Reality

Preoccupied with black

December 22, 2017 by Elena Maslova-Levin

… black is treated purely as a color, not as its opposite, and is recognized again as a color among colors everywhere

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

The Salon has closed, and Rilke has left Paris for Prague, but this encounter with Cézanne isn’t over yet.

NOVEMBER 4, 1907 (Part 1)

… will you believe that I came to Prague to see Cézannes? … Outside in the Manes-Pavilion, where the Rodin exhibit used to be, there was (as I fortunately learned just in time) an exhibition of modern pictures. The best and most remarkable: Monticelli and Monet well represented, Pissarro adequately; 3 things by Daumier. And 4 Cézannes. (Also van Gogh, Gauguin, Émile Bernard: each with several pieces.)

But Cézanne: a large portrait, a seated man (M. Valabrègue) with lots of black on a lead-black ground. His face, and his fists resting on his lap below, their skin tones intensified all the way to orange, are strongly and unequivocally put there.

Paul Cezanne. Portrait of Anthony Valabregue. 1866.

A still life, equally preoccupied with black; on a smoothly black table a long loaf of white bread in natural yellow, a white cloth, a thick-walled wine glass on a stem, two eggs, two onions, a tin milk container, and, obliquely resting against the loaf, a black knife.

Paul Cezanne. Still life with bread and eggs. 1865

And here, even more than in the portrait, black is treated purely as a color, not as its opposite, and is recognized again as a color among colors everywhere: in the cloth, over whose white it is spread, inside the glass, muting the white of the eggs and weighting the yellow of the onions to old gold.

(Just as, without having quite seen this yellow yet, I surmised that there must have been black with it.)

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

Intercourse of Colors. Color Black. Reality

Isn’t it strange and wonderful, how the unfolding of life brings us exactly what we need (or at least it does if we pay attention)?

Not just more of Cézanne, but the miraculous continuation of the theme which both opens and closes his encounter with Cézanne in Paris: the color black.

And so, as this sequence of letters draws to its close, I ask you once again to pay attention to this mysterious color, which is both a color and the absence of it, depending on how we look at it.

There is a hidden, not fully open, parallel, between seeing black as color and “realizing that even something horrible, something that seems no more than disgusting, is, and is valid, along with everything else that is”.

All we basically have to do is to be there, but simply, ardently

December 11, 2017 by Elena Maslova-Levin

… all we basically have to do is to be there, but simply, ardently, the way the earth simply is, consenting to the seasons, light and dark and altogether in space, not asking to rest upon anything other than the net of influences and forces in which the stars feel secure.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

OCTOBER 19, 1907 (Part 2)

<…> After this devotion, in small ways at first, lies the beginning of sainthood: the simple life of a love that endured; that, without ever boasting of it, approaches everything, unaccompanied, inconspicuous, wordless.

The real work, the abundance of tasks, begins, all of it, after this enduring, and whoever has not been able to come this far may well get to see the Virgin Mary in Heaven, and certain saints and minor prophets as well, and King Saul and Charles le Téméraire—:

but as for Hokusai and Leonardo, Li Tai Pe and Villion, Verhaeren, Rodin, Cézanne—of these, not to mention the good Lord, all he will ever learn, even there, is hearsay.

Ah, we compute the years and divide them here and there and stop and begin and hesitate between the two.

But how very much of one piece is everything we encounter, how related one thing is to the next, how it gave birth to itself and grows up and is educated in its own nature,

and all we basically have to do is to be there, but simply, ardently, the way the earth simply is, consenting to the seasons, light and dark and altogether in space, not asking to rest upon anything other than the net of influences and forces in which the stars feel secure.

Some day the time and composure and patience must also be there to let me continue writing the Notebooks of Malte Laurids; I now know much more about him, or rather: the knowledge will be there when it is needed …

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

THE WORK

I read this letter, and see a miracle.

Here and now, in this moment, we are witnessing Rilke becoming what he is, and has always been, and will always be.

The real work begins after enduring…

SEEING PRACTICE: how related one thing is to the next

Rilke writes:

But how very much of one piece is everything we encounter, how related one thing is to the next…

Our brains are trained to see separate objects, not how inseparable they are from what surrounds them. But find a moment or two in your day, and pay attention to how things are related, to the spaces in between, to how very much of one piece is everything. Just rest your awareness in the space BETWEEN objects, not on the objects themselves.

