalism, eagerly collaborating with the destructive processes of nature and time. (9)

Oh I did diligently start reading a ‘real’ historical book about Byzantium, conscientiously tracking the imperial reversals of fortune with its military victories and defeats, with its inventory of administrative and legal achievements, with its economic and sociologic ramifications . And just as diligently, I duly peered, at the London exhibition, into the glass cases which displayed domestic objects, imperial parafernalia, jewels & more jewels and other material remains of the ‘real' Byzantine life.

Mesmerizing folds & golden ribbings

But I must confess that, of this grand medieval civilization that lasted a 1000 years, what has enduringly captured my imagination are folds …. yes the vicissitudes of folds, of “delicate gold striations defining the folds of cloth”. What gave Byzantium a lasting place in my imagination, is the fate of these golden highlights & ribbings in panel paintings & mosaics… (10)

Indeed, something as seemingly futile as how folds of clothing are rendered, is pivotal in any story of the life of the mind – because tracking the fate of these folds, shows how the elegance of graeco-roman anthropocentric and figurative art made way for the “clumsiness” of western-christian schematically-abstract and spiritual art. And it shows how at the same time some of the graeco-roman artistic formulas had some sort of afterlife in the decorative and hieratic conventions of Byzantine art, which in their turn were transformed by Italian painters into a renewed elegant naturalism, announcing the humanist-christian Renaissance.

So Byzantium, for me, is about images….., about the scattered artistic traces it left. Byzantium is about what it salvaged from Antique imagery, and how it transmitted this classical heritage under the form, as it were, of dried food, as mummified conventions that only needed to be hydrated by later Italian artists to spawn a renaissance. (11)

Byzantium is about these imposing hieratic images , about shimmering gold in half-dark domes ….. It is about the seduction of lost splendor as well as of a lost meaning of that splendor. Byzantium is about enchantment and mourning. Byzantium is so seductive for our imagination since so little of authentic early Byzantine art has been left, since we “can only grope for its character from nothing better than the surviving canvases of its imitators” (9)

Byzantium is about all the tragic longings which generations of poets and aesthetes have projected in it. (12) (13)

And as one who has never been to Ravenna, who has never wandered about in the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul and who has never been to the St Catherine monastery on Mount Sinai, I do solemnly declare being utterly enthralled by Byzantium.

A dilettante’s feverish footnotes
(1) dilettante
Etymology: Italian, from present participle of dilettare to delight, from Latin dilectare — (more at delight) Date: 1748
1 : an admirer or lover of the arts
2 : a person having a superficial interest in an art or a branch of knowledge : dabbler
(2) am paraphrasing here an erudite flowervillain
(3) Erwin Panofsky, more sternly this time : “As I have said before, no one can be blamed for enjoying works of art “naively” – for appraising them according to his lights and not caring any further. But the humanist will look with suspicion upon what might be called ‘appreciationism’. He who teaches innocent people to understand art without bothering about classical languages, boresome historical methods and dusty old documents, deprives naiveté of its charm without correcting its errors”
(4) thus the impeccably erudite Warburg detested Bernard Berenson, the flamboyant connoisseur-aesthete. Berenson indeed didn’t have any qualms to venture fanciful attributions without rigorous scholarly evidence but based mainly on “certain intuitions”. And Walter Pater, that other quintessential 19th C aesthete, produced delightfully imaginative essays, which were however “ manifestly lacking […] rigour in matters of fact “.
(5) personally I don’t see the amateur and the professional as competitors - The amateur is just that: “in the best sense of the word, a lover of [the arts and] of learning among the general citizenry “ . (Robert Darnton in a NYRB article). And the amateur will be devoted to his or her domain of predilection in a very personal way. The amateur's devotion is tinged with subjectivity, especially when it concerns a humanistic discipline (as opposed to say physics or mathematics). Because, it is laden with our very personal questions & obsessions that we (the amateurs) come to the humanities.
And in my experience the amateur will gladly accept lessons from the professional and will not mingle in scholarly discussions. But does this mean then that amateurs and professionals can never communicate on an equal level? Well, in matters of taste and personal judgment they can, of course, in their quality of thinking & judging human beings. But much less so indeed in matters of objective , scholarly purport.

****WARNING**** This picture of the humble amateur is not the whole truth though … There is a subterranean Faustian arrogance at play too, the Amateur does entertain a secret universalist yearning …
Yes, there's a hidden hubris of the Dilettante, who, at times, exults in the (deceptive) vastness & swiftness of his intuitive imagination as opposed to the slow & methodic grinding of the toiling specialist ….

(6) Exhibition at the London Royal Academy of Arts: Byzantium 330-1453
(7) Adam Phillips in his introduction to Walter Pater’s “The Renaissance”
(8) J.J. Winckelmann, History of the art of antiquity
(9) Bernard Berenson – Studies in Medieval Painting (which contains not quite scholarly correct articles about Byzantine art, but may nevertheless (or rather : therefore) offer exactly the sort of imaginative reconstruction that serves my own not-quite-corroborated Byzantium-construct…. :
“ Iconoclasts, native rebels, Bulgars and Turks seem to have participated joyously in Nature’s destructiveness […] there are in the east only fragmentary traces of mosaics before 1300 [..] Outside […] a few noted shrines such as those on Mt Sinai. […]
The pictures of eastern origin that we see in the West are all of later date. They are specimens of the mummified art to which we are commonly accustomed to apply the word Byzantine, although they date from a time when the Christian eastern Empire was dying, or dead
Until the great Venetian betrayal in 1204, Constantinople, despite many vicissitudes, was the metropolis of European and of nearer Asia civilization. There is no reason for assuming that traditions of good craftsmanship were ever lost there, as again and again they were lost in the West, or that the ideals of form were dragged down to the barbarous puerilities to which we declined in our darkest centuries. […]
Imagine that all the pictures done in Paris by Frenchmen had disappeared, and that we could grope at their character from nothing better than the surviving canvases of […] imitators”
(10) The “delicate gold striations defining the folds of cloth” Byzantine art
Byzantine art offers the fascinating spectacle of the nimble mixture of surviving graeco-roman naturalistic forms, Christian spiritualism, and Byzantine hieratic & decorative splendor. And one cannot be but moved by the awakening in early 13th century Italian painting, which started transforming these conventional Byzantine golden notations of the folds into something both naturalistic/representative and elegant.
So these Byzantine icons & mosaics with their decorative shimmering gold , with their hieratical, timeless visual incantations beyond earthly reality, not only continued as a barely unchanged & mummified Icon-tradition in the orthodox countries , but also contained the seeds of the Italian Renaissance’s elegant naturalism, harking back to the greco-roman gracefulness. In such a way that John White lyrically notes of this Italian transformation of Byzantine conventions : “
“The complicated linear symbols for the folds are caught, like chrysalids in the very act of transformation, at the moment of their softening into rich, material forms. “

(11) Panofsky : La renaissance et ses avant-courriers dans l’art d’occident – « La tradition byzantine qui, pour reprendre la comparaison immortelle d’Adolf Goldschmidt, a transmis l’héritage classique - y compris bon nombre des ‘pathosformeln’ – à la postérité « sous la forme d’aliments déshydratés que l’on hérite de famille en famille et qui peuvent être rendus digestibles par l’adjonction d’eau et l’effet de la chaleur »
(12) Yves Bonnefoy – Byzance :
« Son impersonnalité, que si pauvrement on lui reproche : elle rêve pour nous
La forme est une écriture qui, dans sa simplification, sa recherche des symétries, peut suggérer une connivence de l’universel et de l’être , où s’efface notre présence - , puis découvrant que ses gauchissements, ses flexions, ses élongations dans le canon de Byzance sont autant de refus de cette rêverie dangereuse.
Un certain faste peut célébrer la transcendance d’un lieu . De même un dénuement conscient de soi peut rappeler la forme à sa charge terrestre, la substance
Et à mi-chemin de ce dénuement et de grands rituels, il faudra définir l’élégance, qui est une des filles de la douleur er , de Ravenne à Mozart, de Botticelli à Tiepolo, hante toutes les œuvres anxieuses de l’Occident. C’est Byzance qui la première a enseigné cette ascèse, qui demande au luxe l’éveil à tous les pouvoirs de nos sens, mais ne vit en ceux-ci que pour y méditer une absence. L’art byzantin, qui a désigné l’absolu, en sait aussi la distance. Il n’est pas, comme parfois Venise et souvent Rubens, l’assez vain déploiement d’une illusion de triomphe. »
(13) WB Yeats :
“But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come”

Part III of the angels trilogy : kitsch & misanthropy

I ‘d better bring this fluffy angel stuff to its close now. Not good for my street credibility at all. Although, frankly, angels dó belong to the streets, as firmly as rap-artists and hard-boiled detectives. Where else but on these mean streets, will a solitary wanderer find accompaniment in many an angelic statue?
Sure, angels are kitsch. So what, just another argument for their non-elitist street credibility! Kitsch, after all , does address (exploit?) the most genuine & heartfelt of human longings.

Yeah – angels are definitely all-inclusive symbols and can be substantiated with quotes ranging from Pico della Mirandola (1) to Robbie Williams (2) !

But there’ s something very pessimistic and misanthropic about angels too…. There’s a whole brooding tradition which pitches angels & their qualities against the woeful limitations of mere men & women. Montaigne did that (3), Pascal (4) did it and even Robbie Williams (2) does it. (5)

Then again – angels in the Robbie Williams version are of course nothing but fantasies of outcasts looking for something to fix their spurned affections on. But darn you reader, if you’re going to be disdainful about that. Lookin’ fer sumtin’ an someone ta love in an unfriendly world – why, this is not merely about teenage tearjerkers!

Anyone who, for whatever reason, does not quite fit into the dominant discourse of his or her environment, knows the dilemma - either go for the full integrity of the self, go for the self-assertion of the right to be and to be as one is(6). No compromises. And remain a proud misanthropic minority of one.

Or compromise, be selective in what you show, do not flaunt the full self. Accept being loved not for your full self but rather despite your true self (and for everyone’s sakes, don’t be bitter about that). And (the single redeeming feature of this charade), seize the opportunity (however warped, however imperfect) to love back.

As James Baldwin movingly wrote (7) , in an altogether different political context of revolt against white Western dominance, (as if he had to justify any lapse in unwavering aloofness vàv the dominant system):

“Whoever is part of whatever civilization helplessly loves some aspects of it and some of the people in it”.

fluttering footnotes
(1) See comments to part II of the Angel Trilogy
(2) See comments to part I of the Angel Trilogy
(3) « [les hommes], au lieu de se transformer en anges, ils se transforment en bêtes, au lieu de se hausser, ils s’abaissent » - « [men] instead of transforming themselves into angels, they transform themselves into beasts, instead of raising themselves, they lower themselves »
(4) “L'homme n'est ni ange ni bête, et le malheur veut que qui veut faire l'ange fait la bête. » - “man is neither angel nor beast, and as ill-luck would have it, he who strives to be like an angel, acts like a beast”
(5) Now, quite apart from my own angel-spielerei here – and speaking as the earnest humanist I am: Montaigne may be more of a pragmatic & tolerant humanist than the crypto-catholic Pascal… Indeed, to Montaigne man has his dignity, precisely as man, i.e. as neither angel nor beast. As he states in the introduction to his essais: “ ma conscience se contente de soi, non comme de la conscience d’un ange ou d’un cheval, mais comme de la conscience d’un homme » - « my conscience will stick to itself, not as the conscience of an angel, nor as that of a horse, but as the conscience of a man” - But on the other hand, how modern this observation of Pascal, that a fundamentalist striving for absolute virtue turns men into monsters …
(6) Think I am paraphrasing Pat Barker here.
(7) Found the quote in a New Yorker review

solicitous angels

Its melange of naivete and erudition (1), yes that may well be what I love best about art history.

This naivete is to be found in even the most sophisticated art historian, in as much as he or she can’t help being aesthetically and sentimentally moved by a work of art. (2)
Apart from some sour iconophobic postmodern specimens (3), I haven’t yet read an art historian who didn’t at some point lapse from scientific erudition & distance into genuine love for the art works they research.

More, art historians’ sheer devoted erudition can be endearingly naïve. Meticulously tracking down the ancestry or the afterlife of a certain image throughout the ages, accumulating documentary evidence from musty archives: what could be more devoid of utilitarian cynicism? What could be a greater testimony to that discredited humanistic notion that the evolving formal expressions of human concerns have a value as such, even after the societies that have spawned them have collapsed. (4)

But still, there’s the question – how much cultural background information do we need to process in order to properly enjoy a work of art. And what is “properly enjoying”? Is it about grasping the “meaning” of a work of art, recreating the initial intention of the maker? (5) Is it about formal aesthetical enjoyment? Is it about a naive, uneducated emotional response? Or do I need to be familiar with the bible and with medieval scholastic thought & iconography to appreciate a 12th century relief from a French cathedral? (6)

Did I pin the above image on my kitchen wall because of its religious significance? Because I like to be reminded of the angel-assisted resurrection of the Virgin Mary while devoutly drinking my morning tea?
Or because, in general, I dote on statues of winged creatures gathered around a dead body?

Eh, no, that’s not it. Well then, why do I love this image?

Oh, because I found it in a second-hand book , a lovely bundle of essays by the French art historian Emile Mâle who at the turn of the century set out (not without French-chauvinistic and Christian-religious zeal) to restore the fame of French roman-gothic imagery.
And because he wrote so engagingly and affectionately about these swift & gentle angels. (7) .
And because this tympanum relief was so expertly sculpted by an anonymous artist in the 12th Century.
And mostly I love this image, because, in that tumultuous & harsh age, someone took the pains to lovingly represent an image of unalloyed gentleness & solicitude.

suitably naïve notes
(1) self-consciously post-modern readers may now sigh and click on to less naive blogs
(2) Roland Recht in « L’historien de l’art est-il naïf ? » :
« Le spectateur peut se trouver place à différents degrés de “naiveté”, à savoir d’illusions sur la plus ou moins forte implication de son propre équipement culturel dans l’appréhension des œuvres du passé »
But the art historian would then not be naive, because he is aware of the cultural distance, and should be able to dissociate naive aesthetic enjoyment from a cultural & intellectual interpretation of the work.
« Une ligne de démarcation entre une forme « sentimentale » de l’appréhension de l’œuvre d’art et une forme intellectuelle qui se définit (entièrement) par la conscience de l’histoire sous sa forme la plus élémentaire : la conscience de la distance »
(3) A sure sign of this sourness is the lack of reproductions/images in these postmodern art history books, which excel in ironical and conceited meta-discourses-about –the- historical - art historical-discourses
(4) E Panofsky in “the history of art as a humanistic discipline” : “from the humanistic point of view human records do not age"
(5) E Panofsky, Ibidem. "Thus, in experiencing a work of art aesthetically we perform two entirely different acts which, however, psychologically merge with each other into one Erlebnis: we build up our aesthetic object both by re-creating the work of art according to the “intention” of its maker, and by freely creating a set of aesthetic values comparable to those with which we endow a tree or a sunset
[…] the sensual pleasure in a peculiar play of light and color and the more sentimental delight in « age » and « genuineness, » has nothing to do with the objective, or artistic, value with which the sculptures were invested by their makers. "
(6) I’d like to refer here to all the libraries which are filled with highly enjoyable erudite tomes about this ‘what is art’ question. But, sorry, I really can’t go into all this right now. I have to leave for work in about 1 hour and, well, the whole point of this post was just to reproduce a beloved image of solicitous angels, so I’d better get on now.
(7) Emile Mâle - Art et Artistes du moyen âge : recueil d’articles publiés à des dates s’échelonnant de 1897 à 1927. La première édition est de 1927, la quatrième est de 1947.
The reproduction is from the essay about « Le portail de Senlis et son influence »
« Puis, les anges viennent ressusciter ce corps sacré et le tirent doucement du tombeau.[…] La résurrection du corps de la Vierge par les anges est une scène nouvelle dans l’iconographie religieuse et pour laquelle [les artistes de Senlis] n’avaient aucun modèle : ils en ont fait un chef-d’œuvre de vie et de grâce . […]La belle pensée de Senlis .[…] C’est à Senlis que se forme l’iconographie de la résurrection […] de la Vierge . La légèreté, l’allégresse des anges de Senlis […] ».

while updating my CV

Updating one’s Curriculum Vitae is nothing but a banal act of prudence, adapting to these uncertain times. While doing so, you’re obviously not supposed to ponder in earnest the course of your life, and even less should you start wondering about what that life really amounts to. But staring at the neatly unbroken sequence of Dates and Facts, resuming Work Experience and Education and Skills, one can only conclude (with bewildered puzzlement): this is not it, this is not it at all, my life has flown into another channel .... (1)

And this is not just about the evident difference between public and private life, not just about the fact that a CV will not list how people came and went, how loves were found & lost and found & lost again. It is about the amazing fact that a CV does not give the slightest hint of one’s sense of self , does not give a single clue to one’s inner life (be it of the mind or of the soul).

Imagine then a thematic CV, built around one’s defining insights, passions & obsessions – a CV full of objective information diligently based on say, significant evidence found in one’s cupboards & book-cases – such as fading photos with pin-holes testifying to a former personal iconic status; such as doubly & triply -underlined sentences in books, ….

A prominent theme in such a CV of mine would surely have to be “Angels”, “Angels” in their most poignant sense of atheist longing of course. The available evidence might point to a certain sentimentalist & kitschy aesthetic streak in youth
- but all in all, what sets the tone of the theme is rather the somber & knowing reflective-ness of angels, their powerless sympathy with vainly striving humans.

Chronologically Wim Wender’s film “Der Himmel über Berlin”/ “Wings of desire” has to feature first on the CV ( with the mention it is the only film I ever went to see three times in the same week, & with the mention I saw it at age 22, just before I had to plunge headlong in the work-experience as detailed on the official CV).
Oh, it was all there – humans and their catastrophic history, and their eternally clashing or frustrated desires, and their loneliness, and their longings.

And the melancholy sense of this human condition which only the contemplative, the irrelevant members of society truly have.

Thus, seeing and pitying human drama & comedy is the task of powerless , eternally silently murmuring angels. The task of angels, because humans are too wrapped up in their own present battles – too busy preparing the future.

Yes – it was all there (2) , and this poignant image of the powerless, horrified and sympathizing angel has accompanied me for the next twenty years. And surely it is no coincidence that all of my most cherished writers and artists did have something to say about angels ... Like the perfect sentence to resume our dependence on angels as our non-judgmental witnesses of last resort, I found it somewhere in the works of Anna Blaman (3): “only the powerless attentiveness of sympathizing angels”.

Later of course, I could feel challenged by the Rilkian despair that not even angels would hear us: “Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen? “ (4)

And then, ah, the encounter with Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, which does merit a lengthy quote :

“A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.” (5)

Only angels can thus bear to view & remember history as this catastrophe of human suffering. Only angels, or perhaps also some rare melancholy contemplative humans (the kind of irrelevant individuals which are disqualified anyhow for the optimist task of building the future).

