Three Tales of Art
Cyril Welch
Atcost Press
2013
Copyright © Cyril Welch
All rights reserved
Outing
ISBN 978-0-9685092-8-9
1
The Hague
23
Modernity
43
Outing
Jeanne d’Arc entre dans Orléans (1887) by Jean-Jacques Scherrer
Robert de Baudricourt Donne une Escorte à Jeanne (1886-1890) by
Jules Eugène Lenepveu
e had dreaded it all, starting with those many hours stiffly
propped in the tour bus, the interminable droning of the guide,
the small talk with seat-mates, the late evening meal of flimsy
French delicacies, and the inevitably retarded return. Then too he
feared that the early departure would prevent the emptying of his
gut, which would make for a day clogged with yesterday’s
fermenting refuse. A masochist, he was telling himself. Why else
did he sign up for the excursion? He had no use for Jeanne d’Arc,
nor for the company of bored and lonely bus-mates, nor any for the
artful cuisine capping the day. A sourpuss, he admitted to himself,
and tried to explain his masochism as penitence.
H
Yet he rose even earlier than planned — shortly after five — and
had plenty of time to prepare his usual breakfast of fruit and coffee,
do his stretch exercises — especially salutary for enduring the
sedentary day — and even cleanse himself of yesterday’s refuse (as
so often, the dread itself loosening his bowels). He even had time to
write up his diary for the previous day, the second highlight of
1
2
3
Cyril Welch
Outing
which (after his morning writing) already heightened his spirits: the
afternoon hike with his old friend through woods and under cliffs
near Nommer — all startlingly new to him, even though at home he
read his long-deceased wife’s smooth hand recording that the two
of them had traversed this very same stretch three times in a short
interval about twenty years ago. Strange, he had thought at the
time, although he was now musing on forgetfulness as a gift.
hesitation, in a voice both urgent and unfazed: he should return to
the car (where he was in fact still sitting) and drive like the devil to
the cemetery in Lalléng. Unlike her, he had doubts, and was already
envisioning a quiet Sunday at home. Vite vite, she said. And, as
always, he meekly obeyed.
It was then with rising spirits that he set off for the five-minute
drive to the P&R in Hollerech, where he was to board the tour bus
for Nancy and beyond. On the way, he stroked his cheek and noted
that, for all the morning’s leisure, he had neglected to shave; no
matter, he thought, since old men often appear in public with a gray
stubble.
Pulling into the parking lot shortly after eight o’clock, he found
the Sunday-morning silence eerie: plenty of immobile cars but none
of the commotion typical of a pending departure. Had he mistaken
the assignation? It would not be the first time. What a fool he was
for not having re-read the instructions Vanna had sent some months
previous! Without even turning the engine off he unpacked his cell
phone, about which, until recently, he had entertained serious
reservations — just as, several decades before, he had long resisted
the influx of credit cards: the one assuring random disruption of
concentration and the other facilitation of ill-considered consumption. Now again, though, he noticed its utility in the
reparation of his own aberrations.
Hallo, he immediately heard, as though Vanna had her phone
already in hand. Ech sinn hei zu Hollerech, awer ‘t ass kee Mënsch do,
I said, with just enough panic in my voice to indicate my guilt. Ma
de Bus ass scho fortgefuer, she said in that decisive tone of hers stating
the bald fact. They were on their way to Esch to pick up the
southern contingent. So he had inverted the times: eight here,
quarter after in Esch. As always Vanna proceeded without
Meekly but now also resolutely. He usually figured about 20
minutes on the Autobunn for the drive to Esch, chugging along
through the traffic, well under the speed limit of 130 km/hr. But
now there were both reason and opportunity for racing beyond it.
Turning into Lalléng only a few minutes later, he realized he wasn’t
sure where exactly the cemetery was, never having had occasion to
attend a burial there. At the second stoplight he saw a parking lot
at the entrance to what looked like a walking park, but no bus in
sight. So at the red light he extracted his cell phone again and called
Vanna. Komm, komm, she shouted, and couldn’t understand that he
had no idea where to go. Just come, she kept shouting. Concerned
that some other vehicle might disturb the empty streets and find him
inexplicably blocking the way, he looked backwards, then right and
left: kitty-corner, down a bit to his left was Vanna, gesticulating
with her right arm and holding her cell phone to her ear with the
other. Once again he discovered that he could be in the right place
without knowing it until another helped him — one more reason for
sojourning with others.
lle doit faire sacrer Charles VII et bouter les anglais. So he was
reading in the magazine François handed to him, an issue in a
series quaintly called Zoom sur l’Histoire that was reviewing the story
by way of paintings. What caught his eye was Jeanne d’Arc’s
intention to “kick out the English” — the colloquial flavor of the
expression, but also its contrast with the talk of anointing someone
which, he thought, had meaning mainly for the one anointed.
E
4
5
Cyril Welch
Outing
All this from a reproduction of a 19th-Century depiction of a
mounted tomboy receiving a sword and a scroll from the fullyarmored captain at the gate of the garrison at Vaucouleurs, on her
escorted way to offer her services to the Dauphin. François spoke of
the magazine as a kind of comic book. But what better way to
ponder the puzzles of the past than by carefully inspecting the artworks recreating them? And yet even these, themselves of the past,
also puzzled him. So he was especially taken by the succinct commentaries drawing his attention to the details of each painting and
relating them to the iconography of the time. Such historical
paintings left him cold when he passed them in museums, but this
“comic book,” by singling out the various elements of the scene for
careful consideration, was drawing him into the drama. Perhaps it
helped that the bus was also drawing ever closer to the place itself.
with the West; moreover, it was as though the West could now
abandon its efforts to prove that capitalism could outstrip
communism in the promotion of the common good, and could now
turn entirely to promoting itself and its attendant greed and
consumerism. Old now, and severely bloated (diabetes, François
said), the once-prominent political figure seemed to stand for the
current dramas of global financial bankruptcy currently dominating
the news, an analogue to the moral one.
Leisurely swaying along the expressway at its assigned 90
km/hr, the high-riding bus — le car, he heard francophones call it —
was inducing the usual reflections on his life. Or rather on the
variety of things that life was or had been purveying to him. His
last-minute arrival in Lalléng led to his placement in a front-row
seat, next to François, with Vanna and her assistant across the aisle.
So he had a nearly unbroken view sweeping from left to right where
the ever-changing landscape kept surging forward — first the
familiar, rather flat territory southwards toward Thionville and
Metz, then the hilly countryside ensconcing Nancy. Even the
sporadic conversation with his seat-mate lent itself to his reflections.
Although now retired from a high-ranking government post in the
European Union, François was still invited to momentous occasions,
and he had recently sat next to a Russian diplomat at a dinner where
Mikhail Gorbachew had spoken about the relations between his
country and Europe that had resulted from his efforts to bring his
own into line with Europe’s manners of governance: he was disappointed that perestroika had only led to the dissolution of the Soviet
Union and to the end of the Cold War and not to greater cooperation
Strange how the story of Jeanne d’Arc was taking on substance
during his episodic reading — each episode starting with a full-page
reproduction on the left, historical commentary on the right, then
two facing pages of cut-outs with careful analyses. His life-long
love-affair with artworks of nearly every kind — those for the eye,
those for the ear and those mysteriously recreating both at once in
words — had taught him that, until recently, history painting held
first-place in general estimation. This ranking he could hardly
understand, since his first-loves of the visual kind were of works by
Van Gogh, Monet, Manet, Degas and the like, back to Dutch genre
paintings, all celebrating present moments. Depictions of great
moments of the tradition required, it seemed to him, both familiarity
with and concern for political or religious developments, something
he sorely lacked as a West-Coast American with a youth entirely free
of historical saturation.
Why all this interest, after six-hundred years, on the part of his
fellow pilgrims on the bus — or at least on the part of all those
painters and their commissioners? Hollywood could build on the
story of rags to fame, especially poignant in its female version.
Thoughtful students could ponder the story of the strong character
of an individual and the weakness of, eventual betrayal by the very
ones benefitted. Serious historians could find a colorful mantlepiece
for the grand architecture of the European destiny of nationbuilding starting at the dissolution of the medieval order. Les
6
7
Cyril Welch
Outing
philosophes français, comme Voltaire, la dénigrent, he was reading, and
it occurred to him that, unlike Socrates and Jesus, she indeed
testified to no ideas, only to desires — she was no martyr in the
original sense (although he knew that even Dante was already using
the word to describe anyone suffering), and her desires were in fact
quite popular. Precisely this, he was thinking, might be what
attracts her posterity: lots of action, a conspicuous personality (a
voice-driven, pants-wearing virgin), and no need to rethink any
thoughts. Still, he was re-thinking his own, and these reproductions
served the moment very well, as did the commentaries that, he
noted with some satisfaction, were supplied by two professional
historians rather than by journalists.
to fill the vacuum with nearly weightless foam. The secret of such
flotsam, he figured, lay in the careful concealment of the narrator’s
true position in the story. And this concealment, he knew, could be
effected equally well by disguising that position either as one of
suffering outrageous injustice or as one heroically overcoming it or
as one only looking on — the events then being always tucked away
in the passé defini, whereas in truth one lives in a passé composé
forever harboring the tasks yet to be completed. Even these evasive
maneuvers he could understand as already revealing what he long
ago had learned to be the most sustained and burdensome feature
of being human — having to make something out of wherever one
finds oneself, having to begin all over each morning with what the
time offers. “Creatures of a day!” had long been echoing in his ears
— ephemeral in this sense rather than in the simpler sense of being
short-lived, although he knew philosophers had long argued that
the two go together, each conditioning the other.
Such rethinking, he knew, held no interest for his fellow
voyagers. Or so he figured. They seemed simply to accept the
general importance of history and to await the fancy meal at the end
of the day. Perhaps he was underestimating them, or some of them.
Perhaps they too, or some of them, were harboring a similar
puzzlement or wonder. But, do what he could, he couldn’t hear any
indication of it, or stir up any conversation addressing it. With rare
exceptions, he felt himself alone with it, alone among the throng of
others. An occupational hazard, he figured, with its attendant
déformation professionnelle. But he wondered about this too, since he
saw other artists apparently integrating themselves into conversation antithetical to the spirit of their own work, and he sometimes
envied them, or rather their ease.
e had long ago concluded that most social occasions served
chiefly to distract their perpetrators from their own troublesome lives — sometimes cheerfully, even wholesomely, sometimes
frenetically and desperately. He could hear it in their conversation,
which typically flitted from one image to another, telling stories
drawn from their lives but coming to nothing — or, rather, serving
H
Strange, he thought, how the true position of a narrator never
really gets stated in a story — not even in first-person narrative, since
it’s still the narrator, always outside the story, that creates that
person. Outside yet still essential to a true story — around it, to form
a kind of nimbus. A nimbus not visible in itself, but highlighting
whatever the story is about. And not even that of the maker of the
story — although readers especially, perhaps less likely listeners to
a well-told story, like to solve its mystery by assigning it to the
author. But the author, as he knew all too well, is only the medium,
not the source of the story — and can easily disappear entirely or, as
in the case of Homer, leave a name signifying only the story itself.
It’s the nimbus, he was convinced, that made the difference — and
allowed the story to address others over the ages and in places never
visited in the flesh.
