Stilled Life: Poet Trapped beneath Bell Jar
Some Musings on Poetry and Painting
Ryan Mosley Snow Shaker Courtesy Alison Jacques
Gallery, 2009
Poets cast their lines into a lake and wait for a nibble; prose writers lob in a stick of dynamite and gather the fish; painters take out a glass-bottomed boat.
I was mulling over the respective virtues of poetry and painting the other month, and wondering whether there was something that painters could teach poets, or vice versa. It seemed to me that there was one thing that paintings could do far better than poems: the still life. A bowl of fruit, a wine bottle and an ashtray, a vase of daffodils. Can poets do justice to objects such as these in the way that painters such as Van Gogh and Cézanne could? Could any poet say, as Cézanne did, 'I will astonish Paris with an apple'? And if not, should a poet be concerned that there might be an element of artistic endeavour from which he/she is virtually excluded?
The painter, I imagine, finds fascination in still lifes because the objects throw up infinitesimal combinations of light, colour, shape and texture. The challenge is to deconstruct received opinions about the familiar (an apple is round and green, a sack is brown and crumpled) and see it anew. The apple may be subtle shades of yellow with tinges of pink, or not exactly pink, and not exactly yellow. And what are pink and yellow anyway? As Van Gogh observed, there is 'no blue without yellow and without orange'.
The genius of painting is that it can depict not only the surface of an object, but also its essence, its inner being. If one were a Neo-platonist, one might say that the particular - the cloud, the swimming pool, the sunflower - can lead the artist to the universal Form or Idea of cloud, swimming pool, sunflower, that is the immutable archetype that exists in another dimension of being. By doing this, the painted object can give the viewer a sense of transcendence, or rapture even.
I don't know of any poet who has been able to replicate my imagined process of an artist painting a still life. Would any poet want to write about an apple in itself, or a sunflower in itself, in the way that a painter does. The poet may start with an object (daffodils, a pike) but will usually soon go beyond or around it, creating a matrix of feelings, thoughts, speculations, associations. And that is poetry's great strength.[i] The object is a rock from which the poet leaps into the ocean of psyche, imagination.
Conversely, does the capacity for thought and creating imagery, as opposed to visual images, by-pass the painter? John Carey in his What Good Are the Arts? thinks it does. He puts forward the case that literature, and particularly poetry, is superior to the other arts. It can reason and moralize, for instance, in a way that painting (and music) cannot do, or at least not so effectively. And then there is imagery: 'Painting cannot manage metaphor, which is the gateway to the subconscious and that hugely limits it by comparison with literature. True, there is Surrealist painting, but it is static and deliberate, and quite unlike the flickering, inconsequential nature of thought.' [ii]
Another advantage literature has, Carey says, is the way words can convey an indistinctness that encourages the reader to participate in the act of imagination. He contrasts Blake's poem 'The Sick Rose', with its clipped, enigmatic darkness, with Blake's own illustration of his poem, which shows a rose with a spirit form breaking out of it. 'It supports the feeling,' Carey concludes, 'that visual art, in its definiteness and solidity, cannot match the indistinctness of literature.'[iii] I don't know how true that is. Definiteness of brushstroke might not imply definiteness of effect, in the same way that Blake's crystalline verse has the precise contours of a bottle, but one with a genie inside.[iv]
On the other side of the aesthetic ring from Carey, and with bigger creative boxing gloves, is Leonardo da Vinci.[v] Leonardo was in no doubt that painting was superior to poetry. For a start, poetry relies on sound, painting on vision, and Leonardo believed vision was the 'worthier' sense. If you put, he says, a description of a battle next to a painting of it and observed the public's reaction, you would find the painting attracted more attention, being 'by a long way more beautiful and intelligible'. Similarly, if you wrote the name of God and placed it alongside a painting of him, it would be the latter that gained more reverence. In terms of depicting 'beauty, ferocity, or a base, a foul or a monstrous thing' the poet must concede the painter's superior ability, for 'are there not pictures to be seen, so like the actual things, that they deceive men and animals?'
