Aseroë

by François Dominique

  The birth of a word, and then of another, invented by woman. The day when the wound will be healed. Which could be a secret, or the avowal of a secret: to stop “communicating,” lest you become monsters—that is, empty “whos” and empty “whats” subject to the empty questions tossed back and forth by the Major Powers of Communication. To learn to speak—simply—as before … With the murmurings of small children in tow. And with the sheer song of vowels or consonants also providing an escape from the embrace of the void.

  5

  Aseroë

  MY FEBRUARY VISIT to the Accademia in Venice, the emotion felt facing Giorgione’s The Tempest—the flash of lightning suddenly seized—and my reading one year later, in a catalog of the Château de Tanlay, of a letter written to Giorgione by his poet friend Antonio Brocardo. I wrote a short story in which I identified myself with the latter, claiming that from 1480 to 1510 I had worked in Giovanni Bellini’s studio as well as in that of Giorgio Barbarelli, who was known as Giorgione. Thus, I would have been a rare witness to this capture of a flash of lightning.

  In this short story (later abandoned), I shrank away from my own private sensory impressions—under the pretext of fictionally embodying an earlier existence I had never experienced—but why did I refuse to open my eyes? Apart from the historical meaning of The Tempest or the disturbance provoked by my observation of this work, the reading of a letter of which I believed myself to be the author had encouraged me to maintain that this ancient canvas contained AT THE PRESENT TIME a visible thought. A thought, translated by artistic means, but in such a way as to move it forward in time—as if just short of or just beyond the possibilities of figurative representation.

  I would have granted that Giorgione might have wanted to destroy his painting, having despaired of providing a representation of the impossible; and also that the magic of the lightning flash, according to the aesthetic of the end of the Quattrocento, might come down to us several centuries later as somewhat dimmed or unpersuasive. And that the capturing of the lightning flash would remain what it has never ceased to be for art: an impossibility comparable to the lack of lived life in even the most vibrant of Early Renaissance portraits.

  I recall my feelings at that time. It was midwinter and I was looking at the painting and, without making the slightest movement, was anticipating an event, although I didn’t know of what sort. Soon, I sensed that a light was flooding the space and illuminating the soldier and the half-naked Gypsy woman suckling her baby. I was caught up in the landscape of the painting. The lightning flash removed the shadows and traversed the objects without reducing their opacity; it enclosed and traversed me, as well.

  I’ve seen hundreds of visitors pass in front The Tempest. Some would only react after having identified its signature (ah, Giorgione’s Tempest!); others would pass by without noticing anything whatsoever. My behavior was unusual enough to trouble me for a long time after my visits. At the end of prolonged contemplation, the lightning—fictionally restrained within the limits of the frame—agreed to offer me the blinding explosion I was anticipating. The original strike of lightning was, as it were, restored by a second flash, in which time was deferred and perturbed by a double emergency—the initial jolt of the painter who had managed to fix this flash in an immobile duration, and its subsequent seizure by my admiring glance, which had to follow a reverse path, resolving the lightning’s original duration into an abrupt effulgence in the now. I suspected Giorgione of having foreseen such a result, but how and why?

  I remember several stormy nights in mid-August in the Ardèche. I saw the clouds crumble down and burst over the Meyrand pass and the lightning illuminating mountain and valley. But the fascination exerted by Giorgione’s work doesn’t stem from some sort of painterly, representational “truth”—even if the painter’s art stirs in us the most vivid impression of a resemblance to what nature displays to us in the blink of an eye. In The Tempest, the most ephemeral moment of suddenness and the most prolonged moment of duration both undergo a violent reversal that modifies our fundamental perception of time.

  It’s possible that some obscure motivation leads me to exaggerate. Is Giorgione’s procedure as singular as I had thought? Any portrait requires this same finesse: a smile, a subtle gesture, the intent of a gaze are as difficult to represent as the sudden flash of a storm. This very rational train of thought led me to abandon the above-mentioned short story, which would have necessarily led to my utter confusion.

