Twentieth Century Pagan

Odilon Redon (1840-1916) - Eye-Balloon, 1876


'I never have experienced intellectual pleasure except on the analogical plane. For me the only evidence in the world is commanded by the spontaneous, extralucid, insolent rapport which establishes itself, under certain conditions, between one thing and another, and which common sense hesitates to confront. True as it is that the most execrable word I know is the word therefore, with all it bears in terms of vanity and morose delectation, I madly love everything that adventurously breaks the thread of discursive thought and suddenly ignites a flare illuminating a life of relations fecund in another way. Everything indicates that men of an earlier time possessed the secret of these relations. And the flare, though it quickly dies, hardly needs to be measured on the dismal scale of exchange values prevailing today. No answers except to immediate utilitarian questions. Indifferent to anything that does not approach from very near, more and more insensible to anything that can deliver him (provided he has some amplitude) an interrogation of nature, the man we shun gives himself hardly any other task than to float. The millenarian conviction which maintains that nothing exists gratuitously and that, on the contrary, there can be neither beings nor natural phenomena deprived of a ciphered communication with us - the conviction animating the majority of cosmogonies - has lost its position to the most obtuse of detachments; we have thrown away the axehead with its handle. We stop and ask ourselves: 'Where do we come from? Why am I here? Where am I going?' But is it not an aberration, and impudent, to wish to transform a world which one no longer cares to interpret in any permanent sense? Primordial links are broken. I say only analogical tools reach fleetingly towards their re-establishment. Whence the importance assumed, at long intervals, by these brief flashes from a mirror.

On the bed of the whites of the eyes, the
iris is the base for the mattress of the
pupil, where a phantom of ourselves lies
down in a dream.

Malcolm de Chazal

Poetic analogy has in common with mystical analogy that it transgresses the deductive laws in order to make the mind apprehend the interdependence of two objects of thought situated on different planes, between which the logical functioning of the mind is unlikely to throw a bridge, in fact opposes a priori any bridge which might be thrown. Poetic analogy differs profoundly from mystical analogy in that it never presupposes, beyond the bounds of the visible world, an invisible universe tending to make itself manifest. It is entirely empirical in its movement forward, except that the empiricism assures it the total liberty of motion necessary for the leap it must provide. Considered in its effects, it is true that poetic analogy seems, like mystical analogy, to militate in favour of the conception of the world ramified as far as the eye can see and entirely filled with the same sap, but it maintains itself without any constraints in the sensible or even the sensual structure and without displaying any propensity to orient itself towards the supernatural. It tends to hint at and bring to account truly 'absent' life. And, just as it cannot lose its substance in metaphysical reverie, so it cannot for an instant dream of turning its conquests to the greater glory of some 'beyond'.

The dream is a heavy
Ham
Which hangs from the ceiling

Pierre Reverdy

I arrive a sparrow hawk and depart a phoenix.

Voice of the Third Soul, Egypt

Given the present state of poetic research, little should be made of the purely formal distinction which might be established between metaphor and comparison. It suffices that both constitute interchangeable vehicles of analogical thought and that if the first offers flashing resources, the second, which one must judge by Lautréamont's 'beautiful as', presents considerable advantages of suspension. It is understood that beside these the other 'figures' which rhetoric persists in enumerating are absolutely devoid of interest. Only the analogical switch arouses our passion; only by it can we start the world's motor. The word like is the most exalting at our command when it is pronounced familiarly. Through it human imagination fulfils itself and the highest destiny of the mind comes into play. Likewise, we reject disdainfully the grievously ignorant abuses of the image in today's poetry and we appeal to it, in this regard, for an always-great luxuriance.

Your throat which advances and which pushes the silk
Your triumphant throat is a beautiful armoire.

Charles Baudelaire

The analogical method, though held in honour in antiquity and the Middle Ages, was thereafter grossly supplanted by the 'logical' method which has led us to our well-known impasse.The first duty of poets and artists is to re-establish analogy in all its prerogatives, taking care to uproot all the rear-guard spiritualist thought, always carried along parasitically, which vitiates or paralyses its functioning.

Your teeth are like a flock of sheep leaving the washpen.

Song of Songs

It should be remembered that thirty years ago Pierre Reverdy, first approaching the source of the image, was led to formulate the capital law: 'The greater and truer the distance between two juxtaposed realities, the stronger will be the image and the greater its emotive power and poetic reality.' This absolutely necessary condition can never be taken as sufficient. Another exigency which, in the final analysis, could well be of an ethical order, takes place beside it. Let notice be taken: The analogical image, to the degree that it illuminates in the brightest way partial similarities, will not be traduced in terms of equation. It moves between the two realities present in a determined way which is never reversible. From the first of these realities to the second, it marks a vital tension turned possibly towards health, pleasure, quietude, given thanks, consented usages. It has as its mortal enemies the deprecative and the depressing. If noble words no longer exist, false poets cannot avoid identifying themselves by ignoble rapprochements. The classic example is the 'Guitar - a bidet that sings', by an author [Cocteau] who abounds in such 'discoveries'.

I see the spirits assembled; they have their hats on.

Swedenborg

Your tongue
The red fish in the aquarium
Of your mouth

Apollonaire

We passed along an avenue planted with blue breasts where day no longer differentiated itself from night except by a comma, and the sardine from the grasshopper by a scratching hair.

