longing for light

The darker the days, the more intensely I feed on light and its many derivative reflections & refractions. Walking to and from work, through dark streets, I intently fix my gaze on dancing rows of streetlamps vanishing into the distance, with squinted eyes I bravely stare into the glaring headlights of an oncoming truck, I bide my time at crossings to revel in the red harmonies of traffic lights and taillights. 

And best of all is the shimmering shadowy world of a rainy street at night – the dark gleam of wet asphalt (B’s black sun indeed!), the trailing lights, the dark hurried shades, the pale phantom faces of people waiting at a bus stop (staring at their phones). 

When I’m not out there in the world, dazzled by its shiny lights, I cherish the quiet luminosity of the printed pages of the book I'm reading. 

I read about longings for light and transcendence, startlingly similar across regions, cultures and ages.  From Baal in Zenobia’s Palmyra to Sol Invictus [unvanquished sun] in Aurelius’ Rome to Christmas Day.

Notes

[Aurelian] established, as the central and focal point of Roman religion, a massive and strongly subsidised cult of Sol Invictus.

The birthday of the god was to be on 25 December, and this, transformed into Christmas Day, was one of the heritages which Christianity owed to the solar cult.

[…] Aurelian was deeply influenced by the Syrian veneration of the Sun which the relatives of Septimius, coming from that land, had done so much to extend.

Zenobia’s capital Palmyra […] was a center of solar theology, as its temple of the Sun-god Malachbel (Baal)[…] shows.

Origen (d254) linked Christ to the rising of the sun – and in the same period  a mosaic beneath St Peter showed a composite Christ-Helios.

(from Michael Grant  - The Climax of Rome)

"Hurling words against it"

Sometimes, what you remember best, is that what keeps posing a challenge to your habitual understanding. It can be a scene from real life, a picture, or a passage from a book. Something you would not have told or shared or jotted down, because it never really managed to settle down in precise syntactical thought. But silently it keeps haunting you – an unfinished business of understanding, always popping up again whenever another situation, another sentence seems to evoke the initial perplexity.

So these days, while I’m mutely watching the pitiful spectacle  of politics (local, European, world) – while all I want is to withdraw in contemplation and art,  the nagging sentence that keeps popping up, kindling again and again my wonderment, is “The Promise of Politics”.

Having lived through the darkest times of the 20th century, Hannah Arendt did not withdraw from the world, did not settle in a philosophical misanthropy, but relentlessly analysed the human condition, the origins of totalitarianism, and, amongst others, wrote an introduction to politics “The Promise of Politics”.

I keep reading the book, savouring her philosophical-poetical reflections and I keep marking those sentences which are most philosophical & contemplative, and, in my mind, maybe most at variance with a faith in human politics.  

“All thinking activity that is not simply the calculation of means to obtain an intended or willed end, but is concerned with meaning in the most general sense, came to play the role of ‘afterthought’, that is after action had decided and determined reality.” 

a passage which, in my mind, turns into a lament for the loss of reflective thinking (what remains is either calculating thinking or mere opinion).

Or take the following beautiful passage, on the dignity of our words even when we perish. How to circumvent my reflective interpretation of this passage as a wistful consolation for the vanquished, how to see in it a recipe for successful politics via a thoughtful balance between action and speech?

 

“Man cannot defend himself against the blows of fate, against the chicanery of the gods, but he can resist them in speech and respond to them, and though the response changes nothing, neither turning ill fortune aside nor prompting good fortune, such words belong to the event as such. If words are of equal rank with the event, if, as is said at the end of Antigone, “great words” answer  and requite “great blows struck from on high”, then what happens is itself something great and worthy of remembrance and fame. Speech in this sense is a form of action, and our downfall can become a deed if we hurl words against it even as we perish. Greek tragedy – its drama, its enacted events – is based on this fundamental conviction.”

On the back cover of my copy of “The Promise of Politics” Adam Kirsch writes “By insisting that politics remain a promise rather than a threat, Arendt offers a hope that history has yet to justify”  

the strange resilience of a fleeting sense of light

All of a sudden, the world has turned a gleaming yellow – yellow trees, yellow leaves slowly twirling in the air, then smoothly settling on the black asphalt.   

In the dark too, yellow rules:  yellow lamp light in the streets, yellow lit windows – even speed turns yellow with car lights tracing yellow trails as glowing trams rumble by.

It’s my best season as a Flâneur – roaming about invisibly at dusk, hands in pockets, face half hidden in a scarf (now that temperatures have at last come down).

Autumn is an eminently urban season, too – with the city in its highest gear – exhibition, concerts, auctions, …

I have only recently discovered these Brussels auction houses – with their endearingly varied mixture of artefacts on display – from signature handbags, over diamond rings, to rugs, statues and paintings.   

The audience at the public viewings is quite mixed, too: both accidental passers-by and regular visitors, old and young, dressed up and dressed down people, … There are professionals carefully appraising the works on display, passionate amateurs & discreet connoisseurs and couples just looking for a bargain to furnish their living room. 

The art is usually of wildly diverging quality, effortlessly straddling periods and schools (French, Dutch, Flemish or Belgian and a rare ‘in Italian manner’) -  featuring anonymous followers, minor masters, largely forgotten names  ….

On this grey & yellow autumn Sunday with its drizzling rain, I’m not the only one seeking distraction (and perhaps sudden beauty) at the pre-auction public viewing  – umbrellas have amassed in the portal, all visitors looking eminently autumnal, with trench coats and scarves. 

As always, I’m drawn to the land-  and cityscapes  of all ages.

 

Suddenly my attention is caught by a luminous painting recalling for the briefest of moments a Claude Lorrain. Looking closer (but still graciously ignoring both the slightly kitschy romance and  the awkward perspective) I see a vaguely familiar basilica, glowing almost miraculously in an autumnal country side.

The catalogue tells it’s by a certain Ferdinand Marinus  (1808-1890).  Later I will learn he spent his life assiduously painting local Belgian landscapes, in this case the basilica of Saint Hubert. Browsing the web I'm also delighted to find there is such a thing as a regional publication called  "entre la Meuse et l'Ardenne"  which back in 1990 dedicated a full article to our Ferdinand Marinus.

The next aesthetic hit is in a corner of the auction room : a series of darkly contrasted engravings of a city at night. 

I spend a long time looking at these black & white ”soft ground etchings” of windows at night (“gravures au vernis mou”).  The soft waxy gleam of this technique so eminently suited to capture the mysterious nocturnal allure of lit windows.

The series is aptly called “Les fenêtres Le soir” – dated 1937, and dedicated to “my friend xxx”.  They are by Jeanne Oosting , a Dutch woman artist who had a long life (1898- 1994) and who spent 11 years in Paris,  until the approaching war made her return to Holland.  

And on this banal Sunday in Brussels, at a second-rate auction house, I revel in the strange resilience (throughout the vicissitudes of history, across very different lives) of an ephemeral nocturnal impression, of a fleeting sense of light.