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Apparitions All The More Divine

Okay… I’ve spared you all long enough. Communal racist that he was, Louis-Ferdinand Celine remains one the 20th century’s fire-breathing heavyweights. His Journey to the End of the Night, translated by Ralph Manheim, is a terrifyingly hilarious uproar that takes him from the ghettos of France to African jungles to… Detroit(!) where he worked for Ford Motor Company, to Manhattan, back to France. His Death on the Installment Plan is well, probably just a little too familiar while at the same probingly fitful and clairvoyant.

The following is from Journey, just as he arrives in New York the first time.

As if I knew where I was going, I put on an air of choosing and hanged my direction, taking a different street on my right, one that was better lit. “Broadway” it was called. I read the name on a sign. High up, far above the uppermost stories, there was still a bit of daylight, with sea gulls and patches of sky. We moved in the lower light, a sick sort of jungle light, so gray that the street seemed to be full of grimy cotton waste.

That street was like a dismal gash, endless, with us at the bottom of it filling it from side to side, advancing from sorrow to sorrow, toward an end that is never in sight, the end of all the streets in the world.

There were no cars or carriages, only people and more people.

This was the priceless district, I was told later, the gold district : Manhattan.You can enter it only on foot, like a church. It’s the banking heart and center of the present-day world. Yet some of those people spit on the sidewalk as they pass. You’ve got to have your nerve with you.

It’s a district filled with gold, a miracle, and through the doors you can actually hear the miracle, the sound of dollars being crumpled, for the Dollar is always too light, a genuine Holy Ghost, more precious than blood.

I found time to go and see them, I even went in and spoke to the employees who guard the cash. They’re sad and underpaid.

When the faithful enter their bank, don’t go thinking they can help themselves as they please. Far from it. In speaking to Dollar, they mumble words through a little grill; that’s their confessional. Not much sound, dim light, a tiny wicket between high arches, that’s all. They don’t swallow the Host, they put it on their hearts. I couldn’t stay there long admiring them. I had to follow the crowd in the street, between those walls of smooth shadow.

Suddenly our street widened, like a crevasse opening out into a bright clearing. Up ahead of us we saw a great pool of sea-green light, wedged between hordes of monstrous buildings. And in the middle of the clearing stood a rather countrified-looking house, surrounded by woebegone lawns.

I asked several people in the crowd what this edifice was, but most of them pretended not to hear me. They couldn’t spare the time. But one young fellow right next to me was kind enough to tell me it was City Hall, adding that it was an ancient monument dating back to colonial times, ever so historical… so they’d left it there… The fringes of this oasis formed a kind of park with benches, where you could sit comfortably enough and look at the building. When I got there, there was hardly anything else to see.

I waited more than an hour in the same place, and then toward noon, from the half-light, from the shuffling, discontinuous, dismal crowd, there erupted a sudden avalanche of absolutely and undeniably beautiful women.

What a discovery! What an America! What ecstasy! I thought of Lola… Her promises had not deceived me! It was true.

I had come to the heart of my pilgrimage. And if my appetite hadn’t kept calling itself to my attention, that would have struck me as one of those moments of supernatural aesthetic revelation. If I’d been a little more comfortable and confident, the incessant beauties I was discovering might have ravished me from my base human condition. In short, all I needed was a sandwich to make me believe in miracles. But how I needed that sandwich!

And yet, what supple grace! What incredible delicacy of form and feature! What inspired harmonies! What perilous nuances! Triumphant where the danger is greatest! Every conceivable promise of face and figure fulfilled! Those blondes! Those brunettes! Those Titian redheads! And more and more kept coming! Maybe, I thought, this is Greece starting all over again. Looks like I got here just in time.

What made those apparitions all the more divine in my eyes was that they seemed totally unaware of my existence as I sat on a bench close by, slap-happy, drooling with erotico-mystical admiration and quinine, but also, I have to admit, with hunger. If it were possible for a man to jump out of his skin, I’d have done it then, once and for all. There was nothing to hold me back.

Those unlikely midinettes could have wafted me away, sublimated me; a gesture, a word would have sufficed, and in that moment I’d have been transported, all of me, into the world of dreams. But I suppose they had other fish to fry.

I sat there for an hour, two hours, in that state of stupefaction. I had nothing more in the world to hope for.

You know about innards? The trick they play on tramps in the country? They stuff an old wallet with putrid chicken innards. Well, take it from me, a man is just like that, except that he’s fatter and hungrier and can move around, and inside there’s a dream.

I had to look at the practical side of things and not dip into my small supply of money right away. I didn’t have much. I was even afraid to count it. I couldn’t have anyway, because I was seeing double. I could only feel those thin, bashful banknotes through the material of my pocket, side by side with my phony statistics.

Men were passing, too, mostly young ones with faces that seemed to be made of pink wood, with a dry, monotonous expression, and jowls so wide and coarse they were hard to get used to… Well, maybe that was the kind of jowls their womenfolk wanted. The sexes seemed to stay on different sides of the street. The women looked only at the shopwindows, their whole attention was taken by the handbags, scarves, and little silk doodads, displayed very little at a time, but with precision and authority. You didn’t see many old people in that crowd. Not many couples either. Nobody seemed to find it strange that I should sit on that bench for hours all by myself, watching the people pass. But all at once the policeman standing like an inkwell in the middle of the street seemed to suspect me of sinister intentions. I could tell.

And big congratulations, Mr. President.

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A Correct Animal

The Crack Up is a collection of essays by Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, published after his death  in 1940. I’ve always thought of them as a sort of portrait of the artist at various points in his life. The book is a collection of notebooks, letters and essays, including the three-essay valedictory from which the title is derived. The following is from “Handle With Care,” part three of The Crack Up as originally published in Esquire, April 1936.

I have spoken in these pages of how an exceptionally optimistic young man experienced a crack-up of all values, a crack-up that he scarcely knew of until long after it occurred. I told of the succeeding period of desolation and of the necessity of going on, but without the benefit of Henley’s familiar heroics, “my head is bloody but unbowed.” For a checkup of my spiritual liabilities indicated that I had no particular head to be bowed or unbowed. Once I had had a heart but that was about all I was sure of.

This was at least a starting place out of the morass in which I floundered: “I felt — therefore I was.” At one time or another there had been many people who had leaned on me, come to me in difficulties or written me from afar, believed implicitly in my advice and my attitude toward life. The dullest platitude monger or the most unscrupulous Rasputin who can influence the destinies of many people must have some individuality, so the question became one of finding why and where I had changed, where was the leak through which, unknown to myself, my enthusiasm and my vitality had been steadily and prematurely trickling away.

One harassed and despairing night I packed a briefcase and went off a thousand miles to think it over. I took a dollar room in a drab little town where I knew no one and sunk all the money I had with me in a stock of potted meat, crackers, and apples. But don’t let me suggest that the change from a rather overstuffed world to a comparative asceticism was any Research Magnificent — I only wanted absolute quiet to think out why I had developed a sad attitude towards sadness, a melancholy attitude toward melancholy, and a tragic attitude toward tragedy — why I had become identified with the objects of my horror or compassion.