Benjamin Peret

The best light on the general, obligatory sense that the image worthy of the name must have is furnished by a Zen writer: 'Out of Buddhist kindness, Basho one day ingeniously changed a cruel haiku composed by his humorous disciple, Kikaku. The latter having written, "A red dragonfly - tear off its wings - a pimento", Basho substituted "A pimento - add wings - a red dragonfly".'

From Rising Sun by André Breton

The Virtues of Vicissitude

Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) - Prometheus Bound, 1611-12


'Whether it be hedonism, pessimism, utilitarianism, eudemonism - all of these ideas that measure the value of things according to pleasure or suffering, that is to say, according to secondary states and side-effects, are foreground ideas, and naive. Anyone conscious of having creative energies and an artist's conscience will look down on them not without mockery, but also not without pity. Pity for all of you! Although it is not pity in your sense, to be sure. It is not pity for social 'misery', for 'society' and its sick and injured, for the perennially depraved and downtrodden who lie around us everywhere; even less is it pity for the grumbling, oppressed, rebellious ranks of slaves who are looking to be masters (which they call 'being free'). Our pity is a more elevated, more far-sighted pity - we see how human beings are being reduced, how all of you are reducing them! And there are moments when we look at your pity especially with an indescribable anxiety, when we defend ourselves against this pity - when we find your seriousness more dangerous than any frivolity. If possible (and no 'if possible' can be more crazy) you want to abolish suffering! And we? - it seems that we want it to be, if anything, worse and greater than before! Well-being in your sense of the word - that certainly is no goal, it seems to us to be an end! A condition that would immediately make people ludicrous and contemptible - make us wish their downfall! The discipline of suffering, great suffering - don't you know that this discipline alone has created all human greatness to date? The tension of the soul in unhappiness, which cultivates its strength; its horror at the sight of great destruction; its inventiveness and bravery in bearing, enduring, interpreting, exploiting unhappiness, and whatever in the way of depth, mystery, mask, spirit, cleverness, greatness the heart has been granted - has it not been granted them through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering? In the human being, creature and creator are united: the human being is matter, fragment, excess, clay, filth, nonsense, chaos; but the human being is also creator, sculptor, hammer-hardness, observer-divinity, and the Seventh Day - do you not understand this opposition? Do you understand that you pity is for the 'creature in the human being', that which must be formed, broken, forged, torn, burned, annealed, purified - that which necessarily has to suffer and should suffer? And our pity - do you not understand whom our reversed pity is intended for, when it resists your pity as the worst of all possible self-indulgences and weaknesses?

Pity versus pity, then!'

From Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche

The Sonorous Image

Bill Henson (b. 1955) - Untitled (from the Paris Opera Project) 1990-91


1. 'The work might begin with a fleeting impression from first-hand experience or a piece of music I am always drawn back to, or perhaps in a paragraph of writing I cannot forget - and then it takes its own course. I become like a participant in some larger process I happen to be fascinated by.'

2. 'In every form of art, you really want the experience of the images to transcend the medium, for the medium to disappear into the greater experience of viewing the work. So that you forget you're looking at a painting, or a photograph.'

3. 'I'm interested in that tender proximity, that ineffable, fragile, breathing closeness or presence which photography can animate while, at the same time, allowing no possibility for any familiar connection with the individuals in the picture.'

Bill Henson

The Possible And The Real

Yves Tanguy (1900-1955) - Old Horizon, 1928


'I believe in the end we shall consider it evident that the artist in executing his work is creating the possible as well as the real. Whence comes it then that one might hesitate to say the same thing for nature? Is not the world a work of art incomparably richer than that of the greatest artist? And is there not as much absurdity, if not more, in supposing, in the work of nature, that the future is outlined in advance, that possibility existed before reality? Once more let me say I am perfectly willing to admit that the future states of a closed system of material points are calculable and hence visible in its present state. But, I repeat, this system is extracted, or abstracted, from a whole which, in addition to inert and unorganised matter, comprises organisation. Take the concrete and complete world, with the life and consciousness it encloses; consider nature in its entirety, nature the generator of new species as novel and original in form as the design of any artist; in these species concentrate upon individuals, plants or animals, each of which has its own character - I was going to say its personality (for one blade of grass does not resemble another any more that a Raphael resembles a Rembrandt); lift your attention above and beyond individual man to societies which disclose actions and situations comparable to those of any drama: how can one still speak of possibles which would precede their own realisation? How can we fail to see that the event can always be explained afterwards by an arbitrary choice of antecedent events, a completely different event could have been equally well explained in the same circumstances by another choice of antecedents - nay, by the same antecedents otherwise cut out, otherwise distributed, otherwise perceived - in short, by our retrospective attention? Backwards over the course of time a constant remodelling of the past by the present, of the cause by the effect, is being carried out.

We do not see it, always for the same reason, always a prey to the same illusion, always because we treat as more what is the less, as the less what is the more. If we put the possible back in its proper place, evolution becomes something quite different from the realisation of a program: the gates of the future open wide; freedom is offered an unlimited field. The fault of those doctrines - rare indeed in the history of philosophy - which have succeeded in leaving room for indetermination and freedom in the world, is to have failed to see what their affirmation implied. When they spoke of indetermination, of freedom, they meant by indetermination a competition between possibles, by freedom a choice between possibles - as if possibility was not created by freedom itself! As if any other hypothesis, by affirming an ideal pre-existence of the possible to the real, did not reduce the new to a mere arrangement of former elements! As if it were not thus to be led sooner or later to regard that arrangement as calculable and foreseeable! By accepting the premise of the contrary theory one was letting the enemy in. We must resign ourselves to the inevitable: it is the real which makes itself possible, not the possible which becomes real.'