So it’s clearly in this sense that I interpret Benjamin’s insight of history “ as a process of empathy whose origin is the indolence of the heart, acedia, which despairs of grasping and holding the genuine historical image as it flares up briefly”. (6)

Now I shall refrain from a brief history of angels in art (7), and only quote the very latest acquired angelic reference (for which I have to thank a certain flowervillain ) : here’s Gombrich on a statue by Anna Mahler:

“ [..] the entrance of a cemetery for which she created a model twenty-four years ago: the erect figure of an angel standing on a high square pillar, wiping his tears with one of his wings - an austere vision, utterly devoid of sentimentality”

But what on earth set off this pathetic angelic post? A CV??? Yes, and the moral musings inevitably produced by these dire times.
More specifically, the growing realization that in the practical world, wanting to hold high moral values of human sympathy and wanting “to stand guiltless” in fact condemns one to irrelevance and powerlessness. ( And people may even despise those who have not the power to help them).
What a choice – either compromise on tender moral feelings, play the game and be rewarded with at least some relevance in the world (including the power to, maybe just maybe, right some of the wrongs).
Or stand unwaveringly guiltless and therefore renounce any position of real power in the world and so be condemned to “powerless sympathy” … (8).

CV’s don’t carry footnotes, do they?

(1) Paraphrasing Anna Achmatova
(2) Not all was there : I don’t remember for instance much insistence on angels’ androgyny . Angels not being trapped in human genetics, they’re of course neither male nor female. An d their androgyny is obviously integral to their impotence/ barrenness, which in turn guarantees their disinterested attentiveness : indeed, they’re not propelled by selfish genes bent on reproduction.
(3) Anna Blaman: Dutch writer, active in the 40s & 50s – I don’t know whether she’s still read today – I suspect she’s far too pathetically-earnestly existential for our ironizing times. Here’s the quote (as I remember it, I couldn’t track it down) in Dutch: “ Alleen de machteloze belangstelling van sympathiserende engelen”
(4) It is such a strong line that I have to quote it “jeder engel ist schrecklich”, but clearly it does not at all enter in my personal iconology of boundlessly empathizing angels
(5) From Benjamin’s “Theses on the philosophy of history” as compiled in Illuminations
(6) Straying from angels to melancholy writers such as W. G. Sebald and Orhan Pamuk – at the core of their work there is this same reflective and pitying sadness, a sadness of knowing too much, a sadness of too much moral non-judgmental sensitivity, too much understanding while “speaking of very ugly matters” .
(7) Though what a history that is!!!! The little shrieking & crying & hand-wringing angels of Giotto (as described by Proust), the grave Renaissance angel-musicians, the many impetuous Annunciation angels with fluttering wings , the sensuously swinging angels of Bernini, the angel accompanying Tobias on his winding road, Dürer’s terrible angels, not to mention the many weeping angels at graves, and the irreverent little fat putti so far removed from both heaven and hell …
8) a good occasion to quote from Pamuk's Snow (that sublime, melancholy, moving, kind, desperate novel): "an honest and well-meaning man, like those Chekhovian characters so laden with virtues that they never know success in life - full of melancholy"

Kant in the Boardroom

Poor Kant! Our foremost western philosopher, so proud of his rationally determined moral imperatives. And yet, in any busy & conceited Boardroom he’d be derided as an irrelevant irrational moralist. Just imagine that board-members, before an important business decision, would not only demand assurance regarding profitability and compliance with legal, fiscal and operational constraints but would also test the decision on its obedience of the Kantian imperative: “ Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end and never merely as a means to an end.”

Glad I made you laugh. The “business of business is business” , isn’t it (1). Of course, any successful organization, to ensure its survival and growth, is interested only in what people can contribute to its business ends, and not in their intrinsic worth (whatever that may be). If people don’t perform, they’re out, however good as persons they may be, however great the suffering of being sacked (2) may be. Idem, if a business line would no longer be profitable, then you have to close units down and “make people redundant”.
And “we” all accept that, knowing that the success of our western business models depends on a “rational allocation of resources as dictated by the market” . And in the end, so the reasoning goes, everyone is the better off if resources (ie people and capital) are put to profitable use.
Surely we don’t want wasteful soviet-style inefficiency (or do we)? Surely we prefer economical “creative destruction” which ensures that obsolete activities make way for brave new & innovative industries . And yet, in this “rational allocation” game, it is clear that (all too) often people are not treated as an end, but merely as a means.
So: are we immoral? Or was Kant wrong?

But perhaps we can still wriggle out of our moral dilemma if we formulate Kant’s imperative differently: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law”.
This one does permit us to point to a greater collective good down the road, one that would more than compensate for the individual cases of ‘using people as a means”. So we could say it’s just an economic game that we as a society have collectively agreed upon. And each of us individually, by signing a labor contract, accepts the rules of this game. Plus, modern society does try to smooth out the worst effects of this ‘being used as a means’: by sets of labor laws, social protection, redundancy pay etc.

So neither we nor Kant should worry about our business customs: it’s all about a rationally calculated, limited suspension of morality to get the job done. And having qualms about that is against the company’s and the society’s greater good.

Being rational in business terms would then mean you have to suspend your natural emotions of sympathy for your fellow-man so as to be able to take a decision that takes into account only objective factors of performance and suitability to the company’s goals. Yuk. This sounds awful, doesn’t it?
And yet, if I would present this differently, it would sound not horrendous at all but only just and reasonable. Here we go: suppose that you’re a team’s supervisor and that you would leave in place a blatantly incompetent team-member because you feel personal sympathy for him or her: this would be sheer nepotism or favoritism that would be rightly resented by the rest of the team….

So for the time being, let’s leave it at this: by presenting things in black and white, we won’t get anywhere, this is yet again a case where “being good” is a matter of striking a balance, of pursuing ends as efficiently as possible, but while respecting certain minimum standards of human dignity.

Leave it at this???? While we’re living in a time that has exposed the Great Geniuses of Finance, those eminently Rational Allocators of Capital, as incompetent at best and as crooks at worst? A previous post circled around the benefits and risks of greed. And it ascribed the current economic catastrophe mainly to weak regulation failing to keep excessive greed in check.
But maybe one should question further the dominant economic paradigm that equates “Good” = “rational” = “ efficient pursuit of self-interest and greed”. Perhaps one should not meekly accept a definition of rationality in which there is no room for moral feelings or for sympathy.
Perhaps it is this one-sided definition of rationality that got us into this incredible mess in the first place. (3)

Time for a bit of cool-headed, objective analysis. Greed is an emotion, right? Fear is an emotion, right? Greed and fear are powerful primitive emotions having evolved very early on to ensure personal survival. OK, and survival = good = rational. That’s how the reasoning goes.
But! Later on in the evolution moral feelings of sympathy and a sense of justice (4) have evolved too, probably because a sense of community and trust allow people to collaborate, which is no mean evolutionary advantage.
And as Adam Smith himself (thé proponent of self-interest as leading principle) has always pointed out, moral feelings of sympathy for one’s fellow-man are needed to avoid the excesses of greed.

A very interesting blog post argues that the current state of huge global companies does no longer permit the natural checks that spontaneous human sympathy might place on selfish greed, because neither CEOs nor flashy traders ever actually see the people impacted by their decisions. Hence, a structural absence of natural sympathy would explain why the greed-bubble could reach such horrendous proportions.

So lo and behold – perhaps we really should not settle for anything less than a redefinition of economic rationality : Good = rational = “the efficient and just pursuit of self-interest, judiciously balancing the emotions of greed, fear, justice and sympathy”. Granted, not the pithiest & sexiest expression ever. …..

But apart from monstrous formulations, the point I do want to insist on: we should no longer accept being ruled by a concept of rationality that is based only on the most primitive urges of greed and fear, and that discounts as irrelevant and irrational our moral feelings and our sense of justice.

Perhaps it’s bit rash for a humble Sunday Blogger to just ditch ruling economic paradigms like that and to pretend to redefine economic rationality itself. So let’s go for a less grand example.

Let’s present a wholly fictitious (5) small scale boardroom drama (to keep in style). Suppose the members of the board of a small subsidiary of a larger group, are invited by the chief commander of this large group to validate his decision to fire the boss of the small subsidiary. The chief commander, of course, is made of steel , does not ever come back on decisions and does not suffer opposition gladly. The board members of the subsidiary are all employees either of the subsiduary or of another entity of the Group (so in the end all subordinated to the chief commander).
The case against the small subsidiary boss, who has a 10 year record of good management and is widely respected , is presented by the chief commander: no fraud, no obvious incompetence but some petty acts of assertive independence and so yes, clearly a matter of clashing characters.

There are those who say it is rational to vote for dismissal of this boss, as asked by the chief commander. There is the personal risk of irritating the chief commander, there is the fact of going against an order of a superior and the decision has been taken anyhow.
Abstention would then be irrational, because it goes against one’s own self-interest in the strict sense and has no impact anyhow. A personal assessment of the presented evidence would be futile and a sense of justice should not enter into the decision, because, again, that would be irrational.

Here I want to yell (yelling ever so demurely & ever so rationally, of course): those “rational followers of the chief commander" are wrong, they delude themselves, they are entirely mistaken about the rationality of their decision : theirs is a decision wholly inspired by fear (and maybe greed too).
And over the ages , it’s that kind of allegedly rational decisions (which abandon personal responsibility and stifle the own sense of justice) that have gotten us in the deepest trouble.

a rationalized set of footnotes
(1) This brilliantly alliterating & deep phrase was coined by the eminent economist Milton Friedman
(2) the psychological suffering of being fired ranks in the top of the stress factors, together with severe illness, divorce, loss of a beloved one etc.
(3) Lovely Wikipedia primer on “rationality”
(4) they are located in a “later” part of the brain
(5) An enlarged opinion, if you will …. “a sensus communis” - Yes, just like Kant’s aesthetical judgment that wants to claim universality.
(6) Any resemblance with real life situations or persons is of course entirely accidental

"Ich bleibe dennoch. Es giebt immer Zuschaun"

"The paradoxical, ambiguous, and desperate situation from which standpoint the Duino Elegies may alone be understood has two characteristics: the absence of an echo and the knowledge of futility."

"a power of resistance of quite another kind"

April is the cruelest month (1) , but January may well be the gloomiest. So let that be my excuse for a darkly brooding post, about vast vacuities , sinister seas, gory crucifixions and an utterly illegitimate use of Kant’s definition of the sublime.

Sitting here safely at my desk on the third floor, with a banal view of backyards, rooftops and windows, all of them easily comprehended by even the dullest of sensibilities, I might just have the right set of mind to be awe-struck by the image of a dark sea, of a stark vastness swallowing the very edges of the world. Partly I may feel terrorized by this infinity (2) which my senses cannot grasp, and yet...., this image gives me delight.... A paradoxical aesthetical delight, in spite of the inadequacy of my senses to comprehend this formless vastness.

The venerable Kant explains that our mind then experiences the sublime, which is a form of mental delight precisely because that wayward mind of ours feels somehow proud that it can conjure up this idea of infinity, that it can have ideas that transcend the limits of our naïve sensibility. (3) “[the feeling] is sublime because the mind has been incited to abandon sensibility, and employ itself upon ideas involving a higher purposiveness”.

And what about the feeling of sublimity we experience when we see nature’s elements fearfully unchained? Again the sublimity does not reside in the sensuous objects as such, which are merely horrible, but in our mind which links them to a ‘higher’ human moral faculty. Says the undaunted closet scholar Kant, about mighty & fearsome natural phenomena : “[…] provided our own position is secure, their aspect is all the more attractive for its fearfulness; and we readily call these objects sublime, because they raise the forces of the soul above the height of the vulgar commonplace, and discover within us a power of resistance of quite another kind, which gives us courage to be able to measure ourselves against the seeming omnipotence of nature.” (4)

So the feeling of the sublime is altogether a more ambiguous and complex feeling than the obviously pleasing feeling of the beautiful. The “beautiful charms”, and all one needs are well-honed senses, taste and a freely, dis-interestedly playing imagination. But “the sublime moves”, and requires more of us than taste & imagination, it also appeals to our faculty of ideas, to our moral feelings. So: “The sensations of the sublime exert the powers of the soul more strongly” (5)

Thus far a well-intentioned (albeit crudely amateurish) summary of Kant’s distinction of the sublime from the beautiful in aesthetical judgments. So what’s with the illegitimate use I announced? In fact I must confess I had always seized upon this notion of the sublime to explain the aesthetical appeal of art works that definitely are not charming but are bloody well moving. And actually I must find that Kant’s analysis of the sublime only relates to the sublime in nature, not in works of art. (6)

But oh well, unhindered by any methodological qualms I will now pass on to the gory crucifixions (also as announced) and qualify them as sublime.

Take Grünewald’s famous Crucifixion for instance. How can we bear to look at it? Suffering depicted in its most gruesome physical aspects. A bleeding man nailed to a cross, surrounded by a stark, vast darkness. Isn’t it just a repulsive image that offends our senses & our finer sensibilities?
And yet, we stand in awe in front of it, we indeed experience something of the sublime. Because, beyond the sensibly repulsive, this image moves us, speaks to our moral faculties that are roused to pity. And it evokes ideas of redemption of human suffering that we may find consoling (religious ideas in which the faithful at least may find consolation, and in which non-believers are moved to recognize a human all too human longing for redemption of unredeemable sufferings).

But still, again, how can we bear to look at it without horror? Well, of course, it’s not we, nor one of our loved ones, writhing on that cross. More, it’s simply not real. A photo of a real life torture would be horrendous to look at. No way we could be looking at such a photo and enjoy the disinterested deployment of our faculties of pity. We would have to act, we would have to do something – we would be under the full horrible stress of facing real life suffering. With Grünewald’s crucifixion, we’re in the safe realm of mere mental representation.
There is a message of suffering, but it is delivered not without sweeteners. (7) There is beauty in that contrast of the red mantle with the white mantle against a black background. There is a moving musical melody in that duet between the fainting Mary and the compassionate John (8) . There is a god given sense and a promise of ultimate redemption delivered by the religious sermon ( the lamb of god carrying our sins, the son of god dying on the cross for us etc. ).

Humankind cannot bear much reality (9). We want artistic beauty and/or religious sense to transform the ugliest aspects of the suffering. In fact we always want our tales of suffering duly packaged: in stories where heroics redeem the suffering, or stories where human dignity and love ultimately prevail over hardship, or in tragedies of fate that with their Greek necessity and ultimate understanding of one’s fate at least spare us the demeaning meaninglessness of most suffering, the revolting meaninglessness of the accidents, the violence , the maladies which are blindly inflicted upon us. So - “the bitterness of greatest grief cannot be expressed by art” (10).

So: away with this foul irresponsible art, however sublime ? Away with all safely experienced catharsis? Away with this artificial outlet for pent up emotions? Shouldn’t we instead do something (take political action, become a medical doctor, etc).

It’s no use to oppose art to action. Of course art is artificial. Of course art shan’t save the world. But, especially in a world without an all-seeing god, humankind is entitled to a mental realm where we tempt to make some sense of the human condition, and where we can find shared forms of mourning and pitying.
We’re entitled to a realm where we are moved by Grünewald’s crucifixion, although we know fully well that the world is full of sufferings that will never find a Grünewald to express them. Art is just another kind of power of resistance, one which we also need. (11)

futilely resisting footnotes

first the image credits:
Caspar David Friedrich; Monk by the Sea


Grünewald's Crucifixion (this webpage actually quotes from Gombrich, but without giving him the credits)

then the musing-credits:

(1) he was so good at that, TS Eliot, coining phrases that acquire their own autonomous afterlife
(2) "le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraie" (Pascal)
(3) This is how Kant phrases it: “The sublime, in the strictest sense of the word, cannot be contained in any sensuous form, but rather concerns ideas of reason, which although no adequate presentation is possible, may be aroused and called to mind by that very inadequacy itself which does admit of sensuous presentation” (Critique of Aesthetic Judgement)
(4) Critique of Aesthetic Judgement
(5) Kant – Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime
(6) “If the aesthetic judgment is to be pure (unmixed with any teleological judgement which, as such, belongs to reason) […] we must not point to the sublime in works of art, where a human end determines the form as well as the magnitude.” (Critique of Aesthetic Judgement)
(7) “the emotion of the sublime is stronger than that of the beautiful, but that unless the latter alternates with or accompanies it, it tires and cannot be so long enjoyed”
(8) no wonder the Grünewald crucifixion can be found on the cover of Bach-cantata CD’s
(9) yet another of those TS Eliot phrases
(10) said by a Valerius Maximus, as quoted by Lessing in his Laocoön

(11) Granted, not quite the most representative out-of-context Kant-quote to head this post. I suppose I liked its hesitant ambiguity, which may be the only tone suitable to musings about art and unpleasant realities.

winter light

Time: quite early on a Saturday morning during the Holiday season.
Weather: temperature well below zero; a clear sky.
Setting: a train rattling through Brussels’ industrial outskirts.
Mood: temporarily elated.

Ah, early morning frosty winter light…. Slowly illuminating a pale blue sky with the faintest of pinkish glows – and suffusing the roofs & upper parts of buildings with a warm coppery radiance. The kind of light that gets even the grimiest industrial landscape smoldering & glimmering. Riding a train through such a wintry limpid atmosphere is a pure delight. One could spend hours gazing out of the window.

Except that there’ s also a book demanding my attention.

A serious book, by a serious writer, deserving my full serious attention!

Hmmm – how nicely the sun-light is refracted by the book’s rough paper . Shall I hold the book more upright, to capture all of the light streaming in? Or perhaps I should just tilt the book a bit to the right? And what if I lay it like that, obliquely on the little table? Look - it’s made of brittle golden parchment, this book. Soon it’ll be set ablaze! Oh…… now the train has taken a bent, the sun’s gone and there’s the plain black-lettered pale paper again. (photo’s shot: 11 - pages read: 2)

I have to change trains in Tournai – where the platforms are deserted, far too freezing cold , so all the waiting passengers huddle together in the station hall. It’s a large 19th century, bulky station hall, with many rows of arched & pillared windows. No doubt meant as a tribute to Tournai’s great Romanesque cathedral, unless it was specifically built to celebrate the generous patches of golden light on the red-tiled floor?
A few minutes before my train arrives, I get outside, walking shivering up & down the platform and watching the strange movements of a girl on the opposite, sun-flooded platform. What is she doing? Gliding forward, then stepping back, waving her arms, now feinting something like an attack, then almost doing a pirouette.
Oh, I see, to fend off the cold she’s fencing with her shadow!

