Sometimes I sit here trying to coax words to come out and play. I think of them wafting in the wind, high above the clouds, like Platonic ideas separated from our world and yet forever intertwined with it. I've always thought of words as being available, ready and willing to be strung along, if only the writer allows himself to become receptive to their quiet message of possibility and creativity. Sit still and they will drift from the clouds to your page. That's what I tell myself when I feel like I am getting nowhere.
In this sense writing is no different from all other art forms; we have the tools, we should just use them. Words are to a writer what colours are to a painter, aren't they? When I think of the similitude between expectant canvas and expectant page, glaring as it may appear, I feel that this idea of 'blankness to fill', with words or colours, doesn't quite pay justice to the inherent difficulty of creating, of moving from one state of matter (blank, emptiness, nothingness) to another (colour, story, painting). But is the page really blank? Aren't words in existence regardless of my putting them on the page? What happens when I decide to inject them with a specific type of life on my page?
Many years ago I read that Michelangelo detested oil painting. He saw landscape painting as 'a vague and deceitful sketch, a game for children and uneducated men' and portraiture as 'a flattery of idle curiosity and of the imperfect illusions of the senses'. He didn't stop there, for he wrote to Benedetto Varchi: 'The more painting resembles sculpture, the better I like it, and the more sculpture resembles painting, the worse I like it. Sculpture is the torch by which painting is illuminated, and the difference between them is the difference between the sun and the moon. [...] If he who wrote that painting was more noble than sculpture shows the same understanding in other things as in that remark, my servant girl could do better'.
Such remarks confused me at the time because, while my eyes could read the words, my mind could not process the message. How could such a great painter dismiss one of his art forms so readily? But I understood nothing of him then, and, most important of all, I had never seen any of his work in real life. The turning point took place at the Louvre some years later. It was then that I experienced the Stendhal Syndrome (my second one in life, I should say). It descended upon me like icy fog over a lake, with my heart suddenly accelerating in my chest and my mouth drying up as if I were sliding into shock in slow-motion. The chattering of others faded into a whisper as I caught a glimpse of The Dying Slave at the staircase-end of the Galerie Michel-Ange.
Much has been said about this sculpture in relation to the Tomb of Pope Julius II and in relation to Michelangelo's sensual, monumental work, regardless of the subject (also see The Rebel Slave which, incidentally, was right next to him). Yet, it wasn't all that I knew from the books that sent me into an emotional over-drive; it was the figure itself, emerging from the block of marble as if it had always been within it, that thrilled me beyond all logic.
To see so much perfect beauty caught in the moment of fighting for the life that nature appeared to have intended for it, changed my perception of art. I still love painting but, my dear reader, I can tell you that there and then I understood Michelangelo's deepest reasons for referring to painting as a deceitful sketch, as colourful phantoms that prize the attraction of colours over the pure idea. There and then I witnessed the fight of art against matter, forever frozen in time, forever bearing witness to art-in-the-making, forever demonstrating the immense effort of the process and the magnificent result at the end of it, the butterfly risen from the caterpillar.
The Dying Slave, and all of Michelangelo's sculptures, most typically the enormous David, are so far from us, high up on their pedestals, behind ropes and barriers, that we end up watching from afar. But while we do so because taking them in up close is impossible in more than one sense (Moses springs to my mind as well), as I pushed among tens of gawping tourists, I really only wanted to be alone with him.
I wanted to be able to touch him, I wanted to impress my retina with every single minute mark on the finished, and unfinished, features; I wanted to understand the secret of The Making (was there one?) as I expected him to burst out of the marble, coming to life as I understood life. These are curious feelings dear reader; after all this is a sculpture that, on a more basic level, shows life surrendering to death. But art isn't prescriptive and its greatness is linked to our engagement with, and response to, it.
A few days ago, as I was reading Muriel Barbery's The Gourmet, I came across this passage:
'A good marble-worker knows his material. He senses where the cut – which already exists, just waiting to be revealed – will yield to his blow, and he has already divined, to the nearest millimitre, the shape that will emerge, a figure which only the uninformed might impute to the will of the sculptor. No, on the contrary, the sculptor merely unveils the shape – for talent consists not in inventing shapes but in causing those that were invisible to emerge.'
Don't we all live this when we write? I often feel that the words are already on the page before I put them there. I know that as we fight with them daily, looking for them, changing them, removing them, adding them, rejecting them furiously, our writing itself is encapsulated within the never-ending fight of process against matter. Our matter, the words, aren't dead when they lie waiting and dormant in our heads; they are already pulsating in expectancy, waiting to be excavated, chiselled, shaped up, unveiled and polished.
I must confess that when I re-read the most difficult parts of some of my writings, I wonder why they seemed so difficult as I was excavating them. They look in their element on the page, as if they always belonged there, as they were invisibly written until I started deciphering them with a lit candle behind the page. And let's be clear on one thing: we don't need to be Michelangelo; nobody but him is. But when I think back on The Dying Slave and what he has taught me, I shake my head in disbelief. What was I thinking, waiting for him to come to life? He already lives.
[Are you wondering how on earth I captured these images with nobody else in sight? Because I returned to him every day and I discovered that the best time to visit the Louvre is on Wednesday and Friday evenings, when it closes at 10 pm and when you'll be going around pretty much on your own past 7 pm. And so I went again and again, every day, until it was only me and him.]
Comments