From The Creative Mind by Henri Bergson

The Bodies Of Christ

Hans Holbein the Younger (1497-1543), The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb, 1522 (above) and Andrea Mantegna (c. 1431-1506), Cristo in scruto, c. 1480 (below)

'In 1522 (the underlying coat bears the date 1521) Hans Holbein the Younger (1497-1543) painted a disturbing picture, the Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb, which may be seen at the Basel Museum. The painting apparently made a tremendous impression on Dostoevsky. At the very outset of The Idiot, Prince Myshkin attempted to speak of it, but to no avail; only through a new polyphonic twist of the plot did he see a reproduction of it in Rogozhin's house and, "struck by a sudden thought", he exclaimed: "That picture . . . that picture! Why, some people may lose their faith by looking at that picture!" A little later, Ippolit, a peripheral character who nevertheless seems, in many respects, to be the narrator's and Myshkin's double, gave a striking account of it: "The picture depicted Christ, who has just been taken from the Cross. I believe that painters are usually in the habit of portraying Christ, whether in the Cross or taken down from the Cross, as still retaining a shade of extraordinary beauty on His face; that beauty they strive to preserve even in His moments of greatest agony. In Rogozhin's picture there was no trace of beauty. It was a faithful representation of the dead body of a man who had undergone unbearable torments before Crucifixion, been wounded, tortured, beaten by the guards, beaten by the people, when He carried the Cross and fell under its weight, and, at last, had suffered the agony of Crucifixion, lasting for six hours (according to my calculation, at least). It is true, it is the face of a man who had only just been taken from the Cross - that is, still retaining a great deal of warmth and life; rigor mortis had not yet set in, so that there is still a look of suffering on the face of the dead man, as though He were still feeling it (that has been well caught by the artist); on the other hand, His face has not been spared in the least; it is nature itself, and, indeed, any man's corpse would look like that after much suffering. I know that the Christian church laid it down in the first few centuries of its existence that Christ really did suffer and that the Passion was not symbolic. His body on the Cross was therefore fully and entirely subject to the laws of nature. In the picture the face is terribly smashed with blows, swollen, covered with terrible, swollen and bloodstained bruises, the eyes open and squinting; the large, open whites of the eyes have a sort of dead and glassy glint. But, strange to say, as one looks at the dead body of this tortured man, one cannot help asking oneself the peculiar, and interesting question: if such a corpse (and it must have been just like that) was seen by all His disciples, by His future chief apostles, by the women who followed Him and stood by the Cross, by all who believed in Him and worshipped Him, then how could they possibly believe, as they looked at the corpse, that that martyr would rise again? Here one cannot help being struck with the idea that if death is so horrible and if the laws of nature are so powerful, then how can they be overcome? How can they be overcome when even He did not conquer them, He who overcame nature during His lifetime and whom nature obeyed, who said Talitha cumi! and the damsel arose, who cried, Lazarus come forth! and the dead man came forth? Looking at that picture, you get the impression of nature as some enormous, implacable and dumb beast, or to put it more correctly, much more correctly, though it may seem strange, some huge engine of the latest design, which has endlessly seized, cut to pieces and swallowed up - impassively and unfeelingly - a great and priceless Being, a Being worth the whole of nature and all its laws, worth the entire earth, which was perhaps created solely for the coming of that Being! The picture seems to give expression to the idea of a dark, insolent and senselessly eternal power, to which everything is subordinated, and this idea is suggested to you unconsciously. The people surrounding the dead man, none of whom is shown in the picture, must have been overwhelmed by a feeling of terrible anguish and dismay on that evening which had shattered all their hopes and almost all their beliefs in one fell blow. They must have parted in a state of the most dreadful terror, though each of them carried away, within him a mighty thought which could never be wrested from him. And if, on the eve of the Crucifixion, the Master could have seen what He would look like when taken from the Cross, would He have mounted the Cross and died as He did? This question, too, you can't help asking yourself as you look at the picture.""

Holbein's painting represents a corpse stretched out by itself on a slab covered with a cloth that is hardly draped. Life-size, the painted corpse is seen from the side, its head slightly turned toward the viewer, the hair spread out on the sheet. The right arm is in full view, resting alongside the emaciated, tortured body, and the hand protrudes slightly from the slab. The rounded chest suggests a triangle within the very low, elongated rectangle of the recess that constitutes the painting's frame. the chest bears the bloody mark of a spear, and the hand shows the stigmata of the Crucifixion, which stiffen the outstretched middle finger. Imprints of nails mark Christ's feet. The martyr's face bears the expression of hopeless grief; the empty stare, the sharp-lined profile, the dull blue-green complexion are those of a man who is truly dead, of Christ taken by the Father ("My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?") and without the promise of Resurrection.

The unadorned representation of human death, the well-nigh anatomical stripping of the corpse conveys to viewers an unbearable anguish before the death of God, which here is mingled with our own death because there isn't the slightest suggestion of transcendency. What is more, Hans Holbein has given up all architectural or compositional fancy. The tombstone weighs down on the upper portion of the painting, which is merely twelve inches high, and intensifies the feeling of permanent death: this corpse will never rise again. The pall itself, reduced to a minimum of folds, emphasises, through that economy of motion, the feeling of stiffness and stony cold.