Does this seem a fine distraction? It isn’t: identification such as this spells the death of accomplishment. It is something like this that keeps sane people from working. Lenin did not willingly endure the sufferings of his proletariat, nor Washington of his troops, nor Dickens of his London poor. And when Tolstoy tried some such merging of himself with the objects of his attention, it was a fake and a failure. I mention these because they are the men best known to us all.

It was dangerous mist. When Wordsworth decided that “there hath passed away a glory from the earth,” he felt no compulsion to pass away with it, and the Fiery Particle Keats never ceased his struggle against T.B. nor in his last moments relinquished his hope of being among the English poets.

My self-immolation was something sodden-dark. It was very distinctly not modern — yet I saw it in others, saw it in a dozen men of honor and industry since the war. (I heard you, but that’s too easy — there were Marxians among these men.) I had stood by while one famous contemporary of mine played with the idea of the Big Out for half a year; I had watched when another, equally eminent, spent months in an asylum unable to endure any contact with his fellowmen. And of those who had given up and passed on I could list a score.

This led me to the idea that the ones who had survived had made some sort of clean break. This is a big word and is no parallel to a jailbreak when one is probably headed for a new jail or will be forced back to the old one. The famous “Escape” or “Run away from it all” is an excursion in a trap even if the trap includes the South Seas, which are only for those who want to paint them or sail them. A clean break is something you cannot come back from; that is irretrievable because it makes the past cease to exist. So, since I could no longer fulfill the obligations that life had set for me or that I had set for myself, why not slay the empty shell who had been posturing at it for four years? I must continue to be a writer because that was my only way of life, but I would cease any attempts to be a person — to be kind, just, or generous. There were plenty of counterfeit coins around that would pass instead of these and I knew where I could get them at a nickel on the dollar. In thirty-nine years an observant eye has learned to detect where the milk is watered and the sugar is sanded, the rhinestone passed for diamond and the stucco for stone. There was to be no more giving of myself — all giving was to be outlawed henceforth under a new name, and that name was Waste.

The decision made me rather exuberant, like anything that is both real and new. As a sort of beginning there was a whole shaft of letters to be tipped into the wastebasket when I went home, letters that wanted something for nothing — to read this man’s manuscript, market this man’s poem, speak free on the radio, indite notes of introduction, give this interview, help with the plot of this play, with this domestic situation, perform this act of thoughtfulness or charity.

The conjurer’s hat was empty. To draw things out of it had long been a sort of sleight of hand, and now, to change the metaphor, I was off the dispensing end of the relief roll forever.

The heady villainous feeling continued.

I felt like the beady-eyed men I used to see on the commuting train from Great Neck fifteen years back — men who didn’t care whether the world tumbled into chaos tomorrow if it spared their houses. I was one with them now, one with the smooth articles who said:

“I’m sorry but business is business.”

Or:

“You ought to have thought of that before you got into this trouble.”

Or:

“I’m not the person to see about that.”

And a smile — ah, I would get me a smile. I’m still working on that smile. It is to combine the best qualities of a hotel manager, an experienced old social weasel, a headmaster on visitors’ day, a colored elevator man, a pansy pulling a profile, a producer getting stuff at half its market value, a trained nurse coming on a new job, a body-vender in her first rotogravure, a hopeful extra swept near the camera, a ballet dancer with an infected toe, and of course the great beam of loving kindness common to all those from Washington to Beverly Hills who must exist by virtue of the contorted pan.

The voice too — I am working with a teacher on the voice. When I have perfected it the larynx will show no ring of conviction except the conviction of the person I am talking to. Since it will be largely called upon for the elicitation of the word “Yes,” my teacher (a lawyer) and I are concentrating on that, but in extra hours. I am learning to bring into it that polite acerbity that makes people feel that far from being welcome they are not even tolerated and are under continual and scathing analysis at every moment. These times will of course not coincide with the smile. This will be reserved exclusively for those from whom I have nothing to gain, old worn-out people or young struggling people. They won’t mind — what the hell, they get it most of the time anyhow.

But enough. It is not a matter of levity. If you are young and you should write asking to see me and learn how to be a somber literary man writing pieces upon the state of emotional exhaustion that often overtakes writers in their prime — if you should be so young and fatuous as to do this, I would not do so much as acknowledge your letter, unless you were related to someone very rich and important indeed. And if you were dying of starvation outside my window, I would go out quickly and give you the smile and the voice (if no longer the hand) and stick around till somebody raised a nickel to phone for the ambulance, that is if I thought there would be any copy in it for me.

I have now at last become a writer only. The man I had persistently tried to be became such a burden that I have “cut him loose” with as little compunction as a Negro lady cuts loose a rival on Saturday night. Let the good people function as such — let the overworked doctors die in harness, with one week’s “vacation” a year that they can devote to straightening out their family affairs, and let the underworked doctors scramble for cases at one dollar a throw; let the soldiers be killed and enter immediately into the Valhalla of their profession. That is their contract with the gods. A writer need have no such ideals unless he makes them for himself, and this one has quit. The old dream of being an entire man in the Goethe-Byron-Shaw tradition, with an opulent American touch, a sort of combination of J.P. Morgan, Topham Beauclerk, and St. Francis of Assisi, has been relegated to the junk heap of the shoulder pads word for one day on the Princeton freshman football field and the overseas cap never worn overseas.

So what? This is what I think now: that the natural state of the sentient adult is a qualified unhappiness. I think also that in an adult the desire to be finer in grain that you are, “a constant striving” (as those people say who gain their bread by saying it). only adds to this unhappiness in the end — that end that comes to our youth and hope. My own happiness in the past often approached such an ecstasy that I could not share it even with the person dearest to me but had to walk it away in quiet streets and lanes with only fragments of it to distill into little lines in books — and I think that my happiness, or talent for self-delusion or what you will, was an exception. It was not the natural thing but the unnatural — unnatural as the Boom; and my recent experience parallels the wave of despair that swept the nation when the Boom was over.

I shall manage to live with the new dispensation, though it has taken some months to be certain of the fact. And just as the laughing stoicism which has enabled the American Negro to endure the intolerable conditions of his existence has cost him his sense of the truth — so in my case there is a price to pay. I do not any longer like the postman, nor the grocer, nor the editor, nor the cousin’s husband, and he in turn will come to dislike me, so that life will never be very pleasant again, and the sign Cave Canem is hung permanently just above my door. I will try to be a correct animal though, and if you throw me a bone with enough meat on it I may even lick your hand.

