presence

A painting that knows no evil. by Gerardo Muñoz

In several places of his Lectures of Aesthetics, Hegel refers to Dutch painting as a way to thematize the concept of completion that fulfills being in the world. For a moment his commentary brings to bear a state of the mundane while avoiding the vulgarity of the overachieving surface that would define the general tendency of modern painting. True, Hegel’s indictment of Dutch painting does not negate the modern sensibility either, insofar as the portraits of the Flemish tradition fail to disrupt that is always held incredibly visible in the frame of pictorial representation. The artistic triumph of Dutch painting depends on a specific oscillation between the inner and outer experience of the subject visible range of depiction. This is not an exclusive one-directional movement towards the immanence of life; which Carlo Levi will denounce as the estrangement from the world, but rather a synthesis that gracefully falls on the sensuous activity of painting just at the moment that appearance dispenses in the world. 

Thus, the emergence of Dutch painting was only possible in a specific form of life that was resolutely experiential in nature and spiritual rich. As Hegel writes in a first moment in the Lectures: “the Dutch in their taverns, at weddings and dances, at feasting and drinking, everything goes on merrily and jovieall, even if matters come to quarrels and blows; wives and girls join in and a feeling of freedom and gaiety animates one and all…this spiritual cheerfulness in a justified pleasure, constitutes the higher soul of pictures of this kind” [1]. And this spiritual freedom, sublated from the necessities and constraints of external things in the world, validates a concept of the ‘ideal of life’ that is transcendent only to its sense of living. Hegel notes that Protestantism facilitated the Dutch a materiality for this sense of worldly transcendence, of communitarian deificatio, allowing them to have, in his words, “some footing in the prose of life” [2]. So, Dutch painting is predominantly concerned with depth; and this depth is not concerned with the absorption of the spectator, but quite literally, almost in a physical way, enmeshed in the inner tonality of everyday figures. This is their inner being made visibly manifest. The manifested and gathered presence of this inner and outer movement of the infinite is precisely what retains the imperturbable trace of the divine beyond time; indeed; an eternal Sunday of life, as Hegel says in another important moment: 

“This painting has developed unsurpassably, on the one hand, through and through living characterization in the greatest truth of which art is capable…For this reason we have before us no vulgar feelings and passions but peasant life and the down-to-earth life. lower classes which is cheerful, roguish, and comic. In this very heedless boisterousness there lies the ideal feature: it is the Sunday of life which equalizes everything and removes all evil; people who are so whole-heartedly cheerful cannot be altogether evil and base”. [3] 

It is well known that in the art historical discipline, the moment of Dutch painting has been understood within the framework of the scientific and optical revolution of that century; a new “faith in the eyes”, to follow Francis Bacon’s terms, capable of generating a concrete and rational knowledge of the “common world” of a new, more geometrico, regime of light [4]. But nothing could be further from how Hegel’s synthesis approached the sensibility of Dutch painting; mainly, as fundamentally a site of the overcoming of evil because it was not alien to the comic downfall of human experience. In Dutch painting, Hegel reminds us, it is not that evil or wrongdoing is removed from the factical life; rather, it means that the comic is a nested experience that can grasp and transfigure the miseries or the disasters beyond taxative transactions of the social world and preparing the conditions for a kallipolis. 

Although it is not clear who are the Dutch painters that Hegel had in mind when writing about a painting that enters into the “Sunday of life”, certainly the pictures of Pieter de Hooch – “A Dutch Courtyard” (1660) comes to mind – where distant and miniscule figures smile at each other in the open encounter of a place. The erasure of evil from painting is achieved not from stating the dogma through which the world could transcend and reverse the fall from nature, that is something like a new “faith in the visible”; it is more the event that accounts for the surrounding as it becomes oblivious to the very artifice of depiction. In this sense, the imperturbable state of Dutch painting is achieved as a life that dwells in the folds of the world as it retreats from the force of anticipation. And, if according to Chrysippus, evil is nothing but losing the capacity of affection or mediation of our inner sensibility; what the Dutch pictorial order brings to bear is that the ‘good’, rather than being a substantive function of the will and contingency, it can only be accessed in a form of life that is indistinct from the inconspicuous and breathable space through which it dwells.

And what is the sensibility of the comic if not what remains ungraspable in each and every in a painterly expression in a world in consonance, a place without remainder? In other words, if there is a painting that has abdicated from evil, it is because its has attuned the soul to an exteriority that is no longer dependent on the weight of the sign. It is still the business of the mute things (Poussin) in order of the beautiful. This is the state the state of grace that Schelling thought the plastic arts could bestow human sensuous experience after the irredeemable apotheosis of nature: “In painting a lovely being that is neither  sensuous nor spiritual, but rather ungraspable, diffuses itself over the figure and nestle into all the figures and to each oscillation of the extremities. This being, which as we said, is ungraspable yet perceptible to everyone, is what the Greek language calls kháris and we call grace (Anmut) [5]. And the movement of grace in painting is what initiates the transfiguration of death – the muted voices of the dead – into a divine whose sole task is the disclosure of presence. 

