John R. Harris, Ph.D. (Executive Director)

Thomas F. Bertonneau, Ph.D. (Secretary)

Helen R. Andretta, Ph.D.; York College-CUNY

Ralph S. Carlson, Ph.D.; Azusa Pacific University

Kelly Ann Hampton

Michael H. Lythgoe, Lt. Col. USAF (Retd.)

Pensée de la Saison:

CONTENTS

Can Glory Blaze from the Void?  Thoughts on the Tenuous Connection between Painting and Literacy

Putting a Period to the "Quote" Issue

Staff

These four brief poems move from Southeast Asia to the television studio to the canvases of expressionist painters. 

When I read the following words in chapter 22 of Jules Romains’s Verdun a few days ago, I thought instantly of Praesidium and of the seemingly hopeless war which we who contribute to it are trying to wage:

I am persuaded that in all epochs, and especially the most gloomy, the role played by a few—by as few as you like—has been precious… yes, necessary, much more necessary than the other services which history has celebrated. For example, in the day when it was accepted conduct to practice human sacrifice, I believe that those who made arrangements not to participate in the festival, not to receive a morsel of flesh or a spoonful of blood, at the moment when the victims were being shared out—these few didn’t work against humanity. They were not without regard for future times or without connivance at human destiny.

Great words. Why do they leave me with a residue of misgiving as I recover them now? Perhaps because so many, especially in the contemporary academy, would hijack them to speak in defense of "progress", of the cultural meltdown which war in Iraq—they claim—is somehow interrupting or short-changing. If we weren’t wasting so much money in pursuit of child-killers all over the globe, we could devote our energies and resources more effectively to building the kind of campuses described in Tom Wolfe’s new novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons: refuges for the post-civilized who desire unlimited access to booze, drugs, hook-ups, and a self-contradictory PC/libertarian ideology bundling it all together. But that’s not the "culture" in defense of which Romains’s Jallez refuses to fight a fratricidal war. Jallez’s culture is the very one which today’s most strident anti-warriors have long since booted out of their classrooms.

Not that our effort against terrorism is, by default, advancing Western culture: it may do so—but the equation has a great many variables. Are we making the world free for conscientious self-expression and reflective, original analysis of life’s conditions—or for fast food, quick thrills, easy money, and a generally dumbed-down transit to a euthanized exit from four score meaningless years? The vulgarian ethos of the leftist campus, after all, merely complements (with shallow, sensual contrasts) the vulgarian ethos of the rightest marketplace. As we try to save school children from the slaughter of Beslan, we have yet to consider responsibly just what should go on in schools. The "No Child Left Behind" doctrine has us grinding out fledgling computer programmers, insurance agents, and sales reps without any recognition of the inexorable fact that people buy what they value, and value what taste (or lack thereof) has elevated in their lives. If we do not teach taste to some extent, then we shall end up with an economy which advances tastelessness. If we prepare students to create flashy websites and to balance ledgers without introducing them to the refined play of the human spirit in music, art, and letters, then we may expect a populace magnetized to sugar, porn, speed, and blood—to all the animal attractions. We have not yet demonstrated, as a culture, that we understand what "our way of life" is. Were we to answer the question by recurring to Western tradition, we would have plenty of ammunition to win angry young Muslim males away from bombs and rifles; but if the best we have to offer is a Big Mac and a Triple X website, then we shall not save our own males from choosing either fanaticism or nihilism.

I confess that I personally no longer have much confidence in the historical value of not drinking the victim’s blood. It isn’t something I choose to participate in; but my choice has far more to do with keeping a clear conscience than with declaring humanity’s destiny. Perhaps killing child-killers is the last noble gesture of which our decadent civilization is capable. Perhaps, having been saved, our precious children must look to the grace of God if they are to navigate between the shoals of sugar-coated consumerism and Shangri-La elitism—between the debauchery of summer vacation and the debauchery of freshman orientation.

But there is a kind of hope, after all, in just chipping away. I don’t like the image of refusing the spoonful of blood: I prefer that of striking a flake from the marble or of carrying a stone to the cairn. We who are involved as readers of and contributors to Praesidium must constantly remind ourselves that sincere intellectuals and devoted artists tend to get cut off from the mainstream. Hence we must constantly direct our cryptic gestures back to a crowd that seems to pass by unmoved. We have a moral obligation to do so—to declare, not destiny, but mankind’s present and eternal attraction to higher things, as well. Arrogance is as costly as despair for us, since we are the brethren of that puzzled crowd.

So I offer you one more issue of the journal. It’s shorter than I had wished: duties and indispositions have taken their toll among us this fall. Still, one can steer by a dim star as well as by a constellation, and these brief pages are not without sparkle. Read a story over the Christmas holidays, sketch a picture, or pick out a few tunes on the piano. Don’t simply refuse the inhuman draught offered by the naïve or the thoughtless: chip away at the marble.

"A last blaze summons the vanquished."

                               Vergil, Aeneid 2.668

The incursion of last quarter’s Praesidium into musical territory was a great success, I think, if only because the discussion was actually sustained for most of the issue. I will not divulge any dark secret when I say that the current climate in academe does not favor the exploration of ties between the arts. Such an inquiry would smack of that loathsome contemporary bugbear, universalism. For if literary pleasure and musical pleasure have something significant in common, then it would seem that the human mind is deeply implicated in processing raw sense data into a more sophisticated state, so that even the reports of fully distinct senses end up leaving a similar fingerprint; and if this processing follows hard upon the reception of a raw datum (creating that instant-seeming sigh of aesthetic satisfaction), then the intellect’s intrusion must be so rapid and decisive that even the most thorough cultural conditioning (synonymous in academe with brainwashing) could scarcely anticipate it. We must be confronting something very like a bedrock level of constitutive, if not reflective, judgment in the human mind’s operations. And there’s the rub. Nothing is supposed to lie closer to the ground than cultural conditioning. The stratum beneath our common brainwashing (so goes the ivory-tower argument) is a near-chaos of "pure" animal drives and instincts. Might the tacit contradiction posed here be responsible for the literary professoriat’s general indifference to classical music? That is, besides dreading the elitist snobbery of appearing highbrow, might some of our professors also divine that pleasant resonance between music and literature raises a challenge to their simplistic explanations of human value?