The viewer's gaze penetrates this closed-in coffin from below and, following the painting from left to right, stops at the stone set against the corpse's feet, sloping at a wide angle toward the spectators.

What was the purpose of a painting with such peculiar dimensions? Does the Dead Christ belong to the altar that Holbein did for Hans Oberried in 1520-21, in which the two outside wings depicted the Passion and the centre was saved for the Nativity and the Adoration? There is nothing to support such a hypothesis, which, however, is not implausible when one takes into account a few features it shares with the outside wings of the altar that was partially destroyed during iconoclastic outbursts in Basel.

Among the various interpretations given by critics, one stands out and seems today the most plausible. The painting was done for a predella that remained independent and was to be positioned above the visitors as they filed in, from the side and the left (for instance from the church's central nave toward the souther aisle). In the Upper Rhine region, there are churches that contain funerary recesses where sculpted Christly bodies are displayed. Might Holbein's work be a painterly transposition of such recumbent statues? According to one hypothesis, this Dead Christ was the covering for a sacred tomb open only on Good Friday and closed for the rest of the year. Finally, relying on X rays of the painting, Fridtjof Zschokke has shown that the Dead Christ was initially located in a semicircular recess, like the section of a tube. That location corresponds to the date inscribed next to the right foot and the signature: H. H. DXXI. One year later, Holbein substituted the arched recess with the rectangular one and signed above the feet: MDXXII H. H.

Italian iconography embellishes, or at least ennobles, Christ's face during the Passion; but above all, it surrounds Christ with figures that are plunged not only in grief but also in the certainty of the Resurrection, as if to suggest the attitude we too should adopt when facing the Passion. Holbein, on the contrary, leaves the corpse strangely alone. It is perhaps this isolation - an act of composition - that endows the painting with its major melancholy burden, more so than its delineation or colouring. To be sure, Christ's suffering is expressed through three components inherent in line and colour: the head bent backward, the contortion of the right hand bearing the stigmata, the position of the feet - the whole being bonded by means of a dark palette of greys, greens and browns. Nevertheless, such realism, harrowing on account of its very parsimony, is emphasised to the utmost through the painting's composition and location: a body stretched out alone, situated above the viewers and separated from them.

Cut off from us by its base but without any possibility for the gaze to extend to Heaven because the ceiling in the recess comes down low, Holbein's Dead Christ is inaccessible, distant and without a beyond. It is a way of looking at mankind from afar, even in death. Just as Erasmus saw folly from a distance. It is a vision that opens out not onto glory but to endurance. Another, a new, morality resides in this painting.

Christ's dereliction is here at its worst: forsaken by the Father, He is apart from all of us. Unless Holbein, whose mind, pungent as it was, does appear to have led him across the threshold of atheism, wanted to include us personally, humans, aliens, spectators that we are, in this crucial moment of Christ's life. With no intermediary, suggestion or indoctrination, whether pictorial or theological, other than our ability to imagine death, we are led to collapse in the horror of the caesura that is death or to dream of an invisible beyond. Does Holbein forsake us, as Christ, for an instant, had imagine Himself forsaken? Or does he, on the contrary, invite us to change the Christly tomb into a living tomb, to participate in the painted death and thus and thus include it in our own life? In order to live with it and make it live, for if the living body in opposition to the rigid corpse is a dancing body, doesn't our life, through identification with death, become a "dance macabre", in keeping with Holbein's other well-known vision?

This enclosed recess, this well-isolated coffin simultaneously rejects us and invites us. Indeed, the corpse fills the entire field of the painting, without any laboured reference to the Passion. Our gaze follows the slightest physical detail: it is, as it were, nailed, crucified and riveted to the hand placed at the centre of the composition. Should we attempt to avert our gaze, it is quickly stopped, locked in on the distressed face or the feet propped against the black stone. And yet this walling-in allows for two prospects.

On the one hand, there is the insertion of the signature, MDXXII H. H., at Christ's feet. Placing the painter's name, to which was often added that of the donor, in that position was common at the time. It is nevertheless possible that in abiding by that code Holbein inserted himself into the drama of the dead body. A sign of humility: the artist throwing himself at God's feet? Or a sign of equality? The painter's name is not lower than Christ's body - they are both at the same level, jammed into the recess, united in man's death, in death as the essential sign of mankind, of which the only surviving evidence is the ephemeral creation of a picture drawn here in 1521 and 1522!

We have, on the other hand, this hair and this hand that extend beyond the base as if they might slide over toward us, as if the frame could not hold back the corpse. The frame dates precisely from the end of the sixteenth century and includes a narrow edging, bearing the inscription Jesus Nazarenus Rex Judaeorum, which encroaches on the painting. The edging, which seems nonetheless always to have been part of Holbein's painting, includes, between the words of the inscription, five angels bearing the instruments of the martyrdom: the shaft, the crown of thorns, the scourge, the flogging column, the cross. Integrated afterward in that symbolic framework, Holbein's painting recovers the evangelical meaning that it did not insistently contain in itself, and which probably legitimised it in the eyes of its purchasers.

Even if Holbein's painting had originally been conceived as a predella for an altarpiece, it remained alone; no other panel was added to it. Such isolation, as splendid as it is gloomy, avoided Christian symbolism as much as the surfeit of German Gothic style, which combined painting and sculpture but also added wings to altarpieces, aiming for syncretism and the imparting of motion to figures. In the face of that tradition, which directly preceded him, Holbein isolated, pruned, condensed and reduced.