Leonardo also makes the point that paintings can be seen all at once, immediately, whereas, by their nature, poems are linear and sequential, relying on a greater element of time for their comprehension.[vi] And paintings are more instantly intelligible than poems, which sometimes need to be interpreted and glossed.
Leonardo's views of course beg many questions. Is vision superior to sound? Is it a fair comparison to put a battle description next to a painting? And surely the battle scenes in the Iliad, the Aeneid, or even the Battle of Maldon, and so on, convey a sense of epic drama along with gory detail to match any painting? Yet he does have a point that paintings are in at least one way more universal: I may not have enough French to understand a poem by Rimbaud, but I can form a judgement on a painting by Monet. A painting, too, is more immediately and comprehensively enjoyed. That is the nature of its form - it does not rely on time sequence in the way poetry does - and possibly another reason why the still life suits it so well.
When looking at a painting of a chair, you can see the shape (the four legs, high back), the colour (light brown), the texture (smooth, glassy in places), the light (highlights on the seat), and so on. But crucially, you can see these elements more or less at the same time. Indeed, they are inextricably bound into the unity of chair. A poem, describing a chair, would have to enumerate its qualities, beginning with one thing and carrying on with the rest. The mind has to dart backwards and forwards, albeit in an instant, to marry the different components.
Painters can dwell on a still life lovingly. They can convey the distinctness of texture, the rough grain of wood, the softness of velvet, the smoothness of glass. They can capture light, and stillness, and reveal familiar objects in new ways, or strip away old ways of seeing the quotidian. Cézanne confidently predicted that the day would come when 'a single carrot, freshly observed, will set off a revolution'. For poets, on the other hand, the object comes to life because of what its form prompts, not because of what its form is.
I have sometimes toyed with the idea of writing about an object as an object just for an experiment, and if I ever get round to it, the object I'd choose would be one of a pair of boots I found in the house I now live in West Cork. The two boots were perched on a ledge above the door of the sitting room. They had been put there as objects of interest, of art, if you will. They were a countryman's or possibly countrywoman's boots. They are brown, high enough to cover the ankle; the leather is dry and torn, like mummified flesh. The soles, evidently much repaired, are made of black leather. The laces are wound around brass studs rather than through holes. They have an indisputably antique air, possibly of the nineteenth century, and for me their attraction is that they conjure up farms, milking, country markets, walking to Mass, dancing at crossroads - the usual conditioned responses. For all I know they could date from as late as the 1950s. The point is that I resist looking at them as a painter would. All I want to do is let my mind rove over them and let it spiral into fantasies. Turning those fantasies into something striking and original seems to me to be the task of the writer. Ignoring those fantasies and depicting the boots as boots the task of the painter.
The boots are now such a familiar ornament that they have become invisible. Or that was the case until a few weeks before Christmas 2008, when I received a postcard from a friend who was staying in Amsterdam. The card was of Van Gogh's painting of 'a pair of shoes', which look more like boots.[vii] She had sent it to me, she said, because she had remembered the pair of boots in my sitting room.
Van Gogh's painting, even at the level of postcard reproduction, is striking. The peasant's boots are dark brown and glow from the golden background, rather in the manner of a Byzantine icon. The paint was thickly applied, giving a sense of heavy-duty leather, itself crumpled and worn. In the left-hand boot especially, you can clearly sense the shape of a foot, as if it were an organic memory of its owner. The boot's top is folded down, almost inviting the missing foot to slip into it. The painting seemed to me to capture the boots in a way a poet never could.
I used the postcard of the boots as a bookmark, putting a painting to the service of literary endeavour. And then, strangely, I came across the painting again, about a week after receiving the card, which rekindled my thoughts about still lifes. I was doing some idle research on Martin Heidegger, who had been mentioned on a radio programme in conjunction with the idea of artistic originality. I somewhat reluctantly turned to Heidegger's 'On the Origin of the Work of Art',[viii] cheered only by the famous philosophers' drinking song ('Immanuel Kant was a real pissant/Who was very rarely stable,/Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar/Who could think you under the table'). I probably would not have persevered with the essay, for Heidegger can do to language what a hall of mirror can do to images.
