Acculturation appears in other guises too. Ancient Greek literary criticism spoke of mimesis – the attempt by an artist to represent nature. Although, obviously, artists will influence each other, offering new perspectives and showing new solutions to technical problems, especially when working in the same society or Zeitgeist, it was one Dionysius of Halicarnassus, writing in the first century BCE, who first formally advocated imitatio or aemulatio – the deliberate attempt to imitate the work of another artist. With this new dispensation, art became more deeply and consciously acculturated, offering easy pickings for the indolent and the charlatans – paintings about the nature of art, sculptures winking at critics, novels for academics, poems as a riposte to other poets, documentaries about the media – the real world left behind. Soon the self-conscious display of personality legitimised the whole business of ‘influence’ and ‘movements’, the isms that deny the haecceity of each artist. [Footnote: the academic business of influence-
tracking is largely a matter of showing off how much the academic knows. The poet will often have been influenced by something he heard on the bus, or in a film, by the sound of the sea, or the still quality of light one evening, a piece of music or a thousand other unrecorded, perhaps even unremembered, moments. The academic, dealing only with the evidence he has – the work of contemporaries, a few biographical fragments – is oblivious to all this. Often he is also out of touch with the process of creativity itself, and so is likely to underestimate how the technical business of making can influence the original idea just as much as the idea influences the making. Our poor academic is merely hazarding over-educated guesses about a subject which is, in any case, unimportant. The work, not its background, is the important thing. Why doesn’t he just make something of his own, like he did when he was a kid? Doubtless, he will furnish practical reasons – salary, hopes of academic advancement, self-doubt, lack of learnt technical skill, a lingering reverence for artists as a separate breed – to excuse his failure, but they are excuses and sadly it is a failure.]
The artistic impulse is not, at root, social (as Andrei Tarkovsky acknowledges: ‘to calculate or foresee communication with the spectator seems to me infinitely more risky than fidelity to oneself’). It is simply the natural expression of one’s relationship with the universe. The first cell did not divide in order to impress its neighbours – in fact, it had no neighbours. The person who carved the Lion-Man of the Hohlenstein-Stadel, was not, I surmise, hoping to get noticed. It is essential that you paint (or make in whatever medium you choose) but you don’t have to show your paintings. [Footnote: In To the Lighthouse, Lily Briscoe came to understand this: ‘There it was – her picture. Yes, with all its green and blues, its lines running up and across, its attempt at something. It would be hung in the attics, she thought; it would be destroyed. But what did that matter? she asked herself, taking up her brush again. She looked at the steps; they were empty; she looked at her canvas; it was blurred. With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the centre. It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision.’] I had to write this book but you do not necessarily have to read it. If it brings you any benefit or pleasure (as surely it must) I am truly delighted. If not, for God’s sake do something else. Life is short; the world is teeming with wonders – don’t waste your time imprisoned in these pages.
But, although the initial creative impulse is not social, the shared values and experiences of those around us – our intersubjectivity – run so deep that unless our work is mere fancy without imagination, flagrantly personal or ineptly expressed, it will be a testament of experience which lights a path for others. This is what Virginia Woolf finds lacking in Dickens – ‘Nothing to engender in solitude.’ [Footnote: Russell Hoban, in his astonishing novel Riddley Walker, coins the invaluable word ‘onwith’ – a message or lesson that you find in a piece of art (or in any experience) and take ‘on with’ you to ‘engender in solitude’.] Here again creativity is inseparably bound up with love in producing works which, by their truth, radiate something of value to others. ‘The last perfection to supervene upon a thing is its becoming the cause of other things,’ as Thomas Aquinas expresses it. In Buddhism, someone who has finally attained nirvana may, out of compassion, become a bodhisattva, a teacher helping others out in the rough everyday world to the same goal. They have met a truth and seek to express it (which may serve as a quick definition of ‘an artist’ too). Love, awareness and creativity are inseparably bound together, always expressed in our individual haecceities.
Ultimately, we create not because it is good for us, teaches us, forces us to be aware, unites the world and binds us to it, not because it is fun, although it is all these things and more, but because it is our nature to create. What we create – hymns or bombs – we determine by our chosen attitude to the world and to each other. As the flower processes the sunlight into nectar, we process the universe into art. It is as natural as that.
Nature creates: new cells, new beings, new perceptions, new art – the same process realised in different ways according to the evolved capacities of each creature – microbe, plant or poet.
The Three Ravens
There were three rauens sat on a tree,
downe a downe, hay downe, hay downe,
They were as blacke as they might be
with a downe,
Then one of them said to his mate
Where shall we our breakfast take?
with a downe, derrie, derrie, derrie, downe, downe.
