Frivolous Fragments

Oblivious to the world - between reading & sleeping

2012-01-29T05:20:00.000-08:00

I had never really looked at it before – at this painting of an old woman reading, by a certain Cornelis Bisschop. Well, I had certainly glanced over it before – labelling it as the work of a minor Dutch master of the Golden Age before moving on. The painting shows a rather darkish interior with clair-obscur contrasts - light focused on the woman reading and on some (possibly symbolic) objects while the rest of the interior is receding in darkish tones. All typical artifices indeed of Dutch 17th C art.

But then, what made me look so intently this time? Possibly I had now felt attracted to the look of concentration on the woman’s face , and to the way she sat there, reading. Because she sat there, not in any coquettish nor devout reading pose, but rather with the true bearing of one who is absorbed in her reading – with the mixture of corporal nonchalance and dignity bestowed on those intensely engaged in the life of the mind. And then there were the books – not just any books it seemed, not the family-bible either. No, these books were worn and weighty, filled with the wisdom of ages.

There are of course quite a lot of reading women to be seen in art history – what with all those Annunciations (the Virgin Mary looking up from her book, startled, when the divine messenger rushes in) and all those Saint Barbaras reading. But in those paintings the atmosphere is limpid and tranquil, the women are devout and the books undoubtedly holy. Thus they display none of the intense curiosity and concentration, none of the superior nonchalance that had struck me in this old Dutch woman’s bearing.

However, on closer inspection of the objects in this particular painting, I had to admit that the impression of active concentration was belied by the objects’ symbolism. The sculpted head on the wall, with the head drowsily inclined , ... that must be Hypnos (the God of sleep). And what’s with that key, so prominently hanging on the wall ... a key to the kingdom of sleep?

In the same room I was startled to see yet another painting with a similar iconography – a woman with a book on her lap, other worn books piled on a table, a key on the wall. But this woman was ungraciously snoring, her mouth slightly open. So it was only a superficial similarity – gone were the look of concentration, gone the dignified posture of reading which had so enchanted me.

But browsing on the web, I moreover learned that the subject of a woman-falling-asleep- with-a-book-on-her-lap is something of a standing theme in 17th C Dutch genre-painting.

So was my fascination for this particular painting a sorry case of hineininterpretierung? Was I projecting a longed for mood of concentration and dignified wisdom in a painting that merely shows a woman-nodding-off-above-her-book? And then this painting would not be a rare and happy celebration of the intent absorption of the reader, oblivious to the world?

Winter light in Brussels (or: Memories of Glamour & Grime)

2011-12-31T07:22:00.000-08:00

A small town kid’s fascination for both the glamour and the grime of the city is hard to match. I must have been ten when I first fell in love with a city, Brussels as it happened – while waiting with my parents for the night train to France in the station of Schaerbeek, at that time the Brussels terminal for the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits . Ah, the excitement of eating a sandwich in a Brussels grand café – with its intimidating waiters clad in black, its windows half covered by little lace curtains hung on gleaming copper railings - wholly immersed in the exhilarating noises of trains & clattering cutlery.
Before boarding our train the whole family would still go for a short walk outside, in the streets of Schaerbeek. It would be a cautious walk, with all the kids holding hands and with my mother clutching her handbag, because you never knew what could happen in the big city! Especially in these rather sombre streets of the station quarter, where I particularly remember a quite daunting avenue, alongside a little gloomy park, with old stately houses covered with sooth - all exuding an air of “grandeur déchue”.

At age 24 I finally made it to Brussels for real, moving to a small apartment on the fourth floor of an old house in Schaerbeek. From my window I could see turning a big neon lit Mercedes star, which was perched on top of a high rise near Brussels North, another Brussels station. This was the real thing, a “real big city” kind of view I thought, promptly projecting all my longings for exciting urban life in this tipsily turning neon sign at Brussels North . It was there that I would take the tram from and to the city centre. And also when going on foot, my journey would take me through the North Station quarter - so exotic & unfamiliar.
I would wander through lively streets full of Turkish and Moroccan shops and restaurants, I would fixedly stare at the pavement while crossing the infamous red district street near the railway, a street filled with slowly advancing cars and with loitering men avidly looking into the neon lit windows which ignominiously displayed bored women in sultry poses .

Only a few streets further from the North station were the shops I was regularly raiding, the huge (in my provincial eyes) Fnac records & bookshop (which was still about records & books back then, now it is a stressful multi-media centre). And of course the blessed little 2nd hand record shop where people were apparently dumping all their old collections of quality LPs when buying CD’s. There I not only got Kraftwerk’s shimmering neonlights LP, but there I also started to build up my classical LP collection.
It was a true treasure trove – and coming back home in my sparsely furnished flat, I would sit on the ground, with my back to the wall, looking out of the rooftops through the opposite window, and listen listen – to those so touchingly human and humble and yet dazzlingly brilliant Bach cantatas, to Glenn Gould playing the Goldberg variations, to the divine and melancholy Monteverdi, to the gay and frivolous Mozart simmering underneath with umbral sadness.
Just as I myself was simmering with all the contradictory longings and anxieties of a 25 year old who has just arrived in the city ... .

And for a long time, even when living in other parts of Brussels , I would still go for long walks in Schaerbeek. Perhaps no other borough so encapsulates the essence of Brussels, exhibiting so many contradictory traces of past & present, offering a home to so diverse a population. Native ‘Brusselaars’, young & trendy people, well-off bourgeois (less & less though) and many many waves of immigrants .
In some neighbourhoods you can still sense the atmosphere of the village Schaarbeek once was, before being swallowed up by the big city. In other streets, with a nostalgic suburban feel, you can spot the fading traces of once buzzing small industries and artisan shops. Elsewhere you can get startled by unexpected railway beds surging out of old brick tunnels and then continuing amidst park-like bushes in the middle of a gsplendid residential lane. Schaarbeek’s rich bourgeois period did leave many grand art nouveau houses and a great park too. Some of the streets have remained neat and uppity, others have fallen victim to urban decay and grime, but always, always one is curious to see what is around the next corner.

No, one never gets bored when taking a walk in Schaerbeek, especially when dazzling winter light sets ablaze rusty tram rails and grimy windows alike.

Retreat (coda)

2011-12-26T08:21:00.000-08:00

A special thanks for giving interiority its place in the public world (see previous anguished post) should definitely go to the late 19th century sculptor George Minne (1).
Though much of his work may seem too shriekingly tormented to our current taste, he also brought into the world some meditative sculptures which achieve a unique balance of stillness and expressiveness, in an almost classical contrapposto.

“The kneeling youths”, “The small relic bearer” : slight, humbly kneeling figures, all carrying some weight (be it a relic or their own upper torso).
Their head is bent, resigned to look forever inward, to endure without expecting anything from the world (2).

Clearly, not the most clamorous or glamorous statues. Their maker, too, seems to have led a rather withdrawn life . And yet, these static, introspective statues did strike a chord in the art circles of round about 1900: both fellow artists and patrons of the arts avidly collected (3) many different versions of these “kneeling youths”.

Therefore, in many an interior painting of that time (showing
an artists’ gathering , fellow artists’ (self) portraits or portraits of patrons in their habitats) one can spot in the background the familiar shape of one of Minne’s introverted kneeling youths. Still, withdrawn, but unmistakably present.

Also in museum rooms, these Minne statues tend to stand a bit apart, quietly reserved, drawing the spectator’s gaze into their stillness.

Even worldly bankers once seem to have seen fit to add so unworldly a statue to their collection, or so I could see for myself. Over 10 years ago (at a time when I still felt obliged to participate in work receptions), while stressing in a big stuffy bank room full of self-important, extraverted men, I all of a sudden noticed this Minne statue, discreetly standing in a corner. Ah, the relief I felt – knowing there was at least this still, friendly presence I could gaze at, from time to time.

Notes
(1) An excellent on-line introduction to Minne’s art in (mostly) English in a Canadian journal
(2) Below you'll find a nice characterisation (in French) of these Minne statues, by Andre De Ridder, in a beloved old booklet about Minne (a little book i found in the unsurpassed Posada art bookshop whose closure earlier this year I still am mourning – where am I now to get hold of all those old art history books? This particular Minne booklet was jointly edited in 1947 by the Belgian “Ministère de l’Instruction publique” and the legendary Antwerp schoolbook-editor “De Sikkel”): “Chaque oeuvre se replie sur elle-même, se tasse en quelque sorte; elle semble subir le monde extérieur, en porter le poids, au sens moral et materiel, plutôt que conquerir l’espace et s’y élancer”
(3) i consider myself a loving collector, too, of these Minne statues, but being a humble post-modern melancholiac living in 'the age of mechanical reproduction' – i obviously do not collect tangible things, but content myself with stolen glances in bankers’ rooms, long meditations in museum rooms, amateur photos taken in those same museum rooms , official photo reproductions & their copies, ...

Retreat?

2011-12-24T01:01:00.000-08:00

On a cold and wet December day a weary flâneur may be forgiven to seek solace in Arcadian Visions (1) – especially if these visions, however lush & luminous, do not shy away from “intimations of mortality” .

In my longing for “leisure & tranquility with dignity “ (“otium cum dignitate” ) it was to “Poussin and Nature” (2), a book about the landscape paintings by the 17th C painter Poussin , that I turned. I have always remained rather discreet about my love of Poussin, perhaps to avoid being tainted by the qualifications of “haughty and cold” that have become standard to describe this supposedly over-intellectual painter. (3)

But “ Poussin and Nature” not only soothed my wrought up nerves by reproductions of nostalgic landscapes, it also offered a comforting interpretation of Poussin as a contemplative, melancholy man, with “an inclination towards retreat and silence” (4) , wanting to flee from the worries and vanities of human affairs.

Landscape or Tragedy?

While Poussin’s famous “Et in Arcadia Ego” painting still oozes a reassuring, antique loftiness despite its “memento mori” (5) , in other landscape paintings he explores “a more austere, somber, and clear-eyed analysis of the forms of nature and of the place of humankind in the universe”. (6)

There’s the (seemingly) enchantingly bucolic painting of Orpheus insouciantly playing his lyre in a delightful natural scenery, charming his audience, while in the background, unnoticed by him, Eurydice is bitten by a snake. (7) (8) (9)

There are also the landscapes with antique historical tales - like the two “Phocion” paintings: grand landscapes, exuding nobility and order, showing untroubled humans going about their business , oblivious of the tragic fate of the proud and loyal Athenian general Phocion who for obscure reasons had been condemned to death by his compatriots. In the “Landscape with the Funeral of Phocion” the idyllic and indifferent harmony of the landscape contrasts with the individual tragedy of proud Phocion’s corpse being carried away on a makeshift stretcher.
In the “Landscape with the ashes of Phocion” sublime nobility rules, be it in the grandeur of the trees and the antique buildings, or in the calm and casual attitudes of the minuscule figures in the background. And yet, in the foreground, there’s the anxiously bent figure of a woman, collecting the ashes of the dead general, amidst the general indifference performing an act of compassion, an act of mere human piety.

History or Goodness ?

Should these paintings be interpreted then as Glorifications of Grand History? As edifying antique tales about Great Deeds of Stoic Heroes ? Or are they rather laments about the futility of heroism, denouncing the inhumanity of History and the public World?
Do they perhaps rather intend to compare the vanity of worldly human affairs with the soothing (though indifferent) harmony of nature? Do they rather want to contrast public indifference with the private compassion of an unimportant, ordinary woman?

“Landscape or History?”, asks René Démoris in his startling (and deeply moving) essay about Poussin’s historical landscape paintings . He argues that “the two Phocion paintings mark the moment of Poussin’s retreat from the historical stage”.
Influenced also by the contemporary nasty political bickering in France, Poussin would have become disenchanted with grand history and with all those supposedly “providential designs & projects of great men”.
“Grand history masks the petty maneuvering of private interests”

And Démoris goes on by evoking the paintings in which Poussin concentrates on the direct, non-historical, relationships between ordinary men and nature, in which he “stages an ordinary humanity” utterly subject to frailty and mortality, facing the manifold horrors which both the human public realm and nature have in store for us.
In such a melancholy world view neither public heroism nor godly intervention can offer solace – the only redemption for “ the inhumanity of that order” might be simple human goodness, mere human sympathy and kindness – however powerless.
Like the humble woman compassionately collecting the ashes of the spurned general. Like the washerwoman (in yet another sombre Poussin painting ) looking intently at a man who flees in great fright from his horrific discovery of a man devoured by a monstrous serpent.
"Can the washerwoman’s gaze make this horror before the unnameable more bearable?”

“our school text-books lie.
What they call History
is nothing to vaunt of,
being made, as it is,
by the criminal in us:
goodness is timeless.”(10)

Retreat from the World & from History?

It is a classical topos of course, this longing for a “withdrawal from the mundane world, or escape to a more ordered and tranquil ideal universe”.
Weary Roman citizens as well as wealthy but tired renaissance men aspired to escape from their worldly duties to the peace and quiet of their country estate.

But there’s more to it than mere fatigue – it is also about a reassessment of values, about realizing how much of worldly success depends on vanity & pettiness & brute power. About having to observe that those who get ahead in the world draw upon selfish ambitions and smugness rather than on goodness or a concern for the general interest. (11)
Kindness, generosity, thoughtfulness ... no, they don’t seem to be the prime qualities that lead to worldly success.

When it comes to it, kindness and thoughtfulness even might dis-empower in worldly affairs because power always contains a latent, but unmistakable, single-minded willingness to use force . And it is power which people fear and respect, rather than goodness – however unfair & even inhuman this may seem.

Thus, the desire to retreat from the world also comes from a feeling of impotency - feeling unable to change the world as one finds it. Is world weariness then a matter of sour grapes, of resentment? If we had been greater or stronger, would we have been less weary of the world? Is it to be considered an abdication or a defeat when one withdraws from the public realm into one‘s interior life or into the shelter of a circle of kindred souls?
And are kindness or goodness indeed essentially “unworldly” qualities, invisible, outside history ... ?

And what does Hannah Arendt say?

In cases of intense bewilderment, I tend to reread Hannah Arendt. And especially in this case of worldly confusion, since her philosophical “amor mundi” (love of the world, of the common world humans build, which is our sole hope to attain some relative permanence) so seems to clash with the usually more unworldly philosophical intuitions about transcendental timelessness or eternity.

Here’s what she has to say (words inspired by a reality much grimmer than ours now):
“’inner emigration’ [...] the flight from the world to concealment , from public life to anonymity [...] can always be justified as long as reality is not ignored, but is constantly acknowledged as the thing that must be escaped. [...] At the same time we cannot fail to see the limited political relevance of such an existence, even if it is sustained in purity. Its limits are inherent in the fact that strength and power are not the same, that power arises only when people act together, but not where people grow stronger as individuals. No strength is ever great enough to replace power” (12)

Smuggling Interiority and Goodness back into the World

But we can’t leave it at that, can we? We can’t have goodness and interiority banished from the World, condemned to transience and invisibility? Wouldn’t that be too unjust?
Though obviously, both interiority and goodness as such “harbour[s] a tendency to hide from being seen or heard” (13), recommending themselves – perhaps – only to god’s remembrance ... And therefore they would remain unrecorded and forgotten by the World?

And yet, and yet .... poetic justice does exist in the World. It is in art that justice can be done to transient interior human experiences & qualities, which are otherwise ignored amidst all the sound and fury of History.

Art, so paradoxical a human activity – drawing both upon the most interior resources and the most public skills, hobnobbing with the rich & powerful but also able to pay attention to the most humble manifestations of humanity . Art is obviously part and parcel of the public world where it can find some measure of protection and where it can claim public remembrance.
And while many artists were consummate public actors endowed with a huge self-esteem, avid to please powerful patrons, their talent (conscientiously or not ) does often capture deeper human truths as well as touchingly humble sensations.
Moreover, art has also (almost miraculously, i’d say) given shelter to the more self-doubting, solitary personalities, to those who can rely only on their fragile sensitivity, on their own skills and their inner strength.

And thus, both quiet interiority and humble goodness have been smuggled back, as it were, via art into the “public realm which can absorb and make shine through the centuries whatever men may want to save from the natural ruin of time” (13)

“A still cruelty reigns in many of Pieter Bruegel’s paintings, which we may perhaps call realism. [...] [but] every once in a while, one catches a glimpse of something else in Bruegel. The ‘Census at Bethlehem’ [...] touches with its busy comings and goings of a winter day. [...] Mary is cold and she smiles [..] Just as the young peasant woman does amidst all the light & heat of a July-day, in the painting the ‘Hay Harvest’ – a tiny smile full of trust, not at the centre of the representation, but subtly just beside it” (14)

Disorderly Retreat into the Notes
(1) Arcadia (Utopia)
(2) About “Poussin and Nature” (The exhibition) and (The book)
(3) This wariness of mine (about being associated with a supposedly ‘intellectual’ painter)has to do with the depressing fact that it is indeed possible to be highly erudite & aesthetically sensitive and yet to be heartless. A refined capability to appreciate art can, alas, be accompanied in the same person with revolting, unfeeling selfishness. But somehow I feel that the cliché of “the cold heartless intellectual” nowadays may have been unfairly extended to encompass all thoughtful and reserved natures . As if only the more spontaneous natures would be capable of affectionateness and warmth, as if those same spontaneous natures would never be capable of cruelty.
(4) Jacques Bousquet as quoted by Claire Pace in her essay for “Poussin and Nature”: “’Peace and Tranquillity of Mind’ : The Theme of Retreat and Poussin’s Landscapes”
(5) “Et in Arcadia Ego” (‘Also in Arcadia am I’) is a wonderfully meditative painting by Poussin: in a tranquil antique landscape, bathed in a golden light, three shepherds and a shepherdess of splendid bearing seem to have just discovered a tomb. One of them tries to decipher what’s written on it and, while doing so, casts an ominous shadow on the tomb. The four figures share an attitude of bemused concentration – they may be concerned, but are not (yet) horrified. The mood remains pensive and nobly resigned at this discovery of death, even in Arcadia.
(6) from Claire Pace’s essay in “Poussin and Nature”
(7) “The elegiac Virgilian vision underlies many of Poussin’s landscapes: inherent in the idyllic scene is hidden danger , such as the serpent that appears in so many of the paintings” (from Claire Pace’s essay in “Poussin and Nature” )
(8) “The contrast between the triumph of Orpheus charming beasts and men and offering himself, creating a spectacle, and the crucial event to which he remains blind: Eurydice bitten by a tiny snake, which she turns to look at – an event that is witnessed by a fisherman –and from it flows the dark sequel to the story, in which Orpheus will again fall victim to his own fatal lack of attention.” René Démoris’ essay for “Poussin and Nature”: From The Storm to The Flood
(9) It is this painting (Landscape with Orpheus and Eurydice) that inspired Michel Déon to his wonderfully sympathetic interpretation of Poussin as a sensitive artist with a keen sense of human tragedy : “It is the birth of tragedy at which we must look on, powerless and with a heavy heart. As always, Destiny has chosen as its victim the most innocent and poetic of creatures. We mourn for Eurydice over the centuries. This is certainly very far from the image that all too often has been cultivated of a cold and haughty painter” (as quoted in “Poussin and nature”)
(10) W.H. Auden – Archeology: Finder’s credits go to Leen Huet in whose book “Mijn België” I found the quote
(11) As an inveterate pessimist and avid reader of popular neuro-science articles I couldn’t fail to read with a shudder how smugness & self-congratulation prove to be, brain-physiologically speaking, very effective to increase a person’s intellectual performance (cf also all the crap about positive thinking) . Whereas self-criticism and modest self-assessment just use up energy and diminish a person’ s performance . I also deeply regret to have to observe that selfish ambition and competitiveness seem the most effective drivers for people to be creative, to do great deeds, to invent & produce things and thus to contribute to a world that benefits all. But is self-interest really the sole possible driver? Might it not be a matter of appearance, because precisely the more arrogant & selfish natures are wont to widely display and advertise all they accomplish? And might not a bit more thoughtfulness & self-doubt, a bit more generosity have avoided many a crisis and much suffering?
(12) Hannah Arendt – Men in Dark Times
(13) Hannah Arendt – The Human Condition
(14) amateur translation of a passage in Leen Huet’s “Mijn België” : “Er heerst een stille wreedheid in veel schilderijen van Pieter Bruegel, die we misschien realisme mogen noemen. […] Heel af en toe vang je bij Bruegel een ander signaal op. 'De volkstelling in Bethlehem' […] ontroert door al de drukte van een winterdag […] Maria heeft het koud en ze glimlacht […] Net zoals de jonge boerin dat doet in al het licht en de warmte van een julidag, op het schilderij 'De hooioogst' – een kleine glimlach vol vertrouwen, niet in het centrum van de voorstelling maar subtiel even daarnaast. “
(15) Merry Xmas!

twirling & swirling

2011-11-27T04:27:00.000-08:00

"A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing
A flowery band to bind us to the earth,
Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth
Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,
Of all the unhealthy and o'er-darkened ways
Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits.
[...]
let Autumn bold,
With universal tinge of sober gold,
Be all about me"

John Keats (1)

Times may be grave & grim but autumn leaves do keep twirling & swirling (2) . Not to mention their rustling grace when, ever so crisply, they brush the ground.

Times have often been grave & grim (and humans vicious & violent). But ‘nobler natures’ do keep creating and guarding beauty.

Thus, on a gray and troubled November day, one can find quiet relief, standing in the windy entry hall of a lovely museum (3), watching a leaf landing on the floor, whirling amidst swirling mosaic patterns.

just three dwindling notes
(1) the full poem
(2) for A: English for dwarrelen! Wirbeln in German?
(3) The Ghent Museum of Fine Arts - built in the early 20th century, and recently so carefully & lovingly restored, including the floor mosaics

Confessions of an Accidental Asset Manager

2011-11-13T03:50:00.000-08:00

“La chose la plus importante à toute la vie est le choix du metier: le hazard en dispose. La coutume fait les maçons, soldats, couvreurs.” (1)

In my public life, stubborn pursuit of personal inclinations has alas never been my forte. Already at age 18 I cowardly succumbed to utilitarian propriety (2) : the then raging economic crisis and my parents’ insistence made me duly discard a penchant for Classical Languages & Philosophy to enrol instead at the Faculty of Business Economics.