I have pondered long and hard how the visual arts might be brought into this discussion. At least one strand already plucked for scrutiny runs all the way through music to visual creations. The literary academy, it seems to me, has the same curiously incurious attitude toward great painting as it displays toward great music. I’ve seen hundreds of literature professors’ offices in my time, and a few of their homes. The offices are decorated largely by the flotsam of pop culture: posters promoting movies and rock stars fill the rare spaces not consumed by book shelves and framed degrees. The homes are, if anything, yet more Spartan (or, I might also say, more Puritan). No landscapes or portraits, no reproductions of the masters, no amateur water colors… perhaps a few family photos. In this, of course, our typical professor is little different from our typical doctor or lawyer. Perhaps I am wrong to expect that things should be otherwise: perhaps there really is no painting/writing connection. Perhaps my mild shock that lifelong readers and writers do not place things of beauty on their walls indicts their oddity less than my own.

At any rate, academic indifference here seems less deliberate and inveterate. If literature professors openly disdain classical music, most of them simply don’t know anything about painting. In their defense, our educational system has never promoted visual art even to the paltry degree that it once favored music. High school students enjoy their time in band or choir. The occasion is gregarious, and successfully executing a piece inspires an irresistible exhilaration. Drawing, painting, and sculpting are, in contrast, deeply introverted activities, and they leave one exhausted even in triumph. The audience’s perception of the art work is also comparatively isolating rather than socializing. People will quietly knit their brows and purse their lips before a painting rather than collectively hold their breath during a crescendo and then burst into applause.¹ They come away, not whistling Bolero’s theme, but feeling for their steps in the perplexing afterglow of Turner’s color orgies. Indeed, the essentially puzzling or indefinite nature of most great visual art is far more like poetry than are opera and symphony (though not more so, I think, than a classical piano étude). Time does not move to a metronome when you view a canvas or a colonnade. You can live with a painting for months and discover, all of a sudden, why it’s not quite right (as has happened to me several times with my own sophomoric efforts). I suppose musical composers might know similar blockages and liberations; but they, I suspect, know at once when something hasn’t worked and do not endure many weeks in the humiliating belief that it has. From a literary perspective, I can only relate the painter’s nagging uncertainty to the poet’s groping after just the right word.

The life of the painter, thanks to such groping, is so impervious to clock time that it can seem radically anti-social—and this, too, damages the cause of art among the general public. That is, the painter is not amenable to visiting Ms. James’s fifth grade with his tools and giving the class a whirlwind tour of his magical secrets (unless he is the late Bob Ross’s reincarnation). He can, on the contrary, be quite a bear. Those who have never painted cannot appreciate the truth behind such outlandish characters as Joyce Carol Oates’s Gully Jimpson. In my own puny endeavors, I have often noticed how irritating the clock can grow when one labors in the throes of inspiration—and even the sun. As the daylight vexatiously shifts, one discovers that a quadrant of the canvas quite satisfactorily covered a few hours ago looks flat and dull. Artificial lighting enhances nothing but problems: it throws everything into an improbable web of shadows—except for all those highlights which it suffuses in glare. Yet one works on after dark, concentrating on fine detail, every so often taking the canvas for a walk around the room to "average out" its appearance in various unfavorable streams of lamp light. One skips meals without noticing, misses sleep without noticing. Paint leeches into one’s clothes, one’s hair, one’s cup of tea. And at the end of it all, one collapses with the sickening suspicion that the canvas just may have looked better half a day earlier, about the time when one should have stopped for lunch.

The poet, in comparison, is perhaps more confidently progressive. He can preserve, after all, earlier morphoi of his goddess: he can always take a step back, or indeed retrace an entire meander. His attentions can be focused wholly on his poem’s future, on its further refinement. The painter is torn between contemplated improvements, possible compromises of an already-good-thing, and the transcendent misgiving that his vision may truly not be possible in any medium as it appears in his mind. For all their lupine bohemianism—their rudeness, their drunkenness, their mistresses, their unpaid rent—artists are, in the long run, whenever they acquire a public persona, rather more conservative than that prim tribe of dandies, the poets. Delacroix had a far less charitable view of human nature than Hugo, Turner could only gesture clumsily at Ruskin’s idealism, and even Millet was more a votary of the bucolic picturesque than an extension in oils of Maxim Gorky. Matisse, Picasso, and many of their generation were persecuted by fascism as decadents (though their rejected canvases were often squirreled away in some collector’s vault, "just in case"): one can hardly attribute their response to pure ideological fervor. Only as the visual art of our day has grown indigestibly politicized have its creators spoken and behaved liked card-carrying ideologues; and this "art", I hasten to observe, is of the sort that could not conceivably be compromised by any misuse or defacement, since chaos is its guide.