He himself, he knew, treasured company — more so, really, than
those who only flee into it. What greater pleasure — what truer
8
9
Cyril Welch
Outing
satisfaction — than to make contact with something jointly? Strange,
he thought, this getting out of himself, although leaving him
exposed, essentially vulnerable (like some crustacean that has just
shed its shell, having outgrown it), he finds himself, ever again for
the first time, in a world essentially shared, revealed for what and
who is there, and no longer as a negotiated battlefield of egos
indifferent to actual circumstances and seeking relief from its
attendant pains and disappointments. Getting out of oneself to find
oneself — a time-tested paradox, he knew, and for that reason all the
more thought-provoking. He had experienced something like this
double-edged liberation already in the pleasures of pursuing joint
projects — playing in theater productions or on football teams, where
he also discovered, to his own disappointment, that others often
prefer their beleaguerment in practical affairs. But, for him, the
paradox took on its most powerful, most reliable form in reading —
in reading great literature, he always wanted to add, although he
knew from his own failures that the greatness of any work depends
also on the reader’s willingness to participate in the getting out and
getting in. His own experience of teaching had taught him that
literacy is about as rare now as it had been in ancient times, and not
only among the youth but among his own kind as well.
white shirt with monochromatic blue tie neither narrow nor wide,
black trousers and shoes, barely perceptible spectacles. Whatever he
was saying, he was saying it confidently, intent upon whatever
Vanna was saying. Warmly, then: something in his manner
indicated full acceptance both of his role as guide for the remainder
of the day and his role as thinker in a life elsewhere into which he
could draw others without insisting they assent.
e looked up to see Vanna talking earnestly but quietly with a
man standing in the stairwell of the bus. Outside he could see
a throng circulating every which way. Ah, the train station, he
thought. François had said something about picking up the guide
in Nancy, the director of the Centre Jeanne d’Arc in Orleans,
apparently a three-hour train-ride from Nancy. A tall man, fifty-ish
(old himself now, he could no longer be sure, even of a rough
guess), with closely cropped graying hair, clean-shaven, slightly
tanned face, probably less than ten pounds overweight, dressed
casually in an inconspicuously professorial manner: beige coat,
H
Den do ass e feine Mann, “That’s a fine man,” he immediately
said, leaning slightly over toward François. “One that speaks out of
the matter itself rather than out of books.” Strange, he thought to
himself, that he came to that conclusion after only a few seconds,
and without even hearing what the man was saying. Only from
instantaneous gestures — of the eyes and mouth certainly, also of the
whole body, its tilts — and from those accumulated statically in the
dress. Great portrait painters must work from such intuition — or,
more to the point he thought, invent it. Over the years he had heard
and watched many guides droning him through cathedrals and
museums and cities, reciting names and dates gathered independently of their source. Already as a youth he had no room for
such recitations and failed miserably as a student in history classes.
Yet he had noticed over the same years that such recitations left very
little lasting impression on others, either — certainly none that could
compete with the silliest anecdotes inserted by the guide or the
slightest mishaps that inevitably punctuated a tour. As an academic
he had had ample occasion to experience the danger first hand — the
terror of loss followed by the shame of cover-up.
Vous avez peut-être des questions, “You have perhaps some
questions.” — Oh no, he thought, one of those teachers who, having
no pressing thoughts of their own, hoped to borrow some from
those in the audience — whose ignorance or indifference generated,
at most, inane questions (as always happens at the end of a poetry
reading, he knew). He himself certainly had none, other than the
10
11
Cyril Welch
Outing
vacuous question of why bother. Immediately, though, François
leaned forward and signaled that he had one: How could it happen
that a young girl, barely in her teens, could gain the confidence of
seasoned warriors? Now that’s a good question, he thought. And
now, too, he could see whether the professor would live up to his
promise, or to that of his gestures. No historian has more that relics
from the past, he knew, and these already buried in stories also left
over from the past. Not just the relics, then, but already the everexpanding contest over rights to the reliquary.
above and easily pierced the strongest armor — that had been
regularly decimating the troops and had engendered a penury of
manpower. The anxiety over leadership and the massacre of
experienced warriors left room for hope in the inexperienced. The
professor was gathering these disparate facts, in each case
apparently documented in some archive, into a fresh story gathered
around the gap left by the question. Something of the matter itself
was slowly filling it in and, he faintly noticed, drawing himself into
it as well.
The bus was now swaying itself out of the town and back to the
autoroute, but now his attention was fixed on the professor. He
himself was an on-looker whenever away from his study. To him,
the world outside did not add up to much, and only rarely could he
fully accept the terms it set for participation — terms that, he felt,
obscured or even denied whatever of substance might lie there. In
compensation, though, he had learned to take part in stories,
whether by Homer or Plato, Kant or Proust. A story, for him, was
a script that, if only he could discover his part in it and learn to act
it out, gathered up the otherwise fragmentary world and placed him
directly up to its substance — momentarily illumined in the play
itself. A dear friend of his once expressed some concern, when she
learned he was reading Proust avidly, whether she would appear to
him now as Gilberte, Albertine or Odette. Meanwhile, his years of
academia had taught him that students — and especially colleagues
— generally reversed the priority and thereby tended, even when
knowing better, to convert gold back into lead.
Outside the landscape of Burgundy also zoomed slowly in, left
and right. Sprawling fields bordered on both sides by distant ridges.
Cultivated segments recalling a thousand or more years of labor, at
first ever expanding and then (he knew from his own experience
with the Napoleonic Code and its overruling of primogeniture)
breaking up and shifting around into ever-new configurations. The
charm of the landscape lay, he was thinking, in its exudation of
autochthony, a kind of love underlying the often bitter struggles of
ownership. So unlike the landscapes of America, these being more
sublime, in the literary sense, than beautiful, exuding as they do
either the sense of wilderness or its peculiar opposite, exploitation
on an amazingly massive scale, outright commercialization — in
either case uninhabitable and therefore inviting interminable and
goalless peregrination and rendering pilgrimage an empty word.
The professor was backtracking, as was obviously necessary.
There was the Hundred Years’ War, with its internecine alliances.
There was the uncertain leadership, with the Dauphin yet to be
anointed at Reims. And there were the gruesome developments in
warfare — such as portable cannons and, on the English side, heavy
arrows shot high, and massively, so that they rained down from
As the bus took the party ever closer to Domrémy the professor
was addressing another question inaudibly posed from the back of
the bus — evidently something about the impact of Jeanne d’Arc on
the future. Here the professor seemed especially at home in his
topic: the facts of history — l’histoire événementielle — cast into the
light of their subsequent reception. From the mix of secular victory
and defeat, divine inspiration, ignominious execution and female
resolve — from all this successive generations found various ideals
worthy of emulation. Most immediately at the time was the conflict
12
13
Cyril Welch
Outing
of hegemony between state and church, of only vestigial interest
today: it juxtaposed two ideals, the republican (government for the
practical interests of the people) and the clerical (government for the
ultimate salvation of individuals). Listening to the professor, he
himself noted that paintings of her in various situations emphasized
the one at the expense of the other — or, as in one by Ingres,
combined the two. Difficult for us today to comprehend in their
power, each ideal served as a rallying point on the question how
society could hang together — a question muffled in our own
consumerism. During the rise of the Soviet Union she served
uniquely as an admirable act of self-sacrifice for the sake of the
people. In contrast, the English, whose forebears had seen in her the
utmost threat to their ambitions on the Continent, have since
admired her feminine pluck and female accomplishment. And in
France today extreme nationalists celebrate her efforts to expel
foreigners, in this case immigrants, from French soil.
If nothing else, it occurred to him, practice in historical research
might teach one the tragedy of narration, something mere on-lookers
can never learn.
The professor was retelling the story of each reception. And
with only the slightest tinge of irony. After all, each was drawing on
something événementiel, and it seemed to him, listening, that the
professor knew there was no separating of story and fact: it takes a
story to make the facts available in their detail and coherent in their
interrelation. Again, that each story deserved to be taken with a
grain of salt has very different possible meanings, from the most
sophomoric (they are all arbitrary, so there’s no need to take any
seriously) to the most problematic (each generation must remake the
stories inherited, just as each individual must make something of
received circumstances). Listening to this panoply, he noticed one
overall salutary effect: each story — or painting — presented,
enigmatically, a narrative stance, a decision regarding both the
stories received and the future to be forged. This in contrast to most
talk, which, he so often felt, evades such double-edged decision,
providing, as it does, a kind of smokescreen that, while shielding
from the agony, does so at the price of asphyxiation in the present.
rom the left window he saw a panel identifying the river the bus
was about to cross: La Meuse. How strange, he thought: this is
the river he crosses regularly when driving northwards to Brussels.
He had figured he would be breaking into new territory on this tour
southwards. The same world, then. Except that now the bus was
turning into a parking lot, and he realized it had arrived at
Domrémy — Domrémy-la-Pucelle, a sign was insisting, evidently to
assure all comers that this was indeed the hometown of the Virgin
who had kicked the English out of Orleans.
F
He was now standing just to the right side of the professor, the
better to hear him with his one good ear. Across from the group was
a modest but solid two-storey house. Above its door was a niche
with a figurine of some sort. Jeanne’s birthplace. The professor was
saying that the family was well off, Jeanne’s father owning the land
he cultivated and serving as a magistrate in the village. Under these
conditions, it was highly unlikely that Jeanne would have been sent
out to tend the sheep, not so much because of the menial work
involved as because of the dangers to which a girl would have been
exposed in the lawless countryside. It must be remembered, he said,
that the medieval mind required that every detail of a story reflect
the destiny embedded in the one big story of salvation. Jeanne
became an impoverished shepherdess because she had to appear in
parallel with the shepherds in the story of Jesus. Even dates were
altered to reflect the trinity: despite documents stating the 25th, one
story recounted an event to have occurred on the 23rd of a month.
Inside the house he noted the massively thick walls and the
correspondingly massive beams supporting the downstairs ceiling.
Tiny rooms, of course, and no inside plumbing. Imagination had to
14
15
Cyril Welch
Outing
fill in the rest. But what struck him was that this building dated
from more than six hundred years ago, about a century before
Columbus set sail on his famous voyage. How could that be? His
own daughter once remarked that, after traveling a bit in Europe,
she felt that she and her American friends were camping out in their
own homes: inside everything was temporary, to be used up rather
than put to use, and the buildings themselves, even most churches,
hardly less flimsy than tents. But, he was thinking, the difference
lay more in the manner of living than in the materials of construction: whether you were living only for passing moments or for
all time — meaning not only building for a future in which you will
have no personal stake but also recovering a past in which you have
taken no personal part. Less than a century and a half after La
Pucelle was burned at the stake the village was renamed to recall
both her place and her virginity. This long before the age of mass
tourism.
at hand. Each just wanted to go home, or perhaps to a bar to get
drunk. (Cockroaches in evidence? Spray the place with DDT!)
Those few days had ever since led him to ponder the thought that
perhaps the great divide in life is whether or not you can take your
work, the place of your work, as your own. Not just care about
where you are, but take care of it — clean, repair, upgrade it — and
often in opposition to the official caretakers who may in fact try to
convince you it’s not yours at all. (Surely, he was now wondering,
there must have been liberated Romanians at that time: he just
happened to see only those who, up against daunting odds, were
failing — seemingly no longer even trying.) He remembered
Aristotle saying that it’s best that things belong to individuals rather
than to the city, since people only take care of what’s theirs, and part
of caring is sharing — as when we clean up our house to receive
guests — so that commonality is a result and not a beginning.
Neither renters nor landlords are naturally inclined to take care of
their premises, since these are dwellings in name only. The
adolescent version of liberty, the right to do as one pleases, simply
draws out the infantile condition of dependence: a terrifying time
of life, where one is traversing a ridge with a death-dealing abyss on
either side. He had long agreed with Plato that the way we tell the
stories of liberation — whether about Jeanne d’Arc or William
Wallace a hundred years before, about George Washington or
Giuseppe Garibaldi centuries later, or about purely fictional
characters at any time — either urge the young along the ridge or
knock them off balance.
So this was her home, he thought. Not something he had
thought about when hearing the stories of her adventures. It now
passed his mind, though, that maybe this was the point of those
undertakings — to recover her home. Later generations, having
none such, or at least not this one, have interpreted her project of
kicking out the English as one of liberation from the dictates of
governors far away —in keeping with today’s complaints about the
impingements of the modern state, and with the incessant talk of
rights to be and have as one pleases. But the greater part of her
project — the part that in fact succeeded — was to install an absolute
monarch. How might liberty then have been an issue for her or
hers?
He often recalled his few days in Bucharest, it must have been
sometime in 1973, when he first experienced the opposite, or one
opposite: never once did he see a salesclerk in a bookstore or
grocerystore, or a deskclerk in an hotel, take ownership of the task
Vanna had arranged for a quick jog down to some Roman ruins
not far south, in a village called Grand (not meaning grand, but
recalling the sanctuary dedicated to the Gallic Apollo, Grannus).