Holbein's originality, then, lies in this vision of Christly death that is devoid of pathos and is intimate on account of its very banality. Humanisation thus reached its highest point: the point at which glory is obliterated though the image. When the dismal brushes against the nondescript, the most disturbing sign is the most ordinary one. In contrast to Gothic enthusiasm, humanism and parsimony were the inverted products of melancholia.

. . .

Finally, Mantegna's famous Cristo in scruto (c. 1480, at the Brera Museum in Milan) may be considered the precursor of the quasi-anatomical vision of the dead Christ. With the soles of the feet turned toward the viewers and the foreshortened perspective, Mantegna's corpse imposes itself with a brutality that verges on the obscene. Nevertheless, the two women who appear in the upper left hand corner of this painting introduce the grief and the compassion that Holbein puts aside precisely by banishing them from sight or else creating them with no mediator other than the invisible appeal to our all-too-human identification with the dead Son . . . And yet, always heedful of the Gothic spirit, Holbein maintains grief while humanising it, without following the Italian path of negating pain and glorifying the arrogance of the flesh or the beauty of the beyond. Holbein is in another dimension: he makes commonplace the Passion of the Crucified Christ in order to make it more accessible to us. Such a humanising gesture, which is not without a modicum of irony toward transcendence, suggests a tremendous amount of mercy with respect to our death.'

From Holbein's Dead Christ by Julia Kristeva

Six Images In Search Of An Exhibition III

Splitting Hares

Broomstick Bunny, released February 25th 1956 (Warner Brothers) - d. Chuck Jones, w. Tedd Pierce, a. Richard Thompson, Ken Harris, Ben Washam, Abe Letivow, v. Mel Blanc, June Foray (uncredited), m. Milt Franlyn, p. Eddie Selzer

The Week in Review

Films:

Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man, 2005 - d. Lian Lunson
Perfume, 2006 - d. Tom Tykwer
Pan's Labyrinth, 2006 - d. Guillermo del Toro
A Scanner Darkly, 2006 - d. Richard Linklater
Little Miss Sunshine, 2006 - d. Johnathan Dayton and Valerie Faris
Marie Antoinette, 2006 - d. Sofia Coppola

Books:

Journals of Jean Cocteau - Jean Cocteau
Confessions of an English Opium Eater - Thomas de Quincey
Noa Noa: The Tahitian Journal - Paul Gauguin
The Private Journals of Edvard Munch: We Are Flames Which Pour Out Of The Earth - Edvard Munch
Inferno: From the Occult Diaries - August Strindberg
Complete Letters of Vincent van Gogh - Vincent van Gogh

Music:

Symphonies, 1-10 - Gustav Mahler
Daphnis et Cloé - Maurice Ravel
Four Last Songs - Richard Strauss

Exhibitions:

Before the Body: Matter - Monash University Museum of Art
Sigmar Polke: Music from an Unknown Source - RMIT Gallery

Bunny Bonus

Lady Bugs






















From Hare Conditioned, 1945 - d. Chuck Jones

Dreams Of The Marionettes

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610) - Medusa, c. 1597

"Mythology is an expression of the collective unconscious."

"The human psyche is essentially the same all over the world. The psyche is the inward experience of the human body, which is essentially the same in all human beings, with the same organs, the same instincts, the same impulses, the same conflicts, the same fears. Out of this common ground have come what Jung has called the archetypes, which are the common ideas of myths."

"The elementary ideas: what could be called the ground ideas. These ideas Jung spoke of as archetypes of the unconscious. "Archetype" is a better term because "elementary idea" suggests head work. Archetypes of the unconscious means it comes from below. The archetypes of the unconscious are manifestations of the organs of the body and their powers. Archetypes are biologically grounded: the biographical is secondary to that. All over the world and at different times in human history, these archetypes have appeared in different costumes. The differences in costume are the result of environment and historical conditions."

"It's surprising how much memory there is down in the unconscious. There's a whole system . . . which, when we see it in animals, we call instinct. That is the biological ground. But then certain things happen that make it repulsive or difficult or frightening or sinful to do some of the things one is impelled to do, and that is when we begin to have our most troublesome psychological problems. Myths are primarily for fundamental instruction in these matters."

"A metaphor points to two ends: one is psychological, the other metaphysical. The dream is metaphoric of the structures of the psyche, and your dreams will correspond to the level of psychological realisation you are operating on. The metaphysical, on the other hand, points past all conceptualisations, all things, to the ultimate depth. And when the two come together, when the psyche and metaphysics meet, then you have a real myth."

"Myths are the world's dreams. They are archetypal dreams and deal with the great human problems."

"Myths and dreams come from the same place. They come from realisations of some kind that have then to find expression in symbolic form."

"Heaven and hell are within us, and all the gods. All the worlds are within us. They are magnified dreams, and dreams are manifestations in image form of the energies of the body on conflict with each other."

"Dreamtime is the time you get into when you do to sleep and have a dream that talks about the permanent conditions within your own psyche as they relate to the temporal conditions of your life right now."

"Everyone has to pass a threshold of some kind. This is an archetypal thing. So there is a basic mythological theme there even though it is a personal dream. These two levels . . . are found in all cultures. For example, everyone has the problem of facing death. This is a standard mystery."

