(mirror note 6)
The only real divertissement came when a gentleman with a prospering moustache, functionary of UNESCO, explained the wondrous project they’d embarked upon to establish (create?) The Memory of the World. One had visions of an enormous echoing space, maybe a cave, that had to be furnished with the elements that would constitute our shared human memory. In this way shall we become global. The earnest man of Arab origin, a librarian by profession, presented his paper while projecting on the wall behind him images of our memory genes. That is, our documentary heritage which was being rescued from the attrition of time, “acidified paper that crumbles to dust, leather, parchment, film and magnetic tape attacked by light, heat, humidity or dust.” Next to him on the podium sat a ponderous German historian, eminent member of an organism called IAC, the International Advisory Committee, white-haired with age and seasoning, and nodded a solemn and wise head. Trouble was that there was little traceable correlation between the discourse and the images. Peccadilloes! The beauty, surely, was that here you had the dream of creating a vastness with neither beginning nor end. Like the Borges story of attempting to draw a true remembered face of the world, this ‘map’ would eventually have to be big enough to cover all of human consciousness. Were there criteria?
You bet, sir! Documentary heritage must be shown to have had major influence on the history of the world at a particularly important time and crucial place, associated with people who made an outstanding contribution; it should give valuable information about a major theme, or should be an example of outstanding form or style, encapsulating a cultural and social or spiritual value which transcends, transcends. . And the morsel of heritage will be enhanced if it has a high degree of integrity or completeness or if it is unique or rare. But how do you decide as poor, coughing, foot-shuffling humans? Oh, oh, sir. It is almost too much to bear. Maybe the old tried method of leaving the documents on a table overnight and that which has not fallen off deserves to be included? Are there exclusions? Well, after months of agonizing but expert deliberations, it was decided not to include anything relating to the ‘Condor Project’ in terms of which a cabal of Latin American dictators and the CIA had physically eliminated thousands of leftist agitators and dreamers. . This was too horrible to remember. And nobody knows yet how to incorporate the Berlin Wall.
SURFACE
I’m cutting up words and pasting them in a painting. And I have to think of the Tibetan prayer flags, words and wishes scribbled on cloth to flap in the breeze at crossroads or in inaccessible mountain places. To forward pleas, to appease the gods and the departed spirits. What is the ‘use’ of beauty which ‘nobody’ can see? No one will ‘read’ them: these are sounds confided to the wind. Especially to wind — the presence of absence, the breath of immortality and of death.
We have covered much ground in the weeks we spent together; it has been an exciting time and a privilege to be with you. And yet, we only scratched the surface. We looked sideways at some of the elements and implications of writing, but we only paused to discuss more closely when they surfaced through your stories. For example, we did not consider the primordial importance of the sentence — the donkey — that essential beast of burden encapsulating breath or breathing a wisp of thought. Nor did we study the function of texturing through sounds and patterns and associations, or how repetition leads to absence. (Or does it originate from the void, like a reverberating sound-wave, effacing itself through repetition?)
Surface is important. It constitutes and illustrates the flapping of our minds. It is the federation of intention and illusion, of emptiness and of manifestation, and then it exists and shimmers in its own right. I have often thought that it might be worthwhile to try and write a treatise on The Metaphysics of the Surface.
We always work with sensitive spaces, both in our relationship to what comes down on the paper (and this will be a sustained tension all through one’s writing life) and in the way we position ourselves to the product — the adaptability and acceptability of it, its coherence or resonance or success; and then the attitude to the reader’s expectations and our relations with other writers and the links and breaks among our own various writings.
Writing is the dialectic between absence and presence. It is the art of leaving out so that you can let in more. It is the process of surfacing. As you write, you surface to yourself — like turbulent water stilling to the rise of an image. The water is not any less deep and there are as many creatures gliding through the sweet thickness of currents, but it now allows itself to be focused to a surface of reading, to what I referred to earlier as ‘a plausible bounded mirage of meaning’. . (Movement, of course, obviates the need for a recognizable face.) And then, if the writing works, it will allow the reader to surface to him- or herself. As Russell Banks put it: Writing is the art (and thus the pleasure and the pain) of being intimate with strangers. With yourself as the first stranger.