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Master and Slave

The Time of the Assassins is Henry Miller’s study of Rimbaud, but in it he loops in all manner of late-nineteenth century tragic figure – Van Gogh, Dostoevsky, Gogol – he even mentions Jesus Christ in a way that completely makes sense. He’s talking about poetry, genius, death and magic. From page 96:

Always it is some invisible wand, some magic star, which beckons, and then the old wisdom, the old magic, is done for. Death and transfiguration, that is the eternal song. Some seek the death they choose, whether of form, body, wisdom or soul, directly; others approach it deviously. Some accentuate the drama by disappearing from the face of the earth, leaving no clues, no traces; others make their life an even more inspiring spectacle than the confession which is their work. Rimbaud drew his death out woefully. he spread his ruin all about him, so that none could fail to comprehend the utter futility of his flight. Anywhere, out of the world! That is the cry of those for whom life no longer has any meaning. Rimbaud discovered the true world as a child; he tried to proclaim it as a youth; he betrayed it as a man. Forbidden access to the world of love, all his endowments were in vain. His hell did not go deep enough, he roasted in the vestibule. It was too brief a period, this season, as we know, because the rest of his life becomes a purgatory. Did he lack the courage to swim the deep? We do not know. We know only that he surrenders his treasure – as if it were the burden. But the guilt which he suffers from no man escapes, not even those who are born in the light. His failure seems stupendous, though it brought him through to victory. But it is not Rimbaud who triumphs, it is the unquenchable spirit that was within him. As Victor Hugo said: ‘Angel is the only word in the language that cannot be worn out.”

“Creation begin with painful separation from God and the creation of an independent will to the end that this separation may be overcome in a type of higher unity than that with which the process began.”* [The Mystic Will, by H.H. Brinton]

At the age of nineteen, in the very middle of his life, Rimbaud gave up the ghost. “His Muse died at his side, among his massacred dreams,” says one biographer. Nevertheless, he was a prodigy who in three years gave the impression of exhausting whole cycles of art. “It is as if he contained whole careers within himself,” said Jacques Riviere. To which Matthew Josephson adds” “Indeed literature ever since Rimbaud has been engaged in the struggle to circumvent him.” Why? Because, as the latter says, “he made poetry too dangerous.” Rimbaud himself declares, in the Season, that he “became a fabulous opera.” Opera or not, he remains fabulous – nothing less. The one side of his life is just as fabulous as the other, that is the amazing thing. Dreamer and man of action, he is both at once. It is like combining Shakespeare and Bonaparte. And now listen to his own words… “I saw that all beings are fatally attracted to happiness: action is not life, but a way of dissipating one’s strength, and enervation.” And then, as if to prove it, he plunges into the maelstrom. he crosses and recrosses Europe on foot, ships in one boat after another for foreign ports, is returned ill and penniless again and again; he takes a thousand and one jobs, learns a dozen or more languages, and, in lieu of dealing words deals in coffee, spices, ivory, skins, gold, muskets, slaves. Adventure, exploration, study; association with every type of man, race, nationality; always work, work, work, which he loathed. But above all, ennui! Always bored. Incurably bored. But what activity! What a wealth of experiences! And what emptiness!

Read the whole thing; buy extra copies for your friends.

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On Cezanne

Rainer Maria Rilke spent much of 1907, from June to November, in Paris following the traces of one of the formative influences on his poetry, Paul Cezanne, who had died the previous October. In correspondence with his wife Clara Westhoff, Rilke wrote about many of the elements to making things; in these careful but free flowing love letters by any other name, he allows us a particular view toward the ramparts of the possible, the desperate, the beautiful and the audible truths that rise from great artists and art work. From Rilke’s  Letters on Cezanne, translated from the German by Joel Agee.

Monday, June 24

… This morning your long letter, with all your thoughts… After all works of art are always the result of one’s having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, to where no one can go any further. The further one goes, the more private, the more personal, the more singular an experience becomes, and the thing one is making is, finally, the necessary, irrepressible, and as nearly as possible, definitive utterance of this singularity… Therein lies the enormous aide the work of art brings to the life of the one who must make it, —; that it is his epitome; the knot in the rosary at which his life says a prayer, the ever-returning proof to himself of his unity and genuine-ness, which presents only to him while appearing anonymous to the outside, nameless as mere necessity, as reality, existence -.

So surely we have no choice but to test and to try ourselves against the utmost, but probably we are also constrained to keep silence regarding it, to avoid sharing it, parting with it in communication before it has entered the work of art: for the utmost represents nothing other than that singularity in us which must enter into the work as such, as our personal madness, so to speak, in order to find its justification in the work and show the law in it, like an inborn design that is invisible until it emerges in the transparency of the artistic. – Nevertheless there are two liberties of communication, and these seem to me to be the utmost possible ones: the one that occurs face-to-face with the accomplished thing, and the one that takes place within daily life, in showing one another what one has become through one’s work and thereby supporting and helping and (in the humble sense of the word) admiring one another. But in either case one must show results, and it is not lack of trust or withdrawal or rejection if one doesn’t present to another the tools of one’s progress, which have so much about them that is confusing and tortuous, and whose only value lies in the personal use one makes of them. I often think to myself what madness it would have been for van Gogh, and how destructive, if he had been forced to share the singularity of his vision with someone, to have someone join him in looking at his motifs before he had made his pictures out of them, these existences that justify him with all their being, that vouch for him, invoke his reality. He did seem to feel sometimes that he needed to do this in letters (although there, too, he’s usually talking of finished work), but no sooner did Gauguin, the comrade he’d longed for, the kindred spirit, arrive than he had o cut off his ear in despair, after they had both determined to hate one another and at the first opportunity get rid of each other for good. (But that’s just one side of it: feeling this from artist to artist. Another side is the woman and her part in it.) And a third (but only conceivable as a test for the upper grades) is the complication of the woman being an artist. Ah, that is an altogether new question, and ideas start nibbling at you from all sides as soon as you take just a few steps in their direction. I won’t say any more about this today.-

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The Seduction of Myth

That title was supposed to go with a long excerpt from a Thomas Mann essay on Goethe, to help you fight the creeping endarkenment, but it doesn’t seem to be anywhere on line – an excellent reason to head over to the library. All the best stuff is there, for free, if you ever need any of it.

Instead, here is the beginning of chapter four of my novel, No More Real Fires. As always, interested female vocalists and/or literary agents, inquire within.

Karl Michael von Fohrness had been brought to Manitoba as a young boy of four years and little experience living in the ‘wild’ conditions of the turn-of-the-century Canadian frontier.   His father, Reichmarshall Hans Richter von Fohrness, had been a general in the Prussian Army under Bismarck and later the Kaiser and had emigrated from Germany to the youngish city of Toronto in 1890 with his new wife.  Flush with his borderless pension and young bride, the elder Fohrness indulged his lifelong love of big game hunting in the easily accessible outback of central Canada, and slowly intrigued himself with primitive safaris into more remote reaches of the territories.  Remarkably, in between these excursions he found time to father a son in whom he delighted in the visions and vast possibilities of sharing his fascination with sport and the outdoors.  He continued to venture into the wilds with regular occasion and growing extravagance, until being struck with the frontier beauty of the primitive frontier town of Winnipeg.  On a strict schedule which included the building of one of the new town’s grandest houses, von Fohrness moved his wife and young son out to the town, which by most accounts would have been generously regarded as an outpost.  To be sure, the younger, perhaps more feminine Fohrness wanted nothing at all to do with safaris or the wilds of the Canadian frontier and rather preferred to at least remain in the ‘city’ at the side of his mother.  Not to be denied, Fohrness the elder insisted on bringing his son out into the interior with him for weeks at a time, sure that time and experience would polish the boy in the ways of the Great Woods.

