The Van Gogh Doctrine

The lesson Van Gogh would teach us is that the artist is someone for whom much in life is negotiable (hence the stereotype of the artist as libertine); what is not negotiable, however, is the artist's vision. She must paint what she sees.

Post-Kant, this conviction is rooted in the belief that truth resides, if anywhere, in that personal vision--and that personal vision made articulate.

The artist understands intuitively that there is an audience to be addressed; the more visionary an artist, the more actively she must create an audience for her work. The relation is one of call and response.

In canvas after canvas, Van Gogh (the former evangelist) called out to the world--to those whom he knew or instinctively believed must exist in the world. As his work matured, each new canvas contained the call. And little by little, the audience (not knowing itself, initially, to be such) heard something and, hearing something, was drawn out.

Budapest, Part Two

Roughly between 1870 and 1920, Budapest made a bid to be considered the center of European culture. To this day, the people of Hungary are the beneficiaries of the creative energies of those years--monumental architecture, statuary, classical music, painting, etc. The century that followed was less than kind. Today, the citizens of Budapest are living with a variety of legacies: war and revolution, the persecution and near decimation of one of Europe's largest and most prosperous Jewish communities, then Soviet domination for several decades followed by a "liberation" to capitalism. One gets the sense that the Hungarian people have emerged a little shell-shocked. At present, Hungarian politics have taken a sharp turn to the right. It is an understandable shift, but a worrisome one as well.

Budapest is a great city, an important nexus of humanitas, of cultural refinement and civility. May it find its way to past glories, but renewed in tune with 21st century exigencies: wiser for the years of suffering and humiliation, mindful of the mistakes of the past.

Budapest

The Mazeppist continues his rihla to the urban hubs of humanitas with a visit to Budapest--home to a once-thriving (and presently reviving) Jewish community and, of course, the turbe of none other than Gulbaba--whose probable fictionality makes the pilgrimage to his "grave" all the more delicious.

O the humanity!

Paris

The Mazeppist has returned to Paris for a few days of wandering the city's streets, haunting its cafes, museums, parks, bookstores, restaurants, art galleries, churches, mosques, and universities.

Why? Because Mazeppism is a humanism and humanism is an urban phenomenon. Ever since the first humanist epic (Gilgamesh) celebrated Uruk the sheepfold, humanists have looked to cities as repositories of the best that has been thought and said (and built and written, painted, sculpted, performed and sung). Cities are stages upon which the human tragi-comedy is improvised in concentrated fashion: its glory and misery, wealth and poverty, avarice and generosity, and everything between. Paris is a grand venue de l'humanisme.

In December 1995, the Mazeppist visited Paris with a copy of al-Ghazali's Munqidh in hand (W. M. Watt's translation). He found this late 11th-early 12th century confession something of a revelation. Indeed, it would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that the direction his life and work has taken in the past two decades began in Paris and with that book.

This trip, he is reading Van Gogh's letters, Irving Stone's Lust for Life, and seeing as much of Van Gogh's painting as he can find in a brief visit. He expects similar revelations to unfold, and suspects that they already have.

But time alone will tell.

Spots of Time

Theology After Kant

Theology is literally "God-talk." In Literature and Dogma, Matthew Arnold--one of the most incisive of Victorian religious thinkers--noted that the word "'God' is used in most cases as by no means a term of science or exact knowledge, but a term of poetry and eloquence, a term thrown out, so to speak, at a not fully grasped object of the speaker's consciousness, a literary term, in short; and mankind mean different things by it as their consciousness differs" [see Nathan A. Scott's remarkably insightful (if ultimately flawed) essay on Arnold in The Poetics of Belief (1985), 47].

Theologians, on the other hand, are people who pretend to have mastered a science and claim exact knowledge. With very few exceptions, they exhibit an unparalleled fluency in what Ludwig Wittgenstein called "language on holiday."

After Kant, any assertion that unmediated contact with the Real or the Thing-in-Itself is possible (or that it is possible to unequivocally express such contact in language) must be held suspect. After Kant, we must learn to content ourselves with humanitas.