Of course, this relative lukewarmth of the great painters to slash-and-torch revolution may also explain why the literary elite is not more aware of them (or is aware, I should say, that no awareness is requisite). We may savor in this littérateur’s disdain the delicious irony—one of its umpteen academic varieties—of genuine class snobbery. For painters, besides being haunted by what carelessness may ruin and what the greatest genius may never reach, are also traditionally rendered somewhat plodding by their lack of liberal education: compared to the poets, they are a thoroughly blue-collar lot. From the Middle Ages to the dawn of the twentieth century, painters and sculptors were often children of the petit bourgeoisie, and even the proletariat. Legend held that Giotto was recruited from his goat-herding duties by the painter Cimabue. Holbein’s grandfather was a successful tanner. Leonardo enjoyed more educational advantages than most who pursued an artistic calling; yet his well-heeled father had adopted him after committing certain indiscretions with a peasant girl, and the boy’s social horizons would have allowed him to entertain more worldly aspirations but for these dubious origins. Titian was knighted—but only after his work had enchanted several noble patrons. (Renaissance Italy, let us note, was extraordinarily appreciative of fine art.) Goya was the son of a destitute peasant, Gainsborough of a poor rustic clothier, Turner of a barber, van Gogh of a country parson. Theirs was not the class of person who attended Eton or Harrow or the Sorbonne. Seldom were young artists packed off to conservatories or to quasi-monastic places of tutelage, as musicians frequently were. Instead, they were apprenticed to masters much as any other artisan or skilled laborer—the butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker. Their preparation did not include reading the Greek and Latin classics, practicing rhetoric, composing sonnets, and learning the manners expected in heads of state.²

To be sure, painters were not uniformly boorish. Some appear to have acquired an estimable literary education more or less on their own. In settings like Renaissance Italy, this was perhaps made easier because a considerable degree of ecclesiastical fosterage was indeed present; and the Church, of course (by which most of the greatest art was commissioned), was the pipeline of Latin learning and the classical tradition. Rembrandt and Vermeer were also entirely presentable citizen-neighbors, their intellectual curiosity surely whetted and somewhat satisfied by the steady stream of foreign travelers who poured into an urbane Holland at the time. Delacroix was, according to Baudelaire, a dandy (a word I have already used of poets—but the poet intends it as a compliment).³ He enjoyed the unique, if unenviable, position of being the natural son of Tallyrand and of having been born among lavish wealth which was all gone when he came of age.

Nevertheless, there was no systematic infusion of the Western literary heritage into the lives of these men, if we take them as a group. Their performance was never part of a live liturgy, as was the musician’s, and they were not absolutely required to have the Latin competence and biblical erudition of the choirmaster or the organist. Their art seems to have ridden the same cultural wave as brought literate creativity to its crest in the nineteenth century, yet intense reading and writing clearly had no direct causative influence on their prolific activity (unless one considers Giotto and Goya to be second-raters). Such a relationship might far more readily be argued between literacy and music, even in the Protestant world of the Enlightenment—perhaps especially there. Protestantism of Reformation-vintage was far more suspicious of painting (as Islam has always been) than of music, and did not deign to encourage painting in its approved pedagogy. Playing a clavichord or a cello, in contrast, was eminently civilized. It allowed young women, in particular, to display their taste and talent in a wholesome manner before a public of chosen guests. Such study was deemed at least as important as learning to write an elegant hand.

Exactly what, then is, the literary/artistic connection, other than a certain whimsical resemblance between the poet’s abstraction and the painter’s absorption? I hope I may be pardoned a return to aesthetics, wherein I sought an objective orientation in my previous essay on music. Throughout my adult life, I have always found entirely plausible the proposition that literature and music and painting, sculpture, and architecture all achieve a sense of beauty by appealing to the same essential human faculties. Their appeal, I believe, is a playful one in that it enhances the opportunities for our judgment to "exercise" itself within a given perception. Our quantitative reason is stimulated by the greater prominence of pattern—form, rhythm, crescendo, purpose, etc.—built into the art object; and, in what may seem paradoxical at first (but the opposition here is merely superficial), our qualitative reason is likewise stimulated by the object’s enticing nuance—its shading, its tone, its mood, its timbre. I dedicated my doctoral dissertation to these ideas, which I cast in a neo-Kantian terminology so as to seek lucidity and avoid mysticism… and I thereupon watched my dissertation committee rubber-stamp the project with utter indifference. Even when I succeeded in publishing the overhauled thesis as a small book, it elicited no interest beyond one enthusiastic reviewer in San Francisco—who was not, of course, an academic.⁴ I had not simply trespassed into that forbidden realm of the universal whose dangers I recited in beginning the present essay: I had encamped bag and baggage smack in the middle of the universalist’s gleaming but deserted stoa. On my side was mere lucidity. The career-making politics of chasing after arcane trends with impenetrable jargon were fully against me. No wonder the dominant response which I drew from the ivory tower was not the rancor one would expect of "honest" doctrinaire opposition, but (as I have said) indifference. My ideas didn’t call for a rebuttal because they were too far off the "scholarly review" circuit for the most spirited rebuttal to be publishable. When every artisan in the city is being paid by a foolish king to make shoes, don’t argue for more hats: argue for a new kind of shoe.

In Praesidium, however, we "spoiled scholars" (if I may borrow the Irish phrase, "spoiled priest") are free to argue purely from lucidity. So I shall start from the obvious—and then, perhaps, surprise my readers. A painting must have form, in my view. I am altogether out of sympathy with visual art lacking entirely in formal composition. As I wrote of music, any genre which stirs to activity a bare minimum of judgments in the human intelligence must be considered debased art. A musical performance with unvarying volume and the least possible variation of a bland theme—a Heavy Metal number, say, whose only claim to success is an ear-splitting cacophony and a litany of obscene lyrics—is utter rubbish. So for the "art" of paint-splatter and dart-throw; though, indeed, I must add that natural chaos often conceals complex rhythms.⁵ The patterns left by raindrops in fine sand can be entrancing. When the human mind seeks to replicate chaos by tying a paintbrush to the proverbial turtle’s tail, the results may be less prepossessing… but at least nature, through the turtle, has a certain amount of sense.

