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” “
"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).
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.
