The Monster's Bride: Part One

Emmanuel Frémiet - Gorille enlevant une negresse (1859)

"In 1859, the French sculptor Emmanuel Frémiet (1824-1910) alarmed the jury of the Paris Salon by submitting a greater than life-size plaster composition, Gorille enlevant une negresse (Gorilla Carrying off a Negress). The jury found it to be too confronting for both its graphic violence and for its proximity to current debates about evolution. In that same year, Charles Darwin had published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, a work that acted as a flashpoint for evolutionary theory. For decades prior to the appearance of Darwin's landmark text, scientists and theologians struggled to reconcile a barrage of new discoveries in the fields of archaeology, geology and comparative anatomy with traditionally held beliefs concerning the world's and humanity's creation.

By 1859 Frémiet had already established a national and international reputation as a master sculptor. He had caught the imagination of visitors to the annual Paris Salon in 1843 with his life-size plaster sculptures of both wild and domestic animals that were astonishing for their faithfulness to nature and lifelike qualities. Frémiet’s three-dimensional evocations of domestic pets proved especially popular in his early career, bringing him increasing critical acclaim and the financial reward of official patronage. He seemed, however, to have seriously blotted his copybook with the Gorilla Carrying off a Negress, at least in the eyes of the more conservative controllers of the art world. Frémiet himself recalled:

At a time when a lot of noise was being made about mankind and apes being brothers, it was an audacious idea; and my work proved even more aggravating since, the gorilla being the ugliest of all the primates, the comparison was hardly flattering for humans ... The jury's condemnation was unanimous. My work was declared to be seriously offensive to public morality, and it was banished pitilessly from the Salon.

Alfred, Comte de Nieuwerkerke, the chief arts administrator, quickly intervened and a place was found for the artist's sculpture, despite its official rejection from the items accepted into the Salon proper. The Gorilla was installed towards the entrance of the Salon's sculpture section, set back in a niche behind heavy green velvet curtains. While the conservative jury surely hoped to marginalise the work, this special treatment - or maltreatment - served only to create a cause celebre around Frémiet's sculpture. Parting these curtains to obtain a glimpse of the censored work became de rigueur for adult visitors to that year's Salon. According to the artist, women were especially titillated by the piece, whose composition was certainly confronting. The sculpture not only depicted a murder, but also seemed to allude to ravishment, visualising the worst fears of many about the planet's largest and most human-seeming primate. Reading the sculpture in this way, the critic Charles Baudelaire took exception to its subject matter:

Why are we not given a crocodile, a tiger, or any other wild animal that might eat a woman? Because this is not about eating, but rape! It is the ape alone, this gigantic ape at once so much more and less than a man, which has at times shown a human appetite for women ... To be honest, such subjects are beneath the dignity of so talented an artist, and the jury has done well to reject this sordid topic.

It is perhaps not surprising that Gorilla Carrying off a Negress, which was destroyed in 1861 and is now known only from a handful of photographs, was disturbing to viewers in 1859. The gorilla itself was still a newly discovered and much misunderstood species, and this added scientific and speculative weight to the frisson produced by Frémiet's sculpture."

From Clutch of the Beast by Ted Gott

The Light Of The Mind

Georges de La Tour - Woman Catching Fleas (1630s)

"Great images have both a history and a prehistory; they are always a blend of memory and legend, with the result that we never experience an image directly. Indeed, every great image has an unfathomable oneiric depth to which the personal past adds colour. Consequently it is not until late in life that we really revere an image, when we discover that its roots plunge well beyond the history that is fixed in our memories. In the realm of absolute imagination, we remain young late in life. But we must lose our earthly Paradise in order actually to live in it, to experience it in the reality of its images, in the absolute sublimation that transcends all passion."

From The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard


"When the silent vision falls into speech, and when the speech in turn, opening up a field of the nameable and the sayable, inscribes itself in that field, in its place, according to its truth - in short, when it metamorphoses the structures of the visible world and makes itself a gaze of the mind, intuitus mentis - this is always in virtue of the same fundamental phenomenon of reversibility which sustains both the mute perception and the speech."

From The Visible and The Invisible by Maurice Merleau-Ponty

"'I was going to say...'- You remember various details. But not even all of them shew your intention. It is as if a snapshot of a scene had been taken, but only a few scattered details of it were to be seen...And now it is as if we knew quite certainly what the whole picture respresented. As if I could read the darkness."

From Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein

These Lips Were Made For Talking

Salvador Dali - Mae West (1934)


"When I'm good I'm very good, but when I'm bad I'm better."

"A hard man is good to find."

"It's not the men in my life that counts, but the life in my men."

"I go for two kinds of men: domestic and imported."

"I generally avoid temptation - unless I can't resist it."

"It's better to be looked over than overlooked."

"To err is human - but it feels divine."

"I used to be Snow White...but I drifted."

"I like my clothes to be tight enough to show I'm a woman but loose enough to show I'm a lady."

"When choosing between two evils, I like to try the one I've never tried before."

Mae West

The Music Of Chance

Pablo Picasso - Three Musicians (1921)


"We all know that art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realise the truth."

"The hidden harmony is better than the obvious."

"Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun."

"I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them."

"I do not seek. I find."

"I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it."

"Everything you can imagine is real."

"Every act of creation is first an act of destruction."

"It takes a long time to become young."

"Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up."

Pablo Picasso

Eleven Mirrors (November Special)

Hans Memling - Earthly Vanity (c. 1485)

Giovanni Bellini - Naked Young Woman in Front of the Mirror (1515)

Parmigianino - Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror (c. 1524)

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio - Narcissus (1598-99)

Peter Paul Rubens - Venus at a Mirror (c. 1615)

Georges de la Tour - The Penitent Magdalen (1638)

Diego Velasquez - Venus at her Mirror (1649-51)

Jean- Baptiste Greuze - The Broken Mirror (1763)

Rene Magritte - Dangerous Liaison (1926)

Pablo Picasso - Girl Before a Mirror (1932)

Barbara Kruger - Who's the Fairest of them All? (date unknown)

"The mirror reflects all objects without being sullied."

Confucious

The Serenity Machine

Georges Seurat - Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884-86)

"Let's go get drunk on light again - it has the power to console."

Georges Seurat

"Boredom is the feeling that everything is a waste of time; serenity, that nothing is."

Thomas Szasz

"There are in our existence spots of time,
Which with distinct pre-eminence retain
A vivifying virtue, whence, depressed
By false opinion and contentious thought,
Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight,
In trivial occupations, and the round
Of ordinary intercourse, our minds
Are nourished and invisibly repaired;
A virtue, by which pleasure is enhanced,
That penetrates, enables us to mount,
When high, more high, and lifts us up
when fallen."

From The Prelude by William Wordsworth

Oh, Nothing

Lucio Fontana - Spatial Concept, Attesa (1966)


"God made everything out of nothing but the nothingness shows through."

Paul Valery

"Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed."

Blaise Pascal

"Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness."

Samuel Beckett

What You See Is What You'll Be

Piet Mondrian - Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942-1943)


"In art the search for a content which is collectively understandable is false; the content will always be individual."

Piet Mondrian

"Abstract Art: A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered."

Albert Camus

"The foundation of one's thought is the thought of another; thought is like a brick cemented in a wall. It is the simulacrum of thought if, in his looking back at himself, the being who thinks he sees a free brick and not the price of semblance this freedom cost him: he doesn't see the waste ground and the heaps of detritus to which a sensitive vanity consigns him with his brick.

The work of the mason, who assembles, is the work that matters. Thus the adjoining bricks, in a book, should not be less visible than the new brick, which is the book. What is offered the reader, in fact, cannot be an element, but must be an ensemble in which it is inserted: it is the whole human assemblage and edifice, which must be, not just a pike of scraps, but rather a self-consciousness.

In this sense, the unlimited assemblage is the impossible. It takes courage and stubbornness not to go slack. Everything invites one to drop the substance for shadow, to forsake the open and impersonal movement of thought for the isolated opinion. Of course the isolated opinion is also the shortest means of revealing what the assemblage really is - the impossible. But it has this deep meaning only if it is not conscious of the fact.

This powerlessness defines the apex of possibility, or at least, awareness of the impossibility opens consciousness to all that it is possible for it to think. In this gathering place, where violence is rife, at the boundary of that which escapes cohesion, he who realises cohesion realises that there is no longer any room for him."