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Notes 

1.  G.W. F. Hegel. Aesthetics. Volume I (Oxford University Press, 1975), 169-170.

2.  Ibid., 597-98.

3. G.W. F. Hegel. Aesthetics. Volume II (Oxford University Press, 1975), 886-887.

4. Svetlana Alpers. The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (University of Chicago Press, 1983), 91. 

5. F.W. J. Schelling. “On the relationship of the plastic arts to Nature” (1807), Kabiri : The Official Journal of the North American Schelling Society, 2021, Vol. 3, 146.

Marruz’s Mount of Transfiguration. by Gerardo Muñoz

In 1947, the very young Cuban poet Fina García Marruz published the liturgical poem Transfiguración de Jesús en el Monte (Ediciones Orígenes, 1947), which stands in the modernist tradition series of attempts to probe the divine nature of language after the flight of gods and the triumph of the new secular jargons. If earlier in the century a well known Italian philosopher will predict that the international language of the future will be that of technical terms; the English Catholic poet David Jones, will reaffirm that we are “living in a world where the symbolic life (the life of the true cultures, of institutional religion and of all artists) is progressive eliminated – the technician is master. In a manner of speaking the priest and the artists are already in the catacombs, but separate catacombs – for the technician divides to rule” [1]. And if “liturgy” originally meant “public service” and the sphere of gestures, as suggested by Lubienska de Lenval, then Transfiguración has to be read, even into our days, as an attempt for language to measure to the transfiguration of revelation, in which the poem is a sacramental form that retracts language to possibilities of retaining communication.

In fact, Transfiguración de Jesús en el Monte, reinforcing the liturgical repetitions of an hymn and a sacred chant, enacts a flowing rhythm (“en tanto que”) that assesses the limits of the ineffable; a pure exteriority that is the negative or wound of language without ever being able to transcend it. In this sense, Marruz’s poem is only the poetic anabasis to the impossibility of a guided sacrament to organize interiority and visibility. Only the mystical can mediate between exteriority and the crisis of appearance. In an almost programmatic fashion, we read in the second part of the poem: “oh, difícilmente podríamos comprenderlo / Él se ha vuelto totalmente exterior como la luz; / Él ha rehusado la intimidad y se ha echado totalmente fuera de sí mismo” [2]. Transfiguration is the event that exiles oneself from the self (phygé), and in which language can generate contact with something other than its own conventions. This is why they [the witnesses and the martyrs] cannot provide an account about the transfigured revelation – just like anyone cannot truly provide a narrative, except by betraying the experience – except by their hearts as if being mysteriously called by a singular name (“ellos sienten que dentro de su corazón alguien / los ha llamado misteriosamente por su nombre”). 

How can language disclose a sense of exteriority that is capable of moving past the autonomy of signification and self-referentiality of language? Can language befall into exteriority? Marruz provides an answer to this question, which can be taken as her contribution to the aporias of modern poetics: poetry can only attune to transfiguration as a cohabitual of a communicating being. In the year that the poem was published, Marruz also wrote in the winter issue of 1947 Orígenes a dense essay titled “Lo Exterior en la Poesía” (“The exterior in poetry) where she claims that “the heart of poem is always outside of it – it should not be that the poet can offer infinite variations of a secret self-possessed knowledge, but rather to rediscover the liturgy of the real; the extreme degree of visibility, which is also its great escape” [3]. What could the “liturgia de lo real” have meant for Marruz in 1947? Marruz does provide a clearcut theological definition of the exteriority as the “angelic”, which does corroborate the hymnological dimension of language, a transcendence between beings of the invisible. The liturgy of the real that defines the exteriority of the poetics of life does not entail a Romantic elevation by the Poet, but the effort to animate reality beyond an alienated monologue. This is why Marruz writes that “only a dialogue can realize an impossible communication, mystical, whenever it does take place in all of its purity” [4].

In 1947 Marruz went a step further than her fellow poets Gaztelu & Lezama Lima, who had defined transfiguration as a learning exercise of the potentia dei of the divine (“a todo transfigurarse sigue una suspension y el ejercicio del Monte era solo un aprendizaje”) [5]. Read side by side with Antelme’s Angel of Reims, one could very well say that for Marruz there is an event of transfiguration whenever transcendence delivers communication between beings, soul to soul; a relation that can one truly speak of the ungrounded and commencement. The liturgy clamored in language is not the memory of an original Adam severed from Nature, but the transfiguration of a linguistic relationship with the world. This might be the secret to Marruz last two verses: “como la infancia que acuña nuestro Rostro allí / donde no puede ser despertado”. If transfiguration also entails recapitulation, this means that this is not a process of forward becoming, but of retaining the atemporal detention that, like that of childhood, traces our silhouette as both figural and pure presence in the bushes of language. 