  But seven months later, I was somehow again caught up by my own story. I found myself at that time in a state of mind in which the mere mention of Giorgione’s name or that of any artist would have made me laugh self-consciously.

  On the evening of September 22, contrary to my usual habits, I ate and drank more than was good for me, and went to bed quite out of sorts. Very early the next morning, I left home and wandered on foot through the forests as far as Châtillon-sur-Seine (a hike I undertake once a year). A remote inn on the banks of the Ource, near Voulaines-les-Templiers, was my intended goal after the first leg.

  I was walking at a steady pace, admiring the sky, the impressive plant life, and all the things that came into my view at every turn of the road: the sod huts of the old foresters, the bushes with their nesting birds, the carpets of moss smirched with bloodred muscaria mushrooms, the animals here and there.

  Late the following afternoon, I sighted a grove of elms among the oaks, these towering trees, spared from the disease that had ravaged their species, formed a perfect circle. Their majestic crowns commanded the respect of all the other nearby forms of vegetation. In the middle of this circle, the low grass lay like a freshly mown lawn, presenting me with several clusters of wild orchids—the delicate Ophrys apifera, or bee orchid.

  Seated between two elms, I observed the columns of light between the branches. Evening was falling and the sky was smudged with clouds. Suddenly, several gusts of wind altered the lie of the clouds and the storm broke, rapid and bottomless, with unexpected intensity. I stood there, soaked from head to toe. Just preceding this uproar, a vivid flash had lit up the forest. It died out almost immediately in the approaching half-light. One or two hundred yards behind me, lightning fell upon the clearing. A shredded elm pointed its blackened splinters toward the sky. I ran off, gasping for breath, and without looking back, headed for my inn.

  The next morning, still frightened by the intensity of the storm, I gave up on pushing toward Châtillon-sur-Seine and returned to my home in Plombières as soon as possible. During the miserable night spent in the inn, I had discovered that The Tempest and Antonio Brocardo’s letter to Giorgione (which I had read for the first time two years earlier) were fragments of one and the same work, a diptych simultaneous in its optical and mental image—the painting and the epistle indissolubly comingled into a choreography of time.

  I needed to verify this. Since I couldn’t return to Venice, I gathered together some reproductions and I read and reread Brocardo’s letter to his painter friend. Surprise and alarm amplified my initial enthusiasm: to capture the lightning as Giogione had done would involve far more than creating the mere illusion of freezing time. I sensed that the painter had engaged in a mercilessly lucid act—to gamble his entire project, as well as all his artistic ambitions, on a fraction of a second, on the sudden disappearance of himself. One can read the watermark pressed below the surface of the sky of The Tempest: “Everything is about to disappear. Everything shall disappear.”

  This visual thought—neither a lament for years gone by nor a mortification intended to instruct us to forget the vanities of this world—has no other purpose than to exalt the ephemeral, to praise the stubborn persistence of movement, to extol the precise stroke: the passionate leap of the dancer ahead of a fall.

  This discovery modified all my convictions. It gave new meaning and an entirely different cast to certain facts—later associated with Lausanne and Budapest—whose true import had until then escaped me.

  At the moment I’m
writing this (fall equinox, 6:34 A.M.), I have before my eyes the following sentence of Robert Walser’s, written toward the end of his life: “Write while dancing.” And also these words that Suzanne Cordelier attributed to an exceptional dancer (La Argentina) on May 10, 1936. As legend has it, she addressed a full house, overwhelmed with emotion: “I’m quite willing to dance some more for you, whatever you like, but I’ve run out of music.” Followed by renewed applause as the curtain came down and the lights dimmed and the dustcovers were draped over the velvet of the loges. The image of La Argentina entering her house two months later and collapsing on the threshold. I also have before me a little photo of Vera Ouckama Knoop, the sight of whom inspired Rilke to make a last effort at writing his Sonnets to Orpheus and his final Elegies. Images lost in infinity, in the depths of a hall of mirrors, drowned in the All that is Absence. Farewell, face (captured in a snapshot). Farewell, dance figure. Farewell, final whirl of death.

