31st May, 2015

"And it had been a source of keen pleasure when, below the delicate line of the violin-part, slender but robust, compact and commanding, he had suddenly become aware of the mass of the piano-part beginning to emerge in a sort of liquid rippling of sound, multiform but indivisible, smooth yet restless, like the deep blue tumult of the sea, silvered and charmed into a minor key by the moonlight."

 -- Proust, Swann's Way--

I have today again been consumed by the question of Art vs. Nature, and how the two concepts differ, and which holds greater sway in my affections. In my foregoing post, I noted that, after an imaginary conversation with a professor on this subject, I had come to doubt the hierarchy (my hierarchy) in which Nature presides as a Hyperion over the comparable satyr Art. About three quarters of the way around Buhl Lake, and a good half-hour into the phantasmal dialogue, I was forced to concede that Art was the conduit by which I arrived at my exalted opinion of Nature. I stand by that concession even now, a week hence. Yet today's thoughts have asked further concessions of me, this time by virtue of Vivaldi. I am now requested not merely to admit a preference for viewing Nature through the lens of Art, but further to admit that works of art may on occasion trump works of nature.

Let us consider the opening Allegro of Vivaldi's "La Primavera." We may, for the sake of this discussion, elide (or, at least, substantially abridge) mention of the ritornello, for though the ritornello sets out the concerto's seasonal theme, it suggests Spring rather as an abstraction than as an actuality. The ritornello does not directly mimic any specific Spring characteristic as do the piece's subsequent elements, but rather evokes a general Spring mood--a sense of something buoyantly magisterial, like a young prince stately cantering over greening meadows (assuming one may stately canter; possibly a canter precludes stateliness; the ritornello in the above-featured video attempts a canter and does diminish somewhat in stateliness thereby). In its generality and abstraction the ritornello in "La Primavera" does not compete with any specific aspect of Nature and thus does not raise the question of Nature vs. Art.

The first violin solo, however, does compete with Nature. This solo is one of those mathematically-errant solos that typify the Baroque, whereby the Ante-Nicene riddle of the trinity finds itself orchestrally reenacted, or, to put it more mundanely, the "solo" comprises three instruments. These three instruments each speak or sing to one another in that prettily interruptive and overlapping way that typifies woodland soundscapes. One would be hard-pressed to listen to this violin solo and not bring to mind birdsong. Yet the violin solo offers not an imitation of birdsong so much as a translation, a translation that grasps something Nature herself has failed to grasp. In "La Primavera," Vivaldi presents his listeners with a seeming Platonic form of birdsong, a form that reveals actual birdsong to be only an imperfect copy.

Could it be possible that I might prefer the birdsong of Vivaldi to the birdsong of Buhl Lake? No, no, I could not admit that. Paired side-by-side and out of context, I would, it is true, have to acknowledge the aesthetic superiority of the former, but actual birdsong does not exist independent of birds, and I would rather have my lakeside strolls bereft of Vivaldi's strains than bereft of Nature's. The same goes with the river-sounds and thunders that follow the latter returns of the ritornello. No river ever sounded so enchanting, nor so essentially river-like, as Vivaldi's stringed ripplings, yet beside an actual brook-bank I would rather have water. Zeus never conjured storms so striking as the Red Priest's, yet I would sooner retain the acoustics of Olympus at my window than trade them for the grander euphonics of Art.

I am not so very changed. I still persist, as a general rule, in loving Nature first and next to Nature Art. Yet I do now have to grant that, in some cases, if the Art is placed side-by-side with Nature, I am inclined to love Art the more. That is to say, if the formulation reads "Art, and next to Art, Nature"--then I, true to pseudo-tautological impulse, do now-and-then reverse my Landorian creed: when Art is next to (i.e. side-by-side with) Nature, I do now-and-then love Nature next to (i.e. after; less than) Art.

25th May, 2015

I have let myself be scatterbrained today. Indeed, I have let myself be so all days of late, and it will not do. This airiness of structure (this absence of structure) is time thrown to the zephyrs. I need to focus. Deliberate, careful, concentrational study, that's what is required. A program of paying attention. 

Seneca advises us to take one thought each day to consider deeply. Just one. One from all the thousands. Wise words. But the tragedy of wisdom is that it always operates so much more smoothly on paper than in practice. In practice it is impossible to know which thought one should concentrate on each day until the day and all its thought-production is through. And the thought that is one's darling in the morning is seldom the same as that which bewitches one in the afternoon, and neither of those comprise the cynosure of the night. 

This morning my chief candidate for thought-of-the-day had to do with the distinction between art and nature. I wanted to determine which of these parties reigned (or should reign) supreme, or whether both governed in coalition over man's aesthetic faculties. In the past I typically sided with Landor (Walter Savage) on this question and loved nature first "and next to nature art." Yet last semester a professor whose opinion I hold in high regard told me that, for him, nature must ever play second fiddle to art, and though this professor did not dilate upon his reasons for believing so, ever since that conversation I have found myself more uncertain of my nature/art hierarchy. Which brings me to my morning walk around Buhl Lake, whereupon, having been mesmerized for several minutes by the painted back of a fire-furred caterpillar on the pathway, I lapsed into a renewed imaginary dialogue with said professor, wherein I tried to win him round to my nature-championing point of view. Yet, much to my puzzlement given that I was both voices in the conversation and was thereby odds-on to succeed in my persuasions, it was not so much the professor that came round to my point of view as it was I that came round to his. I had engineered the ruse (in this imaginary conversation) of having the professor stop by some honeysuckle bush and read one of its leaves as if it were a poem (as if the leaf were the creation of a poet), thinking that this would apprise the professor of the superior complexity and beauty and compositional-perspicacity of nature. But my ruse backfired when the professor pointed out that, in the context of my experiment, it was precisely his familiarity with art that enabled him to recognize the splendors in the leaf in the first place. And dash it all, he was right. I had vowed nature was to art as Hyperion to a satyr, and yet without the satyr art my Hyperion looked set to become a mere mortal.

But these were morning thoughts and it is no longer morning and they no longer fit the hour.

24th May, 2015

The above image is a still life by Henri Fantin-Latour, titled Still Life, dated 1866. I do not know that any artist before or after has ever come so close to capturing what it is to look upon the world, to really look upon the world, to look as men and women look. A photograph does not capture what it is to look upon the world, nor yet does photographic realism. The world does not greet the eye of man as it greets the lens of a camera; the world is not experienced as unamalgamated matter. Nor, on the other hand, do abstract, impressionistic, surrealistic or conceptual works approach what it is to look upon the world. The world is not experienced as unamalgamated mind. Fantin-Latour's great genius is to have looked at the world and, steering clear of the Scylla of materialism and the Charybdis of idealism, to have simply painted what he saw.

If Fantin-Latour had only been a little less successful, I would not so desire to push the tray further back upon the table. It makes me almost anxious to see it thus precariously arranged.