The kind of art I fully reject is the gimmick: the canvas painted all in one color, the big green square, the portrait of a stop sign or a Coke bottle—and, for the most part, Cubism. I have heard and read enough accounts of Picasso’s objectives that I believe I "get it". I just don’t like it. I don’t like the parody of form through overstating constitutive formal elements any more than I like the absence of form in the blank canvas.⁶ I understand that others may "like" the intellectual commentary which abstract art implies about the artist and his material or the artist and the creative struggle. If I keep asserting my own "I like", it is because my response is an immediate one—an aesthetic one—which the avant garde has already refused to allow before the first tube is squeezed out on the palette. My "like" is pure liking. For that matter, what intellectual substance is there to observing that creation is hard, or to whistle-blowing that artistic tradition is really a confidence racket? At best, we have in cubism and its successors a lot of sharp-witted (if you wish) awakening to the foibles of the senses, but not a single beautiful object.

As I have said before in these pages when writing of literature and ethics, too much form is equivalent to no form at all: exaggerated formality is self-defeating.⁷ Surely this is nowhere more true than in art. I believe that the painting must posit recognizable forms in some coherent relationship precisely so that the perceiver’s eye may proceed to unravel them or to extend them into limbo. The snowy peak or the dense thicket in a Caspar David Friedrich landscape is so evocative because of the mists and chasms and shadows which haunt its edges. We are deceived into thinking that we behold form: more properly, we behold (in a mirror of the soul which no other art so cleanly polishes) our imagination’s assembly of form from obscurity, and its fascination with obscurity as a nursery for new form. The interplay of the defining judgment with the qualifying judgment is magically intricate: to distinguish one moment from the other would truly be to tear the wings off the butterfly. The moments involved in absorbing a great canvas cannot be counted for the very reason that they work toward no formal conclusion (as would a story or a symphony). The hypnotism of contemplating an artistic masterpiece sets a perfect poise between the world of solid substance and the world of lurking possibility.⁸

Hence the painter’s craft (I shall not venture into the architect’s, for all my temerity) begins in mastering form because it ends in the dissolution of form. I have discovered this the hard way over the years: i.e., by grinding out a lot of bad art myself. Like any autodidact, I came to painting by way of sketching. The sketch is not incapable of an alluring vagueness, but it has far fewer means of beckoning into the mist. Specifically, it lacks color, texture, and stroke. Its lines either exist, or they do not (as one realizes, often irately, in attempting to copy an ink sketch electronically). When I made the transition from paper to canvas, I naturally began every oil by sketching in the major formal elements with pencil. I continued as any kid would do in a paint-by-number exercise: I slapped down colors to correspond with my penciled boundaries, being very careful to preserve the borders between different shades. In fact, I must have sacrificed a good many hours on fine brushwork before I figured out that my efforts were not creating a pleasant effect. The forms were too clear. A child’s drawing in crayon could not have elicited less response from the perceiving eye. To be sure, some contours had to be just so—just this long curved in just such an arc. The way to achieve them, however, was decidedly not to work away at them as a sculptor might chip away at a brow or nose: it was to apply boldly a flick of color. The least leveling or redirecting of any bright little ridge would often utterly destroy my design rather than fulfill it. I also realized that this perfect fleck or dash (and how many such strokes had to be redone because my hand fearfully held back!) should almost never approximate the size of what it sought to intimate. The bright half-moon indicating a nostril must merely bend around the nostril’s highest ridge, and the dramatic slash of pure white indicating a distant peak’s snowy crest must follow my knife’s edge into the clouds—where it would fade into the canvas’s weave—rather than demarcating every centimeter of frost-affected real estate.

Even sections whose form required little molding could be "over-determined" by my dilettante simplicity. The cheek in a portrait’s study, for instance: the ingénu might believe, as I originally did, that you merely mix together something like flesh tone on your trusty palette (or perhaps open a tube labeled "flesh") and slap monochrome color on merrily until you reach the form’s boundary—an eyelash or a jaw-line. Such a section is indeed almost entirely color within form. Because of the specific form wherein the color lies, however, the perceiver expects to see delicate gradations of color. He may not know that he expects as much, but he certainly knows that something is wrong when he sees no shading. A cheek is distinctly more exposed to the light in some places than in others (especially a beautiful cheek). The painter is thus required, at the very least, to be working white into his concocted flesh tone up here and gray down there. I always do such blending now on the actual canvas, where I can see shades altering with every stroke and can even, if I wish, leave a "happy blemish". For the blemish, too, is desirable—and not, I think, because no human being has perfect complexion. I have sometimes (when I felt particularly daring) gone so far as to introduce a fleck of color which had no literal business being on a cheek: a bright yellow, maybe, or an orange. This is a trick often employed by Impressionist painters. Why? Because the perceiver’s eye will do the blending, and do it better! A viewer who stands at the distance necessary to perceive the form fully yet in detail (another contribution of form: it shows us where to stand) will not notice a minute point of "misplaced" color. He will notice (or not notice—notice as a mere whisper) a "hot point" which seems to make the surrounding color—quite inexplicably—come to life. Thanks to a recognizable form, he can enter into a purposeful interpretation of varying colors. The formal boundaries create a game of the qualifying judgment.

And this, I repeat (more comprehensibly now, I hope), is the highest function of painting: to elicit a qualitative play. Music might be said to offer us formality without clear and distinct form. We play its game by pursuing well-ordered sounds with imaginatively volunteered images. In this regard, painting is music’s opposite. Of clear, identifiable images, we are given an abundance—but within and between those images, we are released to explore indefinite possibilities. The age-old insistence that visual art must mimic reality (and the ancients had their portrait-painters, too⁹) is thus misleading. The painting must confront us with recognizable forms in order to set our imagination measuring the qualitative range of experience within familiar objects. Observers talk about a portrait springing to life because, unwittingly, their minds have been enlisted in modulating the flow of light and shadow around the face. Painters are more likely to talk about a higher reality or a greater vibrancy which lies latent in quotidian objects, because they are more aware of what visual detonations they must prime in order to stir the perceiver’s mind.