From Tournai it’s only a short ride to Lille, in the North of France. When I first went there, almost 15 years ago, it was still a struggling town, uncertainly looking for a new life beyond its decaying industrial past. Since then it has become quite a confident, trendy city linked by fast trains with London and Paris. It has spruced up its historical centre, bubbles with shops & restaurants & bars, and has attracted many service industries & lots of cool folk.

But something of the vagueness & wistfulness of past glories, something of the tedium of decline, can still be sensed in the smaller towns surrounding Lille. Especially when taking the tramway to Roubaix, clattering through a sub-urban landscape now mercilessly & frostily lit by a glaring white sun. There is the fading glamour of early 20th century art-deco houses, mansions alternating with humble workmen’s houses. Then a non-descript post-industrial landscape with gaudy shopping malls surrounded by vast asphalted parking spaces. And finally, sturdy Roubaix itself, with its weighty decaying bourgeois-industrial heritage. But it’s now definitely much neater and more smugly middle-class than 15 years ago - the grime and the crumbling have mostly gone.

And yet, there’s still this air of provincial desolateness, of relative poverty. Or is this because, on this icy-cold Saturday between Xmas and New Year, people either stay at home or have flocked to the cozy shopping delights of Lille? Anyway, it’s not the merry-go-round (with only a few lonely kids on it), so utterly lost in the white winter glare of a large empty square, that will bring joy. Nor the freezing wind from the east, which blows scraps of papers through empty & vainly Xmas-lit streets. And the festive red carpets on the pavements only serve to highlight the pathetic lack of passers-by.

Most cafés & restaurants are closed, so it’s in a rather grubby sandwich bar that I replenish calorie reserves & warm my icy hands at a mug of hot tea. And there I decide that, at minus 3 ° C, aimless wandering about in desolate towns is perhaps not a brilliant Holidays idea.
And so I resume my voyage to find the Northern Light.

Because that was the true destination of this trip: an exhibit of Nordic painters in the Palais des Beaux Arts of Lille.

Readers of this blog know it is my firm conviction that a painter’s sensitivity to light is inversely correlated with his or her daily exposure to sun. It is light deprivation which makes artists attentive to the faintest variations in intensity & quality of light. Hence it are the painters of the North that can make us fall in love with what little light they get to see, not the sun-flooded Italians (except perhaps the Venetians , undoubtedly because of that strange lagoon-haze which filters their sun light).

And in my quest for Northern light I am not disappointed …. I can bask all I want in Nordic crispy crystalline light – refracted & reflected in snowy landscapes, or surreptitiously gliding over a wall, or so quietly shimmering at a window sill. The soothing stillness of winter light, whether it be outside or inside.

(But perhaps also the numbness of winter light? …. “as freezing persons recollect the snow” ….. also the oppressive stillness of winter light?.... “darin der Schnee des Verschwiegenen treibt”…. )

When I leave the museum, the city sparkles in the violet hour – an abundance of electric lights have gone up , mixing their glow with the purest indigo radiance coming from a frosty sky. And for a few dazzling minutes the world remains suspended in this violet hour, hovering between day & night, between city lights and luminous sky.

Soon the city lights win out, profusely pouring out of shop & café windows, glittering & twittering in decorations everywhere. People are thronging in the streets, cafés and restaurants are crammed full. Full of people eating & drinking & shouting & chattering to keep the cold dark night away. So, high time to seek refuge again in a train & a book.

something else

ah, “something else” – so un-assuming, so endearingly groping a term (1). It was its clumsiness that had attracted my attention, oddly out of order in these thoughtful, elegantly elaborated texts written by two eminent intellectuals. Meaningfully, they were discussing meaning, Hannah Arendt and Erwin Panofsky, when they resorted to this “something else”.

They were writing about “meaning” in altogether different contexts, and totally independent from each other. Because, apart from being both German-speaking 30s Nazi-refugees in the US, I don’t think there was any link between them. One was a political thinker/philosopher, the other an art historian. But anyway, I was so excited to discover these echoing passages, to discover this secret affinity between two beloved authors. Yes, a most gratifying find, “in particular for a certain inner philosopher who was only happy when he had discovered , between two works, between two sensations, a common element” .(2)

two lengthy quotes

Hannah Arendt on the “the meaning of human affairs” (3) :

“Is it not true that “something else” results from the actions of men than what they intend and achieve, something else than they know or want?” […]
It is not through acting but through contemplating that the “something else”, namely, the meaning of the whole, is revealed. The spectator, not the actor, holds the clue to the meaning of human affairs – only, and this is decisive, Kant’s spectators exist in the plural, and this is why he could arrive at a political philosophy ”

Erwin Panofsky on “intrinsic meaning or content” of a work of art (4):

“As long as we limit ourselves to stating that Leonardo da Vinci’s famous fresco shows a group of thirteen men around a dinner table, and that this group of men represents the Last Supper, we deal with the work of art as such. […]
But when we try to understand it as a document of Leonardo’s personality, or of the civilization of the Italian High Renaissance, or of a peculiar religious attitude, we deal with the work of art as something else which expresses itself in a countless variety of other symptoms , and we interpret its compositional and iconographical features as more particularized evidence of this “something else”. The discovery and interpretation of these ‘symbolical’ values (which are often unknown to the artist himself and may even emphatically differ from what he consciously intended to express) is the object of what we may call “iconology” as opposed to “iconography”.

humanism, politics and aesthetics

I said there was no link between Arendt and Panofsky, engaged as they were in different disciplines, but of course they did share something quite fundamental: the humanist attitude. They represent humanism at its erudite & sensitive best: a humanism aware of human frailty & depravity (5), and yet unfalteringly upholding human responsibility. A humanism with a ‘passion for understanding’, deeply interested in human affairs. And more particularly, interested in that fascinating margin of freedom humans have – or at least, the possible margin of freedom humans have, freedom from necessity. Which means freedom, not only from our daily metabolic needs & lusts, but also ( even …) from the despotic constraints of logical reasoning or of irrefutable scientific cognitions. (6)

This freedom is not to be seen as an excuse for obscurantist, irrational revolt against rationality.
But rather, this freedom is a realm of free interaction that humans can create, in their diversity & plurality. A realm where humans determine what they value, what goals they want to pursue and where they try to convince each other of these goals and values – well beyond efficiently providing for life’s necessities. It’s the kind of freedom that (ideally of course, ideally …) is the hallmark of democratic politics; a realm where humans can only hope to convince each other by argumentative persuasion, and by appealing to common human tendencies, but without compulsion by force and without being able to resort to some ultimately sanctioned truth, be it theologically or scientifically.

Or you could define this freedom as the realm where humans can indulge in “the free play of understanding and imagination”, where they can reflect and contemplate. Indeed, the realm of aesthetics, where humans can freely exercise their faculty of taste.
And where they can debate for ages amongst each other on these matters of taste, trying to convince each other, by argumentative persuasion and by appealing to common human tendencies, but without compulsion by force and without being able to resort to some ultimately sanctioned truth, be it theologically or scientifically.

Nope, dear reader, the above is not a frivolous copy-paste-error : I indeed manipulated those two passages in order to attribute some of the same characteristics of human freedom to both politics and aesthetics …. ! (7)

And perhaps that curious correspondence may also explain why Panofsky (the most thoughtful of art historians) and Arendt (the most aesthetic of political thinkers) converge in their respectively art historical and philosophical writings on this “something else”, this “meaning”.

the emergence of meaning


“Meaning” itself is of course eminently a product of human freedom. It is not a fixed attribute of a deed or of a work of art. Meaning emerges only in the encounter between a human subject on the one hand and a deed, or a work of art , or a text on the other hand. (8)

And meaning cannot be analytically dissected into objective components. Yes, of course – when contemplating a work of art, on a first level you can determine what the primary ‘meaning’ of a certain blob of paint is (eg, it represents a loaf of bread), then you might decipher any conventional ‘meanings’ (eg, the religious symbolism of a loaf of bread) – but the overall intrinsic meaning of a work of art?
Ah, but that is “something else” As Panofsky said, to grasp this intrinsic meaning , one needs “a faculty that cannot be described better than by the rather discredited term “synthetic intuition”.

And of course it helps to know the socio-historical background of the artist, it’s good to be acquainted with the history of styles, but in the end – in the end it is not by methodical analysis but by attentive contemplation and by the letting freely play one’s powers of “understanding and imagination” that this “something else”, that “meaning” dawns.

So meaning is subjective, or rather, meaning is inter-subjective – because, as Arendt notes, we are all members of an audience (be it as spectators of the worlds’ affairs at large, or of a particular spectacle or work of art.) And as members of an audience of spectators , we might judge from an “enlarged mentality” , or at least confront our own understanding of meaning with that of our fellow-spectators.
Thus meaning is potentially universal. But also potentially evolving & thus transient : “[…] that even if the spectacle were always the same and therefore tiresome, the audiences would change from generation to generation; nor would a fresh audience be likely to arrive at the conclusions handed down by tradition as to what an unchanging play has to tell it” (9)

Hidden agenda of this post: show that meaning had already been deconstructed - but not ditched! (10) - by humanism before the advent of post-structuralists.

We all know with what relish post-structuralists have debunked the authority of traditions and canons. While doing so they pictured themselves as bravely rebelling against western bourgeois humanist consensus. They allegedly discovered there was no such thing as a fixed meaning and went on to deconstruct the meaning of meaning in convoluted verbosity.
“the meaning of meaning … is infinite implication, the indefinite referral of signifier to signifier”. “ we now know that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the message of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space”. “Meaning, in so far as it can be established at all, exists in the space between the reader and the text”.

Well, the above post-structuralist passages did not teach me anything that I hadn’t yet read, though more poetically and more humbly formulated, in the works of bourgeois humanists like Arendt and Panofsky. And as far as my personal meaning of meaning is concerned, I’ll fondly stick to the clumsy quest for “something else”.

the indefinite referral of footnotes to text
(1) But as plain as it may sound, this “something else” can be quite subversive and revolutionary. “something else” : as opposed to everything that has been neatly defined by the mainstream.
“something else” : to be used when there’s not even yet a vocabulary to denote what one wants.
“something else, I only knew I wanted something else” : can be used by anyone wrestling with stiffling social constraints , but I’ll always remember it as how this transsexual woman explained her childhood gender-transgressive longings
(2) Proust in « La Prisonnière » : « [Des petits personnages intérieurs qui composent notre individu il en restera encore 2 ou 3 qui auront la vie plus dure que les autres] notamment un certain philosophe qui n’est heureux que quand il a découvert, entre deux œuvres, entre deux sensations, une partie commune »
(3) Hannah Arendt : The Life of the Mind – Thinking and doing : the spectator
(4) Erwin Panofsky: Meaning in the Visual Arts – Iconography and Iconology: an introduction to the study of renaissance art
(5) With their Jewish heritage, living in those dark decades of the 20th century, they could of course hardly not know about human depravity
(6) HA: « Truth compels with the force of necessity […] ‘Euclide’, as Mercier de la Rivière once noted, ‘est un véritable despote’. » and « the opposite of necessity is not contingency or accident but freedom »
(7) As Hannah Arendt , rhetorically- surprised, muses in “The Crisis in Culture”: “Could it be that taste belongs among the political faculties?”
(8) I am of course paraphrasing Kant on beauty. And a lot of what has been said about “beauty” can be said about “meaning” – but there is an intriguing difference in degree where the criterion of “disinterestedness” is concerned. Even when, as spectator, we are not directly participating in an event or a spectacle, our own self-interest will taint out interpretation, our understanding of its meaning far more than it would taint our experience of its purely aesthetical qualities. Fascinating pair, meaning & beauty …. The stuff of which all art is made…
(9) Hannah Arendt : The Life of the Mind - Thinking and doing: the spectator
(10) It’s an interesting New Year exercise to make a list, not of good resolutions, but of things one would gladly ditch. Xmas is eminently ditch-able, meaning is not!!!

"the meaning of flowers" (1)

“[…] Darwin […] cracked the secret of flowers , by showing that their special features […] were all ‘contrivances’: they had all evolved in the service of cross-fertilization. What had once been a pretty picture of insects buzzing about brightly colored flowers now became an essential drama in life, full of biological depth and meaning”.

Actually, I don’t know much about flowers. Am more a tree-kind of person; the upward surging kind of trees that is, the cathedral ones. And I like them best when they’re all wintry spires and naked branches, having shed any associations with lust for life.

And yes, I’ve always been rather wary around spring flowers, with their sheer abundance of colors & smells & voluptuous flowery shapes … all that organic ostentation … So, far from me to feel affronted by the Darwinian exposure of flowers’ colors & smells as mere reproductive ploys, adapted to insects’ senses.
And I’m definitely no crypto-creationist irked by evolutionary interpretations.

“Flowers required no Creator, but were wholly intelligible as products of accident and selection, of tiny incremental changes extending over hundreds of millions of years. This, for Darwin, was the meaning of flowers, the meaning of all adaptations, plant and animal, the meaning of natural selection”

But hey! Now, really. I do object! Twice!!

1) Such an abuse of the meaning of the word “Meaning”!!! And worst of all, coming from so eminent & meaningful a humanist as Oliver Sacks. That cries out for a brave post to save the word “meaning” from the clutches of functional- utilitarian teleology.

And,

2) subsidiary object of ire: how dare they posit flowers as merely obsessed with their own reproduction & the seduction of cross-fertilizing insects , how dare they rob flowers of their capacity to freely please human spectators.

Actually, I think Sacks just succumbed to the facile attraction of a good title such as “the meaning of flowers” (a title which I promptly borrowed for this post). Of course he wouldn’t need to consult Merriam Webster (2) for the meaning of meaning. In fact, he qualifies his use of “meaning” himself , describing Darwin as one who “[…] asked why, […] seeking meaning (not in any final sense, but in the immediate sense of use or purpose.)”

But so, should you ask me about the meaning of flowers – then I’d rather express surprise , surprise at the enormous variety of flowers, and of animal and plant life in general. At the sheer excess and seeming superfluity. Surprise at all this sound & fury, all these blazing urges of self-display.
This “urge to appear” (3) that seems to outstrip by far “what may be deemed necessary for life-preservation and sexual attraction”.
Wondering indeed about final meanings, about the question of all questions, the “why is there something and not rather nothing”. All that energy gratuitously spent at being, at appearing. But well yes, I can see the survival & reproductive value of ostentation – & yes, surviving takes at least wanting to survive, takes at least some lust for life… whatever survives is what survives.

But over to the second objection then. What about the meaning of flowers for loving human spectators. What about their beauty as experienced by humans? Meaning, neither in a final sense, nor in the immediate sense of use – meaning rather as a human appraisal which is as (inter-) subjective (and as potentially universal!) as taste.

Humans, though of hardly any cross-fertilizing use to flowers, are as attracted as insects are by flowers’ colors & smells. And flowers, though of no reproductive or survival value to humans, are loved dearly by said humans.

So thàt mystery of the beauty of flowers remains – the fact that humans, in a wholly dis-interested way, find so much pleasure in their beauty. (4)

a rose is a rose is a rose
(1) Oliver Sacks in a NYRB article
(2) meaning
1 a: the thing one intends to convey especially by language : PURPORT b: the thing that is conveyed especially by language : IMPORT2: something meant or intended : AIM 3: significant quality ; especially : implication of a hidden or special significance 4 a: the logical connotation of a word or phrase b: the logical denotation or extension of a word or phrase
(3) Hannah Arendt : from the chapter about ‘the value of the surface’ in The Life of the Mind
(4) Elisabeth Prettejohn in “Beauty & Art” about Kant’s theory of aesthetical judgment : “[when we make a reflective judgment of taste] we do not expect to gain anything from it. It is a disinterested judgment. […] Kant is determined to preserve the possibility that human beings can do this paradoxical thing, and evaluate an object without reference to the interests or purposes it may serve”.

what I was thinking about ...

“that philosophy and poetry were indeed closely related; they were not identical but sprang from the same source – which is thinking” (1)

At some stage, both poetry and philosophy did hope to find truth. But then, they always have been confronted with the infuriating gap between words and reality…. With the frustrating powerlessness of words to grasp the workings of the world and of the creatures of this world .
However abstract & 'un-wordly', mathematics at least get to reveal the laws of nature.

But words …., the very medium in which we think..., words have proven so inadequate to produce scientific knowledge, all they have produced are Great Metaphysical Fallacies and Untrue Stories.

Just as “poetry makes nothing happen” (2), thinking “does not bring knowledge as do the sciences” nor “does it produce usable practical wisdom”(3).

But then, as humans we crave meaning. And meaning is about thinking. And thinking is about meaning, not about knowing .

[…] thinking and knowing are two altogether different concerns, [corresponding] with meaning in the first category, and cognition in the second. […] The need of thinking is not inspired by the quest for truth but by the quest for meaning . And truth and meaning are not the same. “ (4)

Religion (allegedly (5)) reveals both truth and pre-ordained meanings, sanctioned in hallowed formulas & ready-made rituals, shared by a community. All very comforting & soothing & unchanging. No exhausting thinking needed. And only one Book to read.

Poetry & philosophy – ah, no truth is revealed, nothing’s pre-ordained, much less is sanctioned (even the Canon of writers has crumbled). So much thinking to do for so elusive a morsel of meaning.

But is the alternative then to go without individual thinking, to go without this dialogue with the many tentative stories woven throughout the ages? What kind of meaning-less society would that produce? (6)

“Stories constitute together, and referring to each other, the proof of our presence “ (6) (7)

Thinking inevitably produces footnotes:
(1) Hannah Arendt – The Life of the Mind
(2) Says the Poet: W.H. Auden
(3) Confesses the Philosopher: Heidegger
(4) Hannah Arendt – The Life of the Mind
(5) Allegedly – such a lovely word!
(6) Marc Reuyebrink
(7) It’s only in a footnote that I would dare to quote Baudelaire’s pathetic outcry in “les phares” (about how the great artworks troughout the ages are « ardent sobs”, and the best testimony of human dignity): “car vraiment seigneur, c’est le meilleur témoignage que nous puissions donner de notre dignité, que cet ardent sanglot qui roule d’âge en âge et vient mourir au bord de votre éternité »

in praise of snow and folly

It had been announced, snow …. By weathermen and snow-crazy correspondents alike. So expectations were high when I rode out on my bike in the morning.

The park seemed particularly still, the sky particularly grey & expectant. And yes, after a brief feint outbreak of the sun, the world suddenly grew dark and filled up with a mixture of sleet and snow. Ah – the exhilaration of it – being immersed in this dizzying and lacerating sleet.

Then, out of the park, back among the traffic, peering through misty glasses into a hazy world with twirling flocks, trailing red tail-lights, refracting yellow head lights. Around me, the swooshy sound of cars slowly driving through melting snow. Feeling cold water seeping into my shoes, trickling down my neck, mouth & nose watering from intrusive icy flocks.

I’m elated when I get home, feeling so very smug & cozy when I can change into dry clothes and bask in the domestic warmth.