From Theory of Religion by Georges Bataille

After Philosophy

Joan Miró - Nocturne (1940)

"The spectacle of the sky overwhelms me. I'm overwhelmed when I see, in an immense sky, the crescent of the moon, or the sun. There, in my pictures, tiny forms in huge empty spaces. Empty spaces, empty horizons, empty plains - everything which is bare has always greatly impressed me."

Joan Miró

"The problem with philosophy is the passage from the knowledge of limited objects to the knowledge of the entirety of what is."

From Aphorisms for the "System" by Georges Bataille

"A multiplicity is, in the most basic sense, a complex structure that does not reference a prior unity. Multiplicities are not parts of a greater whole that have been fragmented, and they cannot be considered manifold expressions of a single concept or transcendental unity."

From The Deleuze Dictionary - (ed.) Adrian Parr

Lady Paints The Blues

Frida Kahlo - Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird (1940)


"I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best."

Frida Kahlo

"Frida Kahlo used the often traumatic and harrowing iconography of her Mexican heritage to paint herself and the pain which had become an integral part of her life after, at age eighteen, a streetcar accident left her crippled. From then on she underwent a series of operations and, because of her severely injured pelvis, a number of miscarriages and abortions. Her physical disability never inhibited Kahlo's flair for theatrics, and this, combined with the tempestuous relationship with her philandering husband, the mural painter Diego Rivera, established her as a tragically romantic and exotic figure. As a result, Kahlo's works have been exhaustively psychoanalysed and thereby whitewashed of their bloody, brutal, and overtly political content. Kahlo's personal pain should not eclipse her commitment to Mexico and the Mexican people. As she sought her own roots, she also voiced concern for her country as it struggled for an independent cultural identity. Her life and even her death were political.

. . .

Kahlo's representation of the skeletal figure and death can be understood only in relation to their iconography in Aztec work. The Coatlicue sculpture provides a clue to understanding their use in Kahlo's painting. Pasztory writes that Coatlicue "embodies the duality of Mexican consciousness...At the very centre of the figure is a contrast of quintessential opposites: breasts seen behind a skull, the two images of life and death." Although Kahlo seldom included an actual representation of Coatlicue in her work, the enigmatic goddess recurs in symbolic form in a number of Kahlo's self-portraits. For example, in Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird, 1940, Kahlo's thorn necklace draws blood from her neck. Aztec priests performed self-mutilation with agave thorns and stingray spines, and Coatlicue's neck also bleeds. The dead hummingbird is sacred to the chief god of Tenochtitlan, Huitzilopichtli, the god of the sun and war. It also represents the soul or spirit of the warrior who died in battle or on the sacrificial stone."

From Culture, Politics and Identity in the Paintings of Frida Kahlo - Janice Helland


"Of course, the line between art and life is a particularly hard one to draw in Kahlo's case. The majority of her work is self-portraiture; her aesthetic concerns grew from her fascination with the falsity of appearance. Dressing up, role playing and masquerade form the conceptual basis of Kahlo's work."

From 'Her Dress Hangs There': De-frocking the Kahlo Cult by Oriana Baddeley

The Ballad Of Jack The Dripper

Jackson Pollock in his studio (1950) - p. Hans Namuth

"When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It's only after a sort of 'get acquainted' period that I see what I have been about...It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well."

Jackson Pollock

"Modern painting is the first complex style in history which proceeds from elements that are not pre-ordered as closed articulated shapes. The artist today creates an order out of unordered variable elements to a degree greater than the artist of the past.

In ancient art an image of two animals facing each other orders symmetrically bodies that in nature are already closed symmetrical forms. The modern artist, on the contrary, is attracted to those possibilities of form which include a considerable randomness, variability and disorder, whether he finds them in the world or while improvising with his brush, or in looking at spots and marks, or in playing freely with shapes - inverting, adjusting, cutting, varying, reshaping, regrouping, so as to maximise the appearance of randomness. His goal is often an order which retains a decided quality of randomness as far as this is compatible with an ultimate unity of the whole. That randomness corresponds in turn to a feeling of freedom, an unconstrained activity at every point.

Ignoring natural shapes, he is alert to qualities of movement, interplay, change and becoming in nature. And he provokes within himself, in his spontaneous motions and play, an automatic production of chance."

From Recent Abstract Painting (1957) by Meyer Schapiro

"[The] drip paintings are clearly implicated in a whole informing metaphoric of masculinity: the very concepts that seem immediately to apply to them - space, scale, action, trace, energy, 'organic intensity', 'being in the painting', being 'One' - are all, among other things, operators of sexual difference."