Sometimes, indeed, the painter’s genius outdistances the public’s taste. A van Gogh or a Matisse requires such an effort of synthesis from the perceiver that "lazier" viewers cannot quite make the transit from intensity to palpable shape. (Some of the problem, it must be said, rests in the inadequacy of reproductions: an automatic copier never fully matches the original’s colors, nor can paper replicate the texture of paint smoothed wet-ice fine—as for a cheek—or caked on dried-mud rough—as for a row of frothing waves.)¹⁰ One must almost enter into a state of intoxication to appreciate the great colorists. The moment of perception when reds and greens dominate before resolving themselves into familiar forms is that of first awakening, or perhaps of emerging from chaos’s vortex. We might as easily be looking at one of Vermeer’s parlors as at one of Gauguin’s exotic islands: the red could be a cushion as well as a fruit or a rare bird. In that moment, before we are quite sure, the parlor is an island paradise, and the island is a bowl of fruit back home. Call this a higher or deeper reality, if you will: i.e., that the exotic and the homespun suffuse every corner of the earth, and that only sober classification exiles one from the other. I myself think such an insight well deserving of a certain mystical prestige.¹¹

If I might beg a brief digression… I believe this primarily qualitative operation of the perceiver’s mind in enjoying a painting also explains the well-known artistic prohibition against locating the most important object square in the canvas’s center. The defining judgment automatically wants to center the primary form or forms (which is why novice painters must be warned against doing so). A tug-of-war arises, therefore, between the defining judgment’s fixation with the primary form and its respectful awareness of the canvas’s geometric focal point—which the primary form does not quite occupy. The tension is fertile. The eye is forced to acknowledge surrounding objects and background as it unconsciously struggles to "relocate" the primary object, and the delightful comparison/contrast of shades, colors, vectors, and textures begins. If the primary form—the face of a portrait, most obviously—is planted in the exact center, on the other hand, the eye has no formal encouragement to wander. The background may be ever so intriguing, yet the painting’s lay-out has banished it to a position of irremediable uninterest as surely as the tide distances two drifting vessels from each other.

Having now accomplished a very cursory and tentative review of painting from my neo-Kantian perspective, what bridge may I build back to literature? I find that the task has scarcely been elucidated for me. I retain a firm belief that an already literate person may refine his or her sensitivity to qualitative difference by studying art, and specifically painting. A poet would perhaps learn better, not just how to look at clouds, but how to veil all of his descriptions in a stimulating haze of soft edges. At the same time, I cannot adduce examples of such a symbiosis occurring.¹² The Duque de Rivas (Ángel de Saavedra) was an accomplished painter, and yet the ambitious quasi-historical vignettes of Romances Históricos seem to me sadly short of poetic triumph. Worse still, I find that they grow heaviest precisely where a painter’s eye for detail has lured Saavedra into paralyzing his narrative’s action with colorful stage props or lavish finery, as in what follows.

Three and one half centuries ago,

To the glory of Castille,

There once appeared a stranger

Of demeanor wondrous and noble.

 

He concluded at the moment

His journey’s last step; his clothing,

A vest whose weave was crimson

And fine, though frayed with long usage.

 

A woolen cloak, dun-colored

With sleeves and a hood behind,

A beret made of velvet

And worn with ear-flaps lowered,

 

A pair of Portuguese jackboots

Smeared more with mire than polish,

And beneath his dangling elbow,

A pouch or bag or knapsack….¹³

What, I ask, is the purpose of pondering the proper name for the receptacle—"un zarrón, saco, o mochila"—which the young Christopher Columbus carries under his arm? The poet cannot plead that distance throws such detail into obscurity, for he has posed himself close enough to notice the threadbare quality of the garments. Surely the sole reason for this copious overflow of sincere prolixity is to linger over the object as the painter’s smoothing brush would do. And what does it mean to have finished the last step of a journey ("en aquel punto acababa / de llegar allí")? The fatuous phrase ushers Columbus neither into a waiting armchair nor across a familiar threshold. It does nothing more than freeze him for the portrait-painter—who will entitle the canvas, no doubt, "Traveler After a Long Journey."

That most disciplined stylist of Spanish letters, Antonio Azorín, once observed, "The Duke of Rivas is an artist who sees his work in a single plane, in a manner devoid of evolution or dynamism if not entirely static. All his [literary] works are visions of a single moment, or rather of a series of independent moments."¹⁴ The editor who reproduces this remark disagrees with it, but I find it all too apt.¹⁵ Like the sumptuous furniture in their palaces, Rivas’s characters are forever standing petrified in grand (or grandiose) rigidity. Could this—rueful thought!—be the influence of painting? In other words, is painting inimical to the dynamic flow of narrative events? I realize that I am now denigrating Rivas, not strictly in his poetic abilities (his metaphors, his versification, etc.—though the choice of a popular genre to display these is dubious enough), but in his skill as a raconteur. Might his painter’s infatuation with bright, exotic forms not have detracted from his competence in stringing events together? Could it be that all poetry except the most lyrical sort is in fact somewhat impeded by close attention to detail? After all, the painter’s brush can so color and nuance these details as to make them keys which unlock a world of possibility beyond them… but the poet is limited to words, and (if I may paraphrase Callimachus) a great many words make for a great ordeal.

