Translation: Georges Sand on the Environmental Rescue of the Fontainebleau Forest by Artists outside of Paris - Part 4

Camille Corot, Barbizon, 1850

Well, when you have lead him through all the centers from which social life radiates, or on all the pathways through which it functions, when you have taught him what industry, science, art and politics are, there is still one thing which he will not think of if you do not show him, and this thing is religious respect for beauty in nature. Therein lies a deep source of calm and everlasting joy, an immersion of one’s being in the mysterious sources from which it has arisen, a notion of life both positive and pious, the clear and complete idea of which your machines, ships, manufacturing industries, theaters and churches will not have given him. He will have learned how life yields or wastes itself, how man uses himself up; he will not know how life reproduces and renews itself, how man feels and how he belongs. Most of the time, the disorder of social existence makes us act without knowing why and makes us mistake our passions and appetites for real needs. Looking inward is the thing that we are most lacking and from which everything turns us away. Society has launched itself full-steam into an artificial life in every way. We need to answer our appetites and vanities, which come in all shapes and sizes. Life has no other goal, no other illusion, no other promise in the esteem of the masses.

Let’s react a little, that is, as much as we can, because, alas, it will still be too little against this torrent that sweeps our offspring into its muddy waters. Let us not reduce our horizons to the delimited space of a field or the fence around a vegetable garden. Let us open space to the child’s thinking; let us make him drink the poetry of this creation that our industries tend to denature completely at a frightening speed. What? Until now, the young man who deeply feels this poetry is an exceptional being, because, in most families nowadays, we are convinced that contemplation is a waste of time, that dreaming is a lazy habit or a tendency toward madness. Yet, we are sensitive to the beauty of a landscape, and would not want our pupil to be so brutal as to not see it.

I know this, I recognize it, because I am not among those who systematically make war on the bourgeoisie. I have never crusaded against local greengrocers. I am convinced that one can sell capers and cloves, and still be well aware that they are lovable plants, not only because they bring in money, but also because they are gracious and charming. I believe that one can be a good peasant and make a deep furrow without being deaf to the lark’s song or insensitive to the smell of the hawthorn. I would even prefer it this way. I wish that one could be a perfect notary and poet, from time to time, while walking through the countryside or crossing the Seine. I want all men to be complete and that no one prohibits them from any kind of initiation. It is a preconception to believe that one must acquaint oneself with the delicacies of language, with the color arrays of the palette, the technique of the arts for becoming oneself a nuanced critic and an exquisitely sensitive person. Self-expression is a learned ability, but appreciation is a need, and therefore a universal right. It is the mission of artists to bring it to light and to consecrate it; but let us invite all men to a helping of it, in order to experience its joy and to learn to seek to savor it, without thinking that they must give up being good local greengrocers, good farm workers or impeccable notaries, if that be their vocation.

Translation: Frantz Fanon, From Peau noire, masques blancs (Black Skin, White Masks)

Colonial racism is no different than any other racism.

Antisemitism touches me deeply, I am moved, a frightful opposition weakens me, they do not give me the option of being a man. I cannot not join my brother’s fate in solidarity. Each of my acts engages the man in me. Each of my hesitations, each instance of my cowardice, manifests mankind. We still hear Aimé Césaire:

“When I turn on my radio, and I hear that in America black folk are being lynched, I say that they have lied to us: Hitler is not dead; when I turn on my radio and I learn that Jews are being insulted, held in contempt, sent to pogroms, I say they have lied to us: Hitler is not dead; and lastly, when I turn on my radio and I learn that, in Africa, forced labour has been institutionalized, I say that, truly, they have lied to us: Hitler is not dead.”

Yes, European civilization and its most qualified representatives are responsible for colonial racism; and we recall Césaire again:

“And so, one day, a formidable counter-shock wakes up the bourgeoisie; the gestapo is stirring, the prisons are full, torturers invent, refine and gather to talk around their instruments.” We are surprised, we are angry. We say: “How curious! But, it’s just Nazism, it will go away”. And we wait and hope; and we do not admit the truth to ourselves, that it’s barbaric, utmostly barbaric, so barbaric that it crowns, that it encompasses the barbaric in its daily life; that it’s Nazism, yes, but before being its victims, we were its accomplices; that we tolerated this Nazism before being subjected to it, we absolved it, we turned a blind eye, we legitimized it, because, until then, it only applied to non-Europeans; we cultivated this Nazism, we are responsible for it…

….

What [Octave] Mannoni has forgotten is that the Madagascan no longer exists; he has forgotten that the Madagascan exists with the European. The White man who came to Madagascar upset its psychological horizons and mechanisms. Everyone knows it: for the Black man, alterity is not the Black man but the White man. An island like Madagascar, invaded overnight by the “pioneers of civilization,” even if these pioneers had behaved as well as they could, underwent a de-structuring. It’s, by the way, Mannoni who said it: “At the beginning of colonization, each tribe wanted to have its token White man.” Whether we explain this through magical-totemic mechanisms, or through the need for contact with a terrible God, or through the illustration of a system of dependence, it is still true that something new had come to be on this island, and that we need to account for it lest we subscribe to a false, absurd and no longer relevant analysis. Since a new input had been introduced, we had to attempt to understand the new relationships that arose.

The landing of the White man on Madagascar provoked an incontestable wound. The consequences of this sudden European arrival on Madagascar are not just psychological, since, as everyone knows, there is an internal relationship between consciousness and the social context.

The economic consequences? We would have to put colonization on trial!

Let us continue our study.