  A poem, a painter’s glance: the finale of a requiem for fleeting beauty, a requiem for disappearance.

  I can easily imagine the conversation encouraged by true friendship: Giorgione said to Brocardo that in a dream he had seen Apelles’ fresco in the temple of Artemis at Ephesus, Alexander and Lightning. The sky on fire—unrepresentable—was pictured this single time. But of this ancient destroyed temple we have no trace—nor any evidence of Apelles’ painting. The lightning, reclaiming its divine rights, must have erased the profane image. I imagine this dialogue and I think that Giorgione must have bettered Apelles by far, having represented both the flash of lightning and the disappearance of the mortal who had witnessed the flash.

  Now (April 16, 6:45 A.M.), I’m looking through a magnifying glass at an excellent reproduction of The Tempest. The colorless light has no source. Despite the painting’s patina of age, I perceive a bolt of lightning composed of every hue, including black. On either side of the river, the young man and the woman and child are calm, far too calm. Are they awaiting the promise of another life? A glow envelops them all, as well as the walls and the foliage. Night and day escape from the controversy of contrasts, gathered together in the heavenly storm.

  I think of Giorgio Barbelli—that is, Giorgione—as a brother. The black death snatched him away. His days were numbered. His poet friend Brocardo, who fled Venice because of the war, sent him letters that went missing. In the years 1480–1510, the French king’s League laid waste to the villages of the Veneto and the plague broke out amid the devastations of war. On May 13, 1510, Giorgione received a final letter from his friend Antonio Brocardo. Here it is, translated from Italian:

  Dear Giorgio, How pleasant it is to stroll the city streets, as the peripatetic philosophers and the wise men of old once did, speaking of our cats and of the hidden face of the world. By respecting my silence you have strengthened my taste for reticence. Sans image, what good are words? Mere pebbles rolling along a riverbed where we two cannot walk abreast, forced to proceed with our noses to our feet, without seeing anything of the world, without anything possessing the slightest meaning—except that we’re moving forward like beasts. I can see very well where we’re headed: we’re about ready to believe in the power of speech, to be caught up in its game. What a wonder the power of speech, yet how harsh and pure its exile, which so cuts us off from life. Speech is within us, yet we’re also caught up inside it. Once the ink of words is dried on paper, there’s nothing left around us but immense solitude—or death upon the shores of the sea. All is nothingness. But among the ashes of words I know very well that we would continue to write to each other, like children, with our fingers. I can clearly see what it is that obliges the two of us to write or paint: it’s that naïve desire to bring time to a halt, to take up residence in our solitude once again. We want to go on living via our signs, having now become the gods of our own immortality. But what a useless thing to pursue: this cult of immortality. If we cannot know how to live, let us at least learn to die. Our work is like the faith of the simpleminded. The sound of verse is its surest music. We are attached to signs that create a chain, binding man to man. And yet, it is only from the depths of our silence that we speak; it is only as solitaries that we come together as men. But are we yet sufficiently alone to be free? Life is such a small thing that one could easily withdraw into one’s room in order to invent the world. Again and again we repeat the same signs with new images. Come on, my special friend, we so enjoy living that we shall find pleasure in it in the end: let’s rediscover the delights of writing and of painting in quiet rooms. Our ultimate vanity. As if the only legitimate love were the love of absence. They say the plague is now general: take good care of yourself! Otherwise I would never have been able to speak to you as I have.

  6

  Aseroë

  AFTER A WEEK’S WORK in Budapest in November, I decided to spend my Sunday at the National Museum. The next morning, in Szentendre, on the Danube, I was to meet the painter Endre Bálint; he was going to show me the façades of the old houses featuring the “Serbian motifs” of which I was ignorant while looking at his drawings several days earlier.

