“Do let me see your glory!” says Moses to God in today’s Office of Readings. As he stands outside the holy-of-holies tent, and God’s voice issues from a column of cloud…
God replies: “I will make all my beauty pass before you, and in your presence I will prounounce my name, ‘Lord’; I who show favors to whom I will, I who grant mercy to whom I will. But my face you cannot see, for no man sees me and still live.” [Exodus 33:18-20]
Nothing much has changed. Neither our poignant, heartfelt plea–nor God’s hiddenness.
I can’t say enough for a book I mentioned recently: Immortal Thoughts: Late Style in a Time of Plague by Christopher Neve.
It’s about the art of painting, the life of the artist, aging, decaying, dying, pandemic lockdown: the human condition in other words. Neve writes of the last years and works of Poussin, Constable, Pisarro, El Greco, Chardin, Morandi, Rouault, and Chaim Soutine among others.
I first came across Soutine at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia and instantly fell in love. His life, personal hygeine, finances, romances and health were a perpetual mess. He died in agony at 50, basically fleeing from the Nazis, of stomach cancer.
“In talking about Soutine’s last paintings,” Neve writes, “I need to discuss the idea of risk. Risk in painting is characteristic of many artists’ last work, in particular that of Rembrandt, Titian, and Soutine. That is because they knew far too much to be held up by tenchical difficulties and because it no longer mattered to them very much what patrons and buyers might expect. But it was infinitely more than that”…
“In Soutine’s case extreme anxiety and angst are part of his method of inner expression turned outwards, his way of making something his own by realizing it in a system of energetic marks. Nietzsche insists that it is necessary to get in touch with one’s passins and then submit them to discipline. But this version of self-realization is patently not a discipline. It is more like the terrible freedom and loneliness of Sartre’s self-making. To get in touch with your inner genius you act now, this very moment, on impulse and exactly true to your own nature. So the artist, in this turmoil of the psyche, takes risks. He has to….This energetic ardour, an uncontrolled appetitie for paint and life, can produce out of violence and disorder and profound anarchy an occasional truth, the truth he first imagined as if by accident.”
Another book I’m hugely enjoying: In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility, by Costica Bradatan, a Professor of Humanities at the Honors College at Texas Tech University and Honorory Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of Queensland in Australia whose work has been translated into more than twenty languages.
So far he’s covered Simone Weil, Mahatma Gandhi, and Romanian philosopher E.M. Cioran, who “turned his back on social acceptability.” (Well! I hope so…).
Yukio Mishima, who I personally consider a total nutcase, God rest his soul, is fourth.
“Gleefully breaching the boundaries between argument and storytelling, scholarship and spiritual quest, Bradatan concludes that while success can give us a shallow sense of satisfaction, our failures can lead us to humbler, more attentive, and more fulfilling lives. We can do without success, but we are much poorer without the gifts of failure.”
Maybe…but Mishima and arguably Weil were both suicides. That’s not “failure”–that’s abdication, at least they way they did it, which in both cases to my mind stemmed not so much from humility as from, weirdly….pride.
Anyway, Bradatan has a sense of humor (so sorely lacking in today’s world), and is a great storyteller, and the stories provide wonderful fodder for reflection, internal argument, and identification. Which I’m pretty sure was his aim.
Here’s what was on my mind after reading the section on Weil.
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