Monthly Archives: January 2006

and again

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“. . . . There was a time when people recognized things easily when they were depicted by Fromentin and failed to recognize them at all when they were painted by Renoir.

Today people of taste tell us that Renoir is a great eighteenth-century painter. But when they say this they forget Time, and that it took a great deal of time, even in the middle of the nineteenth century, for Renoir to be hailed as a great artist. To gain this sort of recognition, an original painter or an original writer follows the path of the occultist. His painting or his prose acts upon us like a course of treatment that is not always agreeable. When it is over, the practitioner says to us, “Now look.” And at this point the world (which was not created once and for all, but as often as an original artist is born) appears utterly different from the one we knew, but perfectly clear. Women pass in the street, different from those we used to see, because they are Renoirs, the same Renoirs we once refused to see as women. The carriages are also Renoirs, and the water, and the sky: we want to go for a walk in a forest like the one that, when we first saw it, was anything but a forest – more like a tapestry, for instance, with innumerable shades of color but lacking precisely the colors appropriate to forests. Such is the new and perishable universe that has just been created. It will last until the next geological catastrophe unleashed by a new painter or writer with an original view of the world.”

(Proust, The Guermantes Way, pp.323–325, trans. Mark Treharne)

on being wrong

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(The narrator goes to see La Berma for the second time.)

“My impression, to tell the truth, though more agreeable than before, was not really different. Only, I no longer pitted it against a preconceived, abstract, and false notion of dramatic genius, and I understood now, that dramatic genius was precisely this. I had been thinking earlier that if I had not enjoyed my first experience of La Berma it was because, as with my earlier encounters with Gilberte in the Champs-Élysées, I had approached it with too strong a desire. Between these two disappointments there was perhaps not only this resemblance, but another, deeper one. The impression made upon us by a person or a work of strong character (or its interpretation) is intrinsic to them. We have brought along with us the ideas of ‘beauty,’ ‘breadth of style,’ ‘pathos,’ which we might just possibly think we recognize in the banality of a passable talent or face, but our critical mind is confronted in fact with the nagging presence of a form for which it possesses no intellectual equivalent, the unknown part of which it needs to extricate. It hears a high-pitched sound, an oddly questioning intonation. It asks: ‘Is that good? It it admiration I am feeling? Is this what is meant by richness of color, nobility, power?’ And what answers back is a high-pitched voice, an oddly questioning tone, the despotic impression, wholly material, caused by a person we do not know, in which no scope is left for ‘breadth of interpretation.’ And for this reason, really fine works of art, if they are given genuine attention, are the ones that disappoint us most, because in the sum total of our ideas there is none that responds to an individual impression.”

(Proust, The Guermantes Way, p.43, trans. Mark Treharne)

how to gather cinnamon

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“Cinnamon they collect in a yet more marvellous manner than this: for where it grows and what land produces it they are not able to tell, except only that some say (and it is a probable account) that it grows in those regions where Dionysos was brought up; and they say that large birds carry those dried sticks which we have learnt from the Phenicians to call cinnamon, carry them, I say, to nests which are made of clay and stuck on to precipitous sides of mountains, which man can find no means of scaling. With regard to this then the Arabians practise the following contrivance:— they divide up the limbs of the oxen and asses that die and of their other beasts of burden, into pieces as large as convenient, and convey them to these places, and when they have laid them down not far from the nests, they withdraw to a distance from them: and the birds fly down and carry the limbs of the beasts of burden off to their nests; and these are not able to bear them, but break down and fall to the earth; and the men come up to them and collect the cinnamon. Thus cinnamon is collected and comes from this nation to the other countries of the world.”

(Herodotus, Histories, 3.111, trans. G. C. Macaulay. Referenced in Piers Moore Ede’s review of John Keay’s The Spice Route, in The Times Literary Supplement, 6 January 2006.)

from “life and its shadow: the art/life dichotomy”

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“. . . what differentiates the artist’s book from normal books is that the artist’s book always transcends its subject matter, including its own text. Within the category of artists’ books there exist many varieties of book-related works. One subcategory is the ‘bookwork,’ usually a one-of-a-kind or multiple which comments through its very existence on the question: ‘what is a book?’ For example, there is Alison Knowles’s Big Book (1967), which was discarded when it wore out but which had pages, a spine and copyright notice, a fold-out page, a telephone line to the outside world, a grass tunnel in which one could sleep, and many other features not usually found in books or other works of art. Less literally a hybrid of environment, book, and perhaps residence, one could cite a piece by Susan Share, Stream of Consciousness (1979), in which the pages were cut and folded so as to form a paper spring, not unlike a child’s ‘Slinky’ toy. When the work was allowed to move from one space to another beside it, it suggested a paper waterfall. Stream of Consciousness had no words. The fold used was a ‘leporello,’ a zigzag fold found in many oriental books and some Western ones. If I ask myself, ‘Is it the text which makes a book a book?’ I must answer ‘No – its bookness comes from its shape, from the experience of moving from page to page – that is what gives a book its identity.’ This work defines its physical space and reality neatly and efficiently. It may be art but what gives it its meaning is its relationship to the living and interactive world around it.”

(Dick Higgins, in Sculpture Magazine)

5. hemulen

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“The Hemulen woke up slowly and recognized himself and wished he had been someone he didn’t know. He felt even tireder than when he went to bed, and here it was – another day which would go on until evening and then there would be another one and another one which would be the same as all days are when they are lived by a hemulen.

[ . . . ]

Suddenly the Hemulen thought that all he ever did was to move things from one place to another or talk about where they should be put, and in a moment of insight he wondered what would happen if he left things alone.”

(Tove Jansson, Moominvalley in November, trans. Kingsley Hart)