Category: Art

When Will I Be Blown Up?

Bohemia Lies By the Sea, Anselm Kiefer

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed – love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

– Nobel Banquet Speech, William Faulkner

Numberless Silhouettes

If she went to Alan now it would be like detaching one of these cut-outs of a woman, and  forcing it to walk separately from the rest, but once detached from the unison, it would reveal that it was a mere outline of a woman, the figure design as the eye could see it, but empty of substance, this substance having evaporated through the spaces between each layer of the personality. A divided woman indeed, a woman divided into numberless silhouettes, and she could see this form of Sabina leaving a desperate and lonely one walking the streets in the quest of hot coffee, being greeted by Alan as a transparently young girl he had married ten years before and sworn to cherish, as he had, only he had continued to cherish the same young girl he had married, the first exposure of Sabina, the first image delivered into his hands, the first dimension, of this elaborated, complex and extended series of Sabinas which  had been born later and which she had not been able to give him. Each year, just as a tree puts forth a new ring of growth, she should have been able to say: ‘Alan, here is a new version of Sabina, at it to the rest, fuse them well, hold on to them when you embrace her, hold them all at once in your arm, or else, divided, separated, each image will lead a life of its own, and it will not be one but six, or seven, or eight Sabinas who will walk sometimes in unison, by a great effort of synthesis, sometimes separately, one of them following a deep drumming into the the forests of black hair and luxurious mouths, another visiting Vienna-as-it-was-before-the-war, and still another lying beside an insane young man, and still another opening opening maternal arms to a trembling frightened Donald. Was this the crime  to have sought to marry each Sabina to another mate, to match each one in turn by a different life?

– A Spy in the House of Love, Anaïs Nin

Life is the art of being well deceived*

 

The fact that he purposely dropped the key (on the morning of January fourth) proves that he wanted me to read his diary.  Really, he needn’t have bothered to tempt me.  On January fourth I said:  “I shall never read it. I haven’t the faintest desire to penetrate his psychology, beyond the limits I’ve set for myself. I don’t like to let others know what is in my own mind, and I don’t care to pry into theirs.” But that wasn’t true – except when I said: “I don’t like to let others know what is in my own mind.” Soon after our marriage I got into the habit of glancing over his secret notebooks. Of course I’d “known about his diary for a long time.” It’s nonsense to say “I’d never dream of touching it.”

– The Key, Junichiro Tanizaki

 

*William Hazlitt (1778-1830)

When the Cover Doesn’t Match the Art

She looked at him with dread, with entreaty, with love; she looked at him intently, to keep his features more distinctly in her memory.

“I am so unhappy,” she went on, not heeding him. “I have thought of nothing but you all the time; I live only in the thought of you. And I wanted to forget, to forget you; but why, oh, why, have you come?

– The Lady with the Little Dog, Anton Chekhov

Second-Order Vanity

Grotesquerie le regarder (2002), Brent Harris

`Well, a second-order vain person is first of all a vain person.  He’s vain about his intelligence, and wants people to think he’s smart. Or his appearance, and wants people to think he’s attractive. Or, say, his sense of humour, and wants everyone to think he’s amusing and witty. Or his talent, and wants everyone to think he’s talented. Et cetera.  You know what a vain person is.`

`Right.`

Just a feeling (no. 2) (1996), Brent Harris

`A vain person is concerned that people not perceive him as stupid, or dull, or ugly, et cetera et cetera.`

`Gotcha.`

`Now a second-order vain person is a vain person who’s also vain about appearing to have an utter lack of vanity.  Who’s enormously afraid that other people will perceive him as vain. A second-order vain person will sit up late learning jokes in order to appear funny and charming, but will deny that he sits up late learning jokes. Or he’ll perhaps even try to give the impression that he doesn’t regard himself as funny at all.` 

`….`

– The Broom of the System (ch. 2), David Foster Wallace

An Empty Stomach

The Tree of Crows, Caspar David Friedrich (1822)

From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant proffesor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantine and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and off-beat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out.

I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant loosing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

(…)

I don’t know what I ate, but I felt immensely better after the first mouthful. It occurred to me that my vision of the fig tree and all the fat figs that withered and fell to the earth might well have arisen from the profound void of an empty stomach.

– The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath

To Dance, To Write, To Read, To Taste

The Blood of the Fish, Gustav Klimt (1898)

… he touched his lips gently to her closed lips. There was no taste. They were dry. The fact that there was no taste seemed to improve them. He might never see her again. By the time the small lips were wet with the taste of sex, Eguchi might already be dead. The thought did not sadden him. Leaving her mouth, his lips brushed against her eyebrows and eyelashes. She moved her head slightly. Her forehead came against his eyes. His eyes were closed, and he closed them tighter.

Wasserschlangen 1, Gustav Klimt (1904-07)

Behind the closed eyes an endless succession of phantasms floated up and disappeared. Presently they began to take on a certain shape. A number of golden arrows flew near and passed on. At their tips were hyacinths of deep purple. At their tails were orchids of various colours. It seemed strange that at such speed the flowers did not fall. Eguchi opened his eyes. He had begun to doze off.

– House of the Sleeping Beauties, Yasunari Kawabata