"A dream is a personal experience of that deep, dark ground that is the support of our conscious lives, and a myth is the society's dream. The myth is the public dream and the dream is the private myth. If your private myth, your dream, happens to coincide with that of society, you are in accord with your group. If it isn't, you've got an adventure in the dark forest ahead of you."

"Dreams come up from the imagination which is grounded in the energy of the organs of the body, and these are all the same in human beings. Since imagination comes out of one biological ground, it is bound to produce certain themes . . . There are certain characteristics of dreams that can be enumerated, no matter who is dreaming."

"On some levels a private dream runs into runs into truly mythic themes that can't be interpreted except by an analogy with myth. Jung speaks of two orders of dream, the personal dream and the archetypal dream, or the dream of the mythic dimension. You can interpret a personal dream by association, figuring out what it is talking about in your own life, or in relation to your personal problem. But every now and then a dream comes up that is pure myth, and carries a mythic theme, or that is said to come from the archetypal person within us. "

"I think the psychology of Freud tends more to relate to what Jung calls the personal unconscious. When you break past that into the realms that cannot be interpreted in terms of personal experience, you're in the field of mythic forms. And if you're acquainted with the mythic forms, you understand where you are in a way that's impossible if you have no previous acquaintanceship."

Joseph Campbell

Wide Blue Wonder

Joan Miró (1893-1983) - Blue I, 1962


'The blue of the sky, if we were to examine its many image values, would require a long study in which we would see all the types of material imagination being determined according to the basic elements of water, fire, earth, and air. In other words, we could divide poets into four classifications by their response to the single theme of celestial blue:

Those who see in an immobile sky a flowing liquid that comes to life with the smallest cloud.

Those who experience the blue sky as though it were and enormous flame - "searing" blue, as the Comtesse de Noailles describes it.

Those who contemplate the sky as if it were a solidified blue, a painted vault - "compact and hard azure", as the Comtesse de Noailles again says.

Finally those who can truly participate in the aerial nature of celestial blue.

Of course, besides the great poets who instinctively follow these basic inspirations, it would be easy to discover, with such a common image, all the rhymers for whom "blue sky" is always a concept, never a primary image. Poetry about the blue sky suffers an enormous loss on this account. We can almost appreciate Musset's scorn when he called "blue" the stupid colour. In the works of artificial poets, at least, it is the colour of pretentious innocence from which come sapphires or flax blossoms. Such images are not, of course, banned: poetry is just as much the participation of the large in the small as it is the small in the large. But no one experiences this participation by juxtaposing a terrestrial and an aerial name. Only a great poet can discover naturally, without copying a literary example, blue sky in a wildflower.

But, leaving aside the facile polemics against false or worn-out images, I would like to reflect on a fact that has often struck me. As I have read many different kinds of poets, what has surprised me was how rare were the images in which the blue sky was truly aerial. This rarity is due, first of all, to the fact that aerial imagination is much rarer than the imagination of fire, earth, or water. But even more important is the fact that, even when the immense, distant blue infinity is felt by an aerial soul, it needs to be materialised in order to be incorporated into a literary image. The word blue designates, but it does not render. The problem of the image of the blue sky is completely different for the painter than for the poet. For a writer, if the blue sky is not merely a background, if it is a poetic object, only a metaphor can bring it to life. The poet's task is not to translate a colour, but to make us dream the colour. The blue sky is so simple that no one thinks he can oneirise it without materialising it. But this process of materialisation goes too far. The blue sky is made too hard, too glaring, too searing, too compact, too burning, and too brilliant. Often the sky looks at us too fixedly. We attribute too much substance and constancy to it because the soul does not become a part of the life of primary substance. We tonalise the sky's blue by making it "vibrate" like a sonorous crystal, whereas, for truly aerial souls, there is only the sound of a breath. Thus, with excessive intensity, the Comtesse de Noailles writes: "Today the blue is so strong that it blinds you if you look at it too long; it crackles, it whirls, it becomes filled with golden tendrils, with hot frost, with sharp and radiant diamonds, with arrows, with silver flies . . . "

The hallmark of what is truly aerial is to be found, in my opinion, in another direction. It is, in fact, based on the dynamics of dematerialisation. the substantial imagination of air is truly active only on a dynamics of dematerialisation. The blue of the sky is aerial when it is dreamed as a colour that pales a bit, like a pallor that seeks finesse, a finesse that we imagine as yielding beneath our fingers like a delicate fabric as we caress, in Paul Valéry's words:

The mysterious texture of the utmost height.

That is when the blue sky counsels us to be as calm and as light as it is itself:

The sky above the roof, is
So blue, so calm!

sighs Verlaine from the depths of his prison where he is still under the weight of unforgiven memories. This calm can be filled with melancholy. The dreamer feels that the blue sky will never be a possessed good. "What good are the symbols of a basic and comforting mountaineering since I shall not, this evening, reach the blue, that blue which is so aptly called sky blue?"

But it is by following the scale of dematerialisation of celestial blue that we can see aerial reverie at work. Then we will understand that it is an aerial Einfühlung: the fusion of a dreamer with as undifferentiated a universe as possible, on that is blue and gentle, infinite and formless, with a minimum of substance.'

