In this short story (later abandoned), I shrank away from my own private sensory impressions—under the pretext of fictionally embodying an earlier existence I had never experienced—but why did I refuse to open my eyes? Apart from the historical meaning of The Tempest or the disturbance provoked by my observation of this work, the reading of a letter of which I believed myself to be the author had encouraged me to maintain that this ancient canvas contained AT THE PRESENT TIME a visible thought. A thought, translated by artistic means, but in such a way as to move it forward in time—as if just short of or just beyond the possibilities of figurative representation.
I would have granted that Giorgione might have wanted to destroy his painting, having despaired of providing a representation of the impossible; and also that the magic of the lightning flash, according to the aesthetic of the end of the Quattrocento, might come down to us several centuries later as somewhat dimmed or unpersuasive. And that the capturing of the lightning flash would remain what it has never ceased to be for art: an impossibility comparable to the lack of lived life in even the most vibrant of Early Renaissance portraits.
I recall my feelings at that time. It was midwinter and I was looking at the painting and, without making the slightest movement, was anticipating an event, although I didn’t know of what sort. Soon, I sensed that a light was flooding the space and illuminating the soldier and the half-naked Gypsy woman suckling her baby. I was caught up in the landscape of the painting. The lightning flash removed the shadows and traversed the objects without reducing their opacity; it enclosed and traversed me, as well.
I’ve seen hundreds of visitors pass in front The Tempest. Some would only react after having identified its signature (ah, Giorgione’s Tempest!); others would pass by without noticing anything whatsoever. My behavior was unusual enough to trouble me for a long time after my visits. At the end of prolonged contemplation, the lightning—fictionally restrained within the limits of the frame—agreed to offer me the blinding explosion I was anticipating. The original strike of lightning was, as it were, restored by a second flash, in which time was deferred and perturbed by a double emergency—the initial jolt of the painter who had managed to fix this flash in an immobile duration, and its subsequent seizure by my admiring glance, which had to follow a reverse path, resolving the lightning’s original duration into an abrupt effulgence in the now. I suspected Giorgione of having foreseen such a result, but how and why?
I remember several stormy nights in mid-August in the Ardèche. I saw the clouds crumble down and burst over the Meyrand pass and the lightning illuminating mountain and valley. But the fascination exerted by Giorgione’s work doesn’t stem from some sort of painterly, representational “truth”—even if the painter’s art stirs in us the most vivid impression of a resemblance to what nature displays to us in the blink of an eye. In The Tempest, the most ephemeral moment of suddenness and the most prolonged moment of duration both undergo a violent reversal that modifies our fundamental perception of time.
It’s possible that some obscure motivation leads me to exaggerate. Is Giorgione’s procedure as singular as I had thought? Any portrait requires this same finesse: a smile, a subtle gesture, the intent of a gaze are as difficult to represent as the sudden flash of a storm. This very rational train of thought led me to abandon the above-mentioned short story, which would have necessarily led to my utter confusion.
But seven months later, I was somehow again caught up by my own story. I found myself at that time in a state of mind in which the mere mention of Giorgione’s name or that of any artist would have made me laugh self-consciously.
On the evening of September 22, contrary to my usual habits, I ate and drank more than was good for me, and went to bed quite out of sorts. Very early the next morning, I left home and wandered on foot through the forests as far as Châtillon-sur-Seine (a hike I undertake once a year). A remote inn on the banks of the Ource, near Voulaines-les-Templiers, was my intended goal after the first leg.
I was walking at a steady pace, admiring the sky, the impressive plant life, and all the things that came into my view at every turn of the road: the sod huts of the old foresters, the bushes with their nesting birds, the carpets of moss smirched with bloodred muscaria mushrooms, the animals here and there.
Late the following afternoon, I sighted a grove of elms among the oaks, these towering trees, spared from the disease that had ravaged their species, formed a perfect circle. Their majestic crowns commanded the respect of all the other nearby forms of vegetation. In the middle of this circle, the low grass lay like a freshly mown lawn, presenting me with several clusters of wild orchids—the delicate Ophrys apifera, or bee orchid.
Seated between two elms, I observed the columns of light between the branches. Evening was falling and the sky was smudged with clouds. Suddenly, several gusts of wind altered the lie of the clouds and the storm broke, rapid and bottomless, with unexpected intensity. I stood there, soaked from head to toe. Just preceding this uproar, a vivid flash had lit up the forest. It died out almost immediately in the approaching half-light. One or two hundred yards behind me, lightning fell upon the clearing. A shredded elm pointed its blackened splinters toward the sky. I ran off, gasping for breath, and without looking back, headed for my inn.
The next morning, still frightened by the intensity of the storm, I gave up on pushing toward Châtillon-sur-Seine and returned to my home in Plombières as soon as possible. During the miserable night spent in the inn, I had discovered that The Tempest and Antonio Brocardo’s letter to Giorgione (which I had read for the first time two years earlier) were fragments of one and the same work, a diptych simultaneous in its optical and mental image—the painting and the epistle indissolubly comingled into a choreography of time.
I needed to verify this. Since I couldn’t return to Venice, I gathered together some reproductions and I read and reread Brocardo’s letter to his painter friend. Surprise and alarm amplified my initial enthusiasm: to capture the lightning as Giogione had done would involve far more than creating the mere illusion of freezing time. I sensed that the painter had engaged in a mercilessly lucid act—to gamble his entire project, as well as all his artistic ambitions, on a fraction of a second, on the sudden disappearance of himself. One can read the watermark pressed below the surface of the sky of The Tempest: “Everything is about to disappear. Everything shall disappear.”
This visual thought—neither a lament for years gone by nor a mortification intended to instruct us to forget the vanities of this world—has no other purpose than to exalt the ephemeral, to praise the stubborn persistence of movement, to extol the precise stroke: the passionate leap of the dancer ahead of a fall.
This discovery modified all my convictions. It gave new meaning and an entirely different cast to certain facts—later associated with Lausanne and Budapest—whose true import had until then escaped me.
At the moment I’m writing this (fall equinox, 6:34 A.M.), I have before my eyes the following sentence of Robert Walser’s, written toward the end of his life: “Write while dancing.” And also these words that Suzanne Cordelier attributed to an exceptional dancer (La Argentina) on May 10, 1936. As legend has it, she addressed a full house, overwhelmed with emotion: “I’m quite willing to dance some more for you, whatever you like, but I’ve run out of music.” Followed by renewed applause as the curtain came down and the lights dimmed and the dustcovers were draped over the velvet of the loges. The image of La Argentina entering her house two months later and collapsing on the threshold. I also have before me a little photo of Vera Ouckama Knoop, the sight of whom inspired Rilke to make a last effort at writing his Sonnets to Orpheus and his final Elegies. Images lost in infinity, in the depths of a hall of mirrors, drowned in the All that is Absence. Farewell, face (captured in a snapshot). Farewell, dance figure. Farewell, final whirl of death.