And who knows why, around noon, I formed the firm & crazy resolve that on this fine day I would not take weather-proof public transport to go to that exhibition in the castle of Gaasbeek. Nope I would go there by bike – some 16 km into the country, in unknown territory, with weather forecasts unwaveringly bad.

So after lunch, with a childish sense of adventure, I gleefully set out on my bike, duly wrapped & buttoned up against the raging elements.

The hardest part was getting out of the city – pedaling through murky neighborhoods, along car-infested highways, through post-industrial nowhere areas….

But then at last hitting indeed a country road – aptly called “Postweg” . Riding through villages and along wet fields planted with mysterious crops. On some farm-houses there are handwritten posters with solemn announcements - “witloof uit diepe grond”/”chicory from deep out of the ground” – “aardappelen van ‘t veld”/”potatoes from the field” . And on and on I pedal – every once in a while checking maps at bus-stops to monitor my advance in the right direction.

After some hesitation on a crossroads, while it starts icely raining again – I firmly take a right turn, and lo & behold, there is the park surrounding the castle of Gaasbeek.

Obviously, on this fine November day, not too many visitors are thronging at the entry. The woman at the ticket-counter is solicitous & friendly – offering to take care of my helmet & other biking paraphernalia. Insisting that I take a reduced price entry ticket, even after having ascertained that I did not belong to any of the many reduction-qualifying groups.

The castle & the exhibition deserve better than a bantering post. Suffice it to say that the exhibit wanted to celebrate with contemporary art works the last lady of the castle, a scintillating woman of taste & smartness and with many fascinating personas (bourgeois, aristocratic, connoisseur & collectioneur, subversive, artistic, ...).
Suffice it also to say that I loved wandering through this labyrintic castle with both ancient cultural artifacts and startling, imaginative contemporary tributes to this headstrong woman.
And the last thing that it is sufficient to say is that this castle managed to play upon the whole range of childhood-castle associations: from shivering gloomy corridors over grand dining rooms to winding staircases up mysterious towers.

It’s getting dark when I get back at my bike in the court yard. The woman-of-the ticket-counter is standing outside, looking probingly to the sky. That’s a lot of snow coming this way, she remarks , pointing out heavy clouds at the horizon. You could wait here till that snow-storm has passed by.
Then she grins , but I guess you want to be in it.
How right she was, of course a snow storm had been part of the plan all along.

the folly of hope

When are you going to blog about Obama, X asked, while we headed for the Underground. Ah, a good question (1) , instantly appealing to my sense of duty. Of course one should not just revel in morbid-November-autumnal-melancholy, but also engage with the world’s pressing affairs (2).

Boarding the metro and finding a seat gave me some reprieve before answering X's question. So yes, why had I not yet produced an elated blog about the Obama-victory, I asked myself, smugly seated now opposite my companion and feeling quite content in this multilingual carriage full of Saturday people, from all walks of life, of all colors & persuasions (3).

Of course I had felt awed – awed by Obama’s dogged perseverance – awed by the portentous symbolism of his victory (4) . And amazed – it wàs possible – a book-reading, intelligent man of mixed race, with Hussein as his middle name, becoming president of the United States. And moved, oh definitely, I had been moved by the victory of someone who had also known about life at the margins, about not fitting in.
And who in his victory speech, in the very first paragraphs celebrated inclusiveness : “ young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Latino, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled “. (5)

But despite all that …. , well I guess I did feel a bit weary around all this audacity of hope. The sheer tediousness of that tiresome, stirring battle cry “yes we can”. Partly this weariness is due to a genuine concern about the current rotten state of the world: it will need more than hope and rousing rhetoric to set things right … (be it economically or politically).
But mostly it is because of the deeply ingrained pessimism of my philosophically inclined nature that I feel so ambivalent about this Institutionalized Hope and Optimism.

Oh let’s be clear about it: I know that “optimism is a moral duty”(6) , a prerequisite for all human enterprise (7). I know that if we let ourselves being crushed under the weight of horrible truths, if we meticulously imagine the perils of the daunting tasks ahead, nothing ever will get done. So it is against one’s own better knowledge that one should , that one ought to be optimist: hope & unfounded over-optimism (8) as an adaptive trait in the struggle for life.

But still, the diligently truthful mind may find it degrading to dupe itself by hope ( or maybe this diligent mind is only cowardly protecting itself against the pain of dashed hopes? ‘thus conscience does make cowards of us all’ ….) (9) .

Sartre cunningly resolved this existential ambivalence by recommending “a pessimism of the mind combined with an optimism of the will”. And Obama may very well have both: a commanding intelligence which does not hide from the distressing facts of the world, and a powerful optimism of the will which can take on the most daunting of tasks.

But personally, as an eternally self-doubting pessimist, when having to force hope&optimism down my own throat, I find William James’ rhetorical question much more useful: “what proof is there that dupery through hope is so much worse than dupery through fear? “ .

Yeah, useful dupery, that’s what hope is….

In the meanwhile (10) we had again emerged above the ground, finding ourselves in a charming part of the Brussels- neighborhood Anderlecht: a place where one could live - with that pleasantly bent row of early 20th century Brussels brick houses (designed in toned down but still playful art nouveau) reminding one of an epoch when the Brussels petite-bourgeoisie had both zest and taste; with those engagingly swooshing gleaming curves of the tram-rails (11) ; with the very Belgian- Bourgundian-Proletarian taverns ; and all this Brussels couleur locale saved from smug provincialism by a most varied set of native & non-native inhabitants. (12)

But I digress – because this urban peregrination did have a philosophical destination! The Erasmus house, tucked away in a quiet enclave behind an endearingly somber church, under a gloomy sky.
There one can roam through rooms with creaking floor-boards, admire heavy leather-bound books , smile ruefully at the crude censorship of inked out sentences.
Or dream away at Erasmus’ time-worn wooden desk, near a glass-in-lead window looking out in the garden, savoring this scholarly stillness, cloaked by the rustling of autumn leaves.

And there one can wander around in Erasmus’ garden – assembled with such loving care to rejoice philosophically & flowerly inclined visitors.

But I digress again – praising gardens instead of folly.

Because, getting to my point, Erasmus, in all his wisdom, knew of course all about the necessary dupery of overconfidence & hope; about this so expedient & useful & indispensable folly of hope …

“ First then, if wisdom (as must be confessed) is no more than a readiness of doing good, and an expedite method of becoming serviceable to the world, to whom does this virtue more properly belong? To the wise man, who partly out of modesty, partly out of cowardice, can proceed resolutely in no attempt; or to the fool, that goes hand over head, leaps before he looks, and so ventures through the most hazardous undertaking without any sense or prospect of danger? In the undertaking of any enterprize the wise man shall run to consult with his books, and daze himself with poring upon musty authors, while the dispatchful fool shall rush bluntly on, and have done the business, while the other is thinking of it. For the two greatest lets and impediments to the issue of any performance are modesty, which casts a mist before men’s eyes; and fear, which makes them shrink back, and recede from any proposal: both these are banished and cashiered by Folly, and in their stead such a habit of fool-hardiness introduced, as mightily contributes to the success of all enterprizes.” (13)

This is as pedantic as footnotes can get: quoting Hamlet, and copying Latin.

(1) that’s the trouble with intelligent & inquisitive companions – they ask all the questions one avoids to ask oneself. Questions one avoids , not only to dodge duties but also because sometimes an honest answer would be too pathetic. Like this other question X asked: why do you blog? How on earth could one admit it is to gather proof to one’s defense. Proof that one is more than the publicly documented persona of a (perhaps soon to be un-employed) bank-economist. (If the 19th C had its sensitive upper classes reading Ruskin to prove they had a soul, now we may have a community of soulful & soul-searching bloggers).
(2) ah “l’engagement” – that politically rousing heritage of my teenage leftist reading of Sartre, de Beauvoir, Goldman et al.
(3) being rather defensive about my beloved Brussels (I know how filthy & chaotic it can seem) I was quite glad that X approvingly noted the diversity of the Brussels population and that she even granted a whiff of New York urban-ness to Brussels’ quite ugly metro-carriages.
(4) I remember how back in March 2008 an American business acquaintance (a white male) had dismissed Obama’s chances, peremptorily stating “America is not yet ready for a black president” – aha … guess who’s coming to dinner my lad ….
(5) Hey why did he not include “men and women” in that all embracing sentence? (And this footnote will be the only & the faintest of hints to the fact that I maybe, just maybe, might be sulking because America was not yet ready for a female president. )
(6) Karl Popper
(7) Cfr Keynes’ animal spirits!
(8) Overconfidence, locus of control and depression: "Overconfidence bias may cause many individuals to overestimate their degree of control as well as their odds of success. This may be protective against depression - since Seligman and Maier's model of depression includes a sense of learned helplessness and loss of predictability and control. Depressives tend to be more accurate, and less overconfident in their assessments of the probabilities of good and bad events occurring to them. This has caused some researchers to consider that overconfidence bias may be adaptive and/or protective in some situations."
(9) Hamlet:
“Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action”
(10) These citations-backed reflections are of course entirely post-factum. Never ever did I during that metro-ride reply thus to my companion (who herself did however already during the conversation dare to oppose truthful & dignified pessimism to propaganda-tainted hope). And, um , actually the Obama question was maybe not even asked at that precise point of our Brussels-walk – but for blog-compository reasons it’s handy to situate it there.
(11) Someone ought to write a treatise, or at least a poem, about the romance of tramrails and tramways. The blog-pic is one of Brussels tramrails by night, though not at Anderlecht.
(12) And that this charm is not a just a figment of my Brussels-Partial imagination was so gratifyingly proven by X’s instant enchantment with the spot.
(13) My Latin has long lapsed , but X’s hasn’t – so here’s to you, X!
"Principio si rerum usu constat prudentia, in utrum magis competet eius cognominis honos: in sapientem, qui partim ob pudorem, partim ob animi timiditatem nihil aggreditur, an in stultum, quem neque pudor, quo vacat, neque periculum, quod non perpendit, ab ulla re deterret? Sapiens ad libros veterum confugit, atque hinc meras vocum argutias ediscit. Stultus adeundis comminusque periclitandis rebus, veram (ni fallor) prudentiam colligit.
Sunt enim duo praecipua ad cognitionem rerum parandam obstacula: pudor, qui fumum offundit animo, et metus, qui ostenso periculo, dehortatur ab adeundis facinoribus. At his magnifice liberat stultitia."

Ambiguous Autumn: Grey

Autumn soothes me – with its calming greys , its sheltering fogs. This is a season that knows how to reflect about time passing. A season slowly ‘withering into truth’.

Come autumn so pensive, in yellow and grey

And soothe me with tidings of Nature’s decay (1)

Ah the wisdom of the catholic church, to schedule days of mourning, days of remembrance.

Waking on a 1st of November, one can feel the stillness of a foggy day. Such exquisite relief – this stillness. And looking out of the window, one drinks in the hues of greys dappled with the soft yellow of twirling leaves.

I confess I now love Sundays (and all Catholic holidays) – once I dreaded their boredom, now I gladly surrender to their repose, their official release from all practical duties. No Saturday shopping, no Weekday toiling. No useful activities, no brooding about practical survival. (2)

Memory, memory, what do you want of me? Autumn

makes the thrush fly through colourless air,

and the sun casts a monotonous glare

on the yellowing woods where the north winds hum.(3)

But in fact - most autumn poems are too languorously melancholy to my taste - because, frankly, I find the season exhilarating – the wetness, the greyness, the fogginess, the seeping cold – I revel more in them than in the most sprightly Spring.
Yes, in Autumn I feel quite literally in “my element” .

And I go

Where the winds know,

Broken and brief,

To and fro,

As the winds blow

A dead leaf. (4)

Falling Notes
(1) Robert Burns
(2) a propos Sundays: since there are Sunday painters and Sunday writers, it should not come as a surprise there are also Sunday bloggers.
(3) Paul Verlaine ; Nevermore (Poèmes Saturniens: Mélancholia II)
Souvenir, souvenir, que me veux-tu ? L'automne
Faisait voler la grive à travers l'air atone,
Et le soleil dardait un rayon monotone
Sur le bois jaunissant où la bise détone. translation
(4) Paul Verlaine ; Chanson d’automne,(English translation: Arthur Symons)
Et je m'en vais
Au vent mauvais
Qui m'emporte
Deçà, delà,
Pareil à la
Feuille morte.

Ambiguous Autumn: in Yellow, Brown and Green (1)

Well, with age, one does get a tad blasé about yet another blazing summer, yet another sprightly spring etc. Those eternally returning budding trees and buzzing bees. But I would never want to miss yet another Autumn. I’ve already (see above) sung the praise of its soothing greys, but then, there’s still Autumn’s glorious light, its glorious colours, and ah the glorious chaos of leaves set loose!

Over the years I’ve taken quite some autumn pics – the above is a November 1998 favorite. It was a Sunday, and I remember I was feeling drowsy and weak, what with an upcoming cold and a dreaded workweek ahead. But I did manage to kick myself out of the door for a reluctant autumn walk. And alongside a busy road, there was this closed up mansion, with its grey stones looking even more precarious than the brilliantly yellow leaves of the old trees in the garden. I shot pics feverishly, holding the camera between the bars of the rusty iron gate. Even now I still remember the rush of happiness.

A neo-classicist’s autumn.

Nothing like neo-classical pilasters and statues amidst autumn leaves . Not sure it’s a very PMC (PostModern-ly Correct) taste , but I just love these 19th C parks in autumn …

A Reluctant Romantic’s Autumn

(“what is the late November doing with the disturbance of the spring” – TS Eliot)

A Barking-up-Trees Autumn

A cyclist’s autumn

the crispy crackling of leaves under one's bike’s wheels …. or the swooshy wooshing through gleaming wet leaves.

(1) and see here for some really slow, sad but golden light

Howling winds at Haworth

Going to a manufacturing town

It was a perfectly windy & foggy day for a pilgrimage into Brontë-country. Taking a gleaming train at touristy-amiable York to commercially-prosperous Leeds, and then changing there for a shabbily rattling & puffing train to Keighley, the Yorkshire manufacturing town close to Haworth village where the Brontës lived.

Riding that train amongst particularly surly & rough looking men I read what Elizabeth Gaskell had to say (1) on the nature of Yorkshire people and on the looks of Keighley:
“the practical qualities of a man are held in great respect […] and if [virtues] produce no immediate and tangible result, they are rather put aside as unfit for this busy, striving world”. “Nothing can be more opposed [to] any stately, sleepy, picturesque cathedral town in the south than […] such a new manufacturing place as Keighley in the North. […] Nearly every dwelling seems devoted to some branch of commerce.”

Leaving the train-station I immediately exult in the sheer grimy fogginess of it all, avidly taking in the vista of brick chimneys, mills and rows of greyish-yellowish work-man’s houses. But mind you, this is not some miserable decaying industrial town – oh no, it literally thunders with activity, what with the continuous flow of lorries and vans roaring by.
Walking to the center I am struck by the peculiar nature of the many shops – how very no-frills, how eminently useful &practical their trade seems: “tailor & clothing alteration”, a furniture shop , a vacuum-shop and, by far my favorite, “Tools Solutions for Trade and DIY”.

The center of town does have some stately dignity – not the pompous parvenu buildings as in Leeds or Liverpool, but earnest buildings in tune with this un-assuming, industrious town. As Mrs Gaskell perhaps a tad over-optimistically (2) remarked: “ Yet the aspect of Keighley promises well for future stateliness, if not picturesque-ness. Grey stone abounds; and the rows of houses built of it have a kind of solid grandeur connected with their uniform and enduring lines. […]”

Meekly queuing at the bus-station I almost have to giggle at how in character with the town my fellow-travelers are: sturdy men & women clad in sensible rain-wear and carrying bags out of which protrude sensible wares such as leek, onions, screwdrivers etc. How utterly un-bookish, un-romantic, un-gothic and un-oversensitive they seem – in short, what a perfect no-nonsense backdrop for the simmering Brontë-genius…

To Haworth!

But on drives the bus to Haworth, on that winding road through foggy valleys … leaving me to imagine Mrs Gaskell’s evocation of the Brontë-sisters’ return home from a Keighley-book-trip: “they were allowed to get books from the circulating library at Keighley; and many a happy walk, up those long four miles, must they have had, burdened with some new book, into which they peeped as they hurried home”.

And then, there is Haworth …. saved from touristy cobble-stone romance by the grey-ness and wetness of the day, by the sheer solidity of all those thick bricks which have weathered many a storm, by the uncompromising surrounding vastness of foggy vales & hills.
I climb on foot to the top of the hill, to the Brontë-parsonage and the graveyard. It’s a genuinely English-gothic graveyard with congregations of old moss-covered gravestones, pushed aside by age-old trees . And yet, I did not find it sinister, not even in the silently pouring rain. No not sinister at all, rather melancholy- peaceful, perhaps thanks to the tranquil resignation those worn stones and ancient trees inspire.

None of the Brontës are buried in the graveyard, but on my retina lingered the memorial inscriptions reproduced in Gaskell’s book (3). They all died so young …. only the father grew old, surviving his wife, his children …

Inside the church (not the one the Brontës knew, it was rebuilt in the late 19thC) there’s a gilded memorial tablet with some dried flowers another pilgrim has left.
And in the half-dark lights up the imposing presence of a bible …. opened on some pages out of Genesis, listing a whole genealogy of “names of the sons of Israel who went to Egypt” .

The moors ....

But my true Brontë moment came, standing in a field near the parsonage, looking out into vast grey spaces, listening to the howling winds.
Standing there, slightly swaying in the blowing gale, unconsciously almost adopting that pose of Friedrich’s ‘Wanderer above the Sea of Fog’, one leg straight, the other slightly bent to brace myself against the pounding winds. And yes, the pure power of those sights & sounds – one can well imagine those moors being a great resource for the imaginative Brontës.

“This is an autumn evening, wet and wild. […] The wind cannot rest ; it hurries sobbing over hills of sullen outline, colourless with twilight and mist. Rain has beat all day on that church tower. “ (4)

The parsonage

Seeking refuge from the rain in the parsonage, it indeed looks welcoming & bright & cheerful – and so full of books & letters testifying to the irrepressible imagination & creativity of the Brontë children. As Gaskell evokes: “the sound of the night-winds sweeping over the desolate snow-covered moors, coming nearer and nearer, and at last shaking the very door of the room where they were sitting – for it opened out directly on that bleak, wide expanse – is contrasted with the glow, and busy brightness of the cheerful kitchen where these remarkable children are grouped”.

And yet, there’s the sofa upon which Emily died ….and there’s the “gnawing pressure of daily-recurring cares” – the stints as governesses (5) to make up for a lack of a stable, sufficient source of income, a debauched brother, a father going blind, ….

Afterwards ...