You always start out having at least an idea of what you wish to write. But then, it is only in the writing that you find out what you’re about. This is the creative tension between intention and discovery, and it is this relationship that makes for welcoming spaces.
The ethical respect you show your stories — to the characters, the situations, the plot, the environment, the tenses and the tensions — will consist of not having your texts preach your convictions about rape and violence and racism and global warming and war, or the free market and other aberrations of stupidity. The only effective action as writer against social folly is to write better, go deeper, open the mind more, be more democratic in the space you allow the reader.
Enhanced consciousness — that is, first of all the matter of touching and smelling, running your hands over the rough edges of words with their histories and their bastard natures — is the bedding of conscience.
TERRITORIALITY
In the bright morning a daymoon just the barest knuckle of a reminder of subterranean dimensions. Red birds flit and flutter in the bare branches of a big tree. This is Connecticut. We are staying in the house of an old writer. There are many rooms smelling of ancient dogs and manuscripts, narrow passages, creaking wooden floors, framed New England faces against the walls. For breakfast we have ‘hambiscuits’ — salty and sweet Virginia meat cured by the master in his bathtub, then glazed.
It is the season of silent waiting before the first snow that will bring memories of visitors and family. The forests rolling over the hills are armies of threadbare veterans retreating from the summer wars. One senses the throb of muffled drums. I go walking with the master: we see deer tracks in the soft dirt, a neighboring farmer leading two big white horses with steaming flanks down the road to the fast river that spilled over its banks many years ago when my host first moved here. There are several other writers living in the vicinity, he tells me.
What is Writer’s Land? It is a territory of the imagination, more familiar than any existing place, that area of the heart that the writer speaks from. Sometimes it will be consciously delineated and populated, as with William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha or Shelby Foote’s Jordan County or Gabriel Marquéz’s Columbia of the mind where retired colonels and killers live. Very often it is the shadowed land of one’s youth that cannot be found on any map. It may be left undefined so that only recurring situations will constitute an environment, giving one the feeling of having been there before. It could be political surroundings — somewhere you escape to because it provides a sanctuary where the problems of the day can be dealt with metaphorically (with Zamyatin and Kapek in their respective socialist paradises these ‘worlds’ were futuristic), or the place you run away from because, paradoxically, the issues are starker and the implications more momentous there (with Kafka it was that of the suspended nightmare).
Arthur Miller’s world is mostly urban and imbued with the political consciousness of the working classes. Allen Ginsberg probably lived at the chanting intersection of Jewish liturgy and Buddhist ritual where the prayer flags fla
p, but it was more likely the land of desire than that of quietude. It may be a land of traveling, as it was with Arthur Rimbaud, who pushed to the frontiers of himself and was destroyed by what he found there.
It can be a land of time, often tucked into a specific period, and then the borders will be drawn by the story of unfolding. With older writers — William Styron, Norman Mailer, Edgar Doctorow, Philip Levine — you notice how they revisit it phrase by phrase: a familiar landscape smoothed by their attention to the quirks of consciousness and burnished by their lives. The land they walk over is as loyal and hand-tooled as an old dog or a family retainer. They come across deer tracks, pass neighbors leading white horses to sound-spitting rivers. There are still impenetrable copses though, and the unexpected dragons of depression and madness.
South Africa used to be considered ideal writer’s territory, a country of heroes and villains, of loyalty and betrayal, of climatic extremes and severed heads; but it was always too easily and seductively so: the challenges of violence and confrontation, of distinction and acceptance, were exacerbated as forms of escape into the never-never land of portent and moral prancing. Under those circumstances it is difficult for the writer not to become an angel. And the angel has no sex.
