That kind of performance was even subject to a kind of ceremonial critique. It’s reported that the mass executions carried out in Madrid in 1680 were the most “successful” that had ever taken place.
A similar kind of performance was put on in Copenhagen in 1663. Leonora Christina describes, from her jail cell in the Blue Tower, the theater of cruelty in which she lived:
Some time after the Departure of the Imperial Elector’s eldest Son, it was decided that a Wood Carving would be executed [i.e., a carving of Leonora Christina’s husband, Corfitz Ulfeldt], and thus in the Morning my lower Chamber was unlocked, well swept out, cleaned, and strewn with Sand. At Midday it was opened and the Woman, having on the Stairway spoken with the Coachman, came in, approached my Bed, appeared abashed and said quickly, “O Jesus, my Lady! They are bringing in Your Husband!” These Tidings terrified me, as she could easily mark; for when she pronounced them, I rose up in my Bed and stretched out my right Arm and Hand and could not manage to withdraw them again. At that she perchance felt Remorse, for I remained thus and spoke not a Word, whereupon she said, “My Lady, it is but a Carving of Your Husband.” Thereupon said I, “God punish you!” She declared that I spoke with an evil Tongue, that I, not she, deserved Punishment, and she used many offensive Words. I kept quite still, for I was the Weakest and knew not what to believe.
In the Afternoon I heard a great Murmur of People in the innermost Courtyard, as the Carving was borne upon a Pushcart along the Street by the Executioner and placed in the Tower beneath my Cell. The next Morning around 9 the Carving was by the Executioner woefully mistreated, but gave out not a Sound. At the Time of the Midday Meal the Bailiff told the Woman how the Executioner had chopped off the Head of the Carving, had divided the Body into 4 Parts, each of Which was laid upon a Wheel and set up on the Gallows, and the Head was displayed before the Town Hall. The Bailiff stood in the outer Room and shouted this News loudly, that I should hear it, and repeated it three Times. I lay and thought over what I should do; I could not let it appear that I were not strongly affected by it, for at that some new Thing might be hit upon, to make me even more downcast . . . I did not mind the Dishonour, for there were far too many Examples of great Lords in France, whose Images and Likenesses were burned by the Executioner, and who afterward again gained great Honour.
Of course it would have been worse if it had been her real husband who had been executed. But it would have been no less frightening.
For example, I’ve always felt that the most frightening thing about Don Juan as a figure, intended to inspire fear, is the fact that it’s really a carving, a fiction, that is killed. It’s not the real man who is condemned, the one who uses and abuses the earth and women in the name of progress and a perfect future. If it were, the judges would have had to condemn themselves and the pleasure they derived from law and order.
It’s the fictive man who is condemned, the one who makes no progress at all, but clings to imbalances in the perfect moment. In that way the judges have clearly also judged themselves, but only by revealing their fear of chaos. And they are unanimous in advance about that fear, being above the law, just as the imperial elector is above the people.
This Don Juan enters the scene in 1630 in a peculiar blend of faithfulness and panic.
Tirso de Molina has chosen the perfect moment. Kepler dies, and his observations of sunspots are published. In Italy the plague is raging, with around two million total deaths. There are all kinds of reasons to devote oneself more or less cynically to the pleasures of the moment and dismiss fear.
The offense of the Don Juan figure is that he dismisses fear.
He transforms it to panic, as a last sign of his humanness.
Against all good judgment, he rises up from the flat earth and heads straight off into eternity.
In this singular and artistic way he indulges himself in cynical innocence.
He doesn’t want to be human, he doesn’t want to make progress, he wants to take on the vertigo and roll the whole sequence up into a pearl, no matter how distorted it becomes.
Don Juan has no use for reality. The less reality, the better. The only reality he accepts is his human body, which he cultivates to resemble forms belonging to the part of the universe that’s entirely alien. The part that has never known, that has never been a body that could see.
Don Juan doesn’t see reality. He doesn’t see women. He sees only their shadows disappearing and making room for him and his body and his body’s relationship to absolute panic. No one knows, after all, whether the universe is counting backward while we’re so trustingly counting forward.
By humans he’s condemned for his treatment of women.
By judges, for his lack of fear.
And by the gods, because he comes along carrying a carving and has left reality behind.
The freedom he demonstrates is not as much a rebellion against earthly order as an experiment with heavenly chaos.
The Baroque is this battle between the gods’ right to fiction and humans’ right to it. Who invented whom, and who is watching whom. “I think, therefore I am,” wrote Descartes in that same century.
That sentence could easily have been more baroque: I think, therefore I am part of the labyrinth.
The labyrinth as a kind of shared thought process, a Möbius strip between humans and the world — and in that kind of labyrinth, it’s actually only children who feel at home: for they break the spell by making it into reality.