Nothing much to do with Jeanne d’Arc, he thought. But it then
occurred to him that these ruins stood for what her faith had
replaced by absorbing into itself rather than forgetting — just as in
all those Renaissance paintings that depict the Nativity housed in
16
17
Cyril Welch
Outing
crumbling walls of antiquity, and as, over a century earlier, in
Dante’s depiction of damnation, purgation and salvation, where
previous traditions are incorporated rather than abandoned. Would
that his own culture would learn to do the same with what it has
replaced, he was thinking, since otherwise forebears keep haunting
successors — just as a repressed personal past wreaks havoc on an
individual. But then a salient feature of his own culture, he knew,
consisted precisely in its endorsement of a linear sense of time, one
in which the past figures as what is best left behind. Strangely,
though, the rubble at Grand attracts tourists.
divine voices. Listening, he noted that he himself was drawn to
those paintings depicting her as a woman — a girl, by today’s
standards — strong enough to do battle with trying circumstances
(the others, the ones depicting her in a saintly pose, eyes turned
meekly toward heaven, seemed rather to serve an extraneous
doctrine). He mused how he himself had always been attracted to
feminine equals and could not understand all the hullabaloo about
men innately wishing to confine women to the kitchen. Such
complaints no doubt generalize selected instances to justify some
legitimate grievance — soft hate-literature in a way. But they hardly
provide a narrative showing how instances may or may not live up
to their own promise, always variously. The difference between
propaganda and artwork, he figured.
aucouleurs lies a half-day walk to the north of Domrémy, a
short 20 kilometers by bus. The professor was now in lecture
mode, as he had been since the group was seated in the church close
to the house of pilgrimage. It was to Vaucouleurs that she had
walked several times to declare her intention to drive the English
out and to get the Charles VII properly anointed — and to ask the
captain of the garrison for an armed escort on the much longer trek
westward to Chinon, 250 kilometers southwest of Paris, where she
finally met the as-yet unanointed king in 1429. The guide was filling
in all the details of the petition (over and over again the captain
mocked her) and of subsequent developments, most remarkably the
successful storming of the English at Orleans.
V
Along the way he dwelt for some time on the wearing of
trousers. One must remember, he said, that in those days dresscodes belonged to the very fabric of society, identifying the place,
the rights and the obligations of each member. It was not an easy
matter for a woman to dress like a man, and her doing so would not
have been forgiven by relating it to the practical exigencies of
military campaigning. Her dress was, as we would say today,
already a “statement” — exactly of what, however, one can only
speculate. At least this, surely: of difference — just as her hearing of
One last stop before dinner time: Toul, whose cathedral and
cloisters struck him — as they would anybody, he figured — as built
to last: to carry forward their sense of divinely founded human
destiny, and this from an already distant past. Now they provided
the essential rather than accidental backdrop of Jeanne’s intrusion
into history, although for her they had represented the actual
context. By now, though, he was too drained from the day’s
exposure to listen carefully to the local guide’s exposition of
forgettable facts. Besides, these relics, as impressive as they were,
differed not a whole lot from those he had experienced repeatedly
over the decades, starting when he was a child dragged along by his
parents and continuing in earnest as he became ever more aware of
his own origins in California as little more than relics themselves,
more like leftovers from the sense of destiny founded already here
in the Old World.
t was not until after well after 7 p.m. that the bus finally arrived at
the Auberge du Pressoir, charmingly located in what must have
been a vineyard recently reformatted into a housing track: rows of
I
18
19
Cyril Welch
Outing
low-lying bungalows à l’Américaine — yet another village dortoir, now
so familiar everywhere in Europe: bedroom communities that are
no communities at all but primarily bedrooms. He first wandered
around the grounds, noting the fragments of grape presses, the
gravel walkways, the flower beds. Coming in last, he took the
remaining seat conveniently on one side of a long table where his
bus-mates were already adapting themselves to the novel configuration.
liked to cite Disneyland, although he had visited the one in
California only once, and that many decades ago. Cathedrals and
abbeys appear then as the refuse of the hard work or boredom or
distraction of earlier ages — the affairs of other people, to whom one
might at most lend an indifferent eye as one lends an indifferent ear
in polite conversation while waiting for the next dish.
Small servings in succession rather than large ones already at
once: that must be one of the charms of French dining, he was
thinking. Each designed to titillate the eyes as much as the palette
and best enjoyed as offsetting the wines. He remarked to the couple
across the table, and also to the woman to his right, that he found
the professor especially insightful — helpful, he wanted to say, but
Europeans don’t generally admit that they need help. That, as he
had already told François, the man spoke out of the matter itself
rather than out of books. His table-mates agreed, but also remarked
that Vanna had found an equally insightful professor for their
earlier excursion to Paris: a retired historian whose words resonated
with years of study and drew his listeners back into the
subterranean recesses of their present world.
The woman to his right — a familiar figure whose name he
wished he could remember — told of her daughter, a research
biologist presently in Germany, conducting a visiting colleague on
a tour of northern France: the American took not the slightest
interest in any of the monuments, not even in the cathedral at Reims
or the abbey at Mont-Saint-Michel. He knew from his own
experience as an American how that could be: living for passing
moments, whether idly or intensely, such things can serve only as
distraction from boredom or hard work — poorly, though, since they
are designed rather for concentration — for recollection and
anticipation. For distraction there are much better installations — he
Slowly it dawned on him that this woman next to him was the
mother of the young biologist he much admired on a previous
excursion to Sicily some years ago: at one point, instead of standing
idly by as each passenger pulled his own luggage out from the belly
of the tour bus, she stepped in, stooped down under, scooped up
one or two bags, set them out of the way and returned for more —
her arms and legs and torso in a cyclical and rhythmic motion, as in
a dance. It was her graceful resolve in service that struck him,
representing for him a feminine ideal. She was wearing trousers, of
course.
By the time he was sure, it was too late to say anything to the
mother. The conversation had moved on to something else. And
soon their own professor bade us farewell, to much applause, and
the straggle to the bus began — under a cloud that was just
beginning to sprinkle.
he autoroute was not far away, and soon the bus was swaying its
way home, passing the turn-off to Nancy and heading for Metz.
The sun had set, the clouds were bursting, and he was dozing in the
darkness when there was an ominous crash which, when he opened
his eyes, was followed by lightening streaking every which way off
to the West, which was then reflected million-fold in the water
splashing on the pavement, the other vehicles, the road signs, and
the windshield in front of him. No more small talk, no more reading,
no more lectures; just the anticipation of arrival, now clocked:
another hour and a half.
T
20
Cyril Welch
Outing
21
First stop Holleresch, where, had he been more alert to Vanna’s
instructions, he could have descended and driven straight home.
On to Lalléng, then, where he stood in line to shake Vanna’s hand,
thanking her for her massive efforts.
Actually, he enjoyed the longer drive home, mostly on the
Autobunn, so peaceful at this late hour. Already he felt relieved to
withdraw again into his own carefully circumscribed world, one
that, he never ceased to hope, opened out, through his own work,
onto larger ones others might learn to fathom.
Robert de Baudricourt Donne une Escorte à Jeanne, 1886-1890, par
Jules Eugène Lenepveu (1819-1898)
Jeanne d’Arc au Sacre du Roi Charles VII (1854), Jean Auguste
Dominique Ingres
Départ de Jeanne d’Arc de Vaucouleurs (1886-1887) by Jean-Jacques
Scherrer
The Hague
Rembrandt
1642
“
ut they’re all looking at the book,” I said — well, not all, I
corrected myself; the doctor, raising the tendons with a clamp
in his right hand, gazes upward out of the picture to his right, and
of the seven on-lookers, all portrayed in portrait style, one looks
straight out toward us. Not one is looking at the corpse.
B
Vermeer
1660
Rodin
1877
We were standing together before Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson
of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp at the Gemeentemuseum, the temporary housing
for the Mauritshuis collection while that museum was undergoing
major reconstruction. We had driven up from Luxembourg that
morning — an easy four-hour drive, not counting the extra half-hour
of traffic jams around Rotterdam as the two lanes of the motorway
squeezed into one to allow for Sunday repaving. It was now nearly
one o’clock and we were dashing through the galleries to confirm
what we wanted to contemplate more carefully after pausing for the
panini she had brought along.
Dr. Tulp, wearing a black and very broad-rimmed hat, looks up
from the dissecting table, perhaps addressing spectators in a gallery
above, whom he would have already informed that the proceedings
on the table below intended to reveal God’s handiwork. Six of his
seven colleagues, all dressed in formal social attire of the time (most
conspicuously with their white pleated collars: this was 1642) peer
past the scene that attracts our attention, and toward a very large
book, open roughly at mid-point, whose contents face away from us.
The seventh, looking at us, holds another book, one he has evidently
been consulting by himself.
23
24
25
Cyril Welch
The Hague
“Truth lies in the book,” I boldly remarked to my companion.
“What they see happening on the table merely illustrates the truth.”
around noon, and be back twelve hours later, in time for a decent
night’s rest. Anyway, I had a car here, whereas she leaves hers in
Modena.
“As in Galileo’s figure of Simplicius in his Dialogo,” she replied.
“He too of course prefers what he had read in Aristotle to what he
witnessed at a dissection. While he read in the philosopher’s treatise
that the nerves converge on the heart, and saw at the dissection that
they converge on the brain, he expressed gratitude that he had
studied the book first, since otherwise he might have believed his
eyes.”
“Not unlike us today,” I replied. “While our eyes clearly reveal
the sun circling the earth, rising in the east and setting in the west,
we think we know better, and congratulate ourselves on what we
have been told in school and read in its textbooks.” And I went on:
“We also see daily that some people desire to help others —
remember the fellow who took considerable time to direct us
through The Hague to the museum? We see people, among whom
we might count ourselves, finding their own fulfilment in the
fulfillment of whomever they work with and of whatever they work
on; yet the governing books of our time, those of political economy
and biology, ceaselessly disabuse us of our illusion: each is really
only looking out for number one.”
A couple rooms further on the two of us came upon Vermeer’s
View of Delft. It was the prospect of contemplating this painting that
inspired our day-trip — un’ idea pazza, as she called it already last
spring. She had originally proposed that we take the train at 5:30,
which would bring us to The Hague at noon, and return on a train
departing late in the day and arriving in Luxembourg around
midnight. I finally told her that I couldn’t do that, not at my age —
that, rising at 4:00 to allow for my regimen of stretch exercises and
for getting to the station, I’d be dead tired already in the early
afternoon, and quite dead by evening. Better to drive up, I
proposed, and she agreed: leaving at 8:00 we could still arrive
t 7:50 I pulled into the bus lane at the Rousegäertchen, the rosepark across from the old ARBED building, now housing its
successor, the largest iron and steel concern in the world. Almost
immediately I saw her coming and got out of the car to play the
gentleman. Lecturing in class, she had always been very formal, and
we had exchanged e-mails about Dante’s Divine Comedy in a formal
manner. In the quiet of the Sunday morning, approaching now
through the rose beds, she hailed me cheerfully, in the mode of one
off work, and also informally — employing the tu rather than the lei.
A shift of mood that, I knew, would very much facilitate our
conversation over the many hours we were going to be cramped
together.
A
“It’s a long story,” I said when she asked how on earth I had
made a home in Luxembourg. And she: “Well, we have all day to
tell our stories, and get to know each other better.”
So I told her mine . . . May 1968 in Paris at the time of the minirevolution, fleeing by rented car to Brussels, time on our hands
before meeting Heidegger in Freiburg, down to Luxembourg to stay
with Liliane’s parents, her mother spotting apartments for sale, we
eventually buying a small one overlooking Luxembourg City to the
north. Then back to when and where we met in early 1961, our
graduate studies, our move to Canada where we could both teach at
the same university. And forward to our quieter quarters, my
taking on Luxembourg citizenship, her death by cancer two full
years ago now.
And she told hers . . . Teaching the last four years at the
University here, five more to go by contract, whereupon she would
26
27
Cyril Welch
The Hague
be retiring at age sixty-five. She had taught Latin and Greek for
twenty-two years at a classical liceo in Modena, across the street from
her home, and had begun to search for fresh challenges. Over the
years she had often inquired about the possibility of teaching in a
foreign country, when suddenly Luxembourg launched its own
university. Besides our Dante class, she teaches Italian language and
Italian history. She added that she flew back to Modena most
weekends, although a clause in her contract insists on full-week
residence in Luxembourg, so she figured her commuting was illegal
— even though she’s always available to her students by e-mail.
Manfred had been telling (in the last fourteen tercets of the previous
canto) and had lost track of time. Buried in these otherwise
apparently anodyne comments, I wrote Sibilla, lies something of a
warning: absorption in sensation, with its pleasures and pains,
distracts from the unity of the soul, the intellection essential to this
canticle on purgation and dominant in the next on beatification. Not
only Manfred’s frightening story of his demise, but also the current
images, and especially that of Belaqua lazily poking fun at Virgil,
can distract from the proper development of the story. Also, verse
14, where the Pilgrim speaks of marveling at Manfred’s story,
reminded me of a line of Augustine’s Confessions saying it’s weird
that people travel far and wide to marvel at things, whereas nothing
is more worthy of marvel than the workings of one’s own soul. All
this and a bit more I sent in PDF as an e-mail attachment.