  The trip to the museum was painful. I was asleep on my feet. The paintings were running in a blur before me; I had to make an effort to distinguish one from another. My week’s work, which was quite interesting and proceeding at a regular pace, didn’t explain my fatigue. I was afraid I might be falling ill, but I had no shivers, no discomfort—just a strong urge to sleep. All these rows of paintings seemed unbearable to me: bloodless nudes, idiotic portraits, nauseating crucifixions, ponderous battles. The visitors seemed to be accomplices in all this. How could I put up with their murmurs, their admiring commentaries? I was afraid some annoying person might notice my deplorable condition and denounce me as a spy. I immediately made up my mind: I would walk through the galleries at a swift clip.

  I was moving along quickly from gallery to gallery, going against the direction of the tour. I raced through several centuries—the Italian Primitives, Spain, Flanders, the Renaissance, and the Baroque—a few seconds for each period and country, nothing more.

  Since the rooms were well heated, I began to feel reinvigorated. Several times I passed in front of the same canvases. “No point in lingering,” I told myself toward the end of the morning tour, impatiently waiting to be hungry enough to make my exit with a good excuse.

  A little later, I was stopped dead in my tracks in front of Caterina Cornaro, by Gentile Bellini. “Stopped dead in my tracks” is the right expression to describe my condition—for almost the last two hours, any sense of “culture” had been lost on me. Seized by sudden delight, I spontaneously discovered a face—with whose eyes, whose hair, and whose Venetian coif I fell instantly in love.

  Talented, elegant, and flattering as the painter’s treatment may have been, it wasn’t the beauty of the face that captivated me but the sparkle of her look, the intense emotion that animated her. Resisting too hasty an infatuation, I took the time to examine all the details. I observed her forehead, her mouth; I roved lovingly over her hair, her eyes, her cheeks. It was as if her material surface were troubled by the loving caress of my gaze. This idea seemed to please the painting, and its face smiled back at me. I immediately assumed that I was the victim of some visual disorder or the effects of a fatigue too recent to be entirely overcome. I wanted to clarify the situation, and, holding my breath, I approached the portrait. The actual canvas of the painting, now so close to my eyes, became even more disturbing. Who was I to accuse, down to the last detail, the clumsiness of Gentile Bellini, who had left all the vestiges of his numerous pentimenti so poorly covered up? Had the artist interrupted his progress at several points of his painting, leaving it at the sketch stage, neglecting numerous delicate nuances, botching the finished work? Or rather, did every flutter of his brushstroke anticipate that fashionably négligé manner that would later become so common in the art of the portrait?

  I feared the worst: despairing of finding the overall truth of a face, had the painter
simply attacked its individual features, drowning his finest touches under a poor glaze, thickening the color where he should have instead lightened it? No, the portrait was irreproachable: you just fell in love with it the moment you saw it.

  The painted surface came to life before me. It made me think of those faces that sleep with their eyes open: they’re motionless, but you have no doubt that they’re alive. These sleeping beauties never gaze at their onlookers, but this Venetian woman by Bellini was staring at me intently. One would have to find the source of movement, however slight, that justified this illusion. The painting was immobile, and my glance was not distracted. I imagined that there must have been some phenomenon in the air—between my face and this painted face—some change in the atmosphere, some alteration of the light, to which I had failed to pay sufficient attention.

  I moved this way and that in front of Caterina Cornaro. I observed the other canvases as well (with their perfectly inert faces, their formal beauties), but again and again I returned to Caterina Cornaro. The flesh coloring of her face remained ever vivid—a striking anomaly that at once called out to me and made me afraid. Meanwhile, I vehemently rejected any notion that I was here encountering a real woman in the flesh: I preferred the sensible inertia of an image completely divorced from its deceased model, the expected absence of a being whom I would never come to know. In an ancient portrait such as this—quite the reverse of an image glimpsed in a mirror—is not the evocation of a woman supposed to be an image frozen in time?