Self-overcoming on the way to new bliss

December 10, 2017 by Elena Maslova-Levin

This lying-down-with-the-leper and sharing all one’s own warmth with him, including the heart-warmth of nights of love: this must at some time have been part of an artist’s existence, as a self-overcoming on the way to his new bliss.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

OCTOBER 19, 1907 (Part 1)

I’m sure you remember … in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, the place that deals with Baudelaire and his poem: “Carrion.” I couldn’t help thinking that without this poem, the whole trend toward plainspoken truth which we now seem to recognize in Cézanne could not have started; first it had to be there in all its inexorability.

First, artistic perception had to surpass itself to the point of realizing that even something horrible, something that seems no more than disgusting, is, and is valid, along with everything else that is.

Vincent van Gogh. Prisoners’ round. 1890.

Just as the creative artist is not allowed to choose, neither is he permitted to turn his back on anything that exists: a single refusal at any time, and he is cast out of the state of grace and becomes sinful all the way through.

Flaubert, in retelling the legend of Saint-Julien-l’hospitalier with so much discretion and care, showed me this simple believability in the midst of the miraculous, because the artist in him participated in the saint’s decisions, and gave them his happy consent and applause.

This lying-down-with-the-leper and sharing all one’s own warmth with him, including the heart-warmth of nights of love: this must at some time have been part of an artist’s existence, as a self-overcoming on the way to his new bliss.

Paul Cezanne. Preparation for the funeral. 1869.

You can imagine how it moves me to read that even in his last years, Cézanne had memorized this very poem—Baudelaire’s Charogne—and recited it word for word. Surely one could find examples among his earlier works where he mightily surpassed himself to achieve the utmost capacity for love.

Paul Cezanne. Hortense breat-feeding Paul. 1872.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

STORYLINE: Limitless objectivity

Rilke writes:

Just as the creative artist is not allowed to choose, neither is he permitted to turn his back on anything that exists: a single refusal at any time, and he is cast out of the state of grace and becomes sinful all the way through.

But is this only about artists, or about every single one of us?

I think we have reached the point in evolution where neither of us is permitted to turn their back on anything that exists. Otherwise, we are all doomed.

Artists were just in the vanguard (haven’t they always been in the vanguard of humanity’s evolution?)

SEEING PRACTICE: LOOKING AT UGLINESS

Is it as simple, and as difficult, as this: to see the sheer beauty of the world, one must learn not to turn back on its ugliness?

In “The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge”, Rilke writes:

Do you remember Baudelaire’s incredible poem “Une Charogne”? Perhaps I understand it now. Except for the last stanza, he was in the right. What should he have done after that happened to him? It was his task to see, in this terrifying and apparently repulsive object, the Being that underlies all individual beings. There is no choice, no refusal. Do you think it was by chance that Flaubert wrote his “Saint Julien l’Hospitalier”? This, it seems to me, is the test: whether you can bring yourself to lie beside a leper and warm him with the warmth of your own heart—such an action could only have good results. (Translated by Stephen Mitchell, Vintage International Edition (1990)).

Charles Baudelaire. The Carcase

The object that we saw, let us recall,
This summer morn when warmth and beauty mingle —
At the path’s turn, a carcase lay asprawl
Upon a bed of shingle.

Legs raised, like some old whore far-gone in passion,
The burning, deadly, poison-sweating mass
Opened its paunch in careless, cynic fashion,
Ballooned with evil gas.

On this putrescence the sun blazed in gold,
Cooking it to a turn with eager care —
So to repay to Nature, hundredfold,
What she had mingled there.

The sky, as on the opening of a flower,
On this superb obscenity smiled bright.
The stench drove at us, with such fearsome power
You thought you’d swoon outright.

Flies trumpeted upon the rotten belly
Whence larvae poured in legions far and wide,
And flowed, like molten and liquescent jelly,
Down living rags of hide.

The mass ran down, or, like a wave elated
Rolled itself on, and crackled as if frying:
You’d think that corpse, by vague breath animated,
Drew life from multiplying.