What sold me on her Dante class was that she felt at home in
every aspect of the entire Commedia: already when talking about the
Inferno she would look forward to the Purgatorio and the Paradiso to
note thematic parallels and linguistic differences (the language
becomes ever more elevated). This was already in the fall of 2010,
shortly after Liliane died (asked on the registration form what my
état civil was, I wrote for the first time veuf). One canto each week,
one canticle each academic year: so we had just started the Paradiso.
Especially during that first year, as I was flying back and forth
between my two homes, re-ordering my life, I attended class only
sporadically. The second year I did manage to attend both the fall
and the spring classes on the Purgatorio, the canticle that I find
especially engaging, addressing as it does our actual condition of
struggling to live a good life. At the end of the fourth class (on the
4th canto) Sibilla asked if we had any questions or observations.
Unable to keep up with the rapid pace of Italian discourse in a
public setting, I waited to formulate my observations on my
computer at home, where I could write with a spell-checker and
consult my dictionaries. Whereas she had scurried past the opening
tercets of the 4th canto to concentrate on the colorful figure of
Belaqua, I found already in the first five much to think about: the
Pilgrim testifies that he had been totally absorbed in the story
Sibilla replied at equal length, agreeing on the importance of the
opening tercets, noting their indebtedness to Thomas Aquinas, and
expressing some doubt about the reference to Augustine, whom she
called an intimista, one seeking enlightenment by way of reflections
on and analyses of oneself — something we find again in Petrarch’s
sonnets, she noted. In contrast, Dante asks us to begin directly with
our debt to our maker.
She also picked up on my appreciative commentary on some
lines in the twenty-second canto of the Purgatorio:
Interessante è che qui, e altrove, Virgilio può dare
speme mentre lui stesso lo manca: come quei che va di
notte, / che porta il lume dietro e sé non giova / ma dopo sé fa
le persone dotte.
“It’s interesting that here and elsewhere Virgil can give hope
while he himself lacks it: as one who goes at night, / carrying the
lamp behind him and not himself profiting from it, / while lighting the
way for those behind him.” Throughout Dante’s work I find such
remarks deserving pause for thought — these more than the
28
29
Cyril Welch
The Hague
“plot,” the mythos. Otherwise we do indeed abide in sensation
only.
gates and one passage for a canal leading into the city. The
placid water reflects vaguely much of this far shore back toward
us. Then, brightly lit by sunbeams, part of the town behind draws
our attention, especially the cathedral gloriously rising toward
the scattered clouds.
And so our correspondence continued. It seemed I always
wanted to linger over detail, while in class she tended to race by
such apparent asides, both to analyze the obviously dramatic
passages and to provide historical background for them. When
I pressed her in my e-mails, however, she displayed sensitivity to
the details and could easily, as also in class, relate any one detail
to developments throughout the Commedia, as well as to Dante’s
formulations in his other works.
In mid-November I left for Canada, returning in mid-March,
when I began again to attend classes. It was then that Sibilla
mentioned in one of her e-mails her pazza idea of taking a day-trip
by the train to Den Haag (L’Aja, she called it), with a view to the
Vermeer painting. Already in the fall I had sent her a copy of the
artist’s rather unusual (for him) depiction of Mary and Martha
attending to Christ (“Martha, Martha, you take care of many
things, whereas few are necessary, even just one, and that’s what
Mary has chosen”) — as an illustration of the difference between
the vita activa and the vita contemplativa the Pilgrim confronts at
the summit of Purgatory. Sibilla had responded in great detail to
the painting, and ended by saying she preferred the life of
engagement, that of Martha.
o here we were, facing it, the two of us alone. In the
foreground, to the left, six or seven figures, men and women,
in Sunday dress loitering on what looks like a beach (not likely
for sunbathing, this being 1660). They stand next to a moored
barge, largely concealed from our view. Across the water more
boats are tied up, and I could now see tiny stick-figures on them,
as also on the adjacent wharf (something I had never noticed in
reproductions). Behind the wharf rises the city wall, with two
S
“Tranquility,” I said, “serenity even — what we usually
associate with a landscape.”
“It’s not at all like that,” she replied, “at least not today.”
And she went on to say that she had once gone to Delft expressly
to make the comparison; lots of trees in the foreground, for one
thing.
“Yet all the elements of urban bustle are there,” I went on,
pointing out not only the barges and boats, gates, turrets and
towers. “It’s just that these things are at rest, and so also the
inhabitants.” And finally ourselves, I was thinking.
We lingered a while, tracing details up close with our
fingers. She pointed out that no alarms went off, and there was
no guard in sight. As a couple other visitors approached, we
withdrew.
n our way in I had already noted that there were a few
benches outside, snuggling into the hedges and facing the
ponds separating the museum from the traffic. We made our
way back, then, and she pulled out the panini she had prepared
— two each, the usual ham and cheese. Across the one pond, on
the wall of the museum, was a giant poster advertising “Happy
Days” — an exposition of works that emerged in the Netherlands
from 1947 to 1967. Its emblem was a photograph of two clean-cut
youths flirting in an open convertible: both with grown-up
hairdos, the girl in a modest blouse, the boy with a bow-tie, each
holding a towering spiral of soft ice-cream. “Looks like the
O
30
31
Cyril Welch
The Hague
California of my youth,” I remarked. A light-weight world, I
went on to say: one expressed perfectly in Disneyland, the
American way of responding to the horrors of the war that most
only heard about: forgetting them, having fun. What a contrast
to the European way! Which was to recall the horrors over and
over again, as in Alberto Moravia’s novel La Ciociara, which tells
of a woman from that region, just south of Rome, enduring the
hardships of the war with her daughter. The subsequent movie,
dubbed into English for distribution in America, was re-titled
Two Women, so that when the two were raped by Moroccan
soldiers this had nothing to do with the reality of where or who
they were: horror appears abstract, always elsewhere.
Yet, just as we crossed the border into Holland, she said that
every such crossing gives her shivers: the very thought that here
all those great painters, whose works addressed her so
emphatically, had actually walked, feet on the ground. Which
reminded me of another conversation with another Italian
woman who, when I asked what she figured the highlight was of
an excursion I had missed, said it was at a museum when
someone brought out an ancient book (a codex, I assume) and,
with white-gloved hands, turned a few pages: at the time, and
still now, she kept thinking of all the hands and all the eyes that
had traversed these pages over the centuries.
“That’s what I wanted as a young teenager,” Sibilla said, “to
go to America to see Disneyland.” Born in 1951, she went on to
say, she was raised in what we today would call poverty, as most
everyone else she knew: meals generally problematic (so always
a bit hungry), toilette out in the back (so chamber pots inside),
and re-sewn hand-me-downs. Yet already her brother, ten years
younger, knew nothing of such hardship.
ack inside, we agreed to go our separate ways and to meet
out front at 16:00.
“Did you ever go, then?”
“No. By the time I was old enough I had lost interest,” she
said, and she went on to speak of her schooling in Greek and
Latin, French and Spanish, at first in the liceo classico in Modena,
then at the university in Bologna.
Already when driving up — she now at the wheel, I looking
westward over a bay at what must have been the port of
Antwerpen — I had said something about my appreciation of
Europe as a place recalling the formative powers of multiple
traditions, and she replied that these weigh on one, and that she
in turn appreciated Nietzsche’s idea that we must learn to take
them lightly. In order not to be crushed by them.
B
Rembrandt’s again: How does it work? One face calmly
directed outward, hands lifting tendons from the arm of a corpse;
another face challengingly directed at us, hands holding an open
book partly concealed by Dr. Tulp’s right shoulder; the other six
intently focusing on an open book angled toward them rather
than toward us. The faces and the corpse markedly well lit in an
otherwise dark cavern: perhaps there is no gallery of witnesses
other than ourselves.
Now I notice what a surgeon once pointed out to me: the
bloody left hand of the corpse is portrayed knuckles-up but with
the thumb protruding from its left: it’s a right-hand. And
startled now by the inconsistency, I also note the disproportionately extended left arm: by itself rather grotesque. The
artist has pasted together not only the eight portraits but also, as
my surgeon put it, an incongruous drawing of the anatomy.
While the doctor may well have known and transmitted a lesson,
the lesson of the painting, if there is one, actually undermines the
doctor’s. What to make of this?
32
33
Cyril Welch
The Hague
Then Vermeer’s: How does it achieve that air of tranquility?
The figures on the beach seem to be at ease; dressed in street
clothes, they are certainly not working the barge. Across the
water, stick figures on and near the boats remind us of work, yet
they are so indistinct that we find them only after close and
leisurely scrutiny. All the while, though, the entire scene at the
edge of the city, just outside its protective wall, clearly indicates
the bustle of transport and commerce — a place of bustle now
without bustle. Then, what we see of the inside is predominantly
the tower of the cathedral, brightly sunlit under a partly cloudy
sky, and then also a vast array of turrets and rooftops, those to
the right of the cathedral similarly bathed in light. Our own
position seems to be on a rise behind the beach, itself well lit, and
we stand under the dark cloud above.
Galileo and others had to argue extensively, and at personal risk,
that the heavenly bodies did not differ in substance from earthly
ones, and that medicine and statecraft could therefore develop to
cure earthly ills rather than only palliate them — that, for
instance, plagues were earth-sent, therefore governable, rather
than heaven-sent. It took a walk on the moon to seal Galileo’s
otherwise only inductive arguments. We today must struggle to
re-enact the difference between what lies in our power and what
does not, and to re-work the interrelation. Meanwhile,
tranquility is hard to come by — except artificially.
The town itself, its inside and outside, occupies the lower
one-third of the our visual field, the sky with its clouds the upper
two-thirds. Lighting the tower of the cathedral, the sun exercises
an upward draw — on the town itself, and then on us as we are
positioned to contemplate the entire scene. This draw propels,
gives direction to, the array of human construction, a direction
contrasting with the otherwise voided bustle: vertical rather than
horizontal. The brightly lit cathedral, partaking of both, points
the way.
The contrast between and interrelation of earth and heaven
at one time signaled the difference between what comes under
human charge and what overrules human ability: the heavens
above supply light and warmth, wind and rain, the cyclical
measures of night and day, and the seasons of earthly production. Prior to artificial light, technological heating, steam
engines and industrial production, life depended immediately
and absolutely on these gifts. So that their dearth, and our death,
already and always loomed imminently. Five hundred years ago
Which took me back to Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson. It
portrays an effort to scrutinize the materials of life devoid of life
itself. Earthly remains deprived of heavenly spirit, material
lacking the anticipated form — the mere debris of life or, rather,
a complex sign of its mystery, a sign terrifyingly distinct from
what it points to. The painting may portray Dr. Tulp and seven
associates, but it also portrays an interrelation of life and death —
or, dynamically put, the interrelation of living and dying. If the
doctor were looking at us or his associates, the book or the
corpse, the effect would be much different.
And back again to Vermeer’s View of Delft. It too portrays the
interrelation. If there were no high-lighting of the cathedral,
there would be no tranquility, even without the customary
bustle.
round and around I walked, puzzled by its charm: life-sized
male nude in contrapposto, right arm clasping the top of his
head turning to the right and slightly upward, as though in
distress; left arm extended and bent, as though holding something away; left leg carrying the weight, right leg bent. In the
center of the room, this one bathed in natural light from above.
I see that Rodin first called it Le Vaincu, “The Vanquished,” and
A
34
35
Cyril Welch
The Hague
then renamed it L’Age d’Airain, “The Age of Bronze” — which, we
may not notice, can mean “the epoch of” the metal as well as “the
time in a man’s life of” hardening (airain serving also to suggest
“indestructible”).
whether to our sexuality or to our mortality. Such exposure can
either enliven or shock. Perhaps both at once.
Why does this work impress? It seems perfectly proportioned — so much so, I read, that Rodin’s contemporaries
thought he cheated by shaping the mould directly on the flesh of
his model. But exactitude by itself does not make a work of art.
It strikes one as alive, in movement — an effect of the overall
contrapposto, but also of the gestures of the arms. Especially his
right one clasped against the head, face turned away from us.
But also his left arm — the hand of which, I read, was shaped to
hold a spear, which would then re-enforce, in counterpoint, the
distress signaled on the figure’s right side. And the spear would
also re-enforce the original title, signaling battle, or a moment of
defeat in battle. Very realistic, for all the expression.
Well, not entirely. Defeat would be lacerating, whereas our
figure stands whole, in some sense undefeated — hard as stone
(or, in the French simile, hard as bronze). He also stands nude,
like Michelangelo’s David (a warrior poised rather for victory).
Nude, our figure stands exposed: an anatomy lesson for those
who care for one — genitals finely wrought as well. Not at all
realistic in the context of battle.