My Brush with the Foundations of Modern Finance

At this utilitarian, and thus eminently boring (3) faculty my academic career had its ups and downs, as periods of diligent if reluctant studying alternated with brief, rebellious assertions of more innate urges. But 4 years later I nonetheless had been suitably imbued with the business and financial wisdom of that age:

- free competition and profit maximisation ensure that scarce resources are put to their best use ;
- financial markets are efficient and should be left well alone to do their blessed job of optimally allocating capital ;
- whether a company is financed with debt or with own equity does not matter (Nobelprize winning Miller& Modigliani ) ;
- deregulation in finance is the way to go (e.g. abolishment of the separation between investment banks and deposit banks; Big Deregulatory Bang in the City) ;
- risks can be adequately hedged and transferred via derivatives that can be correctly priced via mathematical models (Black & Nobel Prize winning Merton and Scholes ) ;
- the interest rate paid by (western) governments on their bonds is the risk-free rate that serves as reference point for all other risky investments ;

Not that I fully grasped the import of all of these maxims (some of them being pretty counter-intuitive), let alone that I could critically assess them, but then, well, I didn’t have a Nobel Prize winning intellect either and at exams I did manage to reproduce enough of it to earn my degree.

Managing Assets!

Having earned this business degree, I did not in fact have a particular career path in mind, except perhaps for a keen sense of having to earn my own living and to do “something useful”. So I sent out my CV to a random list of companies and promptly accepted the first serious job-offer I got.

Thus I started my working life at a small cooperative bank, which had just launched up a new department for “portfolio management” . A team of 3 people managed about 60 portfolios of wealthy clients, totalling 1 billion Belgian francs. I was mightily impressed by that whopping “1 billion francs” figure (though less than 25 million Euros ...) as well as by the Datastream-terminal on which stock-prices flashed by. It was only a few months after the October 1987 stock market crash (-20% on one day), so every day at 4 PM my colleagues would nervously watch the Wall Street opening.

(They needn’t have worried, not then, not yet at any rate ...., since the US monetary authorities in the following 2 decades would promptly come to the rescue at each sign of financial markets distress ... . By always promptly lowering short term interest rates, they thus put a floor under the markets, while on the other hand failing to raise rates to check any rise in asset prices, however exuberant ... Don’t mess with markets efficiently pricing assets, was the creed. But I digress, all of that of course was still to come..., and could obviously not be foreseen back then in 1988, or could it?)

My tasks at first were very humble – inputting transactions, updating prices, answering client queries - before being entrusted with the actual management of a dozen small client portfolios . As a budding portfolio manager I treaded very cautiously, diversifying broadly, preferring bonds to stocks, panicking at each possible risk. But my senior colleague soon initiated me in the secret of successful investing: Japanese warrants (equity derivatives)!
Buy ‘m today – sell’m next week with profit! As the Japanese markets soared from one peak to the next, these warrants indeed seemed a sure way to make the most of only a small initial money outlay. Japanese brokers called all the time with new and juicy warrant offerings. As these brokers themselves made so much money in the heady markets, they also could afford to invite all their clients over for a Tokyo-visit. Even as a lowly junior portfolio manager at a tiny cooperative Belgian bank I thus got invited for 2 weeks of company visits in Tokyo (4).

(The Japanese asset price bubble duly burst in 1991 and arguably the Japanese financial markets and banks have even now not yet fully recovered as the Japanese debt/GDP ratio remains huge . The 80s Japanese bubble was a matter of financial hubris & irrationality as well as excessive private debt. And also a matter of a declining active population. So Europe and the US could have drawn lessons from the Japanese debacle to avoid their own later excesses – but they didn’t of course. Drawing humbling parallels is not something the financial sector is good at. )

But back to my career: soon it had become clear that, being a born risk-averse person, I was not really made for a swaggering front office equity manager function.
So I went on to specialise in the (then) humbler bond and money market management . In due course I also tortured my brain with the maths involved in pricing hybrid fixed income instruments, including the now infamous Mortgage Backed Obligations and other interest rate based derivatives. These MBO’s& CDO’s etc were fixed income’s bid for financial glamour & sophistication.
And they played a disastrous role in the recent Great Financial Crisis – (but that, of course, nobody could have foreseen back in the 90s).

However, also in fixed income management my risk-aversion kept me from chasing the highest returns and, tellingly, my boss once copied and urged me to read a Financial Analyst study “Bond managers need to take more risk”.

Macro-economic analysis was also part of my job then and I did love to understand and describe how and why economic evolutions unfolded as they did . But obviously, “understanding and describing” is not what asset management is about, one should try to anticipate and outwit the markets with immediate profitable effect. Thus, after having read a macro-economic article of mine, my boss shook his head and sighed “well, this is all very nice and erudite – but it is not going to make us a lot of money, is it?”. And right he was, I did indeed seem to lack the “making money instinct” , so essential for an asset manager.

A Cog in a Booming and then Busting Business

So I wisely moved on to more pedestrian support functions in the company – where neither risk taking nor instant money making forecasting skills were required.
From those posts I went on to obediently serve the system and to observe the ebbs and flows in the financial markets. Thus I witnessed the dotcom bubble when everyone thought the technology and internet productivity miracle justified stellar valuations for each and any internet start up.
I also remember a very smart economic analysis made by an unassuming but brilliant macro-economist working at our company – he explained how consumer price deflation in fact was normal in case of a positive productivity shock and that it should not be countered by an overly lax monetary policy because that would only lead to asset price inflation. How right he later proved to be!
But he left our company, not being considered a good economist, since for months and months his pessimistic forecasts were ridiculed by euphorically rising markets – until also that bubble duly burst again.

In the meanwhile my work context had profoundly changed too. The modest cooperative bank I had joined had felt obliged to do a takeover of another bank in order to play in a bigger league (Bigger Banks was what we needed, small banks could not survive – or so the whole financial and political establishment declared at that time).
The asset management activity was spun off in a separate company with now about a hundred staff (barely 10 years after I had joined the tiny department with its 3 staff-members). But this was not yet the end of it.
Four years later we were taken over again, by a big Franco-Belgian bank, itself the result of an ambitious cross border merger .(5) And while over the next 5 years we became an European asset manager with over 500 staff, our mother company pursued its breathtaking growth – becoming a world leader in public finance and one of the world’s most solid banks with superior credit ratings! (AA-rating).

And this is the same banking group that in October 2008 was as good as bankrupt and had to be saved by the Belgian and French governments. And the same banking group that had to declare forfeit in October 2011, turning to the Belgian and French governments again for help, parts being nationalised, other parts (including asset management) being put up for sale to raise money for the ailing mother company.

What Went Wrong? Whose Fault Is It?

What on earth went wrong? With a bank that still had a AA –rating back in 2007? It is embarrassingly simple what went wrong. So simple .... (6)

This bank was not content to take client deposits and make loans in turn, no, in order to become a world leader they wanted to make even more loans (beyond their own client deposits funding capacity) and didn’t hesitate to go borrowing themselves in the short term interbanking market.
And then – to boost profits even more, they also saw fit to build up a huge financial portfolio (nothing to do with the core business) of long dated financial assets again partly financed by short term lending. (7)

The problem of this financial portfolio was not even mainly one of toxic insolvent investments (though there were some) but rather one of a maturity mismatch (short term funding of long maturity bonds) (8) leading to acute liquidity problems once the markets turned sour. (Try to borrow each day more than 100 bn Euros when people no longer trust you ....).

So there we are, this is what went wrong: irresponsible leverage and hubris. But so, how come nobody saw it coming?
A non-financially savvy person might naively wonder how a bank could have been allowed to blow up its balance sheet to 630 bn Euros while having only an own capital of 16 bn Euros? (9) Why did no-one shout out? No regulator? No asset manager? No financial analyst?

So whose fault is it? There’s of course an individual responsibility of individual CEO’s blinded by easy success in an almost virtual money-world (10) .
There may also be a collective responsibility of academics, regulators, banks, financial analysts , asset managers for all having contributed to the miscomprehension and therefore mis-pricing of risk and for all having failed to critically check against reality the prevailing financial dogma’s .

In the real world of enterprise risk-loving certainly can turn awry too but for every 10 failures or so it can at least produce one success with (hopefully) true added value for society – they are “the bubbles of speculation on a steady stream enterprise” as Keynes called it (and it gave us the railways and the amazon.coms of this world).
But while finance ideally is meant to ensure that all over the world savings flow to the investments and entrepreneurial ideas with the best potential (by efficiently pricing risk and allocating capital), there’s no denying that finance these past decades has more often than not merely amplified irrational hypes and has promoted glaring in-efficiency.

The Charges are: Greed, Stupidity , Hubris and Vanity

So is there something particularly rotten in finance? Could it be that money-lenders and money-managers are more prone to greed, stupidity , hubris and vanity than other professionals? (11) Well, yes, perhaps they are, perhaps in finance it is indeed easier to succumb to fundamental errors and illusions of human nature:

- the “skill or luck” question: financial markets traders and money managers can too easily mistake simple luck for skill (which a bricklayer or a virtuoso violinist cannot) and think themselves geniuses after a couple of lucky trades.
- the “agency” problem: traders and money managers make “bets” with other peoples’ money and get rewarded when things go well, but they do not necessarily suffer enough themselves when things go wrong. While an entrepreneur having put his own money & energy on the line cannot escape from the consequences of his failure. (12)
- the” illusion of quantifiable rationality” in economics and financial markets: not withstanding strands of economic thought such as behavioural finance, finance has more and more put faith in sophisticated quantitative techniques which seemed to allow a perfect mastery of risk. But the models could not adequately capture real life quirks or ‘fat tail events’ and the quants didn’t ever question the received dogma’s (see 1st part of this post..) . Thus common sense made way for a sophistication that kept at bay the non-initiated who might have asked critical questions.
- The “amorality of money” : thinking of money boosts selfishness: this indeed is shown by a number of psychological experiments ...

In any case, over the past decade , finance has failed, judged even on its own terms of efficient-free-markets-capitalism (13).
What to do then – perhaps finance should just go back to basics: let bankers and mainstream asset managers again become humble and slightly boring clerks in a tightly regulated industry, and let risk-loving and entrepreneurial financial types run their own small venture capital outfits and hedge funds, with their own capital at stake (and obviously without state guarantee).

And as to myself – instead of doing “something useful” (which was why I choose business economics in the first place) it now turns out that for over 20 years I have been a diligent cog in a dubious system. So what can I say? Cogs in support functions of course don’t personally initiate any actions of great impact – but they do facilitate what’s happening all around them .
And while I definitely plead “not guilty” to the charges of greed, hubris and vanity – I must admit I do feel rather stupid. (14)

An Inflation of Notes
(1) Pascal – Pensées “The most important thing in life is the choice of career: it is arranged for by chance. Mere custom makes bricklayers, soldiers, roofers”
(2) A dubious waiving of personal responsibility perhaps – after all, also this succumbing to ‘utility’ is obviously a character trait or personal inclination ... (though by no means a cherished one)
(3) the imminently subjective verdict of a 18-year old
(4) what I mainly remember from that Tokyo-trip, were the rare occasions we would meet with a female financial analyst or company official (who would have escaped from the ranks of the so-called office ladies), how condescendingly they still were treated by their male colleagues, how brave they were ( a braveness against despairing odds) and how they seemed relieved and a tad triumphant when they saw women amongst the foreign visitors.
(5) Belgian readers will now sigh and will be barely able to suppress their disgust - they know the story is not going to end well.
(6) Just turn to page 7 with the Financial Highlights in the 2007 annual report of this bank . You’ll see a nice operating result but what you need to look at is the balance sheet. Look and weep. Here’s a bank that between 1999 and 2007 pumped up its balance sheet from EUR 246bn to EUR 604bn (the entire Belgian GDP is around EUR 300bn) and this with an own capital of only EUR 16.1 bn. Then turn to pages 114 and 115 for a closer look at assets and liabilities. End of 2007 you’ll see loans to clients for 243 bn and a huge financial portfolio worth no less than 258 bn! And how was this financed? By client deposits for 127bn, by issued debt securities for 204bn, and by a staggering 179bn of short term lending (“due to banks”).
(7) For the (cynical) fun of it, read also the auto-congratulating messages of the chairmen in the 2007 annual report, on pages 10-13. While the bubble was already bursting the erstwhile CEO still proudly boasts the further growth in loans and assets...
(8) Since most of the time short term rates are below long term rates, funding a portfolio of long term bonds with short term lending (esp. if you’re a well rated bank who can borrow cheaply) looked like a magical profit formula: pay, say, 2.5 % in the market and get 4% or so on the bonds you have bought with the borrowed money , and this on hundreds of billions ...
(9) Oh but that’s a simplistic reasoning, financial experts and regulators could have said back in 2006 – you have to look at the risk adjusted ratios, you have to look at the “risk weighted capital adequacy ratio” which is excellent at 9.6%! The ratio could be so excellent because most western government bonds got a zero risk weighting so banks didn’t even had to put capital aside when they invested in them... Excellent, because it neither adequately captured the risks of a liquidity gap.
(10) Modern computer driven finance has made it deceptively simple to build up a bond portfolio of 100 billions of Euros in just a couple of years.
(11) No wonder so many religions fundamentally distrust money-lenders, condemning the sins of usury and avarice ...
(12) Which is a variant of moral hazard
(13) Lets’ not even think about the failure of “Finance” judged on “other terms” .... i.e. what about the venerated free markets and the needs of future generations (once the last barrel of oil will have been pumped up)? what about price-less goods such as silence, clean air, beauty, relative permanence, goodness, ...
(14) I did not ever really read the annual report of the shareholder-bank of the asset management company I work for, but if I had, I’m sure I would not have questioned the bloated balance sheet, I would have been fooled by its high capital adequacy ratio just like everybody else. But I do faithfully read The Economist every week, and so I could have seen graphs showing an excessive growth in debt, showing the unrealistically outsized proportions the financial sector was taking. And no, I did not ever particularly like or adore the “efficient free markets ruled by self-interest” but I too had come to think that, though unappealing, these free markets did do a good job in creating and spreading wealth all over the world (after all, hadn’t the critics of the free markets been proven wrong in ’89? )

the yearly autumn picture

2011-11-06T03:52:00.000-08:00

(with vanished notes & quotes)

Idle chimneys and a leopard print in Charleroi

2011-09-04T10:14:00.000-07:00

When I left the Charleroi-station, and while still pondering the admirable renovation the building had gone through since I last was there some 3 years ago , a nagging feeling descended upon me. Something was off in the cityscape outside ... something was missing in the skyline!
And indeed, none of the chimneys of the further off plants was bellowing smoke – no thunderous greys, no poisonous browns, no infernal flames ... All was quiet out there, nothing but the still silhouettes of steel plants and slag heaps against an overcast sky.

Only then I vaguely recalled a small article in the paper a while ago about the last blast furnace in the region having to shut down. Yet another blow for industrial employment in struggling Charleroi.
Of course, rational economists will mutter about creative destruction, they will point out the inexorable logic of global specialisation and will readily dispense advise about how to convert to higher value added activities.
Of course, yes, that’s the only way for economic survival: Progress! Flexibility! Embrace Change! Convert! Innovate! Adapt or Die!

Being myself both a (supposedly) rational economist and a melancholy flâneur, I must confess that also the economist in me has of late become rather melancholy. Bewildered by the current economic mess in the West, obviously, and increasingly doubting about the sustainability of the prevailing economic dogmas.
But well, while thus pondering & wondering, I still had enough of my wits together to board a yellow regional bus to bring me to the Charleroi photography museum, an isle of humanist photographic reflection & memory in this troubled region (and the destination of my present visit.)

And that suburban bus brought me a most endearing example of human resistance to capitalism’s insistent exhortations of change and novelty. The woman calmly sitting in a seat in front of me must have been well over 60 and her attire was extraordinary in its out-datedness – her dyed black hair was done in a vertiginous conical beehive, held together in the back by a comb and several pins. And of course she had on butterfly glasses in the best sixties tradition. But what really did me in, was her raincoat: an old worn raincoat sporting a leopard print, and with that distinctively mat shine of old waxed materials. Her grocery bag too was of the kind of waxy plastic I last saw as a child. She did not at all appear as an overaged fashionista, and her overall dignified demeanour saved her from looking pathetic.
In fact she seemed just a woman who had taken care of the things she had loved to wear, someone who quietly had gone on to cherish transient consumerist novelties although these had not been destined to stay very long in the world.

And somehow I felt this woman’s stubbornness in her attire was also linked to what is so poignant about Charleroi – its many traces of the past are mostly not about carefully restored grand buildings or objects of great significance & aesthetic worth.(though they do have some 19th C bourgeois jewels too!).
Theirs is rather a hotchpotch heritage including obsolete industries and shop fronts and consumer objects and designs that were not meant to last, and which elsewhere have long been discarded and replaced by the unrelenting innovation of economic growth.
It’s a paradox in fact, the sheer decay & poverty of this industrial town (with capitalism's global shifts having condemned these local industries which so faithfully served a burgeoning voracious consumerism ), have also worked to preserve some of the humble things that elsewhere have long been swallowed by our insatiable consumerist urge for novelties.

PS – But of course (of course!) I wouldn’t want to lock up Charleroi in a backward reserve of a certain kind of industrial-consumer society and I can only applaud (of course of course) the signs of change and progress that do are popping up everywhere (an ambitious reconstruction program of la ville basse has been launched recently).

The Brussels Museum of Fine Arts Revisited

2011-08-18T06:41:00.000-07:00

“It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off - then, I account it high time to get to ‘sea’ as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ‘ship’” (1)

< now please replace ‘sea’ and ‘ship’ by ‘ art museums’(2)>

Yeah, “whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth”, I take to an art museum. So on that particularly damned “damp, drizzly” Saturday morning in August, without much ado I quietly cycled to the Brussels Royal Museum of Fine Arts, mounted its wide stairs flanked by pompous pillars, drew my wrinkled museum pass and discreetly mixed in with scattered groups of visitors.

The Brussels Royal Museum of Fine Arts is obviously not the Louvre and I still remember overhearing, oh over 10 years ago, the disparaging remarks made by some Dutch tourists, who chiefly found fault with the museum’s outdated set-up, reminiscent of “former eastern bloc poverty ”, its last refurbishing dating from the 70s or so. Since then, however, the Brussels museum people (despite meagre funding) did catch up on trendy museum marketing principles: renovating parts of the building, adding a stylish ‘brasserie’ and an up-to-date bookshop , reshuffling the collections and dedicating a whole museum-within-a-museum to the crowd-attracting Magritte.
But I myself, of course, go on cherishing the museum’s vestiges of obsoleteness wherever I can still spot them (those 70s false ceilings, those worn carpets, the fake wood panelling, ...). It’s especially the inadvertent overlap of ill-matched successive styles that does me in: 20th century shabbiness combined with the lingering bourgeois grandeur of a 19th century museum.

And on a sombre rainy day, when the lights in the museum are up, and when through the windows you can catch glimpses of shadowy people struggling with umbrellas, on such a day it is not hard to imagine the bustling bourgeois city Brussels still was in the 1930s.
Neither is it hard to imagine W.H. Auden wandering about in these museum rooms on a December day in 1938, brooding about the human position of suffering while standing in front of Breughel’s Icarus (3) , “how everything turns away quite leisurely from the disaster”. Today, handy signs direct you to the popular room with the Bruegel paintings. And though the Icarus painting is in fact no longer considered an authentic Bruegel, many visitors still pause in front of it, some of them perhaps reading an Auden sentence quoted in their guide, others searching for Icarus’ tiny “white legs disappearing into the green water” (they are so tiny & tucked away in a corner of the painting, these floundering legs, that you could easily miss them).

There were a lot of Italian visitors last Saturday, flocking together in the rooms with the Flemish Primitives (where they can see, amongst others, two heart rending, pathetic pietas by Van Der Weyden ; an Annunciation by the elusive Master of Flémalle, set in a claustrophobic but enchantingly domestic room ; Dierik Bout’s harsh rendering of a cruel scene of justice ; an oddly still pieta by Petrus Christus, with those figures in frozen postures of grief, standing somewhat forlornly in a vast landscape ; and of course the smooth devotion of Memling’s portraits.

Do Italian art lovers nowadays still admire these Flemish paintings as they reportedly did in the 15th century? According to my friend J. (writer & art historian, carrying a Belgian passport ill matched with his rather Southern ‘elective affinities’ honed during long stays in Italy) Italians are mostly bemused now by the Flemish primitives, struggling with what they see as stiffness and lack of fluidity & volume, failing to fully grasp the sensuality of the typical early Netherlandish sense of atmosphere and of titillating texture.
Be that as it may, my fellow Italian visitors that Saturday were looking intently and slowly, earnestly consulting their guidebooks, whispering appreciatively to each other.

As to me, I got fascinated that day by the quite distinct sensibilities of two Madonna paintings done by Quinten Metsys (1466-1529). Quinten Metsys... ! (4) At times perhaps the most Italian of early Netherlandish painters...
In any case a painter who, without renouncing the Flemish heritage, in some of his paintings fully seems to master the Italian renaissance lessons of well modelled volumes and pleasing compositions. He’s also a painter with a finely honed sensitivity, able to render compassuinately a wide range of emotions, without veering into the somewhat pedant and contorted mannerism of slightly later Netherlandish generations of painters.

Take these two Madonna’s for instance, each appealing to our sensibilities in such a different way. There is that majestic Madonna, seated on an elaborate gothic throne, with the regally draped folds of her robe filling almost the entire picture plane (though in the back, at both sides, you do get a peak at the world outside) . Her expression is serious & sad, (though there’ s a tad of sulkiness too, perhaps in keeping with the slightly aloof appearance of a rich, beautiful girl?). She ‘s absorbed in her reading, no doubt taking in ominous tidings – the little Jesus sitting on her lap is reading too, it seems (or is he just watching the pictures? ) – with a concentrated & knowing look far beyond his age. And yet, it’s such a touchingly small child too, with those little hands, so cute in his white shirt, ah and with a little foot peeping out of the folds of his mother’s stately dress.

And then there’s that other Madonna-painting, so soft and immediately pleasing in both colours and subject , with that warm & intimate rapport between mother & son, with so joyous and domestic a scene (including the humble bread & apple, the homely knife on a plain table cloth).
Two Madonna’s by the same painter, what could be potentially more boring ... and yet (for those who want to see) each painting presents us with a wholly distinct palette of human feeling & sensibility.

How many people have already stood in front of these Madonna’s, rapt with delighted attention ... ? How many meditating faithful Christians? How many agnostic art lovers? (um, & how many bored tourists or students?) How many generations of frivolous dilettantes, earnest connoisseurs and erudite art historians?
In any case, Max J. Friedländer (5) - one of the most insightful and intuitive art historians/connoisseurs I have come across in my, admittedly limited, readings – must have looked quite intently at many of Metsys’ Madonna’s. Leaving us with precise, evocative descriptions, precious crystals of human perceptiveness that manage to capture in a few laconic phrases the full, complex richness of the many sensitivities at play in these paintings.