Santayana's Missing Stanzas

In the summer of 1985, I picked up this book (The Modern Library's Twentieth Century American Poetry, edited by Conrad Aiken) because I was attracted by its deep blue cover and the red rectangle at its center. Once I opened it, I discovered that the book's beauty went far beyond the cover: for the collection included strong poets I had never before encountered (Aiken himself, but also Amy Lowell, Vachel Lindsay, Trumbull Stickney, and Hart Crane among others). I soon found myself luxuriating in its pages whenever I had the chance and continued to do so for several months. One group of poems in particular held my attention, in part because they perplexed me to no end: George Santayana's Odes.

Frankly, I could not make sense of them, for they did not seem to me to relate at all to his thinking as I had understood it to that point.

I was (and remain) a great admirer of Santayana. I began to read him during my junior year in college (1980-81) and, after graduation, continued to read him apace. What I admired about him was his naturalism, skepticism, aestheticism, and appreciation for the religious imagination. Given those characteristics of his thought, I could not seem to recognize the Santayana I encountered in the Odes--though, in retrospect, I can see better today (thirty years on) how this group of poems relates to his work as a whole. Indeed, lately I have come to agree with George Howgate that "the poet in Santayana is perhaps his deepest, most ineradicable self" (see The Complete Poems of George Santayana: A Critical Edition, edited by William G. Holzberger, Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1979, 23). As a consequence, I am of the opinion that his philosophical work ought to be read through the lens of his poetry and not vice versa (as I had done).

When I initially read the first ode, the question with which it opens shocked me: for Santayana anticipates that a god will "choose" the poet to worship him "from afar, with inward gladness,/At sunset and at sunrise, in some Persian/Garden of roses" or, failing that, in some Greek or Roman setting beneath a "myrtle/Hallowed by Venus." Given Santayana's appreciation for classical antiquity, the latter context was not a complete surprise; but Iranian religion? Indeed, the allusions to Iran continue throughout the poem: "A silken soft divan, a woven carpet/Rich, many-coloured;" "Chanting the ditty an Arabian captive/Sang to Darius." Santayana confessed to longing for a god to arrive and transport him to "a chamber in an eastern tower" where he might repose and "dream awhile, and ease a little/The soul long stifled and the straitened spirit,/Tasting new pleasures in a far-off country/Sacred to beauty." For an American in 1985, it was difficult to think of Iran as a country "sacred to beauty." Of course, that was because, like most Americans then (and now), I knew next to nothing about Iran.

I remember shaking my head in complete confusion as I read and re-read those lines; eventually, I would simply bury them deep in my psyche.

The second ode was just as scandalous as, in it, Santayana took his generation of Americans to task for talking of freedom while enslaved to riches. I knew only too well that my generation was no different than his and I sympathized with the poet's disgust--and, yet, I was torn. At twenty-five, it seemed not unreasonable to me that wealth could be honestly acquired and commanded for good. At fifty-four, I don't deny that possibility, but I wonder how often it is put into practice.

The second ode also ended curiously: with the poet imploring Nature to grant him not riches but "what is needful:--" and, there, the ode ends.

I have since learned that the second ode does not, in fact, end with that line. Aiken chose to truncate it without notice to the reader of his anthology and without explanation. The remaining stanzas are as follows:

A staunch heart, nobly calm, averse to evil,
The windy sky for breath, the sea, the mountain,
A well-born, gentle friend, his spirit's brother,
Ever beside him.

What would you gain, ye seekers, with your striving,
Or what vast Babel raise you on your shoulders?
You multiply distresses, and your children
Surely will curse you.

O leave them rather friendlier gods, and fairer
Orchards and temples, and a freer bosom!
What better comfort have we, or what other
Profit in living,

Than to feed, sobered by the truth of Nature,
Awhile upon her bounty and her beauty,
And hand her torch of gladness to the ages
Following after?