To the extent that the plan worked, the boy eventually did learn to trap and kill a great variety of animals; to the depth that it did not, he learned to hate his father and loathe his thirst for blood contrasted against the lush drama of the landscape.  But it was the landscape and it’s drama that would override even a boy’s hatred of his father, as Fohrness intermingled his forced safaris with art lessons from the leading drawing teachers in the province.  His access to the hinterlands unmatched by any similarly talented painters of the day, he slowly weaned himself from the rifle while continuing on as a member of his father’s hunting parties.  The elder Fohrness’ reluctant acceptance of this bone had to have been peppered by what he had at least partially passed on of himself in the boy.  It was a greater love of the outdoors that would produce Canada’s single greatest landscape painter, one in whom no rivals would exist, though his contemporaries would dismiss his style and subject matter as hopelessly nostalgic and antiquated.

Karl Michael von Fohrness’ success as a painter carried him and his work to the exhibition halls of Toronto and Montreal on a yearly basis, where a nascent flame of national pride would be fanned by the young man’s renderings of the unspoiled Canadian wilderness.  But he continued to return to Winnipeg to live near his mother and sew his wild oats until the autumn he returned from an exhibition in Quebec City with a fiancée.   In the years that followed, the married Karl Michael would become more and more of what his father treasured as an outdoorsman while continuing to accumulate one of the country’s most overlooked fortunes as a landscape portraitist.  Nearing mid-life after believing themselves to be barren after many years of marriage, he and his French-Canadian wife, Marthe, quickly had two children, Martin and Celeste, just before the Depression began to reach the outer reaches of North America.

Karl Michael’s fortunes selling expensive pictures seemed to dry up with the financial crisis, so he moved his family to where he believed rich people were socked away in abundance: Long Island, New York.  The transplants settled in East Hampton for a while, but moved to two or three other temporary locations before buying a modest beach house near Southampton that looked out onto the expansive might of the Atlantic.  Karl Michael believed the ocean had begun to speak to him and, transferring his sense of drama from the deep woods to the deeper sea, began a series of seascapes that would take him on into the last years of his painting life.  The supposed cachet of buyers never materialized and Karl Michael sold hardly any new paintings over the next ten years, though he enjoyed his life in the Hamptons and exhibited his seascapes in a small Massapequa gallery.

Not to say that his success ended with the move or the Great Depression.  It could be true that it would have mattered little what he had painted after those events, because coincidentally or not the reach of the landscape painter was shortened considerably and dramatically by other, terribly unforeseen developments in the art world.  With the onset of serial ‘isms’ creating the subtext for the abstractions to come, the world of painting no longer hinged on, much less swooned over, an artist’s ability to corroborate and transpose the beauty of natural scenes from nature.  These painters, and perhaps many were their number, were unceremoniously relegated to third tier importance as mannerists at best, and dinosaurs at worst.

Yet as was possibly the case for many of the others who happened to be at that improper moment in history reduced by events beyond their control, things were not so bad for Karl Michael.  By the 1950’s he was deeply revered in his native country and especially the province of Manitoba, where the devotion bordered on celebrity – actual celebrity, as denoted by the status of a Hollywood actress or American curer of disease in that era.  His paintings of the great Canadian wilds hung in every provincial and regional capital west of Lake Champlain.  Truthfully, there were not many other artists, Canadian or otherwise, who could speak of such a great body of native landscape work as Karl Michael von Fohrness and it spoke to the heritage and glory of Canada’s frontier past.  Thus Karl Michael was feted on an annual basis by the Canadian government and its aristocratic class of nation-guilty art patrons.  His landscapes became rare; newly ‘discovered’ ones were immediately but with great pomp, carted off to museums in Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, and his hometown of Winnipeg.  Even his seascapes of the American coastline enjoyed the occasional run as somewhat of a sensation among collectors and galleries in Montreal and Ottawa.  While it was true that von Fohrness himself no longer enjoyed the tidy sums he once commanded as a so-called naturalist in between-wars Canada, this was padded by something even a bit more astonishingly rare.  He was able to vaguely live a part of the ripening of his own legacy.  And while this is usually one of the few things denied the truly famous and actually celebrated, von Fohrness padded his fall into old age and from artistic grace, both of which he surely noticed, with the knowledge that in the places he himself had celebrated with a patch of eternity here and there, he would live on as well.  And surely as his business acumen had failed him once, the older version of the man no doubt took stock in the glow of his own foresight and examined from time to time thirty of his own landscapes that had traveled over the years with him without ever leaving his possession.  They would be among what he left his two children, prizes to sell or not, to live with or without, but his gift to them of what he had once been and seen, and a spyglass even to the dreams of his own father.

So it was with considerable insistence that Celeste von Fohrness demanded a meeting with Sandy Eliot to clear up the matter of her “lunatic” brother setting fire to fifteen of her father’s masterpieces.  “It’s not a matter I can discuss with you… I’m not in charge of the investigation,” Eliot politely explained as a smile of just desserts crept across his face.

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Cauldron of False Delights

A lot of my favorite writing comes from the twenty-five years on either side of the turn of the twentieth century. Even so, it’s a bit of an abyss to make sense of – i.e. easier for me to understand what was ‘going on’ during other periods. But it was a time of acutely high tumult, with the zenith of the machine age, at least from the perspective of the all of the hope for humanity it represented, which then turned to bitterness and remorse when WWI saw us turn all of this wonderful technology into killing machines.

But so much was stirring in visual art and literature during this period that there are thousands of points in which to delve, even among the better known ones. Anatole France was the pseudonym for a French journalist/novelist/critic who perfectly overlapped that period (1844-1924). A very healthy skeptic, he was a successful novelist and was awarded the Nobel prize in 1921. Here is a little bit of part I ofThaïs (1890),The Lotus, translated by Robert B. Douglas.

Now that Anthony, who was more than a hundred years old, had retired
to Mount Colzin with his well-beloved disciples, Macarius and Amathas,
there was no monk in the Thebaid more renowned for good works than
Paphnutius, the Abbot of Antinoe. Ephrem and Serapion had a greater
number of followers, and in the spiritual and temporal management of
their monasteries surpassed him. But Paphnutius observed the most
rigorous fasts, and often went for three entire days without taking
food. He wore a very rough hair shirt, he flogged himself night and
morning, and lay for hours with his face to the earth.