From The Blue Sky by Gaston Bachelard

Death By Philosophy: Part Three

The Burning Question

Thich Quang Duc (June 11th, 1963)


'What, then, is that incalculable feeling that deprives the mind of the sleep necessary to life? A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity. All healthy men having thought of his own suicide, it can be seen, without further explanation, that there is a direct connection between this feeling and the longing for death.

The subject of this essay is precisely this relationship between the absurd and suicide, the exact degree to which suicide is a solution to the absurd. The principle can be established that for a man who does not cheat, what he believes to be true must determine his action. Belief in the absurdity of existence must then dictate his conduct. It is legitimate to wonder, clearly and without false pathos, whether a conclusion of this importance requires forsaking as rapidly as possible an incomprehensible condition. I am speaking, of course, of men inclined to be in harmony with themselves.

Stated clearly, this problem may seem both simple and insoluble. But it is wrongly assumed that simple questions involve answers that are no less simple and that the evidence implies evidence. A priori and and reversing the terms of the problem, just as one does or does not kill oneself, it seems that there are but two philosophical solutions, either yes or no. This would be too easy. But allowance must be made for those who, without concluding, continue questioning. Here I am only slightly indulging in irony: this is the majority. I notice also that those who answer "no" act as if they thought "yes". As a matter of fact, if I accept the Nietzschean criterion, they think "yes" in one way or another. On the other hand, it often happens that those who commit suicide were assured of the meaning of life. These contradictions are constant. It may even be said that they have never been as on this point where, on the contrary, logic seems so desirable. It is a commonplace to compare philosophical theories and the behaviour of those who profess them . . . Schopenhauer is often cited, as a fit subject for laughter, because he praised suicide while seated at a well-set table. This is no subject for joking. That way of not taking the tragic seriously is not grievous, but it helps to judge a man.

In the face of such contradictions and obscurities must we conclude that there is no relationship between the opinion one has about life and the act one commits to leave it? Let us not exaggerate in this direction. In a man's attachment to life there is something stronger than all the ills in the world the body's judgement is as good as the mind's, and the body shrinks from annihilation. We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking. In that race which daily hastens us towards death, the body retains its irreparable lead. In short, the essence of that contradiction lies in what I shall call the act of eluding because it is both less and more than diversion in the Pascalian sense. Eluding is the invariable game. The typical act of eluding, the fatal evasion that constitutes the third theme of this essay, is hope. Hope for another life one must "deserve" or trickery of those who live not for life itself but for some great idea that will transcend it, refine it, give it a meaning, and betray it . . . '

From Absurdity and Suicide by Albert Camus

Death By Philosophy: Part Two

The Fatal Game

Édouard Manet (1832-1883) - Suicide, 1877


'Suicide has never been dealt with except as a social phenomenon. On the contrary, we are concerned here . . . with the relationship between individual thought and suicide. An act like this is prepared within the silence of the heart, as is a great work of art. The man himself is ignorant of it. One evening he pulls the trigger or jumps. Of an apartment building manager who had killed himself I was told that he had lost his daughter five years before, that he had changed greatly since, and that the experience had "undermined" him. A more exact word cannot be imagined. Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined. Society has but little connection with such beginnings. The worm is in man's heart. That is where it must be sought. One must follow and understand this fatal game that leads from lucidity in the face of existence to flight from the light . . .

But if it is hard to fix the precise instant, the subtle step when the mind opted for death, it is easier to deduce from the act itself the consequences it implies. In a sense, and as in a melodrama, killing yourself amounts to confessing. It is confessing that life is too much for you or that you do not understand it. Let's not go too far in such analogies, however, but rather return to everyday words. It is merely confessing that that "is not worth the trouble". Living, naturally, is never easy. You continue making the gestures commanded by existence for many reasons, the first of which is habit. Dying voluntarily implies that you have recognised, even instinctively, the ridiculous character of that habit. Dying voluntarily implies that you have recognised, even instinctively, the ridiculous character of that habit, the absence of any profound reason for living, the insane character of that daily agitation, and the uselessness of suffering.'

From Absurdity and Suicide by Albert Camus

Death By Philosophy: Part One

A Deadly Thirst

Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825) - The Death of Socrates (1787)


'There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest - whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories - comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer. And if it is true, as Nietzsche claims, that a philosopher, to deserve our respect, must preach by example, you can appreciate the importance of that reply, for it will precede the definitive act. These are facts the heart can feel; yet they call for careful study before they become clear to the intellect.

If I ask myself how to judge that this question is more urgent than that, I reply that one judges by the actions it entails. I have never seen anyone die for the ontological argument. Galileo, who held a scientific truth of great importance, abjured it with the greatest of ease as soon as it endangered his life. In a certain sense, he did right. That truth was not worth the stake. Whether the earth or the sun revolves around the other is a matter of profound indifference. To tell the truth, it is a futile question. On the other hand, I see many people die because the judge that life is not worth living. I see others paradoxically getting killed for the ideas or illusions that give them a reason for living (what is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying). I therefore conclude that the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions. How to answer it? On all essential problems (I mean thereby those that run the risk of leading to death or those that intensify the passion of living) there are probably but two methods of thought: the method of La Palisse and the method of Don Quixote. Solely the balance between evidence and lyricism can allow us to achieve simultaneously emotion and lucidity. In a subject at once so humble and so heavy with emotion, the learned and classical dialectic must yield, one can see, to a more modest attitude of mind deriving at one and the same time from common sense and understanding.'