“In abstract terms, the Madagascan can tolerate not being a white man. What’s cruel is first discovering that you are a man and then having this unity break down into Whites and Blacks. If the “abandoned” or “betrayed” Madagascan maintains his initial identification, it then becomes something he has to claim for himself; and he will demand equalities that he never felt the need for before. These equalities were advantageous to him before he had to demand them, but after, they became an insufficient remedy to his ills: because all progress made in making men equal will make the differences that suddenly seem painfully unerasable more difficult to stand. This is how the Madagascan goes from dependence to psychological inferiority.”


….

If he is Madagascan, it’s because the White man has arrived, and if, at any given moment of his history, he was made to ask whether he was a man or not, that’s because this reality of his had been contested. In other words, I start to suffer of not being White when the White man imposes a discrimination upon me, makes me into a colonized subject, despoils me of all value, all originality, tells me I am a parasite, that I had better catch up to the White world as fast as possible, “that I am a dumb beast, that my people and I are like a pile of walking manure, hideously promising of tender sugarcane and silky cotton, that I do not belong in the world.” So, I will simply try to become white, that is to say, I will force the White man to recognize my humanity. However, as Mannoni will tell us, you cannot, because deep inside of you there exists a dependence complex.

“Not all people are fit to being colonized, only those that posses this need.” And further: “Almost everywhere that Europeans have founded colonies like the one in question, we can say that they were expected and even desired in the unconscious of their subjects. All kinds of legends foreshadowed their arrival as strangers coming from the sea and destined to bring good things. As we can see, the White man obeys to a complex of authority, to a leader complex, while the Madagascan obeys to a complex of dependence. Everyone is happy.

….

My patient suffers from an inferiority complex. His psychic structure risks falling apart. I must prevent this and liberate him from this unconscious desire.

If he is so overwhelmed by the desire to be white, it’s because he lives in a society that makes his inferiority complex possible, in a society that draws its substance from the maintenance of this complex, in a society that affirms the superiority of a race; it’s precisely because this society presents him with difficulties that he finds himself in a neurotic position.

What emerges then is the necessity of a double action directed at the individual and the group. As a psychoanalyst, I have to help my client to make his unconscious conscious, to no longer attempt a hallucinatory whitening, but to take action in order to change social structures.

In other words, the Black man must no longer face this dilemma: become white or disappear; he must instead become aware of the possibility of existence…

Translation: Georges Sand on the Environmental Rescue of the Fontainebleau Forest by Artists outside of Paris - Part 3

Augustin Enfantin, An Artist Painting in the Forest of Fontainebleau

The Fontainebleau forest is not just beautiful because of its vegetation; its terrain features extremely graceful and elegant movements. At each step, its rock formations offer a magnificent decor, austere or delightful. However, these lovely clearings, this unexpected chaos, these melancholic sands would become sad, perhaps even vulgar if they were denuded. The natural sciences also have the right to protest against the destruction of the ground-level plants, which would disappear with the drying of the atmosphere when the tall trees fall. The botanist and the entomologist are serious people who count just as much as the painter and the poet; but even more important than these elites is, I repeat, human kind, whose noble enjoyments we should not impoverish, especially so soon after the atrocious wars that have spoiled and destroyed so many sacred things in nature and civilization. We are all French and we all have, or nearly all of us, children or grandchildren whom we take by the hand to go on walks, with the idea of—regardless of whether we belong to the well-off or not so well-off classes—initiating them to the feeling of life that is in us. In all the places we are with them, we make them observe everything they are supposed to understand, a ship, a train on its tracks, a marketplace, a church, a river, a mountain, or a town. From the gingerbread shop where the lower proletariat look at simple shapes of men and animals, to the museums where the bourgeois leads his progeny and explains what he admires as well as he can; from the furrow where the peasant’s child picks up a flower or a stone all the way to the great royal parks and our public gardens, where both rich and poor can learn by looking; all of these places are a sanctuary for the initiation of a child or the adult who has been developmentally deprived, who wants to exit this childhood that has lasted too long. I know very well that there is a dark or chattering, evil or impassioned proletariat that only dreams of social struggle, looks at nothing and does not take any care to elevate its spirit to the level of the destiny it seeks; but there is also a universal proletariat, the child, the ignorant among all the classes, those we can still shape for social life and for the struggles of the future that are better understood and better positioned. Each one of us has this particular one close at hand because it’s his favorite pupil, or the infant he carries in his arms. We take him on walks, begin his education, explain new objects to him; if the pupil is intelligent, soon he shows an interest in all the things that existence offers for possession, by its very nature or in thought.

Translation: Georges Sand on the Environmental Rescue of the Fontainebleau Forest by Artists outside of Paris - Part 2

The Edge of the Woods at Monts-Girard, Fontainebleau Forest, Théodore Rousseau

Therefore, the great plants are central to life, spreading their benefits near and far. And while it is dangerous or harmful to live under their direct shadow eternally, it is well-proven that foregoing the oxygen they release would fatally change the atmospheric conditions that support human life. It would be like removing large fans that recirculate the air and break up the electricity over our heads; it would also be impoverishing the soil and it subcutaneous circulation, if you will.

Cultural forces scrape, comb and cleanse this delicate bark. This is a necessary kind of upkeep; however, certain parts of rocky or forested areas must be spared this monumental razing and thus conserve the moisture that fertilizes the subsoil over great distances. There is very little visible water in the sands and rocks of Fontainebleau, but the subsoil that has made it possible for trees to live there for so long possesses an unusual richness with extensive repercussions. If you remove the trees that, through their shadows, provide the earth with the coolness their roots drink, you destroy a necessary harmony, essential to the environment you inhabit.