But what’s the significance of nudity — here and perhaps
elsewhere? Clothing protects, to some extent: from the
intrusions of cold and heat, collision and injury. Also from the
eyes of others, forcing these to focus on the overall events
transpiring in the context. Nudity reverses the usual direction of
attention — not always very successfully, as anyone knows who
has attended a nudist colony with its tons of sagging flesh. But
in an art work, nudity addresses us directly: it exposes not the
figures portrayed, or not chiefly; it exposes us as vulnerable,
Here then is life in its liveliness. And, fittingly, bathed in
natural light from above (as I have said) while also surrounded
by a smattering of paintings by other artists of contemporary life:
Cezanne, Monet, Sisley, Van Gogh. But — at least in Rodin’s
figure — also in life’s response to death. In some regards, then,
fitting in with Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson and Vermeer’s View
of Delft.
bruptly you pass from that one room of light and life into a
sequence of others displaying early 20th-century paintings
and then also contemporary works, including many installations
obstructing your way. As so often, these things puzzle me, or
just leave me cold. Some by Kandinsky do engage me, perhaps
because, way back in 1968, Liliane had given me a book on the
painter’s Leben und Werk, from which I learned that, at least in the
artist’s maturity, the works intended to engender a kind of
musicality in our perceptions. From there I sometimes manage
to partake of the free play of the imagination offered by other
painters’ works, having also read Kant’s third Critique and
having long ago noted that the great works of the previous
century (at the moment I think of those of Monet and Degas) tend
in this direction as well. In other words, Kandinsky’s and the
others’ address me only indirectly.
A
Why is it, I asked, that so much of what gets displayed under
the rubric of contemporary art appears so unpromising even
though rated so highly? Is it simply that heirs naturally find it
difficult to find anything to do that can stand up under the
scrutiny of their forebears? Of course, in the worst cases, artists
of any sort, including academic writers, simply aspire to fit in
with what fellow-heirs happen to be doing — therefore, in con-
36
37
Cyril Welch
The Hague
temporary painting, either abandoning the subject of their works
(as already Monet and Degas increasingly did) or “making a
statement” by portraying their subject in an abhorrent manner (a
kind of critical journalism).
youthful face looking up to hers; she holding a lit candle in her
right hand while protecting the flame with her left hand (a basket
of unclear content on her arm) — all this contrasting with the
single right hand of the boy holding an unlit (but one-time lit)
candle toward the flame. If anything, perhaps a bit too obvious.
Meanwhile, it’s evident that we can recuperate works from
our past only because they repay us in kind: they recuperate us.
Great works not only inherit but also bequeath, so that works
that fail on either score can only be contemporary. It’s as though
Rembrandt, Vermeer and Rodin knew not only where things
came from but also where they were going: they not only opened
themselves to the power of their predecessors but also deeded
this power — their borrowed power — over to future artists, and
thereby to the rest of us. Kandinsky and others manage this
inheriting and bequeathing to some extent, but their weakness
becomes clear in the utter poverty of their direct descendants:
some, I have heard, actually deny that they are passing anything
on, even believe that bequeathal is morally wrong because
yoking posterity to its forebears.
More, I was thinking: while those three great works interrelate life and death, embed the elusive rawness of death within
the formation of life, I detect in many celebrated contemporary
works an effort to present rawness all by itself, in effect denying
recuperation. A denial that can lurk disingenuously within
claims to effervescence.
Still, how could we ever appreciate powerful recuperation
apart from surrounding failures? It occurred to me that I might
easily have missed the power of those three if Sibilla and I had
left for home directly after completing our mission. Which
reminded me of a fourth painting that I had passed quickly by on
my way from Vermeer to Rodin: Peter Paul Rubens’ Old Woman
and Boy with Candles, of 1616. To this I briefly returned: an aged
wrinkled face looking down and center, contrasting with a
he hallway is lined with still-lifes from the same era. As I
paused by one — a lavish bouquet of flowers of all seasons
that, examined closely, reveals insects suggesting contrary
developments — Sibilla appeared at my side, saying cheerfully:
“There you are!” Had I seen the Piet Mondriaan collection? she
asked. No; I hadn’t even noted its existence, I said.
T
She leading, we wound our way back to the ground floor,
right near the entrance, and doubled back through what
appeared to be the original edifice, past the museum shop, to a
set of rooms dedicated entirely to that one Dutch artist — Dutch
by birth but American by vocation, I soon learned. The
Gemeentemuseum itself owns this collection: cleanly drawn and
colored configurations, again inviting absorption in immediacy,
purely sensuous for roving eyes. Again, that strange exclusion
of anything outside the workshop itself, accepting only the
geometry of their patrimony, rejecting the arithmetic of
bequeathal, insisting on pure presence, devoid of all love.
Sono troppo stanco, I told her — I was too tired, having
wrestled now for eight hours, conversing first in her language
and then in those of Rembrandt, Vermeer, Rodin and Rubens;
unable now to muster the energy to converse with one whose
only tongue is that of the studio (not unlike academics who speak
of their subject solely in the lingo of their peers).
On schedule, then, we walked the several blocks to where we
had parked the car: good to get the body into proper rhythm,
38
39
Cyril Welch
The Hague
and to bathe for a bit in the leisurely ambience of Sunday streetlife, here with space amply accorded to bicyclists. Sibilla said she
preferred to drive the first half home, since night-driving
bothered her eyes. Ideal then for me, since she would have to get
us out of The Hague and, as it turned out, as much through as
around Rotterdam. From Brussels I could easily get us down to
Luxembourg, the stretch being long familiar to me and
uncluttered by urban conglomerations: quite beautiful, at least
in daylight, as it cuts its way over the hills and dales of the
Ardennes, with alternating farm- and wood-lands.
discovered that a motorway led south from Dordrecht: we had
been fixated on Breda close to the Belgium border. I had been
watching the setting sun as well, insisting it lie directly to the
west. Advance study of a map can be useful! Yet the whole
while Sibilla had kept her cool in the twilight. As we finally
crossed into Belgium, darkness was descending. However, we
drove on past the Brussels airport before stopping to change
drivers. While she went off to a washroom, I purchased a
sandwich in anticipation of the two-hour drive to come — which
in fact stretched into nearly three hours, again owing to lanes
being closed for repairs and, in Luxembourg, my getting off the
motorway wrongly to take her home.
Sibilla quickly retraced our route and got us on to the motorway heading south. As we had anticipated, detour signs soon
sent us off onto country roads. Failing to notice further
instructions, either because conversation absorbed us or because
there were none, I suggested that we simply follow la gregge —
“the herd”: the mass of vehicles, mostly with Dutch license
plates, with whom we seemed to share the same inconvenience.
Although she seldom corrected my Italian, she remarked on the
antiquated gender: while Italy’s greatest 19th-century philosopher still spoke of la gregge, moderns say le gregge. I may
indeed have gotten the la from my reading of older Italian
literature (it still sounds right to me), but I have noticed that,
unlike French and German, Italian often comes in such
variations: it’s not so strict as French in the placement of
adjectives, for another instance. More fodder for conversation.
It wasn’t long before our herd dispersed in various directions
and we began feeling alone. That’s when we took our chances on
a sign indicating Rotterdam — and ended up inside the city,
asking a family of cyclists, then a gas-station attendant, how to
get to Breda to the south, and on to Antwerpen in Belgium.
Directions seemed vague, and signs kept referring to Dordrecht
and Amsterdam to the north. Finally, I looked on the map and
She asked me whether I had any children. There’s my own
Laura, I said, and Liliane’s Colette, both dating from very early
marriages and both now fifty-four years old. Have they ever
come to Luxembourg? she asked? Last spring, I replied: they
came together for a good two weeks. And, having become
buddies, they are talking about another such joint venture. And
their husbands? Yes, there has been talk of them coming as well,
although I myself wonder how that would work. That would
very much change the dynamics, she said: each would form a
couple to which I would naturally have to respond — much
different from my being the father and they being the daughters,
and the men would naturally stand as equals to me, even
competitors of a sort. Better, she said, to have them to myself.
Already on the drive up Sibilla had told me that, while she
had ventured away from home to go to university, her brother
lingered for decades at home. A convenient arrangement, I had
replied: not only on the saving of rent but also on the preparing
of meals. And much more frequent in Italy, I had heard. But, she
emphasized, a man typically experiences great difficulty breaking
away, especially from his mother: How can he complete his life
40
41
Cyril Welch
The Hague
with another woman? Her own brother, now married and living
away from home, must telephone his mother every day: must
look after her as well as his own wife, a double responsibility that
introduces fortuitous competition. But then, Sibilla conceded, her
brother’s predicament has made it easier for her to live far away.
to blame for some unfortunate development we behave as
barristers rather than creators, and lose the present in the name
of settling accounts for the future. More typical in the Old World,
I find. (And more in line with the Old than with the New
Testament, it occurs to me now.) In any creative dynamic, what’s
right trumps who’s right: only then may we enjoy the moment.
But how has Laura handled my having abandoned her at the
age of three? And Colette having been shifted around, first to her
grandparents in Luxembourg when she was less than three-years
old, then to us for a number of years, and finally to her father
from whom she very soon ran away, embarking on a life of her
own already at age fourteen? They both seem grateful to be
welcomed back, I replied, although Laura has admitted to some
resentment in years gone by, and Colette has several times told
me she wished she and her mother could have developed the
kind of mother-daughter relationship that would have seen them
going on excursions together and exchanging confidences.
Children in Italy would never ever forgive a father for
abandoning them, she said: resentment and reproach would
forever lurk in the background of any subsequent reunion. I can
imagine that, I replied. Besides, she added, a child needs un
punto di referimento, a point of reference, perhaps even two: one
feminine and one masculine. Ideals to emulate? I asked. Not
necessarily, she replied: sometimes more like lighthouses reliably
marking shoals to be circumnavigated.
We fell silent for a while, I again pondering with gratitude
the unearned developments in my life. “Perhaps that’s the
difference between the Old and the New World,” I then said.
What’s that? she asked. “The disposition to insist on rights
derived from past encounters vs. the disposition to inaugurate
encounters freshly even when derived from past ones,” I said.
(And, it occurs to me now, this difference may define the decline
of the New into the Old.) Once we start trying to sort out who’s
She said nothing more on this topic. It struck me, though,
that, hearing only fragments of my situation, she immediately
noted its inner workings. Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson, Vermeer’s
Delft, and Rodin’s sculpture present us with traces only, and yet
these traces interweave, if only we let them, to form situations,
each with its own dynamic — one in which we can share if only
we trace them out ourselves, thereby discovering ourselves in it.
Similarly with linguistic works such as Dante’s, which keep
exfoliating their traces in the course of our reading them.
In the sparse traffic and at the brightly lit exchange, I still
managed to head off toward Esch rather than Holleresch, and
had to drive all the way to Féiz before I could reverse directions.
Just up from Holleresch, Sibilla said I could drop her off: at an
intersection close enough to her apartment. From which I wound
my way home. It was now way past my bedtime.
Rubens
1616
Monet
1872
Modernity
“
ut it’s kitsch,” he said, “all those monuments, the festivals, the
skits celebrating events that have left only insignificant traces.”
B
Caillebotte
1877
Kandinsky
1942
We were sitting out on the terrace of the Bridge Street Café on
a balmy day last July. Jamie had come over from his native Prince
Edward Island, where he has a cottage to which he regularly
retreats for relief from his teaching job in Quebec. Something
prompted him to remark on the obsession with history on the Island.
Indeed, over the last years, even decades, I myself have noticed in
and around Sackville, in New Brunswick generally, the proliferation
of museums devoted to memorializing old carriage factories and the
like, with displays of the tools and materials in boarded and breezy
workshops; even quite ordinary houses of prominent businessmen
in the shipping industry, with displays of fineries; and, further
north, a sprawling facsimile of an early settlement complete with,
in the summer, strolling amateur actors dressed in the costumes of
the time.
All part of the tourist business in search of curious pastimes, of
course. Yet, I replied, the attraction of such memorializations surely
rests on a need to recognize precedents for our current engagements.
Our own large-scale, iron- and plastic-based carriage factories come
from, build upon, these earlier worlds; and our own world, with all
its well-insulated workshops and convenience-laden homes, can
43
44
45
Cyril Welch
Modernity
reclaim roots, all the better to flaunt proof of our accomplishments,
and also to respect the ardor, the stamina of our forebears, who
struggled and succeeded under conditions much tougher than ours.