Writer’s Land is the invisible ‘book’ behind the words (these here now, also) — larger than the volume but confined between its covers. It may not be attractive, it may be that place which is covered with the anonymity of burial sites, and the extent of your success in making it live will depend on your capacity to familiarize the reader with its contours and its natives, thus on the sounds of your sentences and the way meaning glances like light off your words; but if you identify and inhabit it you will have a voice, and at least be a citizen of somewhere.
REALITY IS AN OPTICAL ILLUSION
Over the last few days I had the opportunity to become acquainted, a little, with David Hockney’s theories on the uses of optics by master painters from the very early Renaissance on. I must admit that I was skeptical. It just seemed to me inconceivable that such methods — using mirrors at first and later all sorts of lenses to project images on canvas that would then be traced or copied in an effort to create the illusion of ‘reality,’ employed systematically over centuries, and all of this collectively referred to as ‘secret knowledge’ by Hockney — would not have been written about. After all, historians of the time, like Vassari, wrote exhaustively about the lives of the painters and their techniques, and every major practitioner had a whole studio of apprentices working with him. Or, for that matter, that no art historian or contemporary painter worth his wits has since tumbled to the same discoveries and conclusions. To my knowledge there’s not a whisper in the dusty tomes, although it is true that the paintings themselves sometimes refer obliquely to the ubiquity of these potential devices in the vicinity of the makers: eyeglasses resting on the pages of an open book, someone reading with a magnifying glass, the convex mirror as in Van Eyck’s wedding portrait of the Arnolfinis — a dark, bulging, all-seeing eye. The (partial) answers to my caveat would seem to be that, a) there are (or were) indeed written traces of these ‘occult’ goings-on, a reference to Caravaggio with his head stuck under a black cloth here, the hosed legs sticking out comically, some other puzzling process observed there. .; and b) that the old masters were far more secretive about their discoveries, and therefore protective of their businesses, than is generally realized. Jan van Eyck, for instance, is said never to have revealed the composition of his marvelous glazes. Artists of the time belonged to guilds and brotherhoods. All thought of themselves as alchemists — were they not bringing into the world images more real than what the naked eye could ever perceive and was this not producing the sublime from base materials? — and in order to push back the limits of realism, or its depiction (or substitution?), they used whatever measuring trick, broth, talisman, golden rule or theory they could lay their hands on. They knew they were indulging in magic. All creation, be it in words or visually, is a transgression, lifting the skirts of existential darkness, and manipulating the mysterious power this ability bestows is not only human but possibly obligatory if you want to communicate with the unknown. The initiated one has a pact with the mysterious. It was only normal, in order to protect and preserve their power, that certain discoveries or ways of doing should be kept confidential. If the patron king or cardinal didn’t think they were magicians of a kind they probably never would have received the commissions they did. Still, can it really be believed that since six centuries no-one has cracked this momentous code, that all scholars and lovers of fine imagery were struck by some historical blindness?
On Friday last, over lunch at the New York Institute for the Humanities, Hockney’s accomplice in this crusade to invent the wheel, a physicist working in the field of optical science, named Charles Falco, failed to convince the audience completely. Doubts were the deeper shadows framing the highlights of his intellectual bavardage. The Irish term is ‘blarney.’ He first explained why and for how long he has been a motorcycle enthusiast and then tried to pull the wool over our eyes with all sorts of jargon relating to ‘laws of nature,’ ‘depth of fields of vision,’ hypotheses and theories (and how a scientific ‘theory’ is a radically different bird from the artistic one), ‘vanishing lines of perspective,’ fractured edges and fractions of degrees and angles. In other words, he could measure the magic. And, if needed, develop the tools to do this with. It seemed to me odd though, that one should start with the ‘scientific’ proofs and proceed via the methodology to arrive, after much close scrutiny and more than just a slight sleight of eye, at the ‘problem.’ Never mind that none of the old fellows would have approached painting so systematically, even if they thought they did. All artists have a bee in the bonnet. Douanier Rousseau thought he was the greatest living painter in the ‘Egyptian style’ and Picasso in the ‘Greek style.’ He told Picasso so. The creative process has the empirics of ‘natural’ growth (one thing calling up the other and then establishing relationships) and more than a smattering of voodoo (ascribing transformative and ‘covert’ power to these relationships), but many decisions made during the course of the process are arbitrary, destructive and irrational. When I pointed out that all of these paintings born from projected images, at least in part, would then have had to be painted upside down, and this should be visible to the perceptive eye since brushstrokes go from the top down in their movements and are from left to right or inverse, depending on whether you’re left- or right-handed, he lamely refuted the flight of my argument and held that this could not be visually verified. I concluded that he has no understanding of what the hand and the eye do in the game of drawing or applying color to a surface, and he certainly is mistaken in thinking that artists proceed like scientists.
