November 19, 2021
We had our first real snow of the year last night, about an inch on the ground, and yet there is a single rose in full bloom, achingly red, atop the rose bush in the back yard.
It has been there for days: I noticed it last week when I was out blowing leaves, and it still shows no sign of fading. There is a causal explanation: we had a long spell of uncharacteristically warm weather, with temperatures in the mid-60’s. It is no miraculous symbol, no annunciation from a burning bush—this is a backyard in North Royalton, Ohio. But its appearance and stubborn persistence, although surrounded by late autumn bleakness, have lifted my spirits. I will remember it for a long time, perhaps always. Something uncommon dares the common air.
The scene I have described is nature, not art, yet such a scene as a certain type of painter might choose as a subject. Despite a life highly involved with words and music, I have always been powerfully attracted to the visual arts. For me, the advantage of painting over literature is that it shuts up. I love words, yet there are times my head is too full of them, shouting and rampaging about like Maurice Sendak’s wild things. Painting and sculpture are quiet, sensory, and present as even the most imagistic poem cannot be, and they calm me, ground me, whereas in literature, the material elements, the signifiers, tend to run off chasing some elusive signified, frantic hounds coursing after a disembodied fox. Similarly, music is an art of time, but painting gives us as close as the human condition can get to a moment out of time, a moment of aesthetic arrest.
I claim no exceptional originality for such sentiments, whose classic statement is Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” which addresses the urn as a “bride of quietness,” a “foster child of silence and slow time.” Commentary points to the ambivalent attitude of the poem’s speaker, who calls the urn a “Cold Pastoral” because the scenes decorating it are forever frozen, unchanging yet thereby unalive, for all that is living moves in time. Yet the speaker ends by calling the urn a “friend to man,” because it assures humanity that “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” and “that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” After more than two centuries, no one knows quite what to make of that. In what sense is beauty the only truth we need to know? In what sense is beauty any kind of truth at all? Modern art has been in revolt against beauty for over a century. Beauty is a reassuring lie disguising an ugly reality: the task of art is rather to unmask the lie and disclose the reality. What does Picasso’s “Guernica,” with its screaming figures, dead baby, wounded horse, and dismembered soldier have to do with beauty?
“Guernica” is the nightmare reality that we stare at in the news every day, that bombards us on the Internet. We are no longer the complacent bourgeois of a century ago, demanding of art a vision of loveliness that is really a form of denial. Quite the opposite: we cannot stop doomscrolling, and our obsessive anxiety is addicted to worst-case scenarios.
Keats lived at exactly the time when the beautiful began to be paired with a complementary quality, the sublime. The beautiful is tame nature, metroparks nature, nature that is congenial to human needs and desires, always with a bit of a reminder of lost paradise. The sublime is the nature of inhuman power, of wild, untamed nature, volcanoes, forbidding and snow-covered mountain peaks, storms, gigantic predators. In a human context, the sublime vision in art seeks out war and devastation, at its greatest intensity becoming a vision of the end of things, the apocalypse. Homer’s Iliad, dramatic tragedy, the doomsday visions of Old Testament prophecy and the Book of Revelation, the Norse Götterdämmerung: “Guernica” takes its place within the company of such sublime visions, whose artistic attitudes range from horrified prophetic warning to a coldly detached contemplation. But this focus on the dark side and its alluring sublimity risks a certain kind of hubris expressed by Nietzsche’s aphorism in Beyond Good and Evil: “Beware when fighting monsters that you yourself do not become a monster. If you stare long enough into the abyss, the abyss will stare back at you” (section 146). A wise admonition, even if Nietzsche did not heed his own warning. We may join to it an aphorism by William Blake, that in trying to become more than human, we have become less.
For to choose the beautiful is not necessarily to choose vapid pleasantry, but rather to value life within the boundaries of the human condition. It signifies the life of pleasure, and first of all the pleasure of the body and the senses. Not a mindless, compulsive hedonism, which is not pleasure at all but a substitute for it, and not a kind of rational Epicureanism either, a rigidly disciplined rationing of instinct and spontaneous impulse. Unless they have acquired human neuroses, animals are neither hedonists nor rational disciplinarians: they seek pleasure, and then stop when gratified. It says something about our present state that we do not even know what pleasure is anymore, not least in the area of sexuality.