There’s a peculiar temporality here, I wanted to emphasize: the
past lies before us as our future. We either discern and imitate
(measure our work against) the measures lurking within it, or only
recognize and imitate (follow in the footsteps of) the results of our
predecessors. And yet, to discern the greatness, to distinguish the
works true to their measure from those merely extending previous
results, requires that we ourselves already engage in the measure:
if we don’t, the difference will elude us, and we slavishly follow or
mindlessly dispute the assessments of those around us, in either case
failing to engage with any original measure.
Still, there’s something melancholic about such memorializations, he said. They celebrate the arts of survival, and survival
itself as the achievement soliciting our respect. By itself, recollection
of earlier conditions of life, and the arts of dealing with them, can
provide a sense of continuity through time as well as a substantiality
of community. But monuments celebrating those conditions and
arts? Not unlike pornography, I said: they leave us on the sidelines,
where we necessarily focus on, and seek satisfaction in, material
conditions rather than spiritual consummations, and we come away
in a stupor of coitus interruptus. Much more helpful, at least for the
endeavors of creative, truly erotic types, is the recollection of great
achievements —stories that highlight the strains of living well and
that overcome our tendency to settle for simply surviving.
Vasari got something right, I went on — the painter Giorgio
Vasari who, in the mid-16th century apologized for reviewing and
commenting at length on the painters, architects and sculptors of the
15th century. His purpose, he says, is not so much to relish great
works of the past, indulging in the pleasure of pretending they are
present. Rather, by taking careful note of great achievements, such
review reminds us how to live, and makes us discerning — insegna
a vivere e fa gli uomini prudenti. More specifically: its true purpose
(Vasari’s, anyway) is to recall the measure against which
contemporary artists can measure their own work — not by imitating
the results of their predecessors, but by doing precisely the opposite:
looking directly to things themselves and responding freshly. Such
looking-responding is in fact the measure against which those
earlier artists, the great ones at least, measured their own work. A
return to original perception — from which novel construction may
then relevantly ensue.
Vasari was himself a second-rate painter, I recalled. And when
I expressed surprise to Jamie that such a man could set about the
task of calling attention to first-rate ones, he replied, “Or precisely
for that reason.” We seek out measures in works gone by not only
because we discover that our contemporaries cannot serve in that
capacity, but, much more promisingly, because we recognize that
we ourselves fall short. Perhaps only the greatest of the great have
no need to seek, although I like the story that visitors would catch
Beethoven pouring over the scores of J. S. Bach in an effort to
understand how his predecessor had done it.
ll this got me to reminiscing on a lecture I had recently heard.
The professor was talking about the sudden burst of energy in
th
19 -century French painting. He illustrated the before-versus-after
by juxtaposing Ingres’ “Homer Receiving Homage from all the Great
Men of Greece” and Monet’s “Impression, Sun Rising.” The earlier
work (from 1827) requires that we be educated in our traditions: it’s
whole intent is to draw us back to inherited achievements, and it
depicts, precisely, an array of prominent heirs accepting this draw.
The later one (from 1872) welcomes us unconditionally into the
present: first of all its own (boats embarking on a day), then also
ours. The professor then sent me back to re-read Baudelaire’s
A
46
Cyril Welch
Modernity
47
1860ish essay “The Painter of Modern Life” for an inside statement
of the contrast.
There’s something of life, here, I thought. Perhaps simply in the
colorations and reflections.
es, it was this draw forward that first drew me into the paintings
in the Musée du Jeu de Paume. It was when Liliane first took
me to Paris for a few days in the spring of 1961, and again for many
weeks in the summer of 1962. At that time I had recently read a
collection of Van Gogh’s letters in a seminar at the University of
Montana conducted by Henry Bugbee, and the painter’s gritty
accounts of his fresh encounters and his careful responses to circumstances left me primed, even hungry for the gritty results, the
paintings themselves. Overwhelmed by Van Gogh’s own, I drifted
as well into the softer ones by Monet, Renoir and the rest, finding in
them all the same delightful and powerful invitation, awakening me
indeed to current life — as perhaps anyone ensconced for decades in
academia needs to be awakened to both the grit and the sweet of
raw experience. I won’t pretend I remember which works exercised
their power on me — anyway, the ones at the Jeu de Paume have
since been moved to the Quai d’Orsay, and during the last fifty
years I have often and elsewhere enjoyed these and others, both
originals and reproductions. Except for one: Odilon Redon’s
“Bouquet of Field Flowers” (1912), which stood out from the others
while also having the same impact (and which perhaps remains in
my memory precisely because it is the only work of his that has ever
caught my attention, and only in that one place):
Y
Anyway, at the time I had no use for any depiction of an ancient
poet topped by an angelic figure and surrounded by dozens of
venerable personages venerating him. Where’s life in all that? More
an escape from life, at most a pedantic exercise in guessing the
identities of the personages, or in appreciating the techniques of
depiction.
Now, though, fifty years later, that painting got me to thinking.
Granted, it hardly ranks among the best of its kind, or even of
Ingres’ work. Yet it distills something out of the truly great works
of our tradition. In stark contrast to Monet’s, those earlier works
first draw us back: they presume familiarity with Christianity and
its own pagan inheritance, and chiefly illustrate their stories, or
depict the nobles of the time representing their ideals. They
preserve their tradition by re-actualizing what otherwise dozes in
familiarity. Current life of any age awaits fulfilment, substantiation
— failing which there is only dissipation of past, present and future
altogether.
It occurs to me now that I — we — may better understand the
greatness of what we already find engaging and powerful if only we
learn to appreciate the engagement and the power of what it has
displaced. Also, perhaps, of what might, in turn, displace what we
currently find engaging.
48
Cyril Welch
Preserving tradition? Actualizing it? Stagnation, I believe, is
the name for complacence with the forms of what we have inherited,
the catechism of our heritage — whether that of the Church with its
severe requirements for salvation or that of Impressionism with its
easy-going acceptance of current manners. Preparing arduously for
engaging creatively in life, one necessarily begins by borrowing
from some received catechism of style, mood and thought. And the
more powerful the works associated with the catechism the more
difficult will be the task of refreshing their power. Nearly always,
one tries to correct them, perfect them, sometimes even succeeding.
But success in perfecting a style, mood or thought does not
essentially refresh it. We may indeed find ourselves comfortable
with the results, since they remind us of great power. And we may
confuse the reminder with the actualization. Until, that is, the
original greatness has passed into oblivion: old churches throughout Italy are crammed with paintings and frescoes that smell
morally rotten (I shudder at my memory of faces lachrymosely
turned upwards). Just as old journals in philosophy are filled with
sober articles best left unexhumed. Decadent works proceed by
holding on to grab-bars of the sort one finds in retirement homes, so
that once the retirement home itself retires those works collapse.
till, whether as painters or lovers of pictures, writers or readers
of books, we seek a place within actuality. Even, I suppose, those
whom I may judge to be evading actuality. But in the end, I also
suppose, a great work strains to engage us fully where we otherwise
only half are — and will fully succeed only in our hunger for the
missing half — while lesser works string us out in the first half. I
imagine that, by the 15th century, Christianity had become a rather
routine affair. In fact, at the time, dozens and dozens of amazingly
adroit artists set about actualizing its stories in contemporary
settings, as Ghirlandaio did in his “Birth of the Virgin” (c. 1490):
S
Modernity
49
Much closer to our own accouterments, and much more inviting
to me, are those works of late 19th-century France, for instance
Renoir’s “Luncheon of the Boating Party” and “Bar at the Moulin de
la Gallette”:
Each depicted situation has its own immediate past and its own
immediate future. Everything’s right there, and we need only join
in on the present joie de vivre.
In contrast, the Renaissance painting recalls a severe past
imbued with a severe future as two exacting conditions for our
entry. Indeed, as Jamie put it, there is something austere about most
all Renaissance art works, even if they extend a welcome (unlike
their Gothic antecedents) and even (in some cases) include a
suggestion of joy in one or another figure depicted.
Those two by Renoir, as many by Monet, enhance their easygoing invitations by a distinctive, an “impressionistic” execution,
50
51
Cyril Welch
Modernity
leaving their configurations a bit nebulous. Yet the same inclusive
presence I find in Caillebotte’s paintings of the same time, such as
“Rainy Day Out” and “The Floor Scrapers”:
While Manet’s explicitly invites, with both a past and a future
funneling into a moment throbbing with possibility, Giorgione’s
implants an inherited myth into a quiescent present that serves an
inheritance.
As also in many of Manet’s paintings, such as his “Olympia”:
Perspective certainly accounts for the difference as well.
Manet’s “Olympia” locates us within the scene: we are as much
viewed as viewing: the viewer is also the visitor, even the client,
perhaps the purveyor of the bouquet and surely the object of the
cat’s bristling (on the far right, not so evident in the reproduction).
And the figures in Caillebotte’s “Rainy Day Out” are bumping into
us as we, too, stroll along the boulevard of Haussmann’s recently
renovated Paris. In contrast, classical works transport us into some
dimension of a long-established destiny, one which we today can
fully appreciate only through the lens of literature.
recently cracked open Liliane’s much-marked copy of Proust’s
Contra Saint-Beuve — as it happened, onto a page where he, too,
was talking about what truly original writers and painters do:
“modern” ones, at least (the text dates from the end of the first
decade of the 20th century), and whether great or not. Artists work
from a reality that is intérieure, he says, a reality that can “unleash
itself from a familiar impression, even a frivolous or mundane one”
(se dégager d’une impression connue, même frivole ou mondaine),
providing only that the reality “is at a certain depth and freed from
those appearances” (est à une certaine profondeur et libérée de ces
apparences). This faith in the possibility of unleashing reality from
any impression already caught my eye. He then continues:
I
For all their marvelous differences, these works effect a currency of
presence without relying on inherited ideas. For a comparison with
this last by Manet I think of late Renaissance nudes like Giorgione’s
“Sleeping Venus” (c. 1510):
. . . pour cette raison je ne fais aucune différence entre l’art
élevé, qui ne s’occupe pas que de l’amour, à nobles idées, et
l’art immoral ou futile, ceux qui font la psychologie d’un
savant ou d’un saint plutôt que d’un homme du monde.
D’ailleurs dans tout ce qui est du caractère et des passions,
52
53
Cyril Welch
Modernity
des réflexes, il n’y a pas de différence; le caractère est le même
pour les deux, comme les poumons et les os, et le
physiologiste pour démontrer les grandes lois de la
circulation du sang ne se soucie pas que les viscères aient été
extraits du corps d’un artiste ou d’un boutiquier.
public squares, their power lies in their revivification and
celebration of our inherited destiny, not of their own places: they
bind us to the exigencies of our heritage, not to the currencies of our
life — pas à la vie moderne.
The simile I find memorable: just as an anatomist studying and
revealing the laws of blood circulation doesn’t distinguish between
the body of a creator and the body of a shopkeeper, so the artist
doesn’t — any modern artist, one studying variations of character to
reveal the coalescence of pressure and response.
Presence, then, by way of probing the obvious, the familiar, to
reveal, to let shine, the interior of the encounter, the interrelations of
passion and reflex. Having attained to the nether regions of
spiritual life (les régions de la vie spirituelle), the work of art emerges
as a joyful surface integrated with its own measure. In contrast,
classical works (from Shakespearean tragedies back to Renaissance
paintings, sculptures and temples) measure us against a transcendent measure — and remind us of our failings.
Renoir’s so obviously sparkle — and, I always want to add,
invite us into the source of their radiance. Perhaps their nebulous
quality, even more pronounced in Monet’s and the one by Redon,
intimates the interiority of character we must ourselves actualize
before crossing the threshold. Yet there is nothing nebulous about
Caillebotte’s, crisply delineated as they are — as are some of Manet’s.
How they do it is something of a mystery, although I find Proust’s
account suggesting a clue and providing a nudge at our own point
of entry.
But for all the interiority of these paintings — including those by
Degas, Pissarro, Morisott, Toulouse-Lautrec, Cassatt, Van Gogh, and
at least that one by Redon — they revive and celebrate the exteriority
they fathom. While the great Renaissance paintings and statues do
have their places in likewise Renaissance cathedrals, palaces and
laces — placement: that is what held my breath at the Musée du
Jeu de Paume. At twenty-two years of age I had been laboring
most of my life in the fields of academia — which is to say in the
spiritual achievements of our ancestors, whether mathematical or
literary. Fenced in, even though I had entered into the sometimes
dangerous, even violent rough-and-tumble of life’s ordinary
versions — which does not itself root one in circumstance. It’s a
common predicament, this being intellectually disposed but, even
if dramatically exposed, still unrooted. Thus no doubt the tendency
of academics to seek compensation in activism of some sort, usually
in defense of the rights of others and in the name of justice for all (or,
increasingly in the last decades, justice for this or that subset of all):
it gets them outside the fencing where, they believe, they can put
their theories — basically one theory — into practice.