On Saturday, Hockney himself put up a much more attractive fight. The occasion, “Art and Optics: A Conference Around a Theory,” hosted by the Law School, seemed to draw New Yorkers in droves. Hundreds of people were waiting in line all around the block. A sardonic friend of mine suggested there were several reasons for this extravagant interest: Egalitarian New Worlders would like to witness those old European genius ‘masters’ brought down a notch or two by having it explained how they were just tricksters; paradoxically, this would make their works more accessible since Americans just love the idea that creativity is finally but a ‘do-it-yourself’ paint-by-numbers activity that can be mastered if only you knew the techniques; even the sophisticated city dwellers cannot resist being awed by snake oil salesmen — this naivete, too, is part of the American dream bolstered by a pioneer spirit; and any diversion that arouses passionate polemics would be a welcome relief from the post September 11 depression syndrome. In fact, my (American) friend smiled, you could say this is another expression of “America strikes back!”
Hockney, his shoulders bent so that it looks as if he’s developing a late hump (he did say that all of this had started with a hunch), and apparently totally deaf, introduced a BBC film
made on the subject. The film, frenetically applauded, was a marvel of humor and insight. Some sadness too. In it he was shown walking through the masterpieces of smoke and mirrors left us by Van Eyck, Caravaggio, Lotto, Velazquez, Vermeer, Chardin, Ingres and others. Apparently he has more than a thousand ‘cases,’ reproductions of artworks qualifying for examination, pinned to his studio wall. His curiosity was first aroused by the strong light on the faces of patrons sitting for their portraits in studios, light only found outside under the sun or close to a fierce window. Then the film showed him attempting to reproduce the methods and means ostensibly used by the ancients. This involved dressing up desirable young men in Medieval apparel and draping bunches of grapes over their curly heads. One of them had distinctly rosy, tumescent lips. You could envision the juices. A lot of this was, perhaps inadvertently, very funny. It could be done, sure, but the procedure was cumbersome and the results inferior. Some gems were brought to our attention, like a Dutch drinking scene with all the revelers left-handed, including the monkey at the bottom of the frame. But all in all, he seemed to negatively disprove his theories: his own work, done by simple eyeballing, trusting the well-worn working relationship between eye and hand, was far better and much more ‘life-like’ than all this complicated maneuvers necessitating apparatuses. I could not help but think what a great artist he is, and how typical with this unlikely, cranky obsession!
In the ensuing commentary on the film, he did elucidate a few points. For example, according to a London curator (Hockney says) one can indeed see on a Caravaggio painting how he made initial markings from an upside down projected image, then turned the canvas right way up to continue painting. On the other hand, after watching Hockney laboriously trying to reproduce the procedure he thought Van Eyck used to paint the very intricate chandelier dangling from the ceiling in the Arnolfini portrait, I was left wondering why Van Eyck did not then do the same in order to make the wedding couple more ‘realistic.’ They are waif-like and willowy, very distinctly not life-like! And how (a questioner wanted to know) did Michelangelo succeed in giving such an intense appearance of realness to the hands of his Piëta sculpture? In other words, was the perception and depiction of what is ‘real’ really dependent on lenses?
Intimate Stranger Page 13