And isn’t that why we look at paintings : because they are testimonials of human experience which spectators throughout the ages can share and relive, because they offer a “concentrated timelessness”(6) in an otherwise constantly changing and even threatening world.
And isn’t that what is so appealing about these ancient art museums – that the sheer richness of their art collections is proof of a "lasting collective human obsession” (paraphrasing again Leen Huet)(6) .
Thus art museums offer at least some sort of reassurance for the transient & isolated individuals we otherwise are - and some sort of escape too, from our own duller selves, whenever “we grow grim about the mouth” .

neatly numbered (though quite lopsided) notes & quotes
(1) Herman Melville Moby Dick
(2) (taking personal note of the fact that dear C. would of course much rather keep the quote as such, duly salvaging all ships and seas)
(3)
W.H. Auden “Musée des Beaux Arts”
(4) Quinten Metsys (a.ka. Quentin Matsys or Quentin Massys) In fact I don’t quite understand why Metsys (who showed such individuality and mastery in a wide range of genres, from realistic caricatures over moving Madonna’s to religious altarpieces and humanist portraits)is not more widely acclaimed. Why for instance was Mabuse (Jan Gossaert/Gennnin Gossart) recently entitled to a major London ‘solo’-exhibition, and not Metsys? + taking note (4) as an opportunity to apologize for the drab quality of the pics (of the 2 clandestinely taken pictures on the spot and of the rather disappointing reproductions found on the web)
(5) Max J. Friedländer Early Netherlandish Painting Volume VII Quentin Massys - some of my favourite Friedländer quotes about various Metsys madonnas:
“the emotional pitch lacks the depth and gravity that give weight to the Brussels panels. The Virgin’s head is rather doll-like – smug and aloof. The child is amiable and insignificant. The whole painting is innocuous and festive, but without the imprint of sorrow that none of Quentin’s other Madonna’s altogether lack”
“[...] the Virgin’s expression is grave, noble and sorrowful, but here it is a bit more sullen and homespun, not quite so proud and a trifle weary. The child, covered to the toes in a long white shift, perches in somewhat uncertain posture on the mother’s arm, an expression of almost animal-like gravity on his face.”
“The intimacy of the kiss is at odds with any air of solemnity, as are the still life details, the delicacies shown on the table in the foreground in orderly array and painstaking, almost over realistic technique.”
And yet another one: “Mother and child move in triumphant freedom, in the spirit of the renaissance.”
And, finally, a quote to confound those who might think Matsys or Friedländer are only about cloyingly sentimental Madonna’s (the following quote refers to Metsys’ Antwerp Altarpiece of the Lamentation) :
“The master eagerly seizes upon opportunities to bemuse the viewer with a show of splendour and a depiction of orgiastic cruelty. The lofty sorrow and many-voiced harmony of lamentation in the centre panel are framed on either side by evil instinct.”
(6)
a passage from Leen Huet’s novel “Eenoog”, describing a visit to the Uffizi - “op een plek als deze zou het verleidelijk zijn om schilderijen beter gezelschap te vinden dan mensen. […] Het gaat om hun tijdloosheid, hun concentratie. Achter een paar kleurvakken zit de ervaring van een heel leven. Ervaring die ik lees. En ik ben niet de enige die er zo over denkt, alleen een langdurige collectieve obsessie kan tot dit soort overvloedig gevulde ruimtes leiden” -
a hesitant, unauthorized translation : “in a place such as this it would be tempting to prefer the company of paintings to that of human beings […]. It’s about their timelessness, their concentration. Behind a few coloured planes there is the experience of a whole life. An experience I am reading. And I am not the only one who thinks about it like that, only a lasting collective obsession can produce lavishly filled rooms such as these”

The sumptuous villa of an industrial tycoon, politics of oppression, veiled women, International Gothic and the spiritual quiet of a Sacra Conversazione.

2011-08-07T08:33:00.000-07:00

(or: from hybrid reality to universal intuitions )

A disabused post modern discourse?

Is not reality a dirty tale of dominance, full of selfish sound & fury? And is not so-called high or universal art merely an expression of the dominant (obviously) base desires of the dominant class of the dominant continent?

Take that beautiful art deco villa: just the spoiled son of a Belgian 19th C industrial tycoon throwing his inherited money at a lavish art deco villa, sumptuously decorated with the most expensive materials. And that oriental flavour? Well, Mr Tycoon Senior did not only exploit European natural and human resources but also tramped about in Cairo, and indulged in an exotic fascination for the Orient.

Well, at least that sumptuous villa is now being recycled as a “Center of art and dialogue between the cultures of the East and the West”. And all that splendor now houses a politically aware exhibit about “Rituals, wigs, scarves, make-up and so many other constraints determining the life of women for Centuries, between concealment, unveiling and revealing”.

The imposed (!) modesty of the Virgin? The imposed (!) modesty of the veiled Arabic woman? Or the imposed (?) immodesty of Eve, of sensually made up pin ups. Sigh - the inescapable politics of sexual dominance and male projections about how women should dress : never clothed enough (when modesty is required) – never naked enough (when sexual desires have to be aroused). Those naked women on Renaissance paintings: mere porn for rich patrons .
Yah, obviously, whether you’re Darwinian, or Freudian, or Marxist – you have learned that all art can be deconstructed to become a dirty tale of selfish genes, repressed (or expressed? umm...) sexuality, capitalist dominance. We’re all just selfish individuals confined to our contingent provincial conditions. Da. There.

Redeemed by ‘ordinary poetics’

But however true the above disabused discourse may be - yes, Tiziano’s Venus of Orbino is a pin-up , for those who want to see her like that – those who have an “'oculus impudicus' qui ravale l’émotion artistique à la concupiscence” (Jean Claude Bologne ). So, however distressingly true the above may be, ‘disinterested’ poetry and a universal lyrical sensitivity do exist (yes, non-sexually inspired enchantment with the poetic and aesthetic sensitivity of Tizian’s Venus is possible ) – or, at least, there are still enough of us believing in it.

And therefore, wandering about that art deco villa, I can be enchanted by the space and the rhythms of the rooms, by the pure sensuousness of the materials. And I’m moved, deeply moved by the
magic worked by Maimouna Guerresi : the poignancy and stillness of those white, spectral , hieratic figures ... Levitating? Striding?

What do they remind me of? Not of submissiveness. Of the oriental mystery of veiled women, then? Yes perhaps, but not as a matter of exotics, but rather like the mystery and stillness of a meditating Madonna - the “quiet spirituality of a "sacra conversatione”, done by Bellini for instance, whose Madonnas have that same aura of non-sentimental but deeply moving, contemplative concentration. “ quies - a spiritual reconciliation, idyllic or ascetic retreat into solitude”. Yes, I’m reminded of Bellini, whose pictures achieve that rare intuitive unity of poetry & metaphorical & religious meaning, not requiring analytical erudition to understand their significance.

And that levitating figure? The mystical ecstasy of a Saint? Bernini’s baroque imagination? Saint Theresa?

And those striding figures, with the elegantly dignified folds of those draperies, is there not a visual resonance with the
elongated sinuosity of the gothic international style ...

And so I wonder & ponder ... exulting in intuitive associations. Irrelevant projections? Merely revealing my own hybrid set of accidental cultural references, my own pathetic longing for some universal beauty and meaning? Well, not entirely irrelevant ..., not merely strictly personal intuitions it seems. Later on, when doing some web research on Maïmouna Guerresi, I’m delighted to find these echoes in her own artistic statement :

“As with many ancient icons, my figures in hieratic poses recall images of the Virgin, but also celebrate contemporary cultures and religions that have kept their traditions alive. This gives rise to a new and hybrid iconography [...] My work is part of a [...] transcultural expression’, where the elements of formal beauty combine with ancient African symbolic forms. I present a hybrid reality, consisting of eastern and western cultural references, in which ordinary poetics reach beyond what is represented to unite with a universal condition of beauty, mysticism and sensitivity. This kind of intuition is common to all peoples of the world” .

Art Historical Notes Washed Ashore : Guest Contributions to a Brief Art History of Rain

2011-07-30T02:18:00.000-07:00

It seems that representations of rain are definitely on the mind of artistically aware bloggers, as witnessed by the generous reactions to my appeal for contributions towards an art history of rain.

Pensum confirmed the status of Turner (1775-1851) as notorious painter of rain & fog, and furnished a precious link to Georges Michel, a pre-impressionist French landscape painter who ostensibly did not shy away from some dramatic open air drizzle .
And as to non-western art, Pensum also drew attention to Indian artists’ delectation in rendering rainy subjects . Note the explicitly pelting rain in the image (coming from a 17th Century manuscript) of Krishna and Radha dancing in the rain!
Further thinking about “Rain in Art”, Pensum also became all the more certain “that earlier tribes and peoples must have depicted rain in petroglyphs and ritual art “ – suspicions backed up by some interesting articles he found, i.a. by Renaud Ego . And indeed, in view of the importance of “rain” for human life, it only seems natural that it should have turned up in ritual images. Which leaves one speculating whether “Rain” was perhaps too much linked with pagan rain rituals to be admissible for depiction in Christian art?

However that may be, Pensum found further delightful examples of rain in eastern art (quoting his comment): “ it would seem that the Eastern traditions have been more enamoured with precipitation from early on. of course the rain has been used to good effect by oriental artists, as in this Korean painting from the late 12th or early 13th century. And though a later work, this ink painting by Maruyama Oshin from the late 18th century is a fine example of exploiting the obscuration provided by the falling rain. While in India it seems they relate rain with joy (perhaps the fall of blessings?) as they tend to like dancing in it as in this example from about 1670”

Furthermore, both Pensum and Roxana came to the rescue of my failing memory and supplied the name of the Japanese rain artist par excellence, Hiroshige ( 1797-1858), who did the famous Japanese print of a bridge in the rain.

As a superb connoisseur of floating bridges, Roxana also promptly came up with the tribute Van Gogh paid to this Hiroshige rainy bridge.
And with her exquisite Japanese art sensibility, she furthermore kindly shared yet another lovely Japanese print picturing a rainy evening.

Leen Huet from her side consulted the undisputed art expert from the Low Countries, Karel Van Mander (the 16th C Flemish-Dutch gossipy equivalent of Vasari) and came up with a charming anecdote: a painter from Mechelen/Malines, the illustrious completely forgotten Gregorius Beerings (1525-1573), seems to have specialised in Flood pictures showing nothing but a rainy sky and water with the Ark. Questioned about the absence of people in his pictures, the painter shrewdly explained that all people had either drowned (& their bodies would only resurface after the receding of the waters) or were hidden from view in Noah’s ark. According to Van Mander our good Gregorius had quite some success with his chain produced uniformly grey flood pictures. But, Alas!!!, dear curious blog reader: no pictures of this Flemish rain genius seem to have survived. ...
Leen Huet further shows a Michelangelo (1475 – 1564) Sistine fresco with desperate, drenched people seeking refuge from the flood. Michelangelo's Flood looks suitably grey & grim & miserable, but does lack, to my romantic rain taste at least, the splendid splatter of gleaming rain drops .

From an aesthetic point of view, Leen Huet also raises the question why in particular the Flemish Primitives, disposing of the technical means (oil paint!) to depict the sensual and optical qualities of rain, never did render it. Too dull and gray, in comparison with scintillating mirrors , tears, vases and gleaming copper? Iconographically speaking, Leen Huet further notes how Rain is, apart from the Flood, not very present in the bible and therefore not the kind of subject Christian patrons would ask for.

In the meanwhile, rain has briefly stopped over here, so time to rush out for some dry open air experiences.

Wanted: A Brief Art History of Rain

2011-07-24T08:08:00.000-07:00

Granted, there are many pressing questions worth being answered first, but right now I’m just sitting here wondering about Rain in Art. When & where & why has it first been represented? Isn’t there some famous Japanese print with a bridge in the rain (but when was that made?). And how often has it been raining in Western art? Not that much before the 19th century it would seem. There are violently romantic ‘storm at sea’ pictures. And Turner did do foggy & rainy things, and obviously there are impressionist paintings of Paris in the rain and of London in the fog. Simmering expressionist views of drizzly Berlin must have been painted too.
And then of course, the full potential of the urban romance of rain has been unlocked by urban photography – going from classical B&W photos ( Leonard Misonne!) to glossy pictures of all the grubby grimy glamour of shimmering neon lights reflected in wet streets.

But so, the real art-historical question: how about rain in pre-romantic, pre-modern art? Is there for instance any explicit rain to be seen in 17th century Dutch landscape and seascape paintings? Well, skies & seas & rivers can definitely look pretty rough in the most anxious pictures done by Van Ruysdael , but where’s the visibly raging rain? The splashing drops? The rainy misty shrouds? I’m not sure ...
And the Venetians then, with their Laguna-dampness .... Does rain ever finally pour down in Giorgione’s ominous Tempest?
Oh, and in medieval books of hours, with their miniatures showing the labours of the months, surely there must be a picture of poor drenched peasants toiling away in a downpour? But no, even October, November and December seem to keep it quite dry in Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry.

Um, but come to think of it, surely there will be plenty of rain in religious art! Mystical floods! The Deluge! Noah’s Ark! Hmmm ... not really, wet precipitations clearly were not a favourite pictorial theme before the Romantic age.
Though there are of course a few Nativities taking place in snow covered stables including icicles hanging down from the shabby roof. And Bruegel’s hunters were courageously (& quite prettily) trotting through deep and very white snow. But still: no rain.
There are quite some missed iconographic opportunities there methinks. How infinitely pouring rain could have added to the pathos of poor Joseph and Maria trudging on that tired donkey during their Flight to Egypt! And imagine a chilling hostile drizzle in the Garden of Olives... (now don’t tell me it hardly ever rains in Egypt or Jerusalem - painters adapted the scenes to northern tastes anyway).

And the Caravaggists, with their contrasted chiaroscuros – why did they not exploit the many pictorial delights of gleaming , splattering, refracting Rain?
Perhaps because rain back then in the old days really was nothing but a nuisance, a harbinger of miserable wetness and of fatal colds & coughs?
Perhaps one does need a sufficient measure of rainproof materials and vehicles, as well as warm housing, to appreciate the romantic and visual potential of rain?
Not to mention the lavish availability of waterproof sources of artificial light – yeah, car lamps, traffic lights and neon lights ... they do get the very best out of rain.

Notes being washed away

Prisoner's Dilemma in Brussels? (July 21st , 2011)

2011-07-21T09:51:00.000-07:00

Being an inveterate doubting humanist, I‘ve never shied away from Great Nagging Questions such as “the inescapable duel between biological necessity and the transcendence of the human spirit”. (1) Thus there is the puzzle of altruism (or just plain kindness): is it a uniquely human moral quality which transcends (2) the ‘inevitably’ selfish biological instincts (3)? But then how could it survive nature’s merciless selection of the fittest? Or is altruism merely yet another evolutionary strategy serving an ulterior selfish motive, a strategy that has evolved because in some cases apparent selfless behaviour does enhance evolutionary success? (be it on the level of selfish genes, selfish individuals or selfish groups) (4)

In any case, digesting the findings of evolutionary biologists, keen economists reasoned without much delay that 1> self-seeking is inherent to our evolved human nature and that 2> humans are rational in the pursuit of their self-interest. Thus they posited this elemental truth: “Human beings are self-seeking, rational agents out to maximize their gains in a fierce, competitive world”(5).
And wanting to draw conclusions as to how societies should organize themselves, they added 3>, “nature [being] mankind’s moral compass” this ‘natural’ individual gain maximization will get the most out of each and every resource (human or otherwise), thus benefiting to the community as a whole.

Mathematically based ‘game-theory’ could even help those rational self-seeking ‘players’ to find the optimal strategy to maximize their individual gains. (5)
But alas, one of those maximising games irrefutably showed that individual rational and self-seeking reasoning did not always produce the best possible collective good. In the so-called “Prisoner's Dilemma” “each player pursuing his own self-interest leads both players to be worse off than had they not pursued purely their own self-interests”(6)

So shouldn’t we then all, as reasonable beings aware of the limits of pure selfishness, rather seek enlightened cooperation instead of going for the selfish option in our ‘games’?
Umm, well, It’s true that if we are both being reasonable that we will both be better off, but ... ay, here’s the rub, what if I am being reasonable & I give in, and the other does not, then I’m the dunce of the affair! Ah and just suppose that I won’t budge, while the other might give in, then I have a chance to win it all! And so neither of us gives in, neither of us cooperates and we‘re both worse off than if we had cooperated.

Dear readers, obviously only few of you are concerned with the fate of the Belgian people, but really, the recent Belgian political manoeuvres are a perfect (though sickening) example of game-theory. The Belgian politicians (sorry, the Dutch and the French speaking politicians of Belgium) have been trapped in this Prisoner’s Dilemma for over a year now, hostages of narrow “Them and Us” group thinking, too paralyzed to be able to form even a government.

Yesterday, at the eve of the Belgian National Holiday, the poor tired King of Belgium addressed its troubled nation, speaking about responsibility and tolerance, about how disastrous the current stalemate was for each Belgian citizen (sorry, for each Dutch speaking and each French speaking citizen of Belgium). An almost desperate, but above all genuine and dignified plea for cooperation ... (7)

Upon which, quite reluctantly, one of the stalling Flemish political parties (say party A) did announce to be willing to rejoin the negotiations with the French speaking parties. And, WHAMM – BHAMM , this mere sign of “willingness to cooperate” was immediately punished by another Flemish party (say party B), eager to steal voters from party A . Indeed, Party B could now claim to be the only Truly Unflinching Defender of The Flemish Interests. And so Party B did not measure its words – accusing Party A to betray the Flemish Interests, “to show its bare naked butt” (“volledig met de billen bloot” ), “to go flat on its belly” (“plat op de buik”).

Again, I am an eternally doubting person who knows she does not know and who, having not analyzed in full detail all proposals from all Dutch speaking and all French speaking parties, is not eager to take big political stands.
But I do have taste ....and I do have a sense of beauty and of dignity. And the sheer crudeness with which this Flemish party B crushed a tentative opening towards negotiation ... Nope, that’s not where I want to be. And yep, now I know for sure – this party B is indeed nothing but a bullying populist party opportunistically catering to the basest selfish instincts.

And in the meanwhile, also on this 21st of July, and also in Brussels, European leaders are convening, with nothing less than the fate of the Eurozone being at stake. One can only hope they will be able to “transcend”(9) the Prisoner’s dilemma, that they will be able to at least try and pursue the collective good ...

Nine National Belgian Notes
(1) Oren Harman – “The Price of Altruism” - “George Price and the search for the origins of kindness”. Click here for a review. It's a truly fascinating book “[covering] the entire 150-year history of scientists’ researching, debating and bickering about a theoretical problem that lies at the core of behavioral biology, sociobiology and evolutionary psychology: Why is it that organisms sacrifice themselves for the benefit of others?”
(2) Ah, transcendence! Have never been quite able to grasp what it is, except that it denotes a realm of all that‘s beyond our greedy materialist grasp? As a (inveterate, doubting, etc) humanist I of course take “transcendence” in its humanist-philosophical sense, not in any God-given sense. And what would I personally put then in that transcendental realm - everything that is not merely utilitarian, everything that gets us beyond our role in the food chain, ie : meaning, beauty, goodness, justice, ...
(3) “inevitably selfish” – yeah, well, it’s simple really: in a struggle for life under conditions of scarce resources, selfishness does enhance individual fitness to survive, and thus evolution will mercilessly get rid of any selfless tendencies that reduce individual fitness.
(4) This kind of apparent altruism then depends on relatedness of genes (helping one’s kin), or on expected reciprocity of support and mercy amongst individuals, or on the success of cohesive groups against other groups. But so it is still always one entity surviving at the expense of another. There are even very elegant mathematical formulas that describe how and when “selfless” behaviour is an efficient strategy for genes and individuals to enhance their eventual selection success.
(5) “The price of Altruism” pp 135-137
(6) See Wikipedia for full exposition on Prisoner's Dilemma
(7) Look, I have neither outspoken royalist nor anti-royalist convictions. But I can see how a purely ceremonial, symbolic monarch can help to foster some common sense of belonging – without therefore veering into royal adoration or blind patriotism. And again, as to the Belgian nation – yes, I do cherish it, because it so utterly lacks the more nefarious tones of nationalism, and yes, I do value this cultural diversity inherent in the Belgian nation. And as to the threat for the Dutch language of having to share a nation with an “imperialist” language such as French – well, frankly, I think that Global English poses more of a threat – (witness this very blog written in second hand Global English by a Dutch speaker)
(8) as Hannah Arendt rhetorically asked: “ Could it be that taste belongs among the political faculties?”
(9) Ah, there’s “transcend” again! Time for a confession – while I am fascinated by the biological origins of human morality – at heart I still am this old-fashioned Kantian humanist who would rather believe that humans do not merely entertain notions of altruism and goodness because of their use for individual or collective survival. I would much rather continue to believe human morality stems from some sort of empathy or non-utilitarian “affection for our fellow creatures in chance’s kingdom” (Richard Powers), from some non-utilitarian sense of beauty and human dignity.

Ten Minutes

2011-06-13T08:48:00.000-07:00

At an exhibition, one often casts but a glance at each painting. Our enjoyment is based on the retina transmitting an instant impression before being attracted by the next delight.
Looking for a full ten minutes at a single painting is already considered a lot of time (with usually over 100 paintings per exhibition, and 10 minutes for each other painting, one ought to spend 16.5 hours at the average exhibition).

And yet, 10 minutes spent in front of a superb painting .... is nothing. And everything!! 10 minutes standing there, enchanted, entranced by the leaves of a tree, by dancing light patches, by the tangible atmosphere of a breathing nature.

The painter himself, we can read, used to set off for entire days in the countryside to observe patiently the myriad of light effects, “laying in the fields from dawn till night , in order to learn to represent with precision the breaking of day, the sunrise and sunset, the evening hours”.

Today's cameras are probably better equipped to exploit all optical laws to faithfully render a landscape – but could they also convey the enchantment of laying in the fields for entire days from dawn till night?

From the catalogue
“Le peintre Joachim von Sandrart rapporte qu’ils partaient ensemble des jours entiers pour observer les effets du soleil sur le paysage, se préparant ainsi à rendre avec acuité la nature particulière de la lumière matinale ou les effets du coucher du soleil.”
““Il cherchait avec tous les moyens à pénétrer les secrets de la nature, étendu dans les champs, de l’aube à la nuit, afin d’apprendre à représenter avec exactitude la naissance du jour, le lever et le coucher du soleil, les heures du soir” “

Of Soldiers & Mystics, or: from Guns to Tears

2011-06-05T08:47:00.000-07:00

"Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)"

(Walt Whitman - Song of Myself)

Well, dear blog-reader, I bet you would never have pictured me going to the "Royal Museum of the Armed Forces and of Military History". Granted, C. did drag me along, but I didn’t put up much of a resistance either. Furthermore, we didn’t just visit the innocent exhibition documenting the Belgian presence in Germany after WW II. Nope, I must confess that we devoted most of our time to the permanent collections of guns and cannons throughout the ages.

