My Year With Proust - Day 176

   "When Elstir asked me to come with him so that he might introduce me to Albertine, who was sitting a little further down the room, I first of all finished eating a coffee eclair, and, with a show of keen interest, asked an old gentleman whose acquaintance I had just made (and to whom I thought that I might offer the rose in my buttonhole which he had admired) to tell me more about the old Norman fairs.  This is not to say that the introduction which followed did not give me any pleasure and did not assume a certain solemnity in my eyes.  But so far as the pleasure was concerned, I was naturally not conscious of it until some time later, when, back at the hotel, and in my room alone, I had become myself again.  Pleasure in this respect is like photography.  What we take, in the presence of the beloved object, is merely a negative, which we develop later, when we are back at home, and have once again found at our disposal that inner darkroom the entrance to which is barred to us so long as we are with other people."

Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, pp. 931-932

Proust is finally getting his official introduction to Albertine, who will play such a huge role in the story, from Elstir.  It is telling that it is only when he is by himself, in full possession of his "inner darkroom," that he can develop the picture.  "Pleasure in this respect is like photography." I've talked before how I feel so blessed to be able to identify my best day ever, which was 18 June 1993, when I took my son to Six Flags Over Georgia for the first time.  What made it so extraordinary was that at the end of the day, in the gloaming as night approached, it hit me with full force that it was the best day I had ever had and would probably ever have.  Most of us, including me 99% of the time, only realize much later our best moments.  Although, as we've discussed repeatedly, perception and memory are such faulty instruments that we should probably be suspicious of those revelations.

While reading this I hearkened back, not surprisingly, to the end of Gustave Flaubert's Sentimental Education.  In an ending which at a surface level reading of the novel can seem maddeningly random, but it is actually both appropriately summative and brilliant, Frederick and Deslauriers, recall the time that they almost went to a brothel.

   "It was during the vacation of 1837 that they called at the house of the Turkish woman.
   This was a phrase used to designate a woman whose real name was Zoraide Turc; and many persons believed her to be a Mohammedan, a Turk; this added to the poetic character of her establishment, situated at the water's edge behind the rampart.  Even in the middle of summer there was a shadow around her house, which was distinguished by a glass bowl of goldfish near a pot of mignonette at a window. Women in white negligees, with painted cheeks and long earrings, used to tap on the panes as the students passed; and as it grew dark, their custom was to hum softly in their hoarse voices as they stood on the doorsteps.
   This home of perdition spread its fantastic notoriety over all the arrondissement.  References were made to it in a circumlocutory style: 'The place you know a certain street at the bottom of the Bridges.' It made the farmers' wives of the district tremble for their husbands, and the ladies grow apprehensive as to their servants' virtue, inasmuch as the sub-prefect's cook had been found there; and, of course, it exercised a fascination over the minds of all the young lads of the place.
   One Sunday, during vesper-time, Frederick and Deslauriers, having previously curled their hair, gathered some flowers in Madame Moreau's garden, then went out through the gate leading into the fields, and, after taking a wide circuit round the vineyard, came back through the Fishery, and stole into the Turkish woman's house with their bit bouquets in their hands.
   Frederick presented his as a lover does to his betrothed.  But the heat, the fear of the unknown, and even the very pleasure of seeing at one glance so many women at his disposal, excited him so strangely that he turned exceedingly pale, and stood there without advancing a single step or uttering a word.  All the girls bust out laughing, amusing at his embarrassment.  Fancying that they were ridiculing him, he ran away; and, as Frederick had the money, Deslauriers was obliged to follow him.
   They were observed leaving the house; and the episode furnish material for a bit of local gossip which was remembered three years later.
   They related the story to each other in a fashion, each supplementing the narrative where the other's memory failed; and then they had finished the tale:
   'I believe that was the best time we ever had!' said Frederick.
   'Well, perhaps!  Yes, I, too, believe that was the best time we ever had,' said Deslauriers."

My Year With Proust - Day 175

"'There is no man, he began, 'however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived a life, the memory of which is so unpleasant to him that he would gladly expunge it.  And yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man - so far as it is possible for any of us to be wise - unless he has passed through all the fatuous or unwholesome incarnations by which that ultimate stage must be preceded.  I know that there are young people, the sons and grandsons of distinguished men, whose masters have instilled into them nobility of mind and moral refinement from their schooldays.  They may perhaps have nothing to retract from their past lives; they could publish a signed account of everything they have ever said or done; but they are poor creatures, feeble descendants of doctrinaires, and their wisdom is negative and sterile.  We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world. The lives that you admire, the attitudes that seem noble to you, have not been shaped by a paterfamilias or a schoolmaster, they have sprung from very different beginnings, having been influenced by everything evil or commonplace that prevailed round about them.  They represent a struggle and a victory.  I can see that the picture of what we were at an earlier stage may not be recognisable and cannot, certainly, be pleasing to contemplate in later life.  But we must not repudiate it, for it is a proof that we have really lived, that it is in accordance with the laws of life and of the mind that we have, from the common elements of life, of studios, of artistic groups - assuming one is a painter - extracting something that transcends them.'"

Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, pp. 923-924

Here the painter Elstir shares just about the most valuable information that anyone can ever share.  During a conversation Proust has just discovered that Elstir was actually the "ridiculous perverted painter who had at one time been adopted by the Verdunins" and who they always referred to as M. Biche.  Elstir is clearly annoyed by this discovery, and while a lesser man would have taken the opportunity to brush the younger man off and never see him again, the more experienced painter, "like the master that he was," approaches it more philosophically and takes the opportunity to share some wisdom.

I don't know if I can agree with Elstir (and Proust) more.  Life has to be lived, it can't be taught, and the living is often remarkably messy.  Previously I've shared one of my core beliefs, which I first articulated in one of those unpleasant father-son talks, that despite our hope that life will be dominated by beauty and grace, it is actually nothing but a string of remarkably graceless moments.  Life then is how you handle those graceless moments; essentially, how you react to them, how you stand up and dust yourself off, and how you make things right with the people you love and who depend upon you.  It seems to me that Proust is saying, obviously much more eloquently, something similar.  You can be taught certain key guidelines, and these are valuable and you should make every effort to pursue them, but the rules alone will avail you little.  You can, theoretically, live such a defined narrow existence, "but they are poor creatures, feeble descendants of doctrinaires, and their wisdom is negative and sterile."  Rather, the richness of life comes from living it, and that's never going to be neat and tidy.  Mistakes will be made, feelings will be hurt, heart will be broken, and crimes (hopefully small ones) will be committed.  "We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world."  Only then can we in turn share anything of value with the world.

My Year With Proust - Day 174

"We are so accustomed to incorporating in this type not only the beauty of an Odette but her personality, her identity, that standing before the portrait which has thus stripped her of it we are inclined to protest not simply 'How plain he has made her!' but 'Why, it isn't the least bit like her!'  We find it hard to believe that it can be she.  We do not recognise her.  And yet there is a person there on the canvas whom we are quite conscious of having seen before.  But that person is not Odette; the face of the person, her body, her general appearance seem familiar.  They recall to us not this particular woman who never held herself like that, whose natural pose never formed any such strange and teasing arabesque, but other women, all the women whom Elstir has ever painted, women whom invariably, however they may differ from one another, has has chosen to plant thus, in full force face, with an arched foot thrust out from under the skirt, a large round hat in one hand, symmetrically corresponding, at the level of the knee which it covers, to that other disc, higher up in the picture, the face.  And furthermore, not only does a portrait by the hand of genius dislocate a woman's type, as it has been defined by her coquetry and her selfish conception of beauty, but if it is also old, it is not content with ageing the original in the same way as a photograph ages its sitter, by showing her dressed in the fashions of long ago.  In a portrait, it is not only the manner the woman then had of dressing that dates her, it is also the manner the artist had of painting.  And this, Elstir's earliest manner, was the most devastating of birth certificates for Odette because it not only established her, as did her photographs of the same period, as the younger sister of various well-known courtesans, but made her portrait contemporary with the countless portraits that Manet or Whistler had painted of all those vanished models, models who already belonged to oblivion or to history."

Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, pp. 921-922

We've talked before about the concept of "air," the indefinable quality that makes a person a unique person, that quality that appears in some photographs and an even smaller number of portraits.  The problem with air is that you, at least theoretically, have to know the person in question to recognize the air, as compared to simply perceiving a personality or emotion in the photograph or portrait. One of the reasons why it could be argued the Velazquez's painting of Innocent X is the greatest portrait of all time is that, beyond capturing at least a hint of his personality or his emotional life, it seems to capture his air.  You know him.

Velazauez's brilliant portrait of Pope Innocent X.  I feel that I know him, although I'm not certain that I want to.

And the famous Francis Bacon homage to the classic Velazquez work in his Screaming Pope.  Come to think of it, this may also capture Innocent's air.

Clearly Elstir captured Odette's appearance because Proust recognized her, but he also clearly shaped her image to fit his perception of her personality,her self (going back to the previous post), but did he capture her air?  Maybe you can capture the air if you free yourself of the tyranny of producing reality, which may be another way to think about the revolution of modern art.