Strongly influenced by Keats in general and “Ode on a Grecian Urn” in particular, Wallace Stevens’s famous poem “Sunday Morning” imagines a woman who not only skips church but tries to “dissipate / The holy hush of ancient sacrifice,” to stave off “the dark / Encroachment of that old catastrophe.” The church service re-enacts the Crucifixion, and the Crucifixion is in fact a scene of horrific violence, of a man tortured and then hung from a cross with nails through his hands and feet, as bad as anything in “Guernica.” She attempts to replace such images with a serene contemplation of human life within and satisfied by the natural cycle, surrounding herself with “Complacencies of the peignoir, and late / Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair, / And the green freedom of a cockatoo / Upon a rug.” Elsewhere, Stevens has his own confrontation with the sublime, as in “The Auroras of Autumn,” discussed in a recent newsletter, and even with death, in his hauntingly titled long poem “The Owl in the Sarcophagus.” But here he chooses the kind of domesticated paradisal imagery that we are familiar with from certain painters just before or contemporary with Picasso—undoubtedly no accident, as Stevens was an avid admirer and even collector of paintings.
When such painters portray nature, it may be a literally domesticated nature, as in Monet’s famous series of paintings of the gardens belonging to his house in Giverny, France, a house he and his family lived in for forty-three years. A frequent subject of Vuillard and Bonnard is an interior domestic scene, or a still life set within such a scene. The atmosphere is “homey”—those who prefer edginess would say all too homey. After all, who wants home? “’Tis for homely natures to stay home, they had their name thus,” Milton’s witty Comus says. But we remember that Comus is a dangerous, tempting figure appearing to a young woman who is not home at all but lost in a wilderness. Still, it is a severely restricted subject matter, whose placid, harmonious atmosphere may be achieved at the cost of playing it safe and never leaving home. All themes in art are interlaced, and thus we encounter our theme of some weeks ago, the conflict between the desire to wander and adventure and the desire to return home, only this time from the perspective of home. It is not as prestigious as the perspective of wandering and adventure, with a predictable gender bias against the feminine “domestic sphere,” the realm of painters like Mary Cassatt. Yet perhaps the aftermath of a pandemic lockdown, during which home became at times both a refuge and a prison, is a good time for re-evaluating it.
A variant of the domestic is the window picture, which connects interior and exterior by portraying a room with a window providing a view of the world outside. Last week, I hung in one of the bathrooms here a reproduction of a famous example, “Open Window, Collioure” (1905), by Henri Matisse.
Here is no minor genre painter but one of the giants of Modernist art, painting the window of his apartment in the town of Collioure on the French Mediterranean. Art history books (or museum catalogues) will tell you that the idea of a painting as a window goes back to the Renaissance. But a view through a window implies a sense of depth and perspective—compare the proscenium arch of a traditional stage, with its convention of an invisible fourth wall through which the audience looks in upon an interior, so that the whole imaginary wall becomes a kind of window. And a sense of distance and perspective signify the advent of realism, which is based on the subject/object relation, an interior subject perceiving a world of exterior objects—the real window, or boundary line between subjective and objective, being the eye itself.
Matisse’s painting does not give us much of the interior, only a small amount of wall space to either side of the window—but enough to inform us that we are indeed on the inside looking out, an interiority emphasized by shutters that open inward. Outside is a balcony, with boats floating in the harbor beyond it. Thus some sense of realistic perspective is retained, as well as a quasi-Impressionist evocation of bright Mediterranean sunlight. I chose this print for its cheerfulness, for its power to dispel the figurative seasonal affective disorder of these new Dark Ages. But there is more to this work, which is regarded as something of a pivotal moment in modern art, a breakthrough of Matisse’s Fauvist period. Fauve is French for savage beast. No painting could be less savage, but the reference is to the Fauvist palette of brilliant, non-naturalistic colors. All his life, Matisse was known as a colorist. A line is an idea, but a color is feeling. Yet the bright colors of “Open Window” are not created by sunlight but are the light of imagination transfiguring both interior and exterior, “The light that never was, on sea or land,” as Wordsworth put it.