P
In those days you entered the old tennis court from the Jardin
des Tuileries, perhaps coming down from the Champs Elysées or,
more likely, over from the Latin Quarter, the romping-ground of
your peers, the University just off the Boulevard Michel (Boule
Miche, to its adepts) with its myriad bookshops. And when you
finally left, perhaps chased out by a sullen guard at closing time,
you strolled again through the Garden with its gravel walkways,
sprawling fountains, and rickety chairs for hire — crossing the Seine
to get back to your crummy hotel to wash up before seeking out a
cheap restaurant with a menu that might even include a carafe of
dubious wine.
From the livingrooms of the wealthy to the brothels of the
desperate, from cafés and poolrooms to forests and riversides, from
54
55
Cyril Welch
Modernity
façades of cathedrals to stacks of hay, from street scenes to
countrysides, from portraits to bouquets — these paintings place us
where we are, or might be. Or, rather, they elicit the kind of
disposition, the kind of reflex that allows us to be there.
In both, love. Filial vs. erotic, you might insist: different then. More
to the point, the love taught us by our Christian tradition as essential
to its history of salvation, and contrasting with the love taught us by
our Romantic tradition as essential to personal fulfillment. One as
powerful as the other — so long as we find ourselves able, in each
case, to enter into . . . the tradition. Otherwise, we can at most recall
the historical facts surrounding its production, examine the technical
detail of the result, and admire the talent and prowess of the artist:
love and the rest then reduce to mere words, the works themselves
to beautiful cultural objects with emotional appeal.
Secular, you might say: belonging to the age. But not mine,
exactly: those horse-drawn carriages, those top hats . . . Secular in
the sense of not leaning on the prescriptions of earlier ages. Which
hardly entails a denial of divinity, not during that one age at least.
On the contrary, there is in these works such a celebration of circumstance that you may be tempted to think of them as quintessentially
Christian: divinity become flesh in creation, redemption of earth as
well as of soul. Something I find also in Thoreau’s Walden and
Whitman’s Leaves of Grass around the same time as those paintings,
and later in Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses.
Exiting onto the Place de la Concorde with its Egyptian obelisk
— hard to believe, but my guidebook says it was taken from Luxor,
carved over three thousand years ago, and sent to France as a gift —
you can cross the Seine again and make your way to the Rodin
museum located in a garden behind the Hôtel Biron. Of the many
sculptures of Rodin, I think especially of “The Kiss” (1886) as
standing with those 19th-century paintings that reveal the interiority
while celebrating exteriority. Compare it with Michelangelo’s
“Pietà” (1499) carved close to four hundred earlier:
It’s the same love — the same tradition — throughout these late
19 -century works: the love of where and how we are, the love of
place and our engagements in place, portrayed and elicited in selfcontained scenarios, flesh becoming spirit, spirit fearlessly redeemed
in the flesh.
th
It’s a bold endeavor — evident not only in the visual and literary
arts of the time, but also in its political and scientific developments:
the faith in the ability of secular human being to govern human
response and to explore natural circumstance, both holistically and
with gradual but inexorable weaning from divine guidance, from
transcendent love.
et this love of place has proved too much — just as did the love
it displaced. We inherit challenges rather than solutions, frameworks rather than their impetus. And while the first heirs recognize
and admire what they receive, still move within its overwhelming
impetus, they understandably experience difficulty in meeting the
challenge freshly and so drift into elaborating on the framework.
I’m thinking of the heirs of Plato (the Stoics and the Cynics,
Lucretius and Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius), the heirs of
the Renaissance (Tintoretto comes to mind), and the heirs of
Christianity (I like William’s remark to Adso in The Name of the Rose
Y
56
57
Cyril Welch
Modernity
on the question of whether Jesus ever laughed: likely not, because
in his omniscience Jesus knew what his successors would do with
his teachings).
sweating my way through and around all these, they began to speak
to me out of their origins. Which is only possible as we learn to
answer in kind — and this takes time. Without ambient expectations
I would never have taken the time. Perhaps that student has since
taken it too. Meanwhile, the pile of toilette paper certainly had a
point, at least for me.
Several decades ago I attended one of the annual exhibitions of
graduating students in the fine arts department at the university in
Sackville. In one screen-formed corner lay a loosely piled array of
white toilette paper. As Luke Rombout, the spirited curator of the
gallery, passed by I asked him the inevitable question — what the
point was. He answered rather frankly: although not of great
significance, the pile was taking an idea one step further. What the
starting point of that step was, I failed to enquire. But the work
itself, or perhaps more the conversation around it, has stayed with
me. Extending an idea: yes, that’s what a lot of work does, and not
only in fine arts departments. An idea hovers in the air, left over
from previous energies, and new-comers pick up on it in one way or
another.
It could hardly be otherwise. How else can there be newcomers? Each starts out in the footsteps of one’s predecessors, and
at first one measures one’s performance against what already
appears right — hoveringly, in the words and gestures of one’s
teachers, whether at home, at work, at play, or at school. And to
compensate for the obvious shortfall in original perception, one
stretches the old out into something new — additively new, or at
least different from the obviously old. And from there — who
knows, something genuinely original may in time evolve, something
genuinely responsive to its actualizing origin rather than to the
results of previous actualizations.
I myself only read Augustine’s Confessions and Dante’s Divine
Comedy because other books I read, and some of the people around
me, referred to them reverently, as though they set standards for
their own work. Neither these works, nor Renaissance painting,
sculpture and architecture, immediately addressed me. Then, after
hat’s so distinctive about those first paintings of la vie moderne
is not only their joyous celebration of the surface of life (this
they often share with Dutch genre paintings) but also their emphatic
intimation of our own creative place in the celebration. Any circumstance will do: precisely because everything depends on what we
do with it, most emphatically whether we enter into it. That’s partly,
perhaps largely, what makes them so immediately attractive.
W
When I was teaching one summer long ago, at a prestigious U.S.
university, an elderly professor of the department took me out to
lunch, perhaps to vet me but even more obviously to assure me that
Plato had definitively refuted all efforts to reduce values to the
arbitrary preferences of individuals or groups. Perhaps my declared
field of interest — recognized in those days mainly when stated in
reference to established figures or schools, just as nowadays it tends
to be stated in reference to social problems — aroused his suspicion
that I might be a “relativist.” At the time I took no heed of either
side of this debate, which still today I consider rather sophomoric,
belonging to that period of transition when adolescents begin
doubting the received opinions about what’s right and what’s
wrong — opinions in which they had hitherto acquiesced and which
now, as they begin to sniff out the world, don’t smell any better
than others they are learning about or running up against. As it
turns out, though, relativism is just as unreliable and vacuous as its
opposite, absolutism. Apart from appropriate behavior while in
Rome, who in his right mind cares about opinions?
58
59
Cyril Welch
Modernity
As I took on a permanent job in Canada and had occasion to
discuss my work in public, I again noticed that some of my
colleagues became quite rabid (one frothing a bit at the mouth) at
any suggestion that circumstances looked very differently according
to how we ourselves were rising to them. Unless I emphasized the
verb look — appear, seem — and discounted the force of the adverb
differently, I was an idealist (vs. realist), spreading the dangerous
doctrine of subjectivity and impugning the very backbone of
intellectual integrity, namely objectivity. An ironic expression of
their own subjectivity, I thought — a bit like that of Jorge in Umberto
Eco’s novel.
the question whether wellness itself has one meaning in each
circumstance, or essentially varies from one circumstance to another.
And the question what, more exactly, our own role is.
Now, after devoting more than fifty years to the study of our
entire intellectual tradition, I think rather differently about these
questions. What makes the developments inaugurated by Plato and
Aristotle so special is precisely that they map out paths of thought
starting precisely with the truth of variability while also continuing
to finesse its expression. According to Aristotle, Anaxagoras used
to tell some of his companions that things will be according to how
they, his friends, engage with them:
§óôáé ô Ðíôá ïÍá ßðïëÜâùóéí
Beings will be as they receive them.
Aristotle ascribes some version of this maxim to all the early
thinkers — Homer, Protagoras, Democritus, Empedocles, and
Parmenides — and says they all presuppose that assessment and
immediacy are the same (nñüíçóéò comes down to áÇóèçóéò;
careful consideration = heeding just what’s there) — as seems
plausible when we draw a landscape or describe a circumstance,
read a text or examine a patient: things will indeed turn out
according to how we take them. And different people will take
them differently: a patient takes orange juice to be insufferably sour,
while the physician may find it pleasantly sweet. The task then is to
take things well — and here is where the finessing begins, along with
At least since Socrates, the ever-recurrent task has been to
distinguish and interrelate nñüíçóéò and áÇóèçóéò — to show how
human response to what happens can develop so that wellness itself
can become the issue rather than presumed in some thoughtless
way. Self-knowledge henceforth becomes essential to genuine
knowledge of circumstance.
If those “impressionist” paintings engage us powerfully it’s
because, I believe, they keep the two together, self and circumstance.
They retain both the sense that what will be depends on how we
take things and the sense that these things are — and so henceforth
might again be: might embody their own marvel. The paintings are
then “about” the love affair of self and circumstance — any self, any
circumstance, since (as for any lover) everything depends on how
the other gets taken.
ut these are the hard acts to follow. Subsequent artists extract
the quintessence of the great works immediately preceding: the
finessing has already been done, so the quintessence will be only a
part of the whole. Just as you can learn a lot about Plato by studying
Epictetus, a lot about Aristotle by studying Thomas Aquinas, a lot
about Kant by studying later positivists, a lot about Heidegger by
studying subsequent existentialists, so you can learn about the great
“impressionists” by carefully examining great abstractionists.
B
In the works of epigones, it’s the bond of self and circumstance,
love, that soon goes missing or at least falters. Not necessarily in the
second-rate, where it may still faintly tug, but always in the thirdrate — perhaps by definition.
60
61
Cyril Welch
Modernity
Look again at that reproduction of Rodin’s sculpture “The Kiss”
and compare it with Brancusi’s of the same title (1916):
differences really take hold as marking the essential differences in
our own manner of being.
One essential difference is whether we are directly or indirectly
engaged — directly as artists ourselves, or indirectly as we enter into
the works of others. Not being a painter or sculptor myself, I may
perhaps more freely enjoy the works of those who are. For instance,
I find Kandinsky’s “Accord réciproque” (1942) quite effective:
Rodin’s intertwined figures draw us in to be with them, a draw
partly effected by their musculature. Their apparent perfection may
incidentally inspire thoughts of our own bodily deficiency, but their
intrinsic and intra-linked power liberates us from such external
considerations, allowing the whole to embody love. Lodged in the
work, we find ourselves in a place. — In contrast, Brancusi’s intertwined figures play on Rodin’s to extract the idea of love: the
figures serve the extraction only, and the whole places us on the
sidelines to contemplate the idea: suggesting love’s embodiment
elsewhere, at some other time, the idea functions quite well without
any place or time at all.
The piece seems to achieve its power the way a musical piece might.
Which leads me to wonder, again as a non-musician, at the power of
music: for me, at least, it depends on the bonding of circumstance
and reception — but, wondrously, by sketching only one pole of the
bond, and this one for the ear. Music may reveal ethos, as Aristotle
remarks, but it also reveals place — by placing us.
It’s hard to say where to draw the line to distinguish works of
love from works of cleverness. And there are good reasons for
treading lightly when trying to do so. After all, what ultimately
counts is the event itself, not the critical assessment of the works.
Besides, much — perhaps everything — depends on how we take a
given work: first of all on whether we let ourselves into its draw.
Choosing to remain on the sidelines, pretending to do so, we will
find any work flattening out, and we are left with what we can
jointly observe. It’s only when we enter the fray that the provisional
Giorgio Vasari tells a story about Michelangelo: a friend asked
him what he thought of a sculptor who had reproduced in marble
the most celebrated figures of antiquity and vaunted that he had
surpassed them. Michelangelo replied: “One who walks behind
others will never pass in front of them” (Chi va dietro a altri, mai non
li passa innanzi). That was in the 1550 edition of his Lives; in the 1568
edition Vasari lets him go on: “and one who cannot do well by
himself cannot serve himself well of the things of others” (e chi non
sa far bene da sé, non può servirsi bene delle cose d'altri). It’s this follow-
62
63
Cyril Welch
Modernity
up that deserves our attention as artists: we are always making use
of what others have done; the question is whether we are working
on their results or working from where they came. In my own field
I have no trouble discerning the difference; and in my own work I
find it daunting and humbling.
whereupon we of course do run the serious risk of doing the same
thing over and over again, both senselessly and rootlessly. What
else, then?
