My Year With Proust - Day 306

And this single new notion will bring about an entire regrouping, thrusting some back, others forward, of the fractional notions, hence-forward a complete whole, which we possessed of the rest of the family.  Although in the person of M. de Charlus another creature was coupled, as the horse in the centaur, which made him different from other men, although this creature was one with the Baron.  I had never perceived it.  Now the abstraction had become materialised, the creature at last discerned had lost its power of remaining invisible, and the transformation of M. de Charlus into a new person was so complete that not only the contracts of his face and of his voice, but, in retrospect, the very ups and downs of his relations with myself, everything that hitherto had seemed to my mind incoherent, became intelligible, appeared self-evident, just as a sentence which presents no meaning long long as it remains broken up in letters arranged at random expresses, if these letters are rearranged in the proper order, a thought which one can never afterwards forget.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, pp. 636-637

Marcel feels that after his discovery he had now figured out M. de Charlus,  that "everything that hitherto had seemed to my mind incoherent, became intelligible, appeared self-evident."  I agree but I don't agree with Proust's point here.  There are times when I think I have made similar discoveries about people - that I now have the key to solving their mystery.  For example, I had an administrator once who really hated me and we butted heads quite a bit.  Now, part of it was entirely my fault, because I genetically cannot back down from a fight - and lord knows I can be a pain.  As I've often opined, there is nothing worse than being my boss.  That said, one day I had this epiphany that she, the administrator, saw herself as the girl in school who was always picked last for the sports teams and, even though she was bright and worked harder than everyone else, was always unfairly overlooked in favor of the popular kids.  My epiphany was that she saw me as the current personification of the popular kids in school, who got ahead just by being tall and funny, and who didn't follow the rules that she religiously observed.  After that moment I made a very concerted effort to change our working relationship with that perception in mind.  On the one hand, our relationship did improve, but on the other hand I think this is also bullshit because people are not that simple.  I don't think we can be reduced to a simple formula.  For some reason this made me think of the painter Francis Bacon, who pops up a lot in a couple of my Core classes.  His paintings are very dark, with a sense of foreboding, and some would describe them as disturbed.  For those who want to view art through a psychoanalytical lens he's the classic example.  Bacon had a terrible relationship with his father, who beat him for being homosexual.  During World War II Bacon was in London and helped carry charred bodies out of bombed buildings.  Later he led a pretty profligate life featuring a lot of drinking and S&M parties, and suffered through a series of painful relationships. So, the classic psychoanalytical interpretation is that he expressed, and sublimated, his pain through his art - and this is why his paintings are so dark.  There, case closed.  However, Bacon himself hated that explanation.  Essentially, his response was, "fuck you, I'm an artist, don't reduce me to the sum of the events of my life."  And I completely get that, although it's difficult to look at his paintings and not think that there is some connection.  Still, we are not simply a mirror that reflects are experiences.  Cycling back to Proust, I can see how the discovery of the secret life of M. de Charlus would make certain inconsistencies less jarring, but the Baron is also far more than the product of his sexual desires.

Francis Bacon, Figure with Meat, from 1954.  My students love Francis Bacon and his work plays a big part of the Concepts of the Self and the Aesthetic Expression class.