She hath not made us, like her other children,
Merely for peopling of her spacious kingdoms,
Beasts of the wild, or insects of the summer,
Breeding and dying,

But also that we might, half-knowing, worship
The deathless beauty of her guiding vision,
And learn to love, in all things mortal, only
What is eternal.

[The Complete Poems, 140-141].

Santayana knew Conrad Aiken at Harvard and even formed a poetry reading group with him in 1910-1911. The odes discussed here (along with three others, forming a group of five) were first published in 1894 in Sonnets and Other Verses, Santayana's first book (see The Complete Poems, 43). He was, at the time, teaching in Harvard's philosophy department. Aiken's Modern Library anthology was published in 1944; the same collection of poems, however, had appeared in England in 1922 as a sort of "missionary effort" to acquaint the British public with contemporary American poetry. I could speculate as to Conrad Aiken's reasons for shortening the second ode, but I'll leave such speculation to others.

Ode III contains a critique of European colonization of the "New World" that was at least a century ahead of its time and adumbrates the theme of mankind as a kind of blight upon the earth, living on borrowed time.

Ode IV, steeped in agrarian imagery, sounds a more conciliatory note--if human beings would only learn to live in harmony with nature she has much to teach them.

Ode V is a love song to the Mediterranean whose beauty the poet declaims as "the eternal/Solace of mortals." Albert Camus would have approved.

I must confess that I have come to cherish these five odes by Santayana and read them regularly as a kind of secular scripture. The first ode no longer affronts me as it did three decades ago--indeed, I share his longing for respite in a "far-off country/Sacred to beauty." His criticisms of human greed and "vulgar/Circle of troubles" (Ode III) strike me as wholly appropriate.

I also hear his call: Lift the great ploughshare, clear the stones and brambles,/Plant it the deeper, with thy foot upon it,/Uprooting all the flowering weeds that bring not/Food to thy children.

Patience is good for man and beast, and labour/Hardens to sorrow and the frost of winter,/Turn then, again, in the brave hope of harvest,/Singing to heaven. (Ode IV).

The Dark Side (Or Is It Center?) of Biblical Religion

I don't precisely recall when I first read Norman Cohn's Cosmos, Chaos, and the World to Come (first edition, 1993), but I believe it was while I was still in graduate school. What I do recall most clearly was the disturbing effect the book had upon me.

The only book by Cohn that I had read before Cosmos was Europe's Inner Demons--a tour de force study of the paranoid manias that have periodically gripped Christian Europe, leading to the mass torture and slaughter of social outcasts.

So, when I picked up Cosmos, I anticipated a bracing read. What I found, however, was more than I had bargained for.

The thesis that I had expected to find in the book would have been straightforward enough: that "biblical religion" (the literary substrate of those world religious traditions that arose in the ancient to late ancient Near East) has a dark side insofar as it encourages a kind of utopian thinking (technically, a literary genre called "apocalypse") that occasionally erupts into waves of political and/or religious violence.

Stated in that fashion, Cohn's book promised no real surprises: after all, I am an historian of religion; this is fairly routine stuff in my trade. But, unless I mistook Cohn's message (and, having just devoured the book for a second time, I don't think I misread him), Cohn's argument is not as pedestrian as I had anticipated: for he places apocalypticism not at the margins of biblical religion (as I might have done), but at its very center--or at least the center of what biblical religion had become by the time that the author calling himself "John of Patmos" penned his visionary screed.

Given as I am to utopian inclinations, Cohn's argument created within me not a little cognitive dissonance. With Norman O. Brown, I admire the so-called "prophetic tradition" within biblical religion; indeed, I regard it as one of the latter's redeeming qualities. What Cohn demonstrates quite convincingly, however, is that the "prophetic tradition" I revere tended to be more triumphalist and exclusivist than I am usually willing to entertain. Moreover, the "closing" of the prophetic era in the post-exilic period of Judean thought and piety did not necessarily check those less than admirable tendencies in the prophets--and what came to replace prophecy (i.e., apocalypticism) made the triumphalism and exclusivism of the biblical prophets look like child's play.