My rueful assertion that a literary training may somewhat detract from an appreciation of painting by forcing images into narratives was confirmed when I consulted Schiller’s Über das Pathetische (1793) on the advice of a friend. I had read the work much earlier, and I renewed my acquaintance with it in eager expectation of finding profound insight. Schiller reprises and extends the Kantian sublime by stressing the struggle between the individual will and physical events of intimidating power. His analysis of Laocoon’s futile but heroic contest with the serpent in Aeneid 2, for instance, persuades us that the father’s will to save his sons blinds him to the endeavor’s physical impossibility, and thereby creates a truly noble literary moment. As a key to understanding visual art, however (and Schiller quotes lengthily Lessing’s meticulous scrutiny of the ancient Roman sculpture in the Vatican Museum which commemorates Vergil’s scene), this technique risks being as digressive as Saavedra’s. Much as he stresses the art work’s primacy, Schiller invites us away from the immediate object and into a contemplation of literary narrative. Where no such narrative exists, he invites us to imagine one. The effect of a face portrayed in oils, according to him, is to draw from us a quasi-moral judgment about the subject’s character: "We label a facial structure common when it does not reveal human intelligence through anything in particular; we label it expressive when the spirit influences the features, and noble when a refined spirit shapes these features."¹⁶ In other words, the portrait is already a program intimating how its subject will act in any given set of circumstances—and in enjoying that portrait, we implicitly project it into our preferred set of circumstances.

I confess that I find all this a bit too distant from the canvas. The va-et-vient which stirs ceaselessly from represented form to suggested context could, without doubt, take a moral turn: it almost certainly will, for any interesting face implies an action, and every action implies a moral choice. Faces, that is, exude drama in their arrested animation or their rigid inflexibility: a furrowed brow, a set jaw, an opened mouth, wayward locks of hair, etc. Yet the drama, I would argue, always circles back to its point of origin. The portrait is not somehow adequately assessed once its features have been classed as stalwart or lascivious or long-suffering. The drama is always upstaged, one might say, by that eternal instant of indeterminacy which it has sparked. The figures on Keats’s urn are not so much always chasing and always fleeing as they are always enigmatically fulfilled without having either captured or escaped—a view which Keats seems to endorse, by the way. Vermeer’s girl in a scarf (who has inspired a very recent best-selling narrative, though little to my taste) is not so much surprised in an unguarded moment or lured naively to a familiar voice’s call as she is fixed forever in a kind of naiveté which melts away all stiff poses. Her virtue—if it be such in someone’s narrative—is not that she has heeded the call: it is that her face does not compose itself before heeding. This is a minutely intimate quality, the very soul of the girl, and it may indeed be no virtue at all. It precedes virtue, as temperament precedes character. Vermeer allows light to roll across the maiden’s parted lips, which as yet describe neither gasp nor smile, and then to settle uniformly along her far cheek, as if the two features had no material connection but were, perhaps, a speechless angel’s mouth eclipsing a full moon. Such absence of self-awareness can be perfect innocence—but it can also be gullibility awaiting seduction. The paints do not prescribe a story. They model and incarnate, rather, the mystery of a face friendly to light, of a temperament faithful to sense impressions. We all know what a dubious blessing such a heart as that may be!

Any poignantly painted face lends itself to a million and one poetic fables or moralistic anecdotes; but it precedes them all, and poets and moralists are wrong to claim its evocative power for their realm. The resolute jaw line suits the brave captain—but also the beleaguered lunatic. The lowered eyes draped by round, pallid lids befit the modest virgin or chaste matron—but also the scheming coquette. These are genuine mysteries of the human soul, of the sort which novelists may strive unsuccessfully for decades to unlock. Canvas and oil are not more astute than Tolstoy: they are, precisely, more obtuse. The mystery lives in them, because it readily eases itself behind curtains of vague light and of gestures never completed. It turns painting into a representation of that vital element which the story-teller must always seek vainly in his pages.

Some may object that the kind of style I have just vilified—a moralistic style, top-heavy with bold-faced cues of intent—is characteristic of nineteenth-century narrative, and that Saavedra just happens to have dabbled in painting, as well. The protest would be just. Balzac and Dickens never imagined a room without bringing its settees and mantelpieces into focus; and whatever their authorial eye managed to focus on became fair game for their pen. To be sure, a settee’s style and state of wear and tear can divulge something of the proprietor’s tastes, habits, and finances. Where one settee would have sufficed to make the point, however, the florid style of "romantic realism" (for it has tendencies of both, this style, and belongs to the historical seam) gives us an inventory of furniture and dry-walling. The author of this period whose work strikes me as least inclined to such verbosity and most "painterly" is none other than Edgar Allan Poe—who not only did no painting, as far as I know, but inhabited a part of the world far away from any fine museums or collections. (The concept of the museum indeed lay a few decades down the road, in Victorianism’s rise of the middle class.) Poe does not smother his readers with detail.¹⁷ What forms he chooses to bring forward from the surrounding chiaroscuro are often highlighted, for good measure, in a fashion so colorful as to border on the lurid. Washington Irving, and Hawthorne at his best, also partake of this style, in my opinion. There is in such description a minimalist selection of detail which dwells paradoxically with a colorist, almost surrealist love of embellishment. I can think of few other respects in which the New World’s literature so trumped the Old World’s.

And here, once again, the question is begged: for one asset which the Old World certainly possessed in abundance when compared to the New was fine painting. There was more such painting at this historical juncture than ever before, and perhaps more than there would ever be again. David and Corot and Delacroix, Leighton and Constable and Turner, Goya and Friedrich and El Greco… writers like Balzac and Dickens and Manzoni were surrounded by burgeoning artistic productivity in every genre, even if they themselves never picked up a brush. Were they "infected" by the proximity? Did landscape-painting and portraiture inspire in them an artist’s attention to detail without infusing in them a true artist’s respect for the play of shadow between forms? Would they have been better off in the Alleghenies, privy to real thickets and real mountain ridges at their doorstep?