His twenty-four disciples had built their huts near his, and imitated
his austerities. He loved them all dearly in Jesus Christ, and
unceasingly exhorted them to good works. Amongst his spiritual
children were men who had been robbers for many years, and had been
persuaded by the exhortations of the holy abbot to embrace the
monastic life, and who now edified their companions by the purity of
their lives. One, who had been cook to the Queen of Abyssinia, and was
converted by the Abbot of Antinoe, never ceased to weep. There was
also Flavian, the deacon, who knew the Scriptures, and spoke well; but
the disciple of Paphnutius who surpassed all the others in holiness
was a young peasant named Paul, and surnamed the Fool, because of his
extreme simplicity. Men laughed at his childishness, but God favoured
him with visions, and by bestowing upon him the gift of prophecy.

Paphnutius passed his life in teaching his disciples, and in ascetic
practices. Often did he meditate upon the Holy Scriptures in order to
find allegories in them. Therefore he abounded in good works, though
still young. The devils, who so rudely assailed the good hermits, did
not dare to approach him. At night, seven little jackals sat in the
moonlight in front of his cell, silent and motionless, and with their
ears pricked up. It was believed that they were seven devils, who,
owing to his sanctity, could not cross his threshold.

Paphnutius was born at Alexandria of noble parents, who had instructed
him in all profane learning. He had even been allured by the
falsehoods of the poets, and in his early youth had been misguided
enough to believe that the human race had all been drowned by a deluge
in the days of Deucalion, and had argued with his fellow-scholars
concerning the nature, the attributes, and even the existence of God.
He then led a life of dissipation, after the manner of the Gentiles,
and he recalled the memory of those days with shame and horror.

“At that time,” he used to say to the brethren, “I seethed in the
cauldron of false delights.”

He meant by that that he had eaten food properly dressed, and
frequented the public baths. In fact, until his twentieth year he had
continued to lead the ordinary existence of those times, which now
seemed to him rather death than life; but, owing to the lessons of the
priest Macrinus, he then became a new man.

The truth penetrated him through and through, and–as he used to say–
entered his soul like a sword. He embraced the faith of Calvary, and
worshipped Christ crucified. After his baptism he remained yet a year
amongst the Gentiles, unable to cast off the bonds of old habits. But
one day he entered a church, and heard a deacon read from the Bible,
the verse, “If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and
give to the poor.” Thereupon he sold all that he had, gave away the
money in alms, and embraced the monastic life.

During the ten years that he had lived remote from men, he no longer
seethed in the cauldron of false delights, but more profitably
macerated his flesh in the balms of penitence.

One day when, according to his pious custom, he was recalling to mind
the hours he had lived apart from God, and examining his sins one by
one, that he might the better ponder on their enormity, he remembered
that he had seen at the theatre at Alexandria a very beautiful actress
named Thais. This woman showed herself in the public games, and did
not scruple to perform dances, the movements of which, arranged only
too cleverly, brought to mind the most horrible passions. Sometimes
she imitated the horrible deeds which the Pagan fables ascribe to
Venus, Leda, or Pasiphae. Thus she fired all the spectators with lust,
and when handsome young men, or rich old ones, came, inspired with
love, to hang wreaths of flowers round her door, she welcomed them,
and gave herself up to them. So that, whilst she lost her own soul,
she also ruined the souls of many others.

She had almost led Paphnutius himself into the sins of the flesh. She
had awakened desire in him, and he had once approached the house of
Thais. But he stopped on the threshold of the courtesan’s house,
partly restrained by the natural timidity of extreme youth–he was
then but fifteen years old–and partly by the fear of being refused on
account of his want of money, for his parents took care that he should
commit no great extravagances.

God, in His mercy, had used these two means to prevent him from
committing a great sin. But Paphnutius had not been grateful to Him
for that, because at that time he was blind to his own interests, and
did not know that he was lusting after false delights. Now, kneeling
in his cell, before the image of that holy cross on which hung, as in
a balance, the ransom of the world, Paphnutius began to think of
Thais, because Thais was a sin to him, and he meditated long,
according to ascetic rules, on the fearful hideousness of the carnal
delights with which this woman had inspired him in the days of his sin
and ignorance. After some hours of meditation the image of Thais
appeared to him clearly and distinctly. He saw her again, as he had
seen her when she tempted him, in all the beauty of the flesh. At
first she showed herself like a Leda, softly lying upon a bed of
hyacinths, her head bowed, her eyes humid and filled with a strange
light, her nostrils quivering, her mouth half open, her breasts like
two flowers, and her arms smooth and fresh as two brooks. At this
sight Paphnutius struck his breast and said–

“I call Thee to witness, my God, that I have considered how heinous
has been my sin.”

Gradually the face of the image changed its expression. Little by
little the lips of Thais, by lowering at the corners of the mouth,
expressed a mysterious suffering. Her large eyes were filled with
tears and lights; her breast heaved with sighs, like the sighing of a
wind that precedes a tempest. At this sight Paphnutius was troubled to
the bottom of his soul. Prostrating himself on the floor, he uttered
this prayer–

“Thou who hast put pity in our hearts, like the morning dew upon the
fields, O just and merciful God, be Thou blessed! Praise! praise be
unto Thee! Put away from Thy servant that false tenderness which
tempts to concupiscence, and grant that I may only love Thy creatures
in Thee, for they pass away, but Thou endurest for ever. If I care for
this woman, it is only because she is Thy handiwork. The angels
themselves feel pity for her. Is she not, O Lord, the breath of Thy
mouth? Let her not continue to sin with many citizens and strangers.
There is great pity for her in my heart. Her wickednesses are
abominable, and but to think of them makes my flesh creep. But the
more wicked she is, the more do I lament for her. I weep when I think
that the devils will torment her to all eternity.”

As he was meditating in this way, he saw a little jackal lying at his
feet. He felt much surprised, for the door of his cell had been closed
since the morning. The animal seemed to read the Abbot’s thoughts, and
wagged its tail like a dog. Paphnutius made the sign of the cross and
the beast vanished. He knew then that, for the first time, the devil
had entered his cell, and he uttered a short prayer; then he thought
again about Thais.

“With God’s help,” he said to himself, “I must save her.” And he
slept.

The next morning, when he had said his prayers, he went to see the
sainted Palemon, a holy hermit who lived some distance away. He found
him smiling quietly as he dug the ground, as was his custom. Palemon
was an old man, and cultivated a little garden; the wild beasts came
and licked his hands, and the devils never tormented him.

“May God be praised, brother Paphnutius,” he said, as he leaned upon
his spade.

“God be praised!” replied Paphnutius. “And peace be unto my brother.”

“The like peace be unto thee, brother Paphnutius,” said Palemon; and
he wiped the sweat from his forehead with his sleeve.

“Brother Palemon, all our discourse ought to be solely the praise of
Him who has promised to be wheresoever two or three are gathered
together in His Name. That is why I come to you concerning a design I
have formed to glorify the Lord.”