Afterwards, in a tearoom, eating some very English pie and drinking (of course) tea with milk I read on in Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë. What a tribute from one great woman writer to another! And such empathy and loving insight Gaskell shows when she writes of Charlotte: “The deep and exaggerated consciousness of her personal defects – the constitutional absence of hope, which made her slow to trust in human affection, and consequently slow to respond to any manifestation of it – made her manner shy and constrained”. (6)

And yes, CB’s was undoubtedly a shy, sensitive and melancholy nature but she also had a ferocious sense of integrity & autonomy as well as great resources of perseverance and determination in the face of adversity . Both of her great novels, Jane Eyre & Villette feature heroines with such precious internal resources. Though they may well be too sensitive and impressionable for their own good, they do show great resilience and self-respect (ie respect also for the “self without society”).

However dejected and powerless and at times hopelessly depressed Villette’s Lucy Snowe may be, never ever does she relinquish her integrity (7).
And ah, Jane Eyre, emerging from all travails “unbroken in spirit and integrity” . Blessed be this Jane Eyre who, far beyond melodrama and conventional morality , stubbornly maintains :

“I can live alone, if self-respect and circumstances require me so to do. I need not sell my soul to buy bliss. I have an inward treasure, born with me, which can keep me alive if all extraneous delights should be withheld; or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give”

“The more solitary, the more friendless, the more un-sustained I am, the more I will respect myself”

Note that the Oxford edition has Gaskell’s text supplemented with 10 (!) pages of Explanatory Notes & with at least 10 (!) notes per page (obviously this blog's footnotes' apparatus still has some way to go)
(1) Elizabeth Gaskell – The Life of Charlotte Brontë
(2) Or rather it’s Gaskell’s admirable ability of doing justice to both “North” (manufacturing & commerce) and “South” (cathedrals & colleges) ; not only does she lack any condescending attitude vàv the “North”, she has a real appreciation of the North’s merits, all the while being an insightful critic of the social abuses its commercial drive spawned (cf also her excellent novel ‘North & south’
(3) Maria Brontë (mother): ‘departed to the savior in the 39th year of her age’; Maria Brontë (daughter of the aforesaid) died in the 12th year of her age ; Elizabeth Brontë who died in the 11th year of her age; Patrick Branwell Brontë who died aged 30 years ; Emily Brontë who died aged 29 years; Anne Brontë, died aged 27 years; Charlotte Brontë, she died in the 39th year of her age
(4) Out of CB’s “Shirley”, as quoted by EG in The Life
(5) And governess life being so uncongenial to the sensitive yet staunchly autonomous natures of the Brontë –sisters.
(6) In modern parlance this “absence of hope” , this absence of natural “buoyancy of expectation” would be called a lack of “sense of entitlement” (thanks for the formulation, Moss, yet again). And yet, also without hope, without arrogance or presumption, enterprise and perseverance are possible …
(7) Yeah well – I so love Villette, therefore I ‘ll indulge in lavish quotations even though they’re not quite fully relevant to the post (or are they ….?)
- Lucy Snowe soliloquy: “a sorrowful indifference to existence often pressed on me – a despairing resignation to reach betimes the end of all things earthly. […] If [hopes] knocked at my heart sometimes, an inhospitable bar to admission must be inwardly drawn. […] I dared not give such guests lodging. So mortally did I fear the sin and weakness of presumption”
(& when pondering going for a walk or not on a secluded path: ) “For a long time the fear of seeming singular scared me away; but by degrees, as people became accustomed to me and my habits, and to such shades of peculiarity as were engrained in my nature – shades, certainly not striking enough to interest, and perhaps not prominent enough to offend, but born in and with me, and no more to be parted with than my identity”
“and in quarters where we can never be rightly known, we take pleasure I think, in being consummately ignored”
&also in Villette, the outdoorsy moors-girl CB writes thus passionately about wandering about in London: “Prodigious was the amount of life I lived that morning […] I went wandering whither chance might lead, in a still ecstasy of freedom and enjoyment; and I got – I know not how – I got into the heart of city life. I saw and felt London at last: […] I mixed with the life passing along; I dared the perils of crossings. To do this, and to do it utterly alone, gave me, perhaps an irrational, but a real pleasure. Since those days, I have seen the West-end, the parks, the fine squares; but I love the city far better. The city seems so much more in earnest: its business, its rush, its roar, are such serious things, sights, and sounds. The city is getting its living – the West-end but enjoying its pleasure”

merciful gloom

Northern weather can at times be so mercifully gloomy - nothing like darkness & rain & sweeping winds to offer a reprieve from the daily obligation to be cheerful (1). The murky London weather, upon my arrival there last Sunday, was particularly welcome – só in tune with the dismal economic news. I’d been feeling quite uneasy about taking a holiday break in the current conditions, but then, at least it was not going to be an insouciant sunny vacation! (2)

Eurostar disruptions had already complicated my trip’s planning, having had to search on the Web for an extra night of London accommodation at very short notice. Extra train delays further helped to mess up my schedule, so it was an acutely stressed out & glum traveler who descended into the Tube. To make her way to far-out Kensington, where the (oddly ominously named) Centaur Lodge (3), was located.

I got out at the wrong tube-station, Earl’s court, and so still had to walk a couple of miles in the pouring rain. Along the kind of busy road not designed for pedestrians, with ferocious cars roaring by, occasionally spraying the hapless hiker with murky puddle-water. At last I did arrive in more quiet quarters with leafy streets – though they did not look leafy-residential but just leafy-wet. Also, the great number of 'for-sale' signs added to a certain demoralizing atmosphere.

But, at last, there it was! The Centaur Lodge did exist and its front-garden gate swung open creakily. Upon my ringing a little boy opened the door, looking puzzled at my claim of having a reservation. He called his father, who after having stumbled down the stairs, effusively pressed my hand, calling me at once by my first name. Then he apologetically explained the prevailing mess : “why, you see, we’re re-doing the carpets, but your room will be done in an hour”. All the while he was smiling broadly and observing me with an almost insulting fascination, as if I were a particularly peculiar specimen of the human race. (4)

I used the idle hour to replenish calorie-reserves in a small diner off West-Kensington tube station. And I don’t know what restored my spirits more – the cozy diner-activity around me, the heartening tea-with-milk and cheese-sandwich or the reading of a dozen of pages of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë. Anyway, afterwards my lodgings did look a bit less sinister & I could set my mind on more congenial stuff – such as whiling away my time at the British Museum and meeting up with a friend later .

Ah, the British Museum on a rainy day – so sheltering in its 19th Century pompous hospitality. And how consoling to wander about amongst the remnants of civilizations past, in their inexorably logical museum presentation creating an illusion of historical necessity. All those cultural artifacts testifying to humankind's capacity for both savagery and civilization. All those figments of the human imagination ….of which the multifarious winged creatures are definitely my favorites (be they assyrian or egyptian, be they eagle-headed protective spirits or human-headed winged lions).

Given my apocalyptic set of mind, always bent on seeking historical reminders of the rise & fall of civilizations, I was obviously greatly pleased to supplement my stock of decaying empires examples (5) with following notes copied from an educational panel: ”the collapse of the Mycenean civilization in the 12th C BC was followed by a time of cultural poverty, a ‘Dark Age’ that lasted two to three hundred years. During this time […] many of the arts and crafts of the previous era, including writing, were forgotten”. ( Including writing….!) .

Thus my very real present fears could recede and make way for an almost scholarly disinterested fascination with the eternal ebbing & flowing of humankind’s fortunes.

Of course I had to end my museum visit in the great Ancient Greek galleries. Indulging in antiquated feelings of awe and gratitude at that miracle of the Greek aesthetic moment – that unique blend of order and naturalness, that saving grace of beauty, which fuses both ‘quiet grandeur’ and ‘tragic unrest’.

going easy on footnotes
(1) Cf the dreaded ‘rise & shine!’
(2) A very judeo-christian reasoning – thou shall pay with sweat & tears for any enjoyment that possibly might come your way. Well, I did fret about it being irresponsible to not stay at home & shiver real-time at the dismal news – (fear & trembling alas not only out of empathy with the global financial system: my own employer is teetering on the brink of collapse too.)
(3) read & see here why the name Centaur should not necessarily (despite all the deep sympathy & affinity I have with liminal & ambiguous creatures) inspire confidence in a weary traveler
(4) That kind of vaguely disrespectful & over-familiar approach which a lone woman traveler alas often inspires in certain male specimens. And which makes me feel very uncomfortable indeed. (Or could it be that the reserved & wary northerner that I am routinely mis-interprets effusive friendliness?)
(5) I am absolutely fascinated with the ”decline & fall” of the Roman empire – how a whole body of customs, arts, scientific & technical knowledge, how a whole culture could unravel. And as a contemporary cultural pessimist I obviously like to compare the present age’s decadence & turmoil in the Western world with the Roman empire round about AD 350.

the iconography of reading

Well, the grave title may raise expectations this post will not live up to. You’re in for a disappointment if you expect a thoroughly researched, art historical scholarly article on the iconography of reading. (1) But perhaps you’ll bear with my choice of title if it had you fondly envisioning images of people reading. Because that’s exactly what I want to celebrate in this post – those truly heartening sights of people reading, oblivious to the hustle and bustle around them.

We’re obviously not talking here about people perusing papers or magazines – no, it must be a book, and the reader must be absorbed in it, forgetting his surroundings, and thus offering the sight of a rapt stillness in the middle of whirling activity.

Over the course of many years I have built a valued imaginary collection of ‘vignettes’ of people reading in the midst of turmoil. Images I found in stations or on the street, as well as images encountered in books or in paintings. Somehow these images serve as edifying examples, as talismans reminding me of what I value.
Precious reminders, since (terrible confession!) I can be such a sloppy reader – all too easily distracted, not only by the claims of the ‘real’ world, but also by my own limitless capacity for brooding (2).
Therefore I cherish these ‘reading icons’, those inspiring examples humbly asserting the autonomy of the reading self. (4)

Only last Saturday (eaten by existential job-stress related to ongoing financial meltdown) I was cheered by the sight of this middle aged black man queuing in front of me at a busy sandwich bar in the station. He obviously had a cold, witness his coughing and the thick red scarf he wore. And he was holding a book, and reading, ah so intently and with such relish …. Oblivious to the bleary neon lights, to the shouting, to the crushing people around him.

Or another favorite image: once upon a sunny but still chilly spring day, in a busy but rather poor neighborhood in Brussels. This old, slender man was sitting on a bench, wrapped up in a thick coat (looking rather threadbare), wearing fingerless gloves. And he was reading, utterly absorbed in his book, only every once in a while looking up pensively to the sun.

And then this description of Hannah Arendt I encountered in some book (have completely forgotten where). The passage described how in the midst of fearful chaotic refugee scenes in France, Arendt was sitting under a tree, reading, engrossed in a book.

No doubt I find these images so uplifting & soothing because they testify of a certain human dignity that cannot be suppressed by even the most adverse worldly circumstances. It’s the kind of hope needed by the sort of people to whom neither religious consolations nor hedonist oblivion can offer shelter . It’s in fact your typical, naïve mind-over-matter hope (5).

Escapism for humanists…. (6)

But no escaping from the footnotes!
(1) actually, I’m unrepentant. This is the title I wanted, precisely because of its overtones of scholarship in the word “iconography” and precisely because of its association with my favorite art historian Erwin Panofsky. And for those who do want to read some solid art historical stuff, I can highly recommend this article by Elisabeth Losh I stumbled upon while checking the use of the expression “the iconography of reading” (the term yields only 15 Google hits) – it ‘s a wonderful exploration of the imagery of Annunciations : women between a book and an angel. The sheer title!!! “Between the Angel and the Book: The Female Reading Subject of Early Modern Flemish Annunciation Painting”
(2) The unique characteristic of reading is that, brain-processing- wise, it uses up relatively little brain-volume and leaves still ample brainpower for the reader to reflect on what he reads, to “integrate more of her own thoughts and feelings into her [reading] experience “ . (this comes from a fascinating article that really deserves its own footnote 3). But alas, the neurasthenic reader may abuse this extra available brainpower to keep going a simultaneous stream of nagging brooding & worrying.
(3) Caleb Crain's article in the New Yorker Dec 2007 – Mary-Anne Wolf “Proust & The Squid” - it’s about brain-science backing another Proustian intuition: ““to receive a communications with another way of thinking, all the while remaining alone, that is, while continuing to enjoy the intellectual power that one has in solitude and that conversation dissipates immediately”
(4) “attention is another form of freedom”, as A. wrote in a comment to her post. To rid oneself of all pettiness, of all distractions and to choose to concentrate on a sight, or on a thought is indeed a supreme assertion of the freedom and the autonomy of the self as a perceiving and thinking subject . No mere compulsive reaction to stimuli, but chosen attention. It feels as an empowerment of the self – this kind of attention that may well be an instance of the Kantian “ free play of the imagination and the understanding” (= the aesthetic experience). And yes, whenever I’m helplessly at the mercy of worries & dread, the best remedy to get out of that rut is to go to a museum and to concentrate fully and totally on a painting.
(5) It’s such a great tradition, that of the (rightly) deeply pessimistic philosophers living in troubled times, hoping to re-assert by mere thought their dignity vàv the crushing material circumstances they cannot master – like good old Boethius writing “with all the integrity & dignity he could muster” in the face of tyranny and death. & not to forget good old Pascal who wrote “l’homme n’est qu’un roseau, le plus faible de la nature, mais c’est un roseau pensant. Alors toute notre dignité consiste en la pensée »
(6) Escapism = “habitual diversion of the mind to purely imaginative activity or entertainment as an escape from reality or routine”. Obviously I here refer to escapism-with-dignity (‘otium cum dignitate’), with the reader actively imagining and reflecting. To be distinguished from escapism-through-entertainment, which while it lasts can make you forget yourself and your worries (no mean achievement!) but which will not have shored you up, neither your self’s autonomy nor its confidence when you have to return to the scary world outside.

heroic materialism - the sequel

In the previous episode our contemplative economist left New York thoroughly humbled and humiliated. In the face of such display of wealth and success, who would still dare to doubt the superiority of this system, driven by “the deep selfishness of competition” (1) and supported by mathematico-financial wizardry.

The success of free market capitalism may well lay in its smart, illusion-less exploitation of humankind’s selfish urges: innovation and productivity apparently thrive best when spurred on by self-interest. The US success is furthermore propelled by the Americans’ perpetual optimism and urge to action (2).
Whereas centrally planned economies are said to suffer from a certain naïveté: an unwarranted belief in people being productive & innovative also when there’s no personal gain and an equally unwarranted belief in some central intelligence which through rational calculations would be able to steer the economy as a whole.

Animal spirits (3) , selfish greed and even speculation may be great drivers for economic enterprise – think of the 19th C railway mania, the 1990s dotcom and telecom bubbles: without the greedy thirst for great riches, no one would have been ready to venture his capital for these hazardous enterprises.
And though these bubbles in the end ruined the speculators (especially the naive ones who joined the gold-rush last) they did add to society’s tangible wealth (railway-systems, internet & telecom innovation etc).

But of course, free market apologists usually gloss over the social costs associated with the wild mood-swings, the booms and busts, so typical of untrammeled free markets. They also neglect to point out that unrestricted free enterprise can be unrestrictedly selfish and irresponsible . In short, public institutions and regulation are needed to temper the mood swings and especially to make sure that individual greed works at the profit of society as a whole.

And that’s where it went spectacularly wrong over the last decades. An absolute belief in free markets and in auto-regulation by the private sector made us forget that greed never ever regulates itself . A sacred awe for the sophisticated mathematical models of high finance made us forget that mathematics never ever rein in greed. Statistical confidence intervals lulled us into sleep, making us forget that a statistically improbable event, however improbable, is still not impossible.
Finance no longer humbly supported real economic enterprise but had become a self-feeding industry (the financial sector has been the fastest growing industry over the last 20 years, representing an ever growing share of world economic output)(4) .

In the end, this whole disastrous “liquidity and credit crisis” , replete with sophisticated instruments whose outcome can only be calculated by complex mathematical models, is nothing more than the result of a vicious circle of human vices. A shrewd insight in human nature would have done more to prevent it all that the most advanced of quantitative models.

It was the toxic combination of over-optimism, greed and moral hazard (+ plain stupidity?) that got us into this mess. The mathematic-financial wizardry then diligently worked towards amplifying it all and towards distributing its effects all over the globe(5) (6) .

And either governments (ie all of us) will now bail out the troubled financial institutions (at great cost, we speak of more than 700 bln dollars) or else those financial institutions will auto-destruct by an exaggerated fear of lending to each other (now belatedly overcompensating for the complete evaporation of any sense of credit or liquidity risk beforehand).
And though some might cheer at the demise of great and mighty financial institutions, the sad truth is that when they go – people’s savings go, credit goes and we all might as well go back to growing vegetables on a plot of land.

And the culprits? Can they be identified? Will they be punished for their irresponsible greed? Hmmm, the clever ones undoubtedly got out in time, taking with them all the money they made. Laughing all the way from their shaky bank to their lavish homes.

And what are they doing with those heaps of cash? Well, this week while the financial world was burning, stocks and bonds tumbling – millions were forked out for Golden Calves and Sharks at an auction of Damien Hirst works.

This then may be the free market’s ultimate justice : those who made millions by selling stinking Mortgage Backed Securities to unsuspecting investors may now be splurging that money on Dead Animals in Formaldehyde…. (7)

 
This was yet another solid Footnotes-Backed-Post!
(1) Elizabeth Gaskell – North and South. The week that one of the world’s leading brokers went bust and that the US government had to bail out the world’s largest insurer, the week that panic gripped the financial markets, raising the specter of a total collapse of the global financial system in the wake of “the immense speculations that had come to light in making a bad end in America”. That week our contemplative economist contemplated all worst case scenarios and, though partially choked by fear, was even more enchanted by the uncanny parallels between this unfolding 21st century financial panic and a 19th century economic bust as described with such insight & empathy in Gaskell’s 1855 novel …
(2) Some even venture to say that American optimism and hyperactivity (easily apt to veer into mania) are linked to a gene-variant typical for migrants who left everything behind to start a new life : American mania – when more is not enough
(3) John Maynard Keynes – the only economist with a keen sense of metaphor (frequenting Virginia Woolf may have helped) was also equipped with a good deal of psychological insight. He wrote: “Most, probably, of our decisions to do something positive […] can only be taken as a result of animal spirits – of a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities. “
(4) JMK : “speculators may do no harm as bubbles on a steady stream of enterprise. But the position is serious when enterprise becomes the bubble on a whirlpool of speculation”
(5) Bubbles are nothing new – every decade has had its shameful example – but the sheer vastness of this particular boom&bust is mind-boggling.
(6) *** Over-optimism & greed of prospective home-owners: house price are rising, good, they will go on rising! So if I borrow and buy a house now, even if I haven’t got the means, I can sell on my house at a higher price later so , yay let’s go and get a mortgage even I can’t really pay the interests. *** Over-optimism & greed of lenders: oh, a whole new consumer-segment to tap! Let’s go and offer them mortgages – never mind they’re not the most creditworthy borrowers, those mortgages are backed with a house , so we can always sell that one if the borrower can no longer pay what’s due. And who cares about people thus losing their home*** Moral hazard --- oh all those low quality & high risk loans we’re getting on our books – no reason at all to limit that activity, since I can bundle them all in a security, call it a Mortgage Backed Security, get a mathematico-financial smokescreen to make it all look safe and then sell it on to staid investors too impressed with the sophistication of these instruments to critically look into what’s behind it all.
(7) Each epoch has the artists it deserves - our shallow, greedy, manic free-market era definitely deserves Damien Hirst. Actually, Hirst may be an essential part of today's financial eco-system, offering expedient ways to evacuate the system's excess money.

green - the sequel

Not only it's ruining my reputation, all that green. But also, this particular kind of bright green só clashes with the otherwise hushed up hues of this blog.
About time I did an 'abandoned factories' series.

Late Summer

A late afternoon in late summer … like all "late" expressions (late works, late style, … ) redolent with delicate wistfulness.

The sun at noon was still burning hot, but lost strength fast. And in the park the late afternoon brought long shadows and a breeze full of autumnal scents.

It felt so soothing, the decaying light amongst the trees, the crisp haziness of the air.

Mid Summer (or: l'Hôtel de la Gare / the Royal Station Hotel)

Ah, the day was saved, stumbling on these banal pictures (taken back in July, in a small French town). Contemplating them, all anxiety and self-doubt were miraculously quelled. How absolutely re-assuring, how solid, how invigorating even, these images seemed.

Ceci est la Place de La Gare . This is the Station Square.

With flapping flags, obviously. And naturally with the Station Hotel (with shuttered windows and a neatly tiled roof) , and of course with a statue of a local famous 18th Century writer.

And with everything so very quiet and still and self-assured – an eternal fragment of French provincial life.

a lunch concert

A 19th century concert hall is not a bad location to muse about classical longings. Imagine a hall with two stories of balconies - each balcony pompously sculpted in the round, and flanked by velvety red curtains. Imagine rows of creaky seats with fading red upholstery. And light streaming in from a frosted glass ceiling, illuminating four graceful figures on the podium: three humans and a grand piano.

The pianist caresses the keyboard with swift fluidity and in front of the imposing black piano the soprano-singer in evening-dress sways ever so lightly to the melody. The tuxedo-clad violinist seems to stand guard, resting his bow on the violin’s strings, before launching into animated action.

And for a while all is harmonious perfection – the music of course, the pleasing ensemble of two instruments and a human voice. But also the visual grace of it, of those three figures gathered around the gleaming black piano. Formally (musically and visually), it’s a matter of a pleasing unity in multiplicity, of melodious lines, of variations. Emotionally it is about unrest and longing sublimated in melody. It is “rest tempered by movement – movement tempered by rest”(1).

Of course, it is about nostalgia too. A nostalgic longing for a cultivated society of noble taste & gracious urbanity, although such a society, in that ideal, pure & disinterested form may never have existed. Bourgeois snobbery & display and stifling etiquette surely have always been part & parcel of classical concert life. And granted, it’s also a nostalgic longing for the cultivated connoisseur I myself am not.

Frankly, I don’t know where and why I contracted that kind of classical longings – “ce désir en moi qui cherche sa patrie” (2). After all I lack a fully-fledged classical or aesthetic education and belong to the post-punk generation. And what with “classical culture” having become so discredited … But even though I'm aware that classical ideals may never have really existed as we imagine them, I do feel that the longing for them remains valid. The longing for a reconciliation between unrest and order as exemplified by classical aesthetics.

As Bonnefoy remarked upon the often derided neo-classical art: « la nostalgie que portait en soi cette sensibilité tardive est plus véridiquement perpétuable que l’héroique illusion de ce qu’on appelle une haute époque » (3).

And so I sat musing in-between the pieces. My classical longings fulfilled for awhile.
Even though this was just a 35 minutes lunch-concert, with French songs I do not really care for (4) ( and with even a few cloyingly sentimental operette lieder). And despite the very old lady exclaiming very, very, loudly at each good tune “ah, ça … ça c’est jolie!” (5) . And even though afterwards I had to cycle back to work through the pouring rain.

might there be such a thing as notes nostalgia?
(1) Panofsky’s definition of classical contrapposto in the visual arts
(2) Yves Bonnefoy , “that desire within me, searching for its home”
(3) in “Un rêve fait à Mantoue – L’humour, les ombres portées » - « perhaps the nostalgia contained in a late sensitivity/sensibility can last more truly than the heroic illusion of a so-called high period". You can imagine how I cherish that Bonnefoy phrase - it has become something of a talisman to me.
(4) hmmm, the sheer bourgeois frivolity of those 19th C. song-titles! – “Le Bonheur est chose légère” (Happiness is so light a thing - well fleeting I'd personally say or elusive, but light?? ) and “Violons dans le soir” (violins in the evening) , or still “Chanson de l’adieu”
(5) Ah, but she was sweet, really
(6) About the photo: not quite the grand piano in the above described concert hall, but a beautifully gleaming piano all the same, standing in the Liège Musée d’art Moderne, in a corner of the hall, in front of large windows looking out into a very nostalgic bourgeois park. The museum-building itself was the Belgian pavilion for the 1905 World Exposition. So qua mood and intention I dare hope the photo is in tune with the above musings.

apology for the ascetic aesthete (3)

yes, both need an apology - the (allegedly) sour & severe ascetic (1) as well as the (allegedly) effete aesthete (2).

Though ostensibly opposites, the ascetic and the aesthetic attitude are often looked upon with similar suspicion. Perhaps because at times, however different, they do seem equally to disregard basic human urges. Thus both came to be seen as an elitist insult to our common, instinctive sense of pleasure.
But, looking closer, it’s not only as victims of a certain public contempt that these apparent opposites meet. In fact, the aesthetic and the ascetic might very well not be mutually exclusive categories at all. Nay, it’s precisely where the ascetic and aesthetic attitudes intersect that it gets really exciting …. because that’s where springs joy.
Yes, joy! - pure, gentle, disinterested joy (4) .

Like the joy felt upon entering the Fontenay Abbey – a French church & cloister built according to the soberest & severest of principles – as promulgated by the redoubtable ascetic abbot , Saint Bernard of Clairvaux.

Call it joy , or call it an aesthetic shock. Its habitual symptoms are: tears (almost) welling up, a surprised shudder, a slight trembling - awe followed by feelings of silent euphoria & humble gratitude - speechless wonder followed by an avid urge to take it all in, every single minute detail - the desire to stay there forever, contemplating, basking indefinitely in that state of grace.

It’s the kind of shock also felt in the great Gothic cathedrals, which however, in all their upwardly soaring grandeur, in all their complexity of decoration & iconography seem so far removed from the sober Fontenay abbey, with its bare, uncluttered architecture.
And indeed, habitually, the ascetic Saint Bernard (sponsor of simple & serene architecture) is pitched against the undauntedly & lavishly aesthetic Abbot Suger of St Denis (spiritual father of sumptuously decorated & illuminated Gothic churches).

Art historical lore has it that St Bernard was “simply blind to the visible world and its beauty”. He was in pursuit of an austere ideal of monastic life (5) and is still famous for his (suspiciously eloquent … ) diatribes against the profusion of decorations & grotesque sculptures in Romanesque churches .
Erwin Panofsky (6) does nuance this image of the sour & stern St Bernard – but still sees him as bitterly opposed to aesthetic delights. Panofsky speculates that St Bernard’s articulate tirades against art were not so much a sign of his insensitivity to its charms but rather show that he was keenly aware of art’s temptations which would distract humans (& monks in particular) from their higher, spiritual calling (7).

And then we have Abbott Suger, credited with both an ardent aesthetic sense and a shrewd understanding of how ecclesiastical authorities’ fear of art’s sensuality could be assuaged: by persuading them that “the dull mind rises to truth through that which is material”.
In several memorable poems he launches into ecstatic odes of splendor & light, which reunite material sensuality and spiritual elation (8).

Now, taking as proof only my own senses’ humble impressions (9) – impressions gathered in the bare Fontenay-abbey, in the sumptuous Reims & Chartres cathedrals , I’d say that the ascetic and the aesthetic do meet in the transcendence (10) of lines and light .
And that austerity can very well acquire its own profusion of aesthetical delights. Those pure lines of arcades & pillars & vaults & arches ... that pure light streaming in through many windows ....

Thus sheltered by rhythmed space, enveloped in ravishing light – who would worry still about the world, who would not feel elevated and certain in his joy?

So perhaps one should envy those monks … with their regime of simple productive manual work and prayer, their walks around the cloister-garden, their holy masses in that sheltering abbey-space (maybe also with soaring chants? ), undisturbed by any rousing or disquieting images (neither hell nor heaven are depicted in Fontenay).
Watched over only by a single graceful Madonna-statue, basking in her unconditionally loving & welcoming gaze.

a flourishing abundance of ornamental notes of which St Bernard surely would have disapproved.

(1) "ascetic 1 : practicing strict self-denial as a measure of personal and especially spiritual discipline 2 : austere in appearance, manner, or attitude"
& “self-denial” : in this case I suppose it concerns denying to the self any indulgence in facile sensuous & bodily pleasures
(2) aesthete
= “one having or affecting sensitivity to the beautiful especially in art". That “or affecting” captures of course the negative connotations of the fussy, effete artificiality associated with the term “aesthete”
(3) makes one wonder what “aesthetic ascetic” might mean: an attractive, good-looking ascetic person?
(4) I had first written “ecstasy” – but that would not do at all, no, no, a simple & pure word is needed here – not a heavily loaded term as ecstasy
(5) “a life of utter self-denial with respect to personal comfort, food and sleep”. “Silence and a perpetual remoteness from all secular turmoil compel the mind to meditate on celestial things” . (quotes pertaining to St Bernard found in Panofsky’s essay “Abbot Suger of St.-Denis”)
(6) Erwin Panofsky: the most insightful, sensitive and erudite art historian ever
(7) “St Bernard disapproved of art, not because he did not feel its charms but because he felt them too keenly not to consider them dangerous. He banished art, like Plato[…], because it belonged on the wrong side of a world that he could see only as an unending revolt of the temporal against the eternal, of human reason against faith, of the senses against the spirit.”
(8) “For bright is that which is brightly coupled with the bright,
And bright is the noble edifice which is pervaded by the new light, Which stands enlarged in our time”,
“Marvel not at the gold and the expense but at the craftsmanship of the work. Bright is the noble work, but, being nobly bright, the work should brighten the minds, so that they may travel, through the true lights, to the True Light […]. In what manner it be inherent in this world the golden door defines, the dull mind rises to truth through that which is material. And, in seeing this light, is resurrected from its former submersion.”
(9) And if you won’t take my word for it, dear reader, maybe (well, just maybe) this post’s pictures ( taken at Fontenay) may convince you of my thesis that this supposedly austere abbey does appeal to our most sensual & exalted sense of light.
(10)Transcendent! Suspicious word isn’t it, not quite tangible at all & with an equally doubtful list of semi-synonyms: inspiring, inspirational, uplifting, awe-inspiring, moving, magnificent

where I want to be (for a while)

A little over 4 hours of travelling, 2 trains, 1 book – that’s all it takes for an escape. And 1 battered, easy-to-carry bag. That old bag is actually a vital requisite in my personal fiction of a casual traveler: saunter out of a station into the white glare of a burning midday sun, briefly pause for orientation in front of a city-map, then pick up again your bag in one nonchalant sweep and walk gaily off.

Well, we’re all entitled to our own cherished fictions – even if they would crumble under any scrutiny. Because obviously, a contemporary sophisticated traveler does not carry bags but elegantly pulls a sleek suitcase-on-wheels behind her. And neither would any truly blasé traveler set off for a 30-minutes march in the heat to her hotel, she would take a taxi.

But hey, that sophisticated traveler would then miss out on the sheer essence of a French provincial town post 14th of July (1) – it’s just lovely to walk down these hushed, sun-flooded streets, past lazy roadside cafés (with but a few lost tourists passing through on their way South), lovely to chuckle at street names which, so utterly without irony, evoke France’s past military prowess (Avenue de la Première Armée, Place de la Légion d’Honneur). And one just has to veer off one’s route, to stroll into one of these quiet parks with fountains and monuments, pompously commemorating more past French glories.

The hotel lay in a modest, residential part of town. Streets with mom&pop shops (mostly closed), local cafés, artisanal looking warehouses or garages, and a varied set of houses ranging from turn-of-the century bourgeois town-houses to unassuming workmen’ s houses. There was nothing flashy or pretentious about the hotel – but, being located in the “Rue des Fleurs” (street of flowers), the owners had clearly decided to live up to their street’s name. The façade was painted in a soft earthly ochre and the window-sills were all overflowing with red flowers (2).

Entering from the glare outside, the hotel-lobby, slumbering in a semi-darkness, felt pleasantly cool. And it looked all so endearingly neat and sober. The bare furniture and the sparse decorations showing years & years of use and of meticulous care. Red tiles on the floor. An old clock ticking. And a hotel-clerk in keeping with his environment: meticulous and genuinely friendly.

Ah, and those stairs – with that copper-colored iron hand-rail not even attempting at kitsch glamour! Those corridors, with the worn but carefully groomed carpet, with those few pieces of unassorted furniture gathered over many decades. And the room – the room was perfect. Minimalist in the most engaging way - without any trace of trendiness, without gaudy decorations, without any pretentions. A simple room scrupulously furnished with what a guest needs: space, white walls, a bed, a chair, a table, a no-frills bathroom.

Also … a room with a window. A window with white wooden shutters, slightly ajar - dazzling light pouring in through the creaks - and with a transparent white muslin curtain rippling softly in the breeze.

One stretches out on the bed – soothed by so much sober soft whiteness. Soothed too by the peaceful murmurs seeping in – far-off laughter, twittering birds, some muffled city-noises (3).
Yes – this is a good place to stay. This is where I want to be.

3 peaceful footnotes
(1) “French provincial town” means here: any town that is not Paris, not located in the south and neither sea- nor mountain resort. Post 14th of July (France’s national holiday and kick-off date for massive summer-holiday migrations) these towns go into a slumber until their sun-tanned inhabitants return from holidays. One may of course wonder what the hell any sophisticated traveler would be looking for in such a town. One may even question the predicate “traveler” for anyone going to so unadventurous a destination.
(2) Don’t expect any more suggestive detail from me when it comes to describing flora-specimens. “Red flowers” will just have to do.
(3) « Mon dieu Mon dieu. La vie est là. Simple et tranquille, cette paisible rumeur-là vient de la ville. » (Paul Verlaine) / “my god my god – life’s out there – so simple & calm – that peaceful murmur comes from town”

little ode to provincial museums

Provincial(1) ...!

All the energy people spend so as not to appear provincial! Cosmopolitan, sophisticated, cynical, world-wise and post-modern city dwellers on top of the latest global trends (phew) – isn’t that what we all should want to be? Whereas local, unsophisticated, unfashionable, simple, outmoded surely are the kind of adjectives one definitely would not want any of one’s posts to be tagged with?(2)

But look, since we now know that we are all “lonely provincials” (3) anyhow, that none of us lives in the center of the world, why not also succumb without qualms to the genuine charms of provincial museums?

Many of those museums tend to live in a time-warp – embodying still a 19th century European Romantic spirit, oozing this outmoded stern respect for Antiquity & History & High Art but also being plain um, provincial, in their endearing urge to display local artists of dwindling repute.

Broadly speaking, these provincial museums come in two sorts: with and without pretension.

Provincial museums with pretension

Though usually harshly critical towards any kind of pretense – I do make an exception for pretentious provincial museums, because theirs is such a bygone pretense, such a threatened pomposity.
There we have these bloated buildings with neoclassical pillars, grand staircases and pompous statues of self-important (now mostly forgotten) white males. The rooms with either a creepily creaking parquet or a dusty musty carpet (often dating from a renovation-stint several decades earlier). (4)
And if one’s lucky – these rooms still have those old, oval-shaped central seats in the middle of the room, with faded upholstery, upon which many a lady and many a gentleman have rested during their promenade through high culture’s temple.

These rooms then are usually filled with works carefully chosen to flaunt specimens from every art historical period - blithely glossing over the fact that too many of them are second rate.

But shhh …. I’m being excessively unkind here! Perhaps these minor works set off all the better the dozen or so “masterpieces” these museums usually do harbor and to which the ambling visitor at least can devote the attention they merit (undisturbed by thronging fellow visitors and hundreds of competing masterworks) .
And besides, “minor works” or “second rate” are unduly condescending terms - it are not only the ‘universally validated’ masterworks of a certain era that can capture our imagination.

These “minor masters” plied themselves with great skill and dedication to their trade, thus exemplifying how their age saw and represented reality. And sometimes, precisely because they did not create “undisputed masterpieces” – we feel less awed, less boxed in by art historical formulas and we can freely savor this scarcely known painter’s sensitivity to light, or that secondary painter’s obsession with blue skies. Somehow they make us feel more entitled to personal affinity and even affection.(5)

Provincial museums without pretension

Now here the ode becomes an outright love letter … These little, struggling museums (6) with just a couple of rooms, with their “slightly embarrassed antiquities” (7) stemming from local archeological finds , their humble paintings’ collection based on gifts from the town’s richest businessman or from the local artist himself. With these endearing cards accompanying each work – typed in 70s fonts – carrying thoughtful commentaries by a local curator who has spend his or her entire life (oh well, at least a number of years) studying and cherishing these works .

Take the Beaune Musée des Beaux Arts – where I discovered a painter of whom I’d had never heard before. A Hippolyte (8) Michaud (1823-1886) – who of course painted within all the cliché 19th C categories: exalted-historical ; haunted-symbolical ; romantically tormented. But beyond musty historical categories, a vividly moving personal presence emanated from these paintings.



And not in the least from that fascinating self-portrait : a bold modeling and chiaroscuro making for a very tactile presence, a sensitive observation and rendering making us lock eyes with this inquisitive but shy looking young man – wondering about that soupcon of hurt, of despair in his eyes.

And blessed be the considerate curator who has noted some biographical facts for us: only after years of poverty and struggle this Michaud attained “a relative serenity, after his nomination as curator of the Beaune museum” (9)

There’s also an intriguing portrait by his hand of a woman – “in between two ages/ entre deux ages ” as the accompanying card nicely notes. And one cannot but agree with the curator incisively remarking upon the painter’s “subtlety of which he is capable when he is moved by a face” .

And then that arresting pathos in a painting of the dead Christ, which far from being melodramatic sentimentality, may rather be a sign of deep commiseration (10) – the curator again (11) : “a bathos witnessing of his sensibility”.

They’re strangely moving – these unexpected affinities found in small museums – these encounters with unknown dead painters and anonymous curators …

The usual full set of fake scholarly footnotes
(1) provincial
1: of, relating to, or coming from a province
2 a: limited in outlook : narrow ; b: lacking the polish of urban society : unsophisticated
(2) Um, yes I have this thing for Microsoft Word’s list of synonyms
(3) Richard Rorty : “lonely provincialism” [...] stemming from the “admission that we are just the historical moment that we are, not the representative of something a-historical” . According to Rorty the bourgeois postmodern individual cannot but be a lonely provincial with continuing self-doubts, aware of the relativity of his or her perspective. Deeply aware of the fact that no cultural Canon, no way of life can claim any binding or lasting authority.
(4) Sometimes these rooms attempt a reconstruction of epoch furniture and decoration - which in France of course means a room full of Versailles- like pomp & frills - epoch curtains, mirrors, tapestries, do-not-touch tables & stuffed chairs on precariously thin legs– the whole lot often exuding a stale, moldy smell which, I’m afraid, puts off from future museum visits entire generations of whining children (dragged along by their parents).
(5) Examples in this category, starting with those who are located in a ‘province’ but whose collection is scarcely provincial: Antwerp, Lille, Liverpool. (not sure whether I should add Brussels – how provincial is Brussels? Hmmm). Then those with less Major Names on display: Bristol, Manchester, Caen, Reims, Rouen, Dijon, Ghent . & j’en passe.
(6) Cherished examples of small museums without pretence: Bath, Verviers, Laon, Chartres, Autun, Beaune, …
(7) Credits go, again, to Moss for this lovely expression
(8) I so regret that the first name “Hippolyte “ has fallen in disuse
(9) « une relative sérénité, après sa nomination au poste de conservateur du muse des Beaux Arts de Beaune »
(10) perhaps quite incongruously it reminded me of Bellini’s « dead Christ supported by angels”
(11) “effet de pathétisme qui témoigne de sa sensibilité” - don’t know who he or she is, but I’m filled with loving respect and gratitude for the person who wrote those thoughtful notes.

Miscellaneous Objections to Life

“Struggle for Life most severe between Individuals and Varieties of the same Species :

Each organic being is striving to increase in a geometrical ratio; each at some period of its life, during some season of the year, during each generation or at intervals, has to struggle for life and to suffer great destruction. When we reflect on this struggle, we may console ourselves with the full belief, that no fear is felt, that death is generally prompt, and that the vigorous, the healthy, and the happy survive and multiply” (1)

No fear is felt?? Death is generally prompt? Wow, what a consolation for life’s conditions … !
But perhaps Mr Darwin was not (primarily...) referring to human organic beings, but rather to nature’s multitude of fearless swallows, intrepid thrushes, healthy bees and frivolous fruit flies, all vigorously vying for food & residence? And of course, it’s not up to science to lament the human condition. Better leave the moaning and meaning-seeking to philosophers and other unproductively reflecting organic beings.

But so, there we have the human species, composed of a great many assertive varieties – there we have the “plurality of man, out of which arises the whole realm of human affairs – in its grandeur and misery”. (2) And, finally, there we have Darwin’s observation that “competition is most severe between allied forms, which fill nearly the same place in the economy of nature”. So are we humans doomed to blindly struggle and compete, to live a life of “intense and uninterrupted contest of all against all, of ceaselessly showing oneself to be the best of all” (2) ?

In classical jargon this is called the “agonal spirit” (3), nowadays one might euphemistically speak of "peer-pressure".

In polite, political terms, the plurality of man is expressed in the many opinions that reflect each man/woman’s particular position in the world. Opinions that are competing for supremacy - and it is a matter of force which opinion will be eventually be imposed on the multitude. Force which can be exercised either through persuasion and rhetoric or through violence. But whatever way - one opinion will try to get the better of another

And yet, amidst the clashing assertions of subjective desires and opinions there’s also man’s ability to reflect and to dialogue, to understand another man’s position. Instead of trying to push through one’s own opinion one might strive to find the truth in each opinion – not by practicing the political art of persuasion, but rather by indulging in the eminently philosophical art of dialectic speech.
It’s a famous topos in western philosophy of course: the Socratic tradition as recorded in Plato’s early dialogues . These dialogues, 'merely' talking through a subject from diverse viewpoints, end inconclusively. They yield no result, except perhaps to have arrived at “understanding how and in what specific articulateness the common world appears to the other”. It’s the kind of exchange “most appropriate for and most frequently shared by friends” . (2)

But of course this post could not yet end on such a promising, albeit inconclusive, note of human dialogue.
Nope – there’s still more moaning to endure! If only because I won’t let go of the opportunity to introduce in this blog the gloriously-abundantly pessimistic Schopenhauer with his view of life as sheer hell.
In quite Darwinian terms (4), Schopenhauer identifies each individual’s selfish will to live & reproduce as the basis of human misery. As long as we’re at the mercy of this tyrannical drive, we will vacillate forever between the stress of asserting our individual will in an inimical world and the boredom of being at rest without any stimuli to keep us busy. A bit more of this individual will to live, he states, and life would altogether have been too hellish to sustain (quite Darwinian undertones again!(5) )

Is there no escape then, no deliverance from this dreadful condition? Ah, but yes, there is – in the aesthetical state of being, in our enjoyment of and engagement with art, when we exercise all our faculties of feeling, intellect and imagination without suffering the stress of real life battle. When we do not have to “will” anything at all – when we can merely bask in the pure delights of the mind & the senses – without any individual selfish assertion in the world. It’s perhaps in art that we get the closest to substituting our limited individual perspective for a universal one. But these moments of aesthetical escapism are only transient, and offer no enduring redemption.

So is there then no true way out, short perhaps of a superhuman (and eventually self-defeating) self-negation?
Well, deliverance from this continuous strife might start with the simple realization that others have this individual will too, “l’autre est un je / the other is an I“. Call it empathy (yes, a bit of a recurrent theme in this blog – and besides, Schopenhauer himself thought of loving kindness and compassion as the basis of all morality (6)). Or call it ‘piercing through the illusion of the individual self’ . Anyway, here we have Schopenhauer’s precepts for a good life: devote thyself to the life of the spirit & art ; transcend the illusion of thy individual will through compassion.

Anyone familiar with Indian philosophy will of course be nodding her head off by now - and yes, Schopenhauer was profoundly influenced by the great Indian writings (7) and his ideas echo their teachings (8) .

Now what was the point of this particularly ponderous post? Is there at least a conclusion? Or have I merely been frivolously indulging in an inner dialogue? (But mind you: a dialogue with long dead writers and sages, as well as with a very alive and kicking correspondent (9)) .
But actually, yes, there is a point I did want to make: that the world with its inexorably brutish facts may be adequately explained and controlled only by objective science but that we as human beings cannot and will not be content with truth only – we will always seek meaning. And this quest for meaning (however unproductive and inconclusive) reverberates throughout the centuries and across continents, – be it in a 20th century political philosophy like Arendt’s, or in 19th century pessimist-humanist ruminations ( Schopenhauer) or in the ageless ideas of Indian philosophy.

quite a serious series of footnotes
(1) Charles Darwin – The Origin of Species – Chapter III Struggle for Existence
(2) Hannah Arendt – The Promise of Politics
(3) Agonal – Agony – I picture gladiators relentlessly fighting for victory (or a heroic 4.5 hours battle between two top-tennis-players?)
(4) Schopenhauer (1788-1860) wrote his main works before Darwin had published his magnum opus (1859) – another instance of a philosophical intuition anticipating scientific theories based on elaborately ascertained facts
(5) And thus the seeming mystery of altruism (in evolutionary terms, that is) may precisely lay in the fact that too relentless and too aggressive an egoism of competing varieties might eventually result in extinction of the whole species.
(6) But alas, alas, this wise, compassionate philosopher, who so eloquently promoted art and loving kindness, in other writings saw fit to vent the most blatant misogyny. Fearlessly this brilliant philosopher contradicted his own moral teachings when denouncing as a 'defect' women’s allegedly greater sympathy for human suffering.
(7) He qualified the “Upanishads” as the solace of his life (and death)
(8) I’m not very well acquainted myself with Indian philosophy , but luckily there’s Phoenix summarizing the gist of it all in a single sentence: it’s about “balancing the business of living, your 'karma' and the 'maya' ( i.e. the superficial things that are illusory - life itself actually) with the life of the spirit.” And the upbeat conclusion of this savoir-vivre is that this balancing act “is pretty much doable and is the only way to be, or rather become...”
(9) Actually, this post may be a reply to a mail by Phoenix ….

people watching

That 7-year old kid at the fun-fair was quite a charmer, despite his quirky mood-swings. Or maybe, he charmed thanks to those shifting moods, because, truly, they were a delightful spectacle to watch. The boy was the youngest of a bunch of kids which had been set loose (under benign parental guidance of course) amongst the attractions of a local summer fair. As small as he was, he looked very brave amongst the bigger kids.
But then, as swift as a cloud passing over the sun, his face would fall, his lips would tremble, tears would start rolling. And soon he'd be sobbing as the unhappiest little boy in the world. To be all smiles again five minutes later, eyes sparkling and ready to go for it. Oh and then how combative he would look, with anger flaring up in his eyes, when he didn’t get right away the coveted red football…

As adults too, we get bombarded all the time by multifarious emotions of frustration, despondency, anger, elation, … but thick layers of self-control smother most of those emotions, before they even make it to the surface of our face. Haven't we all had years & years of training in self-control. Dignity! Restraint!

Indeed, “could anything be more puerile than a mankind howling because it isn’t happy” (1) - surely we all have been told something to that effect at some stage in our education (even if only by our own, sterner alter ego).

Therefore, watching adult people in public spaces, is usually not very exciting. Adult people have perfected strategies of non-expressiveness, routinely deployed when they're on their own in, say, trains, waiting rooms etc.

When I first started working (oh, ‘the horror the horror’ (2)) all those years ago, I had to commute each day by train & underground. If I wasn’t reading, I used to watch people – trying to guess their lives. But all those silent people on the 7.12 morning train, wrapped up in their thoughts or their newspapers ..... – it was impossible to guess what they thought or felt.

It was on that same morning train, wrapped up in my own somber Monday morning thoughts, seeking support in a book (3), that this brilliant passage (about people in a train-compartment) by Virginia Woolf struck me:

“Life’s what you see in people’s eyes; life’s what they learn, and having learnt it, never, though they seek to hide it, cease to be aware of – what? That life’s like that, it seems. Five faces opposite – five mature faces – and the knowledge on each face. Strange though, how people want to conceal it! Marks of reticence are on all those faces: lips shut, eyes shaded, each one of the five doing something to hide or stultify his knowledge. One smokes; another reads; a third checks entries in a pocket-book; a fourth stares at the map of the line framed opposite; and the fifth – the terrible thing about the fifth is that she does nothing at all. She looks at life. Ah, but my poor, unfortunate woman, do play the game – do, for all our sakes, conceal it!”

trying to confine the footnotes to credits only
(1) From the “Lost Girl” by D.H. Lawrence – must confess I never finished reading that book. But well, I did retain this piece of dour-governess- morality at page 60 : "Happiness is a sort of soap-tablet – he won’t be happy till he gets it, and when he’s got it, the precious baby, it’ll cost him his eyes and stomach. Could anything be more puerile than a mankind howling because it isn’t happy: like a baby in the bath!”
(2) 'Ever so useful, Joseph Conrad' – as Moss would put it. She (Moss) also coined the brilliant expression “life’s penitential status” which, coming to speak of it, was indeed how I thought of life when first being subjected to the harsh and inimical discipline of working life.
(3) Virginia Woolf: An Unwritten Novel (as published in ‘the complete shorter fiction’)

a picture at an exhibition

Perhaps we do not only guess and project when we read, but also when we see…..

Take this painting (1) that attracted me right from the moment I entered into that room. It was the integrity of that pose, the graveness of that look that impressed me – the non-frivolous, non-religious, not-seeking-to-please quality of it. A mature, rather careworn but unyielding, woman looking at life.

But then, what does the official description state: “sweetly contemplative look”.
Sweetly ….????? I can’t see anything sugary cute in this portrait…

(1) Joos Van Cleve: Katlijne van Mispelteeren (c. 1530-1535)

“we guess as we read, we create; it all starts with an initial mistake” (1)

This is a confession. I am guilty of a wrongful appropriation. For over a year I have unjustly enlisted a borrowed phrase as a private talisman to ward off distress. It was an error of projection and a sad case of not finishing reading a sentence.

But let’s put you to the test, dear reader. Let’s see whether you are as tempted as I was to project stoic acceptance into this phrase:

“People who have ceased to hope that they will be fully understood express themselves with something of the torment of the deaf mute” (2)

What kept on echoing in my mind was “people who have ceased to hope” - and I thought of it as people who have wisely shed unrealistic expectations and who therefore would no longer be anguished about being (mis)understood. Stoically consoling, somehow.
But I had completely ignored the subsequent “torment of the deaf mute” (3)…. I had not understood that “ceasing to hope” does not equal “ceasing to need” … And so I had blithely skipped the essential, tormented part of the phrase.

Let me warn you that I’m wrongfully appropriating again: the above are not my own coffee-cup and glass of water. I just found them like that, left behind on a café-table. I myself am a stolid tea-drinker, not a sophisticated, wired espresso-sipper. But somehow an espresso-cup seemed more glamorously melancholic than a sensible tea-mug, and hence also more suited to illustrate this post. (4)

Trying to get more words into the footnotes than in the main body of text
(1) Proust - La fugitive : « “On devine en lisant, on crée; tout part d’une erreur initiale […] Une bonne partie de ce que nous croyons, et jusque dans les conclusions dernières c’est ainsi, avec un entêtement et une bonne foi égale, vient d’une première méprise sur les prémisses »
(2) The art historian Max J. Friedlaënder when describing the portraits painted by Quinten Metsys (Flemish 16th C painter)
(3) I’m all the more not to be forgiven for ignoring the second part of that sentence, since one of my favorite books is “The Heart is a Lonely Hunter” by Carson Mc Cullers. A poignant account of the appeal a deaf mute exerts on a set of lonely people in a small village in the American south. Each of them turns to the deaf-mute to express their hopes and anguishes – his silent smiling seen as proof of his understanding. (Whereas the deaf-mute in reality is rather politely puzzled by the emotional gushes of those people and in his turn ardently communicates in sign-language with the only other deaf mute in town, who is a simpleton addicted to sweets)
(4) a puzzling difference in image really, the one between tea- and coffee- drinking.

old books & newspaper scraps

Once, during a late night bookish discussion, as grave and fervent as they get at the impressionable age of 20, a friend held forth that at 40, people not only get grey hair but also start rereading their favorite authors. How awed I was by this "rereading" ….. it seemed to evoke erudite wisdom, and some sort of discerning maturity which returns to but a select few authors after a lifetime of reading.

As so often, the predicted banal facts proved more reliable than my own accompanying idealistic projections. Hence, Erudite Wisdom and Discerning Maturity have kept eluding me (so what - they’d already lost their luster in these postmodern times anyway) but the part about the grey hairs (just a few of them tho’) and especially about the rereading is quite true.

I’m alas not gifted with a comprehensive memory nor with powers of concentration that easily rise above the distractions & demands of the humdrum business of living. But still, over the years every once in a while a book, a painting, a piece of music has managed to pierce through this shell of dullness - offering an insight, a poetic intuition, some fragment of wisdom or beauty that stayed. And now, having indeed arrived at re-reading age, I love to go back to the writers and painters who have moved me, and love to amass further tokens of their world.

Amassing …. there’ s something of that in all book buying (and this mass becomes quite tangible when eg cycling uphill with the latest book-acquisitions, or when moving house). Now I’ve never been a true book-collector, nor an old-and-rare books connoisseur. (Am not enough of an object-fetishist for that I guess. And perhaps too much of a content-over-form person? )

But when chasing books out of the latest fashion-scope, one inevitably ends up in second-hand book stores where both the time-bound and the very material qualities of books become apparent, so much more so than in shopping malls stocked with piles of new books. Lately I‘ve even surprised myself with buying different editions of the same book . Mind you, am still not into the pursuit of officially famous or rare editions. But I am somehow moved by how different editions testify to the life of a book, how a book is subject to the vagaries of cultural reception and lay-out styles.

Take a book by, say, an old-school art historian like Panofsky : how tellingly different is an early 70s edition from a 2000 edition. Qua content, the main text is the same of course, but how revealing are the differences between the learned fore- (or after-) words in the respective editions– how endearingly dated they can be, thus unintentional proof of the transient quality of cultural interpretation.

And then , take the lay-out, the font, the sheer material quality of paper …. How I love for instance those 30s and 40s art books, with their B&W photo-reproductions almost resembling charcoal-drawings, their heavy paper and their black fonts in slight relief…

There’ s of course also the mere fact that a book has had successive owners, who have left their traces. The well-thumbed library books, sometimes still with their inventory -card of loans made. Or the almost pristine books where suddenly, after pages of immaculate printed text, a pencil-annotation or an underlined sentence signals the attentive presence, once, of a previous reader. (With my own filthy habit of ample underlining and marking I doubt any of my books will ever get an after-life in a second hand shop).

The book I found yesterday had everything to make my heart miss a beat. A 1934 edition of a monograph about a little known pre-impressionist Belgian painter whom I love dearly: Hyppolyte Boulenger. He was a painter of landscapes and brought into this world a certain hue of stormy-weathered blue, especially irresistible in combination with his unique tone of very earthly, brownish greens. In whatever museum room – whenever my eye is drawn to a certain blue and a certain green, I know there’s no need to go and check the name.

Boulenger is not very present on the internet and the few available color-reproductions completely miss the so very material, painterly quality of his colors. Strangely enough, the black & white reproductions in this 30s book don’t disappoint me as modern reproductions do – their manifold hues of grey being so respectfully suggestive of the original color-nuances.

While contentedly leafing through the book back home, a newspaper-scrap falls out. 23 May 1943 … an announcement of a Boulenger exhibit in the Brussels Royal Museum of Fine Arts. On the other side of the scrap – more art news and a column with reminders of events on the same 23rd of may in history. Jeanne d’Arc sold to the English for 10.000 pound on may 23rd 1430, decease of Rockefeller on may 23rd 1937. At first I’m charmed and delighted by this authentic scrap of time. Then chilled, when I realize what year it was . 1943 …. the war in full swing, Brussels occupied by the Nazis. And in this city “whose terrible future had arrived” (1) – frivolous art columns were written, sweet landscape exhibits were organized. (2)

Just two glum footnotes
(1) Paraphrase on a line from a December 1938 poem by Auden about Brussels: “a city whose terrible future may have just arrived”.
(2) Ok, I’ll keep the morbid brooding contained to a single gloomy footnote. For one like me, who has always so sincerely revered the civilizing program of humanist education and high art – it is bitter to have to admit that this humanist tradition of high art has not ever managed to be “a barrier against barbarism”. According to the (ever so dismal) George Steiner this failure of high culture to effectively “humanize” humanity was catastrophically proven in the 20th century and is one of the reasons of the demise of high culture’s standing after WWII… “Where culture flourished, barbarism was , by definition, a nightmare from the past […] We now know that this is not so. […] We now realize that extremes of collective hysteria and savagery can coexist with a parallel conservation of the institutions, bureaucracies, and professional codes of high culture. […]Libraries, museums, theatres can prosper next to concentration camps”

train cantata

Such a sensuous experience, traveling in a rattling slow train with its windows open - immersed in sounds that smell like iron , sounds that feel like sheer wheezing speed. Never will an air-conditioned, shock-proof fast train be able to match this physical sensation of speed in a jangling local train.

I don’t suppose Bach has written any of his cantatas to be heard on a continuous bass of a rumbling train. But devoutly straining to follow the intertwining lines of a violin and an alto voice - instrument & human voice become interchangeable. And completely captive to these voices, it then hardly matters anymore whether the buzz of the basso continuo is the rumble of a train or of an organ.

the last one to stay with us / le dernier de tous

It is not the most uplifting knowledge: the fact that we are utterly captive to physiological processes, not only in our obvious physical functioning, but also in our deepest sense of Self, in our thinking and feeling.

The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat

Tales of neurological dysfunctions are always harrowing – they seem so utterly without redemption or catharsis, unless … unless they’re told by a sensitive humanist as Oliver Sacks . As a clinical neurologist he has studied neurological deficits resulting in all kinds of devastating losses: “loss of speech, loss of language, loss of memory, ….” . As a sympathetic human being, as a humanistic writer he is interested in how the “person", the "human being” deals with these pathological aggressions. As he writes in the introduction to his book “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat”, there’s always “a reaction, on the part of the affected individual, to restore, to replace, to compensate for and to preserve its identity”.

Anyone with lesser scientific credentials than Sacks might be dismissed as being naïve in this stubborn, humanist respect for a “self” which remains in the midst of physiological disintegration (1). As it is, his poignant stories show us human identity as both frail, utterly subject to illness and decay, and resilient. In a story about a man suffering from Tourette’s syndrome he asks rhetorically “How will, how can, the ego stand this bombardment? Will identity survive? Can it develop, in face of such a shattering, such pressures – or will it be overwhelmed, to produce a “Tourettized soul? ”. And yes, apparently identity can move beyond the pathology, for instance , in this story, through channeling the wild Tourette’s tics in brilliant jazz improvisations.

Or in the case of a man suffering from severe amnesia, living in a string of unconnected present moments, without any remaining capacity to form human bonds or even to hold a thought for longer than just a moment : “But if he were held in emotional and spiritual attention – in the contemplation of nature or art, in listening to music, in taking part in the Mass in chapel – the attention, its “mood”, its quietude would persist for a while and there would be in him a pensiveness and peace we rarely, if ever, saw during the rest of his life at the home."

It is quite moving (and consoling? ) to see how convinced Sacks is of the redemptive potential of art – which, in its free and disinterested appeal to our senses & sensibilities, seems to be able to concentrate whatever mental energies we may have left and thus to keep us from being at the mercy of “crude drives and impulsions ”. Sacks sincerely believes in the “undiminished possibility of reintegration by art, […] by touching the human spirit: and this can be preserved in what seems at first a hopeless state of neurological devastation” .

When the Self is Sniffing & Sneezing

But let’s move to less traumatic realms to test the behavior of our Self amidst physiological turmoil. Let’s take those instances when we’re just tired or hungry or feverish. Not only will we be cycling uphill less swiftly, but also may we be less likely to arrive promptly to the conclusion that 1 plus 1 equals 2. Unless we’re professional cyclists our sense of self will be hardly affected by the muscle-fatigue but how about that diminishment in the mental faculties?

Amongst the latter it seems that in particular Reason and Logical Thinking are the first to go under duress (2). Ah, Reason! That summit of human capabilities! Yes, but is it really integral to our sense of Self, to our Identity? Important, valuable and indispensable (3) as they are, Reason or Logical Thinking somehow seem like neutral qualities: though they unquestionably differentiate us, they do not really characterize us as a person (4). In a way it’s like with muscles – some people just have a more powerful apparatus than others. And mere swings in the sugar level, for instance, will affect the functioning of both Muscle and Logical apparatus.

Now, in any modern competitive environment one is definitely judged according to one’s Reasoning skills (these days less so on muscle power) and one cannot really afford any lapses in logical thinking. There will always be those specimens of the human race who prey on any perceived weakness and who will not fail to humiliate the hapless feverish & sneezing human, rejoicing in their own contrasting strength of mental grasp. (5) But thank god there are also those other specimens of the human race (and yet, they are too few) who show concern when someone is ill – who value and respect people for more than their Logical Skills.

But so, think of that hapless feverish human – who is dead tired, who cannot cycle, who cannot think logically: what kind of “I” is there still left, which Selves do still remain?

Well not the foreign language Selves at any rate (it takes only a simple cold or an empty stomach or a bit of stress to have me helplessly fumbling for words in any language but my own). Nor does the practical, problem-solving Self seem a very resilient persona (goes to show that is only an acquired trait - ready to go at the first spot of trouble - well, in my case, that is). But hopefully, yes hopefully, there does remain a courteous & affectionate Self, who treats people with love and respect. (6) And a feeling, intuitive Self? Oh yes definitely, no doubt, the feeling Self remains and perhaps even all the more so, when fever has dissolved all other, pedantically analytical and logical, Selves.

And truly, nothing like a slight fever to promote full immersion into an art experience – visual arts, I would say, or music – an immersion without reserve, without the distancing chaperone of logic. And though eloquency often fails me in such conditions of feebleness (no strength to compose a sentence let alone a full text, no energy even to read a longer text) I can still happily & feverishly tinker then with photos, perhaps I'm even all the more spontaneously and contentedly immersed in the visual , when not under the strains of reasoning. (7)

And when being ill, while not interested in food at all, I am still sensitive to the quality of light, to the slow dances of shadows, to far-off echoing sounds of playing children and humming birds, to the smell of rain, … Oh yes, under duress, that inner atmospheric barometer might be the very last one of my Selves to go ….

And there will always be Proust ...

But in matters of neurology and self-observation the last word of course has to go, yet again, to Proust (8) :

“For some moments, […] I stayed alone with this little inner person, who greeted the rising sun with a song. Of all the Selves which compose our personality, it are not the most apparent that are most essential for us. In myself, when ill health will have slain one after another, there will still remain two or three Selves, more enduring than the rest, notably a certain philosopher who is happy only when he has discovered in two works of art, in two sensations, a common element. But the last of all, I have sometimes wondered whether it would not be this little weather-fellow, like the one the optician at Combray had in his shop window to forecast the weather, and who, taking off his hood when the sun shone, would put it on again if it was going to rain. This little weather-man, […] I do think that in my final hour of agony, when all my other ‘selves’ will be dead and gone, if a ray of sunshine were to break through the clouds, while I am breathing my last breath, the little barometer-fellow will feel quite comfortable, and will take off his hood to sing: “Ah! at last, fine weather!”

Selves hidden in the footnotes

(1) Colin Mc Ginn in a NYRB review of Sacks’ latest book “Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain -
“ His implied message is therefore one of tolerance and understanding. […] The preservation of self: that could be the motto for all of Sacks's writing on neurological disorders. […] There is always an "I" there, someone to whom things matter; so long as there is consciousness at all, there is a subject of that consciousness. Even if you can't tell your wife from a hat, there is still a you that must deal with this disability. Ultimately, then, Sacks's clinical case studies are exercises in love and respect »
(2) A recent experiment showed that when sugar-levels are too low, people were less likely to take decisions based on logical thinking but would rather resort to Intuition, which apparently needs less glucose to operate. “It takes a lot of nervous energy to do logical thinking, whereas intuition takes very little (since intuition usually requires the mind to be free-wheeling or idling). When the nervous energy of the brain runs down then the mind switches off logical thinking”
(3) Is that enough of an ode to Reason? I really wouldn’t want to look like a reason-basher here!
(4) Because Reason is supposed to be objective/universal, not subjective?
(5) Personal note: I should learn to stay home from work when I feel ill – that heroic work-presenteism of mine only gets me into trouble – and besides, I hate being humiliated
(6) Well, one can always hope and try, but truth is: when I’m feverish and tired I often snap at people. Though on the other hand, I do seem to be more, um, softer or compassionate when I run a fever, more tolerant of human fallibility & frailty in general. My own feebleness as a source of affection for my “fellow creatures of chance’s kingdom” ?
(7) This ‘words versus visuals’ passage echoes another blog-discussion about analytical and distancing words versus ‘unthinking’ visuals --- the visual does seem to appeal to a more intuitive self, and feels less exhausting, requiring less disciplined, systematic reasoning.
(8) Proust - La Prisonnière p6 - « Pendant quelques instants […] je restais en tête à tête avec le petit personnage intérieur, salueur chantant du soleil […] De ceux qui composent notre individu, ce ne sont pas les plus apparents qui nous sont le plus essentiels. En moi, quand la maladie aura fini de les jeter l’un après l’autre par terre, il en restera encore deux ou trois qui auront la vie plus dure que les autres, notamment un certain philosophe qui n’est heureux que quand il a découvert, entre deux œuvres, entre deux sensations, une partie commune. Mais le dernier de tous, je me suis quelquefois demandé si ce ne serait pas le petit bonhomme fort semblable à un autre que l’opticien de Combray avait placé derrière sa vitrine pour indiquer le temps qu’il faisait et qui, ôtant son capuchon dès qu’il y avait du soleil, le remettait s’il allait pleuvoir. [.. .] je crois bien qu’à mon agonie, quand tous mes autres « moi » seront morts, s’il vient à briller un rayon de soleil, tandis que je pousserai mes derniers soupirs , le petit personnage barométrique se sentira bien aise, et ôtera son capuchon pour chanter : « Ah ! enfin, il fait beau »

shadow play / vocabulaire des ombres

a primer on light

Suppose you’d want to do a post about shadows & light and , while procrastinating at your computer, you’d browse the web for inspiration. You would soon wish yourself back on the high school benches to learn all about Optics and Physics and Neurobiology.
Who would not want to discover the secrets of The Nature of Light ( is it a Wave? Is it a Particle? ) and learn about how it Reflects and Refracts ? Who would not fall for the seductions of Atmospheric Optics , studying the delicate interactions between air, dust, haze, water and Light ( Why is the Sky Blue? Why are Clouds White? ). And of course one would love to get a crash-course in anatomy and neuro-biology to understand why we see what we see - or rather, how we make up what we see. (1)

shadows defined

But since neither my key-board nor my failing brain is set up for mathematical formulas, we’ll have to stick to good old words to approach our subject, and to visual observations and general ruminations.
The number of entries (Fourteen!!! not counting the a’s & b’s) for “Shadow” in the Merriam-Webster dictionary already indicates the extent of the human fascination with Shadows. A fascination which has fostered a range of connotations going way beyond the humble shadow’s status as a derivative optical phenomenon.
In order to thwart false expectations, I’ll be therefore transparent about my own motivations for this post: sharing my sensuous-emotional response to the visuals of shadows & light, in reality and in art.
So there will be no gloom & doom in this post, hardly any drama - at the very most there may be some faint metaphysical mutterings. In Merriam Webster definition terms this means I’ll safely concentrate on meanings 1,5 & 8.

1) : partial darkness or obscurity within a part of space from which rays from a source of light are cut off by an interposed opaque body
5) : the dark figure cast upon a surface by a body intercepting the rays from a source of light (lovely definitions, conjuring up a scientific graph with purposeful ligh-waves brutally blocked off by an unwaveringly opaque volume)
8) : a shaded or darker portion of a picture

I am moved by shadows ...

This being said, there’ s no denying, I am moved by shadows and reflections, and by how they indicate the intensity of light & the time of day – like this morning, waking up and seeing the shadowy edges of the curtains projected on the wall (announcing a ravishingly sunny day) . Or later, staring out of the window – coming under the spell of a silent cast shadow falling on the glaringly white brick wall.
I am somehow soothed by the refractions & reflections of light & its many shades – like the light refracted by the dust in a room, drawing hovering sun & shadow stripes on the wall, late in the afternoon. And ah, the elation of light bouncing off a water surface or an iron balustrade. And what else are shadows but the silent companions of all these delicious light effects.

But still, what would be so particularly poignant about light and shadows? Apart from their general usefulness to help us see and interpret a three-dimensional world? Perhaps it’s their sheer fleeting quality, their utter complicity with Time (and thus with us, transient beings) . As Gombrich states quite factually: “a shadow is determined by the hour of the day and the time of the year, both governing the position of the sun at a given latitude”.

Though of course it is Bonnefoy, with his poetic intuitions, who gets closest to this pathos of shadows, and to why one would want to celebrate them :

“a desire to face the world in its most fleeting aspects, seemingly least charged with being, to consecrate them so that I may be saved with them” .

And: “what the cast shadow really designates, as the hand on a dial, is such place at such moment”

shadows in art

As an eminently visual phenomenon, it is odd that the representation of shadows & chiaroscuro has for so long been rather the exception than the rule in art. Of course, insofar as art is expected to represent symbols or “essences”, the fleetingness of shadows would be very disruptive indeed. Imagine shadows messing up the eternally frozen Egyptian images…

But also in the early Italian renaissance art, clearly on the representational track, cast shadows are rare. Though they did want to represent reality and more specifically reality as seen from the viewpoint of a spectator. And so they did use all the illusionary tricks from perspective to modeling via shading (3) . But they were still out to catch “essences” , and would only allow the use of shading to create the illusion of three-dimensional volumes on a two-dimensional plane. And perhaps a few attached shadows here & there to enhance the illusion of depth. So yes, shadow-modeling as a useful means to conquer space on the canvas. But no explicit cast shadows, since these were deemed to clutter and confuse an otherwise harmonious composition.

It is in the Northern Renaissance art that light and shadows tentatively gain prominence, in the wake of the Northern bent for realism and individualism. The Northern masters wanted to represent people, landscapes and interiors “in the uniqueness of the moment, not in the abstraction of the essence” . And “ the individuality of the moment is represented by the shadow of objects” (Todorov) .

A personal explanation for this particular northern sensitivity to atmosphere and light is that just because light is so rare in the north, it is considered to be all the more precious. Also, the hazy northern skies soften the light & refract it in a thousand nuances. Whereas in the South the sheer abundance of light and its glaring harshness may mean it is less avidly and lovingly observed.

As to this North-South contrast, Gombrich compares to good effect paintings of madonna’s by two 15th C contemporaries. The Italian master ( Masaccio ) evokes a regal presence on a throne, and masterly suggests solidity and volume through modeling via shading, but introduces only the barest of cast shadows and does not evoke any atmosphere. Whereas the northern master ( Campin ) places his Madonna in a very common interior with a fire burning in the hearth, with a towel on the rack, with many everyday objects, all casting shadows. So, in contrast to the imposing eternal essence in the Italian version this Northern madonna has become a living human being , present in this world, inhabiting a passing moment.

This advent of fleeting light & shadows in art is quite quite moving ….., not only because it marks the advent of the individual existence, of the here & now in art, but also because it acknowledges this oh so human oh so sensuous sensitivity to the vagaries of light.

Of course, during the baroque period shadowy mysteriousness and dramatic cast shadows abound - both Southern and Northern masters of that époque excelled in chiaroscuro and knew how to exploit the dramatic potential of dark & light contrasts.

But perhaps the more modest genre and interior paintings are dearer to me: a maid sweeping a room while light filters through the windows, a dark corridor with at the end the sunny rectangular patch of a door opening, the hazy reflections and shadows of church windows and pillars suggested on a wall. And then I think of the paintings by Pieter de Hooch, Emmanuel De Witte …


And yes, the more fleeting & humble, the more consoling and soothing I find it to behold the light and shadow play in paintings (5).

not that many footnotes
(1) Dale Purves & Timothy J. Andrews (department of neuro-biology University of Durham):
“because the complexities of a three-dimensional world are projected onto a two-dimensional receptor sheet, the interpretation of most retinal images is equivocal” - we’re just guessing at what we’re seeing, ready to be fooled by illusions – we all know that, don’t we.

(2) Merriam Webster – definition of shadow
1: partial darkness or obscurity within a part of space from which rays from a source of light are cut off by an interposed opaque body 2: a reflected image 3: shelter from danger or observation 4 a: an imperfect and faint representation b: an imitation of something : COPY 5: the dark figure cast upon a surface by a body intercepting the rays from a source of light 6: PHANTOM 7 plural : DARK 1a 8: a shaded or darker portion of a picture 9: an attenuated form or a vestigial remnant 10 a: an inseparable companion or follower b: one (as a spy or detective) that shadows 11: a small degree or portion : TRACE 12: a source of gloom or unhappiness 13 a: an area near an object : VICINITY b: pervasive and dominant influence 14: a state of ignominy or obscurity

(3) Shading, as illuminatingly defined by MW:
1 : the use of marking made within outlines to suggest three-dimensionality, shadow, or degrees of light and dark in a picture or drawing


(4) My favourite books on shadows (& these books’ ideas permeate this post)

• Tzvetan Todorov : Eloge de l’individu – Ode to the Individual
  (" ils sont représentés dans l’unicité de l’instant, non dans l’abstraction de l’essence / Represented in the uniqueness of the moment, not in the abstraction of the essence")



• E.H. Gombrich : Ombres Portées – Shadows. The Depiction of Cast Shadows in Western Art



• Yves Bonnefoy : l’improbable et autres essais (in two essays, one about Byzantium,and another about humour and the cast shadow in art) - useful quotes:
  " Les deux intuitions discordantes de la pensée d’Occident, ce qui est périssable – et destin – et ce qui est éternel / The two discordant intuitions in Western thought, that which is perishable - and fate – and that which is eternal "


• "Un désir en moi qui recherchait sa patrie, celui d’affronter notre monde en ses aspects les plus fugitifs, apparemment les moins chargés d’être, pour les sacrer et que je sois sauvé avec eux"
  "Profondément ce que l’ombre portée désigne, comme l’aiguille sur un cadran, c’est tel lieu à tel instant […]"
  


• Michael Baxandall: Ombres et Lumières – Shadows and enlightenment

(5) The metaphysical anguish (de Chirico) and the heart rending immobility of shadows (Hopper) may be treated in some later post. And yet, I don’t know why, but the last picture to insert already in this post just had to be this Hopper. ..

echoes (III)

Weiss und Leicht:
lass es wandern

White and Light:
let it drift

Paul Celan