Consider the matter from another perspective. Contemporary cinema is more savvy in the manipulation of visual images than any postmodern tormentor of canvases. Here, perhaps, is our contemporary world’s highest claim to visual artistry: in the state-of-the-art. When I was writing about music and literature (Praesidium 4.3), I noted similarly that the healthy survival of a certain classical strain in many scores composed for the screen is reason for optimism as we watch our culture’s tastes enter full decline elsewhere. May the same be said of the cinema’s stunning special effects and visual representation? Or dismiss the special effects, and simply ponder the contemporary cinematographer’s genius for coloring and framing. The industry has made vast strides since the days when a director, harried by an impossible schedule and a shoestring budget, ordered the lone camera to roll atop its tripod and waved actors on and off the set.

Yet our movies, as narratives, range from the childishly amusing to the tiresomely predictable to the insipid ad nauseam. The old films, for all their technical crudity, offered complex characters and credible dialogue. It would almost seem, then, that narrative finesse is inversely proportional to visual artistry. Is this disturbing correlation mere illusion—or, if real, is it mere accident?

Personally, I believe the connection here to be both genuine and, in some meaningful way, causal. I believe that our filmmakers have increasingly regarded dialogue (with its vital clues about motivation) as a frill to be added in afterthought around their parade of beautiful faces, apocalyptic explosions, converging planets, and salivating tyrannosaurs. To some extent, the eye disengages the ear. (The phenomenon is well known: when two young people are smitten with each other, they seldom remember conversational details—and a witness to a shocking catastrophe is unlikely to recall what words he or she screamed out at the time.) The image now leads the script about by the nose in Hollywood. This is surely one of the reasons why scripts are so miserably clichéed: colorful, full-bodied figures deploy their signature moves in gorgeous settings, and the words which eventually trail from their mouths have all the profundity of a balloon in a comic strip. I also believe that script-writing would be stale and trite, in any case, given the current state of literacy: our short stories and novels are usually ground out nowadays with the same kind of hip-shot babble, both in and out of quote. Yet it is entirely possible that such writing by cue and token itself results largely from two generations of rearing by that universal nanny, the television.

All the same, I cannot further conclude from film culture that visual art actually dulls our literary taste and aptitude. The reason I resist so grim a conclusion is because I find the evidence tainted. Photographed images, after all, are not paint on canvas. Especially today, they are too meticulously accurate, too vividly colored. They do not partially emerge from shadow or mist to begin half a gesture: they burst floridly upon us like fireworks and dance through their entire routine. They are over-determined (if I may return to a word of my own coinage). They impose their forms upon us insistently and irresistibly, so that all we can do is rear back in search of a space for our beleaguered nose. Even if there might occasionally be something unfinished about an actor’s face or a building’s façade—the heavy shadow of a hat or the thin veil of a rain shower—today’s editing-room techniques do not allow us sufficient time to be invited into the no-man’s-land for exploration. Our vision is forced to hop about from object to object in frenetic impatience, while the sound track does everything aurally possible to dissuade any inclination to intense study. If the script belongs in the balloons of a comic strip, the characters themselves—splendid, refulgent, energetic to the bursting point—belong in a cartoon. The Roger Rabbits and Scooby-Doos who pose beside them ever more frequently are, after all, right at home. The miracle is not that cutting-edge technology should have been able to super-impose a penned caricature upon a "live" scene: the miracle is that it should have taken us this long to recognize how sympathetically the latest techniques of visual representation veer back toward the two-dimensional, reducing human actors, for all their lingering air of kinship with us viewers, to glittering icons.

Who will honestly maintain that the recent color re-makes of black-and-white film classics possess the same evocative quality as their predecessors? Cape Fear in its second incarnation was tasteless hyperbole, overplayed in every direction—dialogue, editing, composition—to the point of grotesquerie. The chilling original was immensely superior. Indeed, whenever contemporary films try to recreate the gray-flannel fifties, or to better them through "updating" the drama, they succeed only in producing something like a video game: flashy, raucous, and in the perpetual motion of frenzy. They are the artistic opus of the Attention Deficit Disorder generation. It is impossible, perhaps, to compare color with black-and-white on merely one level, since intrusive over-editing plays so prominent a role in impeding the viewer’s study; but I cannot rid myself of the inkling that color itself must bear much of the blame. The dreary urban shadows of Odd Man Out are unequaled by any production of our time. The film noir mysticism of Cat People would simply be incaptable in color. When Michael Rennie’s Stoical extra-terrestrial peers down upon Patricia Neal in a stalled elevator, The Day the Earth Stood Still evoked a higher-than-human intelligence in ways that outlandish state-of-the-art make-up and computer enhancement have never approximated. A documentary which aired lately on PBS sang the praises persistently of Chinatown. The color composition was awarded special laurels by all commentators—for the life of me, I know not why. While whiteness may signify withering heat in black –and-white, it signifies purity—and even festivity—when surrounded with color: the tone to choose would have been yellow. The reds should have turned more orange, the browns more gray. No woman in bright red lipstick can ever look one-tenth as sultry as a black-and-white Gene Tierney in Laura. Chinatown’s excessively broad-brimmed fedoras and excessively wide lapels (even for the time: a little rumpling would have helped) only solidified the impression already transmitted with a heavy hand by the coloring—the impression of kids dressing as adults, of an empire’s aristocrats dressing as pastoral figures: of unwitting parody, of comical exaggeration. Of the icon (as we all call it now in unnoticed irony) on our computer screen.