(1978)
The Shadow of Truth
First image. What I see might be a picture of a classical hero. A Greek athlete, a messenger. Night is falling in the mountains, maybe somewhere between Sparta and Athens, and the runner has sat down by the side of the road and unrolled his scroll. Maybe to check the route, the shortest way between his starting point and his goal, or maybe to check a message, but at any rate to orient himself a little better before it gets completely dark, and before he starts running again, which he will soon. As a hero on his way with a crucial communication. But isn’t there something strangely stonelike about the sky? Isn’t there something strangely like the sea bottom about the surface of the road under the scroll? And isn’t there something strangely aquatic about the plants on the cliff? At any rate, it looks like some creature reminiscent of a jellyfish, a sea anemone, or a squid has taken shelter against the cliff for the night.
Second image. Is there a connection between the figure of the classical hero, the suggestion of a watery world, and the stone sky? At first I search the title of the picture for help. What I see has to be supplemented with what I don’t see. Of course I still see the scroll with figures from Greek geometry, which, I am assuming, must be carried from one place to another. But now I’m forced to let what I see be guided by a name. Or more accurately, by two names. By the name “Newton,” which is the title of the picture, and by the name Blake, the painter of the picture, who has made the picture symbolic by calling it “Newton.” Because the hero has not only come running from Sparta to Athens, or vice versa, but he’s also come running all the way up through the history of Europe, until 1795, when Blake placed him here on this roadside in the shape of Newton, a naked human figure who is no longer stopping to check the message and the route, no, he constitutes the message, he himself is the route that the message follows. For we all know that Newton, during a pause in the race, so to speak, changed our whole image of the world. But that change is connected with an image of the sky as wide-open space. Of the invisible ability of planets to move through something that looks like nothing. So why is Newton placed under a sky that looks like molten stone? Why is he sitting so rigidly against a cliff that looks like a volcanic reef? Hasn’t he even noticed the squid, or whatever kind of sea creature it is that he’s sharing the world with?
Third image. Now I’m looking for explanations further from the picture, in reference works. It’s true that Blake’s double exposure of
Newton and the Greek athlete doesn’t directly resemble Newton, not the Newton I find in paintings done during his lifetime, where he’s wearing a lace-trimmed shirt, a velvet jacket, and a long, curled wig. But I’ll take Blake’s word that this naked athlete doing calculations is the physicist, astronomer, and mathematician Isaac Newton, no less, Cambridge professor, Master of the Royal Mint, President of the Royal Society, discoverer of the law of gravity, the spectrum of visible light, and much more. I also find that Blake purposely made the illusion more believable by taking the drawing on the scroll from one of Newton’s own books on optics. The hero as philosopher, as one who makes visible the workings of the world. When we add some speculation — the drawing on the scroll appears to be an equilateral triangle, which is a symbol of God, and inside the triangle an arc has been traced over the base, which might well be the geometric placement for all the points that we see from the base line beneath God’s vantage point — then we’re close to completely idealizing him: Newton as the naked, exposed human being who perceives the interrelatedness of everything. But moving on: Why is he exposed in this world of water and darkness? Why not in air and light? Why does he turn his back to all the glowing colors on the cliff and fix his gaze stiffly on the black-and-white figurative world of the scroll? I’m starting to think that I’m seeing him exposed at the farthest edge of a cliff that might well be triangular, as if he were in reality balancing, without knowing it, on the edge of the triangle that he thinks he has an overview of in the drawing. As if Newton were a victim of his own illusion.
Fourth image. When I move even further afield, I find that early in Blake’s artistic career he was already taking steps toward the Newton picture. In the early 1780s, Blake copied a print by Adamo Ghisi of one of the figures in Michaelangelo’s frescoes in the Sistine Chapel: the Jewish king Abias, whom we know as the king who stood on a high cliff and exhorted his soldiers to go forth into the war he had inherited from his father, a war that he won. One doesn’t see the whole story in Blake’s picture; but one sees Abias portrayed with the same bent back and the same shield-like musculature as Newton, so that one could be tempted to say that Newton also inherited a war, and that he had to turn his back precipitously to the whole elaborate world in order to win that war. A second step appears in one of the pictures from Blake’s series There Is No Natural Religion, a picture showing an old man kneeling on the earth, using a compass to draw an illustration over Blake’s caption: “Application. He who sees the Infinite in all things sees God. He who sees the Ratio only, sees himself only.” That is certainly also a war that’s won, an insight that’s found, and a humanity that maintains its courage because it has found the truth, in the form of Newton; but at the same moment that the truth is found, it shows its limits. For the truth that’s been found is indeed true for all time, whether it has to do with Newton’s laws or any of the other absolutes of science, but at the same moment that the truth comes to the light of day, errors come with it. Errors are, so to speak, the shadow of truth. The more all-encompassing the truth becomes, the more all-encompassing its shadow becomes. Because, as Blake notes somewhere, “All of us on earth are united in thought, for it is impossible to think without images of somewhat on earth.” (Quoted in Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake.)