Having said that, Proust seems to be saying that the Odette in the painting is not truly, uniquely Odette at all, but rather the sum total of any number of women. Proust writes, "But that person is not Odette; the face of the person, her body, her general appearance seem familiar.  They recall to us not this particular woman who never held herself like that, whose natural pose never formed any such strange and teasing arabesque, but other women, all the women whom Elstir has ever painted . . ." I think I would argue that this artistic example is a microcosm of a much greater truth. Is every woman we're ever with the same woman, just as we're the same man to her?  We're clearly the sum totals of all of our emotional and sexual experiences, and they are, to paraphrase a great novel, the things we carry.  When a woman adapts and accepts your emotional and sexual habits is she not unconsciously (or maybe consciously) accepting her role in that progression (just as you are in hers)? So when you see her you truly see all the women you've ever known.  It's a nice philosophical discussion, although one likely to lead to something like Bacon's Screaming Pope.

My Year With Proust - Day 173

"Artistic genius acts in a similar way to those extremely high temperatures which have the power to split up combinations of atoms which they proceed to combine afresh in a diametrically opposite order, corresponding to another type.  All that artificial harmony which a woman has succeeded in imposing upon her features, the persistence of which she oversees in her mirror, every day, before going out, relying on the angle of her hat, the smoothness of her hair, the vivacity of her expression, to ensure its continuity, that harmony the keen eye of the great painter instantly destroys, substituting for it a rearrangement of the woman's features such as will satisfy a certain pictorial ideal of femininity which he carries in his head.  Similarly it often happens that, after a certain age, the eye of a great scientist will find somewhere the elements necessary to establish those relations which alone are of interest to him.  Like those craftsmen, those players who, instead of making a fuss and asking for what they cannot have, content themselves with whatever comes to hand, the artist might say of anything, no mater what, that it would serve his purpose."

Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, pp. 920-921

Sometimes I will make the point that my favorite classes that I teach in the Core are Concepts of the Self (COR 110) and Aesthetic Expressions (COR 220) and that I could not have predicted that.  To which my friends normally reply, "you are such a dumb ass, you love art and you know a lot about it."  I guess I know I love art, but I never really thought that I LOVED art, but apparently I do, or at least it is evident to my friends.  Anyone who has ever gone to a museum with me, and suffered through that Bataan death march (as I'm happy to spend six hours just looking at paintings) still bears the emotional scars.  And, to be fair, whenever I'm overseas I inevitably end up spending way too much time in the local museums.  OK, so maybe I do LOVE art.  I'm not really certain that I know a lot about art.  I think I have a passion to learn more about art.  If I have any intellectual gifts, and that is doubtful, one of them would be that I'm pretty intellectually ravenous.  My supposition is that I know a little bit about many different aspects of art, which is a representative of my surface level knowledge of many subjects.  However, if I know anything at all about art I blame it on endless hours spent playing Masterpiece when I was a kid.

Who knew it would teach me anything?  The damn game tricked me.  Mainly I was just trying to pound my friends Marty and Giggy into submission, and somehow I ended up learning something.  I do need to track down a copy of that game somewhere.

Now, more importantly, I think Proust is making a very important point about the relationship between the artist and subject. In both Concepts of the Self and Aesthetic Expressions we talk about the negotiation between the artist and the subject.  The subject, either verbally or non-verbally, is trying to express to the artist a constructed identity, a self to be captured on the canvas.  In turn, the artist is trying to impose his/her perception of the subject's self.  Herein lies the conflict, which has to be negotiated; although often I suspect the negotiations with a strong-willed artist are much like those with Kim Jong-un.  In the short term it is almost certainly the artist that "wins" the negotiation.  However, in the long term both the artist and subject probably end up losing because they'll be long dead, and every person who stands in front of that portrait will be carrying on their own negotiation and coming up with their own perception of the subject (and, for that matter, the artist).

Just thought I'd throw in a few of my favorite paintings.  I wonder if the subjects would have agreed with how the artist captured their projected identity?  And I've often wondered if Madame X (the real life Virginie Amelie Avegno Gautreau) liked her strap down, as in the original version, or the strap up, which Singer repainted after public outcry.

Sargent, Portrait of Madame X .

Cezanne, Portrait of Madame Cezanne with Loosened Hair. 

Matisse, Portrait of Lydia Delectovskay. 

Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase,no. 2.

The Passing of Time: Yas Island

I was talking to Bill, my best from college, a couple Saturdays ago when he suddenly said, "Hey, do you remember what you were doing 33 years ago today?"  Fortunately, I knew the answer: I was serving as his best man in his wedding to the excellent Kathy nee Valentine (still his wife even today, which is a credit to his good sense).  That said, it was definitely one of those moments when you become aware of how rapidly the years roll away.  With that in mind, I was goofing around on Google Earth the other day and figured out how to grab screen shots of images (yes, I'm just that technologically limited) and snagged a picture of Yas Island in the UAE.  It's difficult for me to process that it is coming up on five years ago that I moved there as part of my sabbatical at Zayed University, and consequently almost four years since I returned.  In some ways it seems like about six months ago, and in other ways it was a different life time.  It was definitely an odd place, but in a lot of different ways I was remarkably happy there.