But I did persevere, because a central part of his essay, as it turned out to my surprise and delight, concerned my bookmark - Van Gogh's painting of a pair of shoes. Would it shed light on painting, art, the still life and even poetry?
The essay was dense, but I found scintillas of connections. Heidegger seems to distinguish between different types of object and their qualities along with modes of perceiving them. There is equipment (utilitariana, such as shoes or a hammer) which resembles an artwork because both are made. But the artwork is different because it is self-sufficient: whereas shoes and a hammer find fulfilment in being worn, or used to hit a nail, an artwork rests in itself. Equipment differs from a 'mere thing', such as a rock, because it is fabricated and the thing isn't (or not by human hand). An artwork differs from a mere thing, too, for the same reason, but it does share the same 'self-sufficient presence' as the mere thing.
So far so good, but the essay became more interesting with Heidegger's description of his technical terms earth and world, which seemed to get closer to the matter of what a still life means respectively to a painter and a poet.
Earth, according to Heidegger, seems to be the material of an equipment (e.g. the leather of shoes) or an artwork (the marble of a sculpture) but which changes in our perception in relation to each. In the case of equipment, earth is said to be 'used up', which I suppose means exhausted to the point that its nature is dulled, unfulfilled. Conversely, an artwork allows earth to be revealed in its finest form, to 'shine forth'. The artwork is said to 'move the earth' (which is 'sheltering and concealing' in it) 'into the open'. Through art, earth reaches its apogee.
If I read it correctly, an example of earth in its inferior and superior forms might be seen in, say, the bottle and dish of lemons Van Gogh was looking at when he painted a still life of them, and his actual painting of them.[ix] Let us suppose that the earth of the bottle itself (equipment) has not reached its truest expression; there is something lacking in it, or there is some other thing absent that might have revealed its earth in its ultimate splendour. With the painting, however, the artwork has enabled the earth of the bottle - its delicateness yet solidity, the way it distorts the pattern of the wallpaper behind it, the dimples of its fluting - to 'shine forth'.
How does the artwork manage to reveal the earth in its fullness? Through world. This seems to be the set of cultural-historical-social associations within which an artwork is found, and which the artwork actively evokes. A Greek temple brings forth the world of gods, rituals, elegance, reason; a Gothic cathedral a world of candlelit altars, pilgrims, chanting, relics.
So an artwork's earth and its world work in tandem, like yin and yang. Heidegger seems to say that the world needs the material of the earth (e.g. without marble no Doric columns); and the earth needs the vitalizing possibilities of a world. As he says, cryptically: 'The world grounds itself on the earth, and the earth juts through world.'
Earth and world seem to me to point towards the difference between a painter's view of a still life and that of a poet. The painter gives us an intense rendering of an object, in which its material and inner being, its thingness (that is its earth) is revealed; a poet's view of the same still life would, I believe, centre on the flow of associations (the world) stemming from the earth of the object, which provides the imaginative impulse to write. In my view, the painter concentrates on earth, the poet on world (to use Heidegger's terms) but both, to a lesser degree, are consciously or subliminally aware of world (in the painter's case) and earth (in the poet's case).
So what would a painter and a poet make of a pair of old boots, like the ones in my sitting room?
I had in front of me a postcard of what a painter would make of the boots, and it persuaded me that Heidegger had a point in claiming that the artwork makes the earth shine. Van Gogh's painting makes you see leather afresh and to want to go out and stare at a pair of boots.
But what about the poet? What would he/she make of the boots? Would he or she focus on the boots' world, as I suspect, or on their earth, and, if so, how. A possible answer to those questions emerged, to my great surprise, from Heidegger's essay itself.