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Picodiribibi

Reading some of this Time article about the high price of cheap food brought to mind some of the many, other connections to the same. You can go read that, but this has all been mainstream for quite a while now. The following is from Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906):

The carcass hog was scooped out of the vat by machinery, and then it fell to the second floor, passing on the way through a wonderful machine with numerous scrapers, which adjusted themselves to the size and shape of the animal, and sent it out at the other end with nearly all of its bristles removed. It was then again strung up by machinery, and sent upon another trolley ride; this time passing between two lines of men, who sat upon a raised platform, each doing a certain single thing to the carcass as it came to him. One scraped the outside of a leg; another scraped the inside of the same leg. One with a swift stroke cut the throat; another with two swift strokes severed the head, which fell to the floor and vanished through a hole. Another made a slit down the body; a second opened the body wider; a third with a saw cut the breastbone; a fourth loosened the entrails; a fifth pulled them out – and they also slid through a hole in the floor. There were men to scrape each side and men to scrape the back; there were men to clean the carcass inside, to trim it and wash it. Looking down this room, one saw, creeping slowly, a line of dangling hogs a hundred yards in length; and for every yard there was a man, working as if a demon were after him. At the end of this hog’s progress every inch of the carcass had been gone over several times; and then it was rolled into the chilling room, where it stayed for twenty-four hours, and where a stranger might lose himself in a forest of freezing hogs.

Before the carcass was admitted here, however, it had to pass a government inspector, who sat in the doorway and felt of the glands in the neck for tuberculosis. This government inspector did not have the manner of a man who was worked to death; he was apparently not haunted by a fear that the hog might get by him before he had finished his testing. If you were a sociable person, he was quite willing to enter into conversation with you, and to explain to you the deadly nature of the ptomaines which are found in tubercular pork; and while he was talking with you you could hardly be so ungrateful as to notice that a dozen carcasses were passing him untouched. This inspector wore a blue uniform, with brass buttons, and he gave an atmosphere of authority to the scene, and, as it were, put the stamp of official approval upon the things which were done in Durham’s.

Jurgis went down the line with the rest of the visitors, staring openmouthed, lost in wonder. He had dressed hogs himself in the forest of Lithuania; but he had never expected to live to see one hog dressed by several hundred men. It was like a wonderful poem to him, and he took it all in guilelessly – even to the conspicuous signs demanding immaculate cleanliness of the employees. Jurgis was vexed when the cynical Jokubas translated these signs with sarcastic comments, offering to take them to the secret rooms where the spoiled meats went to be doctored.

The party descended to the next floor, where the various waste materials were treated. Here came the entrails, to be scraped and washed clean for sausage casings; men and women worked here in the midst of a sickening stench, which caused the visitors to hasten by, gasping. To another room came all the scraps to be “tanked,” which meant boiling and pumping off the grease to make soap and lard; below they took out the refuse, and this, too, was a region in which the visitors did not linger. In still other places men were engaged in cutting up the carcasses that had been through the chilling rooms. First there were the “splitters,” the most expert workmen in the plant, who earned as high as fifty cents an hour, and did not a thing all day except chop hogs down the middle. Then there were “cleaver men,” great giants with muscles of iron; each had two men to attend him – to slide the half carcass in front of him on the table, and hold it while he chopped it, and then turn each piece so that he might chop it once more. His cleaver had a blade about two feet long, and he never made but one cut; he made it so neatly, too, that his implement did not smite through and dull itself – there was just enough force for a perfect cut, and no more. So through various yawning holes there slipped to the floor below – to one room hams, to another forequarters, to another sides of pork. One might go down to this floor and see the pickling rooms, where the hams were put into vats, and the great smoke rooms, with their airtight iron doors. In other rooms they prepared salt pork – there were whole cellars full of it, built up in great towers to the ceiling. In yet other rooms they were putting up meats in boxes and barrels, and wrapping hams and bacon in oiled paper, sealing and labeling and sewing them. From the doors of these rooms went men with loaded trucks, to the platform where freight cars were waiting to be filled; and one went out there and realized with a start that he had come at last to the ground floor of this enormous building.

Then the party went across the street to where they did the killing of beef – where every hour they turned four or five hundred cattle into meat. Unlike the place they had left, all this work was done on one floor; and instead of there being one line of carcasses which moved to the workmen, there were fifteen or twenty lines, and the men moved from one to another of these. This made a scene of intense activity, a picture of human power wonderful to watch. It was all in one great room, like a circus amphitheater, with a gallery for visitors running over the center.

Along one side of the room ran a narrow gallery, a few feet from the floor; into which gallery the cattle were driven by men with goads which gave them electric shocks. Once crowded in here, the creatures were prisoned, each in a separate pen, by gates that shut, leaving them no room to turn around; and while they stood bellowing and plunging, over the top of the pen there leaned one of the “knockers,” armed with a sledge hammer, and watching for a chance to deal a blow. The room echoed with the thuds in quick succession, and the stamping and kicking of the steers. The instant the animal had fallen, the “knocker” passed on to another; while a second man raised a lever, and the side of the pen was raised, and the animal, still kicking and struggling, slid out to the “killing bed.” Here a man put shackles about one leg, and pressed another lever, and the body was jerked up into the air. There were fifteen or twenty such pens, and it was a matter of only a couple of minutes to knock fifteen or twenty cattle and roll them out. Then once more the gates were opened, and another lot rushed in; and so out of each pen there rolled a steady stream of carcasses, which the men upon the killing beds had to get out of the way.

The manner in which they did this was something to be seen and never forgotten. They worked with furious intensity, literally upon the run –

at a pace with which there is nothing to be compared except a football game. It was all highly specialized labor, each man having his task to do; generally this would consist of only two or three specific cuts, and he would pass down the line of fifteen or twenty carcasses, making these cuts upon each. First there came the “butcher,” to bleed them; this meant one swift stroke, so swift that you could not see it – only the flash of the knife; and before you could realize it, the man had darted on to the next line, and a stream of bright red was pouring out upon the floor. This floor was half an inch deep with blood, in spite of the best efforts of men who kept shoveling it through holes; it must have made the floor slippery, but no one could have guessed this by watching the men at work.

And to add to that, here’s also a bit of Plexus, The Rosy Crucifixion, Book Two by Henry Miller.

There remained only a few faculties the monster would never possess, but of these animal functions th emaster himself was not particualry proud. it was obvious that, if he were to recapture his peace of mind, there was only one thing to be done – destroy his precious creation! This however, he was loath to do. It had taken him twenty years to put the monster together and make him function. In th ewhole wide world there was nothing to equal the bloody idoit. Moreover he could no longer recall by what intricate, complicated and mysterious processes he had brought his labors to fruition. In every way, Picodiribibi rivaled the human being whose simulacrum he was. True, he would never be able to reproduce his own kind, but like the freaks and sports of human spawn, he would undoubtedly leave in the memory of man a disturbing haunting image.