To a degree, that color works in what would become typical Modernist fashion to flatten the picture frame and cancel the illusion of depth, replacing it with a pattern parallel to the picture plane, like glorious wallpaper. But in the process, it does something else. It unites what had been separate—inner, outer, and the frame between them—and for a moment creates a single world. It is a kind of Creation myth, creating a new, unified world out of the alienated perspective that Blake called the “cloven fiction” of alienated subject and object. And by doing so creating a feeling of momentary peace.
I live in a house of a style called chalet ranch. The entire front wall is glass, from ground to gable, in a sense one big window, looking out upon roughly two and a half acres of front yard ringed by woods, across which traipse a mostly peaceable kingdom of wild animals of all sorts—deer, wild turkeys, geese, raccoons, groundhogs, opossums, skunks, chipmunks, and birds, including at least three species of woodpecker and very occasionally a great blue heron. I sit at my desk or large oak table, educated and entertained as people are by zoos, but without the guilt, as the animals are not imprisoned for my benefit. As a matter of fact, I am occasionally unsure who is observing whom. Squirrels sit on the front railing, watching me as they eat a nut (and leaving the fragments of shell for me to clean up). I lived in Ohio most of my life without knowing it had wild turkeys, until I got up one morning to find a male in full display five feet outside our transparent wall. Occasionally one of them will come up and peck experimentally on the glass. On summer nights, it is not uncommon to look down at ground level and find baby raccoon faces looking in, heads cocked, curious. My house windows perform a function analogous to Matisse’s Modernist techniques: the walls of partition, to borrow a Biblical phrase, are as close to being abolished as they can be in this alienated world.
An opposite phenomenon occasionally occurs, providing a metaphor for the psychic pathology spreading everywhere today. Occasionally, the glass of the front wall turns reflective, becoming a giant mirror. For an entire season, we had a psychotic cardinal who endlessly attacked his own image in the glass, day after day, thinking it some sort of enemy. Startlingly, in a book with the significant title of The Modern Century, Northrop Frye provides a human analogue derived from a common experience on railway journeys: “As one’s eyes are passively pulled along a rapidly moving landscape, it turns darker and one begins to realize that many of the objects that appear to be outside are actually reflections of what is in the carriage. As it becomes entirely dark one enters a narcissistic world, where, except for a few lights here and there, we can see only the reflection of where we are.” Such narcissistic alienation is not a sophisticated discovery of modern psychology: in naming the concept of narcissism, Freud was only pointing to the meaning of the original myth in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In the Hermeticist scripture called the Poimandres, a cosmic God-man falls pursuing his own image in the dark mirror of matter, an image William Blake borrows for the fall into a state of solipsistic illusion when the imagination becomes passive.
The tendency to a kind of psychological entropy means that this kind of fall is an innate human tendency, but it can be induced and enhanced by artificial means, as Frye goes on to note in the sentence following the passage I have quoted: “A little study of the workings of advertising and propaganda in the modern world, with their magic-lantern techniques of projected images, will show us how successful they are in creating a world of pure illusion.” The effort of constantly resisting an illusion that seems like the fabric of reality itself may wear down even an active imagination: “Even the most genuinely concerned and critical mind finds itself becoming drowsy in its darkening carriage.” Large numbers of people offer no resistance, but are willingly trapped in what has recently been diagnosed as “collective narcissism,” and Frye notes that, for such people, a breakdown in illusion is more disturbing than actual threats in the real environment, a fifty year-old observation that sums up the political crisis of the present moment.
The twofold task of the imagination is, first, to decreate the narcissistic mirror back to transparency, a kind of cataract operation performed upon itself, returning to the halfway house of ordinary sanity. But the active imagination does not stop at ordinary sanity: it goes on to decreate the window, that barrier between interior and exterior, leaving a reality in which observer and observed are in a holistic relationship that is “sympathetic” in all senses of the term, so that all phenomena are what Blake, in a poem about the natural world, called “Auguries of Innocence.” In such a world, the poem says, “Each outcry of the hunted Hare / A fibre from the Brain does tear,” and (almost as if he had been living in North Royalton) “The wild deer, wandring here & there / Keeps the Human Soul from care.” To which I venture to add, by way of a conclusion, my own contribution:
The full-blown rose above the snow
Is all we know, or need to know.