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Notes 

1. David Jones. “Religion and the Muses” (1941), in Epoch and Artist (Faber&Faber, 1959), 134.

2. Fina García Marruz. Transfiguración de Jesús en el Monte (Orígenes, 1947), 6.

3. Fina García Marruz. “Lo Exterior en la Poesía”, 19. 

3. Fina García Marruz. “Lo Exterior en la Poesía”, 22

4. Ángel Gaztelu & José Lezama Lima. Editorial: “Éxtasis de la Sustancia Destruida”, Nadie Parecía, Número IX, Nov, 1943, 1.

Prados Such’s Dormido en la yerba (1953). by Gerardo Muñoz

Emilio Prados Such’s postwar book Dormido en la yerba (1953), long out of print since its publication, is the most clear and straightforward literary document of a poetic voice that stands as one of the foremost attempts at thinking the nexus of existence to the divine in the tradition of the twilight of the gods. Dormido en la yerba (1953), albeit its direct Lucretian overtone, does not enact a metaphoric appeal of a return to the physis of nature; rather for Prados, to dwell, imagine, and inhabit language is only possible in coexistence with the caducity of the natural world including life itself. In the poem that names the book, “Dormido en la yerba”, Prados writes that “La vida se te va / y tu te duermes sobre la hierba”, at first sight claim on appearance that seems to endorse the tempus fugit motif of the Spanish Renaissance verse. However, the temporal course in the poem is immediately redirected to a mysterious proximity that befalls existence in nature’s shadows, plunging the voice into the depth of the abyss that colors the caducity in a place. At this point, we note that Prado’s poetics is traversed by a mystical register that transfigures the temporal continuum with that of making of space that is eternal because it has neither end nor beginning. 

It is in this sense that Emilio Prados’ theological drift in his poetry is neither about making transcendence palpable through the animation of the world; nor does it imply the absolute immanence of the divine presence towards a new reenchantment of the world. The status of the liberated theos in Prados, like in the mythic understanding of the platonic “gods of place” (theos aisthetos), is an event that can only take place once existence is attuned to the minuscule surrounding of the world. This means that there is never a “God” as a matter of a divine economy that orients a moral predicament; rather, as Maria Zambrano argued in an essay on his work, Prados’ instantiation with the divine is always expressed in the most diminutive melody of the common things as they are. A way of multum in parvo such as the “diminuta yerba”. Hence, God is not the agent of creation of individuation, rather God is an “idea” that expresses in each thing that we are affected to, such as every blade of grass, the spacing of the clouds, the invisible direction of the wind, a human face.

The event of the divine, thus, is not a matter of mental or international faculty between objectivity and consciousness, existence and the natural world; the irruption of the divine names the genesis of appearance and disappearance. And this means that the divine (Dios) is ultimately an affection of the soul, that animation that provides birth and death as relations that move world. It is for this very reason that Zambrano could claim that the opaque sun irradiating Prado’s work is disclosed by the “dios que está naciendo”, or the god that is birthing [1]. Of course, the birth of God is far from being a transcendental revelation that weaves the history of salvation; in the manner of Meister Eckhart we can say that the god is nothing else but the affection that makes his birth take place in the soul like a harvest; that is, leafy, bright, and green [2]. God is the possibility of sensation in the world that is ineffable because it is always on the path of natality. For Prados, the eternal dimension of the birth of gods is only temporary because it presupposes spacing; it presupposes being thrown somewhere, like in the lucretian trope of lying happily above the grass. Above the grass and infinitely outside the world, dwelling and world are irreductible whenever they come into its uttermost nearness. To dwell – which is the central meaning of laying on the grass – on the crust of the Earth is to liberate God, and the liberation of God is what allows us entry into the world. 

As Prados wrote in a remarkable letter to his friend Zambrano in March of 1960: “Un cielo sin reposo” que es Dios: Dios no quiso morada y nosotros, como tú dices: edifica que te edifica… Y Dios, sin reposo. No buscamos reposo para Dios y nunca lo tendremos… En la guerra, me acuerdo, unos campesinos prendieron fuego a una iglesita en lo alto de un monte. Cuando bajaban, lo hacían como iluminados y decían: “¡Hemos libertado a Dios!” ¿No es hermoso eso?” [3]. To liberate God from dogmatic commands is also the liberation of world as detachment. There is dwelling for us, but never for the unresting divine presence of god. 

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Notes 

1. Maria Zambrano. “Emilio Prados”, Cuadernos Americanos, Vol. 126, 1963, 165. 

2. Meister Eckhart. “Sermon 2”, in Selected Writings (Penguin Books, 1994), 116.

3. “Un cielo sin reposo. Emilio Prados y María Zambrano: correspondencia” (1998), El Colegio de Mexico: https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/320/oa_edited_volume/chapter/2584791