To such a pass the great scholar had come that he almost lost his mind. Unable to destroy his invention, he racked his brain to determine how and where he might sequester him. For a time he thought of burying him in the garden, in an iron casket. he even entertained the idea of locking him up in a monastery. But fear, fear of loss, fear of damage or deterioration, paralyzed him. it was becoming more and more clear that, inasmuch as he had brought Picodiribibi into being, he would have to live with him forever. He found himself pondering how they could be buried together, secretly, when the time came. Strange thought! The idea of taking with him to the grave a creature which was not alive, and yet in many ways more alive than himself, terrified him. He was convinced that, even in the next world,  this prodigy to which he had given birth would plague him, would possibly usurp his own celestial privileges. he began to realize that, in assuming the powers of the Creator, he had robbed himself of the blessing which death confers upon even the humblest believer. He saw himself as a shade flitting forever between two worlds – and his creation pursuing him. Ever a dvout man, he now began to pray long and fervently for deliverance. On his knees he begged the Lord to intercede, to lift from his shoulders the awesome burden of responsibility which he had unthinkingly assumed. But the Almighty ignored his pleas.

Pick it up on page 410… it gets even better.

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Light From a Fire

That James Baldwin does not occupy more of a place in the canon of twentieth-century American literature says much more about us than it does about him. While I have been hard on him at times, it is not – nor could it be – to the detriment of his remarkable talents. My complaints focus on the nature of his contributions – I wanted more novels, less polemics – but again, this is more my problem than his.

And I’ll admit that he was reaching for something, aspiring to something, as well – a power across the forms of which I see him to have chosen one over the other. In this struggle for plainspoken offense on behalf of truth, it is possible to both let him pass and grow hostile with impatience. Instead of trying to support my argument, I’ll present evidence against it, or rather, take the liberty of ceding the floor to him on the very subject. From Notes of a Native Son, this is the beginning of his essay, Everybody’s Protest Novel:

In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, that cornerstone of American social protest fiction, St. Clare, the kindly master, remarks to his coldly disapproving Yankee cousin, Miss Ophelia, that, so far as he is able to tell, the blacks have been turned over to the devil for the benefit of the whites in this world – however, he adds thoughtfully, it may turn out in the next. Miss Ophelia’s reaction is, at least, vehemently right-minded: “This is perfectly horrible!” she exclaims. “You ought to be ashamed of yourselves!”

Miss Ophelia, as we may suppose, was speaking for the author; her exclamation is the moral, neatly framed, and incontestable like those improving mottoes sometimes found hanging on the walls of furnished rooms. And, like these mottoes, before which one invariably flinches, recognizing an insupportable, almost indecent glibness, she and St. Clare are terribly in earnest. Neither of them questions the medieval morality from which their dialogue springs: black, white, the devil, the next world – posing its alternatives between heaven and flames – were realities for them as, of course, they were for their creator. They spurned and were terrified of the darkness, striving mightily for the light; and considered from this aspect, Miss Ophelia exclamation, like Mrs. Stowe’s novel, achieves a bright, almost lurid significance, like the light from a fire which consumes a witch. This is the more striking as one considers the novels of negro oppression written in our own, more enlightened day, all of which say only: “This is perfectly horrible! You ought to be ashamed of yourselves!” (Let us ignore, for the moment, those novels of oppression written by Negroes, which add only a raging, near-paranoiac postscript to this statement and actually reinforce, as I hope to make clear later, the principles which activate the oppression they decry.)

Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a very bad novel, having, in its self-righteous, virtuous sentimentality, much in common with Little Women. Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, in inability to feel; the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty. Uncle Tom’s Cabin – like its multitudinous, hard-boiled descendants – is a catalogue of violence. This is explained by the nature of Mrs. Stowe’s subject matter, her laudable determination to flinch from nothing in presenting the complete picture; an explanation which falters only if we pause to ask whether or not her picture is indeed complete; and what constriction or failure of perception forced her to so depend on the description of brutality – unmotivated, senseless – and to leave unanswered and unnoticed the only important question: what it was, after all, that moved her people to such deeds.

But this, let us say, was beyond Mrs. Stowe’s powers; she was not much of a novelist as an impassioned pamphleteer; her book was not intended to do anything more than prove that slavery was wrong; was, in fact, perfectly horrible. This makes material for a pamphlet but it is hardly enough for a novel; and the only question left to ask is why are bound stil within the same constriction. How is it that we are so loath to make a further journey than that made by Mrs. Stowe, to discover and reveal something a little closer to the truth?

But that battered word, truth, having made its appearance here, confronts one immediately with a series of riddles and has, moreover, since so many gospels are preached, the unfortunate tendency to make one belligerent. Let us say, then, that truth, as used here, is meant to imply a devotion to the human being, his freedom and fulfillment; freedom which cannot be legislated, fulfillment which cannot be charted. This is the prime concern, the frame of reference; it is not to be confused with a devotion to Humanity which is too easily equated with a devotion to a Cause; and Causes, as we know, are notoriously bloodthirsty. We have, as it seems to me, in this most mechanical and interlocking of civilizations, attempted to lop this creature down to the status of a time-saving invention. he is not, after all, merely a member of a Society or a Group or a deplorable conundrum to be explained by Science. He is – and how old-fashioned the words sound! – something more than that, something resolutely indefinable, unpredictable. In overlooking, denying, evading his complexity – which is nothing more than the disquieting complexity of ourselves – we are diminished and we perish; only within this web of ambiguity, paradox, this hunger, danger, darkness, can we find at once ourselves and the power that will free us from ourselves. It is this power of revelation which is the business of the novelist, this journey toward a more vast reality which must take precedence over all other claims. What is today parroted as his Responsibility – which seems to mean that he must make more formal declaration that he is involved in, and affected by, the lives of other people and to say something improving about this somewhat self-evident fact – is, when he believes it, his corruption and our loss; moreover, it is rooted in, interlocked with and intensifies this same mechanization. Both Gentleman’s Agreement and The Postman Always Rings twice exemplify this terror of the human being, the determination to cut him down to size. And in Uncle Tom’s Cabin we may find foreshadowing of both: the formula created by the necessity to find a lie more palatable than the truth has been handed down and memorized and persists yet with a terrible power.

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Grace to Utility

John Ruskin was the pre-eminent Victorian art critic whose impact is precisely as diverse and long-lasting as the tenants on which any concept of ‘the art of life’ should be. His Fors Clavigera is a series of letters, published as pamphlets, addressed to the working men of Britain during the 1870’s; his Unto This Last was translated into Gujarati by Gandhi in 1908, after Ruskin’s ideas on the value of work inspired him to change his life.

The following is from his lecture, the Relation of Art to Use, part of his Lectures on Art, delivered at the University of Oxford in 1870.

Our subject of enquiry to-day, you will remember, is the mode in which fine art is founded upon, or may contribute to, the practical requirements of human life.