But let us not narrow down the scope of the issue. Not everyone is capable of conducting a detailed study of the oak trees and sandstones of Fontainebleau. Not everyone even wants to try, but everyone has the right to admire the beauty of such things. And there are many more people who are able to feel such beauty than artists interested in communicating it. Everyone has a seedling of intelligence and poetry within them, things that do not require a great deal of education or specialization. Therefore, everyone has a right to admire the beauty and poetry of our forests, and especially this one, one of the marvels of the world. Destroying it would be, morally speaking, legal theft, a truly savage attack on this right to intellectual property, which makes whomever possesses nothing but the sight of beautiful things equal to and, sometimes superior to, their owner.

There should be certain limits, dictated by nature, to the craze for individual property. Can we claim that those who have the means to buy it can share, sell and monopolize the atmosphere? If this were possible, can you imagine each proprietor sweeping his corner of the sky, piling the clouds in his neighbor’s yard, or according to his tastes, parking them in front of his property and demanding a law that would prevent those without money from watching golden sunsets or the amazing splendor of clouds chased away by a storm? I hope that this “happy” era will never dawn, but I believe that the destruction of the beautiful forests is an equally monstrous dream and that we should not withdraw the great trees from the intellectual public domain more than we should do away with their salubrious effects on public hygiene. They are just as sacred as the fecund clouds with which they constantly communicate; we must protect and respect them and never give them up to the barbaric whims or egotistical needs of the individual. Beautiful and majestic until their deaths, they belong to our descendants just like they did to our ancestors. They are the eternal temples whose powerful architecture and ornamental leafs always renew themselves, the sanctuaries of silence and reverie, where successive generations have the right to go and reflect, searching for this serious notion of grandeur, which every human being can feel and needs deep inside.  

Read Part III

Translation: Georges Sand on the Environmental Rescue of the Fontainebleau Forest by Artists outside of Paris - Part 1

Theodore Rousseau, Forest of Fontainebleau, 

Here is a letter I received:

“The President of the Republic most favorably received the artists’ petition; nevertheless, the tender for most of the lots took place on the originally planned day.”

“In order to prevent such great mutilations in the future, the signatories of the petition formed an artistic committee for the protection of the Fontainebleau forest, and, in order to better clarify their goal, unanimously voted on the following resolution:

“The forest of Fontainebleau must become part of our national and historic monuments, and it is most important to conserve it so artists and tourists can continue to admire it. Furthermore, it’s current division into two parts, of artistic and not-of-artistic interest, should not be accepted. The content of this letter cannot be used against its authors.”

I don’t really know what has happened as far as the forest of Fontainebleau is concerned, but that is not important. I am not criticizing something of which I am unaware, but supporting every effort made to conserve this natural monument, which the petitioners have very logically classified among our national monuments. Dividing it, selling it, would be destroying it, and I do not hesitate to swear that that is sacrilegious. It would be yet another shameful act to add to the fires that consumed Paris. 

It is indeed a sad era when, on the one hand, riots have destroyed the archives of civilization, while, on the other hand, the State, which represents order and conservation, destroys or threatens the great works of time and nature. Whether both are transformed to ruins or cash does not minimize the reality of the destruction, and I am not sure I can say that, in comparing both these vandalisms, the one carried out in cold blood, legally, and after deliberation would be the more stupid or shameful. 

The petitioners who are asking me to join my efforts to theirs, and to whom I hereby pronounce my adhesion publicly, are right to invoke the needs of the artists and the enjoyment of tourists; but there are yet other reasons to invoke, because public opinion is made up of the perfectly disdainful mediocrity of the small number of lovers who are attracted to nature. I think we can aim a little higher on this issue and appeal to the experts to show that our centuries-old forests are an essential element of our physical balance, that they conserve in their sanctuaries principles of life that we cannot just neutralize with impunity, and that all of the inhabitants of France have an immediate interest in not allowing France to be denuded of its vast shadow-casters, its humidity reservoirs that are necessary to the air they breathe and the soil they work.

An illustrious friend, the world-class poet that has just passed away, Théophile Gautier, lived with paradoxes he did not just blindly believe. One fine day, he said to us that, as compared to us, plants were sucking up our breathable air, and that his personal hygienic ideal was to live in a garden made up of asphalt-laden alleys with upholstered chairs and constantly lit houkas in place of flowerbeds.

Someone asked him to take note that, while plants absorb part of our air supply, they also give us back a hundredfold nutritious molecular elements without which we would die. He knew this very well, because he knew a lot, and he could uphold theses against himself that no one else could have better argued.   

Read Part II       

Digital Biennale at The Museum of Wild and Newfangled Art (mowna) Opening April 30, 2021

The Magic Hummingbird by Joseph Martin Waters

A new kind of art museum popped up online earlier this year, and its New York-based founders, cari ann shim sham* and Joey Zaza, say to expect no pop-up windows, data mining, advertising or any of the exploitative methods used by most free online platforms and websites. However, The Museum of Wild and Newfangled Art, with its bold yet whimsical name, is not free. It is a virtual, for-profit museum, conceived by artists for artists, featuring mostly new media and technologically-oriented art. Seventy percent of proceeds from ticket sales go to the artist, and 30 percent are used to maintain the museum up and running. 

What might be of immediate interest are the museum’s unique ethical stance and its upcoming Biennale show, intended to replace the Whitney Biennale, which has been postponed until 2022 due the the COVID-19 pandemic. “We have a unique, one-of-a-kind collection of curated art, all in one place, without ads or distractions, without cookie agreements or pop ups, without login requirements and data mining…we want our visitors to enjoy the art without manipulation,” says cari ann shim sham*, when asked about how the museum’s generous business model might compete with platforms that provide art content free-of-charge online.