In an extended paragraph, part of which is reproduced here, Heidegger suddenly describes what he perceives is the world revealed by Van Gogh's painting of boots. In doing so, he also sheds light on their earth. Now obviously this is different from Heidegger writing about the actual pair of boots Van Gogh painted. He is describing a painting of the boots, not the boots themselves. All the same, I was intrigued to read how he would respond to the painting. Given the opacity of much of his language in the rest of the essay, this paragraph stands out:
'From the dark opening of the worn insides of the shoes the toilsome tread of the worker stares forth. In the stiffly rugged heaviness of the shoes there is the accumulated tenacity of her slow trudge through the far-spreading and ever-uniform furrows of the field swept by a raw wind. On the leather lie the dampness and richness of the soil. Under the soles stretches the loneliness of the field-path as evening falls. In the shoes vibrates the silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of the ripening grain and its unexplained self-refusal in the fallow desolation of the wintry field.'
What has happened is that Heidegger has flicked a switch, from analytical to evocatory, from explanatory to imaginative, from philosopher to poet. He has created in prose a poetic world of Van Gogh's boots. In doing so he has shown quite persuasively how the earth and the world of the boots interact to the mutual advantage of each. The 'worn insides' and 'rugged heaviness' (earth) of the shoes gives rise to the evocative 'accumulated tenacity of her slow trudge' (world); and the 'loneliness of the field-path as evening falls'(world) seems to accentuate or deepen the boots' leather (earth), which embodies the soil's dampness and richness.
More than demonstrating his own ideas of earth and world in an artwork - in this case, Van Gogh's boots - Heidegger also shows how the artwork, with both its earth and world working off each other, actually turned his own writing from prose to poetry.
As Heidegger says elsewhere in the essay, the difference between earth in equipment (actual boots) and earth in an artwork (painting of boots) is that between language used to function in the everyday and the language that the writer brings to its highest state: 'To be sure, the poet also uses the word - not however like ordinary speakers and writers who have to use them up [my italics], but rather in such a way that the word only now becomes and remains truly a word [my italics].' Which is not far away from T.S. Eliot's 'Only by the form, the pattern,/Can words or music reach/The stillness ...' And also reminiscent of Karl Kraus's, 'My language is the universal whore whom I have to make into a virgin'.
It is as if the artwork has elicited from Heidegger his best words in the best order, which is, after all, one definition of poetry. From a pair of old boots, a painter created an artwork that showed them in their splendour, which then inspired a philosopher to write in poetic prose.
It may be that the writer (as the example of Heidegger seems to show) gains more inspiration from an artwork depicting an equipment or a mere thing - than the actual equipment or mere thing itself. But for me there is something heroic in the way a painter can create an earth-centred work of art out of an equipment or thing. To make luminous a pair of old boots, or a lemon or a tree is a gift that seems to me to be the essence of the painter's special talent. [x] It needs, at its highest level, the sort of vision possessed by the mystic Teilhard de Chardin, for whom the very fabric of the earth - rocks, soil, minerals and metals - was vital. He once wrote of the world gradually appearing to him as 'fire and light'.
In my view, it is good for poets to be reminded of the simplicity and beauty of objects in themselves, of the earth of things, and of the genius of the painter when depicting still lifes. As Van Gogh said: 'It is ... the language of nature which one should listen to, the feeling for the things themselves [my italics] for reality is more important than the feeling for pictures.' Things, objects, are more mysterious than we think they are, and painters, not poets, are the hierophants who lead us into their mystery. As Cézanne said: 'People think how a sugar basin has no physiognomy, no soul. But it changes every day.'
[i] One poem that conveys a sense of trying to capture a still life (or still death) is Ted Hughes's 'View of a Pig' in Lupercal. Hughes's animal poems have the visual concentration of a painter, but he goes far beyond the 'depicted object' into his own mythic realm.
[ii] John Carey, What Good Are the Arts?, Faber and Faber, 2005, p. 217.
[iii] Ibid., p. 225.
[iv] Blake's painting of the sick rose is in its own way full of 'indistinctness'. The caterpillar and the nearby 'spirit forms' on the leaves draw out imaginative speculation. Turner's 'The Angel in the Sun' or the modern painter David Inshaw's 'The Badminton Game' are two works, which, off the top of my head, combine clarity with that positive 'indistinctness' which Carey claims for literature.