While C. was eager to explain how everything (from cannons to revolvers) worked, I was no less eager to grasp guns’ basic operating principles and pushed for ever more details and examples.
And truly, when it comes to arms human ingenuity is boundless! How ingenious indeed, automatic machine guns that recycle the gun’s own recoil force to increase its fire ability! Yah, and how devilishly smart those shrapnel shells were: self-exploding canisters widely dispersing bullets above enemy grounds!

At this point C. and I did look rather shamefacedly at each other – how smart, and how mean and diabolically destructive this all indeed is ...
And I promptly remembered a similar shameful realisation in childhood. As a true tomboy I had always favoured toy weapons and little soldiers over dolls. But round about age 11 or 12 I did experience a sudden burst of empathy (thanks to voracious reading? or female hormones at last getting through? ) and started worrying about my militarist games. After a transition period ( in which I would only wound but no longer ruthlessly kill my imaginary enemies), I then radically decided to throw out all the toy guns and to pursue more peaceful occupations (ie even more reading).

And as it happened , on the very same day the visit to the Military Museum would find a startling counterpoint. Outside the Cinquantenaire park, just across the road, in a church which I hadn’t even noticed before, ran an exhibition whose title had piqued my curiosity when earlier browsing a cultural agenda:
Mystical Gardens of the Heart of Europe / Les Jardins Intéreurs du Coeur de l’Europe.

After all the , um, virile sound and fury, the contrast couldn’t be greater when entering that church – a half dark space filled with ethereal (albeit recorded) vocal music (1). Only a few people were wandering about , looking at a dozen of exhibition panes with reproductions of drawings & gravures, accompanied by sober texts.
The works and thoughts of the great European mystics (2) were evoked : Hildegard von Bingen, Meester Eckhart, Jan van Ruusbroeck, Hadewijch van Antwerpen, Marguerite Porète, Angelus Silesius, ... and, more recently, Etty van Hillesum, Edith Stein, etc.

And I don’t know at what point exactly it happened – perhaps while stirred by a particular ephemeral & pure passage in that music? Or perhaps while reading some of those accompanying texts, speaking of “inner gardens” and of the ideals of solitude and contemplation in a “collapsing world”?
Anyway, I felt tears welling up, first because it all had felt for the briefest of joyous moments like some sort of homecoming. And then, immediately, because of an all engulfing sadness, a keen sense of fragility and loss. It was about personal loss: hadn’t I renounced my own contemplative inclinations - though rather philosophical & aesthetic than religious- to become a useful member of a utilitarian world?(3). And, worse still, it also was about a general loss: a whole world, a whole human culture of reflective thinking bound to disappear.

But later on, by the most ambiguous of reasoning, I did manage to feel a certain paradoxical and defiant pride about the sheer stubborn persistence of this most useless, this most irrelevant, this most fragile of human inclinations: contemplative thinking. (4)
An inclination, apparently bestowing no evolutionary advantage whatsoever in the struggle of life, producing neither guns nor bread, but still sticking around.... Yah, was not thinking a freedom from necessity, and thus a source of human pride in the face of the overwhelming practical imperatives of our genes?

Always in for some crisp critical notes
(1) Oh beware, do beware of recorded religious music in churches! Insidious tearjerkers, that’s what they are. And not the real thing!
(2) At this point I still owe some sort of apology to A. regarding a discussion about religion we had a couple of years ago. In my over-zealousness to denounce the hypocrisy of established religions, and wishing to save “moral awareness” from the clutches of the church, I did not fully appreciate the nuances A. introduced. She (rightly, I now concede) drew attention to the depths of thinking and the moral integrity attained in the Christian mystical tradition.
(3) And I cannot honestly blame “the” world or my parents for this early exile from the gardens of contemplation. (Well, not completely at any rate). It has been an ongoing (and, frankly, quite exhausting) warfare going on in my own head: on the one side an admiration for the “true” & “useful” knowledge brought by the natural sciences as well as for the impressive technological advances (and this admiration is then accompanied by frustration about the eternally recursive and “useless” nature of reflective thinking). On the other side, a simply irrepressible need for beauty and meaning (“ a life without reflection is not worth living”)
(4) But about “thinking”, Arendt of course was never wrong, and perhaps she has said all there remained to say in her “The Life of the Mind” ( which may well be the ultimate Elegy for Philosophy).

Appalling

2011-06-02T08:11:00.000-07:00

There are things one would rather not know , things one would rather not read about. Atrocious deeds done to people, done to women in particular.

Over the past weeks one could thus read interviews with that doctor of a hospital in east Congo , telling about the ordeals of women who have been raped, mutilated and are then ostracised by their own communities. Telling about how in the vast majority of cases their abusers go unpunished.
And while further perusing the papers, one could read about the belated capture of a Croatian war criminal. And one was reminded of those cruel war years in Yougoslavia, when Bosnian women were abused by the thousands.

No, one would rather not know all that . One really would rather read something else. And yet, these crimes have to be made known, as widely as possible. Silence would be the worst.

And what to do? Besides shuddering and lamenting? Run to the bank and donate to Amnesty? Write a letter to one’s representative in the European parliament? And link to a UN- campaign page.

Links:
http://www.stoprapenow.org/
www.feministpeacenetwork.org

'a certain slant of light', on a late May afternoon

2011-05-15T10:41:00.000-07:00

Place – a terrace in the centre of Brussels
Time – Saturday May 14th , 6PM

“There’s a certain slant of light”, on late May afternoons ... And there ‘s also a certain texture of (grey) stone ....

Not to mention there are certain windows, with red flowers on the window sill, through which one can catch a glimpse of a man reading, with his head slightly bent.

And to perfect this luminous bliss - his silhouette contrasts nicely with the gay colours of a certain rainbow flag, fluttering behind yet an another window in the back.

From Eternal Stone to Mirrors & Polka Dots

2011-05-09T09:32:00.000-07:00

It’s perhaps not needed (but well, not forbidden either) that I generously share the reflections which popped up during a trip to yet another provincial European town, quite removed from the epicentre of world affairs.

Though actually, even a drowsily dull train ride from Brussels to Metz can spawn images quite representative of our age. On this particular train service one first has ample opportunity to observe (live!) the modern breed of valiant business travellers - all impeccably suited, reading financial newspapers, touting Blackberries and laptops – a sure sign that the Belgo-Luxembourg financial industry isn’t dead yet.
After the orderly disembarkation of this financial cohort, one then can direct one’s gaze outside, marvelling at the mightily imposing steel plants of ArcelorMittal – thus being presented with conclusive visual evidence of the fact that, despite the many industrial residues in these regions, the lead in heavy industry has passed on to other continents (to India in this case).
But the gawking train traveller is not granted much time to muse about the financial and industrial decline of Europe because a giant hallucination next fills the entire train window : a gleaming, white roller coaster structure, quickly followed by a vision of yet another, even larger, steel&wood roller coaster skeleton.
Since it is well known that Europe will not perish for lack of amusement, these structures obviously do not startle because of their frivolous function, but rather because of their sheer physical bulkiness: dinosaurs tramping about in an otherwise virtual entertainment age.

Having in the preceding paragraphs duly paid my tribute to the real world, I now dare to divulge the obscure nature of my readings on the train (that is, whenever I was not keenly observing my surroundings). First I expectantly opened a book titled “the necessity of art”, but I soon got bored by its threadbare Marxist references and then even felt quite depressed because of the nature itself of the venture: the necessity to demonstrate the necessity of art ...

So I eagerly switched to (hopefully) more solid reading : an early 20th C book (1) by Wilhelm Worringer (2) about the Gothic "artistic will" as opposed to classical art intentions.
It is strange to read in 2011 a book with a thesis that now is common place but in 1927 was still provocative , challenging as it did the monopoly of classical aesthetic ideals and arguing that “abstract” art was not a matter of lack of representative skills but rather a conscious intention (3).
And though I did savour some of the book’s thoughtful insights about the deep human needs and insufficiencies art caters to (4) , it could not lift my rather sombre, self doubting mood (as an irrelevant unpractical art lover in a materialist world). Ah blessed the times when one would still quarrel about the qualities of representative art versus abstract art - blessed the times when one would still seriously discuss matters of beauty, of meaning, of transcendental longings! Etc Etc Etc

But lo! there was Metz station, time to get out, to check in a hotel and to engage asap in art-touristic appeasing rituals (5).
Wishing to further burnish my modern day credentials, I first of all visited the brand new Pompidou centre for modern & contemporary art. And I must admit, the exhibits there do sometimes manage to revive the feverish ‘Zeitgeist’ and some of the excitement of the once deemed revolutionary 20th C art .
But the Metz-Pompidou curators do not seem dogmatic, and so the exhibits are endearingly ambivalent about some of the 20th C art that does not fit into the now dominant modern discourse, the kind of art now spurned for not being “avant garde” enough (6).
Thus they do display works that “offer an alternative to a reading of the 20th Century reduced to a succession of rowdy ruptures” (7), but on the other hand comments on the wall earnestly and retrospectively chide the Parisian Museum of Modern art for “having neglected in the mid 20the C avant garde works to the benefit of certain cubist works that by their decorative qualities had become acceptable”.

But of course, no eagerness to honour ephemeral modernity, would ever have me skip my dose of illusions of permanence, and so, “for love of the eternal character of stone”(8), the next day I wandered for hours in the gallo-roman-medieval museum of Metz - quietly contemplating the remaining emanations in stone of the many varieties of human energies and beliefs throughout the ages.

And yet , and yet – for all my deplorable art-conservative instincts and classical longings, when later visiting also nearby Nancy – it was not the elegant 18th century classicist splendour of the famous Place Stanislas which stirred me most... No, it was the unexpected encounter in a museum with an old “acquaintance” – the endearingly outrageous, crazy Japanese artist Yayoï Kusama , who magically & stubbornly fills the world with mirrors & polka dots.

notes
(1) "L’Art gothique, [Formprobleme der Gotik, 1927]. Traduction de l'allemand par D. Decourdemanche, Paris, Gallimard, 1941."
(2) his sheer name, so ‘stark und stabil’ , so alliterative, & then also that worrying echo. The publication date of this particular French translation is also startling: April 1941 - one cannot but imagine defeated Parisian flâneurs ruefully scanning the many German names on display in the windows of bookshops ....
(3) “in historical periods of anxiety and uncertainty, man seeks to abstract objects from their unpredictable state and transform them into absolute, transcendental forms”
(4) WW(French translation) : “toutes les creations métaphysiques et poétiques de l’humanité ne sont que des reactions puissantes et admirables de l’instinct de conservation contre la sensation déprimante de l’insuffisance humaine [...]"
(5) In fact, what WW writes about the “primitive art drive” may very well apply to my own refuge-seeking in art galleries, cathedrals and other contemplative sanctuaries: “Troubled and tormented by life, [primitive man] seeks the inanimate because there the disquiet of all becoming makes way for enduring stability. [...] Creating an artistic work, means expressively fixing a stable beyond of the phenomena(un au-delà des phénomènes)"
(6) I may have had an overdose of modern art in my twenties, which would explain why I now often get so very tired when visiting yet another museum of modern art , telling yet again with gusto the story of all those brave ruptures with stifling tradition – but well, “Duchamp’s urinal is in the museum for almost 100 years now” (as Thierry de Duve wrote), so perhaps it's no wonder I find it difficult to experience still its revolutionary thrill.
(7) “offre une alternative à une lecture de l’art du XX siècle réduit à une succession de bruyantes ruptures. [...] [où] le scandale confère [...] une célebrité immédiate”
(8) WW (French translation): “Par amour pour le caractère éternel de la pierre”

Easter Serendipity

2011-04-25T05:47:00.000-07:00

Serendipity at work again – with my freshly honed interest in cultural history (1), I unfailingly stumbled (during a cursory visit to a second hand shop ) upon a great classic in the genre: Huizinga’s “The Autumn of the Middle Ages”.

For me this is obviously the perfect autumnal book to spend a lovely Easter-afternoon with under an insouciantly blossoming tree. While birds were chirping, children laughing and a sweet breeze ruffled the book’s pages , I avidly plunged into this sublimely sombre spectacle of late-medieval pessimism and decadence.

The book is full of pleasing discoveries, such as the fact that in late-medieval texts “melancholize” is actually a verb, denoting thorough thinking (“quand il eut merancoliet une espasse, il s’avisa que il rescripoit [...]” – “when he had melancholized for a while, he decided he would write back [...] “).

In any case, my dear blog readers can rest assured : despite my apparent surrender to frivolous Easter weekend hedonism (such as outings filled with ice cream eating and rosé-sipping on sunny terraces, and lying about in lush green grass) I did not abandon the true contemplative Easter-spirit (2).
Not only did I find this suitably reflective book, but also did I manage to slip from a terrace right into a church where I could meditate upon a 15th C Last Supper and where I could be filled with compassion looking at a wooden, timeworn, so very weary (or resigned?) head of Christ.

And while sitting on a church-bench with C. (who was heroically suppressing her deep aversion from all things religious, just muttering vaguely about obscurantism), I could even catch fragments of that heart-rending Matthäus-passion aria – “erbarme dich, Mein Gott, Um meiner Zähren willen” (3)

Easter-notes
(1) see previous post
(2) disclaimer: in this blog contemplative & spiritual raptures are always strictly humanist-aesthetical
(3) of course, of course I’m against the mechanical reproduction of religious classical music through loudspeakers in churches. Of course this reduces transcendental music to mere muzak, as if it were X-mas songs aired in a shopping street. Of course it should be the real thing! But still, caught unawares by that aria is .... well, heart rending

"history doesn't interest me" : right / wrong / don't know

2011-04-16T04:09:00.000-07:00

"History doesn't interest me"

For inveterate pessimists being wrong is often a cause for celebration. Because it means a good thing could happen despite the resistance of one’s own sceptical self.

This time I was proven wrong as to my long-standing aversion for historical biographies. Those piles of dates & facts..., those pages filled with human pettiness and with (worse even!)great (horrible) deeds - none of it all redeemed by beauty... (1) No thanks. What I looked for in books were the timeless qualities of Art, the illuminations of Meaning, no less. Didn’t I already have the papers for my daily dose of nasty facts?

So when I browsed through the books on offer at the entry of a museum devoted to the collections of a former burgomaster of Antwerp, I confess I quickly discarded the biography of this respected citizen (however nice his name - "Rockox" ). I was there for the paintings & their ageless sensibilities (2) not for the vicissitudes of socio-political history.

How a 'burgomaster-book' proved me wrong!

But the burgomaster-book (3) and I got a second chance, later at a Brussels bookshop, when it managed to overcome my prejudices – after all, it was written by two art historians (which always bodes well for meaningful insights(4)), it did cover a momentous epoch in European history (1560-1640, when pious protestants clashed with catholic zealots) , and there were even some pictures of paintings in it!

And so, here I am, 10 days and more than 300 pages later – captivated by this story of citizens caught amidst the turbulence of sectarian and political strife …

Of course, I had learned long ago about the horrors of the Eighty Years' war, the Iconoclasms, the Spanish fury, etc etc ... But somehow I had always passed over all that misery as merely part of the general brutish & backward spirit of older times. (5) And now this book had me reading letters of men and women of that time – so reasonable & wise , so deeply concerned about the miseries of war, so compassionate in their evocations of other peoples’ suffering, so downtrodden yet dignified when describing their own ill-fortunes – how alive and contemporary these voices sounded, how sensitive ... (6)

And as to my previous notions of Antwerp at the close of its golden age - they too were exposed by this book as being quite superficial, limited as they had been to impressions of baroque splendour & vainglory. Never had I really bothered to imagine how, perhaps even more than the Catholic propaganda efforts, it were civic resilience and a staunch dedication of local citizens to decency and culture that could resuscitate the cosmopolitan and cultivated-humanist climate of "pre-fall" Antwerp.

"Enlivening what otherwise would have remained dead"

The evocative power of this book is in fact astonishing – "enlivening what otherwise would [have remained] dead"(7). Very concrete details make one feel as if one gets a peek at daily life as it was. Well chosen extracts from documents & letters let one read over the shoulder of the local citizens, judges, poets, priests, ... The political twists & turns of the time are commented using quotes of the best historians. And the book allows one to savour the courteous, even affectionate, exchanges between the leading humanist intellectuals of those days, so much so that one ends up feeling their privileged contemporary when looking at the pictures of the paintings they ordered.

And, at times, there’s also a glimpse of the authors themselves, assiduous & sensitive historians-biographers plunging into yet another musty archive to uncover documents shedding light on their subject. One may even catch them musing, not without melancholy, about the vanity of some family-archives, which tirelessly document names & titles & possessions & litigations & marks of honour, without however having kept the slightest trace of a personal thought ...

Ending on a positive note or a glum conclusion?

But then, what about our burgomaster, Nicolaas Rockox? We got to know the events and some of the people that marked his epoch and his city. (8) We got an idea of the kind of families he and his wife came from. We can see his portrait (painted by the best artists of his time) and that of his wife. But what do we know about him personally? He didn’t leave any personal notes either....
And yet, the book’s authors have gathered so much collateral proof.... of his honesty, his faithfulness, his generosity, his love and patronage of the arts, his sense of responsibility. So yes, one does get an image of a good man, a man wanting to leave something of permanence for his city, reaching out to later generations. (9)

So this post should end on a positive note! His good intentions did make it to the 21st century: there’s his house, some of the art works and coins (10) he collected, and even certain student grants he founded still linger on.
But of course, in keeping with the spirit of this blog – here’s a glum, moralizing conclusion anyway: they don’t make men like Rockox any more ... neither in politics nor in business life.

lots of nicely numbered notes
(1) “Assuming that history is nothing but the miserable story of mankind’s eternal ups and downs, the spectacle of sound and fury “may perhaps be moving for a while; but the curtain must eventually descend. For in the long run, it becomes a farce. And even if the actors do not tire of it – for they are fools – the spectator does, for any single act will be enough for him if he can reasonably conclude from it that the never-ending play will be of eternal sameness.”” (Kant as quoted by Hannah Arendt)
(2) That crucifixion by Cornelis Matsys! The stark drama of it, with the dark clouds packed above Golgotha ... , and with the poignant contrasts amongst the spectators : the mocking crowd surrounding the crucified on the top of the hill while further down there’s not only the group of despairing faithful, supporting the fainting Maria, but also the indifferent foursome playing dice. And somehow, the distance between the mourning group and the crucifixion marks even more the desolateness and the loneliness of it all.
(3) Leen Huet & Jan Grieten: “Nicolaas Rockox – 1560-1640 – Burgemeester van de gouden eeuw”
(4) More than mainstream historians, art historians seem to be blessed with a precious mix of erudition, intuition and taste, which turns them into particularly reflective spectators. Perhaps the kind of spectators of whom Arendt could say “The spectator, not the actor, holds the clue to the meaning of human affairs”
(5) It’s a smug human bias – always attributing less sensitivity to people who are further away from us (in time or in geography). This of course conveniently allows us to live happily in a world where there has always been, and still is, too much suffering.
(6) And also , how alike these 16th & 17th scenes of sectarian discord & upheaval are to the daily reports one can read about the conflicts raging in too many parts of our world, where decent and sensitive men and women are likewise made to suffer by the violent.
(7) one of my favourite quotes of Panofsky about the task of the humanities: "The humanities [...] are not faced by the task of arresting what otherwise would slip away, but of enlivening what otherwise would remain dead. [...] they penetrate into a region where time has stopped of its own accord, and try to reactivate it. [...] thus endowing static records with dynamic life "
(8) We, as individualist romantics, would of course rebel at being summed up by just our age and our career, without taking into account our precious individual thoughts & feelings
(9) Ever so delicately, the authors choose to have “only” a sketched portrait of Rockox on the book-cover, because, as they say, they felt they could not get so close to him as to warrant a full-colour oil-portrait.
(10) Coins! Did you think old coins were boring? Not in this book! Our authors manage to combine the zest of an adventure story about a treasure of coins dug up by a poor labourer with the gravitas of an evocation of a 17th C cercle of humanist collector-friends for whom the coins' iconography leads right back to Antiquity.

Spring vs. Mozart

2011-04-03T08:43:00.000-07:00

It’s 4 PM on a Spring Sunday - not the time to embark on a ponderous post. Especially since a thunderstorm woke me up last night, allowing me to already do my fair share of brooding before even getting up.

So let’s talk about Spring. And about how of all a sudden one finds oneself strolling around the countryside where bees are buzzing, flowers flowering , trees budding and everything is just being lively and lovely.
So with the slightest of efforts one can ignore the newer human settlements (with on average 3 gleaming cars in front, and each façade equipped with an ominously blinking security box). And basking in warm sunlight & country smells, one can rather swoon over the bucolic charm of ramshackle farmhouses, winding paths and cute little chapels ( I didn’t know we had so many of them, solitarily standing at crossroads or hiding under big old trees.)

In fact, enjoying the pleasures of nature & spring has come rather late to me, just as my appreciation of Mozart. Apparently my soul needed to age and sadden some, before it could surrender to sheer transient delight. But of course, neither Spring nor Mozart (1) are ever about sheer unalloyed pleasure... Both also exude the melancholy of ephemeral perfection and of , indeed, transient delight.

sounding a single note
(1) Erik Tarloff in “Haydn vs. Mozart”, an article ‘comparing’ sane & straightforward Haydn with ambiguous Mozart : “to music lovers, the adjective Mozartian, while always suggestive of exquisite grace, also connotes an umbral, aural world where emotions shimmer with ambiguity and confront their own opposites”

A Melancholiac’s Rant at the Arrival of Spring (or: brooding about current world affairs & disasters)

2011-03-20T05:08:00.000-07:00

Just a quick post, I thought, celebrating both the arrival of the cruellest season and Google’s recognition of the present blog as an authority on melancholiacs struggling with Spring. (1)
But current world affairs & disasters do call for some serious brooding, beyond the breeding of lilacs out of the dead land (2).

“What did the ancient Greeks ever do for us?”

In fact, I never much liked to engage in the usual left-right debates about the sustainability of our economic growth model. While personally inclined to a sober life style (3) and preferring contemplative pleasures above tangible goods & action, I did always concede that a solid basis of material wealth was needed to allow societies to produce cultural riches beyond the fulfilment of basic needs.

And being well versed in doctrines of economic rationality, I came to think of my own aversion of materialist greed as a mere aberration of a naive heart. Just as irrational as my longing for disinterested reflection and aesthetic delights. After all, was it not enlightened self-interest coupled with rational scientific thinking that built our world of abundance, lifting hundreds of millions of people out of misery? Scientists , engineers and business men: they set free humanity by understanding and exploiting the laws of nature.

“What did the ancient Greeks ever do for us?” “Those contemplating medieval monks”? “And all those serious philosophers, writers and painters of chimeras? “ “What useful things did they make, to feed, cloth, warm, shelter or transport us?” (4)
Well you see, quite relevant questions indeed! And all I had to answer was that a life without reflection or beauty would not seem worth living to me... Pretty unconvincing... (5). So I confess I conceded defeat: “they” won. (6)
But it did always remain something of a puzzle to me that ‘useless’ reflective & aesthetic qualities, having no apparent survival value at all, could have inspired so many people throughout the ages.