Artists Speak asked cari ann shim sham* to go into detail as to why the founders of The Museum of Wild and Newfangled Art (mowna) think it's important for their museum to be ethical, what that means to them, and what is the relationship between technology and ethics to date. After citing the Center for Humane Technology as a pioneer in the fight for ethical technologies, she was quick to characterize GAFA as fundamentally unethical. 

Since mowna is a digital art museum, it also functions as a developer of new technological platforms for appreciating art, but it does so without exploiting artists or the viewing public. In order to highlight and support the role and freedom of the artist in the world, mowna pays artists a substantial commission and does not claim ownership over their copyright. The museum consults the artist in determining how his/her work is going to be displayed online, gives the artist the ability to remove an artwork from its archival collection or online store, and allows the artist’s work to be displayed elsewhere simultaneously. “We do not own the work, we simply store it,” says cari ann shim sham*. “We are pro-artist,” she says, emphasizing how a living wage for the artist is the goal. She thinks the Biennale might attract as many as one million viewers, which would translate to roughly $175,000 per participating artist, through ticket sales alone. While that’s an ambitious figure for a new arts organization, it is not inconceivable for a well-attended Biennale event. 

The mowna Biennale opens at the end of April and runs until September. It is intended to be a recurring event, to be held every two years, as the name suggests. This year’s show is curated by cari ann shim sham* and Joey Zaza and features 100 artists, including individuals, collectives, organizations and AI from 44 countries. It is viewable on any device that connects to the internet, and individual tickets are $18. While they are only valid for a 24-hour period, an interval modelled on traditional museum practice, a monthly membership costs $15 and provides around-the-clock access to the shows, collection and museum store, as well as special events, like meet the artists, curator talks, parties and mowna founder’s chats.

Black Man in America by Vance Brown and Justina Kamiel Gray

This year's Biennale features virtual reality artwork from Canada centering on the theme of the lockdown due to COVID-19, autobiographical visual and sound art meant to elicit the empathy of the viewer for the experience of a black Lebanese-Senegalese artist living in Ghana, a portrait series by Baltimore-based Zachary Z. Handler, who will photograph museum guests three time a week during May 2021, interactive virtual reality and video sculpture art from Brooklyn, a film about what it means to be a black man in America from New York City, a new media installation using soft robotics from Austria, comical gif art from Italy, and a series of experimental music videos from California, among others. For a list of some of the participating artists, see the press release here. Kicking off the Biennale on April 30 at 9 p.m. Eastern, mowna will host a special screening of the feature-length documentary The Faithful: The King, The Pope, The Princess, by Annie Berman, who will subsequently answer questions from the public. The screening will be followed by entrance into the virtual mowna party room, and an overview of the Biennale.   

As a reader, you may be skeptical of how the museum experience translates into a digital setting. I certainly am, but cari ann shim sham* assures us that it is an “intimate experience…there are no crowds in the way of the art or people taking selfies…the art is available 24/7, and you can spend as much time as you want with it.” And most importantly, it is a pandemic-free experience, or almost. Without the spread of COVID-19, this museum may in fact never have been created. So, artists, art lovers, tech geeks, students, teachers and people in search of something new from the comfort of your home, alone or in the company of friends and family, mowna invites you to explore the world of wild and newfangled art online.

Translation: Salvatore Quasimodo The Wall

Giorgio de Chirico, The Uncertainty of the Poet

The Wall 

They build a wall against you

in silence, stone and limestone stone and hate,

each day from higher up

they drop the plumb line. The masons

are all the same, small, dark

in the face, evil. On top of the wall

they mark judgements on the duties

of the world, and if the rain erases them

they rewrite them, with even larger

geometric forms. Once in a while, someone falls

from the scaffolding and immediately another one

runs to take his place. They do not wear

blue overalls and speak an allusive tongue.

The stone wall is high,

in the holes of the beams now crawl

geckos and scorpions, dark weeds hang.

The dark vertical defence shirks

from a certain horizon only the meridians

of the earth, and the sky does not cover it.

On the other side of this shield

you do not ask for grace or mayhem.

From Quasimodo’s 1959 Nobel Prize speech:
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1959/quasimodo/25676-salvatore-quasimodo-nobel-lecture-1959/

The corruption of the concept of culture, as seen in the masses, who believe they have obtained access to the paradise of knowledge, is not a modern political phenomenon; however, the methods used to manifoldly diffuse the meditative interests of man are new and faster. Optimism has become tangible. It’s just a memory game. Myths and fairytales (let’s say human anxiety about supernatural events) have degraded into the “murder mystery,” undergone visual metamorphoses in the movies or in epic tales about innovators or crime. We cannot choose between the poet and the politician. The irony of “the worldly circles,” which sometimes can be a facet of constructed indifference, reduces culture to the dark corner of its history, affirming that the framework of dissent is dramatised, that man and his pain have been and will be trapped in their usual confines, over the years, today as tomorrow. Certainly. But the poet also knows that there is an ordeal, an exacerbation of the drama; he knows that the adulators of culture are also its fanatical incendiaries: the collage of writing composed under any regime corrupts, at their center and periphery, literary groups that vie for eternity with their scant calligraphies of the soul, with the varnish of their impossible intellectual life. At particular moments in history, the cultural secretly unites against the political: it’s a temporary unity that serves to tear down the walls of dictatorship. This force establishes itself under any dictatorship, when it coincides with the quest for the basic liberties of man. This unity disintegrates as soon as, beaten the dictator, the chain of factions arises.

