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[continued from part 4]
Adrian argues for the possibility of a “prideful contritio. The remorse of Cain... who was of the firm persuasion that his sin was greater than could ever be forgiven him...”
p247 He: “You are a sly dog! And where will the likes of you get the single-mindedness, the naive recklessmess of despair, which would premise for this sinfull waye to salvacion?...
I: “And yet only through this non plus ultra can the high prick of the dramatic-theological existence be arrived at; I mean the most abandoned guilt and the last and most irresistible challenge to the Everlasting Goodness.”
He: “Not bad. Of a truth ingenious. And now I will tell you that precisely heads of your sort comprise the population of hell. It is not so easy to get into hell, we should long ago have been suffering for lack of space if we let Philip and Cheyney in. [Richard Cheyney? ] But your theologian in grain, your arrant wily-pie who speculates on speculation because he has speculation in his blood already from the father’s side -- there must be foul work an he did not belong to the divel.”
He again changes in appearance... “without knowing it, apparently...”
“To make an end and a conclusion will be agreeable to you. I have devoted much time and tarried long to entreat of this matter with you -- I hope and trust you realize. But also you are an attractive case, that I freely admit. From early on we had an eye on you, on your quick, arrogant head, your mighty ingenium and memoriam. They have made you study theology, as your conceit devised it, but you would soon name yourself no lenger of theologians, but put the Good Boke under the bench and from then on stuck to the figures, characters, and incantations of music, which pleased us not a little. For your vain glory aspired to the elemental, and you thought to gain it in the form most mete for you, where algebraic magic is married with corresponding cleverness and calculation and yet at the same time it always boldly warres against reason and sobriety. But did we then not know that you were too clever and cold and chaste for the element; and did we not know that you were sore vexed thereat and piteously bored with your shamefast cleverness? Thus it was our busily prepensed plan that you should run into our arms, that is, of my little one, Esmeralda, and that you got it, the illumination, the aphrodisiacum of the brain, after which with body and soul and mind you so desperately longed. To be short, between us there needs no crosse way in the Spesser’s Wood [“These pursuits aroused in him a desire to commune with the Devil, so--having made the necessary evil preparations--he repaired one night to a crossroads in the Spesser Forest near Wittenberg. Between nine and ten o'clock he described certain circles with his staff and thus conjured up the Devil.” -Faust Chapbook of 1587] and no cercles. We are in league and business -- with your blood you have affirmed it and promised yourself to us, and are baptized ours. This my visit concerns only the confirmation therof. Time you have taken from us, a genius’s time, high-flying time, full XXIV years ab dato recessi, [from today] which we set to you as the limit. When they are finished and fully expired, which is not to be forseen, and such a time is also an eternity -- then you shalbe fetched, Against this meanwhile shall we be in all things subject and obedient, and hell shall profit you, in you renay all living creatures, all the Heavenly Host and all men, for that must be.”
I (in an exceedingly cold draught): “What? This is new. What signifies the clausula?”
He: “Renounce, it means. What otherwise? Do you think that jealousy dwells in the height and not also in the depths? To us you are, fine, well-create creature, promised and espoused. Thou maist not love.”
I (really have to laugh): “Not love! Poor divel! Will you substantiate the report of your stupidity and wear a bell even as a cat, that you will base business and promise on so elastic, so ensnaring a concept as love? Will the Devil prohibit lust? If it be not so, then he must endure sympathy, yea, even caritas, else he is betrayed just as it is written in the books. What I have invited, and wherefore you allege that I have promised you -- what is then the source of it, prithee, but love, even if that poisoned by you with God’s sanction? The bond in which you assert we stand has itself to do with love, you doating fool. You allege that I wanted it and repaired to the wood, the crosse-waye, for the sake of the work. But they say that work itself has to do with love.”
p249 He (laughing through his nose): “Do, re, mi! Be assured that thy psychological feints do not trap me, any better then do the theological. Psychology -- God warrant us, do you still hold with it? That is bad, bourgeois nineteenth century. The epoch is heartily sick of it, it will soon be a red rag to her, and he will simply get a crack on the pate, who disturbs life by psychology. We are entering into times, my friend, which will not be hoodwinked by psychology. . . . This en passant. My condition was clear and direct, determined by the legitimate jealousy of hell. Love is forbidden you, as so far as it warms. Thy life shall be cold, therefore thou shall love no human being. What are you thinking, then? The illumination leaves your mental powers to the last unimpaired, yes, heightens them to an ecstatie of delirium -- what shall it then go short of save the dear soul and the priceless life of feeling? A general chilling of your life and your relations to men lies in the nature of things -- rather it lies already in your nature; in feith we lay upon you nothing new, the little ones make nothing new and strange out of you, they only ingeniously strengthen and exaggerate all that you already are. The coldness in you is perhaps not prefigured, as well as the paternal head paynes out of which the pangs of the little sea-maid are to come? Cold we want you to be, that the fires of creation shall be hot enough to warm yourself in. Into them you will flee out of the cold of your life. . . .”