From Jackson Pollock's Abstraction by T. J. Clark

"The catalyst that brought to a head Pollock's self-consciousness of his masquerade was the film Hans Namuth made of the artist at work in the late summer and fall of 1950...After the completion of the painting-on-glass scene, Pollock, who had been sober for more than two years, walked into the house and poured himself a large drink. At the dinner that followed, a drunken Pollock repeatedly shouted at Namuth, "I'm not a phony, you're a phony," before overturning the dinner table. He never got back on the wagon; the drip paintings, and his career, were effectively over."

From Pollock and Postwar Masculinity by Andrew Perchuk

Reading:

This is My Body - Jan Avgikos

'Her Dress Hangs Here': De-frocking the Kahlo Cult - Oriana Badderley

Theory and Art Criticism - Terry Barrett

Of Sculpture and Painting - David Bachelor

Gauguin's Tahitian Body - Peter Brooks

New Encounters with Les Demoiselles d'Avignon: Gender, Race and the Origins of Cubism - Anna C. Chave

Gauguin: On Primitivism (in Theories of Modern Art) - Herschel B. Chipp (ed.)

Going Native: Paul Gauguin and the Invention of Primitivist Modernism - Abigail Solomon-Godeau

Modernist Painting - Clement Greenberg

Culture, Politics and Identity in the Paintings of Frida Kahlo - Janice Helland

By Design: The Early Work of Hannah Hoch in Context - Maria Makela

Notes on Sculpture, Part 2 - Robert Morris

The Imaginary Orient - Linda Nochlin

Pollock and Postwar Masculinity - Andrew Perchuk

Picasso in the Light of a Marxist Sociology of Art - Max Raphael

Picasso and Braque: 1909-1911 - Robert Rosenblum

Orientalism - Edward Said

Recent Abstract Painting (1957) - Meyer Schapiro

Beautiful Beasts: The Call of the Wild (in Managing Monsters: Six Myths of Our Time) - Marina Warner

Reluctant Brides: Beauty and the Beast I and Go! Be a Beast: Beauty and the Beast II (in From the Beast to the Blonde) - Marina Warner

In Purgatory: The Work of Felix Gonzales-Torres - Simon Watney

Viewing:

King Kong (1933) - d. Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack

RKO Production 601: The Making of King Kong: Eighth Wonder of the World (seven-part documentary series) - d. Phil Savernick (2005)


Listening:

Bleed Like Me - Garbage

beautifulgarbage - Garbage

Garbage Version: 2.0 - Garbage

Garbage - Garbage

The Lascivious Eye

Pablo Picasso - Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907)

"Conventionally, both the act of painting and that of viewing have been described as phallic acts, acts of penetration performed on the passive receptacle, the blank field of the canvas. "I paint with my prick," Renoir supposedly boasted. "A painter has also to paint 'with [his] balls,'" bragged Picasso to his mistress, the painter Françoise Gilot. "I guess that even if a painter fucks a picture to a real climax once a year, it is quite a record," Mark Rothko later estimated. And the critic Jean Clair once pithily proclaimed, "The gaze is the erection of the eye."

From New Encounters with Les Demoiselles d'Avignon: Gender, Race and the Origins of Cubism by Anna C. Chave

Thus Spake Friedrich Nietzsche

A Clockwork Orange - d. Stanley Kubrick (1971)


"God is Dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. And we - we still have to vanquish his shadow, too."

From Die fröhliche Wissenschaft by Friedrich Nietzsche

The Artful Savage

Paul Gauguin - The Spirit of the Dead Watching (1892)

"The Savage is decidedly better than us...I am a savage. And the civilised forsee it, for there is nothing surprising or confusing in my work except this savage-in-spite-of-myself. For that reason it is inimitable. The work of a man is the explanation of that man."

Paul Gauguin (from a letter to Charles Morice, 1903)

"If one views (as I do) Gauguin's Tahitian painting with sympathy - as marking a decisive break from current European representation of the nude - one may [say that] Gauguin produced new and compelling art even while his discourse remained hostage to primitivist myths because he turned this discourse to other uses, made his objects of representation call into question traditional kinds of looking. His construction of "the natural"...is a matter of the utmost artifice, aimed at disarming our traditional view of the nude and of the primitive, revising the space of our observation and the context of our looking. Gauguin's "exotic" continually refers us back - and is meant to refer us back - to the problem of the nude in Western art."