[v] Leonardo's views on painting and poetry can be found in his notebook and Paragone: see Paragone: A Comparison of the Arts translated by Irma A. Richter. London: Oxford University Press, 1944. 36-69; and The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci translated by Jean Paul Richter: Volume 1, p. 654, 1888 (reprinted by Dover Books, 1970).
[vi] The idea of painting relying on space, and poetry on time, and therefore being suited to bodies and actions repectively, was developed by Gotthold Lessing in his essay 'Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry'.
[vii] The painting of the 'shoes' was done in 1886 and resides in the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.
[viii] 'On the Origin of the Work of Art', translated by Albert Hofstadter, pp. 80-102, in The Continental Aesthetics Reader by Clive Cazeaux, Routledge, 2000.
[ix] 'Still Life with Bottle and Lemons on a Plate' is in the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.
Some Musings on Poetry and Painting
Ryan Mosley Snow Shaker Courtesy Alison Jacques
Gallery, 2009
Poets cast their lines into a lake and wait for a nibble; prose writers lob in a stick of dynamite and gather the fish; painters take out a glass-bottomed boat.
I was mulling over the respective virtues of poetry and painting the other month, and wondering whether there was something that painters could teach poets, or vice versa. It seemed to me that there was one thing that paintings could do far better than poems: the still life. A bowl of fruit, a wine bottle and an ashtray, a vase of daffodils. Can poets do justice to objects such as these in the way that painters such as Van Gogh and Cézanne could? Could any poet say, as Cézanne did, 'I will astonish Paris with an apple'? And if not, should a poet be concerned that there might be an element of artistic endeavour from which he/she is virtually excluded?
The painter, I imagine, finds fascination in still lifes because the objects throw up infinitesimal combinations of light, colour, shape and texture. The challenge is to deconstruct received opinions about the familiar (an apple is round and green, a sack is brown and crumpled) and see it anew. The apple may be subtle shades of yellow with tinges of pink, or not exactly pink, and not exactly yellow. And what are pink and yellow anyway? As Van Gogh observed, there is 'no blue without yellow and without orange'.
The genius of painting is that it can depict not only the surface of an object, but also its essence, its inner being. If one were a Neo-platonist, one might say that the particular - the cloud, the swimming pool, the sunflower - can lead the artist to the universal Form or Idea of cloud, swimming pool, sunflower, that is the immutable archetype that exists in another dimension of being. By doing this, the painted object can give the viewer a sense of transcendence, or rapture even.
I don't know of any poet who has been able to replicate my imagined process of an artist painting a still life. Would any poet want to write about an apple in itself, or a sunflower in itself, in the way that a painter does. The poet may start with an object (daffodils, a pike) but will usually soon go beyond or around it, creating a matrix of feelings, thoughts, speculations, associations. And that is poetry's great strength.[i] The object is a rock from which the poet leaps into the ocean of psyche, imagination.
Conversely, does the capacity for thought and creating imagery, as opposed to visual images, by-pass the painter? John Carey in his What Good Are the Arts? thinks it does. He puts forward the case that literature, and particularly poetry, is superior to the other arts. It can reason and moralize, for instance, in a way that painting (and music) cannot do, or at least not so effectively. And then there is imagery: 'Painting cannot manage metaphor, which is the gateway to the subconscious and that hugely limits it by comparison with literature. True, there is Surrealist painting, but it is static and deliberate, and quite unlike the flickering, inconsequential nature of thought.' [ii]
Another advantage literature has, Carey says, is the way words can convey an indistinctness that encourages the reader to participate in the act of imagination. He contrasts Blake's poem 'The Sick Rose', with its clipped, enigmatic darkness, with Blake's own illustration of his poem, which shows a rose with a spirit form breaking out of it. 'It supports the feeling,' Carey concludes, 'that visual art, in its definiteness and solidity, cannot match the indistinctness of literature.'[iii] I don't know how true that is. Definiteness of brushstroke might not imply definiteness of effect, in the same way that Blake's crystalline verse has the precise contours of a bottle, but one with a genie inside.[iv]
On the other side of the aesthetic ring from Carey, and with bigger creative boxing gloves, is Leonardo da Vinci.[v] Leonardo was in no doubt that painting was superior to poetry. For a start, poetry relies on sound, painting on vision, and Leonardo believed vision was the 'worthier' sense. If you put, he says, a description of a battle next to a painting of it and observed the public's reaction, you would find the painting attracted more attention, being 'by a long way more beautiful and intelligible'. Similarly, if you wrote the name of God and placed it alongside a painting of him, it would be the latter that gained more reverence. In terms of depicting 'beauty, ferocity, or a base, a foul or a monstrous thing' the poet must concede the painter's superior ability, for 'are there not pictures to be seen, so like the actual things, that they deceive men and animals?'
