At the same time the extraordinary richness of the initial ‘J’ activates in the viewer the very sensation of the calligrapher at work. Like the paradox of the Cretan liar it denies what it asserts and asserts what it denies. For, writing ‘Jan van Eyck was here, 1434’, and writing it so beautifully and so boldly right in the centre of the picture and just above the tiny scene of the Crucifixion, the painter ensures that he is in some sense still here, today, brought to life again by the viewer whenever the painting is looked at, just as for the believer Christ crucified rises again at every performance of the Mass.
In the same way the mirror beneath the inscription both affirms and negates the effect of mirrors, reproducing for ever an image that can only have been fleeting and asking us to note the act of artistic making without which it would not exist. Looking at the painting we experience wonder: wonder that such a work could have been made, wonder at the fact that Jan Arnolfini and his wife and Jan van Eyck existed then and left these traces, and wonder too that we exist and are seeing this, here, now.
4 Holding and Grasping
Every day the prisoner in solitary confinement is confronted with the same finite set of objects: bed, chair, table, walls, door, bucket. He has seen these so often, has run his hand over them so often, that he knows them by heart. Because he knows that today they will be the same as they were yesterday and that tomorrow they will be the same as they were today he finds that they have lost the power to look back at him. By contrast, the room in which productive work is being done, the room one enters with anticipation each morning and which one is free to leave at will, grows sanctified by use. Unnoticed, taken for granted, it is nevertheless felt to be beneficent, almost, for the one at work in it, a blessed space.
That is why for the prisoner, a window, however small, is so important. For the sky is never the same from minute to minute or from day to day, and there is always the possibility that a bird will fly across the sky as the prisoner looks out. Moreover, the sense that this is the same sky as stretches over those who are free gives the prisoner daily hope, reminds him every day that he is still alive.
That is why, too, daily exercise is so important to the prisoner and, if possible, books to read and pen and paper with which to write. Otherwise the lack of movement, the lack of conversation with others, the sheer monotony of his existence, may gradually lead him to feel that he has lost his own body, and the sense of that loss may make him lose his mind.
Of course when there is nothing to do there is always the wall to run your finger over. But the prisoner touches the wall of his cell only to remind himself of what keeps him shut in. Or perhaps he is driven by the faint hope that his fingers may tell him what his eyes cannot, that a crack has appeared in the wall, or that the crack which was already there has grown so large that he may just be able to squeeze through it to freedom.
He does not merely touch the walclass="underline" he examines it, he explores its surface, he tests its firmness.
But it is as he thought: nothing has changed. The following day, however, for want of something to do, he starts to examine it, to test it again.
If I touch what I have touched a thousand times and seen a thousand times it is as though I had not touched it. On the other hand if, with my eyes closed, I touch something that I cannot recognise, I will pull my hand back sharply in fear and revulsion.
But what of the familiar feeling of the garden wall under my hand as I leave the house at dawn to walk out into the hills? What of the familiar feel of the tennis racquet in my hand as I prepare to serve? Of the hockey stick or cricket bat as I take the field?
Clearly it is not just a question of familiarity. It has something to do with trusting things, with taking them for granted as allies and companions rather than as enemies and obstructions. If the garden wall were not there, reassuringly, under my hand, I would feel that something was wrong. If the racquet handle felt unfamiliar my service would disintegrate. Wall and racquet are here like the mother's hand which the child instinctively takes as he sets out for a walk. He does not take the hand to confirm anything or to test anything; he merely takes it because that is what one does at the start of a walk.
Yet if the hand is withdrawn his world collapses. Suddenly that hand, to which he had never given a thought, becomes the most important thing in the world to him. He realises he needs it the moment he has lost it. He knows now that he has to have it. He lays siege to his mother till she returns it to him. Yet once he has got it back his attitude to it has changed. He no longer merely holds it; knowing that it could at any moment be withdrawn, he now clings to it.
What had always been there when he wanted it has suddenly been withheld. It has been withheld for reasons the child cannot fathom. And it becomes important, crucial even, that this should not happen again. The owner of that hand, instead of being the unseen, unthought-about ground of the child's universe, now becomes an opponent, and calculations have to be made as to the best means of defeating that opponent. Should the owner of the hand be threatened? Or cajoled? Or both?
It is no longer enough, though, merely to regain the hand a second or third time. What the child needs is for the status quo ante to be regained, for a situation to be put in place whereby the devastating arbitrary withdrawal of the hand will never again take place. To that end he bends every thought, to that end he strains every fibre of his being.
Yet the more he clings to the hand he has now got hold of again, the more restless will the owner of the hand become. The mother had been happy to hold her child's hand, but now that he has started to cling she becomes less happy. She feels that perhaps this excessive dependence is unhealthy, that it can only lead to sorrow in the future; or she suddenly resents the child's assertion that he has a right to her hand at all times. There is, probably, a mixture of both, for she is as confused by the emotions she has unwittingly aroused as is the child himself. The fact is that, suddenly, in the place of life being simply lived, there is drama.
No one has explored this abrupt and violent transition and its consequences better than Proust. One could almost say that A la recherche, for the whole of its enormous length, explores nothing but that.
His life as a unique individual begins for Marcel with an episode very similar to the one I have just described. He has gone to bed as usual and, as usual, is expecting his mother to come up and kiss him goodnight. But Swann has come to dinner and his mother is too busy to appear. Marcel grows more and more anxious; eventually he can stand it no longer and sends a servant with a message to his mother, begging her to come. She does not reply. Confusedly he determines to wait up for his parents and waylay them on their way to bed. He carries out his plan, confronting the surprised and sleepy pair on the stairs with a kind of heroic despair, for while he longs for his mother's presence he also dreads his father's anger. But there is no other way: he cannot, at this stage, hope to catch his mother alone.
To his surprise it is his father who gives in at once to his entreaty, while his mother, perhaps out of fear of appearing weak and indulgent in front of her husband, tries to refuse. But the father is adamant: ‘Go on. Stay with the boy. Can't you see he's overwrought?’