From Gauguin's Tahitian Body by Peter Brooks


"There is, in short, a darker side to primitivist desire, one implicated in fantasies of imaginary knowledge, power and rape; and these fantasies, moreover, are sometimes underpinned by real power, by real rape. When Gauguin writes in the margins of the Noa Noa manuscript, "I saw plenty of calm-eyed women. I wanted them to be willing to be taken without a word, brutally. In a way [it was a] longing to rape", we are on the border between the acceptable myth of the primitivist artist as sexual outlaw, and the relations of violence and domination that provide its historic and psychic armature."

From Going Native by Abigail Solomon-Godeau

The Big "O"

Eugene Delecroix - The Women of Algiers in Their Apartment (1834)


"Orientalism is not a mere political subject matter or field that is reflected passively by culture, scholarship, or institutions; nor it is a large and diffuse collection of texts about the Orient; nor is it representative and expressive of some nefarious "Western" imperialist plot to hold down the "Oriental" world. It is rather a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts; it is an elaboration not only of a basic geographical distinction (the world is made up of two unequal halves, Orient and Occident) but also of a whole series of "interests" which, by such means as scholarly discovery, philological reconstruction, psychological analysis, landscape and sociological description, it not only creates but also maintains; it is, rather than expresses, a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even to incorporate, what is a manifestly different (or alternative and novel) world; it is, above all, a discourse that is by no means in direct, corresponding relationship with political power in the raw, but rather is produced and exists in an uneven exchange with various kinds of power, shaped to a degree by the exchange with power political (as with a colonial or imperial establishment), power intellectual (as with reigning sciences like comparative linguistics or anatomy, or any of the modern policy sciences), power cultural ( as with orthodoxies and canons of taste, tests, values), power moral (as with ideas about what "we" do and "they" cannot do or cannot understand as "we" do). Indeed, my real argument is that Orientalism is - and does not simply represent - a considerable dimension of modern political-intellectual culture, and as such has less to with the Orient that it has to do with "our" world."

From Orientalism by Edward Said


"[The] key notion of Orientalism itself cannot be confronted without a critical analysis of the particular power structure in which these works came into being. For instance, the degree of realism (or lack of it) in individual Orientalist images can hardly be discussed without some attempt to clarify whose reality we are talking about."

From The Imaginary Orient by Linda Nochlin


"A taste for simplicity cannot last for long."

Eugene Delecroix

Ophelia's Last Dance

John Everett Millais - Ophelia (1851-52)


Dance Me To The End Of Love

Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin
Dance me through the panic 'til I'm gathered safely in
Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love

Oh let me see your beauty when the witnesses are gone
Let me feel you moving like they do in Babylon
Show me slowly what I only know the limits of
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love

Dance me to the wedding now, dance me on and on
Dance me very tenderly and dance me very long
We're both of us beneath our love, we're both of us above
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love

Dance me to the children who are asking to be born
Dance me through the curtains that our kisses have outworn
Raise a tent of shelter now, though every thread is torn
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love

Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin
Dance me through the panic till I'm gathered safely in
Touch me with your naked hand or touch me with your glove
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love

Leonard Cohen


Link:

Millais at The Victorian Web.

Spellbound

Anselm Kiefer - The Cauterisation of the Rural District of Buchen (1974)

'Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.'

Ludwig Wittgenstein

We Do Not Bleed, We Can Not Cry, We Must Not Feel

Barbara Kruger - Untitled (Thinking of You) (1999-2000)


'Discredited by modern opinion, love's sentimentality must be assumed by the amorous subject as a powerful transgression which leaves him alone and exposed; by a reversal of values, then, it is this sentimentality which today constitutes love's obscenity.'