Downe in yonder greene field,
downe a downe, hay downe, hay downe
There lies a Knight slain under his shield,
with a downe,
His hounds they lie downe at his feete,
So well they can their Master keepe,
with a downe, derrie, derrie, derrie, downe, downe.
His Hawkes they flie so eagerly,
downe a downe, hay downe, hay downe
There’s no fowle dare come him come nie.
with a downe,
Downe there comes a fallow Doe,
As great with yong as she might goe,
with a downe, derrie, derrie, derrie, downe, downe.
She lift up his bloudy head,
downe a downe, hay downe, hay downe
And kist his wounds that were so red,
with a downe,
She got him up upon her backe,
And carried him to earthen lake
with a downe, derrie, derrie, derrie, downe, downe
She buried him before the prime,
downe a downe, hay downe, hay downe
She was dead herself ere euen-song time.
with a downe,
God send euery gentleman,
Such haukes, such hounds, and such a Leman.
with a downe, derrie, derrie, derrie, downe, downe
CEZANNIAN AND PADDINGTONIAN PERSPECTIVES ON REALITY: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS
Some of us of a certain age may remember that in the 1970s, long before his recent film reincarnation, Paddington Bear appeared on our television screens. Though he was, admittedly, somewhat immobile, Paddington dominated the drama more than Hamlet, Oedipus or any other protagonist in the history of fiction. He was literally the only three-dimensional character. The Browns and other supporting cast were merely drawings; the world through which he unconvincingly moved in stop-frame ‘animation’ was flat and pallid.
We often see the world like this. We think ourselves conscious, motivated, reasoning personalities manoeuvring through a less intensely real environment, which largely exists to respond to our thoughts, feelings and wishes. Our brain senses the world – the smell of toast, the pain of a stubbed toe – with automatic immediacy from our Cyclopean perspective, whereas it takes conscious effort (if we bother at all) to imagine the same sensations in another person’s mind. The experiences are equally real – they fancy the toast as much as we do – but we only notice our own reactions.
An alternative approach is pursued by Paul Cézanne. Cézanne’s portraits are hardly portraits at all in the conventional sense. He is painting what he experiences in front of him. His wife, his gardener, his apples may be in the middle of the canvas but they’re just a part of the whole thing. Alex Danchev encapsulates this: ‘More a thereness, than a likeness.’ There is something almost prayerful about this. Though prayer takes many forms it is primarily an acknowledgement of a presence (rather than a request for favours, or a chance for God to catch up with our latest opinions about Him).
Cézanne, Madame Cézanne in a Striped Skirt (Museum of Fine Art, Boston)
Rilke describes Madame Cézanne in a Striped Skirt:
‘It is as if every part were aware of all the others – it participates that much; that much adjustment and recognition is happening in it; that’s how each daub plays its part in maintaining equilibrium and in producing it: just as the whole picture finally keeps reality in equilibrium. For if one say, this is a red armchair (and it is the first and ultimate red armchair in the history of painting): it is only that because it contains latently within it an experienced sum of colour which, whatever it may be, reinforces and confirms it in this red. … Everything … has become an affair that’s settled among the colours themselves.’
And this is how nature works, as Martin Buber said earlier: ‘The inmost growth of the self is not accomplished … in man’s relation to himself but in the relation between one and the other.’ We are not wholly independent entities flung together. There are no outlines drawn around us. Mme Cézanne’s face, skirt, armchair and wallpaper are all equally real and present. In some of his later portraits Cézanne merges his sitters even more deeply into their surroundings. An ear disappears into the wallpaper. This is what happens in reality. As I sit here bits flake off me, bits are rubbed on to this paper; my skin absorbs moisture from the air, and half of the crumpet on the table at my side is already becoming integrated into my being. We bleed into our surroundings. Like the red of the armchair we appear as we do, and are as we are, because of the circumstances in which we exist, as Richard Fortey confirms: ‘Life and environment comprise one linked system, they have an umbilical connection.’ I do not merely live in the universe. I am a constituent part of the universe, as a brick is part of a house. [Footnote: I’m not suggesting that the equality of all the elements in a picture (rather as in Celtic art) is Cézanne’s only trick, or that he did it every time. He was experiential rather than programmatic. He looked before he painted and because he looked he saw different things each time. An ideologue wouldn’t have needed to look – he would have decided what he saw long before he opened his eyes.]
In short, I suppose I am saying that Cézanne’s portrait of his wife in a red armchair is a valid and therefore valuable and informative representation of the real equality of all objects in the universe, whereas the 1970s avatar of Paddington Bear, doubtless unintentionally, portrays, even almost caricatures, our fancy of a hierarchical world in which there are protagonists and chorus. Cézanne is essentially truer than… er…Paddington. Is that, um, helpful?
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