Its offices in this respect are mainly twofold: it gives Form to knowledge, and Grace to utility; that is to say, it makes permanently visible to us things which otherwise could neither be described by our science, nor retained by our memory; and it gives delightfulness and worth to the implements of daily use, and materials of dress, furniture and lodging. In the first of these offices it gives precision and charm to truth; in the second it gives precision and charm to service. For, the moment we make anything useful thoroughly, it is a law of nature that we shall be pleased with ourselves, and with the thing we have made; and become desirous therefore to adorn or complete it, in some dainty way, with finer art expressive of our pleasure.

And the point I wish chiefly to bring before you to-day is this close and healthy connection of the fine arts with material use; but I must first try briefly to put in clear light the function of art in giving Form to truth.

Much that I have hitherto tried to teach has been disputed on the ground that I have attached too much importance to art as representing natural facts, and too little to it as a source of pleasure. And I wish, in the close of these four prefatory lectures, strongly to assert to you, and, so far as I can in the time, convince you, that the entire vitality of art depends upon its being either full of truth, or full of use; and that, however pleasant, wonderful or impressive it may be in itself, it must yet be of inferior kind, and tend to deeper inferiority, unless it has clearly one of these main objects,—either to state a true thing, or to adorn a serviceable one. It must never exist alone—never for itself; it exists rightly only when it is the means of knowledge, or the grace of agency for life.

Now, I pray you to observe—for though I have said this often before, I have never yet said it clearly enough—every good piece of art, to whichever of these ends it may be directed, involves first essentially the evidence of human skill and the formation of an actually beautiful thing by it.

Skill, and beauty, always then; and, beyond these, the formative arts have always one or other of the two objects which I have just defined to you—truth, or serviceableness; and without these aims neither the skill nor their beauty will avail; only by these can either legitimately reign. All the graphic arts begin in keeping the outline of shadow that we have loved, and they end in giving to it the aspect of life; and all the architectural arts begin in the shaping of the cup and the platter, and they end in a glorified roof.

Therefore, you see, in the graphic arts you have Skill, Beauty, and Likeness; and in the architectural arts, Skill, Beauty, and Use; and you must have the three in each group, balanced and co-ordinate; and all the chief errors of art consist in losing or exaggerating one of these elements.

For instance, almost the whole system and hope of modern life are founded on the notion that you may substitute mechanism for skill, photograph for picture, cast-iron for sculpture. That is your main nineteenth-century faith, or infidelity. You think you can get everything by grinding—music, literature, and painting. You will find it grievously not so; you can get nothing but dust by mere grinding. Even to have the barley-meal out of it, you must have the barley first; and that comes by growth, not grinding. But essentially, we have lost our delight in Skill; in that majesty of it which I was trying to make clear to you in my last address, and which long ago I tried to express, under the head of ideas of power. The entire sense of that, we have lost, because we ourselves do not take pains enough to do right, and have no conception of what the right costs; so that all the joy and reverence we ought to feel in looking at a strong man’s work have ceased in us. We keep them yet a little in looking at a honeycomb or a bird’s-nest; we understand that these differ, by divinity of skill, from a lump of wax or a cluster of sticks. But a picture, which is a much more wonderful thing than a honeycomb or a bird’s-nest,—have we not known people, and sensible people too, who expected to be taught to produce that, in six lessons?

Well, you must have the skill, you must have the beauty, which is the highest moral element; and then, lastly, you must have the verity or utility, which is not the moral, but the vital element; and this desire for verity and use is the one aim of the three that always leads in great schools, and in the minds of great masters, without any exception. They will permit themselves in awkwardness, they will permit themselves in ugliness; but they will never permit themselves in uselessness or in unveracity.

And farther, as their skill increases, and as their grace, so much more, their desire for truth. It is impossible to find the three motives in fairer balance and harmony than in our own Reynolds. He rejoices in showing you his skill; and those of you who succeed in learning what painter’s work really is, will one day rejoice also, even to laughter—that highest laughter which springs of pure delight, in watching the fortitude and the fire of a hand which strikes forth its will upon the canvas as easily as the wind strikes it on the sea. He rejoices in all abstract beauty and rhythm and melody of design; he will never give you a colour that is not lovely, nor a shade that is unnecessary, nor a line that is ungraceful. But all his power and all his invention are held by him subordinate,—and the more obediently because of their nobleness,—to his true leading purpose of setting before you such likeness of the living presence of an English gentleman or an English lady, as shall be worthy of being looked upon for ever.

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Naked in the Sun

Apropos of nearing the unofficial end of the travel season,  a little of that voodoo that some do so well. Paul Bowles (1910-1999) was an American expat novelist, travel writer and composer. After living in Paris and New York in the 30’s, he ventured to North Africa and, with a few exceptions, never left, spending most of his life in Tangier. The following is an excerpt from The Age of Monsters, from the book, Let It Come Down

Outside the wind blew by; in here there was nothing but the beating of the hot sun on the skin. he lay a while, intensely conscious of the welcome heat, in a state of self-induced voluptuosness. When he looked at the sun, his eyes closed almost tight, he saw webs of crystalline fire crawling across the narrow space between the slitted lids, and his eyelashes made the furry beams of light stretch out, recede, stretch out. It was a long time since he had lain naked in the sun. he remembered that if you stayed long enough the rays drew every thought out of your head. That was what he wanted, to be baked dry and hard, to vaporous worries evaporating one by one, to know finally that all the damp little doubts and hesitations that covered the floor of his being were curling up and expiring in the great furnace-blast of the sun. Presently he forgot about all that, hs muscles relaxed, and he dozed lightly, waking now and then to lift his head above the worm-eaten gunwale and glance up and down the beach. There was no one. Eventually he ceased doing even that. At one point he turned over and lay face down on the hard-packed sand, feeling the sun’s burning sheet settle over his back. The soft, regular cymbal-crash of the waves was like a distant breathing of tyhe morning; the sound sifted down through the myriad compartments of the air and reached his ears long afterward. When he turned back and looked straight at the sky it seemed farther away than he had ever seen it. Yet he felt very close to himself, perhaps because in order to feel alove a man must first cease to think of himself as being on his way.There must be a full stop, all objectives forgotten. A voice says, “Wait,” but he usually will not listen, because if he waits he may be too late. Then, too, if he really waits, he may find that when he starts to move again it will be in a different direction, and that also is a frightening thought. Because life is not a movement toward or away from anything; not even from the past to the future, or from youth to old age, or from birth to death. The whole of life does not equal the sum of its parts. It equals any one of the parts; there is no sum. The full-grown man is no more deeply involved in life than the new-born child; his only advantage is that it can occasionally be given him to become conscious of the substance of life, and unless he is a fool he will not look for reasons or explanations. Life needs no clarifying, no justification. From whatever direction the appraoch is made, the result is the same: life for life’s sake, the transcending fact of the living individual. In the meantime you eat. And so he, lying in the sun and feeling close to himself, knew that he was there and rejoiced in the knowledge.