The poet is alone: the wall of hate rises around him as literary companies of mercenaries throw the stones. The poet considers the world from this wall, and, without going from town square to town square, like the bards, or into the “worldly” world, like men of letters, but precisely from this ivory tower so dear to those who seek to tear to shreds the romantic soul, he enters the realm of the people, not only of their desires and feelings, but also of their jealous political thoughts.

Kalki

ma tache d’huile qui glisse entre mes doigts

ma marée noire qui se répand partout dans la maison comme poussée par un piston
fiston? non, tu es une demoiselle

mon petit raisin de beaujolais nouveau

ma perle rare 

qui grimpe sur mon oreiller quand tu as faim

qui fait pipi dans ma chambre

(dans ta litière bien entendu)

et qui accapare mon lit pendant toute la journée

tu aimes te cacher comme un vieux renard

tu glousses comme un lapereau qui frotte ses confrères

le printemps est venu et tu as neuf ans

mais au fond tu n’es qu’un minou

ma chère, tu n’as qu’à me laisser dormir un peu

ma goutte de charbon

Mes règles d'or pour le bien-être universel

Je te juge si tu:

manges de la viande animale

exploites les vulnérables

ne signes aucun accord par peur de ne pas pouvoir y adhérer

dis des mensonges

fais souffrir les autres

mènes des guerres

trouves des excuses pour manquer à ta responsabilité

diminues la souffrance d'autrui

préfères exploiter au lieu d'aimer et de prendre soin de la planète et ses habitants

t'en fiches de l'avenir

t'en fiches du passé

demeures neutre dans tous les cas

ne proteges pas les autres 

es violent physiquement ou mentalement

détruis au lieu de conserver les ressources naturelles et la santé de la planète et ses habitants

te crois supérieur

ne prends pas soin de toi

ne crois pas aux valeurs universels sans hypocrisie

Je préfères ne pas avoir à juger les autres parce qu'ils se comportent bien.

Translation: Louise Ackermann To an Artist

To an Artist

Since even those who are happiest face infinite pain,

Since the ground is cold and the sky looms dark,

Since mankind here below wanders sullen in vain,

Among futile regrets and fleeting amorous darts, 

What to make of life? Oh our immortal souls,

Where to direct your desires and your secret urges?

You would possess, but here all quivers and prowls;

You want to love forever, but near death emerges.     

It’s better yet in some austere study to immerse 

Ourselves, and in an enchanted world too,

And in our beloved art to contemplate on earth,

Through one of its facets, beauty pure and true.    

Artist of unclouded brow, you have grasped it from above, 

You, whom, of all the arts, the sweetest hath drawn near,

Who envelops it in faith, a cult, tender love,

At a time when faith, cult and love, all disappear.

Ah! And as for us, for whom weakness is mistress, 

And who lack a flame to light the shadows we tread,

We step over brambles and cry out in distress,   

Walk in your bright path that you have always lead.    

Walk! so that the sky may love and smile upon thee,

So you can yearn for it yourself with a holy fire,

And outwit, your heart full of your idolatry,

The eternal pain and immense desire. 

Translation: Charles Baudelaire's Beauty

Maxfield Parrish, Contentment, 1927

I am fair, oh mortals! like a stoney dream,

And my breast, where each has been bruised shard by shard, 

Is made to inspire a love in the bard

Eternal and mute like matter serene.

I reign in the sky like a quizzical sphinx

Marrying a snow heart with the swan’s white;

I loath movement in the lines however slight,

Never in tears or laughter do I sink.

Poets, in the face of my grandiose airs,

which I seem to borrow from the proudest marvels

Will consume their days in austere study snares;

For I have, to fascinate these sheepish lovers, 

Pure mirrors, which render all more fair and tender:

My eyes, my large eyes of eternal splendor.

Translation: Victor Hugo Yes, I am a dreamer …

Ivan Shishkin, Forest

Yes, I am a dreamer; I am the friend

of little golden flowers on a crumbling wall,

and the interlocutor of trees and the wind.

You see, all of them know me. I often have

conversations with the gillyflowers,

in May, when the branches are full with perfumes;

I receive advice from the ivy and the cornflower.

The mysterious being that you think is mute,

leans over me and comes to write with my quill. 

I hear what Rabelais heard; I see laughter

and crying; and I hear what Orpheus heard.

Do not be surprised at all about what nature

says to me in ineffable sighs. I chat 

with all the voices of the metempsychosis. 

Before beginning the sacred great concert,

the swallow, the bush, the white water in the meadow,

the forest, enormous bass, and the wing and the corolla, 

all of these soft instruments, talk to me; 

I am the regular of the divine orchestra;

If I were not a dreamer, I would have been a sylvan.

Thanks to the calm in which I reflect,

by speaking softly to the leaf, 

to the raindrop, to the striped feather, I ended up  

descending to such point in creation,

this abyss where a shy trembling quivers, 

that I do not even chase away a fly!

The blade of grass, vibrating with an eternal excitement,

becomes tame and familiar with me,

and without noticing that I am there, the roses

do all kinds of things with the bumblebees;

Sometimes, through the soft blessed branches,

I fully place my face over the nests,

and the little bird, worried and saintly mother,

is no more afraid of me than we are of fear,

us, if the eye of the good Lord looked into our niches; 

The prude lily watches me approach without fury,

when she opens at sunset; the violet, 

the most modest, bathes herself in front of me; 

For these beauties I am the discreet and sure friend

and the fresh butterfly, libertine of the sky,

who cheerfully rumples a half-naked flower,

continues, if I come and pass in the shadows, 

and, if the flower wants to hide in the lawn, 

she tells her: “You are silly! He is one of us.”