I: “And from the burning back to the ice. It seems to be hell in advance, which is already offered me on earth.”
He: “It is that extravagant living, the only one that suffices a proud soul. Your arrogance will probably never want to exchange with a lukewarm one. Do you strike with me? A work-filled eternity of human life shall you enjoy. When the houre-glasse runs out, then I shall have good power to deal and dole with, to move and manage the fine-created Creature after my way and my pleasure, be it in life, soul, flesh, blood or goods -- to all eternity!”
There it was again, the uncontrollable disgust that had already seized me once before and shaken me, together with the glacial wave of cold which came over me again from the tight-trousered strizzi there. I forgot myself in a fury of disgust, it was like a fainting-fit. And then I heard Schildknapp’s easy, everyday voice, he sat there in the sofa-corner, saying to me:
“Of course you didn’t miss anything. Newspapers and two games of billiards, a round of Marsala and the good souls calling the governo [government] over the coals.”
p250 I was sitting in my summer suit, by my lamp, the Christian’s book on my knee. Can’t be anything else: in my excitement I must have chased the losel out and carried my coat and rug back before Schildknapp returned.
So no black poodle. I do prefer this approach, though I suppose we will not be getting wine out of a table either -- a much more subtle magic than in the earlier versions, but more appropriate to our bourgeois age.
Mephisto’s (I’m going to continue referring to him thus) relation to that bourgeois age is still confusing to me. Goethe had him as the Metternich or Bismarck behind the new world order, but Mann seems to put him in opposition. Mephisto and Naphtha would seem to be in the same camp -- both fighting for a more spiritual/religious/metaphysical reality.
I’m also a little confused by the way this ends. It seems that Adrian would really have no reason not to make this wager -- that he had really already made it. Why the pussy-footing at the end?
The painter’s Eye - from A Natural History of the Senses by Diane Ackerman
Cézanne
p267 In his later years, Cézanne suffered a famous paroxysm of doubt about his genius. Could his art have been only an eccentricity of his vision, not imagination and talent guarded by a vigilant esthetic? In his excellent essay on Cézanne in Sense and Nonsense, Maurice Merleau-Ponty says: “As he grew old, he wondered whether the novelty of his paintings might not come from trouble with his eyes, whether his whole life had not been based upon an accident of the body.” Cézanne anxiously considered each brush stroke, striving for the fullest sense of the world, as Merleau-Ponty describes so well:
We see the depth, the smoothness, the softness, the hardness of objects; Cézanne even claimed that we see their odor. If the painter is to express the world, the arrangement of his colors must carry with it this invisible world, or else his picture will only hint at things and will not give them in the imperious unity, the presence the insurpassable plentitude which is for us the definition of the real. That is why each brush stroke must satisfy an infinite number of conditions. Cézanne sometimes pondered for hours at a time before putting down a certain stroke, for, as Bernard said, each stroke must “contain the air, the light, the object, the composition the character, the outline, and the style.” Expressing what exists is an endless task.
Opening up wide to the fullness of life, Cézanne felt himself to be the conduit where nature and humanity met -- “The landscape thinks itself in me . . . I am its consciousness” -- and would work on all the different sections of a painting at the same time, as if in that way he could capture the many angles, half-truths, and reflections a scene held, and fuse them into one conglomerate version. “He considered himself powerless,” Merleau-Ponty writes, “because he was not omnipotent, because he was not God and wanted nevertheless to portray the world, to change it completely into spectacle, to make visible how the world touches us.” When one thinks of the masses of color and shape in his paintings, perhaps it won’t come as a surprise to learn that Cézanne was myopic, although he refused glasses, reputedly crying “Take those vulgar things away!” He also suffered from diabetes, which may have resulted in some retinal damage, and in time he developed cataracts (a clouding of the clear lens). Huysmans once captiously described him as “An artist with a diseased retina, who, exasperated by a defective vision, discovered the basis of a new art.” Born into a different universe than most people, Cézanne painted the world his slightly askew eyes saw, but the random chance of that possibility gnawed at him. The sculptor Giacometti, on the other hand, whose long, stretched-out figures look as consciously distorted as one could wish, once confessed amiably: “All the critics spoke about the metaphysical content or the poetic message of my work. But for me it is nothing of the sort. It is purely optical exercise. I try to represent a head as I see it.”