But what will we leave to future generations?

Having surrendered to scientific and economic rationality, I also thought I was just being naive again when wondering how on earth we were ever going to sustain this unrelenting growth in production and consumption. Weren’t we being a tad wasteful? How about billions of people wanting to eat meat, own televisions, drive cars, take planes, etc. How would there ever be enough resources?

But then, the pessimism of the Club of Rome had proven to be wrong too. Thanks to ever advancing science, human ingenuity , entrepreneurship and the geniuses of finance, the infallible free markets would make sure that processes would get ever more resource-efficient and that new solutions would be found.

Yeah right.

The past decade we have been witnessing a series of crises that throw serious doubt on the infallibility of free markets and on the human capacity to master ever more complex systems.

We have had the Great Financial Crisis (of which we are still experiencing its aftershocks): with its mixture of irresponsible greed and hubris (the geniuses of finance seem really to have thought their quantitative models had everything under control). We are experiencing uncontrollable changes in climate linked to our own behaviour. We have watched engineers struggle for months to stop a massive oil spill and to regain control of their deepwater drilling contraptions. We are all now following with horror the unfolding nuclear crisis in Japan ...

Why are humans intellectually so badly equipped to understand that statistically improbable events do can materialise (and thus may not be discarded if they have more than banal consequences). Why are our celebrated free markets so bad at pricing “externalities” (7) and long term risks?

Do I have answers? No. But this morning, looking lovingly at some art reproductions in a book about 15th century paintings, I all of a sudden anxiously wondered: what will we leave for future generations? Our kind of art does not strive for permanence anymore, our aim is no longer to bring objects in the world that may rejoice future generations. (8) We don’t build or paint or sing for eternity .... (9)

From cathedrals to nuclear sarcophagi ...

We are just using up all the resources of our planet to fulfil our present needs and follies. We are taking risks that contaminate parts of our planet for thousands of years to come, or that may irreversibly alter (for the worst) climatic conditions.

We no longer build cathedrals, to be admired throughout the ages. But what we do build, as long lasting memorials for future generations: giant steel & concrete sarcophagi to contain our radioactive debris.

Nods & Nuances in the Notes
(1) I happened to type ‘melancholiac’ and ‘Spring’ in the Google-box, and lo & behold: Frivolous Fragments turned up first !! Of course, the word ‘melancholiac’ is not in common use (Google even forces ignorant searchers to look first at ‘melancholic Spring’ results ). But still!
(2) Just like catholic church services recycle the same old bible texts (granted, with some evangelist variations) at the yearly recurring feasts, a secular melancholiac may very well, year after year, at the arrival of Spring, recite the first stanza’s of the Waste Land.
(3) I have never even owned a car, which, just as my daily cycling-commuter habits, is considered as somewhat odd by colleagues and acquaintances
(4) Heidegger (as quoted in Arendt’s Life of the Mind): “Thinking does not bring knowledge as do the sciences. Thinking does not produce usable practical wisdom. Thinking does not solve the riddles of the universe. Thinking does not endow us directly with the power to act”. (Brooding blogs don’t either)
(5) Of course, the Greeks, for instance, gave us principles of reasoning, mathematics, architecture, medicine... Their concepts are still alive in western languages, etc. Etc And those medieval monks saved western civilisation. But for the sake of this blog’s fake rhetoric method, I, for now surrender to the usual disparaging clichés
(6) “They won” – as The Economist wrote : “ The West’s long run as top dog may be ending. But the values that made it great, consumerism included, have been sold on to the rest of the world” – so depressing ... Couldn’t the rest of the world have chosen some of our “useless” reflective & aesthetic values ? Why did they all have to copy with such gusto our greedy consumerism that devours everything, and builds nothing of permanence? Does shopping & consuming perhaps correspond with a primary genetic need to hunt & gather & wallow ?
(7) Externalities : for instance side effects of pollution, the degradation of both natural and urban environment
(8) “A thing of beauty is a joy forever ....”
(9) Ok, ok – I am exaggerating. Future generations will undoubtedly be very grateful for the immense stock of scientific knowledge and technological know how we will be transmitting. And for our huge digital networks & our savvy applicatons. And perhaps, indeed, scientific advances will manage just in time to solve our resources problem (or maybe we will find yet another planet to plunder)

Venetian light in Brussels (March 2nd , 11 AM)

2011-03-13T05:08:00.000-07:00

Assailed by twin-viruses (virtual & physical) my few days off did seem compromised. On my PC McAfee was waging a losing battle against the redoubtable Cycbot.B Backdoor Trojan. And my own defense system had been outwitted by an enemy attacking on multiple fronts: lungs (wheezing), eyes (bleary), stomach (upset), muscles (twitching), synapses (drowsy), …

Left to my own devices, I easily could have spent the day (& night) pitying myself, morosely imagining worst case crash scenarios for both PC and Body. But luckily, there was the Stern Governess (1) to take things in hand: making me put on my boots & coat, kicking me out of the door, onto my bicycle and into the cold & gloriously sunny day. Ah, the sheer luminous splendor of a frosty day, … a splendor made bearable by the ever so slight haziness hovering in the air.

A good day to seek refuge amongst old Venetian and Flemish masters (2) - who were never wrong about the subtleties of light. Nor about the subtleties of human sensibility ...

Take that Bellini Madonna for instance, how the insouciant playfulness of the child is tempered by the wistful look on the Madonna’s face (3), how with a few colors a hazy limpidity is suggested (4) .

Ah, Bellini … The emotional range of his paintings spans heart wrenching pathos as well as an intense, yet still, shade of pensive wistfulness, ‘which none of his Madonna’s altogether lack’.
And his exquisite sense of light & atmosphere! Reaching well beyond sheer technical virtuosity (5) it fills us with poetic elation, suggesting (ever so quietly) a contemplative transcendence (6). “Am Lichtsinn errätst du die Seele” (7), one might indeed consent, while meditating in front of a Bellini-painting.

Apart from luminous meditations, the exhibit also showed paintings tugging more stridently at our hearts, but I’ll leave my melancholy musings about pathos & morbidity in Christian art for a later post.
For now, let me just evoke the soothing powers of the calm blue & grey & beige hues of a Canaletto-painting. (8) Appeasing, but stimulating too – these luminous vista’s of Venetian canals: how they instantaneously widen our cramped mental horizon by their sheer spaciousness, how they lighten up our dull broodings by their sheer liveliness - with a touch of vivacious red here & there, & with everywhere little boats & gondolas & ordinary people going about their daily business in a busy town.

Cycling back home I took a short cut through the Brussels Warande park. It was 11 AM, so the park lay there quite still & empty: long gone were the hordes of commuters tramping through it in the morning, and it was still too early for the lunch hour invasion by office workers seeking repose. Right now, there were just the empty lanes & benches, the silent statues, the bare trees and the shimmering hazy light. How blessed the park felt at this fleeting hour – temporarily released from all duties & stress, basking in a luminous quiet (9).

More than Quotes in the Notes
(1) For combative melancholiacs, it is well advised to have a “Stern Governess” amongst the many persona’s that constitute their inconsistent self.
(2) Exhibit “Venetian & Flemish Masters” at the Brussels Bozar gallery
(3) What Friedländer wrote about Metsys, is so apt for Bellini’s Madonna’s too: “the imprint of sadness, which none of his madonna’s all together lack”
(4) As the exhibit notes competently & lovingly resume: “la palette réduite des couleurs, la composition épurée, la pluie de lumière dorée qui baigne la scène d’une claret tamisée concourent au tragique retenu de l’oeuvre”
(5) There have been many great colorists in the Venetian tradition, and in The Flemish one – Titian, Rubens … But somewhere along the road, their virtuosity has become so monumental & formidable…, their sheer technical prowess and confidence so overwhelming that they have crowded out some of the reflectiveness, some of the anxiety which endow a Bellini painting with en enduring poetical gravitas. However much I admire Titian, how much in awe I stand of Rubens … I agree with Yves Bonnefoy who sees , in some of their works, a certain vanity & arrogance : “ l’assez vain deploiement d’une illusion de triomphe” . (Though the triumphal tone has quite disappeared from Tiziono’s late, anxious works)
(6) Hmmm, Meditations, Transcendence … experiences not quite befitting a rational humanist? Nah, because, as Zadie Smith wrote about prayer (“prayer unmoored, without it usual object, God, but still focused, self forgetful”) : “for the secular among us, art has become our best last hope of undergoing this experience” ,
(7) Paul Celan – ‘by it sense of light you recognize the soul’
(8) Ah, at last an occasion to copy these dear, soberly consoling phrases written by Marguerite Yourcenar – “Aux pires heures de découragement et d’atonie, j’allais revoir, dans le beau Musée de Hartford (Connecticut) , une toile romaine de Canaletto, le Panthéon brun et doré se profilant sur le ciel bleu d’une fin d’après-midi d’été. Je la quittais chaque fous rassérénée et réchauffée” (from Carnets de notes de “Mémoires d’Hadrien”)
(9) Venice may seem a distant dream in a Brussels park, yet the hazy counter light of these northern skies is quite akin to the vaporous luminosity of the lagoon city. Which perhaps explains why once upon a time Flemish and Venetian painters shared this delicate sense of light.

Taking to the Streets!

2011-03-03T08:36:00.000-08:00

Expanding my Sunday-repertoire

Well, it sure was a startling addition to my Sunday repertoire! (1) Last Sunday (2), instead of morosely watching the dreary drizzle outside, I blithely put on my walking boots and joined a demonstration in the streets of Brussels. I guess only a demonstration as unlikely as this one could have lured me into public action (3) .

The march was unlikely because only three weeks earlier a couple of students had launched the initiative on the Internet, foregoing the mobilization power and logistical support of the established interest groups. It was unlikely in its authentic concern for the welfare of all of the people living in this country (not only for those of the own language-group – which alas seems to have become the political norm). And unlikely it was too in its appeal to compromise at the service of the “common good” of the Belgian people (both ‘common good’ and ‘Belgian’ seem to have become compromised concepts, judging by the currently prevailing political discourse).

And this unlikely initiative was a success!
Because some 40.000 people decided to brave the chilly rain and to take to the streets to express their concern.

Because the overwhelming majority of these 40.000 people didn’t brandish any of the usual cliché-slogans: neither stale party-political watchwords nor easy populist anti-political cries.

Because these 40.000 people were so peaceful and tolerant (only 2 or 3 small incidents were noted) (4).

Because these 40.000 people were so diverse : young & old, from different walks of life, coming from Brussels, Flanders, Wallonia or the German speaking East cantons.

Because 40.000 people showed that action could be inspired not only by narrow party-political watchwords, but also by the “mere” concern to end a political stalemate via constructive compromise.
And, finally, this demonstration was a success because of the sheer incredible sight of it: the whole of the Rue de la Loi / Wetstraat (Brussels main thorough fare) filled with people just asking their politicians to be reasonable (5) .
As that man, obviously from far-off Eupen-Malmedy, reported on his mobile to the home front, while standing on a small height to take in the crowd filling the Rue de la Loi: “das lohnt sich! Wahnsinnig, die ganse rue de la loi ist ja voll mit leute”.

But as it goes, leading established politicians were quick to call the demonstration, well-intentioned perhaps, but quite naïve, too fuzzy in its allegiances and objectives and thus ineffective, politically speaking.
For them, apparently, mature and effective politics is about pitching “us” against “them”, about an unwavering conviction of “us” being right and “them” being wrong .
And their self-declared realist non-naïve discourse is one nurtured by short term egoist economic interests , by cowardly inertia and by atavistic tribal reflexes. Their world is one of a zero-sum-game: what “they” gain, “we” lose – thus precluding an “enlarged mentality” that could arrive at a creative solution.

One politician even managed to use the sheer diversity of the demonstrating public as proof for his belief that : 1) this country is too diverse 2) diversity isn’t workable 3) hence, this country must be split in two separate (allegedly) homogenous blocs.
So where I felt at home amongst this reassuringly diverse and friendly crowd, all sharing a common concern and peacefully demonstrating for common sense and compromise, he merely saw potential for strife & discord. (6)

Of course, dear Blog reader, the unfolding events in the Middle East and North-Africa do deserve more of your attention than the looming un- heroic demise of a small country without strategic oil-reserves or Suez-canal.
But still, the Belgian debacle is worth analyzing, if only to serve as a warning against the fatal self-fulfilling prophecy of polarizing populist rhetoric. So, please bear with me for a (not so) brief sketch of the Belgian conundrum.

* * * The Belgian Situation Explained in Only 789 Words ! * * *
(which you are Free to Skip to Proceed directly to the How-to-Go-Tribal-Guide below)
(& please see elsewhere for revolutionary 50-character tweets).

Belgium was created as a nation-state in 1830, assembling a couple of regions in the low countries, with Dutch and French speaking populations (later, as part of a World war-settlement a small German speaking part was added) . Most Dutch-speaking Belgian citizens live in the Northern part of the country (Flanders) and the French-speaking citizens tend to live in the Southern part (Wallonia).
In the heroic 19th Century Wallonia , well-furnished with coal-mines and heavy industries, flourished while Flanders had become a rather poor agricultural region with many indigent Flemish emigrating as guest-workers to the heavy industries in Wallonia (this explains the very Flemish names of many now French-speaking people).

For a long time the Belgian elite was French-speaking , and higher education was for instance not even available in Dutch. This of course created much resentment with the Dutch-speakers and spawned a “Flemish emancipation” movement that battled for equal rights for the Dutch language. It was in this context that some came to see the Belgian state as a Francophile anti-Flemish clique, which contemptuously ignored the rich Flemish cultural heritage (ah, prosperous Bruges & Ghent in the Middle Ages! Oh, the Baroque splendors of Antwerp! ) .
Quite unfortunately, a few key-figures of this Flemish movement became enthralled by German-like nationalism, and even saw the German “brother people” as allies against this Frencophone imperialism, thus tainting the Flemish emancipation movement with unsavory connotations of nationalist extremism and nazi-collaboration. It also contributed to much extra resentment amongst Flemish nationalists due to the after war “repression” of Flemish collaborators.

In the course of the 20th century the discrimination of the Dutch language was gradually abolished while at the same time the economic fortunes of both regions went in reverse. The Walloon heavy industry was all but wiped out, causing high unemployment, while Flanders grew richer, positioning itself in the intermediate goods and services industries.
Wallonia got trapped in a vicious circle of unions fighting losing battles to save globally un-competitive industries, of then trying to compensate private sector job-losses by job-creation in ever swelling local administrations. The ensuing importance of having the right “political” connections created a climate of dependency on favors from local party-officials, bringing fatefully in its wake a host of corruption problems.

Brussels, in the meanwhile, evolved from the opulent financial and governmental centre of Belgium, with a Belgian French speaking elite (who often spurned the allegedly ‘lesser’ Dutch language, though over the years the Dutch language rights got quite well protected for all official dealings) to a cosmopolitan city.
French now is the “lingua franca” in Brussels, but in fact for the majority of Brussels citizens neither Dutch nor French is the mother tongue, since over 50% of the Brussels population is of non-Belgian descent. Not only is Brussels the main entry point for non-European immigrants & asylum-seekers, it is also host to the European officials from the Brussels based European institutions . Furthermore, as Belgium’s economic capital, it attracts each day tens of thousands of commuters from both Flanders and Wallonia, who work in Brussels and use its services ( but pay taxes in their home regions).
Many of the non-European immigrant families in Brussels are still struggling to catch on and, having relatively high fertility rates, this has created a boiling reservoir of under-skilled and unemployed youngsters.
On the other hand, the well-off Brussels citizens (often French speaking bourgeois as well as wealthy Eurocrats) more and more flee from messy Brussels to the quieter & greener Flemish hinterland. This migration creates not only much extra resentment in Flanders (Dutch speakers feel threatened by this afflux of allegedly arrogant non-Dutch speaking people) but also causes a huge financial drain for Brussels.

Politically speaking, the need to ‘protect’ the Dutch language from being crushed by the ‘heavyweight’ French, together with the persistence of a “Flemish emancipation” movement with separatist tendencies (which however has never represented a clear majority amongst Dutch-speaking Belgians!) resulted in a series of institutional reforms for Belgium.
A territorial language principle was established (the only official language in Flanders is Dutch, the only official language in Wallonia is French, and Brussels is officially bilingual).

Also, more and more responsibilities were devolved from the Belgian federal government level to the Dutch and French speaking language communities/regions . This evolution towards greater regional autonomy was accompanied by a system of checks and balances to safeguard the equilibrium between the language groups and regions. Thus there are also “solidarity” mechanisms implying financial transfers from the richer to the poorer communities.

As to Brussels, this complex melting pot is now jointly & messily governed by the Dutch and the French-speaking communities (not always with due consideration to its particular problems and challenges , which are quite beyond the Dutch-French language divide ).

How to drift into splendid tribal isolation

If you would want to create separate tribal identities, do adopt the following fateful features of the Belgian institutional overhaul:
The Belgian political parties and voting districts were neatly split into French speaking and Dutch speaking parties and districts. This means that, now, even for the federal government elections, people living in Flanders can only vote for Flemish parties, and people living in Wallonia can only vote for French speaking parties ( only in Brussels the two language groups may submit voting lists). So, by-and-large, Dutch-speaking politicians are accountable only to the Dutch speaking voters , and the French-speaking politicians are accountable to the French speaking voters only.

And with humans being hardwired to identify with the group they’ve been assigned to (even if it’s based on an arbitrary allocation process (7) ), this institutional insistence on having two language groups insidiously fostered the creation of separate identities within Belgium ( especially on the Flemish side , influenced by its very persistent minority of separatists) .

And obviously, with politicians only accountable to the own language group, the “others” were always the easy scapegoat, and each group, unchecked, could nurture its particular causes of cultural or economic resentment, could pursue, unaccountable to the other group, regional policies in their separate voting districts (which of course only compounded the economic & financial imbalances).

So there, the stage was set … for compromising the very notion of a common Belgian identity and for creating two groups nestling smugly in their own delusions.
Enter the caricatures of “The Flemish” and “The French-speakers”:
“The Flemish” like to see themselves as innately hard working & prudent folks, subsidizing French-speaking lazy-bones and Dutch-spurning snobs , keeping afloat an expensive & useless national Belgian structure ( not to mention that bottomless pit of a spend-thrift, dirty & dangerous capital infested with foreigners). “The Flemish” love to ignore the objective demographic and global economic factors that would explain a big part of each region’s evolution ( by the way, demographic evolutions do point towards slower growth in Flanders in future while Brussels & Wallonia have younger & growing populations… ).

“The Flemish” conveniently forget their own past stints of dependency & poverty and, continuously feeling aggrieved for past insults, they forget the Flemish have been furnishing the prime minister of the Belgian government almost continuously since WWII. They cherish a mythical Flemish identity that ignores the continuous interactions and migrations that have shaped the lowlands since the Romans … (8). And for all their self-declared economic prudence, they lack the foresight to see that more and not less cooperation with Brussels and Wallonia will be needed to take up the challenges of demographic evolutions. That more and not less investments in Brussels are needed, so as not to let go to waste yet another generation of youngsters ...

“The French-speakers ”, by contrast, see themselves as responsible folks with a social culture of caring solidarity (French speaking party 1) and/or with a refined, universal French culture far superior to the crude provincial Flemish one (French speaking party 2 ), in any case forming a French-speaking bulwark to defend the Belgian Nation against Flemish extremist separatist barbarians .
“The French-speakers” thus conveniently omit to question their own regional political governance plagued by inertia and nepotism. For lack of self-criticism “The French-speakers” perpetuate a vicious circle of unemployment, political favors and corruption. And they fail to address a certain stubbornness amongst certain classes in refusing to learn properly the language of the other community of the single Belgian Nation they profess to cherish.

And nowadays journalists and professional politicians alike seem to conspire to turn politics in a petty populist theatre whereby in the media each day each language group is turning more into the caricature the other makes of them .
Take the eloquent and charismatic president of the Flemish leading party – he is fuelled by a single-minded romantic desire for “Flemish independence” ( in fact until recently not shared by a majority of Flemish) . But he so masterly exposes all “the French-speaking “ regions’ weaknesses and failures , he so brilliantly appeals to a “martyred Flemish ‘we ‘ feeling “ that his party went from less than 5% to 30% in 7 years. (9)

But in fact this Flemish separatist strain is itself largely co-responsible for any immobility or lack of self-reflection of the French-speaking parties. Because their criticism of the French speaking parties’ failings is so entwined with this Flemish nationalist agenda, because it is so crude and laden with disrespect, it is completely counter-productive: any self-respecting French-speaking politician cannot but dismiss their criticism as extremist propaganda.
And because of it, at the very first hint of any criticism (however well-founded), these French speaking politicians can promptly evoke the specter of Flemish Separatist Extremism , so as to have the perfect excuse not to critically assess their own ways, let alone to bring about change. By which they confirm, also in the eyes of moderate Flemish people, the caricature of inert, eternally needy dependents , and by which they themselves feed Flemish extremism …

A chorus of un-assigned voices, lost in between Groups

Really, once people start to focus on their being two “Groups” and start behaving like “enemy tribes”, they in fact become the best propagandists for the other side’s most narrow cause.
Indeed, out of a sense of self-defense , each group will stifle its own doubting and critical voices (traitors!) and thus block constructive internal change. Furthermore , each Group will then abjure all empathy for the other side’s viewpoint and they will end up seeing all interactions and negotiations as a zero-sum game, where one side’s gain is the other side’s loss. And such protracted periods of animosity and mutual callousness often of course become a self-fulfilling prophecy: these hostile groups can’t live together anymore...

Ah, these human tribal instincts – quite despairing … And yet, the success of the human species lies not in tribal isolation but in cooperation … in our capacity to arrive at some sort of social contract, based on fairness, in order to find collaborative solutions (and the cooperative total is more than the sum of the parts …) .

But, alas, the leading "Flemish" and "French-speaking" parties are doing their utmost to make a fair solution impossible.
Reading the papers, one is engulfed by petty reciprocal reproaches & by extensive accounts of who- said-what-about-whom behind closed doors , there are scandals about leaked mails and there’s this & there’s that --- - but what is mostly lacking: an in-depth , sober analysis and assessment of alternative solutions.

And surfing on the websites of the two leading Flemish and French-speaking parties, I alas find much rhetoric and much trifling party-political issues, but again, no sober assessment of the main drivers of Belgium’s cultural and economic evolution, no comprehensive analysis of proposed solutions and their consequences . .. They just sell two extreme positions based on a single group’s vested interests, sure to bring us collective ruin.