Theories of Beauty

Summary of the Theory of Beauty, according to George Dickie’s “Introduction to Aesthetics”

The theory of beauty dates back to Plato, who holds a usually antagonistic and suspicious view of art since he views art as a representation of a representation, giving precedence to real material objects, which in turn are inferior to ideal Forms. Plato posits that there exists a Form of Beauty that is present in everything that we recognize as beautiful, whether in the manmade world or in nature. He influenced Lord Shaftesbury in the 18th century, who still held that the contemplation of beauty is a rational process while introducing the idea of a faculty of taste that governs the apprehension of beauty. Shaftesbury also introduced the idea of disinterestedness in the contemplation of beauty, which would be adopted by numerous other philosophers in the 18th and 19th centuries. Theories of taste, which unified the objectivity of the material world with the internal senses, governed the 18th century. In the 19th century, Arthur Schopenhauer introduced the idea of aesthetic consciousness, a special and rare state of mind, which unlike the faculty of taste presupposed a complete subjectivity of aesthetic experience.  

1. Plato — Beauty is not embodied in anything physical or spiritual. It is a single, ideal Form that has a real existence beyond our sense perception. All beautiful things have the accompanying quality of unity. Beautiful things share the qualities of measure and proportion. The appreciation of Beauty involves contemplation.
   (Forms, contemplation)
   
   
2. St. Thomas Aquinas — Forms are part of the sensory world. Cognition is important to the experience of beauty. The mind grasps a Form that is embodied in the object of experience. There is no single Form of Beauty.
   (Forms, cognition, experience)
   
   
3. Lord Shaftesbury — His theory of beauty unifies Platonism with a single faculty of taste that governs moral judgment as well as our judgment of what is beautiful. The sense of beauty is a cognitive faculty. The contemplation of beautiful things is separate from the desire to posses them. Therefore, the contemplation of beauty is disinterested or not vested in any personal interest.
   (Faculty of taste, cognition, contemplation, disinterestedness)
   
   
4. Francis Hutcheson — The perception of beauty is the object of our sensory faculties. It is in our private consciousness and is a feeling. There are several internal senses that allow us to perceive beauty. The experience of beauty is immediate, free of thought and calculation, therefore it cannot be premeditated and selfish. All beautiful things share the quality of uniformity in variety.
   (Sensory faculties, disinterestedness, uniformity in variety)
   
   
5. Edmund Burke — The sublime is separate from beauty. Beauty arises from the emotion of love, while the sublime arises from delight. Delight arises from the removal of the possibility of pain or the possibility of the anticipation of pain in experiencing. Love is disinterested, therefore our appreciation of beauty is disinterested.
   (Sublime, disinterestedness)
   
   
6. David Hume — The nature of taste should be an empirical investigation into human nature. Beauty cannot be rationally intuited, but is founded in experience. Beauty is the sum of the varying tastes of individuals, but in order to be part of the survey group from which our understanding of beauty will be derived, individuals must posses “a delicacy of taste,” and not be motivated by prevailing trends or ignorance or envy. Beauty is a feeling and it is possible to have universal agreement and objective judgments about what is beautiful because there exists a range of normal subjects to be investigated on what their sense of beauty is.
   (Experience, normative evaluation of beauty)
   
   
7. Archibald Alison — There are no special internal senses that detect beauty. There is only the association of ideas. The ordinary cognitive functions and affective faculties operate to generate an emotion of taste from all material objects in the world indiscriminately through the association of ideas. In order to give rise to the emotion of taste, material objects must become a sign of or expressive of a quality of mind. Simple emotions, simple thoughts, and simple pleasures give rise to complex emotions, complex thoughts and complex pleasures in the imagination to produce delight through sequential arisings. One association triggers another, and so material objects reflect qualities of mind. There exists a disinterested state of mind which is most favorable to the emotion of taste.
   (Association of ideas, cognition, emotion of taste, disinterestedness, any object can be beautiful)
   
   
8. Kant — Beauty is not a concept. Beauty is a reflective judgment, but since reflective judgments seek to derive new concepts from existing ones, beauty is a reflective judgment looking for a nonexistent concept. A judgment of beauty must be disinterested (we should not actively desire for an object of beauty to exist), universal (because beauty is a reflective judgment, the imagination cannot derive a new concept from beauty and so engages in free play, a universal faculty), necessary (if one person feels pleasure from the apprehension of beauty through the free play of cognitive faculties, then all people must feel the same pleasure because the cognitive faculties are universal), and recognize a form of purpose (since the recognition of a purpose in an object of beauty would entail the use of a concept, Kant states that we recognize the Form of Purpose in an object of beauty.)
   (Form of purpose, reflective judgment, disinterestedness)
   
   
9. Arthur Schopenhauer — Beauty is the object of aesthetic contemplation. To perceive beauty, the ordinary cognitive faculties function in an unusual way and slip into aesthetic consciousness, “in which knowledge tears itself free from the service of the will.” Aesthetic consciousness takes as its object a relationless Platonic Idea, which distances the subject from the object of perception, thus producing disinterestedness.
   (Aesthetic consciousness, cognition, contemplation, disinterestedness)

Translation: Charles Baudelaire Hymn to Beauty

Xavier Fabre, The Judgement of Paris, 1808

Do you rise from the deep sky or the abyss,

Oh Beauty? your gaze, infernal and divine,

Pours both of goodness and of crime,

And for that, we can compare it to wine.