Alberto Giacometti
It should be evident to those of you still with me from the previous blog, that I’ve included this in part for the way it relates to what I’ve previously written on this subject. Soon, I hope, you will see why I’ve placed it just here. But I’m also including this section in its (almost) entirely to acknowledge my debt. While I had forgotten so much of what I read so very long ago, there can be no doubt that it has shaped my thinking.
p268 Quite a lot has been learned in recent years about the vision problems of certain artists, whose eyeglasses and medical records have survived... Though he was known for cutting off his ear, van Gogh also hit himself with a club, went to many church services each Sunday, slept on a board, had bizarre religious hallucinations, drank kerosene, and ate paint. Some researchers now feel that a few of van Gogh’s stylistic quirks (coronas around streetlights, for instance) may not have been intentional distortions at all but the result of illness, or, indeed of poisoning from the paint thinners and resins he used, which could have damaged his eyes so that he saw halo effects around light sources. According to Patrick Trevor-Roper, whose The World Through Blunted Sight investigates the vision problems of painters and poets, some of the possible diagnoses for van Gogh's depression “have included cerebral tumour, syphilis, magnesium deficiency, temporal lobe epilepsy, poisoning by digitalis (given as a treatment for epilepsy, which could have provided the yellow vision), and glaucoma (some self-portraits show a dilated right pupil, and he depicted coloured haloes around lights).” Most recently, a scientist speaking before a meeting of neurologists in Boston added Geschwind’s syndrome, a personality disorder that sometimes accompanies epilepsy. Van Gogh’s own doctor said of him: “Genius and lunacy are well know next-door neighbors.” Many of these ailments could have affected his vision. But, equally important, the most brilliant pigments used to include toxic heavy metals like copper, cadmium, and mercury. Fumes and poisons could easily get into food, since painters frequently worked and lived in the same rooms... Renoir was a heavy smoker, and he probably didn’t bother to wash his hands before he rolled a cigarette; paint from his fingers undoubtedly rubbed onto the paper. Two Danish internists, studying the relationship between arthritis and heavy metals, have compared the color choices in paintings by Renoir, Peter Paul Rubens, and Raoul Dufy (all rheumatoid arthritis sufferers), with those of their contemporaries. When Renoir chose his bright reds, oranges, and blues, he was also choosing big doses of aluminum, mercury, and cobalt. In fact, up to 60 percent of the colors Renoir preferred contained dangerous metals, twice the amount used by such contemporaries of his as Claude Monet or Edgar Degas, who often painted with darker pigments made from safer iron compounds.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
p269 According to Trevor-Roper, there is a myopic personality that artists, mathematicians, and bookish people tend to share. They have “an interior life different from others,” a different personality, because only the close-up world is visually available to them. [By this measure I should be the wonder of the age] The imagery in their work tends to pivot around things that “can be viewed at very close range,” and they’re more introverted. Of Degas’s myopia, for example, he says:
As time passed he was often reduced to painting in pastel rather than oil as being an easier medium for his failing sight. Later, he discovered that by using photographs of the models or horses he sought to depict, he was able to bring these comfortably within his limited focal range. And finally he fell back increasingly on sculpture where at least he could be sure that his sense of touch would always remain true, saying, ‘I must learn a blind man’s trade now.’ although he had always in fact had an interest in modelling.
Edgar Degas
p270 Trevor-Roper points out that the mechanism which causes short-sightedness (an elongated eye) affects perception of color as well (reds will appear more starkly defined); cataracts, especially, may affect color, blurring and reddening simultaneously. Consider Turner, whose later paintings Mark Twain once described as “like a ginger cat having a fit in a bowl of tomatoes.” ...
J. M. W. Turner
Or Renoir’s “increasing fascination for reds.” Or Monet, who developed such severe cataracts that he had to label his tubes of paint and arrange colors carefully on his palette. After a cataract operation, Monet is reported by friends to have been surprised by all the blueness in the world, and to have been appalled by the strange colors in his recent work, which he anxiously retouched.
One theory about artistic creation is that extraordinary artists come into this world with a different way of seeing. That doesn’t explain genius, of course, which has so much to do with risk, anger, a blazing emotional furnace, a sense of esthetic decorum, a savage wistfulness, lidless curiosity, and many other qualities, including a willingness to be fully available to life, to pause over both its general patterns and its ravishing details. As the robustly sensuous painter Georgia O’Keeffe once said: “In a way, nobody sees a flower really, it is so small, we haven’t time -- and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.” What kind of novel vision do artists bring into the world with them, long before they develop an inner vision? That question disturbed Cézanne, as it has other artists -- as if it made any difference to how and what he would end up painting. When all is said and done, it’s as Merleau-Ponty says: “This work to be done called for this life.”
Georgia O'Keeffe
I can’t help seeing what Mann would see in this; how the artist is shaped by his flaws and disabilities as well as by his genius. One has to wonder about not just how an artist’s vision of the world was affected by being poisoned by paints and thinners but also how his sensibility was affected. Would van Gogh have painted as well in a less toxic environment? To what degree are we indebted to the debilities of our favorite artists? And would they have chosen the self-poisoning had it been presented to them as necessary by their personal Mephisto?
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