From A Lover's Discourse by Roland Barthes

Reading:

Eroticism: Death and Sensuality - Georges Bataille

Bergson: Key Writings - Henri Bergson

Cindy Sherman: Retrospective – Amanda Cruz, Amelia Jones and Elizabeth A. T. Smith

Cindy Sherman: Photographic Work 1975-1995 – Zdenek Felix and Martin Schwander

Cindy Sherman: 1975-1993 – Norman Bryson and Rosalind Krauss

Cindy Sherman: History Portraits – Arthur C. Danto

Cindy Sherman – Lorrie Moore and Rochelle Steiner

A Phantasmagoria of the Female Body: The Work of Cindy Sherman – Laura Mulvey

A Piece of the Action: Images of ‘Woman’ in the Photography of Cindy Sherman – Judith Williamson

Viewing:

Night of the Hunter – d. Charles Laughton (1955)

Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Season Six):

Ep1. The Bargaining: Part One - d. David Grossman
Ep2. The Bargaining: Part Two - d. David Grossman
Ep3. Afterlife - d. David Solomon
Ep4. Flooded - d. Douglas Petrie
Ep5. Life Serial - d. Nick Marck
Ep6. All The Way - d. David Solomon
Ep7. Once More With Feeling - d. Joss Whedon
Ep8. Tabula Rasa - d. David Grossman
Ep9. Smashed - d. Turi Meyer
Ep10. Wrecked - d. David Solomon
Ep11. Gone - d. David Fury
Ep12. Doublemeat Palace - d. Nick Marck
Ep13. Dead Things - d. James A. Contner
Ep14. Older And Far Away - d. Michael E. Gershman
Ep15. As You Were - d. Douglas Petrie
Ep16. Hell's Bells - d. David Solomon
Ep17. Normal Again - d. Rick Rosenthal
Ep18. Entropy - d. James A. Contner
Ep19. Seeing Red - d. Michael Gershman
Ep20. Villains - d. David Solomon
Ep21. Two To Go - d. Bill L. Norton
Ep22. Grave - d. James A. Contner

On The Threshold Of Death And Desire

Gian Lorenzo Bernini - The Ecstasy of Saint Theresa (1652)


'The desire to go keeling helplessly over, that assails the innermost depths of every human being is nevertheless different from the desire to die in that it is ambiguous. It may well be a desire to die, but it is at the same time a desire to live at the limits of the possible and the impossible with ever-increasing intensity. It is the desire to live while ceasing to live, or to die without ceasing to live, the desire of an extreme state that Saint Theresa has perhaps been the only one to depict strongly enough in words. "I die because I cannot die". But the death of not dying is precisely not death; it is the ultimate stage of life; if I die because I cannot die it is on condition that I live on; because of the death I feel though still alive and still live on. St Theresa's being reeled, but did not actually die of her desire actually to experience that sensation. She lost her footing but all she did was to live more violently, so violently that she could say she was on the threshold of dying, but such a death as tried her to the utmost though it did not cease to make her live.'

From Eroticism: Death and Sensuality by Georges Bataille


'Affirming and denying, appreciating and depreciating, express the will to power just as acting and reacting express force... Affirmation is not action but the power of becoming active, becoming active personified. Negation is not simply reaction but a becoming reactive.'

From Nietzsche and Philosophy by Gilles Deleuze


'I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the iron's point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it. The soul is satisfied now with nothing less than God. The pain is not bodily, but spiritual; though the body has its share in it. It is a caressing of love so sweet which now takes place between the soul and God, that I pray God of His goodness to make him experience it who may think that I am lying.'

From Saint Theresa's autobiography: The Life of St. Theresa of Jesus

The Cinema Of Sorrows

The Age of Innocence - d. Martin Scorsese (1993)

You Came Late And Your Beloved Is Lost

I began work on this essay with the impulse to downplay things like acting, character, story, theme - usually assumed as the privileged vessels of emotion - and to look elsewhere, at purely formal, non-representational elements of film style and language. Like most categorical, schematic distinctions, this one turned out to be false and misleading. Ultimately, it is a waste of time to set abstract against concrete, form against content, signifier against signified. In the films that move us, that take us somewhere in the truest sense, there is no distinction between these levels, only the deepest, inseparable fusion. This is an economy of form and content, as equal partners, that we are not yet used to: every so-called 'device' can absorb and express feeling; can move and transform the impulses and concerns of the film; can carry us, frame by frame, through thick and thin, to some place we haven't quite been or seen or heard before.

The film is just about to end. It is a sad film where things turn out badly. A voluptuously melancholic film, a hushed, pained, romantic melodrama full of mutual misunderstandings, missed connections and masochistic stupidities. The world ends, drains away, in the concluding four-minute scene of Martin Scorsese's The Age of Innocence. Poor Newland Archer (Daniel Day Lewis): he came late, and his beloved is lost. Newland is the sad anti-hero, so moving, but also so difficult and troubling, because he doesn't move much at all, in any sense: as the film draws to its magisterial ending, Newland takes refuge in cryptic statements of denial, lines like "she never asked me" and "just say I'm old fashioned, that should be enough".