In your eye you contain both dusk and dawn;

You cast your perfumes like a stormy eve;

Your kisses are a potion and your mouth an urn

That turn heroes cowardly and children brave.

Do you rise from the dark chasm or descend from the stars?

Charmed destiny chases after your skirts like a dog;

At random you sow joy and disasters,

And you rule over all and answer for nothing.

You walk over the dead, Beauty, whom you mock;

Of your jewels Horror is not the least charming,

And Murder, among your most dear trinkets,

On your proud belly dances amorously.

The ephemeral moth flies toward you, candle,

Crackles, blazes and says: Let us bless this flame!

The panting lover bent over his belle

Seems like a ghost caressing his tomb.

Whether you come from the sky or from hell, what does it matter,

Oh Beauty! enormous monster, frightening, naive!

If your eye, your smile, your foot open the door

To an Infinity I love and have never known?

From Satan or God, what does it matter? Angel or Siren,

What does it matter, if you make — fairy with velvet eyes,

Rhythm, perfume, sheen, oh my only queen! —

The universe less hideous and the moments lighter?

Translation: Art Is Life but on a Different Rhythm

Excerpt translated from French from "L'Elégance du Hérisson" by Muriel Barbery, Gallimard edition, p. 188-189.

As we walk, through the continuity of our movement without spurts, and because our culture demands it, we try to restore what we believe is the essence of life: unimpeded efficiency and fluid performance that through the absence of rupture portrays the vital élan with which we accomplish everything. Here, the cheetah in action is the norm; all its gestures are harmonious; we cannot distinguish the first one from the one that follows, and the racing great beast seems like a single and long movement that symbolizes the deep perfection of life. But as Japanese women break up the powerful deployment of natural movement with their intermittent steps, at a time when we should feel the torment that overcomes the soul at the sight of nature affronted, on the contrary, we experience a strange bliss, as if rupture had given rise to ecstasy and the grain of sand to beauty. We perceive a paradigm of Art in this offense to the sacred rhythm of life, in this impeded walk, in the excellence born of constraint.  

And so, propelled beyond a nature that demands for it to be continuous and becoming both renegade and remarkable through its discontinuity, movement attains the level of aesthetic creation. 

For Art is life but on a different rhythm. 

Translation: Flavor of Green Tea over Rice

Excerpt translated from French from "L'Elégance du Hérisson" by Muriel Barbery, Gallimard edition, p. 186-188. 

Two reasons, both related to Ozu’s films. 

The first rests in the sliding doors themselves. Since I saw my first film, “Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice,” I have been fascinated by space in Japanese life and by those sliding doors that refuse to slice through the air, sliding gently on invisible rails. When we open a door, we transform our surroundings in tiny ways. We introduce an obstacle into their full extension and an ill-advised breach of inadequate proportions. If you think about it, there is nothing uglier than an open door. Like a rupture, it introduces a provincial interference in the room that breaks the unity of the space. In the adjoining room, it foments a depression, a gaping yet stupid fissure, lost in a section of wall that would have preferred to have been whole. In both cases, it disturbs continuity without any other benefit than the ability to circulate, something that is possible through other means. The sliding door avoids pitfalls and glorifies space. Without altering its balance, it allows for its metamorphosis. As it opens, two places communicate with one another without offending each other. As it closes, it restores integrity to each. Division and coming together take place without intrusion. Life is a calm promenade, whereas otherwise, it resembles a series of break-ins.        

“It’s true,” I say to Manuela. “It’s more practical and less brutal.”

The second reason comes from an association that led me from sliding doors to women’s feet. In Ozu’s films, there are numerous shots where an actor pushes aside a door, enters, and takes off his shoes. The women, especially, demonstrate a special talent as these actions unfold. They enter, slide the door along the wall, and in two small, rapid steps inch their way to the foot of the elevated space found in living rooms. Without bending over, they remove their laceless shoes and, through a gracious and fluid movement of their legs spin around after having climbed the platform they approached with their backs turned. Their skirts swell lightly. The bending of the knee, necessitated by the ascension, is energetic and precise. The body effortlessly follows this pirouette performed on the feet. As if the ankles were tied together, a curiously broken gait ensues. However, while usually, impeded gestures evoke a sense of constraint, the small steps animated by an incomprehensible halting gait grant the seal of a work of art to the women’s feet as they walk.  

Translation: Art Is Emotion without Desire

Excerpt translated from French from "L'Elégance du Hérisson" by Muriel Barbery, Gallimard edition, p. 253-255.

What is the purpose of Art? To give us the brief but dazzling illusion of the camellia, enabling an emotional breach in time that cannot be reduced to animal logic. How is Art born? It is born of the mind’s ability to sculpt the sensory domain. What does Art do for us? It shapes and makes our emotions visible, and in so doing places on them the seal of eternity found in all works of art that are capable of embodying the universality of human affects through a particular form.

The seal of eternity … What absent life do these meals, dishes, carpets and glasses suggest to the heart? Beyond the edges of the painting, most probably, there’s the chaos and boredom of life — that endless and vain race worn out by projects; but within, there’s the plenitude of a moment of human covetousness suspended in time. Human covetousness! We cannot stop desiring, which both gives us glory and kills us. Desire! It transports and crucifies us, leading us back to the battle field each day — where we lost the previous day but that in the sunlight appears once more like a terrain full of conquests. While death is certain, desire makes us build empires destined to turn to dust, as if our knowledge of their impending doom did not affect our thirst to erect them now. It moves us to continue to want what we cannot posses, and in the early morning tosses us onto the grass strewn with dead bodies. Until our death, it bequeaths us projects that are reborn as soon as they are completed. But it is so exhausting to desire nonstop … We soon aspire to pleasure lacking quest. We dream of a blissful state that does not begin or end, and where beauty is no longer an end or a project but becomes the evidence of our very nature. Yet, this state is Art. 