Good use, I take Michelangelo to be saying, does not require
getting ahead; it requires getting back. By its very nature, modernity
is, at least for the creatively minded, self-immolating. And not only
in the sense that a fashion changes precisely when it has become
established. More to the point is that the ways of effecting the bond
between self and circumstances must always be re-excavated and rediscovered. Then the bond itself must be re-enacted, as any love
must. The very fact that dead loves lie scattered on the field serves
as a daily reminder; it may not be a pretty sight, to say nothing of
the stench, but it sets the challenge — which is not to bury the dead
(a task taken on as a surrogate for honest work) but to love again.
odernity, Jamie was saying, is by definition the latest
configuration of results: of what our forebears created and we
have inherited without the hard work of inauguration. A painter of
modern life, just as a writer of it, looks to, sounds out, these results
and reveals the life, the origination otherwise languishing in them —
and presents another inaugural work to us. Starting, as always, at
third place, we may accept the task, as Cephalus reports doing in
Plato’s Republic, of recovering what our immediate predecessors,
merely feeding on earlier results, failed to recover from theirs. In
this we may of course also fail, as Cephalus reportedly did not, and
thereby merely consume our inheritance.
M
But what would it mean to go back — back to the land, as it
were? Going back in time, to the conditions of a previous age?
Impossible: no matter what we are doing, we have to learn to
handle what arises at the moment and to forge ahead to the next —
When Crito came to fetch Socrates from prison — he and his
friends having paid off the guards, as was the custom — Socrates
suggested, almost comically to our ears, that they first talk about the
wisdom of such escape. The ensuing conversation starts with
Socrates asking: What’s the issue — living on or living well? Then,
agreeing that they must aim for living well, they proceed on this
principle to consider whether it would be wise to run off, with the
result that Socrates — it must have been in the wee hours of the
morning — declines the offer.
There’s no record that Socrates, or any of those he immediately
inspired, ever dwelt on the question how one might learn to distinguish between simply making do with situations, edging oneself
through them, and making good on them, risking oneself to uphold
them. Or ever raised the question of what might incite one to cross
the line from the first to the second. Pagan literature, as we now call
it, assumed that recognition of the line and courage to cross it were
matters of character: noble vs. plebeian (Achilles was noble by birth,
while Archilochus sang a preference for abandoning his shield and
running from defeat). It was Christian literature that introduced the
question of conversion: just as anyone could be saved, so everyone
had to learn to cross the line —and learn it not all by oneself but by
acknowledging the need for it and consenting to assistance in it.
We take the talk of “going back” much differently according to
how we stand on the Socratic question. Still aiming simply to live
on, we will understand this movement to mean looking back to how
things were at some point on a time-line that, no longer effective,
counts as past. From this side, such looking seems justified only as
diversion from present-living or preparation for future-living, all
three now construed as points on the time-line. And, the past as no
64
Cyril Welch
longer being and the future as not yet being, only present-living
makes full sense; and to assure it we will gladly leave our shields
behind. Committing our energies to survival, we understand
ourselves as essentially racing ahead — toward death, we half know,
but in the meantime hoping to enjoy the race, winning small
reprieves along the way.
This sense of linear time gets turned on its head once we aim for
living well. Doing it right — doing anything right — is essentially a
recovery operation. There may be moments when we look back, but
we are essentially moving forward. For a measure draws us out
toward a rightness that lies on the forward-side of the moment, as
in a truly run athletic race. Here, what looms ahead is precisely the
measure that we must meet. Time is here no longer linear — a time
invented for opting out. It is compact — circular, as has been said:
an always, an evermore, an •åß.
For nearly stunning moments of recovery I myself need only
look again at those paintings by Manet and the rest, whose forward
thrust consists in recovering . . . what? la vie moderne, to be sure, but
— at least for those who can cross the Socratic line — the places of
this life, precisely the placedness that the life of survival necessarily
loses, lost as it is at the vanishing point between past and future.
Where I would call Liliane’s attention to works like Whitman’s
Leaves of Grass and Thoreau’s Walden, she in turn called mine to
works by Mallarmé, so different from those of his French and
American counterparts in that they unfold in tension with the
question of whether the place will be (as in Un Coup de dés: RIEN . . .
N’AURA EU LIEU . . . QUE LE LIEU. . . EXCEPTÉ. . . PEUT-ÊTRE . . . UNE
CONSTELLATION). In a tragic mode, then, so unlike the cheerful
mode of, say, Rimbaud. Perhaps the question of whether to do it
right makes most vivid sense in pending failure to do so. That,
anyway, is what I find in his sonnet of 1885 beginning Le vierge, le
vivace et le bel aujourd’hui, which I here leave to speak for itself:
Modernity
Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui
Va-t-il nous déchirer avec un coup d’aile ivre
Ce lac dur oublié que hante sous le givre
Le transparent glacier des vols qui n’ont pas fui!
Un cygne d’autrefois se souvient que c’est lui
Magnifique mais que sans espoir se délivre
Pour n’avoir pas chanté la région où vivre
Quand du stérile hiver a resplendi l’ennui.
Tout son col secouera cette blanche agonie
Par l’espace infligé à l’oiseau qui le nie,
Mais non l’horreur du sol où le plumage est pris.
Fantôme qu’à ce lieu son pur éclat assigne,
Il s’immobilise au songe froid de mépris
Que vêt parmi l’exile inutile le Cygne.
The virginal, the vivacious, the beautiful today
Shall it lacerate for us with a beat of elated wing
This forgotten hard lake haunted beneath the frost
By the transparent glacier of flights that flew not!
A swan of long ago recalls that it’s he
Magnificent but who, without hope, is freeing himself
For not having sung the region where to live
When the ennui of sterile winter came blazing.
His whole neck will shake off this white agony
Inflicted by the space on the bird who denies it,
But not the horror of the ground where the plumage is caught.
Phantom destined to this place by his pure radiance,
He immobilizes himself in the cold dream of scorn
Worn amidst useless exile by the Swan.
65
66
67
Cyril Welch
Modernity
Recovery, I say. This even though it looks like something new
is being presented. Indeed, anything fully significant will always
appear new for those ready for it, just as everything will appear old
to those seeking only the new. The truly great Renaissance
paintings recover Christianity, fading as it was, by placing the
familiar stories freshly. We today, for whom these constellations
have faded almost completely, must doubly struggle to recover the
conditions of their power.
far from the nitty-gritty faced by cabinet-makers and horse-trainers,
captains at sea and fighters on land. As denizens of academia, we
are the ones most likely to lose touch; we are the camp followers —
at first perhaps paying to hear and read, then perhaps learning the
exploits of others so well that we can demand pay for talking and
writing about them. Yet — and here is where the irony becomes
productively beautiful — if we now learn to return to the nitty-gritty
ensconced in the stories, whether in those of Plato or in those of
Homer, human engagements with circumstance will finally sparkle
in their true glory. And, if we don’t return, we read and talk and
write only to escape, perhaps by keeping track of the phantasmagoria of academia itself.
or decades, beginning in the fall of 1965, I regularly taught a
course in Plato’s Republic, designed to introduce students to
philosophy. The frustrations of failure kept driving me to return to
the details of the text in search of clues to its urgency, with the result
that my own appreciation of the work never ceased growing in the
extent of the detail and the subtlety of its challenge. Ever more, one
detail came to serve me as a kind of litmus test of understanding:
how students took the account, toward the end, of the “three
removes from the king and the truth.” At the first remove, i.e. facing
the origin, are those directly engaged with the nitty-gritty of things,
master-artisans attuned to nature. One-step back are those who
follow the cues of the masters, attuned to them in their actions and
productions. And farthest back are those who make a living out of
telling stories about the acts and products of others — attuned, then,
neither to nature nor to those who are so attuned. The first might
properly design a bed; one who can follow instructions might then
make a bed; and one who can do neither might paint or describe
one. Similarly, there might be a wise statesman, his lieutenants in
battle, and finally the camp followers (including those big on yarns).
F
There is an irony here that students easily miss, as I myself long
did, and that I learned to explicate painstakingly: following Plato’s
story, we ourselves start out at the “third remove” — his work, too,
is a verbal composition that will initially install us in a dream-world
As so many others, I find the sense of a return powerfully
present in Van Gogh’s 1888 painting of his bedroom in Arles:
Of course, intent on finding lodging for the night, we will not deem
this work to be of much help. It rather reminds us that there may be
something missing in the lodgings we have already found. For the
place in this work is a place to dwell. The painting depicts not only
a place, the inside of a bedroom with indications of an outside, but
also a variety of times: times of washing up, times of sitting to talk
or to read, times of dressing to retire or to leave. Perhaps this
multiplicity accounts for the shifting perspective as we move about
68
69
Cyril Welch
Modernity
in such a place: dwelling is not static, it’s kinetic. Effecting a return,
the work is a masterpiece — even if, at first, we ourselves are
tempted to reconstruct our own bedrooms along the same lines, as
students sometimes do.
inductively and celebratively (as in those 19th-century works) but
indifferently (as in Wittgenstein’s writings) and now reproachfully
— as in the relatively recent rash of minor, basically journalistic
works decrying injustices rather than revealing the justice against
which we might properly measure the ineptitudes or evils they
indict.
If I were a painter I would be overwhelmed by the works of my
tradition. I would have to live up to the expectations of so many
masters. In a 1973 German documentary on him and his work, Alex
Colville — clearly the greatest painter in Canada — said that he felt
fortunate to be in a place that had been little explored, little
fathomed for dwelling: there was plenty left to do. But, he
immediately went on, he could also draw upon the European
tradition for lessons on how to do it. — It was in another, a Canadian
documentary I believe, where he remarked that he felt it unwise for
painters to return only as far back as the 19th century: he himself
drew upon the Renaissance painters (on the early ones, he made
clear to me in conversation). You might be able to see this in his
1969 “Roadwork”:
Yet Americans — and I am originally one myself — do have
H. D. Thoreau’s Walden and R. W. Emerson’s Essays: works dating
from the time of Manet and Rodin, Whitman and Mallarmé, all of
which draw heavily on their own tradition to bring the already-then
faltering ideals of the Enlightenment back down to earth. And here
I employ another litmus test: whether a candidate for American
thinking takes Thoreau and Emerson as serious thinkers focusing
attention on matters of substance — or as romantic poets expressing
personal sentiments. Again, the difference depends largely on
whether one has crossed the Socratic line (and thereby learned to
read, Jamie added).
nder the trellis work of the Bridge Street Café, a bit protected —
by pots of copious and various flowers — from the sun filtering
through onto the wrought-iron tables and chairs — loins de ceux qui
vont cueillir des remords dans la fête servile — yet still within hearing of
the distant rumblings of economic and political bad news, he was
wondering about the future of education. Jamie had just finished a
three-year stint as Dean of Arts, and could see clearly its direction —
forged conspicuously by legislative and parental pressure from the
outside, enhanced more subtly by trepidation and timidity from the
inside, but staged covertly by the age-old decline in sensitivity to
our great beginnings. In servitude, namely, to interests in production, distribution and consumption. In our own field, he went
on to say, there’s been no tide of fresh thinking since phenomenology peaked out some time in the 1960s.
U
As Jamie was saying, the burden weighs heavily in our own
field, where the measures resound from millennia ago, and the latest
— those of the Enlightenment — still command all construction in
politics, education and science. Command, he said, but in the
manner Herr Klamm does in Kafka’s work. For its origin, the
project of bringing heaven down to earth, no longer declares itself
70
Cyril Welch
Listening to him, I found myself prophesying (Reader, please
don’t hold me to my brashness!): within the next ten or twenty
years, China and India will kick us so badly, beating us at our own
game, that our economic and political system will collapse — will, let
us hope, still struggle along in a shadow-form of itself, despite
losing its supremacy — and only then will there be a rush of eyes
and ears ready for fresh thinking: for witnessing our circumstances
directly, for recovering our heritage earnestly, for minding our
future inaugurally. In short, for drawing the line once again, after
its obliteration by our tradition of humanism, which has petered out
in the construal of living well as a matter of enhancements and
entitlements, augmentation and intensification — rather than one of
reactivation.
“You’re an optimist,” he said. But, I replied, I’m talking about a
painful collapse — and, besides, I’m recalling the occasions of the
birth of philosophy at the collapse of Periclean Greece, of
Christianity at the collapse of Imperial Rome, of the Enlightenment
at the collapse of Christianity. “Not always very pretty,” I added.
“Still,” he said, “you’re optimistic.”