So much flows in and out of this final scene, so much gathered and dispersed - even the birds who, in the final shot, circle up high and then gather in a spot on the ground which Newland, obliviously, walks through and disturbs. Most spectacularly, the centrepiece of the four minutes is a theatre of memory: Newland gets to replay, in his mind, and at last put right, the moment that once upon a time stymied him for the rest of his long and uneventful life. He wished for the Countess Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer) to turn around before that Murnau-like boat passed and, if so, all would be well with the world, and between them as lovers. It didn't happen then, and now it happens with tremendous yearning but with no joy: Newland looks assaulted, wounded by that harsh, reflected light that causes him to blink, and sends him into fantasy-land with his eyes wide shut.

But these shots, while encapsulating a character and his destiny, also soar high and far from him; they constitute, like Almodóvar's apparition of a title, a gesture. Light, flicker, rapid montage, superimposition, a spectator and a vision: this is one of those privileged passages, also gone in less than sixty seconds, when the cinema all of a sudden bears witness to itself, reflecting on its powers of creation and destruction, as if to declare its hand at the dark or light heart of all our fantasy projections.

That constitutes the obvious fireworks in the scene. But its force is channelled and amplified by the more seemingly ordinary material on either side. Newland's son, Ted (Robert Sean Leonard), for instance, is the reality-principle in the scene. All he talks about and embodies are facts of place (on the third floor) and time (almost six o'clock), etiquettes of social reasonableness (she won't understand). Ted is a comfortably dressed, chipper guy; his jaunty walk and his movements briskly set-up a shot-reverse shot, low-high angle volley. That's his function and his form: to secure an orderly progression of elements. Newland on the other hand, walks slowly, in fact he's a log. For most of the scene, he barely moves more than a couple of feet's distance - and that's essentially in order to sit down.

Scorsese has a found a street setting here that can centre Newland perfectly in the frame, wrap around him, like he's one of those trees rooted to the spot; or maybe some insect, since we almost always view him here from above. In this setting, once again bodies become ritually like objects, and the non-human is invested with presence. All the sadness of the entire movie flows around Newland in this strangely truncated street space, of which we deliberately see very little. Again, this space has a static, solemn, church-like air. All it offers, finally, is a back exit: the exit into off-screen oblivion and anonymity that Newland will duly, gratefully take, as extras walk on by, as Elmer Bernstein's music finishes, and the film takes us to the sharply wrenching but also deeply satisfying void of a black and soundless screen for some long seconds - the only place we can bear to be right now, right here.

The voice-over narration (spoken by Joanne Woodward) is sparse, located only in the first moments of the scene. Appropriately, this narration speaks, in its few words, about the mystery, grace and pathos of being moved inexpressibly. At the very end, for Scorsese, there are only images and sounds, a gesture and a place, and then nothingness: things, feelings, that words (even the best chosen words) can no longer express. The duration of the final, long-held, static shot, the closing cadences of the music, the black screen - are these signs of an excess, a melodramatic overflowing? I don't figure so. They are the signs of an artistry and a richness, a hyper-saturation of mood, feeling and meaning taken to the point of ecstasy. A delirious enchantment.

From Delerious Enchantment by Adrian Martin

Indeed, one might conclude that the melancholic identification permits the loss of the object in the external world precisely because it provides a way to preserve the object as part of the ego and, hence, to evert the loss as a complete loss. Here we see that letting the object go means, paradoxically, not full abandonment of the object but transferring the status of the object from external to internal. Giving up the object becomes possible only on the condition of a melancholic internalisation or, what might for our purposes turn out to be even more important, a melancholic incorporation.

If in melancholia loss is refused, it is not for that reason abolished. Internalisation preserves loss in the psyche; more precisely, the internalisation of loss is part of the mechanism of its refusal. If the object can no longer exist in the external world, it will then exist internally, and that internalisation will be a way to disavow the loss, to keep it at bay, to stay or postpone the recognition and suffering of loss.

From Melancholy Gender/Refused Identification by Judith Butler

All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.

Anatole France