Did I have to set this table? Do I have to covet these meals in order to see them? Somewhere, elsewhere, someone wanted this meal, aspired to this mineral transparency and pursued the joy of caressing with his tongue the silky saltiness of a lemony oyster. This project was necessary. It was contained in 100 other projects and made 1,000 others spring to mind. This intention to prepare and enjoy a feast of shellfish, this project belonging to someone else in real life, was necessary for the painting to be realized. 

But when we look at a still life, as we enjoy without pursuit the beauty that carries the glorious and unmovable portrayal of things, we rejoice for what we did not have to want; we cherish what we did not have to desire. Then, because it portrays a beauty that speaks to our desire but is born of the desire of another, because it indulges our pleasure without being part of any of our plans, because it gives in to us without our making the effort to desire it, the still life embodies the quintessence of Art, the certainty of timelessness. Without life or movement, the mute scene embodies time exempt from projects, perfection removed from duration and its weary greediness, pleasure without desire, existence without duration, beauty without will.

Because Art is emotion without desire.

Translation: Are There Universals or Only Particular Things?

Excerpt translated from French from "L'Elégance du Hérisson" by Muriel Barbery, Gallimard edition, p. 314-316.

However, it is fascinating in principle. Are there universals, or are there only particular things? As I understand it, that is the question to which William [of Ockham] devoted the crux of his existence. I think it’s a fascinating question. Is each thing an individual entity — in which case, the similarities between things are just an illusion or an outcome of language, which works through words and concepts; through generalities that designate and incorporate many particular things? Or are there really general forms, in which singular things participate and which are not simple effects of language? When we say a table, when we call the table by name, when we form the concept of the table, do we only refer to the table in front of us, or do we really go back to a universal table entity, which is the basis for the reality of all existing particular tables? Is the idea of the table real or just part of our minds? In which case, why are certain things alike? Does language artificially group them into categories for the sake of making them convenient and understandable to humans, or are there universal forms in which all specific forms participate?

For William, things are singular, and the reality of universals is erroneous. There are only particular realities; generalities exist only in the mind. Believing that there are general realities complicates the simplicity of things. But are we so sure? Just last evening, I was asking myself about the congruence between a Raphael and a Vermeer. The eye recognizes in both a shared form. Both participate in it. It is the form of Beauty. And I believe that that form must be grounded in reality, that it is not simply an expediency of the mind categorizing in order to understand, discriminating in order to apprehend. You cannot classify anything that is not classifiable, group anything that cannot be grouped, or bring together anything that cannot come together. A table will never be a “View of Delft.” The human mind cannot engender this dissimilitude, in the same way that it does not have the power to give birth to the profound solidarity that unites a Dutch still life to an Italian Virgin and Child. 

Everything, like each table, has an essence that gives it its form. All works of art are part of a universal form that alone seals them. Sure, we do not directly perceive this universality. That is one of the reasons why so many philosophers have objected to considering essences as real — because we never see anything but the table in front of us and not the universal “table” form; we only see the painting in front of us, and not the essence of Beauty itself. Yet … yet, it is there, in front of our eyes. Each painting by a Dutch master is an incarnation, a striking apparition that we can only contemplate through the singular, but which gives us access to eternity, timelessness, a sublime form.

Eternity is looking upon the invisible.

Translation: The Grace of Art

Excerpt translated from French from "L'Elégance du Hérisson" by Muriel Barbery, Gallimard edition, p. 116-117.

Eternity escapes us.

On those days when all of our romantic, intellectual, metaphysical and moral beliefs — which years of instruction and education have attempted to inculcate in us — capsize on the altar of our profound nature, society — that territory charged with sweeping hierarchies — drowns in the nothingness of Meaning. Gone are the rich and poor, thinkers, seekers, decision-makers, slaves, good and evil, creatives and conscientious, union supporters and individualists, progressives and conservatives. They become no more than primitive hominids whose grins and smiles, posturing and finery, language and codes, written on the genetic map of the average primate, boil down to this — maintain your social standing or die.

On such days, you desperately need Art. You ardently strive to reconnect with spiritual illusion. You passionately hope that something will save you from biological destiny, that poetry and greatness will not be ousted from this world.

Then, you drink a cup of tea or watch an Ozu film in order to withdraw from the rounds of jousts and battles, the daily fare of our dominating species, and bestow the grace of Art and its major works to this pathetic theatrical show. 

Translation: Exercise Without Love

Excerpt translated from French from "L'Elégance du Hérisson" by Muriel Barbery, Gallimard edition, p. 116. 

Sometimes though, life looks like a phantom comedy. As if torn from a dream, we look at ourselves acting, and stunned to realize how much of our lives we expend in maintaining our most primitive needs, we ask ourselves stupefied, what is Art? Our frenzy of grins and glances suddenly seems utterly insignificant; our cozy nest, the fruit of a 20-year indebtedness, a pointless barbarian custom; and our position in the social ladder, so painstakingly acquired and so eternally precarious, an unsophisticated vanity. As for our progeny, we contemplate it anew, and we are horrified because without the guise of altruism, the act of reproduction seems profoundly displaced. We are only left with sexual pleasures, but gone down the river of primal abjection, they flounder accordingly — exercise without love does not fall within the bounds of our well-learned lessons.