From Absurdity and Suicide by Albert Camus

Six Images In Search Of An Exhibition II

Henri Julien Félix Rousseau (1844-1910): The Armchair Jungle

Surpris!, 1891




La Charmeuse de serpents, 1907




Combat de tigre et de buffle, 1908




Nègre attaqué par un jaguar, c. 1910




Forêt tropicale avec singes, 1910




Cheval attaqué par un jaguar, 1910

The Week in Review

Films:

Éloge d'lamour (In Praise of Love), 2001 - d. Jean-Luc Godard
Notre musique, 2004 - d. Jean-Luc Godard

La Jetée (The Pier), 1962 - d. Chris Marker
Sans soleil (Sunless), 1983 - d. Chris Marker

Double Indemnity, 1944 - d. Billy Wilder
The Lost Weekend, 1945 - d. Billy Wilder
Sunset Boulevard, 1950 - d. Billy Wilder
Some Like it Hot, 1959 - d. Billy Wilder

Television:

Smallville: Fourth Season

Books:

Meetings with Remarkable Trees - Thomas Pakenham
Mythic Woods: The World's Most Remarkable Forests - Thomas Pakenham
Remarkable Baobab - Thomas Pakenham
Remarkable Trees of the World - Thomas Pakenham

Music:

String Quartets - Ludwig van Beethoven
String Quartets - Belá Bartók
String Quartets - Elliot Carter
String Quartets - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
String Quartets - Arnold Schoenberg
String Quartets - Dmitri Shostakovich

Power Without Story

Ed Ruscha (b. 1937) - The End, c. 1990s


'I don't believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.'

Joseph Campbell

Two Backs (February Special)

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867) - The Bather of Valpiçon, 1808 (left) and Lucian Freud (b. 1922) - Naked Man, Back View, 1991-92 (right)

With talent, you do what you like. With genius, you do what you can.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

With me it's what Yeats called the fascination with what's difficult. I'm only trying to do what I can't do.

Lucian Freud

Unmapping The Heavens

Plates from Harmonica Macrocosmica, 1660 - Andreas Cellarius (c. 1595-1665)

"Ah what Bull, what Dog, what Bear,
What trophies of victory immense,
Once embarked on resourceless time
The soul imposes on formless space!

Charms, "Secret Ode", Paul Valery

Mathematical reverie has drawn diagrams of this immense tableau of a Cerulean night. These constellations are all false! They have grouped totally foreign stars in a dingle figure. Between real points, that is between stars that are isolated like diamond solitaires, the dream of constellations has drawn imaginary lines. Dream, that great master of abstract painting, sees all the animals of the zodiac done in a pointillism reduced to the minimum. Homo faber - a lazy maker of wheels - puts a chariot without wheels in the sky; the ploughman, dreaming of his harvests, erects a simple golden sheaf. Seeing such luxuriance produced by the powers of projective imagination, how odd this logical dictionary definition seems!

Constellations: the assembly of a certain number of fixed stars on which has been superimposed a figure, either man or animal or plant, in order to remember them better and to which has been given a name to distinguish them from other groupings of the same kind.

Naming stars to "help remember them", what a lack of appreciation for the speaking powers of dream! What ignorance of the principles of reverie's imaginary project! The zodiac is the Rorschach test for the child Humanity. Why have learned grimoires been written; why has the sky of night been replaced by the sky of books?

There are so many dreams in the sky which poetry, encumbered by old words, has not been able to name. To how many writers of the night would we like to say: "Come back to the principle of reverie; the starry sky has been given to us, not to think about, but to dream"? It is an invitation to constellating dreams, to dream about the easy and ephemeral construction of the thousand forms that our desires take. The mission of "fixed" stars is to fix some dreams, to communicate some, and to rediscover some. They prove to a dreamer the universality of oneirism. This ram, young shepherd, that your hand caresses as you dream - there he is up there, turning gently in the immense night! Then there will be two of you to sketch him, to recognise him, and to talk to him as a friend. You will find that the two of you have the same vision, the same desire, and that even in the night, in the nocturnal solitude, you will see the same ghosts pass by. How much greater life becomes when dreams are bound together!

We will understand to what an extent the imagination of the sky is falsified and impeded by book knowledge if we reread some passages in which writers have blithely lost track of dreams in exchange for "knowledge" that is as poor as it is lifeless. At that stage we will perhaps be justified in suggesting a kind of counter-psychoanalysis that might destroy the conscious mind in favour of an established oneirism, which would be the only way to restore a refreshing continuity to reverie. "Knowing" the constellations, naming them as in books, projecting a classroom map of the sky on the sky itself, is brutalising our imaginary powers and depriving us of the benefits of the stars' oneirism. If we were not burdened with the words that "help our memory"- the memory of words, the great sloth that refuses to dream - every new night would be a new reverie for us, a renewed cosmogony. An ill-formed consciousness or one that is too formal is as harmful for the dreaming soul as an amorphous or warped unconscious. The psyche must find a balance between the imagined and the known. This equilibrium cannot be satisfied by vain substitutions in which, suddenly, the imagining powers find themselves bound up with arbitrary schemata. The imagination is a primary power. It must be born in the solitude of the imagining being. As always, to understand contemplation, we must begin with the Schopenhauerean formula: the starry night is my constellation. It makes me aware of my power to form constellations. It puts in my hands, as the poet says, these weightless chalices and these flowers that grow in space."

From The Constellations by Gaston Bachelard