Apocalyptic Troubadour:

Even the "good thought" of my beloved Zarathustra is shown to have inaugurated some of the exclusivism and triumphalism that I find so unattractive in biblical literature. No one, in Cohn's reading, has clean hands.

And while he does not discuss the rise of Muhammad's reformist movement (the precursor of what would become, in time, the world religion of Islam), the implications of Cohn's study are clear: the more one comes to recognize Islam as the third major iteration of biblical religion, the more one has to evaluate the degree to which the apocalyptic inheritance of the previous centuries of Near Eastern religious development was absorbed and elaborated upon in Qur'an, ahadith, the broader literary tradition and, more generally, in extra-literary acts and institutions that compose most of what we think of as the history of Islam.

Again, such considerations are, in one sense, routine for an historian of religion: there is really nothing new here. It is a question of emphasis--but an emphasis we would do well to consider carefully if we do not wish to distort the historical record. Even today, apocalypticism is alive and well in Islam and among Muslims--as well it should be, considering the conditions under which tens of millions of Muslims are forced to live. But is it at the center of Islamic tradition? Cohn's work on biblical religion suggests that it may be viewed in that fashion. Is this fair?

Perhaps more curious (because seemingly less justified by prevailing socio-economic and political conditions) is the rise and intensification of apocalypticism among white American evangelical Christians. How on earth they can imagine themselves to be living with a gun to their heads and their backs to the wall is truly mysterious. Then again, maybe not: for so much depends upon a given individual's perception of his or her position in the world and what attracted him or her to Lifeboat Christianity in the first place.

And then there remains the underlying psychopathology Cohn named "Europe's inner demons"...

Of course, in this case, as in all others, we must carefully distinguish between causation and correlation. Cohn does not necessarily do that but, then, his approach is more literary than not. Even so, this distinction is of the essence when contemplating the kinds of historical questions Cohn raised in his scholarship.

Grotesques: A Cautionary Tale

At his desk the writer worked for an hour. In the end he wrote a book which he called "The Book of the Grotesque"...The book had one central thought that is very strange and has always remained with me. By remembering it I have been able to understand many people and things that I was never able to understand before. The thought was involved but a simple statement of it would be something like this: That in the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as a truth. Man made the truths himself and each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts. All about in the world were the truths and they were all beautiful. The old man had listed hundreds of truths in his book. I will not try to tell you all of them. There was the truth of virginity and the truth of passion, the truth of wealth and of poverty, of thrift and of profligacy, of carelessness and abandon. Hundreds and hundreds were the truths and they were all beautiful. And then the people came along. Each as he appeared snatched up one of the truths and some who were quite strong snatched up a dozen of them. It was the truths that made people grotesques. The old man had quite an elaborate theory concerning the matter. It was his notion that the moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood.

Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio.

Call Me Ishmael

I.

What god will choose me from this labouring nation
To worship him afar, with inward gladness,
At sunset and at sunrise, in some Persian
Garden of roses;

Or under the full moon, in rapturous silence,
Charmed by the trickling fountain, and the moaning
Of the death-hallowed cypress, and the myrtle
Hallowed by Venus?

O for a chamber in an eastern tower,
Spacious and empty, roofed in an odorous cedar,
A silken soft divan, a woven carpet
Rich, many-coloured;

A jug that, poised on her firm head, a Negress
Fetched from the well; a window to the ocean,
Lest of the stormy world too deep seclusion
Make me forgetful!

Thence I might watch the vessel-bearing waters
Beat the slow pulses of the life eternal,
Bringing of nature's universal travail
Infinite echoes;

And there at even I might stand and listen
To thrum of distant lutes and dying voices
Chanting the ditty an Arabian captive
Sang to Darius.

So would I dream awhile, and ease a little
The soul long stifled and the straitened spirit,
Tasting new pleasures in a far-off country
Sacred to beauty.

II.

My heart rebels against my generation,
That talks of freedom and is slave to riches,
And, toiling 'neath each day's ignoble burden,
Boasts of the morrow.

No space for noonday rest or midnight watches,
No purest joy of breathing under heaven!
Wretched themselves, they heap, to make them happy,
Many possessions.

