It is the season of silent waiting before the first snow that will bring memories of visitors and family. The forests rolling over the hills are armies of threadbare veterans retreating from the summer wars. One senses the throb of muffled drums. I go walking with the master: we see deer tracks in the soft dirt, a neighboring farmer leading two big white horses with steaming flanks down the road to the fast river that spilled over its banks many years ago when my host first moved here. There are several other writers living in the vicinity, he tells me.
What is Writer’s Land? It is a territory of the imagination, more familiar than any existing place, that area of the heart that the writer speaks from. Sometimes it will be consciously delineated and populated, as with William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha or Shelby Foote’s Jordan County or Gabriel Marquéz’s Columbia of the mind where retired colonels and killers live. Very often it is the shadowed land of one’s youth that cannot be found on any map. It may be left undefined so that only recurring situations will constitute an environment, giving one the feeling of having been there before. It could be political surroundings — somewhere you escape to because it provides a sanctuary where the problems of the day can be dealt with metaphorically (with Zamyatin and Kapek in their respective socialist paradises these ‘worlds’ were futuristic), or the place you run away from because, paradoxically, the issues are starker and the implications more momentous there (with Kafka it was that of the suspended nightmare).
Arthur Miller’s world is mostly urban and imbued with the political consciousness of the working classes. Allen Ginsberg probably lived at the chanting intersection of Jewish liturgy and Buddhist ritual where the prayer flags flap, but it was more likely the land of desire than that of quietude. It may be a land of traveling, as it was with Arthur Rimbaud, who pushed to the frontiers of himself and was destroyed by what he found there.
It can be a land of time, often tucked into a specific period, and then the borders will be drawn by the story of unfolding. With older writers — William Styron, Norman Mailer, Edgar Doctorow, Philip Levine — you notice how they revisit it phrase by phrase: a familiar landscape smoothed by their attention to the quirks of consciousness and burnished by their lives. The land they walk over is as loyal and hand-tooled as an old dog or a family retainer. They come across deer tracks, pass neighbors leading white horses to sound-spitting rivers. There are still impenetrable copses though, and the unexpected dragons of depression and madness.
South Africa used to be considered ideal writer’s territory, a country of heroes and villains, of loyalty and betrayal, of climatic extremes and severed heads; but it was always too easily and seductively so: the challenges of violence and confrontation, of distinction and acceptance, were exacerbated as forms of escape into the never-never land of portent and moral prancing. Under those circumstances it is difficult for the writer not to become an angel. And the angel has no sex.
Writer’s Land is the invisible ‘book’ behind the words (these here now, also) — larger than the volume but confined between its covers. It may not be attractive, it may be that place which is covered with the anonymity of burial sites, and the extent of your success in making it live will depend on your capacity to familiarize the reader with its contours and its natives, thus on the sounds of your sentences and the way meaning glances like light off your words; but if you identify and inhabit it you will have a voice, and at least be a citizen of somewhere.
REALITY IS AN OPTICAL ILLUSION
Over the last few days I had the opportunity to become acquainted, a little, with David Hockney’s theories on the uses of optics by master painters from the very early Renaissance on. I must admit that I was skeptical. It just seemed to me inconceivable that such methods — using mirrors at first and later all sorts of lenses to project images on canvas that would then be traced or copied in an effort to create the illusion of ‘reality,’ employed systematically over centuries, and all of this collectively referred to as ‘secret knowledge’ by Hockney — would not have been written about. After all, historians of the time, like Vassari, wrote exhaustively about the lives of the painters and their techniques, and every major practitioner had a whole studio of apprentices working with him. Or, for that matter, that no art historian or contemporary painter worth his wits has since tumbled to the same discoveries and conclusions. To my knowledge there’s not a whisper in the dusty tomes, although it is true that the paintings themselves sometimes refer obliquely to the ubiquity of these potential devices in the vicinity of the makers: eyeglasses resting on the pages of an open book, someone reading with a magnifying glass, the convex mirror as in Van Eyck’s wedding portrait of the Arnolfinis — a dark, bulging, all-seeing eye. The (partial) answers to my caveat would seem to be that, a) there are (or were) indeed written traces of these ‘occult’ goings-on, a reference to Caravaggio with his head stuck under a black cloth here, the hosed legs sticking out comically, some other puzzling process observed there. .; and b) that the old masters were far more secretive about their discoveries, and therefore protective of their businesses, than is generally realized. Jan van Eyck, for instance, is said never to have revealed the composition of his marvelous glazes. Artists of the time belonged to guilds and brotherhoods. All thought of themselves as alchemists — were they not bringing into the world images more real than what the naked eye could ever perceive and was this not producing the sublime from base materials? — and in order to push back the limits of realism, or its depiction (or substitution?), they used whatever measuring trick, broth, talisman, golden rule or theory they could lay their hands on. They knew they were indulging in magic. All creation, be it in words or visually, is a transgression, lifting the skirts of existential darkness, and manipulating the mysterious power this ability bestows is not only human but possibly obligatory if you want to communicate with the unknown. The initiated one has a pact with the mysterious. It was only normal, in order to protect and preserve their power, that certain discoveries or ways of doing should be kept confidential. If the patron king or cardinal didn’t think they were magicians of a kind they probably never would have received the commissions they did. Still, can it really be believed that since six centuries no-one has cracked this momentous code, that all scholars and lovers of fine imagery were struck by some historical blindness?
On Friday last, over lunch at the New York Institute for the Humanities, Hockney’s accomplice in this crusade to invent the wheel, a physicist working in the field of optical science, named Charles Falco, failed to convince the audience completely. Doubts were the deeper shadows framing the highlights of his intellectual bavardage. The Irish term is ‘blarney.’ He first explained why and for how long he has been a motorcycle enthusiast and then tried to pull the wool over our eyes with all sorts of jargon relating to ‘laws of nature,’ ‘depth of fields of vision,’ hypotheses and theories (and how a scientific ‘theory’ is a radically different bird from the artistic one), ‘vanishing lines of perspective,’ fractured edges and fractions of degrees and angles. In other words, he could measure the magic. And, if needed, develop the tools to do this with. It seemed to me odd though, that one should start with the ‘scientific’ proofs and proceed via the methodology to arrive, after much close scrutiny and more than just a slight sleight of eye, at the ‘problem.’ Never mind that none of the old fellows would have approached painting so systematically, even if they thought they did. All artists have a bee in the bonnet. Douanier Rousseau thought he was the greatest living painter in the ‘Egyptian style’ and Picasso in the ‘Greek style.’ He told Picasso so. The creative process has the empirics of ‘natural’ growth (one thing calling up the other and then establishing relationships) and more than a smattering of voodoo (ascribing transformative and ‘covert’ power to these relationships), but many decisions made during the course of the process are arbitrary, destructive and irrational. When I pointed out that all of these paintings born from projected images, at least in part, would then have had to be painted upside down, and this should be visible to the perceptive eye since brushstrokes go from the top down in their movements and are from left to right or inverse, depending on whether you’re left- or right-handed, he lamely refuted the flight of my argument and held that this could not be visually verified. I concluded that he has no understanding of what the hand and the eye do in the game of drawing or applying color to a surface, and he certainly is mistaken in thinking that artists proceed like scientists.