And I never made it to Ferrari World, although I did go check out the Formula One race track several times.

My Year With Proust - Day 172

   "'I should very much like, if you have such a thing, a photograph of the little portrait of Miss Sacripant.  By the way, that's not a real name, surely?'

   'It's the name of a character the sitter played in a stupid little musical comedy.'

   'But, I assure you, Monsieur, that I've never set eyes on her; you look as though you thought that I knew her.'

   Elstir was silent.  'It couldn't be Mme Swann before she was married?' I hazarded, in one of those sudden fortuitous stumblings upon the truth, which are rare enough in all conscience, and yet suffice, after the event, to give a certain cumulative support to the theory of presentiments, provided that one takes care to forget all the wrong gestures that would invalidate it.

   Elstir did not reply.  The portrait was indeed that of Odette de Crecy.  She had preferred not to keep it for many reasons, some of them only too obvious.  But there were others less apparent.  The portrait dated from before the point at which Odette, disciplining her features, had made of her face and figure that creation the broad outlines of which her hair-dressers, her dressmakers, she herself - in her way of holding herself, of speaking, of smiling, of moving her hands and eyes, of thinking - were to respect throughout the years to come.  It required the vitiated taste of a surfeited lover to make Swann prefer to all the countless photographs of the 'definitive' Odette who was his charming wife the little photograph, which he kept in his room and in which, beneath a straw hat trimmed with pansies, one saw a thin young woman, fairly plain, with bunched out hair and drawn features."

Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, pp. 919-920

Initially I included this passage mainly because it once again draws in Odette, a character who increasingly fascinates me.  I'm frustrated that Proust, at least up to this point, did not share more of her internal world with the reader; she's more of an object or an ideal than a person.  Of course, it may well be that I wasn't paying enough attention to the more subtle points Proust was making and I'll understand her more clearly on a second reading.

Upon more mature reflection, however, I'm also intrigued by Odette's decision to leave the painting with Elstir.  Certainly, some of it relates to the fact that it would be a constant reminder for her, and for Swann, of her more "notorious" past.  However, I think that's only part of it, and Proust makes that clear.  Odette doesn't like that painting because it was of an Odette before she "became" ODETTE, before she created herself, the public self, the self that would eventually become Mme Swann.  As any student who survived Concepts of the Self at Champlain will tell you, the self is a negotiated construct, and this is one of the reasons why we, like Odette, cringe at earlier pictures of ourselves.  It's not simply that we might look ridiculous or that we're wearing whatever horrible clothes were the fashion then or are sporting an absurd haircut, but because we're viewing painfully incomplete and clumsy, although oddly predictive, proto-versions of the self we eventually constructed.

Iftar

On Saturday night I visited the Islamic Society of Vermont for my first communal Iftar, the meal that breaks the fast during Ramadan.  Technically, I guess, the meal that breaks the fast is Iftar, but it is usually celebrated with family and friends, and for Muslims it is a cherished part of Ramadan.  I sat with several friends and enjoyed wonderful food and companionship.  I also met some new friends, including a Jewish visitor who worked closely with one of the leaders of ISVT to help ensure that Muslims incarcerated in Vermont prisons had items such as Qurans and prayer mats for Ramadan.  And despite the popular perception generated by a lazy and tragedy-addicted media of unending antipathy between Jews and Muslims there was nothing but fellowship.  We only have one mosque in Vermont so there is a tremendous diversity of nationalities represented, where as if you went up to a huge city like Montreal you would have the Pakistani mosque and the Indian mosque, etc.  It was a wonderful evening, and one that made waking up the next morning to the horror of the Orlando shootings all the more jarring.  I ended up devoting way too much time on Twitter yesterday trying to avoid context without being an apologist.  The first point I made was that in the mad rush to demonize Muslims or to call for gun control, let's please first focus on the fact that this was a horrible hate crime against the LGBT community.  What is interesting is that the LGBT community seems to be naturally doing a much better job of taking the approach (and this was at the heart of my second main point on Twitter) of recognizing this as a hate crime committed by a Muslim, which, although horrific, was not synonymous with a hate crime perpetuated by Islam itself.  If only our national political leaders had such a nuanced view of the world.  I guess followers of all religions are always astonished when acts of violence are carried out by angry fringe elements of the faith, and this is completely true of the overwhelming vast majority of Muslims.  In much the same way that the majority of Christians cannot understand how you can take the teachings of Jesus at the Sermon on the Mount and turn it into a violent, judgmental religion, Muslims cannot understand how a religion that stresses the need to be humble and tolerant and forgiving and non-violent can be warped so dramatically.

Prepping to break the fast.  We started with dates, which is traditional.

Queuing up for Iftar.  The food was wonderful and the fellowship was even better.