Through that strange world a rustling rumour ran
Like rushing water or a gust of air,
Or grain that winnowers, with rhythmic fan,
Sweep simmering here and there.

It seemed a dream after the forms grew fainter,
Or like a sketch that slowly seems to dawn
On a forgotten canvas, which the painter
From memory has drawn.

Behind the rocks a restless cur that slunk
Eyed us with fretful greed to recommence
His feast, amidst the bonework, on the chunk
That he had torn from thence.

Yet you’ll resemble this infection too
One day, and stink and sprawl in such a fashion,
Star of my eyes, sun of my nature, you,
My angel and my passion!

Yes, you must come to this, O queen of graces,
At length, when the last sacraments are over,
And you go down to moulder in dark places
Beneath the grass and clover.

Then tell the vermin as it takes its pleasance
And feasts with kisses on that face of yours,
I’ve kept intact in form and godlike essence
Our decomposed amours!

— From Roy Campbell, Poems of Baudelaire (New York: Pantheon Books, 1952). Click for other translations.

Here is a translation of Flaubert’s retelling of The Legend of St. Julian the Hospitaller.

The turning point in these paintings

December 8, 2017 by Elena Maslova-Levin

It is the turning point in these paintings which I recognized, because I had just reached it in my own work or had at least come close to it somehow, probably after having long been ready for this one thing which so much depends on.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

October 18, 1907 (Part 1)

<…> I would not have been able to say how far I had developed in the direction corresponding to the immense progress Cézanne achieved in his paintings.

I was only convinced that there are personal inner reasons that allow me to see certain pictures which, a while ago, I might have passed by with momentary sympathy, but would not have revisited with increased excitement and expectation.

It’s not really painting I’m studying (for despite everything, I remain uncertain about pictures and am slow to learn how to distinguish what’s good from what’s less good, and am always confusing early with late works).

It is the turning point in these paintings which I recognized, because I had just reached it in my own work or had at least come close to it somehow, probably after having long been ready for this one thing which so much depends on.

Paul Cezanne. Still life with apples. C. 1879.

That’s why I must be careful in trying to write about Cézanne, which of course tempts me greatly now.

It’s a mistake (and I have to acknowledge this once and for all) to think that one who has such private access to pictures is for that reason justified in writing about them; their fairest judge would surely be the one who could quietly confirm them in their existence without experiencing in them anything more or different than facts.

But within my life, this unexpected contact, the way it came and established a place for itself, is full of confirmation and relevance.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

Storyline: limitless objectivity

The turning point Rilke feels in Cézanne, and in himself, is the point of LIMITLESS OBJECTIVITY (he will write more about it later on).

Here, it emerges in opposition to his own subjective experience of Cézanne, his “private access”.

But is it possible to see a work of art as an objective fact, without any inner “private access” to it?

SEEING PRACTICE: SIMPLY THINGS

In the beginning of this series, I asked you to pay attention to simple things surrounding you in daily life.

Has anything changed in the way you see them?

The error of writing about art

November 29, 2017 by Elena Maslova-Levin

… as always when I fall into the error of writing about art, it was valid more as a personal and provisional insight than as a fact objectively derived from the presence of the pictures.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

Rodin’s drawings were announced as a part of that year’s Salon, but something went wrong. Instead, they were exhibited at Bernheim-Jeune, a Parisian art gallery. So Rilke went there to see them.

He had already seen many of them while working with Rodin on his biography.

OCTOBER 15, 1907 (Part 1)

There indeed were the drawings, many pages which I already knew, which I had helped frame in those cheap white-gold frames that were ordered in such enormous quantities, back then.

Which I knew: but did I really know them?

There was so much in them that seemed different to me (is it Cézanne? Is it the passing of time?); what I had written about them two months ago had receded to the limits of validity.

It still was valid, somewhere; but, as always when I fall into the error of writing about art, it was valid more as a personal and provisional insight than as a fact objectively derived from the presence of the pictures.

Auguste Rodin. Drawing. Click the image to see more at Tuttartpitturasculturapoesiamusica

It bothered me that they were so self-explanatory, so easy to interpret; I found myself limited precisely by what ordinarily seemed to open up all sorts of vistas. I would have preferred them like that, without any statement, more discreet, more factual, left alone with themselves.