I purchased for a friend’s birthday a while back the off-print of a black-and-white photo showing baseball slugger Ted Williams in full stride. The original shot must have been taken half a century ago. One can stand spellbound before such images, just as before a painting. The soft edges, the minutely subtle gradations of gray and silver, the shady definition at crucial points… if this is not the stuff that ghosts are made of, it is surely the technique of making ghosts. The qualitative judgement is incalculably more active in playing among the dusky waves and snowy beaches of such visions than in the typical color photograph. A great painting uses colors to enhance the qualitative experience—but electronic means of coloring almost always vitiate it. Perhaps always. I do not wish to rule against the genius of directors like David Lean, Werner Herzog, and Sergio Leone. Yet the tendency of all electronic technology, let us admit, is toward greater definition. The cinematic genius of the future must be precisely he or she who resists this tendency with conscious, tireless obstinacy. Films have grown far too "cool", in Marshal McLuhan’s terms. Their images are so assertively defined that the perceiver’s mind is by no means invited to assist in their formation—is, if anything, turned away. An imagination which thus "cools" like a motor in neutral gear is not a very happy prospect to exponents of literate culture. Literacy, of course, requires an intense heat of activity: the reader’s mind is offered only descriptions, and is forced to generate its own picture. What scant works in print are widely read nowadays, however, tend to describe only those icons which the movies churn out for mass consumption. Neither reading nor viewing remains a very warm activity in our culture, and the temperature drops infinitesimally every day.¹⁸

Notice, at least, that the culprit here is not visual art—and certainly not painting. It is "high definition" electronic technology. As for Saavedra, Balzac, and that "romantic realist" love of counting the number of buttons on a gilet or the number of nails in an ivy-laced gate, we may surely attribute it as readily to the ever more domesticated, sedentary, bourgeois thrust of narrative as to the influence of painting (which was itself, of course, responding to the same pressures and inducements). Drama in the mid-nineteenth century, after a brief romantic resurgence of the heroic, was in headlong pursuit of the ordinary. Bourgeois tedium was perhaps Ibsen’s favorite theme.

Yet having exonerated my beloved canvases of complicity in our decline, I cannot hold out much hope to others who love them that visual art is not lumbering down the same slope as literate creation. The movies may at last revive taste in music: stranger things have happened, and the aural equivalent of strep throat cannot very well accompany the sinking Titanic, even in our present twilight of degeneracy. If musical taste revives, then perhaps literary taste follow suit—and then, finally, perhaps artistic taste will do the same. No other progression of rebirth, however, makes much sense to me. I myself discovered painting because the literary life had already inured me to hours of silent sequestration. I rather doubt that today’s talented youth would be able to withstand the sheer intensity of the experience, its demands upon one’s concentration. That the great painters of yesteryear were seldom literati is irrelevant. The clientele which made their existence possible—wealthy bourgeois bankers in quest of a portrait, otiose aristocrats with a thoroughbred to commemorate or a mantelpiece to adorn, priests with a church wall to be frescoed—has gone state-of-the-art. Our budding Raphael now learns the intricacies of PhotoShop.

It would be poetic justice if literacy could replenish the ranks of painters. From what little I know of art history in the early twentieth century, I gather that Cubists and Conists and various other abstractionists—Picasso, Duchamps, Mondrian—took their cue from literary movements. What Ferdinand de Saussure said (or was thought to have said) about verbal signifiers could be applied uncritically to the visual realm. Even the Kantian distinction of the aesthetic object as a purposive construct without a purpose was seized upon as an unqualified endorsement of l’art pour l’art. Precisely because painters do not parse the written word very finely, this group seemed to talk itself out of creating beauty rather easily for the dubious pleasure of shocking the respectable citizen. Guillaume Apollinaire cheered on among his many paint-stained admirers the same chaos as he unleashed into poetry. André Breton’s fatuous Surrealist mill made grist of the painters’ bohemian community—more so, perhaps, than it ever did of Breton’s fellow writers. As I have often said, literacy was deeply implicated in its own demise.¹⁹ He who is excessively adroit with words, it seems, will eventually talk himself into suicide.

And here I return to where I began: the similarity of art and music. The two have this in common, also—and it apparently distances them somewhat from literature. One may say of a piece of music or a painting, "Non te amo. I’m sorry, I just don’t like it. I know all the bright people like it. I know that I herein confess to not being bright. But more than anything, I know that I cannot stomach this." A visceral reaction tends to hold us to a kind of honesty in music and art which we willingly disavow in literature. Ph.D.s have built entire careers on extolling the virtues of texts which they secretly detest, and social parvenus have libraries full of authors whom they actually read (to what extent and depth, who knows?) without the least real pleasure, sympathy, or recognition. Now, not every art collector or symphony-booster is a connoisseur, to be sure; but I suspect that the false among these latter at least know themselves to be poseurs. There has to be an unobserved moment when they linger before a certain canvas or over a certain CD and murmur, "I really like that one." The literary poseur, on the other hand, seeks respite from the tomes of indigestible parlor-play he so often pretends to masticate by reading, in his "spare time", absolutely nothing at all.

Maybe, then, a new generation of painters will spring up sua sponte. They may not be very good painters; they may just be people like me, people who love painting. (What else is an amateur?) For the great disadvantage of painting in this age of the quick fix and the mass-endorsed icon—its radical isolation from the world’s bustle and chatter—is also its great asset. Anyone can grab a canvas, some tubes of paint, and the key to an empty room. Anyone can start painting at any time. One can achieve far less satisfaction picking out notes on a guitar or a penny-whistle, and such novice efforts are often painful to endure. Literate creation requires even more of an apprenticeship to yield results of a tolerable nature. But painting… if you do no more than squeeze several tubes onto a palette, one or two of the colors is sure to please you. If you do no more than try to represent a cloudbank or a mountain range with those colors, some stroke or blend of colliding colors—some accidental effect of untutored "clumsiness", perhaps—is sure to catch your eye.

Painting, it seems to me, is the most obvious, most accessible retreat from a highly efficient, murderously over-determined world. And though there may, after all, be no benign concatenation of cultural revivals (e.g., from musical to literary to artistic) which can credibly transport us back to a love of painting, the mere loathing of our shallow, up-front, drive-thru environment may achieve the same effect far better. Painters may start popping up all over the place in silent, introverted rebellion as an alternative to going numb or insane.

NOTES: