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*****
A Few
Words from the Editor
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.
~J.H.
back to Contents
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Can Glory Blaze from the Void?
Thoughts on the Tenuous Connection between Painting and
Literacy
by
John R. Harris
Vocat lux ultima victos.
"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:
1 Nevertheless, legend has it
that Delacroix once executed a painting within two hours at a soirée
given by Alexandre Duman père, and that his triumphant labors
wrung a spontaneous burst of applause from the gathering.
2 A colleague specializing in
art history has recommended to me Bruce Cole, The Renaissance Artist at
Work (New York: Harper and Row, 1983) for a detailed view of this
milieu, and I willingly pass along the recommendation.
3 Cf. p. 756 of Charles
Baudelaire, "L’Oeuvre et la vie de Delacroix" (Oeuvres
Complètes, v. 2 of Editions Pléiades [Paris: Gallimard, 1976],
742-770): "Eugène Delacroix was a curious mixture of skepticism,
politeness, dandyism, ardent volition, guile, despotism, and—in fine—a
kind of eccentric goodness and controlled tenderness which always
accompanies genius" (my translation).
4 The book is Accidental
Grandeur: A Defense of Narrative Vagueness in Ancient Epic Literature
(Peter Lang: New York, 1989). I recall that the front office conveyed a
rather caustic comment to me which originated with Lang Classical Studies
editor Daniel Garrison. Although this oblique, one-sentence remark was the
extent of my contact with Mr. Garrison, I have little doubt that he
considered the book’s flaws not worth an explicit denunciation because
they lay, in his view, at the fundamental level. In fairness, I will add
that a prominent name on my dissertation committee effectively summarized
his reservations by asking, "And whom do you expect to read
this?" Had I known of the response which Heinrich Böll once made to
the same question, I would have borrowed it: "I write for everyone
who knows how to read, just as a painter paints for everyone who knows how
to see."
5 James Gleick, Chaos:
Making a New Science (New York: Penguin, 1988), began the
"rehabilitating" of naturally random systems as in fact
possessing complex designs or purposes. A certain visual complexity, even
if it may have no concealed regularity, at least suffices to keep the eye
seeking after a pattern. The "blank canvas" approach, in
contrast, overtly refuses to involve the eye (and the mind behind it) in
any sort of quest or amusement.
6 Abstract Expressionist
Barrett Newman, for instance, executed a virtually monochrome canvas with
a single white line dividing its two panels which he called Cathedra.
"We are completely denying that art has any concern with the problem
of beauty and where to find it," Newman declared (cited in Michele
Cone, The Roots and Routes of Art in the Twentieth Century [New
York: Horizon, 1975], 194). My own opinion is that beauty poses no problem
at all—only perverse thinking which stands judgment on its ear. In this,
I freely confess that I have something in common with Vladimir Lenin, who
once protested, "I cannot value the works of Expressionism, Futurism,
Cubism and any other ism as the highest expression of artistic genius.. I
don’t understand them. They give me no pleasure" (cited in Joseph
Freedman and Louis Lozowick, Voices of October [New York: Vanguard,
1930], 55). I suppose this just goes to show that art must indeed have
something of the universal, since an unregenerate rationalist can join a
dialectical materialist in denouncing a ghastly mess.
7 See "Daggerpoints and
Loggerheads: A Sad Time’s Taste for Perverse Oppositions," Praesidium
3.2 (Spring 2003), 23-32.
8 It seems to me that
Baudelaire conceived of painting’s aesthetics similarly (if I may cite a
literary figure who also happened to be one of his day’s preeminent art
critics). He is keenly aware, for instance, of the role played by color in
Delacroix—a role of such power that the viewer’s eye would already be
deeply engaged by a canvas before it was close enough to distinguish
represented forms. Furthermore, Baudelaire is plainly aware that form is not
the wellspring of universal beauty when he writes the following: "The
beautiful is made of an eternal, invariable element, whose quality is
excessively difficult to determine, and of a relative, circumstantial
element, which would be, if one wishes—in succession or altogether—a
period effect, a trend, mores, or a dominant passion" (685 in
"Le Peintre de la vie moderne," op.cit., 683-724). More
common in Baudelaire’s time—or in the classicism of any time—would
have been a consigning of color and style to trend and conditioning.
Baudelaire’s reversing the polarities accounts much better for why most
of us can admire Titian or Rembrandt (or, for that matter, Chinese vase
painting or Japanese water colors) even though the represented forms may
seem archaic or alien.
9 Cf. Plutarch’s "How
to Tell a Flatterer from a
Friend” 53.D, where, in a simile, the author compares sycophants who
copy shameful behavior to “inferior painters” (οι
φαύλοι
ζωγράφοι—the final word
literally means “life-writers”) who seek to vivify their subjects by
throwing in many wrinkles and scars.
10 I recommend Philip Ball’s
recent book, Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color (New
York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2002), in passing. It is quite
astonishing—and, in a way, exhilarating—to learn repeatedly from Ball’s
study that certain colors await discovery, and that their sudden arrival
on the scene can enthrall an artist or an entire culture. This is yet more
proof that qualitative play lies at the heart of the artistic experience:
i.e., that a mere color can captivate an audience. I should also remark
that only the museum, given the limitations of copies, can make such an
experience generally available. As our cities have grown ever less
navigable in their dense and dangerous sprawl, art museums have become
ever more remote from the education of the typical young person.
11 My zeal for the French
novelist Antoine de Saint-Exupéry naturally brings him to mind in this
context, though there are many other authors who have shown us how the
most improbable experiences spill over into one another if our rational
mind does not impose boundaries. The novel Pilote de Guerre, for
example, while concerned with France’s futile resistance of the Nazi
blitz in 1939, is almost as devoted to dredging up memories from Saint-Ex’s
childhood. Chapter 14 not only gains access to the forgotten world of
innocence through the mortal menace of combat: it recognizes in the
flashback—an occasion when little Antoine hid on a console as his uncles
talked politics—an intricately crafted Newtonian universe where the boy
himself was a magnetically guided planet! Though the painting of his day
was already far too abstract to excite Saint-Exupéry’s sympathy (he had
no use whatever for Breton and his Surrealist crew), such passages suggest
to me that the novelist possessed a genuine painter’s alertness to
harmonious shades within quite unrelated forms.
12 Michael Lythgoe, scholar,
poet, and faithful contributor to Praesidium, has mercifully
supplemented my ignorance in a detailed response to this essay. He writes:
"W C. Williams wrote a series of poems on the paintings of a Dutch
Master, including one on Icarus. I have heard the contemporary poet
Mark Strand speak to the painting of Hopper at an art museum in DC—using
visuals. As I studied some painters and sought inspiration for my own
writing I discovered [that] Wallace Stevens’ ‘Man with the Blue Guitar’
seems to have been influenced by Picasso—but shares the idea of the
guitar as the instrument of creativity, both [in ]music and poetry. Strand
has painted. John Haines started as a sculptor and then took up poetry. My
essay on his poems about paintings and sculpture was published in A
Gradual Twilight by Cavan Kerry Press (NJ 2003). I called my essay ‘Night
of Painted Iron.’ Michelangelo wrote sonnets and discussed (agonized
over?) the creative process. I have read the bilingual edition of poems by
the Spanish poet Rafael Alberti entitled ‘To Painting.’ Kandinsky had
his theories of color and some of his work appears like musical notes on
the canvas. Degas wrote poems along with his paintings. I am fond of the
poetry of Nobel writer Derek Walcott, who grew up in the Caribbean. He is
a painter as well as a playwright and has a book called Tiepolo's Hound
(FSG: NY, 2000) based on two artistic journeys—Camile Pissarro’s
travel from the island of St. Thomas to Paris and Walcott’s own journey
through Europe in his mind’s eye after seeing a Venetian painting in New
York. Finally, I discovered a series of essays by poets on paintings
several years ago edited by J.D. McClatchy… and The Glazer’s Spirit
edited by John Hollander (Poems Speaking to Silent Works of Art [U.
of Chicago, 1995]). I have been citing recently the ecphrastic idea of how
poets have been inspired since Homer first described Achilles’s shield
and Keats wrote his ode to the Grecian Urn…. I have tried to write on El
Greco, Kandinsky, Bonnard, Degas, a Cuban primitive painter in Key
West/Tampa, an American painter in Spain who was also a bull fighter (John
Fulton), John Haines, Cezanne, Matisse.… David Lehman, poet and
essayist, editor of the Best American Poetry series, did a book on The
Last Avant Garde and documented the New York School of poets who in
the 1950s were so connected to painting and jazz…."
This is an impressive
bibliography from a person who, very probably, should be writing the
present essay instead of me! Of course, it remains to be seen (and is
quite possibly indemonstrable) whether exposure to painting actually makes
for a better poet, or vice versa. That so many of the figures cited by Mr.
Lythgoe belong to the beleaguered twentieth century may give rise to
suspicions about the link’s wholesomeness; and, after all, ecphrasis is
a species of digression, and some cruel hearts judge Achilles’ shield as
uncharitably as I shall do Saavedra’s descriptions. On the other,
perhaps our cultural degeneracy would have accelerated if a certain
interdisciplinary residue of taste had not been applying the brakes. Who
knows?
13 From Recuerdos de un
grand hombre, 1.25-40, in Romances Históricos, ed. Salvador
García Castañeda (Madrid: Catedra, 1987), p. 175. The translation is
mine.
14 Cited by Castañeda on p.
40 of his introduction to Romances Históricos (ibid.), pp.
15-70; my translation.
15 See Castañeda’s remarks on p. 41 (ibid.).
16 See p. 60 of Über das Pathetische
in Friedrich Schiller, Vom Pathetischen und
Erhabenen (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1970), 55-82. The translation from
German is mine.
17 Cf. Poe’s counsel in the
fourth paragraph of "The Philosophy of Composition": "I
prefer commencing with the consideration of an effect. Keeping
originality always in view—for he is false to himself who
ventures to dispense with so obvious and so easily attainable a source of
interest—I say to myself, in the first place, ‘Of the innumerable
effects, or impressions, of which the heart, or intellect, or (more
generally) the soul is susceptible, what one shall I, on the present
occasion, select?’" Notice that Poe, while clearly emphasizing a
qualitative response to the art work ("impression",
"heart", "soul"), is laboring toward a formula
of composition involving careful calculation.
18 I might add that the
connection between print culture and visual perception drawn by Walter Ong
is misleading (cf. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word
[London and New York: Routledge, 1989], 117-138). McLuhan’s enthusiastic
anticipation that electronic media will return us to the vicinity of oral
tradition implies the same belief that "the shift from oral to
written is essentially a shift from sound to visual space" (Ong 117).
The literate life, in fact, is not more visually aware than the oral life
in any profound respect. The cues for visualization have simply shifted
from spoken to written ones. The shift crucially slows down the
communicant’s choice of terms, however, making them more accurate and
less formulaic. From this perspective, electronic culture does indeed
resemble orality in speeding up the choice of terms and thereby
depriving them of discrimination. Yet neither the new media’s visual nor
their aural transmissions have the upper hand in inspiring this revived
opposition to analysis. The dominant sense (whichever that may be) in
electronic life is irrelevant to the break-neck rapidity of sensations.
19 Cf. "Daggerpoints and
Loggerheads: Intellectualism and the Decline of the
West," Praesidium 3.4 (Fall 2003), 5-18;
and also "Proteus Surrenders: The Life and Death of the
Death-and-Rebirth Myth," Renascence 49.2 (Winter 1997):
121-138.
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Putting a Period to the "Quote" Issue
Periodically, a friend or contributor raises the issue
of the "closed quote" with us, since our editorial policy on
this matter does not agree with the ruling of the Modern Language
Association. Now is probably a good time to reiterate a defense which we
have not made publicly in several years.
The MLA has determined that all punctuation should
typically be included within the closing quotation mark, even if the
quoted matter consists of no more than one word. There are obvious
exceptions. A question mark, exclamation point, or parenthesis is not to
be included in the quotation unless it represents part of the matter
cited. For instance, we write, "It is incredible that he would use
the word ‘penniless’!" The exclamation point belongs to the
complete statement we have quoted, but not to the specific word
"penniless" quoted within the statement. So for the following:
"Would anyone consider resigning in these circumstances (at least
during a ‘meltdown’)?" The word "meltdown" has
presumably been lifted from another context familiar to the audience: part
of that context is clearly not a closing parenthesis or question
mark right after the word. To close the quotation of "meltdown"
after one or both of these points of punctuation would indeed be utterly
absurd.
We fully accept this reasoning. In fact, we applaud it
and extend it to cases where the absurdity is not so transparent. The MLA
insists that the period must fall within the closing quotation mark in the
following: "He is resigning ‘to avoid later embarrassment.’"
It insists the same, even, of the following: "He is resigning to
avoid ‘embarrassment.’" Yet the reasoning in the previous
paragraph should apply equally to these examples: in a phrase lacking the
essential parts of a clause, to include the final stop as integral to the
quoted matter is sheer whimsy. (The period would be just as MLA-mandatory
within quotes, we hasten to add, even if a comma followed
"embarrassment" in the original material.) That the
determination of absurdity is a little harder to make in such examples,
nevertheless, seems to supply the MLA with sufficient cause to herd
everything within the quotation mark. By all means, preempt the appearance
of very hard determinations—some of which might be argued either way—by
promulgating an inflexible rule! Better that common sense should die than
that professors should ever have to say before their classes, "I’m
not sure."
No linguistic Caiaphas has succeeded in persuading us
of this view. Hence Praesidium will continue (unless otherwise
directed by contributors) to be published with single words or short
phrases in exclusive quotes, beyond which commas and periods float
unconfined on the greater sentence’s swell. Some battles are not worth
fighting, and some traditions should be observed even though illogical.
The MLA’s case, however, has little tradition on its side—only a
generation of ignorance and indolence; and the logic of the logos
itself must always be defended assertively.
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Have Late Modern Values and Technology Made Great Art
Impossible?
by
Mark Wegierski
Mark
Wegierski is an independent Canadian journalist who is particularly
interested in how technology shapes our cultural future. His views stem
from his own creative assessment of our world rather than from allegiance
to any party or ideology. Mr. Wegierski has contributed several pieces to Praesidium
in recent months.
Massive advances in technology have by now given us
such superb instruments as the word processor, graphics arts programs,
music composition
tools, and Internet multimedia—which could have,
theoretically speaking, increased the prevalence of great art today.
However, the cumulative social, cultural, and spiritual effects of
multifarious technological advances have, it could be argued, corrosively
dissolved or smashed to bits the more traditional social, cultural, and
spiritual contexts which could produce and nourish great art and great
artists—such as, archetypically, Renaissance England and William
Shakespeare.
Today, it could be argued that the vast mass of people
are reduced to unreflective, history-less "vidiots"—passive
consumers of stupefying television programs, films, Internet images,
videogames, sports events, and popular music that is "racing to the
bottom". The mass-education system, rather than offering a salutary
"counter-ethic" to the mass-media, in most cases reinforces it.
As for so-called high art, one could argue that it
indulges today in excessively frequent portrayals of evil, ugliness, and
perversity; in nearly infinite variations and explorations of designated
minority consciousness; in expressions of hatred or self-hatred of white,
Western, Christian civilization; and in multifarious techniques for
rendering virtually the whole Western and European past to appear as
utterly hideous to decent human sensibilities.
The near-infinite reproducibility of photographic and
video images, as well as raising the disturbing question of what can
possibly be seen as "authentic" today, has made mass pornography
into a huge industry and social phenomenon. Today, mass pornography is
part of the societal background field, probably for the first time in
history. Certainly, the rendering of erotic pictorial images in premodern
societies required substantial amounts of time and artistic skill, thus
inherently limiting them to a comparatively small audience.
It can be argued that Western societies are mostly in the grip of a "toxic" culture. It is
possible that certain stand-up comedy acts and late-night talk-shows, or
almost every one of the newer sitcoms, as well as many relentlessly
violent and gruesome movies, films, and videogames (not to mention the
hideous works on display in some art galleries, with their non-stop,
sneering contempt for the old verities) can be far more socially,
culturally, and spiritually corrosive than the images found in Playboy
or Penthouse magazines. What is particularly troubling about most
forms of pop-culture—sports, films and television, popular music, and
the fashion-industry (now especially renowned for its decadence)—is the
near-total exclusion of a more traditionalist vision from them. Ted Nugent
is about the only rock-star who has openly declared himself to be a
conservative. One supposes that Country and Western Music and NASCAR
racing (both of them largely concentrated in the South) are two
pop-culture subgenres with a semi-traditionalist element. There is also a
fairly large subgenre of Christian music and Christian fiction, but its
profile outside of its segment-market is nugatory. Most music and
publishing industry moguls treat it with disdain. In Canada today, the
love of hockey is one of the last unifying elements of the country. Some
less obvious foci in the social and cultural landscape of civil society
with traditionalist implications might include the following: local
historical and architectural preservation societies; historical and
battlefield re-enactors (such as those focussing on the American Civil
War, American Revolutionary War, or the Medieval/Renaissance eras);
classical music, folk music, book, and Classics, Medieval, or Renaissance
enthusiasts; some ecological and conservation organizations; and railroad
and historical board-games hobbyists.
Following to a certain extent the arguments made by
Anthony Gancarski, one might argue that Eighties’ alternative, New Wave,
technopop, and some ballad-type music—such as that represented by groups
and artists like The Smiths, Bryan Ferry, Joy Division/New Order, David
Bowie, The Police (and Sting in his solo career), ABC, The Cure, Sade (sharday),
and Christopher Cross—can be seen as having Romantic, aesthetic, and
definitely "Eurocentric" aspects. Such music often seems to have
an "orchestral" or "symphonic" feel to it. Called
"Eighties’ retro", "retro-alternative", or simply
"retro", it can be favorably contrasted today with such
currently popular music subgenres as rap, hip-hop, and grunge.
It could be argued that the artist who seeks to create
great art today should try to enter into a spirit of thought and
reflection about the nature of late modern society. Insofar as it aims for
greatness, outstanding art today must largely move towards a rejection of
the current-day atmosphere of political correctness, designated
minorities, and relativist aesthetics. While great art must be careful of
not falling into kitsch, it should at the same time aspire to some
fragment of "the true, the good, and the beautiful"—often
including elements of history, religion, and the heroic. In some cases, of
course, the portrayal of evil, ugliness, and perversity can be
artistically brilliant—but the project must be deftly handled. And let
us say openly that some kind of salutary, positive
"counter-ethic" is emphatically needed in today’s society, as
we are at almost every point overwhelmed by the relentless portrayal and
evocation of evil, ugliness, and perversity—as well as by the
mind-numbing strictures of political correctness. In current-day society,
a piece of carefully-crafted, representational art by a European artist,
patriotically celebrating some part of his or her nation’s heroic
history, may be the most truly radical work of art possible. Mel
Gibson’s reverential film on the Passion of Christ—whose potential
power to move hearts and minds is attested to by the smear-campaign
against it—is also likely to stand as very great art. Another recent
outstanding film is Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s Quo Vadis? (based on the
Nobel-winning historical novel by Henryk Sienkiewicz).
On a more mundane level, one can enjoy the still-practised
popular artforms of historical and battlefield painting (which often
focusses on the American Civil War) as well as much of the art associated
with fantasy and science fiction subgenres—such as that of Boris Vallejo
and Frank Frazetta. Much of the fantasy subgenre today continues in the
directions set by J.R.R. Tolkien’s monumental Lord of the Rings
(recently rendered magnificently in film by Peter Jackson, and having its
two current, best-known illustrators in John Howe and Ted Nasmith).
Certain elements of science fiction such as those represented in Frank
Herbert’s DUNE and Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers,
have distinctly neo-traditionalist elements, as does George Lucas’ Star
Wars, albeit to a limited extent. The highly "progressive" Star
Trek future gives a possible place to semi-traditionalist impulses
only through "dissident" identifications such as those with the
alien Klingon, Romulan, or Bajoran cultures. Given the producers’
biases, these portrayals of "traditionalism" can be seen, to a
large extent, as manifest parodies.
Dystopian science fiction movies such as Blade
Runner (based on Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric
Sheep?) can certainly be interpreted in a traditionalist way. And
Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, if carefully looked at, is
indeed a very sharp critique of many trends and directions of our
current-day society. Although it may have escaped the attention of most
professional critics, the posited abolition of God, history, and family in
Huxley’s dystopic society points to the book as a conservative classic.
At the same time, while Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four appears prima
facie as a critique of coercive, violent totalitarianism (of the
Soviet or Nazi type), it also draws brilliant attention to the critical
role of language and manipulation of language and thought in maintaining
tyranny—or, as Orwell puts it: "Newspeak is Ingsoc, Ingsoc is
Newspeak."
It could be argued that the unrelenting advance of
technology in Western societies—resulting in the creation of a mass,
lowest-common-denominator society driven by advertising, consumption,
notions of designated victimhood, and political-correctness—has
attenuated the possibilities of the creation and reception of great art,
which depends on the valorization of "the high". The late modern
society is
indeed an extraordinarily harsh climate for the
nourishing of the what the Ancient Greeks called the megapsychlos—"the
great-souled man". In the sprawling and multifarious social and
cultural landscape of late modern society, which is at places entirely
barren, and in others choked with luxuriant weeds, there are only a few
niches where more elevated art and culture can exist.
It would be the task of a rooted social and cultural
criticism to try to portray accurately the near-dystopic configurations of
late modern society, to try to identify the few remaining foci of
resistance, and to endeavor to coalesce these (to the extent it is
possible) into a broader social, cultural, and spiritual resistance
movement. Pointing to the thinness, even barrenness, of late modernity
brings into high relief how much has been lost of human experience,
despite the enormous gains in physical wealth by which North America is
characterized—a wealth which, though unevenly distributed, far exceeds
that available to any premodern society. Ours is indeed a materially very
wealthy society, but one of extreme social, cultural, spiritual,
religious, moral, psychological—and hence artistic—impoverishment.
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War on a Rainy Afternoon:
Boardgames and Myth-Making
by
Mark Wegierski
EDITOR’S NOTE
Mr. Wegierski and I both entertained reservations about
whether or not the following descriptions and reviews of a favorite
national pastime would be appropriate in Praesidium. I ultimately
decided in the affirmative, since these portraits of a culture at play at
least imply (when they do not explicitly remark) that the games’
designers bring curiously skewed political and cultural assumptions to
their fantasies about North America’s future. Readers can smile or fume
at such assumptions, or shrug them off; but it bears emphasis, I believe,
that a kind of utopian revisionism (from whose view Western culture always
appears dystopic) has bled deeply into the marketplace’s heart of
capitalist darkness. In other words, PC, while it may not sell
merchandise, is now commonly sold with merchandise. If this is a surprise
to you, then we are delighted to have lifted the veil. ~ J.H.
What Are Historical Boardgames or Wargames? An
Introduction
Historical boardgames are called by various names:
wargames, conflict-simulation games (or simply, conflict-simulations),
historical adventure games, military history games, simulation games, etc.
There are various near and distant relations of historical boardgames,
such as military boardgames on hypothetical near-future or science
fictional conflicts. The typical wargame situation places the players at
the beginning of major historical battle or campaign, e.g. the battle of
Waterloo (Napoleon vs. Wellington), or Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet
Union (Operation Barbarossa). The opposing players have forces
corresponding to the historical situation, which they then move around and
engage in combat according to an established set of procedures and rules.
A preponderance of historical boardgames deals with land battles or
campaigns, where air or sea elements play little or no part.
Historical boardgames typically include the following
components: a map of geographical terrain divided into hexagons
("hexes") to regularize movement and combat procedures;
one-hundred to four-hundred colour-coded, die-cut, ¼" x ¼"
"counters", some of which represent the "units" which
fought in battle or campaign (e.g. regiments or divisions) and others
which serve as game-markers with different functions; and the
above-mentioned set
of rules. A "unit" will typically have a
"combat factor", a numerical quantification of its strength
(e.g. "4") in comparison to all other units that fought in the
battle or campaign, and a "movement factor", a numerical
quantification of how far it can move in a given turn (e.g.
"5"). There are various of types of terrain, some of which cost
extra movement points to
enter or cross. The terrain scale chosen is usually
such that no more than two or three units can occupy the same hex at the
end of the player’s movement, thus rewarding effective dispersal and
concentration of forces.
The typical wargame is played sequentially, in
"phases". Generally, one player gets to move any or all of his
units and attack eligible enemy units if he wishes, and then the other
player moves his units and attacks eligible enemy units, and so forth.
Combat is resolved via the Combat Results Table and the roll of a
six-sided or ten-sided die. First, the player calculates the number of
combat factors he can bring to bear on adjacent enemy units. The general
objective is to get the best odds possible while making the most effective
series of attacks. Combat results usually require a retreat of one or two
hexes in a certain direction, an "exchange" (at least one unit
of both players is eliminated), or the elimination of all of either
players’ units involved in this particular combat. Elimination
represents the shattering of the effective operational structure of a
military unit, not the killing of every single soldier in the unit. 8
combat factors attacking 3 combat factors makes 2:1 odds (rounding is
generally done in favour of the "non-active" player who is
"defending" in that phase, regardless of the over-all situation
on the board). These are usually fairly poor odds, with some chance of a
negative result for the attack. Experienced players can utilize the
various capabilities of their units, e.g. the ability of units
representing armoured formations to advance 1 hex after combat, to maximum
effect, thus creating situations where weaker attacks can achieve better
results.
An important feature of many games are the rules for
units’ Zones of Control (ZOC’s), the six hexagons surrounding the hex
the unit is on, which typically block the retreat paths of the opposing
player’s units during combat as well as forcing the other player’s
units to stop during their movement phase. Typically, a unit which is
required to retreat as a result of combat, but which cannot do so because
it is surrounded by hostile ZOC’s, is eliminated instead. ZOC’s are
crucial for constructing successful defensive perimetres because of their
ability to interdict opponent’s movement. Sometimes ZOC rules require
that all friendly units adjacent to enemy units must attack all of those
enemy units, which makes the distribution of units’ attacks crucial to
success. (The combat factors of individual units are generally
indivisible.)
The variation and layering on of more complex rules and
combat mechanisms is virtually endless (e.g. ranged combat—the delivery
of combat factors beyond adjacent hexes; an additional movement segment
for armoured units; or in-hex combat, where strong attacking units try to
"over-run" weak defenders). This complexity requires an
increasing level of skill from the players, and increases the demands on
making a truly skillful use of the forces and capabilities one has
available. (A simple example of such skill is the landing of a German
paratroop division in Paris in a game on the 1940 Battle of France
campaign, thus ending the game immediately, if the French player has been
so stupid as to leave Paris open.) Another complicating rule is logistics
and supply effects, which means that if units cannot meet certain supply
criteria—e.g., the tracing of a line free of enemy ZOC’s to a supply
centre (usually a hex on the map representing a city)—their combat and
movement abilities are more or less severely downgraded. (For example,
they cannot move or attack.) Once a person has grasped the basic dynamic
of the sequence of play, the play follows easily for the ten or so turns
an average simple game lasts. (Viz., you move as many of your eligible
units as you wish; you set up a series of attacks on your opponent’s
units; you execute those attacks and carry out their effects—then your
opponent moves his eligible units; he sets up a series of attacks; and he
carries out their effects—before passing the baton to you again as a
second game-turn begins)
One of the interesting aspects of the game is that
movement, generally speaking, is never compulsory (and attacks on adjacent
enemy units are not usually compulsory, either), so a player is open to
try a wide variety of strategies in a game where forces are more-or-less
evenly balanced. In a game of unbalanced forces, for example, on the 1939
invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany, the Polish player’s skill would
consist in an adroit placement and fall-back of his army rather than in
making a large number of successful attacks. Victory in game terms would
be this player’s if the Germans failed to achieve their historical
result of a complete victory.
However, many historical boardgames are set up so that
both players get a chance to make big attacks at some point in the game;
for example, where a large force is attacking a small force which is
quickly being reinforced. The interweave of different unit capabilities,
different aspects of warfare simulated (such as supply, morale, and
command control considerations), and a plethora of different historical
settings (World War II; Napoleonic; American Civil War, etc.), as well as
different levels of war (tactical, operational, and strategic, to name the
main three), allows for an enormous amount of variety in the atmosphere,
flavour, and particular stratagems or tactics used to secure victory in
these games.
If a person finds these games difficult even at the
most introductory level, or lacks interest in military history, or
vehemently feels that conflict-simulation is immoral, or simply views
these games as a useless waste of time, he or she not likely to find
enjoyment in the hobby.
Paleocons vs. Neocons in Board Wargames
There is in America and Canada today a large number of
what could be called "geek subgenres". Apart from a more general
interest in some of these areas by a larger proportion of the population,
they are also followed by dedicated fan communities. These would include
science fiction (such as Star Trek and Star Wars); fantasy
(which was pioneered by J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings);
role-playing games (such as Dungeons & Dragons); comic-books;
and multifarious types of gaming, including historical boardgames (also
called wargames, strategy games, or conflict simulations). Historical
boardgames could be seen as a more reality-based alternative in relation
to most forms of gaming and fan identifications today. Having attended the
same high school—University of Toronto Schools (UTS), a unique
"model" school affiliated with the University of Toronto—as
David Frum in the late 1970s, I knew him to be a fairly avid wargame
player.
Among the games popular at that time was Invasion:
America, a wargame portraying a hypothetical future invasion of the
United States and Canada by three hostile powers—the "European
Socialist Coalition", the "South American Union" and the
"Pan-Asiatic League". Another very popular game was Sinai,
a depiction of the Arab-Israeli Wars of 1956, 1967, and 1973. There was
also a game called Oil War, which portrayed a
"near-future" attempt by the United States to seize control of
virtually the entire oil supplies of the Middle East (in the wake of a new
OPEC embargo) by the launching of a simultaneous attack against Iran,
Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and the smaller Gulf countries. The play of the game
usually resulted in easy American victories, as the swarms of
"nifty-looking" counters representing air force and naval
aviation units—supported by airborne infantry and amphibiously landing
Marines—blasted away the Arab and Iranian armies. There was no inkling
that massive guerilla resistance to the American assault might occur. The
Soviets were also conspicuously absent.
While there certainly was an element of gamers who
enjoyed playing Nazi Germany in World War II East Front games a bit too
much, there were also many young neocons who were drawn to the hobby. As a
young, traditionalist-leaning student, I was repelled by the "Nazi
worship" elements of the hobby, but the main concerns of the young
neocons were to some extent remote to me. In any case, I appreciated their
willingness at that time to confront Soviet imperialism. Looking back at a
shared interest in wargames by persons of varying outlooks (most of which
would be conventionally considered as being "on the Right"), I
must say a number of contrasts have emerged.
David Frum is today one of the most important persons
in the United States—who, it could be sharply said, is currently
"playing wargames for real". It could be asked, however, if his
interest in the hobby ever actually imparted a genuine historical sense to
him—or any sense of the real suffering entailed by war. Perhaps it is
subliminally just a feeling of pushing colorful cardboard counters around
on a finely designed map, in search of "the perfect offensive".
Persons of "paleo" persuasions usually have
their understanding of war leavened by a more careful study of history and
culture. They understand, for example, that the program of a "global
democratic revolution" cannot be considered as any kind of
"conservatism"; and that the defense of America’s heartland
"base" is more important than imperial engagements half a world
away. So an adolescent interest in wargaming can lead one along various
paths.
The interest in historical board wargames can be seen,
nevertheless, as among the most "conservative" of the "geek
subgenres" mentioned above. Indeed, one can highlight the contrast
between historical board wargames vs. role-playing games and electronic
shoot-’em-ups. Historical wargamers and players of Dungeons &
Dragons are often considered "mortal enemies" in the broader
gaming hobby. Historical boardgames have been commercially marketed in the
U.S. since the late 1950s. Codified rules for playing with historical
miniatures (i.e., so-called "toy soldiers") are one of the
origins of historical boardgaming. Abstract military boardgames such as RISK,
Tactics II, and Diplomacy are also close cousins. Diplomacy
was one of the favorite pastimes of many university students, especially
those studying political science. Avalon Hill pioneered the genre in the
late 1950s, with its game on the battle of Gettysburg. The company moved
through decades of varying success, bringing out such titles as PanzerBlitz
(World War II tactical armored combat), Third Reich (strategic
WWII), and the Advanced Squad Leader (ASL) system of tactical WWII
combat. The firm was acquired in the late-1990s by toys and games giant
Hasbro, resulting in the abandonment of nearly all of its game lines,
deemed far too complex for the current-day audience.
Wargaming’s Golden Age was the late 1970s, the heyday
of its second major company, SPI (Simulations Publications, Inc.).
Historical board-games were heavily undermined by the Dungeons &
Dragons company, TSR, which took over SPI in the early 1980s and let
historical games languish in favor of building up the fantasy role-playing
games (RPG’s) market. Arcade-style electronic games and collectible card
games (CCG’s— now called trading card games, or TCG’s—such as Magic:
The Gathering and, most spectacularly, Pokemon, both controlled
by Wizards of the Coast) now challenged what remained of board wargaming
in the late 1980s and the 1990s. TSR was itself taken over by WOTC, which
in turn has been bought out by Hasbro.
Today, board wargaming (as well as playing games of the
wargame type in electronic format) might be seen as a more
reality-grounded alternative to currently prevalent gaming genres. Fantasy
RPG’s (especially of the newer, darker variety, such as those in X-Files-type
settings), might tend to encourage an excess of florid and disorienting
imaginings in some people. The mostly arcade-style electronic games
(typically, the so-called First Person Shooters such as DOOM) are centered
around grotesquely individualized, very graphic killing, and are in most
cases entirely history-less. While there are of course more abstract,
electronic, arcade-type games (typified by the 1980s PAC-MAN and TETRIS),
the addictive element of repetitive hand and eye movements is certainly
present in most of them. In CCG’s, one finds, apart from the commonly
seen occult aspects, a combination of collecting and gambling impulses,
which are often extremely addictive.
The concrete facts—the historical situation, the
game-board, and the counters representing military units—may help a
person playing a boardgame to avoid falling into the overwrought
fantasizing sometimes found in RPG’s, and the excessively addictive
aspects of FPS’s and CCG’s. Even when one plays ahistorical board
wargames (such as those based on near-future, alternative-history, or
sci-fi situations, or those set in Tolkien-style fantasy worlds), or plays
strategy games electronically, there might be a certain residual
concreteness, a shielding from being overwhelmed by what is in other cases
the often highly lurid "virtual reality" of the game. This
concreteness is also present in historical miniatures, but the financial
costs of these elaborately painted historical "figures" are
clearly much greater, particularly if one wants to play out such great
battles as Waterloo.
One should mention, also, the rather lurid subgenre of
miniatures gaming represented by the Warhammer Fantasy and Warhammer
40,000 A.D. systems; as well as the existence of other fantasy and
sci-fi miniatures systems. Chatham Hill Games produces a number of small,
simple, inexpensive games, suitable for children (not all of which are
strictly wargames) and based on American history. Gamewright Games
produces a series of mostly young children’s games, most of which are
not military-related.
The main Internet portals for wargaming are www.grognard.com
and www.consimworld.com.
The major printed historical gaming magazine (which
includes a game with each issue) is Strategy &
Tactics (published by Decision Games, which has acquired what remained
of the old SPI). In December 2001, the other major gaming magazine, COMMAND,
and its parent company, XTR, declared bankruptcy, after having produced
fifty-four issues packed with military history (with one or two games in
each issue) and several games outside of the magazine.
Some other extant boardgame companies include GMT,
Avalanche Press, Clash of Arms, Columbia Games, Critical Hit/Moments in
History, L2 Design Group, and Eagle Games. There have also arisen
companies that produce, through desk-top publishing, games on often
obscure topics, such as Schutze and Microgame Design Group. One should
also mention the family-oriented boardgames imported from Germany, such as
the very popular Settlers of Catan. These games, which typically
have very high-quality components, are also less explicitly military. In
Europe, there are also, among other enterprises, Azure Wish, Phalanx
Games, and the French gaming magazine Vae Victis. The Australian
Design Group is known for its massive World War II games. While they too,
can sometimes be very obsessive, historical boardgames could be seen as
more grounded in reality and in somewhat useful knowledge (about military
history, strategy, and real geography) than role-playing games and most
electronic-based games.
It could be argued that most board wargames can usually
harness some commonly occurring "armchair general" desires to
relatively positive ends. In some cases, however, the impact of the "wargame
mentality" may be less salutary.
Exploring Social Alternatives through Eclectic Media
Review of the Magazine: GameFix: The Forum of Ideas
and of "Near-Future Conflict" boardgame Crisis 2000:
Insurrection in the United States!
Magazine: GameFix: The Forum of Ideas
(Sacramento: Game Publications Group no. 2 [November
1994])
Game: Crisis 2000: Insurrection in the United
States!
(enclosed in GameFix)
N.B.: The subtitle, "The Forum of Ideas," was
dropped in issue 8; the publication was renamed Competitive Edge
starting with issue 10. The company has renamed itself One Small Step.
GameFix/Competitive Edge markets itself as producing
"wargames for people who don’t like wargames." The conflict
simulation games they offer with every issue of their magazine are
deliberately designed to be simple to play (at least by wargame standards)
and to be relatively quick and easy to finish (often less than an hour).
GameFix/ Competitive Edge had also intended to feature non-military games
dealing with mountain-climbing, various major-league sports, etc. In the
last few years, the publication schedule of the magazine has slowed to a
crawl, and it is doubtless going through difficulties.
In tune with the aimed-for simplicity, Crisis 2000
has a map of the U.S. consisting of 14 regions in total. They are of three
types—metroplex, developed, and wilderness. (The numerous black dots
representing cities and military bases play no role in the actual game.)
There are also three boxes on the map representing U.S. overseas
deployment areas. The game has a hundred counters, of which fifty-five
represent military and political forces or "units", seventeen
represent "infrastructures", and thirty-seven are
"crisis" markers used to augment the strength of one’s forces
in different ways.
There are two notable things about the
units/infrastructure counters. First of all, they are printed on both
sides, showing the same formation (e.g. High-Tech Arms Division) in
different colors, on different sides of the counter. This economizing
measure is useful in terms of indicating immediate "defections"
of military and political units as well as infrastructures to the other
side, which is one of the main aspects of so-called "Data
Conflict". Secondly, the units have two values apart from their
movement allowance: their ratings for "Data Conflict" and for
"Armed Conflict". There are special rules for certain units,
e.g. the "Cybernauts" usually cannot be attacked through
"Armed Conflict", as they are presumed to be clandestine, while
federal police forces can in some circumstances use their higher
"Armed Conflict" rating against the "Cybernauts".
Ultimately, however, the game often simply amounts to "move in with
your units and try to bash your opponent," although the use of
randomly drawn "Crisis" markers to weaken your opponent or
augment your own offensive is critical to success. (The three numbers on a
typical Crisis marker represent its conflict-augmentation values when
committed to metroplex, developed, or wilderness regions for Data or Armed
Conflict.) The more combat and political forces are committed to a given
battle, the greater the chance of "Collateral Damage", which
impacts on the winner of the battle as well.
The magazine’s background material to the game is
highly interesting (pp. 6-8, 22-24), although written from a very
libertarian slant. It is a good beginning for speculations about possible
future civil conflicts in the U.S., and for further analysis of the
sociopolitical impact of the Internet. Game designer Joe Miranda points to
the "Clipper Chip" controversy—the attempt to create a
microchip standard for all e-mail encryption, which would also allow for
the decryption of all electronic messages through special "keys"
held by government agencies. (The current "standard" is a
plethora of commercially available encryption programs, which may often be
virtually inaccessible to government monitoring.) Miranda also writes
about Operation Sun Devil, launched by the U.S. Secret Service in 1990.
Among the targets was a gaming company, Steve Jackson Games, whose
"cyberpunk" role-playing game—although dealing with fictional
hardware and software—was considered to possess such verisimilitude as
to constitute a "how-to" guide. The company faced great
difficulties, since all its computer equipment and files contained therein
were impounded; however, it was eventually vindicated in court, while
gaining great publicity on behalf of its products. One of the results of
Operation Sun Devil was the formation of the Electronic Frontier
Foundation, which is one of the chief groups fighting for complete freedom
of communication on the Internet (although it has itself sometimes been
criticized by more radical groups for neglecting its mission).
The magazine also mentions a provocative article
published in the Winter 1992-93 issue of Parameters, the U.S. Army
War College’s journal, by Lt. Colonel Charles J. Dunlap, Jr., entitled,
"The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012." The article’s
main purpose appeared to be to critique the very deep cuts under Clinton
to the U.S. military, but especially to protest the increasing use of the
U.S. armed forces for political ends, both at home and abroad. In the
future, both these trends are seen as sapping U.S. morale and combat
effectiveness—to the point where a major U.S. defeat in the Persian
Gulf-area causes the military to turn against its inept political masters,
supposedly cheered on by much of the civilian sector.
Among the eclectic mixture of other references listed
are James Burnham’s political classic, The Managerial Revolution,
and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.
The game offers seven scenarios, with differing
force-mixes for the two opposing players (unlike many political games like
Diplomacy, this is strictly a two-player game).
The seven main scenarios (p. 20) are:
- Coup 2001: The Military attempts to seize power from a corrupt
civilian government.
- Culture Wars: The country splits wide open between Cyber-Futurists
and Family Values Traditionalists.
- UN Occupation: The United Nations dispatches a peacekeeping force to
suppress the outlawed American firearms, tobacco, and rogue computer
industries.
- War on Freedom: The government makes a preemptive strike to clamp
down on crime, local secessionist movements, unwed mothers, computer
hackers, and other threats to the national security.
- Generation X: Everybody against the younger generation! [or, should
that be, the younger generation against everybody else!—reviewer]
- Anarchy in the USA: Various groups unite to fight for life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness.
- Civil War II: Fed up with the Feds, state and local governments
declare independence, backed by their National Guards and unofficial
local militias.
In GameFix no. 9 (p. 26), a further scenario is added,
"The Militia War": The trend of the 1990s was toward forming
local militias to protect the citizenry from real or imagined threats from
criminals and government interference. By the year 2000, the Feds,
deciding that the movement is too large and dangerous, launch an operation
to disarm the militias.
Many of these scenarios are clearly rooted in a
specifically American experience of the world. Although all of them point
to identifiable social and political realities, the U.S. fortunately seems
rather distant from a scenario where any of these would metamorphose into
an actual "shooting" civil war (both the game and this review of
course being somewhat ironic exercises).
One questionable aspect of the game would be what could
be seen as its huge overrating of the impact of "the Cybernauts"
and Internet. In the reviewer’s opinion, "Cybernaut" units
should be re-interpreted as representing the media in general (or at least
its most senior and activist persons). If a "Cybernaut" unit was
seen as standing for a massive agglomeration of media-leaders—such as
film producers and directors, key television network people, hundreds of
newspaper, book or magazine publishers, and the best-known investigative
journalists, as well as the Internet activists themselves—then such a
projection of power would seem more warranted. The merger of AOL with Time
Warner showed the hunger for "hard content" as part of a
successful Internet strategy, albeit much of what Time Warner offers is,
admittedly, "mere entertainment". Very many people today,
however, fundamentally live and define themselves by their varied
entertainments.
Another game inaccuracy, in the reviewer’s opinion,
is the zero ratings of military units in ‘Data Conflict". While the
military might find it difficult to initiate political struggle, it is
certainly among the most cohesive groups in society. Propaganda might
degrade a military unit somewhat, but never to the point where it comes
over to another side, with fully intact combat and movement capabilities.
It would probably "break" completely before changing sides. The
strengths of irregular fighting formations also seem rather overvalued in
relation to disciplined, cohesive military units with heavy equipment.
It may be seen that the onset of a period of high
prosperity and low unemployment in the 1990s put to rest (at least for the
time being) the dangers of major civil upheaval in the U.S. However, the
developments in social and cultural matters are more troubling. Indeed,
the U.S. continues to be engulfed by a series of bitter and highly
divisive "culture wars". At the same time, the U.S. is now
heavily engaged abroad in an increasingly unpopular war, and the economic
signs today are at best mixed.
Review of the "Near-Future Conflict" Boardgame,
Minuteman: The Second American Revolution
Minuteman: The Second American Revolution
Designer: James F. Dunnigan
Graphics: Redmond A. Simonsen
Development: Joseph Balkoski, Edward Curran
Simulations Publications, Inc., 1976
Minuteman: The Second American Revolution is a
conflict simulation or wargame of relatively moderate complexity,
published by Simulations Publications Incorporated (SPI), then the
premiere company in the field, in 1976 (the U.S. Bicentennial Year). It is
today a collector’s item, though Decision Games, which has recently
acquired rights to most of the SPI game-line, might bring out a revamped
edition at some point. Although certain game-mechanics are discussed in
this review, most of the focus will be on the conceptual framework
animating the game, especially in terms of its possible predictive
aspects.
The game is played on a map which represents most of
North America and on which terrain is regularized into hexes. The main
terrain and hex types are "clear", "rough brush",
"south winter cover", "north winter cover", and Major
and Minor Population areas. These are meant to represent the main types of
terrain significant to conducting insurgency and counterinsurgency in
North America. (For example, units in severe terrain types during a Winter
turn are sometimes eliminated because of lack of supply.) There are 400
counters of various types in this game, though, fortunately, not all of
them are on the map at the same time. Most of the counters represent
"units", which include army divisions and brigades;
counterintelligence groups (CIG’s); government agents; government
informers; rebel minutemen (small, select revolutionary leadership teams);
rebel networks; and rebel militia. There are also about 130 other types of
counters. These include 40 "special events" markers, which are
randomly picked throughout the game and can be used to enhance one’s
efforts. "Special events" include enhanced movement for one of
your units; increased mobilization efforts; betrayals; and assassination
attempts. Other markers represent "riots" (which is one of the
main ways for the Rebel Player to augment his forces), "unrest",
(which has weaker effects than a riot), "pins" (which is one of
the main effects of rebel activity on government military forces), and
markers denoting rebel units which "go underground" (meaning
they are doubled in defense strength when attacked by government forces,
but cannot move or carry out attacks themselves).
The units have several notable characteristics. First
of all, in contrast to many wargames, the movement allowances do not
appear on the units, as they are standardized for different types of
formations. For the high-intensity-combat units, which include U.S. army
divisions, Canadian army brigades, Mexican army brigades, and Rebel
Militia, the two printed values represent attack and defense strength. For
government agents, CIG’s, rebel minutemen, and rebel networks, the three
printed values represent attack strength, defense strength, and build
strength, the third value being a quantification of that unit’s ability
to place new friendly units on the map. Finally, informers have only one
value printed on their counter, which can only be used in one defined way
against rebels.
The second notable feature of the units is that they
are printed on both sides. For high-intensity combat units, this means
that they are initially selected as "untried": that is, neither
player knows their actual strength until they are committed to combat. For
the political units, it means they have a weaker (unaugmented) and
stronger (augmented) side, which economizes on the number of counters
needed and also affords an improved build and conflict-outcome procedure:
i.e., flipping the unit up or down. (Informers are blank on the reverse
side.)
A third feature is the rather curious use of some
well-known names of individuals and organizations for the informers,
agents, minutemen, rebel nets, and rebel militia unit designations. The
designer rather disingenuously claims that this "simulates the
employment of these names as code-names (i.e. the units do not
actually represent the named organizations and individuals)." While
the pseudo-appearance of various famous fictional, and even contemporary,
figures as well as of well-known (and currently-existing!) organizations
such as the "K of C" (Knights of Columbus) might have some
novelty value, it is also often in exceedingly poor taste. Apart from the
use of the names of many
actually-existing organizations and living persons,
four famous Star Trek names are used for informers, while government
agents include the names of a number of comic-book heroes. Fortunately for
the designer, the product was probably considered too marginal to bring
lawsuits from any of the concerned fictional properties, or from actual
individuals and actually existing organizations.
Looking at this mish-mash carefully, one finds that the
1st Rebel faction is mostly led by American Revolutionary War names; its
nets are either American patriotic or far-left organizations; and its
militia units use WASP names. The 2nd Rebel faction is led mostly by names
associated with African-American history; its nets consist mostly of
well-known union organization names (e.g. AFL); and its militia units are
designated by common American names, two of which are non-WASP. The 3rd
Rebel faction consists mostly of names of American labor leaders, while
most of its nets are named after African-American organizations; and its
militia designations are all WASP, with the curious exception of
"Nagy" (referring, of course, to one of the leaders of the 1956
Hungarian Uprising). The Canadian rebel militia is named, if one can
believe it, after Trudeau, Pearson, and four prominent hockey players, as
well as "Loup Gru" and "Dieppe"! It is too bad that
the game-designer did not attempt to put some method in this madness,
eliminating some rather offensive "borrowings" and perhaps
identifying three main Rebel factions: "American patriots",
"American labor", and "the Rainbow Coalition".
Let us now turn to the main scenarios of the game. The
basic scenario is entitled, "The Enemy Within". It has some
fairly interesting speculation about a period of diminished (and
diminishing) expectations, to take place in the U.S. after about 2015. It
sounds in some respects like the period of "early Nineties’
retrenchment" in Canada (although not in the United States): e.g.,
"Some 50% [of people] were either unemployed or vastly
underemployed." At the same time, the idea of the military
practically becoming the most important and most prestigious social sector
in American society seems a little strained, and certainly has no
applicability to Canada. The designer’s conceptualization ignored the
possibility that tyranny in the U.S. is far more likely to emerge from
managerial-therapeutic agendas of big-government and big-business, or
perhaps from the pronounced tendency to social-engineering of
"political correctness", which might well create "the
tyranny of `the just'". Potential lines of conflict along ethnic
lines, as well as between the rural hinterland/periphery vs. the urban
nodes, are also ignored. It could be argued that the U.S. today is,
generally speaking, moving in a left-liberal rather than rightwing
direction. Political conflict in the former situation would be highly
unlikely to emerge into outright and massive armed struggle.
One additional notable element of this game scenario is
the possibility of either player calling in up to six foreign intervention
divisions, which are provided in the countermix. There are three main
"Alternative Scenarios". The first of these is the
"Partisan" Scenario, which is based on the now laughable premise
of the invasion of America by a "European Socialist Coalition"
(shades of that famous movie, Red Dawn!). The scenario is played on
the east side of the map (which is considered "under occupation"
after a successful amphibious and airborne ESC invasion of the East
Coast). For the purposes of this scenario, the 24 U.S. army divisions in
the countermix are used to represent the occupation forces divisions. The
ESC gets to use four security divisions, as well. Since sixteen ESC
divisions are tied to garrisoning "the Front Line" along the
Mississippi, one suspects the American Partisans are rather likely to
achieve their objective of cutting these divisions’ Lines of
Communication to the East Coast ports.
The second "Occupation" scenario portrays
"North American" resistance to a "European"
occupation. There is certainly some kind of American phobia expressed in
explicitly referring to "the Europeans" as villains—reflected,
for example, in the following phrase: "most Americans seemed willing
to submit their continent to the satellite that Europe wished to make of
her." Not only is there a nonchalant presumption of the co-identity
of American, Canadian, and Mexican interests; in actuality, many people in
Europe today feel that it is precisely the U.S. that is imposing its will
and way of life on Europe (and on the planet as a whole), albeit through
cultural rather than military means.
The final scenario, "Civil War", is the
endpoint of this rather curious future-history. Who could make sense out
of this mish-mash: "The...partisan leaders... began to exert strong
pressure on the President for an isolationist foreign policy and a
dramatically reduced Defense budget. The new Progressive Party—formed by
the former Partisan leaders—expressed strong Socialist ideals [which
they had supposedly just fought against—see above] that were entirely
rejected by most Army officers. Many of these officers (and government
officials) formed the Constitutionalist Party, which called for the
reinstitution of the Constitution of 1787 along traditionalist lines [in
the 21st century?]." The curious figure of a "General Albert
Sanchez" who launches a coup on October 1 is introduced. About the
best thing that can be said about the scenario is that it points to the
growing influence of Hispanics in
America! The main feature of the scenario as a game is
that initially deployed units can change allegiance, with army divisions
possibly converting to rebel militia, rebel networks possibly converting
to weak CIG’s, and minutemen possibly converting to weak government
agents. In other words, the situation is highly chaotic.
The fourth scenario, which has been alluded to above in
discussing the three Rebel factions, concerns three or four-player games.
In the four-player game, there is an interesting option for a player to
become "federalized" for one or more turns: i.e., to collaborate
with the government player in attacking other rebels. Also rather
interesting is the procedure by which, if the Government player is
eliminated, the Rebel player with the most nets becomes the Government
player: every Militia unit becomes an army division; every minuteman
becomes an agent (to the corresponding strength); and every Net becomes a
CIG (to the corresponding strength). The permutations of achieving victory
in this kind of multi-cornered struggle become interesting indeed.
Minuteman offers some rather innovative mechanics
to simulate unconventional warfare. One obvious omission in the game was
air power, which could have easily been incorporated by the use of
air-points augmenting government attack or defense strengths. The
helicopter forces for which Americans are so well-known do not explicitly
appear, either. Another obvious omission, naval power, could have easily
been simulated by naval bombardment points available to the government
player in hexes adjacent to the sea. Naval-based air power could also have
been easily represented, by having air-points with a limited range of use
from sea-hexes. The land-based Government nuclear arsenal, which Rebels
would certainly try to sabotage and/or take over, if not actually use, is
completely ignored. There are also no provisions for the struggle for U.S.
diplomatic and commercial resources abroad which would undoubtedly take
place.
It was certainly a major oversimplification of the
game-design not to take any of these factors into account. Perhaps,
however, the whole posited scenario would collapse into complete
improbability when taking into consideration the vast preponderance of
military force available to the U.S. government. For example, virtually
all personnel in the U.S. military, regardless of which branch or support
service they occupy, probably have sufficient training to fight as
land-infantry if necessary—certainly well enough to defeat the average
rural "patriot militiaman" or "urban guerilla". All
this suggests a re-design would do well to move the game onto the tracks
of social/political/economic, as opposed to military conflict.
It seems that the enormous build-up of ponderous
military and bureaucratic infrastructures in the late-twentieth century
Western societies forever precludes in those societies successful
"barricade revolutions" of the nineteenth or early-twentieth
century type; or the kinds of military coups typical of Latin American
"banana republics". Current-day social/political/ economic
conflict can certainly be very destructive to society; yet, while it is
accompanied by a degree of what could sardonically be called
"street-theatre", it is not destructive in the obvious way of
dissidents being rounded up, people being shot in the streets, etc. The
excruciatingly high pitch of programmatic, systematized, coercive/violent
totalitarianism in the "Western world" was probably reached in
the regimes of Hitler’s Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union. The
dangers of late modernity in current Western societies are of an entirely
different nature. Some would say that, because such dangers are not
immediately obvious, they are in some senses even more pernicious.
There is certainly more than one way of "skinning
the cat", i.e., of ruining or destroying a society. One aspect of the
game-mechanics that could be debated is the extent to which major urban
centers—as opposed to the hinterland—constitute the strong points of
the revolution. While urban centers are difficult to police and control in
the context of late modern liberal democracies (i.e., from the standpoint
of legitimate law enforcement); it would seem that an authoritarian, and
especially a totalitarian regime, would find control of the cities
comparatively far easier to effect. The countryside has always appeared to
be the natural locale for partisan or guerilla resistance against any
oppressive or semi-oppressive regimes.
In recent times in America, there has been a current of
speculation about a "second American revolution". It could be
argued that the American Civil War was itself "a second American
Revolution", both in terms of the South’s attempted secession and
in terms of the subsequent birth of a new America. Michael Lind’s recent
book, The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth
American Revolution, raises these kinds of questions. It also argues
that the New Deal and the Sixties could be interpreted as two other
profoundly revolutionary periods. Some might have seen Newt Gingrich and
his followers as trying to launch another revolution (or, really,
counter-revolution). However, one of the major characteristics of the more
recent "new American revolutions" has been the fact that they
never developed into armed struggle on a massive scale, although the
social transformations engendered have probably been no less wrenching and
far-reaching as a result of their somewhat more pacific natures.
Although Minuteman may still function reasonably
well as a game, its background concept and its premises are today clearly
severely flawed and utterly outdated. Should Decision Games consider
re-issuing the game, major work would be required on reconfiguring a
coherent background. How is the game to mirror the authentic ideological,
cultural, economic, regional, ethnic, and other lines of division of North
America today—or possibly, tomorrow? Should the game attempt to show
only purely political—as opposed to military—actions? The kind of
massive, large-scale military conflict shown in Minuteman appears
too hypothetical. If the situation had really gotten to the point where
the Government was authoritarian or semi-authoritarian (which would imply
a rather unlikely neutering of media criticism), then no patriot militias
in the woods or urban guerillas in the inner-cities could constitute much
of a challenge to it, given the modern military realities. A line of
future development where a military invasion of America from Europe (or
Asia, or anywhere else) would become possible also seems rather
hypothetical.
A re-design of the game Minuteman should
therefore probably focus on social/political/economic struggle, with few
military aspects, or perhaps be set somewhat further in the future. One
way of reducing what would certainly be the incredible military power of
the Government would be to conceive the conflict along a dichotomy other
than Government vs. Rebels, and have all of the starting military,
police, intelligence, and bureaucratic resources and assets both
appropriately weakened and "divvied up" between the two or more
different factions. The very idea that an entity called "the U.S.
Government", in all of its multifarious and many-splendored variety,
could ever achieve a single-minded unity of purpose, seems extremely
remote. The pinnacle structures of formal political national-level
leadership—the Federal Presidency, Cabinet, Congress, and the Supreme
Court—are in themselves extremely labyrinthine, yet they constitute only
a fraction of the persons and possible interests represented in the U.S.
Government.
Although there is no "shooting civil war" in
the U.S. today, the fact is that social/political/economic conflict can
often take on a highly sharp edge, with the losing side’s outlook
condemned to near-oblivion in the society. As Professor John Gray
(formerly at Oxford, now at LSE) has written, Machiavelli understood
everyday politics as at the same time an extension as well as sublimation
of war. Can it be hoped that truly democratic politics will maintain an
extensive range of models and options for a given population to choose
from?
back to Contents
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Fashion Art and the Moral Imagination
by
Gary Inbinder
Gary Inbinder is an attorney specializing in healthcare
law. He holds a B.A. in English Literature from the University of
Illinois, Chicago, and a J.D. from the University of La Verne
(California). We have been fortunate to publish two of his previous
essays: "The Judgment of Paris," Praesidium 4.2 (Spring
2004), 16-21; and "Cosmic Dualism, Moral Freedom, Teleology, and
Natural Rights," Praesidium 4.3 (Summer 2004), 39-42. Mr.
Inbinder resides in Woodland Hills, California.
I.
In his recent Art, A New History, English
historian Paul Johnson writes the following about what he calls
"Fashion Art": "Fashion plays a useful but necessarily
subordinate part in art. When it usurps order and tries to become art
itself, the result, sooner or later, is a culture war, and culture wars
are perhaps the cruelest and most demoralizing of all wars".1
In this essay, I discuss one particular example of
"Fashion Art" by the Turner Prize winning contemporary English
artist Damien Hirst. I briefly survey the history of Western aesthetics,
paying attention to ideas and political and socio-economic changes that
have impacted both art and the artist. I then place contemporary
"Fashion Art" within its historical and cultural context,
attempting to show how such "art" became a weapon in the culture
wars. Finally, I will discuss how such "art" is evidence of a
failure of the moral imagination among the cognoscenti of the
postmodern cultural elite.
I first became acquainted with Mr. Hirst’s work
through a typically insightful article by Roger Kimball appearing in the
December 4, 2001, volume of the New Criterion. The article was
entitled "Wrong Turns", and recounts a delightful "Emperor’s
New Clothes" story about an incident involving one of Mr. Hirst’s
"installations" at London’s Eyestorm Gallery. The Gallery’s
janitor "mistook" the work of "art", which consisted
of a pile of beer bottles, coffee cups, and overflowing ashtrays, for what
it appeared to be: a pile of rubbish. Like the little boy who saw that the
Emperor had no clothes, and therefore spoke the truth about what he
observed, the janitor saw that rubbish is rubbish, and therefore did his
job and cleaned up the mess.
Mr. Kimball found this incident aesthetically
enlightening and, in recognition of the janitor’s display of good
judgment and taste in the efficient performance of his duties, Kimball
proposed the janitor be offered a position as art critic at one of the
eminent London Newspapers. Alas, that was not to be; the
"installation" which the Gallery gathered together and
reassembled was valued in the six figures, and therefore regained its
dubious place of honor on display, rather than being left to the rubbish
heap where it belonged, and the janitor’s career as "art
critic" was apparently short lived.
Mr. Hirst, however, did get a good laugh out of this
incident, enjoying the publicity, and that cynical laughter of a clever
and skillful artist turned meretricious trickster, is the gist of Kimball’s
article. When Mr. Kimball writes about the wrong turns of
twentieth-century art, a major wrong turn has been toward the fashionable
practical joke. Transgressing the boundaries of bourgeois taste by
offending it with apparent hoaxes disguised as fine "art", such
as a six-figure heap of rubbish, is de rigueur among the
trendy elites of the art world. People get away with this nonsense because
there are few art critics who, like Roger Kimball, have the honesty and
guts to say that the "emperor has no clothes."
From the Dada "Art" of the 1920s, exemplified
by Marcel Duchamp’s famous, or should I say infamous, gallery display of
a urinal and Salvador Dali’s mustached Mona Lisa, through Andy Warhol’s
Pop Art of the 1960s and 1970s, to the postmodern heaps of rubbish,
photographs of sadomasochist homoerotica, crucifixes in bottles of urine
and dung-smeared "Madonnas", contemporary "Fashion
Art" has taken a wrong turn, indeed. It has, in the words of Paul
Johnson, become a weapon of the culture wars, the cultural equivalent of
biological or chemical Weapons of Mass Destruction. Further, while many
who play this game have a dubious underlying political agenda, all who
profit from it have an equally dubious socio-economic motive: wealth, fame
and acceptance within the trendy circle, with no concern for the
culturally corrosive and toxic effects such "art" produces.
So why do contemporary Western artists who are free
from the constraints of Church, state, and aristocratic and bourgeois
tastes produce rubbish and call it art? And why do well-educated critics
promote rubbish and wealthy patrons collect it? Could it be that Western
civilization and culture have produced new constraints, the constraints of
postmodern fashion, to which artists must adhere if they are to achieve
the recognition, status and success, both critical and financial, they
naturally desire? And what are the potential consequences to a culture
that is being undermined from within while simultaneously being attacked
from without? To attempt an answer to these questions, we must first
briefly review the history of Western aesthetics, the impact of Western
ideas, and the political and socio-economic forces acting on the artist
and the art he or she produces.
When discussing the aesthetics of Western culture and
civilization there is no better place to begin than the ideas of Plato and
Aristotle. Plato is known for a mimetic, or imitative theory
of art. In Plato’s philosophy, "time is the moving image of
eternity," and the fine arts are, at best, "an imitation of an
imitation." Beauty, on the other hand, refers to the symmetry and
proportion of form that transcends time and space, and is found primarily
in abstract ideas after which the world is patterned. Therefore, in my
understanding of the Platonic aesthetic, a great artist would be one whose
art came as close as possible to an expression of the ideal form. The
artist would reach the ideal beauty of form through a process of anamnesis,
or the recollection of ideas known to the soul in a previous
existence. The artist would then produce a material imitation of the ideal
form in space-time; the greater the artist’s wisdom and depth in
understanding and the greater his skill in execution, the closer the work
of art to the ideal.
Aristotle modified Plato’s mimetic theory so
that the work of art was not an imitation of an actual ideal form, but of
a possible or potential thing; and beauty depended on organic unity, a
unity in which every part contributes to the quality of the whole.
Therefore, we can see the practical side to an Aristotelian aesthetic; art
is an ordering process, and the "final cause" or purpose of art
ought to be the achievement of a beautiful, orderly creation which
enriches us all. Further, in Aristotle’s ethics we see the operation of
moral reasoning and judgment in the production of a work of art:
"Art, then… is a productive state which is truly reasoned, while
its contrary non-art is a productive state that is falsely reasoned; both
operate in the sphere of the variable".2 So for Aristotle,
the work of art, to achieve its potential, its telos or natural end—to
be a good and beautiful object that enriches our lives—must be truly
reasoned. That is to say, it must be developed and produced according to
some true theory or principle. "Non-art" would, in its
productive state, be developed according to some false theory or principle
subversive of beauty and order: for example the postmodern theories that
produced Mr. Hirst’s heap of rubbish.
The Classical aesthetic best exemplified by Plato and
Aristotle was carried forward in Christendom—most notably by the great
Doctors of the Church such as Augustine, who followed and expounded the
Platonic (or neo-Platonic) view, and Thomas Aquinas, who was a noted
Aristotelian. The Church considered salvation the highest purpose of Art.
A beautiful work of Art was supposed to draw the soul upward toward God
according to the Doctrines of the Church. Perhaps the greatest expression
of this Church approved-aesthetic is the majestic vaulting and stained
glass lighting of Western medieval Cathedrals, and the icons and mosaics
of the East which seem to exude a holy and eternal light. In the words of
Michelangelo, "If it be true that any beautiful thing raises the pure
and just desire of man from earth to God, the eternal fount of all, such I
believe my love."
The Church also approved the didactic purposes of art
in a pre-literate era, where works of art became visual representations of
Biblical teachings, just as morality plays were their verbal expression.
The Renascence heralded a re-examination of the
Classics, unfiltered by Church doctrine. Great secular patrons of the
Arts, such as the Florentine Medici, sponsored translations of Plato and
Aristotle into Latin by scholars such as Ficino, and also sponsored the
works of the greatest artists of the era such as Michelangelo, Leonardo,
and Raphael. The Church remained a great patron of the arts, and the
Inquisition monitored works of art for form and content. This was
especially true during and after the Protestant Reformation and the
subsequent Counter Reformation.
With the Reformation came translations of both the
Bible and the Classics into the vernacular and wide dissemination through
the printed medium, courtesy of the newly invented printing press. The
spread of learning among a growing middle class, social and economic
change nourishing a re-distribution of wealth, and the concomitant
development of bourgeois taste were best exemplified by the development,
in the Protestant Low Countries, of a new bourgeois aesthetic. This
seventeenth-century cultural milieu produced great masters of genre
painting, portraiture and landscape like Rembrandt and Hals, and minor
masters like Terborch, Hobbema, and the van Ruisdaels. The new Protestant
bourgeoisie promoted different styles, tastes, ends and purposes from the
art of Church, emperors, kings and nobles, but great art none the less:
art with a humane purpose that enriched the culture and which still
inspires today.
Another sea change in art came with the
eighteenth-century Enlightenment, the French Revolution and the subsequent
Napoleonic Imperium. The great neo-Classicist Jacques Louis David intended
his art to serve the ends of the new Revolutionary state. The
neo-Classical style of David and his most distinguished pupil Ingres,
which emphasized Republican virtue, moral seriousness, and a dulce et
decorum pro patria mori commitment to civic duty, set the tone of one
main line of French academic taste for more than a century.
Another new style of painting, best exemplified by
Delacroix and Gericault, appealed more to Romantic emotion and exoticism à
la Rousseau. Today we can admire and enjoy such painting for its
visual beauty and the great artistic skill with which it was executed,
rather than succumbing to the Romantic emotional excess drawn forth by
contemplating the "sublime powers of nature". At this distance
from nineteenth-century Romanticism, one might question what higher
purpose or ethical principle is served by a picture of a woman being
devoured by wild beasts, or a picture of the survivors of a shipwreck
driven to madness and cannibalism by hunger and thirst. Of course, one can
say the same of all the erotic nudes and scenes of sadistic violence,
drawn from both the classics and the Bible, which for centuries covered
the walls of European palaces. For example, many of the paintings of
François Boucher, a favorite of King Louis XV, could easily be dismissed
as "brothel art" if not for the great painterly skill and taste
with which they were executed. The fact that such art, which is obviously
not "rubbish", also arguably does not appear to serve some great
transcendent purpose, leads me to a discussion of the modern "art for
arts sake" aesthetic that took hold in the nineteenth century. In From
Dawn to Decadence, Jacques Barzun limns the social and economic
changes that underlie the new aesthetic, and it is worth quoting Barzun at
length:
With the artist becoming independent, a dedicated
being, art itself begins to be an entity distinct from work, thought,
faith, and social purpose. In the 16C [sic] it had not yet worn off
morality or ignored existing tastes, but the roots of autonomy were
there. When a mural or altar piece came to be judged not for its pious
effulgence and fitness for the spot in need of decoration, but instead
for what we now call its aesthetic merit, art for art’s sake was just
below the horizon. Aesthetic appreciation is something more than
spontaneous liking; a good eye for accurate representation is not
enough; one must be able to judge and talk about style,
technique, and originality. This demand gives rise to a new public
character: the critic. The future professional begins by being simply
the gifted art lover who compares, sees fine points, and works up a
vocabulary for his perceptions. He and his kind are not theorists but
connoisseurs and ultimately experts.3
The question remains whether or not, in making a
critical judgment about art, both the critic’s and the artist’s moral
responsibility must be considered correlative to their individual
autonomy, for individual autonomy, free from the constraints of Church,
state, aristocratic or bourgeois tastes, is the hallmark of the modern
artist.
The remainder of this essay will discuss the
twentieth-century rise of "Fashion Art" in which
"connoisseurs" and "experts" have taken sides in the
culture wars. They have become fashion arbiters who, rather than promoting
fine art, now usurp the cultural order by promoting non-art
"rubbish" like the Damien Hirst "installation". What
this produces is not "art for arts sake", nor art for a humane
or higher purpose, but non-art, for the sake of fashion, reputation and
financial gain.
II.
Before proceeding, I want to make a distinction between
the role fashion has always played in the fine arts, and "Fashion
Art". To make this distinction, I will return to Paul Johnson.
Earlier in this essay, I discussed the nineteenth-century French academic
style best exemplified by the neo-Classicism of David and Ingres, and the
Romanticism of Delacroix and Gericault. By the time of the Second Empire
in France, 1852-1870, these styles of painting—as taught at the Ecole
des Beaux-Arts, exhibited at the Paris salons, and marketed at galleries
in Paris, London, New York, etc.—had become stilted and mannered. Such
Salon art was exemplified by the works of Adolphe William Bouguereau and
Jean Louis Ernest Meisonnier; artists whose names and canvases once
commanded great respect and large sticker prices throughout the West, and
who are now largely forgotten except as historical footnotes. Such art was
well made, appealing, and fashionable at the time; it still has some
aesthetic value and appeal, and is not what Johnson refers to as
"Fashion Art". As Johnson writes, throughout history we see how
systems of art become over-elaborate, provoking a change in fashion in an
attempt to restore order and simplicity, and such change occurred
dramatically in Paris, the world’s fashion center at the time of the
Second Empire and the early years of the Third Republic (ca. 1871-1900).
The art of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and Salon was first challenged by the
contemporary realism of Courbet and Manet, followed by Impressionists like
Pisarro, Degas, and Monet, and the late Impressionists and
post-Impressionists like Toulouse-Lautrec, Seurat, Gauguin, Cezanne, and
van Gogh. The end of this era saw the rise of Cubism, Futurism, and other
forms of abstract and non-traditional art.
What distinguishes the often necessary and salutary
changes in artistic fashion from "Fashion Art" is, according to
Johnson, "when changes in art are forced through not by the quest for
order but simply the desire for novelty, itself enhanced by the needs of
commerce."4 Thus art becomes a marketable commodity driven
by the desire for novelty, like the creations of the Parisian dress
designers who seasonally raise and lower the hems of women’s skirts.
What is "in" is good, not because it is good, but because it is
"in" this season.
It is here that I want briefly to discuss 1920s art
fads in the socio-economic and political context of their time, and
conclude by relating those expressions of artistic nihilism with our own,
contemporary forms of non- art.
Of Dada, Paul Johnson is typically dismissive:
"Dada was pretentious, contemptuous, destructive, very chic,
publicity seeking and ultimately pointless". Of the more marketable
Surrealism, which itself was an outgrowth of Cubism, Futurism, and Dada,
Johnson writes, "Like Dada it was originally a literary movement… a
bastard compound of the new Freudian theories about the unconscious, then
becoming popular among the rich, oriental mysticism, a current craze
called automatic writing and other fads."5 This non-art
was born amid the cynicism and nihilism, of decadent, trendy, elite
counterculture following the First World War. It was a reaction to, and
rejection of, Western values which were fashionably blamed as root causes
of capitalist socio-economic oppression and imperialism, and which in turn
were fashionably seen as root causes of the war. However, during this same
period, the new radical (many among the 1920s elite would say
"progressive") politics of Lenin, Mussolini, and Hitler were
transforming Europe and leading it toward the inevitable catastrophe of
the Second World War.
The leaders of Communism and Fascism had very definite
ideas about art—most particularly Adolph Hitler, himself an erstwhile
artist of modest ability. I recall reading a story told by one of Hitler’s
childhood friends who remembered an outing with the nascent dictator.
Viewing the Austrian city of Linz from the prospect of a nearby hill, the
young Hitler portentously proclaimed he would some day tear down this
symbol of turn-of-the-century Austrian bourgeois provincialism and rebuild
it according to his own shining, progressive, and heroic ideals. The story
may be apocryphal, but it has about it the ring of truth, for it was in
Linz that the twelve-year-old Hitler attended his first Wagner opera, Lohengrin.
The adolescent Hitler was "swept away by an enthusiasm knowing no
bounds… by those ferocious passages of nationalism erupting throughout—the
German king’s impassioned call to end ‘the need of the Reich’
through a crusade against the eastern villains menacing German soil, and
the blood-curdling cry of the armed men in the final act… ‘A German
sword for the German land! Thus will the power of the Reich be
established.’"6 Understanding Hitler as both artist and
politician is illuminating, because I think no other individual better
illustrates the disastrous consequences that arise from a failure of the
moral imagination, where the willful assertion of the "artist’s"
warped vision of the world is loosed from all constraints of individual
moral responsibility.
The "arts" mandated by the totalitarian
National Socialist, Fascist, and Communist states are often seen as a
reaction to the decadence of "modern art". Further, it is
commonly understood that under a totalitarian regime art is made to serve
the most evil of ends, including the promotion of unjust and aggressive
war, the enslavement of nations, and the unjust imprisonment and genocide
of those held to be enemies of the state. However, not much is written or
said about how the producers and promoters of the more specious forms of
modern art, or "Fashion Art", became the collaborators—willing,
or unwilling—of totalitarianism. We must consider the fact that both the
totalitarian regimes and the trendy elites who produced, promoted, and
marketed the "Fashion Art" of the 1920s had an ostensibly common
enemy, which is often referred to as the "establishment", that
is to say the organic civil society which was the natural product of
millennia of Western civilization and culture. That
"establishment" was comprised of many free natural associations,
including the nuclear family; community groups; organizations; religious
institutions, which are the foundations of the social structure; and the
free market capitalist system, which is the foundation of the economic
structure.
The trendy 1920s counter-culture which produced,
promoted, marketed, and consumed "Fashion Art" contributed,
during the period between the two World Wars, to the subversion and
usurpation of the Western European establishment while simultaneously
benefiting from the socio-economic freedom and artistic autonomy created
by the established order it sought to usurp. Concurrently, in the
political sphere, the Communists, National Socialists, and Fascists could
point to the trendy counter-culture as a product of capitalist bourgeois
decadence: a "rubbish heap" that must be swept away by a
"progressive" movement toward a new world order—which brings
us full circle to Mr. Hirst’s recent London Gallery
"installation".
When we consider the fact that the totalitarian regimes
of the twentieth century would have thought Mr. Hirst’s artwork prima
facie evidence of capitalist bourgeois decadence and corruption, we
should also consider the old adage that two wrongs don’t make a right.
With great individual freedom and moral autonomy goes great individual
moral responsibility, and moral responsibility applies to artists just as
it applies to the rest of us. Those artists who take advantage of our
liberty and the free market economy to cynically perpetrate their trendy
hoaxes, while laughing up their sleeve at "conventional
morality" and making money into the bargain, are no better than those
who prostitute themselves to the evil ends of a totalitarian regime. As
Aristotle wrote, non-art, in its productive state, is that which is
developed according to some false theory or principle, and that applies
equally to the non-art that glorified the false theories and principles of
Communism and National Socialism and the non-art rubbish heap of
postmodernism.
So what is a true theory or principle of art? First,
from my perspective, art should not be used as propaganda or a weapon in
the culture wars. Art should be for the sake of humanity, and therefore it
should have a humane purpose, which requires, in the creative process,
balancing the artist’s intuitive sense and perception of his or her
world with the controlling force of a higher intuition. In Will,
Imagination and Reason: Babbitt, Croce and the Problem of Reality, Claes
Ryn relies on the aesthetic theories of the early twentieth century
American scholar Irving Babbitt, who wrote, "if art is to have humane
purpose, these intuitions of sense must come under the control of the
higher intuitions." Dr. Ryn elaborates on Babbitt’s statement as
follows:
This does not mean that great art somehow dismisses
or ignores the variety of human experience. What distinguishes great art
is that it intuits this multiplicity in its most significant aspect,
that is, in its bearing on what ultimately completes human existence.
Without this sense of proportion, art must present more or less unreal,
twisted or trivial visions of life. Deeply pessimistic, cynical or
utopian views of the world reveal in their own way the self-serving,
confusing orientation of the will that carries them.7
The above I take to be a true theory or principle, in
the Aristotelian sense, to guide us in our appreciation, evaluation, and
judgment of art. When we look at Mr. Hirst’s pile of rubbish, or a
propaganda piece of the Stalin or Hitler era, we see how the artistic
intuitive sense which contemplates the world as it is has warped and
twisted reality through the filter of a distorted artistic imagination,
and has carried this warped vision to material fruition by the bad will of
the artist. Whether it is the "deeply pessimistic, cynical" work
of a postmodernist like Hirst, or the "utopian view" of a
Communist or Fascist propagandist, such art reflects the
"self-serving, confusing orientation of the will" of the artist.
Such art is not produced for the sake of humanity, but as an anti-human
Weapon of Mass Destruction in the seemingly unending culture wars. True
art is an ordering process, and that ordering must be aligned with moral
responsibility if the work of art is to achieve its humane purpose.
I would like to end this piece on an optimistic note,
and to do so I end as I began, with a quotation from Paul Johnson:
"The human need for art is greater than ever, for the world is more
chaotic, and the demand for the ordering process which art supplies is
rising. All the mistakes made in the last century can be corrected. In
many ways the process has already started. The human race is in its
infancy. The story of art has only just begun. Human life is short but the
life of art is long and the best is yet to come."8 Ars
longa, vita brevis.
NOTES:
1 Art,
A New History, Paul Johnson (New York: Harper
Collins 2003), 6.
2 Aristotle
Ethics, trans. J.A.K. Thomson (London: Penguin Books rev. ed.
1973), 208.
3 From
Dawn to Decadence, Jacques Barzun (New York:
Harper Collins 2000), 71.
4 Johnson, op. cit.,
651.
5 Johnson, op. cit., 669-670.
6 Richard
Wagner, The Man, His Mind, and His Music, Robert
W. Gutman (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1968), 426.
7 Will,
Imagination and Reason: Babbitt, Croce and the Problem of Reality,
Claes G. Ryn (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers 1997), 200-201.
8 Johnson, op.
cit., 752.
back to Contents
************************************
The Prize for the Race
by
Ivor Davies
Mr.
Davies’ stories about academe have become a very pleasant fixture in
Praesidium.
"She’s almost as smart as I am, Walter!"
Big laugh. Loleen’s big laugh, head thrown back in a
tingle of earrings, upper lip stretched till it glistened, three husky
rhythmic shouts. The rite duly performed, she resumed pouring words over
Walter’s paper-strewn desk in a voluble cascade. A cascade that was one
decibel short of either mirth or wrath—he could never be sure which. A
fearful cascade.
"She’s my oldest sister’s oldest child, so
hell, we pra-ticly grew up playing together. I helped her do her math in
high school when she was a freshman and I was a senior. You know how that
went! Come to find out, it wasn’t neither one of us gonna be a rocket
scientist, you know. But I did the literary magazine that year, I was the
editor, and Toriqua she was already giving me things like… you know, the
most beautiful little poems she’d be writing. Do you gotta answer that
phone, Walter? ’Cause I’m just wanting to put her resumé just right
here where you can see it."
And Loleen proceeded not only to plant a couple of
stapled pages squarely on top of the Dean’s confidential memo, but to
cut Walter’s fingers off from the buzzing, blinking phone carriage with
a slender chocolate arm a-rattle in bracelets. The buzzes and red blinks
died simultaneously, just before his itching fingers could reach the goal.
"There, now. That couldn’t have been nobody.
See, you don’t even got a blink on your voice mail there. Just some
student gonna be late, or something. Now this Torique I’m telling you
about, the students is where she’ll come into her own. They’ll
understand her, you know what I mean? Fresh blood and all. She’s like
their age group, you know? She’ll talk their talk."
If the Dean’s memo had announced massive lay-offs
prior to a bulldozing of Crawford Hall, Walter could not have looked more
distressed… but his painfully twisted brow, though pointed at what
remained visible of the official letterhead, covered a blind gaze. Did
Loleen chatter this jive, he pondered for the umpteenth time, to annoy
him, or could she really not control herself? Surely it was the latter.
She would hardly set about dealing multiple knife wounds to the English
language on an occasion when she wished a serious favor of him. But that
made it worse. That meant, at the very least, that she could not
comprehend the gravity of the situation. At worst, it meant that she had no idea how… how
down-in-the-Delta she sounded. She was herself far, far too close to the
students’ level, too apt to revert to their speech habits rather
than to set them a proper example. And what, after all, could he say to
her? "Talk like you got an education, girl!" That would go over
well with all the crackpots and grandstanders in the African-American
Forum (every fourth Wednesday… to think that the VP accepted their
antics as committee work!), even if he could bring himself to be so rude.
"… but by then she was working on her Master’s,
and she didn’t need no man like that holding her back, anyway. Am I
right? You got two daughters, Walter. Would you want some doped-up—"
"Loleen…"
"Yes, Walter?"
Irresistibly, he found himself groping after the
longest words, the stuffiest phraseology, as if this might remind Loleen
that she was employed by a college English department. He always ended up
despising the postures he assumed in these exchanges, yet he always
reprised the role on the next occasion.
"Umm… so are you giving me to understand that
your… your niece has terminated her Master’s thesis?"
"I didn’t say that, Walter. What I said was, she
only likes the thesis hours, that’s all."
Walter couldn’t suppress a little groan. In the early
going, when Loleen was just an ebullient recruit from a respected state
university in Tennessee, he and she had had a knock-down-drag-out over the
unfortunate coalescence, through Southern drawling, of "lack"
and "like". He had thumped the dictionary, while she had called
him an assimilationist and very nearly a patriarchal flunky—proving, by
the way, that she was entirely capable of grasping abstract principles and
articulating intricate polysyllabic slurs. He tried very hard not to look
at her. He looked, instead, at the photo of his two daughters whose costly
frame Loleen’s bracelets had almost raked from his desk. (Now that
would have set some real fur to flying, he mused acidly as his jaws
worked. The younger child was dark like him—about as dark as Loleen’s
arm—and, like him, would be wedded to her glasses permanently; but the
elder child was as fair as his wife Patrice, and perhaps even more
lovely.) What did this chit of a soapbox rebel, with her mock-African
ornamentation and her solecism-friendly ideology, know of misery, of
oppression? Could he have stopped the steady spate of drivel pouring from
her mouth if he had shouted, "Why do you think my name is Walter
Walter? Because my mother misunderstood the form at the hospital. Because
I couldn’t bring myself to change it later and remind her forever of her
shame by taking a new name. And you want me to honor that shame?
You want us to send more girls out to misname their babies?"
"I’ll look at it later," he said quietly.
"I’ll look at her… your niece’s resumé… when I have a
chance."
"S’all I ask, brother."
Brother. Yes, that was the most curious thing about the
irritation Loleen always inspired in him. He was ashamed for her,
too. In some unfathomable way, she too belonged in that frame—she whose
color was closer to his younger daughter’s (and to his own) than was his
wife’s. He was not only embarrassed by Loleen, he was embarrassed
for her. Why did she have to play the fool? He had seen ample
evidence of her writing ability: she could spell "lack" and
avoid double negatives when she wrote a conference paper. How could she
possibly take pride in promulgating the stereotype that Americans of
African descent were too dense to master proper English? What dishonor—what
folly—to have hoodwinked oneself into believing that incoherent blabber
was a blow for freedom!
The rattle of the bracelets at his desk’s edge roused
Walter. Loleen was leaning so far toward him that her face was a blur
above his glasses. Had she read his thoughts? Her tone had softened
dramatically, and her grammar was miraculously healed.
"You’ve got something on your mind, don’t you?
Something big."
He made a dismissive gesture. "Things are only as
big as we make them—"
"Then something you’ve made big." She would
not relent. "Something big for you."
Walter was both touched by this unexpected intimacy and
prickled by it. The warmth which swept up his shirtsleeves and collar
would make him start sweating in another moment. He leaned back in his
chair, struggling for distance as a drowning man struggles for air, and
cleared his throat.
"I’ve got a candidate coming in this
morning."
"For the composition job? For Toriqua’s…."
Even before Loleen straightened up from his desk, her
tone had already shattered the spell. There had been no complex
grammatical construction in the brief outburst for it to violate, that
brassy, sassy tone which could erupt into a laugh or a curse with equal
ease. But the next bit of hypotaxis which came within range would be
machine-gunned. If only she had been able to swallow her indignation that
her own petty, unethical designs were in jeopardy, Loleen might have heard
his full confession: how this white man on whose vita Yale and
Purdue and MIT appeared prominently (where could names like that hide on a
vita?) frightened the hell out of him. How the gross incongruity of
the occasion—a spectacularly successful academic applying for an
entry-level position at a Southern, predominantly black community college—made
him seethe with the certainty that he was the brunt of a joke, and then
with shame for feeling such certainty? How he had dreaded for three days
the mere notion of that first encounter, when he must introduce himself—absurdly,
comically, disgracefully—as Walter Walter.
If only Loleen hadn’t moved a muscle, he probably
would have spilled his guts out to her in some way which she could
understand, perhaps, far better than Patrice. A close call. Good thing
Loleen was invincibly self-interested, twenty-four hours a day. And yet,
Walter was surprised to glimpse, within the gray clouds which immediately
repaired the rift over his anxiety, a longing regret.
"There’s his c.v.," he nodded dryly, almost
haughtily, indicating with his chin a sheet all-but-hidden beneath the
Dean’s memo and, now, the famous niece’s resumé. He well knew that
Loleen could see nothing useful of the document, and he wondered if she
would have the nerve to reach over and fish it out. When she failed to do
so (probably not for want of nerve, but in disdain: he observed her
fingertips growing almost white where they pressed her elbows in a
pugnacious arm lock), he continued.
"A Ph.D. Two of his degrees are from Yale, where
he also taught briefly. I managed to check out his book on the
Enlightenment last night—not from our library, of course; I had
to go down to Tuscaloola—and, I must say…" (Walter eased back in
his chair now, strangely enjoying himself) "he’s a very learned
man."
"Bull!" Loleen writhed back on her spiked
heels so as not to have to look at him. "An African man driving
across town to a campus named by the native people they stole it
from to check out a book about their Enlightenment, when they did
all their best stealing and slaving—I bet your great man’s book didn’t
say nothing about that!"
She was double-negativing again, and the last syllable
of "Enlightenment" was a drawled mit as long as all three
preceding syllables… but Walter was deeply impressed. The irony, he
admitted, was real, and the grasp of historical events astonishing in one
so generally hostile to "picky details". Nevertheless, he
corrected very quietly, peering over his glasses, "I’m not an
African, Loleen. Neither are you."
"And who d’we have to thank for that,
Walter?" she burst out in lilting fury which, with a fine tune, could
have been merriment. "Anyway, to them you are! One drop,
Walter—and you’ve got a hell of a lot more ’n that, brother!"
How he would eventually have responded to the glower
which she unleashed upon him at that instant—whether he could even have
met her eyes for five seconds running—remained an unsolved mystery for
Walter. A gentle knock on the slightly ajar door shocked them both like a
gunshot. Yet the mystery, Walter knew painfully, would settle somewhere in
his soul’s most hidden places and fester there with other mysteries of
its kind.
The face which peered through the door at them vaguely
resembled a rising moon—a full moon rising. The bald pate shone
splendidly in the office’s neon light; and the tiny orifices of mouth,
eyes, nostrils, and ears, though all plainly visible against the smooth,
pale surface, had the distant uncertainty of definition belonging to lunar
craters on a calm night.
"Vesperie. Xavier Vesperie. I had an appointment…
at nine o’clock. It is now… by the clock out here, it’s nine o’clock.
I can come back later. I just didn’t want you to… to think that I had
arrived late. Please excuse… I can come back…."
The face’s incipient retreat drew Walter from his
chair. "Not at all, Mr…. Dr. Vesperie. Come right in." He
studied Loleen’s downcast expression while feeling his way around the
desk. She was no doubt sharing his thought: How much had he heard?
For he had probably arrived early, so as to knock exactly at nine. What
was that he’d said? "I had an appointment"—not "I have"—as
if acknowledging the likelihood that he had been nudged to another hour.
Walter knew that traitorous "had" as he knew the assassin
signals of his rising blood pressure. He would not have expected to find
such gremlins in the man who owned the curriculum vitae buried on
his desk.
"Come right in. Yes, that’s it. Loleen, this is…
Dr. Xavier Vesperie. Dr. Vesperie, this is our leading nineteenth-century
Americanist, Dr. Loleen Doucey."
"Listen to him—as if I don’t spend all my time
teaching freshman comp!"
Except for drawling "time" and dropping the
"g" from "teaching", Loleen’s elocution was suddenly
flawless. She virtually launched a lovely long-fingered hand into Dr.
Vesperie’s somewhat convex blue tie, and held it there like a weapon
until the visitor pressed it deferentially. Deference? Walter watched the
anemic, stubby fingers feel their way around the back of the lean black
hand. Curiosity, perhaps? Flirtation with otherness?
""I have a class, Walter… Dr. Walter. In
fact, I’m going to be late now."
"Oh. Well…"
"Pleased to meet you, Dr. Vesperie."
"I… yes. I hope our paths will cross
later."
Suddenly, it was here: the moment he had dreaded for
three days. Loleen had vanished, and the two of them were standing around
looking at each other’s lapels like a couple of butlers waiting for a
bell to ring. He realized that he didn’t really have to cross one of the
most unpleasant bridges: in fact, the time to cross properly had come and
gone. But in a surge of something like defiance, Walter thrust out his
right hand—a thick spear to Loleen’s supple dart—and looked his man
dead in the eye.
"I’m Walter Walter."
The watery blue eyes lowered, perhaps to the hand that
he felt being pressed lightly. The smile… it seemed legitimate enough, a
thin show of teeth to release the "e’s" of "pleased to
meet you". He realized that he was staring. It would have been so
much easier to say "Walt Walter", or even "Wally
Walter". But no, he would never do that again; he had done it in
graduate school, but he would never do it again. Not for anyone.
("Wally" was not an option, anyway, even in grad school. The
bullies had called him "Wally" when he was a kid, along with
"Wawa" and "Dub-dub" [for
"double-double-u"]. One of them had left him with a pinkie that
wouldn’t close all the way on occasions such as this handshake. The
twelve-year-old Walter, already slammed to the floor, had raised the hand
to avoid having his teeth kicked in.)
"You know what they called me in high
school?" smirked Vesperie irrelevantly—or with incredibly
perceptive relevance—letting the hand slide free. Walter felt his jaw
falling. "They called me ‘Fifteen’" he laughed openly,
jovially. "My initials… ‘XV’. The Roman numerals for ‘fifteen’!"
Something in Walter snapped back, "We didn’t
study the Romans in my high school"… but his jaw, all the while,
was re-fastening itself.
"Well," resumed Vesperie, his watery eyes
growing round like little blue marbles. "You need a composition
teacher, and I need a job. Maybe I could take some of the load off of Ms….
off of Dr. Doucey so that she could teach the nineteenth century."
With an effort, Walter wrested his stare from the man
and looked about his office. Chairs, perhaps? The two of them sitting, he
pretending to scour the c.v. while the other juggled patented answers? He
didn’t think he could do it. He already felt himself suffocating. How
much pussy-footing could you do around the only real question: Why the
hell does a man of your credentials want to work in a dump like this?
Whose daughter did you rape—or whose son?
""You know what?" he said slowly,
deliberately. "I have a class, too, at eleven o’clock. We have less
than two hours. Why don’t we talk while we walk? A lot of your interest
in this job, it seems to me, might be affected by what you see with your
own eyes."
"Capital!" piped Vesperie. Sweet Jesus… capital!
Walter didn’t even bother to take the vita.
Wrestling with the dead bolt after he had pulled the door behind them, he
made sure that the man from Yale had a good look at his fungal-green key.
They took a left and exited Crawford Hall quickly
(might as well save the worst for the last—or maybe, Walter mused, he
just needed fresher air than a century-old rat trap could offer). Groups
of students, practically each member a head taller than either professor,
parted for the two dignitaries on the sidewalks without so much as
interrupting their animated conversations. There were many such groups:
the main parking lot was immediately adjacent. Either they were all late
for class, or they had all arrived almost an hour early for their next
class, or they were enjoying the fine fall weather in good company, or
they were moseying over to the Commons for a middling late breakfast, or…
Walter nervously eyed one or two hands that slid into pockets just before
he and his guest passed—and then, no less nervously, he glanced behind
his glasses at the bald, slightly rotund, enigmatically smiling white man
beside him. The closest thing to his color they met on these walkways was
some fair-skinned Asians—Iranians, Syrians, a few Palestinians (one of
them, Hafiz, always beaming except when announcing to the world that he
was going home soon to strap a bomb around himself). What did the man from
Yale make of this overly spiced melting pot? What exactly was Yale like,
in comparison, Walter wondered? When they became distinctly mired behind a
clique of sweat-shirted basketball players (from the altitude of whose
ambling shoulders, presumably, their Lilliputian figures could not be
detected), he almost yielded to blurting out, "What’s it like at
Yale?" He longed to know, but… but he didn’t trust himself. He
didn’t trust his tongue, his heart, his chained demons. ("At Yale,
you have to lower standards to achieve a degree of diversity,"
one demon was already whispering. "Here we have to double security to
keep our diversity from blowing up the dorms."
"The bookstore and the Student Commons are in that
building," he said.
Vesperie nodded behind his moonbeam smile.
"We won’t go in. It’s just… students."
The funereal basketball procession did go in,
liberating them to accelerate and share the sunlight.
"The dorms are to your right, beyond the parking
lot. All of this that you’ve seen so far is the older section of campus.
[‘Old’ doesn’t mean ‘scenic’ here, as it does at Yale.]
The Commons has been renovated, but… it sits along the border, so to
speak. The dormitories are… in some cases, quite decrepit. One of them
burned down last year. Two students died. [Lloyd Calloway—one of my
best freshmen, always ready with a joke—and his cousin.] I believe
the state opted not to prosecute for building code violations if the
county would undertake to… to renovate the whole section [to dispose
of the whole big death trap] within three years. As you can see over
there, new construction had already been completed elsewhere—right there
between the hedges, the new Administration Building. [The bureaucrats
had to park their asses in a place without rats and window units before
they could think about that rusty, seventy-year-old fire escape
half-falling off the wall.] And just before the tragedy, the Permi-Tech
Group—our biggest local employer—had donated the money for the Permi-Tech
Building, where the science and business classes meet. [You must have
read about that in the paper: why am I speaking to you as if you just got
off a plane from New Haven?] It caused quite a stir locally… a very
generous donation [most of which reached the pocket of the Group’s
president’s nephew, who owns a construction company]."
"Yes. Yes, I read about it in the paper."
"I’ll… I’ll take you over there. It’s
really a wonder of the world, that building. They say that the humanities
will come next, though… [though not after the fire] though
I don’t expect we’ll have anything quite so grand."
Why was he steering a course for the Permi-Tech
Building? The whole point of this odyssey had been to rub the fellow’s
clean white face in the facts of life—and here he was, taking the man
from Yale to the P-T Building as if afraid that he might see rodent
droppings elsewhere.
"We could turn here and go up to the
Administration Building [where you will also see no cobwebs or gnawed
chairs], but I’m afraid no one is scheduled to meet with you. You
understand… the appointment is just a renewable year’s contract. With
no benefits to speak of. That’s how we could [how we can, damn
it!] afford to offer as much as… or, at any rate, the amount that we’re
offering in salary."
"Of course! I’ll be eligible for Medicare pretty
soon, anyway. I just need to pay some bills."
"Don’t we all! [So why don’t you get a real
job at a real college?] Well, then… do you… shall we visit
the Admin Building, or go on to the P-T Building?"
"It’s entirely up to you."
"But I… I’m willing to give you the entire
tour [minus the rats]."
"Of course! Well…"
"Although it is getting on toward… almost
nine-thirty [a mere ten minutes from now. Am I afraid that the VP might
see my man from Yale and have the bright idea of giving him my job?]."
"Well, then. Perhaps we should…"
"Waltaaah!"
Such an operatic rendition of his name could only have
come from the ample lungs of Augustine. Walter, curiously, discovered that
he was not sorry to feel the flowing, rainbow-colored robe spill
sensuously through his glasses as he turned. Augustine had spread both
arms broadly from his polychromatic poncho (whatever they called it in
Nigeria), but he made no further effort to grab Walter by the shoulders
after spying his guest. On the other hand, neither did his arms sink one
centimeter—a measurement by which his glistening smile probably
broadened behind a flattering "ah".
"Umm… Augustine Nge, Xavier Vesperie. Dr.
Vesperie is interviewing for an English position. Dr. Vesperie, Professor
Nge is our…"
"Enchanté, Doctah Vespah-rie! We are most
fortunate to have you among us!"
Walter sighed over his aborted introduction, admiring
in almost hypnotized abstraction the Nigerian’s utterly flawless
chocolate hand gripping the white man’s. It dawned on him that "Vesperie"
would have been a French name, and yet Augustine had drawled the middle
syllable just as he dropped English "r’s" in his
mission-school version of an Oxford accent. Everyone about campus
obligingly accepted that Augustine was a native French-speaker, since that
language was one of the two colonial grafts forced upon his culture. He
certainly spoke a kind of French… but was it, perhaps, as
idiosyncratic as Loleen’s English? Would anyone have cared, even though
he taught French along with several Business courses? Did the colonial
outrage allow him the same unlimited free pass in pronunciation as it
allowed Loleen in double negatives? Odd, that the two of them…
"Isn’t that so, Waltah?"
"Yes, quite so. Er… what?"
"Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!"
Augustine’s musical mirth could probably be heard
from the parking lot. People from that far away were probably already
charting a course that would spare them a close encounter.
"I was saying that the place needs a touch of
class, you know. An atmosphee-uh of scholah-ship." The final word’s
"o" rhymed with "go", and "ship" very nearly
came out "sheep". "We have too much ball-playing, you know.
Play ball when you are a keed, fine. But college is to learn. Walter is
one of the few who day-uh to admeet this."
It struck Walter that this was quite true. In fact, it
struck him that Augustine was generally, if rather covertly, disliked
about campus for no other reason than that he went around saying such
things quite openly. True things. As if stifling true utterances in his
homeland had caused some valve to burst fatefully, he went about in his
adoptive Land of the Free terrorizing the population with his frankness.
Not that anyone would admit as much. Loleen belonged to the clique which
reviled him—absurdly, and with manifest racism—for buying a nice house
in a white neighborhood. In that pair, verily (as Walter had been musing
before), lay the paradox in a nutshell: Loleen Call-Me-African Doucey with
her knick-knacks and baubles out of a catalogue and her incorrigible Delta
slang, Augustine Nge with his unblemished black skin and Igbo-prince
wardrobe speaking Oxford English and expostulating à haute voix
that he was an American—just an American! Was everybody
insane in this place?
"They-uh now, Waltah, I will leave you alone with
your companion and the poem that is in your heart. Did you know, Doctah
Vespah-rie, that Waltah is an accomplished poet? He is unappreciated
around hee-uh, of course. But you will read his boook and see for
yourself."
Walter was now hopelessly tongue-tied. At least
Vesperie didn’t ask for further explanation as the splendidly plumed
figure swayed toward the P-T Building, where they themselves hesitated to
follow until the distance was politely safe.
"Capital fellow! I’ll bet he has some
fascinating stories to tell."
Stories? Like the time the traffic cop beat him
up in Lagos? Walter peeked at his "companion".
"You’ll have to ask him some time."
As if by common consent, they at last began to drift
after Augustine’s concrete wake, and to lengthen their strides more
comfortably when his coiled rainbow finally melted into the glass doors of
the P-T Building like Iris returning to Olympus. Glass and steel vaulted
skyward over the vanished figure, perhaps more of the former than the
latter (if glass, then not quite transparent; if steel, then almost
transparent). Anyone would naturally feel like a god stepping into such a
space—far more than when browbeaten by the Admin Building’s columns,
still visible over a hedge. White forearms with white fists on top, Walter
had sometimes mused, never with any racial undercurrent (always puzzled
that some part of his mind explicitly remarked the absence of racial
undercurrent)… what an image! Was he a good poet? Would the man
from Yale ask for a copy of his book? Some of the poems rhymed—what
would a Yalee think of that? Wasn’t rhyme dead? Was modern architecture
superior to classical, in the same way—shouldn’t a poet who favored
rhyme enjoy soaring white columns? Shouldn’t a teacher who insisted on
paradigm over patois regard the P-T Building as the Tower of Babel rather
than Olympus?
His head began to buzz. With every step, it buzzed
more, and the "fresh air" of his physical surroundings only
seemed to disorient him worse than ever. Madness, all madness.
"I love the names the Nigerians have," said
the voice at his side, as if in memory or from a great distance.
"Their Christian names, I mean. Ambrose… Godwin… Valentine…"
"My mother was going to name me Ezekiel,"
said some subtle thief of tongues in Walter’s voice. "Ezekiel
Lazarus."
"Names of… of resurrection. Of new birth."
Yes—and instead, she got stuck in a circle of
paperwork. Walter fought to regain his earthly footing, literally
clenching his fists. Already the P-T Building was looming over them like a
benign iceberg. He had just time enough to nod toward the gym.
"Um… the Foster Calligrew Gymnasium, to your
left."
"Yes, I noticed that a while back. Very
state-of-the-art, compared to the English building. And I’ll bet you
didn’t need either a wealthy donor or an impending lawsuit to have it
funded."
What did he mean by that? "What… what do you
mean?"
"Oh, you know… what your friend Augustine was
talking about. The inverted priorities."
Walter hardly felt himself more master of his tongue
than a minute earlier when he grumbled back, "Our basketball team won
the conference three years running, just… just recently." How
recently? He had always ignored that particular campus laurel before.
"And that’s good—it’s good that young people
should learn discipline, in any pursuit. But the knees will give out,
sooner rather than later, and then what do you do from your chair or your
desk?"
"Write poetry," murmured Walter more morosely
than ever, yet content to let reality slide through his fingertips rather
than persist in this absurd sparring. He thought of his high school coach,
one of the few faculty figures he had actually liked in those days… and
liked, no doubt, because the man regarded him as athletically hopeless and
took it easy on him. With the others, it was, "Move your butt,
Smith!" and, "Get the lead out, Jones!" But the mild,
wearily sarcastic, "Come on, now, Walter!" always seemed to
evoke his first name—though, of course, this was an entirely fanciful
conclusion on the spectacled boy’s part. Would the boy have run faster
if he had been Zeke Walter ("Shake it, Walter—hit it, ZW!")?
Would he have grown taller? Exactly how much of his life’s misery had
been preordained by a stupid mistake in the maternity ward?
The Permi-Tech Building received them just as Walter
was entertaining this thought, its uniformly cooled air and oddly splendid
penumbra (admitted, perhaps, by the not-quite-transparent glass or steel)
swallowing them in fantasy as if poetic whimsy had indeed suddenly
triumphed over reality. For Walter was now completely disarmed, as he
always was in these corridors. The rumination, "What if I were
Ezekiel Walter?" merged seamlessly with the blossoming of this Space
Age biosphere around his person. Resurrection… rebirth… yes, he might
have been an engineer or architect instead of a rhyming poet and
pettifogging academic, with just a little courage. He might have been able
to afford a house where Augustine lived. Everything might have been
different, for Ezekiel Lazarus Walter.
He was almost startled to re-discover Vesperie at his
side. Almost. But the almost-transparency of the carpeted, glue-scented,
high-vaulted promenade before them muted his discomfort now as well as his
footsteps. Vesperie felt it, too, he could tell. The man from Yale was
gaping at the two decks of classrooms which ran up and down the great
corridor, their inner walls fully glassed and revealing teacher-student
combinations in a softly lit action yet in unbroken silence. He and his
charge might have been in a cathedral—in a nave the size of an aircraft
carrier’s flight deck, its stained glass updated to dozens of panels
where live figures mimed dramas of arcane significance.
Think of the money, Walter mused to himself in awe
rather than bitterness. He must have exhaled the words audibly, for
Vesperie responded in a kind of gasp.
"I had not thought that death had undone so many
souls."
"What?"
"Oh, a bit of Dante."
"Ah… Dante." So their outpost of progress
was Inferno’s gate… he should have said that, with his rhymed
poetry. But without progress, where was there hope?
Vesperie laughed nervously and resumed. "It’s
like a… a shopping mall constructed by NASA. Think what kind of theater
you could have built at a fraction of the cost… what kind of art
gallery."
"Think on. I come here sometimes, just to
think."
"Like a church."
"Yeah… yes, exactly. Like a church. Like a
church I don’t belong to, a church in a foreign land I’m visiting. I
don’t even know what the order of worship is, and I’m half afraid of
committing some sacrilege."
"Even the students who pass us seem…"
"Yes, they keep their voices down in here, for
some reason."
"Is that a fountain I hear?"
They were approaching an oasis of potted ferns. The
radiance which shimmered through the immense double skylights (running the
length of the corridor’s vaulted ceiling in their ballistic-quality
glass or steel or plastic) appeared to settle rather more luxuriously upon
this display-case paradise, as if through some sympathetic magnetism of
slender rays and purling water.
"Look inside there," pointed Walter.
"Children?"
"A child-care center for employees and students.
It virtually runs itself, since the Early Childhood people staff it with
qualified students—a kind of practicum, with credit hours."
"How… progressive!"
"Yes. Very progressive."
Walter was aware that these were his finest moments as
a tour-guide: aware, and somewhat frustrated. What on earth were they
doing here? They were at this instant—geographically, financially, and
culturally—at the antipodes from Crawford Hall. He had effectively
hurried Vesperie past every wreck and ruin on campus (the dormitories, the
music building) along with every sumptuous setting which was sabotaged by
openly venal maneuvering (the Admin Building, the gym). Was this any way
to warn the man from Yale about just what he would be up against, or to
observe his expression when he came up against it? Were they here because he
himself felt more comfortable in this progressive module, spoke more
easily in this interplanetary stop-over? They had already spent the bulk
of their first hour together wandering around a… a hi-tech mall, as
Vesperie had rightly dubbed it. This edu-techno-mall. Was he ashamed to
show the man his campus’s other side—its real side, as far as
humanities professors were concerned? Or did the company of someone with a
killer c.v. make him, in some treacherous fashion, indulge his eternal
fantasy of a better life—a world where you could read poetry in
paradise?
"That must be the student lounge. Wide-screen TV…
billiard tables!"
"Yes," drawled Walter, recovering a touch of
acerbity with some effort. "One of those tables would have
refurbished the ancient computers in our writing lab [another tinder
box waiting to ignite]. I really should be showing you that. In
fact… we should be getting back. But look, since we’re here… here’s
the faculty lounge, on the other side. We might as well get a cup of
drinkable coffee."
The faculty lounge was the one room in the building (as
it always was in all buildings) without any glass facing a promiscuously
traveled hallway. Walter once again played the part of magician/escort,
easing open a door which promised no more than a janitor’s mops (not
that this carpeted wonderland needed a mop). Inside, a flood of genuine,
unfiltered sunlight streamed at them through an outside window, almost as
thrilling as the scent of coffee. They both staggered briefly. Then Walter
led his charge by the elbow (he hadn’t touched him since shaking hands)
to the left, navigating him around a sofa’s arm, until they were safely
back in relative obscurity.
"Someone needs to shut that blind," said a
husky female voice in faintly maternal tones, and a form turned its back
to them and went about the task before either could acknowledge the now
unnecessary favor.
"If the isotope is there, then why wouldn’t that
be conclusive?"
"But how do they know that it wasn’t there
before?"
"By testing for it, Earl!"
"And there’s the flaw. Read the methodology.
Under those conditions, two miles under the surface…"
"This," whispered Walter, smiling, "is
when it truly hits you that you’re in the science building. Sugar?"
Why had he smiled? It was the first time he had done so
today, hand-shaking included. Loleen and the Dean included. Patrice and
the girls included, probably. As he peered into his own steaming coffee
mug, Walter’s lips parted reflexively to sip—but he was in fact
marveling that this fragmentary conversation, which would have been
nonsense to him even had he observed the opening volley, could bring the
smile to his face which he had begrudged his own daughters that morning.
He glanced almost guiltily at the skirmishers: Jessup of Chemistry, and
the other a hot-shot just brought in to teach Physics… Harlan had called
him Earl. They were both of about his age, both white, and both paid
perhaps three or four times what anyone in Crawford Hall made. Absorbed in
their controversy, they did not so much as wave from their cushions at him
or his guest or anyone else. And he had smiled. Was it because he was
proud of them in front of his Yale man? Would he have smiled, anyway, if
he had entered alone? Probably not… but he hadn’t smiled now in the
spirit of showing off. He most certainly would not have smiled if Loleen’s
niece had been his companion. He had smiled because he felt himself in the
presence of a man who was as impressed as he himself was—a true
intellectual, someone who could appreciate the heat of purely
disinterested argument. The antithesis of Loleen.
Was there a racial overtone to this delight—was he
ingratiating himself…
"Sorry, yes. Let’s sit over there."
… ingratiating himself to the superior race? What
perfect crap! It wasn’t his fault if he and Loleen couldn’t sit
about arguing over the referential qualities of a symbol. If practically
everyone in the sciences was either Caucasian or Asian, it wasn’t their
fault that this very campus had pumped its budget into basketball—that
it took a donation from a bunch of fat white guys to construct a science
building (a project which just happened to resurrect one or more of their
nephews’ companies). To hell with it…
"Thank you, Letitia. That’s much better—the
sun hasn’t gone far south for he winter, has it? Um, this is Dr. Xavier
Vesperie…"
"Vesperie, yes, I know. So pleased to meet you,
sir!"
… to hell with it all, if he had been with Augustine,
the Nigerian would have beat him to the smile—would have boomed out,
"Scholah-sheep is coming to our world, Waltah!"
"You mustn’t let this building blind you to the
charms of Crawford Hall, Mr. Vesperie. My office was there for thirty
years. Frankly, I miss the old place. It just needs a little tender loving
care. It was constructed in 1892, you know—the main wing, at least. Yes,
in 1892. Another wing was added in 1908…."
Letitia was off and running, very much sounding as
though she had witnessed every stage of the campus’s evolution
personally. And perhaps she had. She must have been seventy if she was a
day. Yet she held her head of steel-wool hair as erect as ever, and her
high, bare forehead still reached Walter’s hairline when the two of them
stood together. He had no trouble imagining her a kind of Zulu princess,
even in her silver years. He had been told (in confidential whispers that
he never sought out or encouraged) that her grasp of accounting methods
was somewhat antiquated; but she continued to teach a full load in that
department, as she had for almost four decades, and the most swaggering
basketball player or bejewelled bad boy grew sullenly submissive under her
stare.
"It was I who opened the blinds when I put on the
coffee early this morning," Letitia was chirping on, having doubled
back on an earlier subject while Walter was musing. Though lately exiled
from her beloved Crawford Hall, she had already adopted the new building
as her special charge. "The temperature is growing quite cold at
about sunrise. They say we will have a mild winter, but my peach trees
have already shed their leaves."
Walter passively admired the perfectly manicured
quality of her English. There used to be teachers like this in his
department, too. Miss Devonport… Miss Paisley… and they always called
you "Miss" or "Mister", whether or not you had a Ph.D.
That had driven Loleen crazy about Ornella Paisley, who had retired just
two years ago. No, those two hadn’t gotten along at all.
Only at that moment did Walter recall that he hadn’t
properly introduced Letitia to Vesperie. It was far too late now. He could
only peer uneasily over his glasses at the candidate, hoping that they
knew better at Yale than to blurt, "I didn’t catch your name."
"I would be starting the semester a bit
late," Vesperie was saying in answer to a question. "That is, if
Dr. Walter should choose to take me on."
"The freshman enrollment figures…." Walter
had to clear his throat. "This year’s freshman class turned out to
be much larger than we had projected."
"Well, sign him on, for heaven’s sake!"
commanded Letitia impassively. "It isn’t every day that we have a
chance to acquire an Ivy League gentleman."
Walter was about to say something suitably placatory
when his thoughts were interrupted by a quick mathematical calculation. Ivy
League gentleman? He had confided that information about the candidate
to no one but Loleen, and to her just this morning. Almost ten o’clock…
but Letitia had clearly been sitting in the lounge several minutes before
they entered. If Loleen had already been late for her nine o’clock class
when she left his office, how had she found the time to go spilling gossip
all over campus? Had she used one of those cell phones that all the kids
owned?
"Walter."
"Yes, Letitia."
"I thought you were going to cut back on coffee.
Your blood pressure, you know. High blood pressure is the curse of our
race, Mr. Vesperie, especially our males. My late husband, who died in
1967…."
By the time they were wandering back toward Crawford
Hall, the ten o’clock change of the guard had come and gone some minutes
ago. There was scarcely time left for the "special exercise"
which Walter had to administer before his own class. Was that, perhaps,
why he had been dragging his heels all morning—to avoid giving Vesperie
the writing test? But give it he would… and, anyway, that was far too
easy an explanation of his official incompetence today. Blaming his
inferiority complex—his race, his name, his field, his age, his height,
his bad eyes, his unlucky star—had become almost habitual with him, as
he mulled now in bittersweet comfort. Good God, was that it? Did he
actually enjoy the company of this patent failure, this Man from
Yale who was begging for a crummy job at the crummiest of schools? Did he
feel… not the satisfied envy of seeing the high brought low, but the
camaraderie of having found Fortune’s second-most hated stepchild?
They said virtually nothing on their way back along the
network of sidewalks; but now it was a comfortable nothing, as of two men
who could sense the profound buzz within each other’s interior world.
And even the writing test, Walter realized, could not rupture this strange
fraternity—because administering the test was Walter’s duty, and
Vesperie would understand it as a duty. He would probably even like him a
little more for it—if, in some peculiar way, one could imagine liking
between two such mismatched creatures.
Was there any last desperate chance to warn this man
off? That was his real duty, his solemn moral duty (as Mother would
have said—or Letitia, or Miss Paisley), and Walter had truly dodged,
ducked, and evaded it all morning long. Was there still time to grab
Vesperie’s arm and hiss, "We had two homicides on campus last year,
and six or eight rapes. And none of them was ever reported as such. We
have our own little reality here, and the official line—no, the unofficial
line: that’s the whole point, because people like Loleen swallow it
hook, line, and sinker—is that the police, the outside world, wouldn’t
understand! They might call a murder a murder. They wouldn’t
understand that we don’t really let it bother us that much—not to
where we’re going to ruin our lives over it. Do you get it now? Do you
see what you’re doing?"
Walter opened his mouth with every intention of
speaking. A heavy exhalation came out, and all he could do was grind his
teeth after its departure.
But the most remarkable thing happened just then—the
most appalling thing (for the violent crime rate, after all, wasn’t
their special reality: Walter had never meant to conjure up physical
violence, even in his imagination). As they neared the front corner of
Crawford Hall, which now barely hid the small portico at its entrance,
they heard shouting. Briefly, Walter hoped it might erupt into laughter.
It had that mocking tone he so often detected in Loleen’s voice, midway
between hatching a classic punch-line and delivering a mortal insult. He
glanced nervously at Vesperie, then averted his eyes when the other
glanced at him. He would have liked to be able to reflect wryly,
"There, now—he doesn’t even understand that those girls are just
horsing around. How’s he ever going to make it around here?" But he
was not very reassured himself. Perhaps the very absence of an audience to
play to made these vying shouts sound blood-curdling.
Then the obscenities came in full spate. Practically
every word—chain after chain of them, sustained with something like
genius, one lithely hooking into another like the paper links school kids
used to build into Christmas-tree decorations.
As they rounded the corner into a pocket of dense
shadow under the extended eave, a large book cracked gunshot-crisp on the
pavement at their feet, and a broad-shouldered girl in a pink silk blouse
came reeling into their arms.
"Hey!" shouted a new voice—a man’s voice,
louder than anything yet heard on the scene. It commanded instant silence;
for though it had nothing to say, its tone carried an indignation which
seemed to come from the clouds. It was Walter’s.
He wrestled to lift the girl out of the staggering
Vesperie’s arms. The slick mousse all over her hair left a coolness in
his hot cheek. When he could, he readjusted his glasses and found the
other girl under the portico.
"Take this somewhere else!" he ordered, not
so loudly but with precisely the same dose of indignation.
The other figure hesitated a moment, then charged.
Walter could see the murder in her bent brow and huge eyes. He took a step
to meet it—not her, but the murder—feeling his molars press themselves
deep into his skull.
His response had been instinctive. That the girl’s
charge might be a feint had never flickered through his mind. She stopped
just short of an arm’s reach, however, and pointed with her fist. He
watched her ivory teeth flash lightning behind her gymnastically flexing
lips.
"You come near my man again and… you dead, ho!"
And then she was gone. Vesperie had picked up the first
girl’s book. She waited till her assailant was halfway to the parking
lot before she burst out—in that same old ambiguous sing-song, and
turning (Walter noticed) to the white man:
"Shit! You see that?"
Walter quickly convinced the girl that they had no
interest in her side of the incident. (When she persisted, he simply
countered, "Good! I’ll go call campus security, and you can press
charges." He received little more than a farewell "Shit!"
which was not half so caressing as the one lavished upon Vesperie.) Then
he hustled his guest safely through the small crowd of about a dozen which
had gathered, fumbled with his door key once they were through the
entrance, waved the plodding little man inside, and made sure to impart a
modest slam to the faces of the most clinging gawkers.
"There, now! That was exciting! Have a seat."
Chairs. Verbal fencing, cliché-swapping, rattling of
the curriculum vitae… then the writing test. Just as planned.
Business as usual. No more evasions, and no more distractions.
So he would have wished: but Walter found himself
tapping out a pill and reaching for his thermos. The blood which had
surged through his brain and his arms seemed unwilling to shuffle back to
his feet, like a crowd that wouldn’t go home.
"You handled that quite well."
"Handled? Handled!" He laughed heartily—like
Augustine—and turned on Vesperie. What a way for it all to come out—and
here it came! "You can’t handle that, man! You just react.
It happens so fast, all you can do is just react! Like life on the
savanna. Like a bunch of animals."
Yeah, there it was. A bunch of animals.
He turned away again: he began screwing the cup back on
his thermos. "Why do you want to teach in a place like this, Dr.
Vesperie?"
"I…"
"No, sir, don’t answer me verbally."
Walter’s "sir", far from sounding
deferential, emerged more like one of the icily formal syllables which
Letitia would have launched at a big kid curled up in a distant desk under
a headset. His back still turned on the man from Yale, he fought to slow
his pulse, and to find the right register. His eyes fell on the
flourishing, artificially gilded frame (Wal-Mart’s top of the line)
which held his daughters’ faces. He couldn’t see them: he could only
see the frame.
"I want you to write me an essay," he said
very slowly, very calmly. "I want you to tell me why you—why you,
a man who has reached the peak of his profession—want to teach basic
English to freshmen who never should have gotten a high school diploma.
Who could hardly attend class, even in high school, because they had one
or two infants at home. Who don’t give a damn about metal detectors,
because a pencil is a deadly weapon in their hands. Who view college as
the next step to pro ball and the life of a millionaire—or to a
lucrative paternity suit against a millionaire playing pro ball. Who
wouldn’t lift a finger against someone like you, because you’re white—and
whatever urban myths you may have been fed, they have the time of their
life putting on little shows for you, looking for your sympathy, your
approval…." He drew a handkerchief from his pants pocket and wiped
the mousse in light taps from his cheek. "Write it down for me. Make
me understand. I know it’s a humiliating exercise… but it’s policy.
It’s my policy. I made it because I got so damn sick of young
people with Master’s degrees coming through here and—as it turned out—not
being able to construct one intelligible sentence. Some of them fail it
now, my test, when they show up with that look in their eye: that ‘at
least I can work here’ look. I catch them before they reach the
classroom... and I shake them out of my net, and send them to lay their
eggs in some other carcass."
There was a new commotion at his back, muffled by the
wall but almost certainly at the building’s entrance again. Running his
eyes down the frame as if in a parting stroke, Walter turned once more
toward Vesperie with a heavy sigh—heavy, but almost smiling. He could
feel his glasses slip up the bridge of his nose as his brows lifted.
"Evidently, I need to put it another appearance
outside. There’s some paper… and a pen, if you need one. You can write
at my desk. Uh… there’s no way of knowing how long this may take. If
you finish before I get back… well, I’ll be in touch." It was
a pleasure to… sorry about the…. "I’ll be in touch."
The assailant of the burning eyes had, according to
bystanders’ reports, come back from the parking lot with a screwdriver
in her hand. The other girl had fortunately wandered off in the opposite
direction by then (perhaps toward the P-T Building: violence almost never
broke out over there, as if the site’s dumbfounding expenditures imposed
a kind of safe haven on all who entered); but a friend of this second girl
had exchanged words with the Fury, while three large male observers
laughed and egged them on. Walter heard conflicting versions of where the
armed girl then proceeded. He was shocked that she had already passed from
sight, and he ran to the Commons to alert the first security guard he
could find. The guard had detained him while drawling monotonously into
his cell phone (a grossly overweight white man, retired from the police
force, who seemed to think that a professor’s testimony was no more
reliable than a vagrant’s: would it have helped, Walter winced, if he
had been a white professor?).
By the time Walter had extricated himself from the
crisis and returned to his office, Vesperie was indeed gone. Three sheets
of paper filled with very small handwriting were neatly stacked on a
student’s desk in the corner—not his own. Walter frowned
briefly. Was this another sign of unwholesome diffidence, or just a fine
display of discretion? The Dean’s confidential memo (about the necessity
of freezing humanities salaries while raising those in the sciences still
higher) remained peeking out under The Niece’s skimpy resumé. If the
Dean wouldn’t label these missives "confidential" in red
capital letters, they might not attract such notice.
Walter took the pages to his desk and sat down with a
plop. His knees were hurting: he had walked too much this morning, and the
sprint to the Commons hadn’t helped.
If I were Socrates arguing for his life before the
demos, I should be condemned by my third sentence. I cannot explain my
motives for desiring this job in any commonly accepted terms. I am sure
to be thought either a bland liar, a ne’er-do-well hiding some dark
addiction behind affability, or—worst of all—a pathetic old man. The
facts insist that I should be too good for this kind of employment. I
have three degrees from two Ivy League universities, including a Ph.D.
from Yale. I have published three scholarly books and placed several
dozen articles in carefully refereed journals: one of the books was
nominated for a Pulitzer. I served two terms as president of the
Mid-Atlantic Conference on Neoclassical Literature. I have taught with
distinction at three major universities, and was awarded tenure at the
final one. In short, I am grossly overqualified for the post of adjunct
instructor at an obscure community college. I have no reason to be here
today: it is grotesque and, in some vague way, insulting to all parties
concerned that I should be sitting in this small desk and pushing this
pen.
I might mitigate the outrage of the situation be
reciting the litany of medications I have known over the past ten years,
or by chronicling my epic struggles with insomnia (I should say,
rambling on about them until my obsessions begin to mimic epic bombast).
That would further insult everyone, however. It would demean me, and it
would imply that this institution is suitable therapy for neurotics who
find the highest echelons of educational endeavor too stressful.
I would more correctly put forth the haunting face of
a young woman who was recently much celebrated via satellite for winning
some Olympic track event. Her eyes were large and intelligent, though
frequently downcast before the interviewer’s microphone. About her
young lips played the hint of a wry smile, as if to deprecate everything
she had just done. Her voice did not tremble, and she used the simple
words which came to her rather than groping after phrases. She was
altogether a very winsome creature—and she was black, the product (no
doubt) of the Deep South region whose accent she sang and whose flagship
university she glorified in track and field. Here, I thought, is a child
not yet twenty years of age who has already been places and seen things
which most of us will not encounter in a lifetime. What might she tell
us all about her experience, especially ten years from now, after
maturity will have leavened her impressions? She clearly has the
intelligence to author a book—but her story will never be told, unless
with the help of some professional ghostwriter. At best, she will become
a coach for the school to which she donated so much free publicity. And
her coach’s existence will not be a bad one, particularly when she
compares it with her roots, her mother’s and grandmother’s lives:
but what might she have been, with a literate education? What
books might people like her have bequeathed to all the rest of us which
we will never have, because she was never taught to love books? What
might we have been, if we had not shortchanged her?
It is for these children that people like me ought to
have existed. Instead, I devoted my professional life to preparing the
pampered elite for graduate study in areas whose pith has already long
since been squeezed out, and whose agonizing trickle of new yield is
mere sweat of palms tinctured with an ancient stain. I may cite one of
my final articles to illustrate. I had been reading beyond my
specialization for some time, both to sustain my dizzying rate of
publication and to prepare myself for a broader job market. I had
chanced upon Baudelaire’s early reviews of Richard Wagner’s music.
Suddenly something clicked when I read the poet’s summary of Tannhäuser.
I recognized therein, of all things, the plot en gerbe of a
modern novel which my then-wife was using in her dissertation work—an
exotic, seductive tale called L’Atlantide. My wife disparaged
the connection and was unwilling to pursue it, probably because her
thesis required that the novel’s paternity be traced to English author
Ryder Haggard. (The whole dissertation was replete with cases of petty
larceny back and forth across the Channel—and its objective, I might
add, was generally to spew contempt upon the entire era.) With more play
than zeal at first, I decided to follow up the idea myself. I discovered
nothing very encouraging, and elbowed my notes to one side; but as my
review for tenure neared and my marriage dissolved (domestic
tranquillity had been among the causes of my shelving the project), I
found myself, for once in my career, desperate for another publication
or two. Only then did it occur to me that Benoit need never actually
have seen Tannhäuser performed—that he need only have read
Baudelaire’s review at some point before writing L’Atlantide.
I threw something together within hours, and placed it within a few
weeks.
Such was my life, my own mound of Olympian garlands.
I minced words daily in such a fashion—and taught others to do so—that
what should have disproved one of my clever propositions only proved it
from another angle. Nothing I ever wrote could be demonstrated to be
false, because none of it ever stated any truth directly.
In the meantime, it is considered satisfactory in our
society—a "good educational outcome"—if a young
African-American woman graduates from college without any love of
reading or hunger to write, all because she can move her feet fast.
Nobody seems concerned that she will never pour her heart and soul onto
a printed page, because she is already "expressing herself" by
running. Like a cheetah or a gazelle, I suppose. She is a svelte,
stunning animal of the savanna. What need has she of writing?
This girl, and her sisters and brothers, are the only
children I will ever have. I might as well be the CEO who earns millions
and heaps his son in extravagant toys, but has never once gone
bike-riding with the child. I need to know my children before it is too
late—too late for them, and too late for me. I need to put words on
their tongues and a pen between their fingers; for if they live on mute
after me, then my only heirs will be those who transcribe and embellish
my half-truths. I will have died without unlocking truth’s door—the
key will lie in my clenched fist as my coffin is nailed shut. What a
horrible thing to be found holding by an angel!
Walter stared at the last page, unblinking, as if in
wait for some invisible stylus to write more. He actually found his index
and thumb dryly rasping the page’s corner, prepared by long rehearsal to
unveil a new page, to breathe more speech-giving life upon the flat,
encrypted sheets. He could hear Vesperie’s voice in his ears above the
shuffling feet out in the corridor. Though the volume of the shuffles told
him precisely that his eleven o’clock class was less than ten minutes
away, what he saw through his thick glasses was the face accompanying the
voice—a face whose Caucasian qualities age had magnified, its lips
smaller than ever, its hair thinner and paler than ever, its eyes smaller
and paler than ever. Except that the eyes sparkled. If he was studying
that face in the abysm between his lenses and the last page’s blank
bottom inch, it was because the eyes now sparkled.
Without leaning back in his chair, he allowed a very
long, very smooth sigh to lift his gaze as a mid-oceanic swell might roll
a raft. The transit to his two daughters in their swirling plastic frame—that
was rehearsed, too. Perhaps as rehearsed for him as turning a page. He
wondered vaguely at this moment—but quite consciously, for the thought
had never occurred to him before—how many times a day his look went
straight to the photo after putting his signature to a provocative memo or
replacing the phone upon the Dean’s, "We’ll have to see, Walter…
we’ll just have to see." What would they do without him, those two
girls—without his steady paycheck? Patrice couldn’t send them to
private school and college. If his blood pressure suddenly went sky-high
and his face were never again seen in a frame with theirs… well, they
would survive nicely enough. Patrice’s job was good for the essentials,
if not for private school. But college? Would Portia and Vanessa end up in
a place like this? And what if he lingered on after a stroke? What if he
couldn’t work—or what if no one would give him work? Blood pressure
aside, what if he made one unpopular move too many? What if Loleen was
appointed departmental chair, and he was demoted to the classroom
full-time, and she made his life there a living hell… the b.p. up again,
Patrice saying, "Find another job, Walter—it ain’t worth your
life," after one of his "I am not a slave!" tirades… and
he sifting through the ads again, updating his resumé (it wouldn’t be
styled a vita at most of the places where he’d apply), waiting
and waiting and waiting for a call instead of a letter….
Portia had his weak eyes, bless her heart, and also his
introverted personality. He worried for her. But perhaps he worried for
Vanessa even more. She was too cute by half, and too outgoing. He could
already see the enemy in some of the bucks who sauntered and sashayed into
his classroom. Perhaps the purchase of a shotgun was in his future… or
the frightful tuition of a Catholic girls’ school….
He gazed back down at the papers under his thumb—not
at their written contents, but at the paper itself. The idea of paper. The
idea of intimate voices speaking intimate thoughts. He was probably a
lousy teacher. He probably came across as too gruff, not enough of a
"people person". He had always wanted to write a novel: he had
always felt that writing one would vindicate him, would show before God
that he… that he loved. That he loved mankind enough to weep. But God
didn’t buy novels, mankind wasn’t in a novelish mood, and he no longer
even had the time. Nothing of his vindication had a real presence except
for… except for this paper. This secret stash of whispering tongues.
As he was struggling to coax a tarnished key into a
moldy lock, his books pressed left-handed up against his chest, Walter was
accosted just outside his office by Loleen.
"Got a class, huh, Dr. Walter!" she drawled
in a loud purr. It wasn’t a question. (Was it a sneer, beneath the purr—as
in, "Are you actually going to do some work, Dr. Walter?")
Walter dealt her all of one glance over his glasses as
he laboriously extracted his key.
"Say, uh… so how’s that coming? With the new
composition person?"
This deserved all of another glance as he fought to
keep his grade book from sliding out along his silk tie.
"Swimmingly."
"Oh. Well good, good. Hey Walter, I know you in a
hurry to get to all those bright-eyed, bushy-tailed students of yours. But
Toriqua—you remember my niece Toriqua? Remember my mentioning her?"
"I seem to recall…"
"Well she just called me to say she just happened
to have this afternoon free and clear, and wondering could she maybe come
in and talk to you."
"I’m here till four." He had counted on
using this walk down the hall to chase nepotism, racism, blood pressure,
office politics, violent crime, and the art of writing from his soul while
preparing for mortal combat with dangling modifiers. It wasn’t going to
happen.
"Well good. I’ll just tell her to come on in,
then."
He bowed to the neon lighting’s reflection in the
smutty linoleum.
"So that position… it’s still…."
Loleen, horn-hided though she surely was, had an
instinctive acuity when it came to catching her prey. She must have sensed
that this morsel was not firmly under her power, for she was back in the
corner of his eye within an instant of receding from it.
Walter inhaled heavily, stopped in his tracks, and hung
his head to face his adversary over his glasses. "I have a class,
Loleen. I’m late."
"Yeah, but… just so we know we on the same page
here, Walter… that job’s still open, am I right?"
"The advertised position in composition has been
filled."
"Damn, Walter! You went off and hired that
raggedy-ass white man from Harvard! You let that Ivy League slick-talking
honky sucker you into a job! I knew it—I knew it!"
Loleen’s voice lowered almost to a whisper as she
grew angrier, but its hisses drew attention which a mild shout would not
have distracted from the far-flung greetings of soul brothers up and down
the hall. Fortunately, the traffic had thinned to a trickle. One of Walter’s
routinely late students burrowed behind him as if in hopes of propping up
a claim that he had in fact been on time today.
Loleen backed off after bellicosely shaking her head so
that her three-inch spiral earrings merrily chattered. She didn’t give a
damn about overstepping the bounds with him—but she must not be observed
by others to do so. (She had already officially accused him of harassing
her when he had assigned her an eight o’clock class one semester.)
Late as it was (not too bad: 11:05 by the clock poised
meekly over Loleen’s head), Walter stared and waited. He refused to give
her a verbal shot at his shoulders in retreat.
"I don’t suppose… I don’t suppose we could
let the depart-mit vote on this. We do still have a depart-mit, don’t
we? In name only, I mean?"
"The appointment is for a renewable year’s
contract. It falls, as such, to the discretion of the chair. Read the
faculty handbook."
"Discretion! Yeah, I guess we know what that
means! Don’t give anybody else a say when you don’t have to,
Walter!"
To his surprise, Walter found that his blood pressure
was not rising: no heat around the collar, no misting around the eyes. He
noticed, even, that Loleen looked curiously attractive when her sarcastic
smile unveiled her bright front teeth. (Odd, that he had never noticed
that before, in years of receiving sarcastic responses: maybe he had
turned away from her too much, before now.)
"Here’s the score, Loleen." And Walter
faced her fully, pushing his glasses up with his index. "If we had
voted, you would have twisted every arm within grabbing distance. The
department would have been further divided, and you—let me finish,
please—you would have further damaged your own prospects on this campus.
The spectacle you made would have been very visible. This is, after all,
your own niece, as you keep reminding everyone. You are not chair, and you’re
never going to be chair, talented though you are, as long as you keep
over-playing your hand. Stop trying to look for leverage in every
situation that evolves. Stop threatening and protesting and flailing about
for hot-button issues to exploit. Just stop the pushing. It’s not how
things get done. Wherever you learned that, it’s wrong. It may get you
fear—but the people who fear you will destroy you one day."
Loleen’s face was as blank (and perhaps as meek) as
the clock’s above her glistening head of braided hair: her glazed lips
held a million crinkles, and her earrings might have been sculpted for all
they moved. Almost 11:10.
Yet Walter found time to call conversationally over a
shoulder, "Don’t forget to have your… to have Toriqua come in
this afternoon."
"What?" Her arms gave a reflexive lurch after
him. "Why?"
"She might as well take the writing test. In case
something opens up."
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R. S. Carlson and Michael
Lythgoe:
Four Poems
Dr. Ralph Carlson and Lt. Col. Michael H. Lythgoe (USAF,
Rtd.) have contributed their work to Praesidium for several years
now. Both serve on the board of The Center for Literate Values. Professor
Carlson teaches at Azusa Pacific University in southern California.
Agribusiness East
(Guangdong Province 2004)
The bullock turns head and horns
back to quiz the plowman
wrestling the harrow into line
for the next swath across the paddy.
Two fields nearer the school road,
a power tiller churns quickly at each corner,
nothing in the clayey wet to slow its tenor
chatter
slicing through the hot, humid air.
Morning, afternoon, conical hats
bowed half-way to the calf-deep flood,
the transplant crew darts set after set of
seedlings
true as a straight-edge into the muck.
This season’s ache and seedlings and sweat
rise as next season’s breakfast, lunch and
dinner.
But even here in the heart of traditional rice
culture
millennia old, who knew?
The family who owns these fields
this week drove to Guangzhou on other
business,
and the ones bending backs over wrinkled feet
in the mud
are this week’s foreign migrant labor.
R.S.C.
Commercial Casting Call
Pose for toilet paper. Smile and scheme.
Learn to dance and sing for camera cue.
Sell the lie by naming it a dream.
Polish the crucifix till the gleam
blinds your public to both false and true.
Pose for toilet paper. Smile and scheme.
Speak sweetly. Make "give and take" your
theme—
and always take: the world owes you!
Sell the lie by naming it a dream.
Promise, then deny. Proclaim the beam
is in the other's eye. What bills are due?
Pose for toilet paper. Smile and scheme.
Laugh, then whine, or whimper, sob and
scream.
How could anyone think ill of you?
Sell the lie by naming it a dream.
Camera! Action! Actor -- fume and steam!
Live half by script, half by impromptu.
Pose for toilet paper. Smile and scheme.
Sell the lie by naming it a dream.
R.S.C.
This Little Pig in Hong Kong
This little pig went to market,
and look what happened to him!
He was roasted to a golden brown
and hung for the chef to trim!
The chef laid him out on a platter,
sliced for a restaurant surprise,
his flanks aglow with a candied glaze,
and flashing red lights in his eyes.
R.S.C.
Kandinsky Rondeau
The blue rider moves like a melody
Across the canvas. Folk art or fable?
Scene full of tremors, a soul surrenders.
The white toy horse is an epiphany
For The Blue Rider.
The Russian painter studies Monet’s Haystacks;
Story and writer are horse and rider,
Or the paint and the painter, a flicker
Of childhood shapes, a gondola—abstract,
Like The Blue Rider.
In motion, black, long—on an inkblot sea.
Squeezed saxophone notes dance; an icon
suddenly
Improvises a Tunisian dream, a small red reality.
Visualize a yellow Munich postal box; a canary
Sings for The Blue Rider.
M.H.L.
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Working, Walking, and Well-Being
In order to allow Professor Chaves’s poems to face
their pictures in our hard-copy version, I thrust in at the last possible moment
the slight condensation of a column
written first for my online "blog". My apologies for whatever
dissonance is thereby created. ~ J.H.
How do we make our communities into places more
compatible with the "family values" we espouse collectively? It
seems naive to suppose that we might ever return to a nineteen-fiftyish,
proto-automobile style of living: sidewalks, picket fences, playgrounds,
corner drug stores and bakeries, minimal traffic driving at responsible
speeds.... We now seem so brick-and-mortared into our various suburban
auto-accessible-only compartments—residential, commercial, recreational—that
everything would have to be plowed under and reconstructed if we were
actually to be able to walk somewhere.
Would that be a bad thing—plowing it all under? A
complete suburban facelift would employ construction crews, architects,
designers, plumbers, electricians, and a host of supporting services for
decades. Naturally, the first remodeled communities would be experimental,
and hence costly to buy into: only the well-off could afford to live in
them. But prices would eventually fall as such neighborhoods became more
common (an eventuality which could be accelerated by government through—for
instance—tax breaks or low-interest loans). A certain amount of
low-income housing could also be built into the community. Duany,
Plater-Zyberk, and Speck portray this strategy as a desideratum in their
book, Suburban Nation (North Point Press, 2000). Think of all the
really charming communities you’ve ever seen. They’re not block upon
block of mansions, are they? (I said charm, not shock and awe.) Residences
of all sizes are pleasantly intermingled. The smaller ones, far from
undermining the market value of the larger ones, increase it, because they
render the neighborhood as a whole a scene of clean, peaceful, harmonious
diversity. That all homes should be well-maintained and built in styles
not pledged to mortal enmity is, of course, the responsibility of
residents and their architects.
The idea which I most wish to advance, though, concerns
doing business in such neighborhoods. We cannot now sell paintings from
our dens or milkshakes from our kitchens because oppressively
over-protective laws will not let us. The culprit is not so much Big
Brother, our federal government (although OSHA sabotages more than its
fair share of tiny enterprises), but irritating local statutes which we
have eagerly heaped upon ourselves. Why don’t we break these shackles?
Because too many cars might park in front of the artist’s home? Then
pass an ordinance imposing a limit of one car per house-front curb. Or
because too many roaches might collect around the milkshake-maker’s
garbage? Then pass an ordinance forbidding the amassment of garbage beyond
so many cans. Force the artist and the chef to make whatever adjustments
the community’s health and taste demand—but give them a chance to
create fine art and good food without crossing their doorstep. The
essential idea behind this vibrant community is that many people will walk
to partake of such riches. They presently venture forth on foot very
seldom because there is simply no place to go.
Critics have objected to me that such paltry businesses
as might be run out of the house would not supply anyone with a
significant source of income. How many paintings can a neighborhood
Vermeer grind out in a month? Is the demand for milkshakes high enough to
pay for the blender’s electricity? Such criticism, I respond, misses the
point. Without doubt, most households would still have to send forth one
member in some fuel-hungry conveyance every day to serve dreary hours
where the city’s businesses are clustered. The halving of this tally,
however, would in itself be extremely significant. Think first of the
money not spent: day care for the children, fuel for a second auto’s
distant adventures, lower insurance premiums in a less car-crazy
community, lower taxes to maintain less battered roads. Then think of the
money saved on wholesome local diversions as opposed to costly on-the-town
or hi--tech distractions: Gina’s Italian Home Cooking across the street
($5 a plate) over La Cucina del Conte downtown ($20 a plate), evening
walks over health club memberships, softball at the park over GameBoy and
PlayStation. The neighborhood life is simply a more frugal life as well as
a more satisfying one. If you then add to all this the five or six
thousand bucks a year that your teenager might earn by renting time on the
basement pool tables and serving refreshments, you begin to approach a
respectable lower rung income. And as more people spend more time in the
neighborhoods, these incomes would go up even as the staples and modest
pleasures of life carried ever lower price tags. The biggest problem might
well be that Gina wants to cook while John wants to paint; someone, for
the time being, must still take the dreaded commute.
We can back away from the ghastly precipice of
machine-dominated swarm and sprawl. We’re not slaves, and we are not yet
lobotomized drones abjectly pledged to serve those same machines. Our
economy will not collapse if we reassert the life of the neighborhood:
quite possibly, it will boom. But we have to think differently from the
way we have been programmed to think all our lives. We have to show some
originality, and some guts.
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************************************
Four Poems in Paint
by
Jonathan Chaves
Dr. Jonathan Chaves is professor of Chinese
language and literature at The George Washington University (Washington,
D.C.). He has published books and articles on classical Chinese poetry,
and traditional Chinese literary theory. His essay, "Kicking the
Stone and Viewing the Icon: Realist Epistemology Between Heaven and
Earth," appeared in Praesidium 3.2 (Spring 2003), 5-22.
In the Waiting Room
Jennifer and Sarah, Jane and Sue:
You're lovely all, in white! Enjoy the view,
Enjoy the conversation, and the breeze
That wafts from ocean islands through the trees.
Somewhere in Massachusetts, or in Maine?
Did you arrive by carriage, or by train?
Are you four cousins, sisters, maybe friends?
You stand or sit on one of our land's ends,
Four flowers beautifying barren rock,
And here defying time's inexorable clock.
It seems that Jennifer and Jane discourse
About the latest scandal, or race-horse,
Or maybe something elevated: art?
Or music? Or religion? Or the heart
That one of them has given to a wooer?
Their words were earnest, but they now grow fewer.
Meanwhile, Sue looks on, and tries to follow
The dancing of their thoughts; she will not wallow
Any further into their conversation;
She merely watches Jane's peregrination
From topic on to topic. Sarah, though,
Is interested not at all. Winds blow
Directly through her hair as she alone
Fronts ocean--and well matches ocean's tone:
So far she gazes, at the islands there?
Or further, does she follow ships that glare,
Points of white fire upon the deepest blue?
I cannot tell, and neither, friend, can you.
We cannot question them, they're not in time,
Their moment lifted, caught in paint and rhyme,
And by a hand that even might have touched
The soft white dresses that it has here brushed.
Frank Weston Benson signed and dated it,
1909, which makes a perfect fit
With what they wear; in 1951
The painter died, but these girls had begun
A journey that would lift them from the plane
Of ordinary life, against the grain
Of time's procession season unto season,
As artistry has given us a reason
To ponder this: A brief epiphany,
A moment of the purest harmony
Of self with self or self with ocean, earth,
Or tree or rock gives transience rebirth,
All unanticipated. Someone sees
The lovely ladies, feels the lovely breeze,
And paints them, though themselves they're unaware,
So they now sit or stand forever there.
How real are they? Did they in fact exist
At all? Or was the painter's soul impressed
By images like dreams, or memories
Of other pictures, which by faint degrees
Became a part of his own inner world
Until upon the canvas they unfurled?
Who knows? The painter too might be confused
About the source. Perhaps he too was used
In turn by someone else, one yet above
Himself, and motivated by a love
So great that it would wish to take what passes--
The ocean breezes, and the flowers and grasses,
The pristine dresses, fluttering in air,
The maidens, oh so beautiful! who are there
Just for the afternoon--and to translate
These signs of something more where temporal fate
Can't harvest them for death with his grim scythe!
Where they forever can ascend, not writhe
In agony once moment's glory's gone,
Ascend where all of this we look upon
Becomes a stage for all of us who burn
With longing for pure beauty, we who yearn
To walk forever on the sacred sod
That's being painted for us by our God.
Two Angels
Two angels playing music—one the cello,
The other heavenly creature is a fellow
Who likes to pluck his strings, and not to bow them,
And thus they entertain those down below them.
For theirs is music leading us mere mortals
To climb the ladder leading to the portals
Of Heaven. When we get there, let’s say, "Thanks!
Our real treasure never sat in banks,
But here, where our heart is!" And my heart
Has been touched by them both. Their heavenly art
Has reached in different ways my fallen soul
And played some role in rendering it whole.
The cello is the instrument of choice
Of my granddaughter—it becomes her voice
As she begins life’s journey, and the song
Of her young heart I pray will linger long.
As for the harp, the one who played for me
Was one of those whose young minds are set free
Or are imprisoned by the way we teach:
I am a teacher, and my goal to reach
The hearts of those who sit in class each year,
To arm them to encounter pain or fear
Of emptiness with weapons never failing
Against the falsehood constantly assailing
Us all: such things as truth, and goodness, beauty—
To witness to them is my real duty.
And once in a great while, in the eyes
Of someone there I see what never dies,
A deep-set light, the sign of inner life,
That will not be extinguished by the strife
Inevitable here; Victoria, one
Of this rare number, had that inner sun,
And it shone when she played the harp that day!
Danses sacrées et profanes ! Yes, either way,
Through children or through students, there’s rebirth
And we see some of heaven here on earth.
Two Girls at the Beach
--For Valerie Browne Lester
Time’s curtain lifts and, once beyond our reach,
A memory we hardly knew we had—
That makes us feel happy, also sad—
Returns revealing two girls at the beach.
One lifts her long dress carefully, afraid
The water that she steps in might disrupt
The careful world she dresses for, abrupt
With sudden rippling motion to invade
Her privacy. Not so the Other, friend
Or sister, who stands boldly past the rock
Which guards the First from open sea, no clock
Recording tiny moments which may end
Quite soon, no, sea breezes from distant lands
Caress to rippling folds her fluent dress,
A mermaid version of Tom Hardy’s Tess,
Her toes beneath the water tickling sands.
This lass’s golden hair floats loose, a heart
About to fall from tip of one long strand,
Perhaps an ornament, unneeded hand
Upon this ocean nymph of human art.
She feels no fear, her gaze goes deep to wonder
What treasure will come up inside the net
She drags along the bottom—never yet
Has Mystery its secret pried asunder
For her, revealing final, hidden pearl—
And yet she knows it’s there, she hears the song
Of what will come to her before too long. . .
To her, and to the Other: they’re one Girl,
The yang and yin of person, light and dark,
The voyager and landlubber in One,
Lover of hats, lover of free-haired fun,
Lover of ocean, lover of garden park!
Ah, Phiz, you saw it, one day at the beach,
The double-sided mystery of us,
Yearning for freedom, fearing to make a fuss,
No quirk of human nature past your reach!
And now your great-great granddaughter, Miss Browne
Has kept alive your insight, black and white,
Both you and she have gotten it just right:
May both be robed in one great angel’s gown!
Phizkids
"I’ll draw a lovely picture for you, Valerie!"
"Oh, thank you! It will hang in some great gallery!
Oh, thank you, love! I love your drawings so,
Like Papa’s—into books they all should go!"
"No, darling, Papa’s drawings are the best
In any book! Our Uncle Charles confessed
That no one else could draw his people well;
Our Papa’s drawings help his books to sell!"
"Well I don’t care, some day you will be famed
For drawing! And although I now am blamed
For drawing terribly, I know my daughter
Or niece will be an artist of first-water
Or someone in our family, some girl
Will be a treasure, will be known a pearl
Of artistry! Our Papa’s blood will bloom
Into a really lovely rose of whom
The world will say, 'She’s got a certain style
In what she does that always brings a smile!
It certainly must be because it is
A gift bequeathed to her by Papa Phiz.'"
"Oh Valerie, you do know how to dream!
I sit and sketch and you think, `Here’s a beam
Of light prophetical!’ But I’m quite boring!
I do assure you it is just a drawing."
Which girl is right? Which vision shows the future?
The one pragmatical, the one who’d nurture
A gift artistic down the generations
Which would emerge in notable creations?
There is a woman now who paints and writes
And teaches students of the greatest heights
Of poetic artistry, her salary
Is much too low, her name? Browne Lester, Valerie.
One girl, the little dreamer, saw her coming,
Maybe knew she’d help to stop the dumbing-
Down of education in our time!
Would help convict our age of its main crime,
Which is to mock the lovely and the good,
The true and the transcendent. If she could
Return today she’d say, "Ah, Valerie!
In you our Papa Hablot I do see."
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