Brief critique of Extreme Position 1: a definitive separation of the two language groups-regions (pleaded for in the statutes of the Flemish leading party) would, objectively speaking, have disastrous consequences : far too costly, the un-doubling of legislations would be utterly inefficient in so small an area (& would hamper the much needed mobility of labor and capital), the carving up of Brussels is as impossible as its joint government by two newly created countries would be ruinous ( and during the messy protracted divorce negotiations the financial markets can be counted on to drive up interest rates for years to come).
Also, this declaration of Flemish independence quite disturbingly definitively imposes on all Belgian Dutch-speaking persons an un-asked for Flemish identity, grounded in parochialism and stale resentment (10). Much better to find a cooperative solution at Belgian level and to strengthen mutual exchanges and accountability.

Brief critique of Extreme Position 2: whining about “Flemish nationalism” each time malfunctions of "French-speaking parties'" policies are denounced, is ultimately a self-defeating strategy.
Demanding ongoing solidarity from “the Flemish” (as does the leading French-speaking party) without any reciprocity is simply not workable. Counting for ever on transfers from others to fund higher unemployment benefits for the own group, instead of seriously tackling the root-causes of economic decline and unemployment is bound to create animosity. At the same time demanding special French-language privileges (ie so as not to have to learn Dutch) for French-speakers moving into traditionally Flemish towns, is obviously right down offensive for the other party.
And without a clear commitment to reciprocal fairness and to doing one’s duty in a cooperative scheme, it’ s quite preposterous to feel entitled to ongoing solidarity.

And yet, the Belgian conundrum need not to be insoluble. If only one could try to take a fresh, comprehensive and objective look at the situation and try to find the best arrangements , in fairness to all … It was on a site of 'amateur-politicians' ( probruxsel ) that I found such an attempt at objective analysis and a discourse not aimed at rousing tribal spirits but just trying to find arrangements that are fair to all , arrangements apt at dealing with the daunting challenges.

It is possible …. If only intellectual energy is channeled into constructive and objective analysis (instead of in petty tribal bickering).
And, though being frankly pessimistic about the situation, I do take heart from the fact that in both parts of the country, in both language groups, people now stand up to say “no” to the uncritical, unified discourse of what is supposed to be the own group. To tribal discourse, they say : ” not in my name” – “niet in mijn naam” – “pas en mon nom”. Those critics, those “traitors” of the “own group”, are very welcome voices to defend reasonableness and a modicum of impartial objectivity, both indispensable to arrive at a solution.

So there, hereby I too have added my tiny little voice to this chorus of rather liminal voices, un-assigned to either Group… . (so, just plain Belgian perhaps?)

Un-assigned Notes
(1) Regular readers of these fragments know my usual Sunday- repertoire spans Hegel-reading, Bach cantata-concerts, much wondering & pondering, frivolous blogging as well as museum visits, all-weather walks and bicycle-rides. (Attentive readers may also have caught discreet hints at strictly private Sunday-occupations involving a loved one).
(2) Ooppps : started writing this thing weeks ago…. Oh well, you know: life’s pressing demands, a bloggers’ block, a computer virus, AND the far more momentous happenings elsewhere in the world – reasons always abound for nor pursuing one’s own middling blogging activities …
(3) Don’t get me wrong, I am far from a-political. But my political awareness is a largely contemplative and analytical one. Though keeping myself daily posted about current affairs and feeling at times passionately concerned about the ways of the world, I hardly ever publicly discuss or act upon my opinions. In principle though, I greatly respect democratic politics as the process by which groups of people can arrive at decisions to organize their interactions and communities, without having to resort to violence. Politics as a necessary counterpart of the “human condition of plurality” , to speak in Arendtian terms .
But in practice, ah in practice the political terrain is occupied by the usual suspects , ie a limited number of a parties who furnish an all-in , one-stop solution to political shoppers : their single ideological party-answer to the whole gamut of social, economical, ethical, cultural and ecological issues. (I for one never managed to find a single party to match all of my viewpoints) . Also, political practice all too often appears in the media as futile bickering amongst parties and political egos rather than as an authentic well-informed debate to arrive at the “best-possible” decision . Why can’t there for instance be more media attention for non-partisan, nuanced study of each issue – as objectively as possible analyzing possible consequences of alternative decisions on the interests of different groups and individuals (I really should read more about Social Choice Theory ) . And then you could have a public debate to explain different viewpoints and proposals and put them into perspective. Now wouldn’t that be a nice basis for citizens to engage and to choose amongst solutions. Hardly workable, I suppose, this studious and referendum style of direct democracy, where each citizen appraises each issue: as “objective”, or at least serene, comparison and assessment possible ? Modern citizens hardly have time enough on their hands to master the knowledge required to come to a well-informed, enlightened decision… And why would individual citizens be better at also taking a long term perspective and the “common good” beyond their narrow immediate self-interest? Food for thought …
(4) One “French-speaking” woman saw fit to advertize her narrow-minded arrogance by brandishing a slogan meant to demean “The Flemish”: “un peu de modestie lorsqu’on parle une langue aussi locale”. And a very small group of “Flemish” “storm-troopers” saw fit to advertize their narrow-minded aggressive nationalism, by provocatively tearing up the demonstration’s manifesto and brandishing separatist slogans.
(5) As it happens, the demonstrators’ motivations were duly analyzed by alert academics distributing questionnaires on the ground – so we now know that, sample-wise, 65% of the demonstrators were French-speaking and 35% were Dutch-speaking. We also know that the French-speaking demonstrators wanted to denounce the ‘immobility’ of the leading French-speaking politicians, and that the Dutch-speaking ones wanted to make clear they opposed the separatist-nationalist strains of the Dutch-speaking politicians. Oh yes, my kind of self-critical crowd…
(6) It’s easy to understand why I really felt at ease amongst that friendly, motley bunch. Since I will never belong to a large, homogeneous, “winning” group, my own best chances for survival lie in a diverse population of minorities & immigrants where difference may be more easily tolerated than in uniform groups. But it is also my contemplative and doubting nature that makes me shun groups & religions that demand of their members undoubting loyalty and an unwavering conviction of their being right and the others being wrong .
(7) Experiments with non-suspecting subjects showed that if they were arbitrarily assigned to respectively a “blue” group and a “red” group, it didn’t take long before they really identified as respectively “reds” and “blues” and found reasons to better like the own group than the other.
(8) Art historians for instance know that “The Flemish Primitives” cover painters from Wallonia, Brussels, Flanders, Holland, Northern France etc . The archetypical Flemish Primitive, Rogier Van Der Weyden, is in fact Rogier de la Pasture from Tournai (Wallonia)
(9) This has really spooked me : the meteoric rise of a political party (from 5 to 30% in 7 years!!!) driven by the sheer popularity of a charismatic & eloquent leader (always ready with a quip or a Latin proverb, undisputed star of Flanders’ most popular TV-quiz) … and how this charismatic politician managed to hijack the political agenda by his Flemish-nationalist discourse and to completely compromise the very notion of a common Belgian identity. And how he managed to posit the whole political process as only a battle between “the Flemish” and “the French-speakers” …. (and thus more fundamental and pressing challenges go unattended now, be they economic, financial, demographic , cultural, …. ) .
(10) I for one, confess not to have a “Flemish Identity”. My mother tongue is Dutch, I have lived for 23 years in Flanders, I have lived for 22 years in Brussels, I like to go to Antwerp , Ghent, Ostend (Flanders) and I like to wander about in Liège, Tournai, Verviers, Spa (Wallonia) and yes, Charleroi... I really have a thing going for Charleroi, of all places... , ( “from the relics of old mines, Derives his algebraic signs, For all in man that mourns and seeks,For all of his renounced techniques,Their tramways overgrown with grass,For lost belief, for all Alas.") (Auden).
Professionally speaking I like the continuous interaction with both Dutch and French speaking colleagues. Culturally speaking I suppose I feel rather European: favorite writers & artists are definitely not contained to a single national culture . But I do have loads of affection for the “Belgian Identity” (ah, the Belgian Coast..., oh, the Belgian Ardennes ...! Ah, our Belgian cycling heroes... ) , precisely because it is such a mixed-up notion, precisely because it so lacks the bloated pomp and arrogance of other nationalities.

Brussels in Winter, or : Things to Brood upon while Riding on a Bus

2010-12-20T09:40:00.000-08:00

Under the familiar weight
Of winter, conscience and the State,
In loose formations of good cheer,
Love, language, loneliness and fear,
Towards the habits of next year,
Along the streets the people flow,
Singing or sighing as they go
[….] (1)

An Office Clerk Looking Out Of The Window

From my desk on the 21th floor I could see the long trails of light formed by the many cars slowly advancing in the Friday night rush hour. A giant green neon X-mas tree was glowing on the office building across the road. And my own floor was rhythmically flooded by flashing green, blue and red lights, all embedded in the glass façade of our building – to produce a 449 ft high colorful tribute to the Winter Season.

An equally colorful and wintry scene, though in a rather more somber mode, could be observed at the nearby railway station, Brussels-North, where a few dozens of so-called asylum seekers camped out, huddling under gaudy sleeping bags and plaids, surrounded by a motley bunch of plastic bags, bottles and cans. Each day they could see the streams of commuters hurrying by, the latter mostly averting their eyes (and noses) from the unruly spectacle. (2)

A Friday Evening Downtown Stroll

As to me, my daily commute to work is usually done by bicycle, which , apart from the ongoing struggle with menacing cars , is in fact a less confrontational urban mode of mobility than walking or using public transports is. But on this particular Friday evening in December, snow and ice had made cycling too hazardous, so I did walk to the underground station hoping to catch a train home. At the turnstile a growing crowd of impatient people was kept from entering by a couple of policemen – “there has been an accident”. They gave no further explanations but diverse rumors spread fast … “ a desperate homeless man jumped from the platform ” or “ a woman trying to get in at the last second got stuck in the closing doors”…

It didn’t look like there would be a train coming through soon, so I left the station and started walking to the city centre, to find alternative transport.
The crowds in the main shopping streets had already thinned out, the ‘out of towners’ were mostly gone, which left just the locals. (3) There were the youths hanging out in little groups, bragging and yelling in high Friday night spirits. The earnest hand-holding couples, hurrying home, looking forward to a cozy dinner. And of course there were the giggling duos of girlfriends, with or without headscarves, comparing purchases while leaving the shops, where the doorguards stood fidgeting, biding their time till the closing hour.

With the shopping frenzy fizzled out, the street started looking a bit forlorn – no escaping from the gracelessness of the neon lit displays, from the garish uniformity of all these chain stores. A sneaking sense of shabbiness hovered around the street corners. This is not a rich part of town, materialism here is not redeemed by elegance. (4)

Music to the Rescue!

And yet , a full outbreak of closing-time desolateness was kept at bay by unexpectedly cheerful music. Not the usual bleary loudspeaker-music, but real, uplifting brass-music performed by a swinging bunch of young musicians who braved the seeping cold with their tubas, drums and trumpets. A modern secular version of the Salvation Army, saving our souls both from drab materialism and from willful sadness.

Thus cheered up, I arrived at the bus stop, not even minding the wait of 20 minutes. I'd found a window sill to sit on, and from this privileged observation post I could leisurely observe a sample of Brussels inner city diversity: young student lovers, so earnestly & innocently kissing; a sexy coquette on very high heels, caressing her shopping bags; a young urban muslim couple, she with an elegant headscarf, he with a neatly trimmed beard and a leather vest.
An older man, mumbling, reeking of beer. Three hipper than hip youngsters with baggy trousers, carrying skateboards. And your usual early evening batch of weary but relieved looking office workers, sprightly shoppers , sensible housewives and dependable husbands with groceries, all returning home, most of them happily blabbing. And all apparently equally unperturbed by the variety of ways of being on display at this bus-stop.

Dozing & Brooding on the Bus

Once on the bus, I was almost lulled to sleep by the hot air and the multi-language buzz around me. But at each bus-stop the opening doors brought in blasts of cold air as well as a change in passengers: a load of rowdy students got off at the Central station, a pack of panting tourists got in at the Royal Palace, and the European Parliament - stop was signaled by the sheer sartorial elegance of Europe’s finest & brightest getting on the bus. Apart from the gloomily mumbling, beer-reeking older man in the pathway, all my transient travel companions were conspicuously cheerful.

Friday night fever in the unlikely capital of Europe …

As round me, trembling on their beds,
Or taut with apprehensive dreads,
The sleepless guests of Europe lay,
[…]
All formulas were tried to still
The scratching on the window-sill,
All bolts of custom made secure
Against the pressure of the door.
[…]
O none escape these questions now:
The future which confronts us [now]
[…]
An earth made common by the means
Of hunger, money and machines,
[…]

But did they, my merry fellow travelers, did they then not wonder about the future of this city, about the future of this Europe of ours? The insouciant young European officials on this bus, blithely discussing their next city-trip or a trendy restaurant tip, did they not lie awake at night contemplating the possible demise of the Euro, worrying about Europe’s debt dilemma? (5) .
Did they not toss and turn at night wondering how to manage Europe’s newly dangerously divisive demographic mix : retiring spendthrift natives withdrawing their skills from active labor life and a growing reserve of inadequately skilled youngsters and immigrants, some of them full of resentment at being at the bottom rung of the social ladder, seeking alternative ways to assert their identity and sense of entitlement.

For we are conscripts to our age
Simply by being born; we wage
The war we are, […]
but how To be the patriots of the Now?
[…]
O all too easily we blame
The politicians for our shame
[…]
The politicians we condemn
Are nothing but our L.C.M.;
The average of the average man
[…]

Ha! “conscripts to our age”! “Patriots of the now”! We’re all more likely to be mere collaborators with whatever system we happen to find in place.

We’re all more likely to be baffled bystanders, watching events unfolding, events driven by “hunger, money and machines”. …

But the real me is, as always, snugly nested in the notes:

(1) When Winter stirs, it’ s time to get the Xmas decorations down from the attic, or , failing that, to re-read that ominous philosophical-political winter poem by WH Auden, “New Year Letter”, written in “January – April 1940” … (by the way, “Brussels in Winter”, is the title of yet another poem by Auden, written in 1938).

(2) As a rich (well, for the time being) Western country, lacking a real government to grapple with pressing contemporary issues (because we rather act out anachronistic tribal Flemish-Walloon jousts) – Belgium is invaded by the world’s economic and political refugees, who understandably hope to get access to Europe’s freedoms & filthy riches via the crumbling Brussels gate. Being a small, ill-governed country, this means ‘native’ Belgians in Winter see their cozy daily TV soap opera of native tribal disputes interrupted by news- images of asylum seekers living in the streets at minus 5° Celsius.

(3) In the mainstream downtown Brussels shopping streets , the “locals” are a mix of different generations of immigrants (mostly Maghreb), ‘native’ working classes, rowdy teenagers, a sprinkle of outsiders of all sorts, and a low dosage of trendy youngsters and yuppies spilling over from the hipper downtown quarters and the nearby mega book&CD store. In uptown Brussels the mix is more tilted towards “Core Europeans – (immigrants or EU officials temporarily residing in Brussels), university students and a few remaining Belgian bourgeois. But the richer and older strata of both Belgian bourgeois and European officials have rather moved on to the wealthy green suburbs around Brussels.

(4) “materialism redeemed by elegance” – well, it does sound good as a phrase, but frankly, my heart isn’t into it. In fact I can’t see what’s redeeming about expensive designer clothes, jewels, furniture , cars … Granted, there’s the sensual thrill of quality materials and of elegance as it is on display in upscale shops – but somehow the sheer expensiveness of it all makes the underlying primal status-seeking motive all the more embarrassing. And as to beauty, well, if ain’t got meaning, if it ain’t disinterested, it ain’t worth a thing ..? If there’s no sliver of emotional truth, no insight to gain, no sheer disinterested, useless beauty – then aesthetic qualities draw a blank with me. (See, I’m not a real flâneur, well anyhow, not in the dandy-esque 19thcentury sense of the term). And I feel slightly repulsed, both by the discreet privileged splendour of, say, a Paris upscale shop as well as by the gaudy greed in a Brussels Rue Neuve chain store.

(5) Allow me a tribute here to an anonymous small brass band which I heard & saw performing on the square in front of the Beaubourg in Paris, on a cold dull Saturday in February 2004. Neither the subtlest luminous grays and greens of Corot in the Louvre, nor the more contemporary combativeness of a Beaubourg exhibit had managed to restore my quite low spirits at the time. Even the always sublime spectacle of the bluish-grey Paris rooftops, viewed from the xth floor, had failed to produce any enthusiasm. And then, then there was that infectious rhythm, the sheer sassy joy of a throbbing tuba, a vèry trumpeting trumpet and a big fat drum. Just swinging & swaying … swaying & singing….

(6) Europe’s debt dilemma : the interests of both the recklessly spendthrift crickets and the industrious ants are so interwoven that any overly harsh punishment of the crickets might just serve to topple the entire European banking system. But helping out the reckless crickets is not only resented by the industrious ants but also creates a moral hazard of free-riding crickets always counting on their bills being paid by others. But beyond this injustice in grocer's terms, there’s the even scarier baseline that in many European countries the fundamental drivers of growth (active population, social and political stability, skills & innovation & productivity ) may have gone in reverse, which means that these countries will be unable to generate enough economic growth to repay the gigantic accumulated debt (let alone to service their pension-promises) … After about 5 decades of rising economic wealth, the prospect of a reversal in economic and social fortunes has gotten very real. And in fcat the past 20 years were nothing but an irresponsible splurging feast by generations (including my generation) in all respects too shortsighted and feeling too entitled to even realize they might irresponsibly be depleting resources, building card-houses and, in short, preparing disaster for future generations. But undoubtedly I’m being too pessimistic. Yeah, surely, everything ‘s gonna be allright! The naive utopist in me even dreams of a future in which the loss of conventional resource-guzzling, and oh so ugly, economic output, is compensated by more room for moral and cultural refinement. Concretely: less cars but more bicycles and more art and more books (on recycled paper or on iPad?).

a lovely day to bask in irrelevance

2010-10-23T05:25:00.000-07:00

ah, the things people do on a sunny Saturday

Well, let’s face it: this blog will not earn me any points for contemporary relevance (1). And this particular post won’t help either ….

In a world facing the challenges of migratory and demographic pressures, in a world threatened by a bloated capitalist system in globalizing overdrive, in a world of dazzling scientific and technological complexity… In such a world, what did I do, on a sunny Saturday in October, AD 2010?

Reader, I confess I took the train to a provincial Flemish university town (2) to go and see a precious 14th century illuminated manuscript, the Bible of Anjou , temporarily released from its dark abode.
How out of step with one’s own time (& with the lovely weather) can one get? The sunny street-terraces were full of people eating & drinking, staring mockingly at the fool entering a museum. Even inside the museum itself, I felt as if my peculiar longings were met with contempt.
While awaiting my turn to ask for directions, I heard how an interestingly-artistic looking, casually-trendily dressed woman, who was inquiring about the different museum-levels, clicked her tongue impatiently when the official listed all exhibits, saying with peremptory disdain: “no, I am not interested in the Anjou Bible!”.

Feeling personally chastened, and darkly brooding on the irrelevance of my loves in art, I made my way through the rooms with the permanent medieval collections.
But ah, I soon stopped sulking, because there was that room with the medieval religious statues! Worn wooden statues, with faint polychromatic traces, expressing various degrees of pathos - solemn or rather hand-wringing suffering, grave or rather cloyingly sentimental mother love.
Statues telling the stories of an all but extinct religion, conveying the messages of a faith I do not share, invested with now long renounced collective beliefs, lacking all modern interest in artistic expression of highly individual emotions, far removed from my own daily pre-occupations and struggles. And yet, wasn’t the whole gamut of fundamental human emotions there?

And so, though these statues have nothing to do with me or my world, I felt connected and deeply moved. Also, I felt somehow soothed, perhaps because these statues offer a retreat from my being just trapped in my own transient hopes & fears & emotions. It felt like when hearing a far-off echo, or the distant cries of children playing in a school yard, …. or like when staring in the distance, at a receding, bluish-simmering horizon.
And only then did I really notice the sounds in the room, sounds forming so naturally a part of the setting … melancholy echoing cries of crows like one can hear in the country side in late autumn. The sounds, capturing & expressing so well this sensation of age-old echoing, turned out to come from an audio-installation by a contemporary artist,
And thus, I felt somehow vindicated: wasn’t this indeed proof enough that my sensations, my loves in art are not merely a matter of isolated idiosyncratic taste … that these medieval statues are indeed not yet dead… since they could still inspire a contemporary artistic dialogue?

An infidel humanist poring over a bible

Hey, but how about the Anjou bible, the alert reader (3) may wonder. Well, it was in yet another room, and it was lovely! Peering into the glass cases, I marveled at those folios with beautifully traced Latin letters, with texts framed by intricately interlacing curves, illuminated by pious bible-scenes and by droll figures tumbling in the margins.
I couldn’t decipher the Latin words, the precise significance of many of the bible-scenes eluded me. Mine was in part naïve marvel as well as awe at the precarious preciousness of it all. And a chuckling fascination for the irreverent menagerie of little figures in the margins: diverse naked little men (with an astonishing range of oddly shaped hats (4) ), Christian knights on horses affronting Muslim fighters on camelback, writhing dragons and other fable monsters, …

The leaflet I had picked up reassuringly showed that scholars were able to trace back each bible-scene, to identify each reference. My own cultural equipment to meet the splendor of these folios was limited to a shallow primary school religious education, to a general curiosity about the diverse manifestations of the human imagination, and to a amateur interest in western art history. A passionate amateur interest in art history!

Art history for me is about a “humanist” interest in how the human mind tirelessly (& uselessly) develops intricate systems of meanings & ideas (all destined one day to crumble & to become irrelevant) . (5) And it is about an aesthetic interest in the history of representation, of form & color & composition, the visible traces of the many splendored variations spawned by human minds. Thus, Art history bears witness to the wide range of human sensibilities & reflective possibilities as they have been realized throughout the ages. (6)

We’re all provincial postmoderns now, without any claims to universality or eternity, but no one may mock my genuine love! (7)

Art history is obviously suffused with cultural relativity, relativity in terms of space and time. Works of art are determined by man-made social values and customs, by man-made religions and philosophies that all come and go.
Art history is about the coming and going of human ways of seeing and of representing the world. And with some of these ways of seeing I feel deep affinities, some leave me indifferent and yet others merely amaze me by their sheer exoticness. But, with some effort of the imagination, and by some learning, and by some un-learning too (of one’s own received ideas), one can arrive at some sort of connection, some sort of appreciation of human artifacts of whatever age or region.
After all, we do all share the basic human equipment of our eyes and hands, and neither has the human condition of fragility fundamentally changed.

So, both as an aesthete and as a humanist I love art history, not to impose the unaltered continuation of standards once deemed classical, nor to block artistic innovations. This love of mine is rather a love of the eye for the many formal realisations of beauty and it is a respect of the mind & the heart for traditions as fragile records of what humans once valued and thought. And these traditions are worth studying, “not [as] a review of bygone concepts”, but because they are a "precious [reminder] of [once living] men’s experiences and values, a human record".
Thus art historical studies help to enlarge one’s own limited frame of reference, and help to revive & recover something of the meaning of these human records from the past. (8)

“For the essence of humanism is that belief […] that nothing which has ever interested living men and women can wholly lose its vitality – no language they have ever spoken, […], no dream which has once been entertained by actual human minds, nothing about which they have ever been passionate, or expended time and zeal” (9)

Not entirely irrelevant notes
(1) neither for past or future relevance, come to think of it.
(2) And on the train I was woefully escaping from the present daunting world in a book, written by an early 20th C medieval art scholar, about (fading & flaking) wall paintings in Romanesque churches …
(3) Rashly assuming a reader made it till here
(4) If ever I were to be endowed with the necessary time, opportunity and skills – I’d write two thematic art histories: one about shadows and the other about the representation of hats throughout the ages.
(5) Erwin Panofsky – “Art as a Humanistic Discipline” : “It may be taken for granted that art history deserves to be counted among the humanities. But what is the use of humanities as such? Admittedly they are not practical, and admittedly they concern themselves with the past. Why, it may be asked, should we engage in impractical investigations, and why should we be interested in the past? “ A rhetorical question … If we ourselves are not interested in the past, don’t we then seal the total annihilation of everything men ever thought and aspired to, including our own aspirations and ruminations?
(6) “Impractical and useless”, this obviously applies to aesthetic interests as well as to any interest in the past. But so what, in any case, “l’homme est une passion inutile”
(7) Nè nè nà nè naa, catch me if you can! – of course I can brandish an irreproachably postmodern quote to back-up this last ditch retreat : Thierry De Duve, Au Nom de l’Art- “Vous n’êtes plus rien, rien de spécial. Vous n’êtes plus un spécialiste, vous êtes vous-même, sans qualification particulière, un simple amateur. […] Vous n’avez pour tout savoir que votre certitude et pour toute certitude que votre sentiment. Il est irrécusable à vos yeux, il est sa propre preuve. […] Votre goût est un habitus esthétique, mais c’est le vôtre »
(8) Erwin Panofsky – “Art as a Humanistic Discipline” : “The humanities […][have the task of] enlivening what otherwise would remain dead . […] the humanities endeavor to capture the processes in the course of which those records were produced and became what they are” -
H. Focillon – [l’histoire de l’art est une] “histoire de l’esprit humain par les formes”
G. Lukàcs – « conscience- de- soi de l’évolution de l’humanité »
Good Old Hegel : « Geistesgeschichte »
(9) Walter Pater, Studies in Art and Poetry, : “Pico Della Mirandola”
(10) The images of landscapes that illuminate this post are details from ancient paintings (Joos De Momper, Tiziano, Matsys). In two cases they formed only modest backdrops to the main subject. But how much I love to gaze at these little landscapes in teh background, at the blue and green hues, at the shimmering horizons, at the golden browns of leaves, at the dazzling splendor of a sinking sun… how dearly I love wandering through these landscapes…

contingent conversations (or: continuous self-doubt)

2010-09-19T07:56:00.000-07:00

“His collections are the practical man’s answer to the aporias of theory” (1)

"And I hazard the guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious and independent citizens "(2)

“she has radical and continuous doubts about the final vocabulary she currently uses, because she has been impressed by other vocabularies, vocabularies taken as final by people or books she has encountered” […] “always aware of the contingency and fragility of their final vocabularies and thus of their selves” […] “ continuous self-doubt” (3)

“He was austere with himself […] But he had an approved tolerance for others ; sometimes wondering, almost with envy, at the high pressure of spirits involved in their misdeeds” (4)

“All purposeful manifestations of life, including their very purposiveness, in the final analysis have their end not in life, but in the expression of its nature, in the representation of its significance” (5)

“Anything from the sound of a word through the color of a leaf to the feel of a piece of skin can […] serve to dramatize and crystallize a human being’s sense of self-identity. […] It can symbolize the blind impress all our behaving bear. Any seemingly random constellation of such things can set the tone of a life. Any such constellation can set up an unconditional commandment to whose service a life may be devoted – a commandment no less unconditional because it may be intelligible to, at most, only one person. “ (6)

« A supposer que Ruskin se soit quelquefois trompé, comme critique, dans l’exacte appréciations de la valeur d’une œuvre, la beauté de son jugement erroné est souvent plus intéressante que celle de l’oeuvre jugée » (7)

« Cicero says “I prefer before heaven to go astray with Plato rather than hold true views with his opponents”. It is a matter of taste to prefer Plato’s company and the company of his thoughts even if this should lead us astray from truth. Certainly a very bold, even an outrageously bold statement, especially because it concerns the truth. […] for the true humanist neither the verities of the scientist nor the truth of the philosopher nor the beauty of the artist can be absolutes; the humanist, because he is not a specialist, exerts a faculty of judgment and taste which is beyond the coercion which each specialty imposes upon us” (8)

“The thinking ego is sheer activity and therefore ageless, sexless, without qualities, and without a life story.” (9)

« Situé hors du temps, que pourrait-il craindre de l’avenir? « (10)

10 contingent contributions
(1) Walter Benjamin - Eduard Fuchs, Collector & Historian
(2) Robert Louis Stevenson - Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde
(3) Richard Rorty – Contingency, irony and solidarity
(4) Robert Louis Stevenson - Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde
(5) Walter Benjamin The Task of the Translator
(6) Richard Rorty – Contingency, irony and solidarity
(7) Marcel Proust – Traduction de “la bible d’Amiens”
(8) Hannah Arendt – The Crisis in Culture
(9) Hannah Arendt – The Life of the Mind
(10) Marcel Proust – A la recherche du temps perdu

from rocket science to the poetry of peeling wallpaper

2010-08-29T06:35:00.000-07:00

It was a bright day in August,at last sparkling with enough sunlight to restore our summer mood after a string of rain-soaked days. The kind of day to joyously set out on a trip (1).

A small digression about cars & trains

Traffic was smooth since not that many people hit the road for Northern France on a summer day. Traffic … car traffic! While certainly not about to burst into a laudatory post about cars, I confess not being entirely immune for car-travelling romance: imagine driving along highways through vast planes, under wide skies, on the tunes of “born to be wild”.
And, from a visual point of view: how seducing is the always receding vanishing point of a long,long road stretching out in front of you (train travelers usually don’t get to enjoy this frontal viewpoint) (2)

A car also allows you to visit many “worlds” in a single day – you can for instance go to an ancient rocket launch base & war memorial in the morning, admire the landscape from a charming old French town on top of a sunny hill at noon and participate in a Flemish art& poetry happening in late afternoon.

Mixing worlds & moods may offend a sense of propriety or of due concentration (3), but is of course quite the stuff of vigorous life itself with its diversity of appeals to our attention.

Into the rocket base!!!

But so, on a bright August day this melancholy flâneur was unleashed in the ancient underground WWII rocket base of La Coupole (4)

It could easily have become a sheer amusement park where one can gleefully reenact scientific & military adventures , drooling over engine replica’s, technical drawings and real life weaponry. But this ancient base was also turned into a historical remembrance center, evoking the sufferings of war in Northern France.

Our visit took over 2.5 hours – wandering through chilly underground corridors enlivened by “James Bond” like missile launch simulations, paying close attention in educational rooms explaining the basic physics & mathematics of rocket science, watching the documentaries with testimonies, old photos & drawings evoking the horrors and the human sufferings during war time....

What a despicable species we are ...

Thus, for the more impressionable amongst us, this visit is not merely a history tour, but becomes a vivid evocation of the alternating urges that have always ruled human behavior:
• there’s the sheer intellectual fascination for scientific &technical exploits, for facts & figures that are logically combined in a rational discourse
• there’s the vivacious zest for adventure and action and heroic deeds
• there’s the appeal to our reflection and empathy, the impotent acknowledgement of so much – far too much - suffering & pain & death, materializing in a mute cry of horror, in the upwelling of dry tears

And obviously, immersion in scientific adventures and heroic action is much more fun than impotent reflection and empathy (5).
But, maybe just maybe, with a bit more reflection and empathy, those V2 rocket-engineers would have had some qualms of conscience? Instead of standing there grinning …. as shown by that unforgettable photo: a bunch of grinning brilliant nazi engineers , proudly cheering the successful trial-launch of a rocket, seemingly oblivious of the death & destruction their contraption will bring about.

But the sun is shining brightly in the sky!
Yet upon leaving the memorial center, we ourselves too, as healthy, fun-loving specimens of the human race disposing of a car, sought out more joyful stimuli for the rest of the day. Happily we motored through a lovely landscape: so soothing, so forgetful, so beautiful, so indifferent to human follies ....(6).
And we enjoyed the wide view from the top of a hill, we sipped from our drinks on a terrace in the pretty town of Cassel and took full pleasure in all the lovely sights, in the sweet breeze and the benign sun.

Art to the rescue?

Yet a ponderous flâneur can of course not leave it at that, she couldn’t possibly finish this post upon so bucolic and hedonistic a note!

And as a matter of fact the same day still brought other sensations too: poetic fragments & artistic interventions in the streets and houses of a little Flemish town in the country . And perhaps for the first time that day I felt like coming home, to be amongst kindred spirits: reflecting & remembering humans, restoring some dignity to the transience of human lives and their earthly homes.
One artist let a light beam illuminate the old fashioned , peeling wallpaper in a vacant parsonage, other artists would gently invade an abandoned rest home and amidst the echoes of declining retired lives one could slowly read poems, or be startled by loose wires and tubes (which were fake but evoked so well the undoing of abandoned houses). Ah, how soothing I found this tender play of imagination and understanding …

Will art save the world? No. Can art redeem suffering? No. Is art an escape from worldly duties? Perhaps (but a necessary one, to restore our spirits, so as not to pass too pessimistic a judgment on the human condition). Are aesthetic pleasures as a-moral as strictly sensuous and intellectual pleasures? Possibly. But still. And yet. Art at least is not as indifferent to human presence and experiences as a landscape is. Art at least is not as oblivious of human sensibilities as purely intellectual-technical reasoning is.

But ah … it was getting late …. time for another meal on yet another lovely terrace …. time to walk back to the car in the setting sun …. and cast a glance on the local 1914-1918 monument, smiling at those old-fashioned engraved names and noting with amazement, oh three brothers who all perished in the same month.

good thing there are the notes to harbor more brooding
(1) As distinguished from days when one dutifully sets out for a trip, eg when it’s the first day of your summer holidays and the rain is pouring down.
(2) So far this tribute to “rock ‘n roll car romance” from one a> who has to swallow anti car sickness pills to limit the rocking & rolling car damage to a mere headache, b> who thoroughly resents not being able to read while just sitting there, c> who draws elation & consolation from the unplugged sensuous purity of intertwining melodies rather than from beats & guitar screeches. And the obstinate train lover in me furthermore wants to point out that a train traveler gets something even better than “the frontal vanishing point”: the mysterious glimpses of a far off horizon whenever the train wheezes through a hard bend.
(3) The insufferable train purist in me wants to point out that “visiting many worlds in a single day” leads to a deplorable scattering of attention & concentration. The curse of shallowness is not far off!
(4) As a matter of fact this German rocket base never quite managed to fire a rocket in WWII since it was discovered by the Allies before it could get fully operational.
(5) and of course reflection& empathy are impotent and merely depressing and so may seek release in rage, rage at all those human specimens who oblivious of human suffering, blithely engage in scientific projects without ever pondering consequences. This rage, not wanting to remain impotent, will then itself enlist action and scientific exploits to crush the objects of its rage. Yah. The human species in action! Take the single-minded , brilliant Wernher von Braun , oblivious (was he?) of the gruesome exploitation of the forced laborers in his base, undisturbed by the death & misery brought about by his V2 combat rockets. And living happily ever after, never ever brought to justice since the American military was all too keen to enlist this rocket-scientist for its own space programs. …
(6) Anyone who has ever visited the world war I memorials in Flanders Fields will have been struck by the contrast formed by the photos of war-torn battlefields (deserts strewn with barbed wire & dead bodies, towns and trees burnt down) with the present day prim & fertile Flemish landscape, with its neat little towns brimming with economic activity.
(7) Art …. reenacting both stark crucifixions and the endearing dalliances of colour & light …. As Bernard Marcadé wrote on the Belgian artist James Ensor : « Citoyen du « pays solitaire de narquoisie » Ensor a consacré l’essentiel de sa vie à la lumière et aux couleurs, en même temps qu’il pourfendait de façon acerbe les vilenies et petitesses de la nature humaine. […] La double exigence d’un homme partagé entre le plaisir voluptueux de peindre et la nécessité de faire rendre gorge aux turpitudes humaines. […] Les auréoles du Christ ou les sensibilités de la lumière. »

for the love of trains

2010-08-17T09:21:00.000-07:00

“I love trains, and they have always loved me back. What does it mean to be loved by a train? Love, it seems to me, is that condition in which one is most contentedly oneself. If this sounds paradoxical, remember Rilke’s admonition: love consists in leaving the loved one space to be themselves while providing the security within which that self may flourish”. (Tony Judt) (1)

Sitting contentedly in a train, absorbed in some abstruse book, or engrossed in the erratic dance of light-patches…. enveloped in the “sleepy rhythm of a hundred hours” ….

Yes, certainly, ”I love trains, and they have always loved me back”.

My enduring love-affair with trains probably dates back to childhood, in particular to the yearly family holiday to the South of France. Our train-trip would start in a sooty but still grand Brussels station (quite impressive for the provincial little girl I was) , where we would board a night train from the venerable “Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-lit” (2)

Of course, the objects of my travel-contentment were not the same as now: at that time I doted on the comic-books and peaches my parents dealt out to keep us quiet, and even on the cute little plastic cutlery that went with the packaged meals distributed by the train attendant. My elder sisters, while also keen on comics & peaches, did not compete for the cutlery, but rather swooned over the male attendant.

As to the “sleepy rhythm of a hundred hours”, instead of a poetic incantation, it was a most sensuous and sleepy rhythm indeed back then: to my great delight, at night, the seats of our compartment were transformed into 6 sleeping bunks with real sheets & blankets & pillows.

Round about 9PM my parents invariably would start worrying about the train attendant not showing up in time to perform this remarkable transformation . My 2 sisters and I further added to my parent’s stress by quarreling over who would get the top-bunk. But in the end all the family members would join in the merry hunt for the diverse light switches, with my father authoritatively seizing control of the main switch.

In the morning I would excitedly climb down out of my bunk and look out of the window to discover a southern sunlit landscape with beige-colored houses having wooden shutters. My parents would be swapping sleepless stories of all the nightly stops & shouts & murmurs that had kept them awake, but which for me had only been enchanting echoes to my train dreams. And then of course started the big morning rush to the lavatories & washing facilities, with each family egoistically monopolizing a washing facility for all of its members.

After the washing ritual, my sisters would be allowed to wander about the train, taking stock of the other teenagers, peeping into the attendant’s compartment , starting to plan their activities at the holiday resort. I would stand in the narrow passage way just outside our compartment, looking out of the window (with the beloved “e pericoloso sporgersi” admonition and the red sign prohibiting the throwing of bottles). And I would feel, already then, the seductive transience of travelling, with its mixture of great expectations and melancholy.

(1) Tony Judt In love with trains NYRB March 2010 Issue
(2) The Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits also operated the Orient Express

one could also go to Saint-Tropez

2010-08-12T08:04:00.000-07:00

Summertime, holiday time !!! For sea, sun and sand, please click here. (1) For meandering musings, do read on.

As you may have noticed, dear reader, I suffer from a particular nervous affliction: while sorely lacking all natural zest for useful practicalities, I definitely perk up amongst dead spirits and fantasies (2).
Not that I haunt cemeteries or study the Kabbalah – no, mine is a very humanistic kind of spirituality, finding elation (almost) only (3) when layers of man-made signs allow my imagination to reconstruct meaning & beauty.

Thus, strolling through the Parc Monceau in Paris, I could not but revel in all those traces of a certain (past) Parisian “haute bourgeoisie” way of life. There is the little pseudo-roman temple at the park-entry (which houses quite decent lavatory services - honoring the Paris habit to offer public services in style).
There are the magnificent wrought-iron gates, the stately broad park avenues with their worn iron name plates commemorating the great French writers of the past (la Comtesse de Ségur!).
And the kiosk … an iron& wood & glass construction in the best public garden tradition which sells classical (4) garden toys in merry colors alongside ice cream and lollies (& delicious croissants!).
The whole conjures up images of nannies wearing starched aprons, keeping an eye on the amusements of the well behaved local bourgeois children. The adult bourgeois locals (as well as my retrograde imagination) would of course have been enchanted also by some of the more adventurously winding garden paths, by the enigmatic Egyptian pyramid on the lawn, or by the ponderous pond surrounded by a melancholy Antique colonnade.

The surrounding broad, tree-lined streets with their marvelous mansions ooze an effortlessly elegant Parisian grandeur. A worthy neighborhood for the Cernuschi museum, which houses the (very rich) private collection of Asian art gathered by the (very rich) 19th C banker Henry Cernuschi.
The vestibule is chic and hushed, making one at once feel a privileged visitor (but entry is free!). Then, there’s the elation of mounting those regal stairs, which are flanked by two huge & exquisite Chinese vases. Only to be dumb-struck a bit later by the formidable presence of a larger than life Buddha. Then, the sheer wonder of gazing at artifacts spanning continents and millennia….
And all the time: the soothing presence of large windows looking out over a very green garden, allowing tired eyes to drift off for a while amongst sunlit foliage.

Still under the impression of the Cernuschi-plendor, aimlessly ambling on in the neighborhood, I soon stumbled on another sublime mansion turned into museum: le Musée Nissim de Camondo.

Here one is enchanted to discover the lavish tribute a Turkish born (in 1860) French banker ( from a Sephardic Jewish family who made their fortune in Constantinople) pays to the French 18th C decorative arts, the life-long object of his collector’s passion .
The interior, abounding with époque furniture, draperies, objects and paintings, is luxuriant, sumptuous …. and yet delicate & graceful – the spirit of the 18th C French decorative genius captured. And the imagination is treated to yet an extra dimension in time and space …. by an exhibit of sepia photographs of a mysterious 19th C Constantinople and of the Camondo ancestors in exotic traditional dress.

Yet, amidst all this marvel, heart & eyes are moved perhaps most by some quiet light filtering through a gauze curtain, a fleeting reflection on a glass pane, by an empty chair standing by a window looking out into the garden, or by a mere shadow in a hall-corner.
This fabulous museum is also a reminder of the vanity of riches; tinged as its history is with melancholy. Moïse Camondo, the rich passionate collector, ended up giving his collection and his house to the French state, demanding it would be named after his son and alas never-to- be heir: Nissim de Camondo, who at age 25 died in an air battle in the first world war.

Ah, pondering & wondering at signs …
Now I don't ponder & wonder only in consciously aesthetically contrived surroundings. There’s for instance this other image from my Paris-visit that lingers on: in those “Roman-temple”-lavatories in the Monceau park, behind an iron gate fencing off the service quarters from the public area, one could spot a small stock of cleaning materials, a bucket & brush-with-towel ànd a flaming red plastic toy tractor, about toddler-size.
I was captivated by that little scene, framed by pseudo-roman columns, because it was a slice of suspended life, looking as if at any moment a child would burst in and mount its toy tractor, while its parent would grab the bucket and go on about his or her cleaning chores.

Also, I could not ignore that most (not all!) of the strolling or jogging park visitors as well as most (not all!) of the museum visitors where white or Asiatic while the majority (not all!) of the attendants (in lavatories, in the kiosk, at the ticket office) were black or of Maghreb-descent. Neither could I fail to notice, on signs in the window of a nearby real estate agency, that the quoted price of, say, a 50 square meter studio in the Monceau-neighborhood is above 400.000 Eur.

But does this mean that the aesthetic and imaginative delights of this neighborhood should be shunned? Written off as mere play-things of the ruling classes, discounted as the despicable fruit of social exploitation and ill gotten capitalist riches?

No. I mean: oh please, for chrissakes no!!

What a cruel waste of potential joy & happiness that would be! However embedded in a bourgeois culture, these are still aesthetic and imaginative delights that can be tasted by all, if only given the chance and some kind of introduction by a mentor (alive or in book-form).

This is written in all honest naiveté and I do hope to prove my good faith by the story of my own late conversion.
Actually, I became sensitive to (classical) aesthetics rather late. For a long time , in my youthful city explorations, I spurned ‘officially’ picturesque sites or famous “old masters” museums , preferring to explore more neglected neighborhoods (5) .
It was an almost chance encounter with some ‘old master’ paintings (6) which “hurt and connect”, that made me curious about this powerful effect of aesthetics and high art.
And I am not ashamed to confess that it is the reading (at age 30 or so) of the best-selling book by Gombrich, “The Story of Art” (written in fact for teenagers) which marked the beginning of my passion for art history books.

Now to further appease lingering doubts of anxious post-colonial blog-readers out there, yes after my Monceau-tour I also went to visit the Quai Branly museum “ built to embody President Jacques Chirac's politically correct dream of French multiculturalism “. And yes, I did come under the spell of those wondrously ponderous masks.

Notes including an opinion poll about Brigitte Bardot and a question about multi-coloured propeller toys

(1) Sun, Sea & Sand: yes, prudishly eluding that other S-Word , convinced as I am that my blog readers don’t need the web for thàt. This being said – I do want to attract attention to the Saint-Tropez Tourist Office announcement of a Brigitte Bardot exhibit. (But then again, are there any Bardot-fans amongst my select blog readership? Do let me know!)
(2) This rumination about dead spirits & fantasies of course echoes the Proust passage I read this morning: « Qui a raison du fossoyeur ou d’Hamlet quand l’un ne voit qu’un crâne là où le second se rappelle une fantaisie? La science peut dire : le fossoyeur ; mais elle a compté sans Shakespeare, qui fera durer le souvenir de cette fantaisie au-delà de la poussière du crâne. » (La bible d’Amiens, préface du traducteur)
(3) “Finding elation (almost) only amidst man-made signs” - Sorry C, that’s of course without counting you – (and anyway, there’s the “almost” qualification , dedicated to you and to sensual autumnal breezes, rays of sunlight on a tile floor, the sun hot on my skin, the smell of a park after the rain, crisp croissants et j’en passe)
(4) “Classical” in the sense of some happy form that has hardly changed since it was perfected long ago: such as red balloons, pink hoops, multi-colored mini-propellers-on-a stake - which -turn-dizzyingly-in-the-wind. (How on earth are these things called? Please let me know , together with your feelings about Brigitte Bardot)
(5) And I will always remain sensitive to the poignancy of “neglected neighborhoods”; partly out of melancholy disposition and partly out of an acute realist observer’s interest in signs of urban life & decay. Witness my Flickr-photostream dedicated to Charleroi ….
(6) Notably, Caravaggio’s “David with the head of Goliath” and Titian’s “Noli me tangere”
(7) Quote from concierge travel guide

On art history, philosophy, lingering longings and the decline of plumbing standards (see note 6)

2010-07-30T02:45:00.000-07:00

It is a big book, weighing 5 kilos at least! A standard work of art education I suppose: Gardner’s "Art through the Ages". (1) Very thorough and instructive, lavishly illustrated but in its scrupulous objectivity also a tad boring. It’s just too impartial a reference work while, for me, the irresistible attraction of art history books lays in their loving labor of imagination to revive what is lost – as exemplified by those great art historians who, combining passionate erudition with imaginative understanding , were on a quest to resuscitate the beauty & meaning of the artifacts from bygone ages. (2)

But still, melancholia too is in the eye of the beholder, and so, even with as impassive & impartial a guide as the Gardner book, I cannot but intensely feel the pathos of the history of art. Those time-lines with their accompanying images of ancient art works …. how could one not see them as witnesses of the glorious rise and inexorable fall of civilizations? (3)

In the chapter about the art of troubled late antiquity there’s this one picture I keep returning to, in awe and wonder. It’s a reproduction of an ivory plaque from around 400 AD.
It shows a woman of noble bearing, calmly picking grapes from a bowl offered to her by a boy (4). Her pose is serene, exuding graceful gravitas. The whole scene, her figure, and the folds of her classical robe are carved with precise fluency .
And the choking poignancy of it, is that this image of striking classical beauty appears in 400 AD, amidst the chaos of a crumbling empire, at a time when confident primitive Christianity had banned all ancient pagan cults and when society’s taste had long turned towards cruder images, to “archaic, abstract and bluntly expressive” forms , oblivious of classical aesthetic ideals.
In fact, one has to turn back almost 200 pages in the weighty Gardner book to find images of similar beauty and the diligent (& melancholy) reader can then ponder how the beauty of a 400 BC Parthenon frieze was briefly recaptured in the amazing grace of a lone 400 AD ivory.

But, surprise, dear blog-reader: I will not now launch in a lamentation about how our own 21st Century has definitely forgotten all about greco-roman gracefulness. I will not now grieve over the loss of authority of classical aesthetics (5). And l will even refrain, for now, from end-of-civilization prophecies (6).

Instead I will rejoice in some rowdy cross referencing between epochs, seeking consolation in the wayward afterlife that transient human expressions do have.

Take Emile Mâle’s “the Gothic Image”, a book written around 1910 (and now more or less out of print) to raise understanding and appreciation of the then largely despised art of the middle ages. Mâle’s book offers such a lovingly-detailed and evocative insight in medieval Christian art - its chief aim being to try and understand the spirit of those medieval artifacts around whom had “gathered a whole world of hopes and longings, and they appeal to us to-day as do all things on which men’s thoughts have lingered.”

This book is a passionate apology of Gothic Christian art, and therefore definitely not into the lamenting of lost classical standards. But Mâle none the less faithfully records the dim classical memories that did survive – like the iconographical origins of the allegorical statue of “Lady Philosophy” , figuring in the series of statues representing the liberal arts in gothic cathedrals. The statue of “Philosophy" appears there with “the attributes given to her by Boethius” .

Boethius (7) …. “living on the confines of two worlds, […] at once the last of the Romans and the first of the mediaeval doctors”. Ah, Boethius …. writing his “The Consolation of Philosophy” in prison, with stoic courage ….. (or with pathetic heartbreaking bravery?), while awaiting his execution. Boethius … striving to preserve classical wisdom in a world where greco-roman traditions were fading fast.

And once a great tradition has declined and faded, it cannot ever come back exactly as it was – but it can have a strange, wayward afterlife – it can be revered and desired even without being really understood or mastered. And it is Mâle, this zealous apologist of the mediaeval christian spirit, who so lyrically captures the full poignancy of late-classical Boethius’ influence in the sturdy middle ages :

“[Boethius] had seen Philosophy and had talked with her, the Middle Ages took him at his word and had no wish to represent her otherwise. […] His vast learning no doubt aroused admiration, but it was the vague sadness, the subtle symbolism, the sudden bursts of poetry which mingle so strangely with his dialectic, in short all that there was of disquietude in this latterday philosophy, which made the strength of his appeal to men”. (8)

Vague sadness , late sensitivities – in our blind race towards some collective future (and a private death) , amidst the always recurring onslaught of new generations who render old traditions irrelevant, we humans have this stranges capacity of nostalgia, of a longing for what is lost.

A longing that itself seems to be more permanent throughout the ages than the objects which it longs for. (9)

Consolation of Notes
(1) hard cover; 28 X 24 X 8 cm , 1198 pages; I do cherish this Gardner – book, not only because of its impeccable instructiveness, but also because, at a certain period in my life, it was a most welcome weighty & tangible proof both of the durability of Art (despite a world ruled by economical priorities) and of the dedication of my long distance lover (who at her PC in Detroit asked Amazon to deliver this doorstopper at a Brussels address - and I still remember the excitement of fetching this gift at the post office, evading clandestinely from my bank desk during the lunch break)
(2) Winckelmann, “the first art historian” is unapologetically melancholy in his evocation of all that has been lost (see note 9) , and Emile Mâle (perhaps the Winckelmann of the gothic image) is on an almost fanatical mission to produce a work summarizing the iconography of the gothic cathedrals (as thorough & comprehensive as a medieval “summa” )--- ah, what could be more moving then these attempts to recover a lost language of the eye
(3) and as sad proof that “L’homme est une passion inutile” (Sartre) – with what passionate energy have humans devoted themselves to transient enterprises of no use whatever for our survival or reproduction … (Darwinians of course argue that displays of useless splendor& complexity are an honest sign of a surplus of health & energy and thus yet another evolutionary ploy to attract mates keen on giving their off spring the best chances of survival – I beg to differ, too many men & women ruined themselves while devoted to enterprises “entirely gratuitous in terms of life-preservation; far transcending what may be deemed necessary for sexual attraction “ (Arendt))
(4) Gardner tells me it is a priestess celebrating the rites of Bacchus
(5) I shall always retain a nostalgia for this 19th C - Grand – Tour - type of reverence for antiquity. A self-conscious, ironical nostalgia of course. Besides, my recent reading about pathetic Ruskin has further dented my belief in the edifying effects of worshipping the arts of the past. Though, still...., mental and physical health cannot but benefit from a habit of regular art-holidays, or so I wistfully (& jealously) noted when reading in this Ruskin-biography: “ In poor spirits, he set off almost at once for a restorative trip to the Continent” ( France, Italy, etc, and this from May to September , dear reader, not just a hurried weekend city-trip. )
(6) This being said, I cannot deny having a keen “decline-and- fall of the Roman empire” sensibility – it may even be a family trait. A great-great-great uncle is reported to have had religious end-of-times visions. And, on a more prosaic note, close relatives of mine glumly take the dearth of qualified plumbers as an omen of the decline of western civilization skills. (which may not be that wide off the mark, the nigh uncontrollable Gulf of Mexico oil spill does show the catastrophic consequences of a slippage in sound plumbing prudence at deep-water levels , as Moss pointed out to me).
(7) on Boethius "Boethius's best known work is the Consolation of Philosophy (De consolatione philosophiae), which he wrote most likely while in exile under house arrest or in prison while awaiting his execution, but his lifelong project was a deliberate attempt to preserve ancient classical knowledge, particularly philosophy."
(8) Doesn’t this echo Bonnefoy’s insight about classical longings and about « meditations sur l’exil, […] parce que 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 ». « the nostalgia inherent to such a late sensibility can be more truthfully perpetuated than the heroic illusions of a so called great epoch”
(9) great opportunity to quote again from that sublime concluding paragraph in Winckelmann’s "History of the Art Of Antiquity" (18th C itself) : “[…] although contemplating the collapse of art has driven me nearly to despair, […] I could not keep myself from gazing after the fate of works of art as far as my eye could see. […] 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. […] In this, we often are like individuals who wish to converse with spirits and believe they can see something where nothing exists. […] One always imagines that there is so much to find…"

« rappelle-toi, on s’était croisé, une journée de pluie » (1)

2010-03-28T07:08:00.000-07:00

The church was already well filled that Sunday morning, some 15 minutes before the Bach-cantata-recital would start. I had only just managed to find a seat, squeezed in between two bulky men. Around me there was the usual pre-concert noise of people meeting & chattering and of chairs scraping over tiles. And within my head there was the even louder, anxious whirl of practical and sentimental worries.
So I could barely concentrate on the program-notes which were explaining how Bach’s music expressed the libretto’s message that the Lord always comes to the aid of his hapless creature. But while futilely browsing the erudite explanations, a phrase uttered by a woman behind me snapped me out of my own hapless fretfulness.

“Rappelle-toi, on s’était croisée une journée de pluie”, said this woman, talking to her neighbor.
And in a flash all of my worries were dissipated by this ordinary image of two friends meeting in the street, on a rainy day in the city, chatting under their umbrellas, amidst passersby hurrying along in the pouring rain. (2)

Still under the spell of this phrase, I gasped when the choir started singing “Fürchte dich nicht, ich bin bei dir”/ “Fear not, I am with you” . Just as almost 300 years ago a faithful peasant attending Mass must have gasped, also with tears in his eyes, deeply stirred by this music. (3)

Bach’s genius is often described in terms of contrapuntal complexities, producing music that would only appeal to the intellect. How very wrong! His cantata’s and his Passions are profoundly moving, expressing the whole gamut of human emotions. They bear no trace of romantic navel-gazing, nor do they vainly flaunt their undeniable complexity – but there’s a touching humility to them, expressing as they do shared human doubts, joys and fears, all momentarily redeemed by sheer musical perfection. And there’s humility, and heartbreaking beauty too, in the way a human voice intertwines, in companionable sonority, with, for instance, an alt-violin in a Bach-aria (4).

After the concert, while queuing to leave the church, I passed in front of the podium where the musicians were preparing to leave. And as I was watching how the alt-violinist lovingly put her instrument back in its case, I mused about the many different manifestations of beauty and art. How they can range from sumptuous displays of glory to humble marks of caring attention for the quotidian (5).

Ah, the consolations of the quotidian! That Sunday-afternoon I could rejoice all I wanted in the marvels of a rainy day, which had even turned into a stormy one.

But instead of cozily watching the rain lashing the windows, philosophizing about Art, I had to go out again and brave the wind-swept streets on foot.
Because C, who was visiting, had alas encountered the sorry Brussels habit of well hidden temporarily no-parking signs, which are then scrupulously enforced by the police-forces. So we had to venture out, first to a local police post manned by a police-woman from the provinces doing a tour of duty in depraved Brussels (and who was positively happy to speak Flemish to a pair of naïve women having had their car towed away).
And then on we walked, fighting gusts of rain, to a bleak garage in a bleak street, looking so very shabby & drab that it did acquire a certain urban romance. Behind a high fence there was the yard with forlorn looking, towed away cars . The garage-office itself, with a lone woman behind a large counter, was protected by a makeshift plexi-glass door with bell and looked like a perfect setting for some noirish police series.

Sitting there on a worn bench, while C was negotiating the administrative and financial details of car release with the lady in charge, I counted the stains of cigarette-burns on the furniture which, together with the musty stench of old smoke, belied the big no-smoking sign on the door. There was a big clock on the wall and many shelves with surprisingly neatly arranged dossiers. Sometimes a voice crackled from a radio and the lady behind the counter then spoke in a microphone to give directions, all the while continuing to fill out the multiple forms for car release. She had a briskness of voice and manners which was quite astonishing in so drab an environment.
Quite a bracing example I thought: definitely temperament over matter! (6)

By the time we got back outside, the elements were really unchained.
And truly, there’s a special elation and companionship in braving together adverse weather, just as encounters in rainy streets can be of a heart rending coziness.
Amongst the saving graces of life certainly have to be counted: rough weather walks, rainy flâneries and Bach-cantatas.

Fear not, the footnotes too are with us
(1) “remember, we had come across each other in the street, on a rainy day”
(2) The extraordinary appeasing power of this ordinary image surely has something to do with the element of simple shared humanity in it and with its consoling evocation of the many ordinary struggling lives that are lived in a city. As Orhan Pamuk writes in “The Museum of Innocence”: “The city was teaching us to see the ordinariness of our lives, teaching us, too, a humility that banished guilt; There was a consoling power I felt mixing with the city crowds in shared taxis and buses”
(3) And I am always touched too by the torch-song- naïveté of some of those Bach cantata-libretto’s, so endearingly & trustingly evoking an informal intimacy between a frail & frightened human and his almost motherly- reassuring God. “Herr, […] du bist mein, ich bin dein, niemand kann uns scheiden ” sings the Choir …. Though not a believer myself, I can of course very well relate to this longing for an all-understanding source of consolation and support. And somehow, from time to time at least, the music produced by the happy conjunction of this longing and a human genius, is in itself redemption and consolation enough.
(4) Tricky word, humility. Before you know it people might think that I, the proudly promethean autonomous human, am promoting self-abasing submission to some authority. No no! I speak of humility as very humanely defined by the OED: “the quality of not thinking that you are better than other people” – or as the 1st connotation offered by Merriam Webster: not proud or haughty , not arrogant.
(5) There’s the writhing splendor of a Rubens with his “assez vain déploiement d’une illusion de triomphe” (Y. Bonnefoy) and there’s the endearing attention paid by a Van Eyck not only to the rendering of sumptuously rich materials, but also to all the tactile details of a simple chair (on which a angel-musician sits in a panel of the famous Ghent altar piece) or of a pair of homely slippers (in the Arnolfini painting).
(6) Actually, I collect such edifying and bracing examples, being always in search of evidence of human resilience and dignity ( perhaps out of a desire for self-improvement, by putting my own all too often frail and willfully sad ways to shame)

Düsseldorf, Winter 2006

2010-01-03T05:31:00.000-08:00

It’s an odd, but cherished, collection: those highly personal memories of moments of harmony with the world. Memories of uneventful moments, neither boisterously happy nor deeply introspective. But rather meditative moments, with the self temporarily released from the selfish burdens of living and worrying. Memories of moments (1), or of places (2), which permitted some sort of reconciliation with the world and with the self.
These moments and their consolations are fugitive alas, but at least they yield the kind of soothing images to which a restive mind can cling, when for instance seeking rescue from the travails of a wakeful night.

Lately this collection has thrown up memories of a wintertrip to Duesseldorf. And how consoling they are, how strangely sheltering they feel, these images of wet, foggy streets and of myself wandering about them.

It was during those dark & drizzly days adrift between Xmas and New Year, and Duesseldorf seemed to have lost its wealthy arrogance. One could nearly believe that its much publicized Winter “Art Quadriennale” had been set up out of a genuine, melancholy need rather than to merely spur the art-tourist-trade.

It was raining when I got out of the station, and despite the late morning hour the streets looked almost nocturnally desolate. The wet pavements glistened with the reflections of flickering red and yellow signs, which pointed to at least some human activity in the Döner-Kebab restaurants, Wurst-stalls and sex-cinemas. (3)

My hotel was located on an empty, shabby square not far from the station. The curtains of the windows of the neighboring Balkan restaurant were closed and no red lights were flashing on the façade of the sex-shop opposite the hotel.

I mounted the narrow staircase to the reception and was greeted only by the twinkling lights of a small Xmas tree. The reception desk itself was empty, but from the open door behind it came the shifting sounds and luminosity of a TV-set. The cramped semi-dark reception-area, the dimly blaring TV, the worn wooden desk, the gaudy Xmas-decorations: they were all of a pathos that moved me profoundly.

I rung the bell, and the receptionist came out, gauging me warily before extending a cautious welcome. But her initial suspicion soon turned into a more amiable curiosity about the motivations of a lone winter traveler. She seemed reassured both by my ’Art-Quadriennale’ travel-motive and by my city of residence, Brussels.
She had been there, she said, and enthusiastically launched into a brief comparative lecture about the Brussels shopping streets versus their Duesseldorf equivalents. But then, taking in my sober winter outfit and battered bag, she checked herself and apologetically said: ‘but you’re here for art, not for shopping’. She gave me my room’s key, and pointed out the corridor with the old, iron cage elevator.
While I stood there waiting, I felt her absentmindedly gazing at me. Then she smiled wistfully, looking suddenly so very lonely and vulnerable, and went back into the TV room.

When I left the hotel again, the heavy rain had turned into a foggy drizzle. Walking along one of the main thoroughfares, I got in thrall to the urban romance of neon signs shimmering in a suggestive haze, of cars swooshing by with sweeping lights. And somehow, in this wintry cityscape, my solitude wasn’t disagreeable to me. (4) Especially since I had not to mingle with the fur-coated ladies in the profusely lit shopping streets, which were full to bursting with silly luxury goods on shiny display.

Skirting the shopping district, I could walk through dark & wet streets, to find a harsh sort of cover in the austerely neon-lit Kunsthalle. With its unadorned concrete and its stark oversized rooms, this building would not obviously please nor give any kind of sentimental shelter.

In this indifferent setting, one was fully exposed to the extreme poignancy of Berlinde De Bruyckere’s sculptures , some occupying the full height of a nine meter high room : “figures in which human and creature-like forms nestle up to and melt into [high] columns, as well as horse torsos, which stretch upward from a wrought iron pedestal”.

These creatures, suffering alone atop pillars and pedestals, show all the deformations of vulnerable flesh, of “flesh through which a conscience of pain has torn and which thus has also suffered in the untraceable soul”. One gasps, one suppresses tears, one falls silent. And feels profoundly for these creatures, who represent a suffering that has been or can be or shall be others' and our lot one day too. “When utterly powerless and helpless, humans resort to reflection and meditation upon what has been suffered”.
While not being able to bring material relief, one thus can at least give suffering a place in the world, give it some human significance through our empathy. (5) (6)

No material relief? Ah, but some of those creatures do seem to find warmth and protection under rough woolen blankets … Yes, about vulnerability, about our yearning for shelter De Bruyckere is never wrong …

odd, but cherished, collection of correlations
(1) of moments and places - Albert Hourani – A History of the Arab Peoples – from the chapter “The language of poetry” (read on Jan 1st 2010)
“The poem tended to begin with the evocation of a place where the poet had once been, which could also be an evocation of a lost love; the mood was not erotic, so much as the commemoration of the transience of human life”
(2) of moments and places - Proust – A la recherche du temps perdu – read and reread since Xmas 1995)
“le souvenir d’une image n’est que le regret d’un instant"
(3) Orhan Pamuk – Snow ('In Frankfurt') – read in March 2007
“It was the middle of the day, but, looking into the dark, dense mist, I could still see the deathly yellow glow of streetlamps. Still, it cheered me to see – in the streets surrounding the central train station, along the pavements lined with döner-kebab restaurants and travel agencies and ice-cream parlours and sex shops – signs of the energy that sustains all big cities”

(4) John le Carré - diverse espionage novels – read somewhere between 1985 and 1988
Le Carré (especially in his cold war novels) surely is one of the most melancholy of thriller writers, bestowing dignity and a sense of gravitas on his often rather lonely and reflective characters. Somehow the following sentence of his has stayed with me over the years. "She realized being quite alone in the world. But somehow in the wintry landscape her solitude wasn’t disagreeable to her. "
Trying to locate this quote, I leaf through my yellowing Le Carré pockets (compulsively read as a procrastinating student). But instead of yielding the searched for sentence, the thickly printed pages offered an unexpected memento senescere : I wince at the very small font which obviously didn’t pose yet any problem in younger days.
(5) paraphrasing Stefan Hertmans’ reflections about “Schmerzensmann V , Een sculptuur van Berlinde De Bruyckere” – essay read between 23 dec and 28 dec 2009
[…] De verfijning van verdriet […] behoort integraal tot wat de beschaving met de existentie van de mens heeft aangericht; de ingehoudenheid, de beheersing, de melancholie die op deze uiterts verfijnde gezichten te lezen is – zij behoort wel degelijk integraal tot de wereld die zijn zin sticht in het gedenken en de empathie
[…] Wat daar ontstaat is onze meditatieve afgezonderdheid, een hulpeloosheid die zich omzet in meditatie over het geleden leed. Verstilling is een essentieel element geweest in het oproepen van een mogelijke catharsis bij het afbeelden van lichamen die omkwamen door pijn.
[…] Het besef dat er bewustzijn van lijden door dat vlees is gegaan, maakt het definitief en categorisch tot spiritueel vlees: tot vlees dat bewustzijn heeft gedragen en dus ook geleden heeft in de onvindbare ziel

(6)Seeking cover under the weight of ponderous reflections(intersecting with afterthoughts about “The Sacred made Real”, a National Gallery exhibit, and with Erwin Panofsky’s “Peinture et devotion en Europe du Nord” , essays about the iconography of the “Man Of Sorrows” and “Ecce Homo”)

Trying to give a human significance to suffering, may have to be distinguished from the mystical or religious significance which many of the great Western rituals have tried to bestow on it.

Western religious iconography is full of images of suffering. Take all those crucifixions, with Christ writhing in agony on the cross, and with lamenting figures beneath. But these images of a suffering Christ offered (and still offer) quite another appeal to the empathic imagination than do De Bruyckere’s sculptures.

Religious images appeal to the transcendent beliefs of the faithful: Christians believe that Christ’ suffering was meant to eventually redeem all human sins and suffering. In the Passion-story, Christ did take upon him a genuinely human fate of suffering, but his divine nature of course meant that he was not trapped in the human fate of an agony ending in a mute death.

De Bruyckere’s suffering creatures cannot invoke this kind of redemption, cannot find release in a religious transcendence.
They are suffering quite alone on their pedestals and pillars or stakes. And yet, and yet....

The sheer fact that an artist has so carefully molded and assembled these creatures, has so meticulously given them this tangible material presence. The fact that we stand at the foot of these crucifixions: lamenting, mourning, meditating.

This human community in empathy and mourning, this shared human significance given by art, this shared commitment of ours to thus give shelter to suffering - isn’t it consolation enough?

a tale of two apples

2009-10-22T05:57:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-14T08:35:00.000-07:00

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"

2009-09-19T07:05:00.000-07:00

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)

2009-09-12T06:39:00.000-07:00

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"

2009-08-16T09:45:00.000-07:00

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)

2009-08-11T08:50:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-21T07:17:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-12T07:37:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-05T06:58:00.000-07:00

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.

2009-06-21T09:30:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-01T06:54:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-23T07:02:00.000-07:00

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)

2009-05-03T05:22:00.000-07:00

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)

2009-04-26T09:41:00.000-07:00

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. "