Ten Minutes

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

"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

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

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

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

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

"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

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)

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)

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.