Fifth image. No one can see without a gaze that is, itself, part of what is being seen. So Blake’s double image of the hero also becomes an image of the hero’s shadow, of the luxuriant, manifold cliff that he’s a part of, in the midst of the closed darkness of the sky, not realizing that the light he sees is a light coming from his own gaze. Placed in this shadow-filled counterimage, Newton comes to resemble Prometheus. Certainly Newton’s heart, sex organs, and liver are there only in concealment, exactly in the center of the picture, to boot, so no eagle can rend his liver during the daytime, and no Zeus can regenerate it during the night. But it does seem as if he, in all his naked innocence, has stolen the gods’ fire, and as if, as punishment for his careful observations, he is chained to the mountainside, exposed on the cliffs — not of the heart, but of the brain, inside his own skull, so to speak. An image of an immensely human powerlessness, where Newton’s compass,with its tremendous wingspan, is transformed into the eagle that martyrs him. Day after day, the same touching attempt to pry the truth from life, to gain a depth of understanding that will reveal the whereabouts of God.
(1992)
The Shadow of Night
It’s midnight, and without further ado we extend one day into another. Night after night we move into the same expansive borderland, where the forest up ahead is never really anything but the forest disappearing behind us, and where we barely manage to glimpse the white barrier at the frontier; it shows that it’s 2400 hours on one side and 0000 hours on the other, before, in passing, we’ve transported the old day into the new one, so we never get a moment’s rest, never a single second beyond the reach of time.
And why entertain the thought that time should stand still at exactly midnight? Like the thought that midnight on New Year’s Eve stands even more still than on other nights. It’s well known that time doesn’t stand still. At least, not of its own accord. But with a little luck, time — the whole natural, mechanical, agreed upon human time frame — can be slipped into other time frames, so that from time to time we can experience what it would be like if time were to stand still. Not at any planned, prearranged point in time. More likely at the point when, on some occasion, we’re so deeply immersed in the occasion itself that we forget time and place, forget ourselves, even completely forget the difference between ourselves and the world around us.
You might be standing still one night in a forest, in the same way that the trees are standing still. You lift your hand in the same way that the wind lifts a leaf. You listen to your own small sounds in the same way that you listen to those of your fellow creatures, you listen to your own breath as to the forest’s. You have stepped into a different kind of time, a time with such slow turnings that you can feel in your very body that time is standing still. Never in your life have you experienced as many minutes as those in this forest time. But afterward, when you look at the clock, time — your own — has moved along as usual, in fact has flown, has vanished forever into that otherwise so inaccessible time that stands still.
So we actually have a very malleable relationship with time. We can move in and out of it as we like, can shorten or lengthen it to suit us. We can make it speed ahead, so that afterward we don’t know at all where the time went, or we can make it trudge along, so that two little hours invariably feel like an eternity. We can do everything by the clock, or we can follow our own rhythms and only occasionally check to see what time it is. Basically we have two strategies: either keep an eye on time, or let time take care of itself. We combine these two strategies so that time keeps time with the wanderings of our consciousness in space. In that way, time itself becomes space, a long sequence of greater or smaller spaces, with life and events taking up more room than they otherwise would by purely chronological reckoning.
This shows that it’s probably not time, the natural process we invented, that never lets us get a moment’s rest. It willingly lets us step away from its numbers, to places where it’s possible to view it all, if not entirely from the outside, then at least from places so mobile and changeable in relation to one another that a web of time arises, the illusion of an overview of the grid we’ve been caught up in. And that illusion becomes our little moments of rest.
So it’s not time that we can’t provisionally get beyond. More accurately, it’s probably life. Life, our own, that never grants us a moment’s rest. And thank goodness for that, we say time and again. But why can’t we ever see what’s beyond? Considering that we’re constructed so that we’re able to conceive of something beyond what we usually think of as beyond everything we know. Might it be because day and light can never really let go of us? Because we are children of light, as some hymn undoubtedly
says? Simply because — more obviously than everything else — day begins in the middle of the night.
Or rather, day just keeps on going, on through the night, on through our dreams, where there’s always enough light for us to see what’s happening. And when we wake up, we have to concede that it’s been day all night long, and that everything has kept going on its own. So night is just the beginning of day, as winter is the beginning of the year. And whether one is a bulb beneath the snow or a child in her bed, the light can always get in, as long as we live. And as long as we live, we can’t think it away, either — the light.
Yet we can have a sense that in our thoughts, or in our sleep, now and then we brush against a different kind of night. A night that lies on the other side of the night we know. A night on the other side of all knowledge, of everything distinct and explainable, but also on the other side of what’s unexplained, of what’s uncertain, of fear and of all our illusions. A night that thinks us away, we might say, a bit aggrieved. At any rate a night without light, without differences, without any of the things we otherwise can name, a night defined by the absence of everything. And so it’s quite possible for that everything to encompass its own absence.
Now, it’s not only that day begins in the middle of the night; it’s also that the week has seven days, but eight nights. So all the days are surrounded by nights. But even these surrounding nights aren’t the original night: the night before the first night, and the night after the last night.
As the Greeks saw it, Night was the daughter of Chaos and mother of Sky and Earth. So the first night, the original night of the daughter of Chaos, has very little, maybe nothing in common with the normal earthly nights we know, which we might consider the civilized and enlightened children of a mother who, while just a child, the child of Chaos, was assigned the role of Night, the original blackness, about which we know nothing, and which we merely characterize on occasion, like Kazimir Malevich when he characterizes blackness as a square.
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