I admired individual pieces in a new way, and rejected others which seemed to glitter in the reflections of their interpretation; until I reached works which I had not known.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

SUBJECTIVE AND OBJECTIVE

The theme of “subjective and objective” in art is present in the letters in two guises, from two (apparently different) vantage points:

From the point of view of an artist: do I express (subjective) feelings, or (objective) facts, THINGS, reality?

And as a spectator, or a reader: do I connect with a work of art because it touches me personally, subjectively? Or dare I look beyond that, into the reality of its objective presence?

But if a poet writes about art, these vantage points are merged together.

SEEING PRACTICE: OBJECTIVE PRESENCE

We are often attracted to works of art that have some personal emotional significance for us; that resonate with something in our own interior, on a deeply personal, subjective level. Is this the only way to really CONNECT with a painting, or a song, or a poem?

What Rilke, I think, dances around and approaches from different angles is that a work of art tells (or shows) us a glimpse of objective reality, beyond and above any personal significance we might project onto it.

It is interesting to think about one’s favorite painting(s) in this way: not in terms of one’s own emotional response to them, but as a pathway to a richer reality.

Urge to comprehend everything

November 27, 2017 by Elena Maslova-Levin

…how deeply we are placed on the ground of all transformation, we most changeable ones who walk about with the urge to comprehend everything and (because we’re unable to grasp it) reduce immensity to the action of our heart, for fear that it might destroy us.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

OCTOBER 13, 1907 (Part 1)

Early this morning I read about your autumn, and all the colors you brought into your letter were changed back in my feelings and filled my mind to the brim with strength and radiance.

Yesterday, while I was admiring the dissolving brightness of autumn here, you were walking through that other autumn back home, which is painted on red wood, as this one’s painted on silk.

And the one reaches us as much as the other; that’s how deeply we are placed on the ground of all transformation, we most changeable ones who walk about with the urge to comprehend everything and (because we’re unable to grasp it) reduce immensity to the action of our heart, for fear that it might destroy us.

Paul Cezanne. Large pine and read earth. 1895.

If I were to come and visit you two, I would surely also see the pageant of moor and heath, the hovering bright green of the meadows, the birches, with new and different eyes.

Though this transformation is something I’ve completely experienced and shared before, in part of the Book of Hours, nature was then still a general inducement for me, an evocation, an instrument in whose strings my hands found themselves again.

I was not yet sitting before her; I allowed myself to be swept away by the soul that emanated from her; she came over me with her vastness, her grand exaggerated presence, the way prophesy came over Saul; exactly like that.

I walked about and saw, saw not nature but the visions she gave me. How little I would have been able to learn from Cézanne, from van Gogh, then. I can tell how much I’ve changed by the way Cézanne challenges me now.

Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke

COLORS AND WORDS. REALITY

Rilke mentions his book of poems, The Book of Hours: Love poems to God, as a premonition of the transformation he is experiencing in 1907.

Here is a poem from this collection which, I think, gives us a glimpse of what he means (translation by Babette Deutsch, from 2009 edition):

Although, as from a prison walled with hate,
each from his own self labors to be free,
the world yet holds a wonder, and how great!
ALL LIFE IS LIVED: now this comes home to me.
But who, then, lives it? Things that patiently
stand there, like some unfingered melody
that sleeps within a harp as day is going?
Is it the winds, across the waters blowing,
is it the branches, beckoning each to each,
is it the flowers, weaving fragrances,
the aging alleys that reach out endlessly?
Is it the warm beasts, moving to and fro,
is it the birds, strange as they sail from view?
This life — who really lives it? God, do you?

SEEING: we most changeable ones

The rhythms of nature are so varied: some things exist on a time scale for grander than our own, others arise and disappear before our eyes, like waves, or in the course of a single day or season, like flowers.

So what does he mean when he says: “we most changeable ones”?

As we go through life, it is so easy to get caught in the illusion of our own sameness. Our environment changes, but the self seems to be constant.

But when one truly sees, sitting before Nature (like a dog), having let go of this urge to comprehend everything, then all that remains of the self is the fluid, constantly changing vantage point.