But thou, O silent Mother, wise, immortal,
To whom our toil is laughter,--take, divine one,
This vanity away, and to thy lover
Give what is needful:--

III.

Gathering the echoes of forgotten wisdom,
And mastered by a proud, adventurous purpose,
Columbus sought the golden shores of India
Opposite Europe.

He gave the world another world, and ruin
Brought upon blameless, river-loving nations,
Cursed Spain with barren gold, and made the Andes
Fiefs of St. Peter;

While in the cheerless North the thrifty Saxon
Planted his corn, and narrowing his bosom,
Made covenant with God, and by keen virtue
Trebled his riches.

What venture hast thou left us, bold Columbus?
What honour left thy brothers, brave Magellan?
Daily the children of the rich for pastime
Circle the planet.

And what good comes to us of all your dangers?
A smaller earth and smaller hope of heaven.
Ye have but cheapened gold, and, measuring ocean,
Counted the islands.

No Ponce de Leon shall drink in fountains,
On any flowering Easter, youth eternal;
No Cortes look upon another ocean;
No Alexander

Found in the Orient dim a boundless kingdom,
And, clothing his Greek strength with barbarous splendour,
Build by the sea his throne, while Sacred Egypt
Honours his godhead.

The earth, the mother of once godlike Theseus
And mighty Heracles, at length is weary,
And now brings forth a spawn of antlike creatures,
Blackening her valleys,

Inglorious in their birth and in their living,
Curious and querulous, afraid of battle,
Rummaging earth for coals, in camps of hovels
Crouching from winter,

As if grim fate, amid our boastful prating,
Made us the image of our brutish fathers,
When from their caves they issued, crazed with terror,
Howling and hungry.

For all things come about in sacred cycles,
And life brings death, and light eternal darkness,
And now the world grows old apace; its glory
Passes for ever.

Perchance the earth will yet for many ages
Bear her dead child, her moon, around her orbit;
Strange craft may tempt the ocean streams, new forests
Cover the mountains.

If in those latter days men still remember
Our wisdom and our travail and our sorrow,
They never can be happy, with that burden
Heavy upon them,

Knowing the hideous past, the blood, the famine,
The ancestral hate, the eager faith's disaster,
All ending in their little lives, and vulgar
Circle of troubles.

But if they have forgot us, and the shifting
Of sands has buried deep our thousand cities,
Fell superstition then will seize upon them;
Protean error,

Will fill their panting heart with sickly phantoms
Of sudden blinding good and monstrous evil;
There will be miracles again, and torment,
Dungeon and fagot,--

Until the patient earth, made dry and barren,
Sheds all her herbage in a final winter,
And the gods turn their eyes to some far distant
Bright constellation.

IV.

Slowly the black earth gains upon the yellow,
And the caked hill-side is ribbed soft with furrows.
Turn now again, with voice and staff, my ploughman,
Guiding thy oxen.

Lift the great ploughshare, clear the stones and brambles,
Plant it the deeper, with thy foot upon it,
Uprooting all the flowering weeds that bring not
Food to thy children.

Patience is good for man and beast, and labour
Hardens to sorrow and the frost of winter,
Turn then, again, in the brave hope of harvest,
Singing to heaven.

V.

Of thee the Northman by his beached galley
Dreamt, as he watched the never-setting Ursa
And longed for summer and thy light, O sacred
Mediterranean.

Unseen he loved thee; for the heart within him
Knew earth had gardens where he might be blessed,
Putting away long dreams and aimless, barbarous
Hunger for battle.

The foretaste of thy languors thawed his bosom;
A great need drove him to thy caverned islands
From the gray, endless reaches of the outer
Desert of Ocean.

He saw thy pillars, saw thy sudden mountains
Wrinkled and stark, and in their crooked gorges,
'Neath peeping pine and cypress, guessed the torrent
Smothered in flowers.

Thine incense to the sun, thy gathered vapours,
He saw suspended on the flanks of Taurus,
Or veiling the snowed bosom of the virgin
Sister of Atlas.

He saw the luminous top of wide Olympus,
Fit for the happy gods; he saw the pilgrim
River, with rains of Ethiopia flooding
Populous Egypt.

And having seen, he loved thee. His racked spirit,
By thy breath tempered and the light that clothes thee,
Forgot the monstrous gods, and made of Nature
Mistress and mother.

The more should I, O fatal sea, before thee
Of alien words make echoes to thy music;
For I was born where first the rills of Tagus
Turn to the westward.

And wandering long, alas! have need of drinking
Deep of the patience of thy perfect sadness,
O thou that constant through the change of ages,
Beautiful ever,

Never wast wholly young and void of sorrows,
Nor ever canst be old, while yet the morning
Kindles thy ripples, or the golden evening
Dyes thee in purple.

Thee, willing to be tamed but still untamable,
The Roman called his own until he perished,
As now the busy English hover o'er thee,
Stalwart and noble;

But all is naught to thee, while no harsh winter
Congeals thy fountains, and the brown Sahara
Chokes not with dreadful sand thy deep and placid
Rock-guarded havens.

Thou carest not what men may tread thy margin;
Nor I, while from some heather-scented headland
I may behold thy beauty, the eternal
Solace of mortals.

--Odes, George Santayana

American Contributions to World Civilization

The twin peaks thus far, the yin and yang of the original American soul or psyche (as Emerson prophesied), are Whitman and Melville.

Fragments of a Lost Gnostic Poem of the Twelfth Century

Found a family, build a state,
The pledged event is still the same:
Matter in end will never abate
His ancient brutal claim.

Indolence is heaven’s ally here,
And energy the child of hell:
The Good Man pouring from his pitcher clear
But brims the poisoned well.

Herman Melville

Advice From Vincent

"Do go on doing a lot of walking & keep up your love of nature, for that is the way to understand art better & better. Painters understand nature & love her & teach us to see."

--Vincent to Theo van Gogh, January 1874.

Van Gogh's Vision

In his painting, Van Gogh turned to texture in an attempt to render visible to others the vibrancy or life force that he could see--literally see--in the world around him.

Chinese Proverb

A small saint runs up to the mountains, but a great saint lives in the city.

Yeats on Tagore Yields to Thoughts on van Gogh

W.B. Yeats was a fan of Tagore's Gitanjali and wrote an introduction to an English edition of that book of poems. Here, in part, is what he had to say:

We had not known that we loved God, hardly it may be that we believed in Him; yet looking backward upon our life we discover, in our exploration of the pathways of woods, in our delight in the lonely places of hills, in that mysterious claim that we have made, unavailingly on the woman that we have loved, the emotion that created this insidious sweetness. "Entering my heart unbidden even as one of the common crowd, unknown to me, my king, thou didst press the signet of eternity upon many a fleeting moment." This is no longer the sanctity of the cell and of the scourge; being but a lifting up, as it were, into a greater intensity of the mood of the painter, painting the dust and the sunlight, and we go for a like voice to St. Francis and to William Blake who have seemed so alien to our violent history.

Had Yeats only known Hafiz and Rumi!

Perhaps the "mood of the painter" as a holy mood is best represented by Vincent van Gogh's attempt to paint the sublimated ecstasies of the everyday:

Van Gogh, The Red Vineyard at Arles.

As Theo van Gogh wrote to a correspondent about his brother in 1889:

"That head of his has been occupied with contemporary society's insoluble problems for so long, and he is still battling on with his good-heartedness and boundless energy. His efforts have not been in vain, but he will probably not live to see them come to fruition, for by the time people understand what he is saying in his paintings it will be too late. He is one of the most advanced painters and it is difficult to understand him, even for me who knows him so intimately. His ideas cover so much ground, examining what is humane and how one should look at the world, that one must first free oneself from anything remotely linked to convention to understand what he was trying to say, but I am sure he will be understood later on. It is just hard to say when."

The Mazeppist wonders if that day of comprehension has yet to arrive--or even if it is too much to hope that it will ever dawn.