Leonardo also makes the point that paintings can be seen all at once, immediately, whereas, by their nature, poems are linear and sequential, relying on a greater element of time for their comprehension.[vi] And paintings are more instantly intelligible than poems, which sometimes need to be interpreted and glossed.
Leonardo's views of course beg many questions. Is vision superior to sound? Is it a fair comparison to put a battle description next to a painting? And surely the battle scenes in the Iliad, the Aeneid, or even the Battle of Maldon, and so on, convey a sense of epic drama along with gory detail to match any painting? Yet he does have a point that paintings are in at least one way more universal: I may not have enough French to understand a poem by Rimbaud, but I can form a judgement on a painting by Monet. A painting, too, is more immediately and comprehensively enjoyed. That is the nature of its form - it does not rely on time sequence in the way poetry does - and possibly another reason why the still life suits it so well.
When looking at a painting of a chair, you can see the shape (the four legs, high back), the colour (light brown), the texture (smooth, glassy in places), the light (highlights on the seat), and so on. But crucially, you can see these elements more or less at the same time. Indeed, they are inextricably bound into the unity of chair. A poem, describing a chair, would have to enumerate its qualities, beginning with one thing and carrying on with the rest. The mind has to dart backwards and forwards, albeit in an instant, to marry the different components.
Painters can dwell on a still life lovingly. They can convey the distinctness of texture, the rough grain of wood, the softness of velvet, the smoothness of glass. They can capture light, and stillness, and reveal familiar objects in new ways, or strip away old ways of seeing the quotidian. Cézanne confidently predicted that the day would come when 'a single carrot, freshly observed, will set off a revolution'. For poets, on the other hand, the object comes to life because of what its form prompts, not because of what its form is.
I have sometimes toyed with the idea of writing about an object as an object just for an experiment, and if I ever get round to it, the object I'd choose would be one of a pair of boots I found in the house I now live in West Cork. The two boots were perched on a ledge above the door of the sitting room. They had been put there as objects of interest, of art, if you will. They were a countryman's or possibly countrywoman's boots. They are brown, high enough to cover the ankle; the leather is dry and torn, like mummified flesh. The soles, evidently much repaired, are made of black leather. The laces are wound around brass studs rather than through holes. They have an indisputably antique air, possibly of the nineteenth century, and for me their attraction is that they conjure up farms, milking, country markets, walking to Mass, dancing at crossroads - the usual conditioned responses. For all I know they could date from as late as the 1950s. The point is that I resist looking at them as a painter would. All I want to do is let my mind rove over them and let it spiral into fantasies. Turning those fantasies into something striking and original seems to me to be the task of the writer. Ignoring those fantasies and depicting the boots as boots the task of the painter.
The boots are now such a familiar ornament that they have become invisible. Or that was the case until a few weeks before Christmas 2008, when I received a postcard from a friend who was staying in Amsterdam. The card was of Van Gogh's painting of 'a pair of shoes', which look more like boots.[vii] She had sent it to me, she said, because she had remembered the pair of boots in my sitting room.
Van Gogh's painting, even at the level of postcard reproduction, is striking. The peasant's boots are dark brown and glow from the golden background, rather in the manner of a Byzantine icon. The paint was thickly applied, giving a sense of heavy-duty leather, itself crumpled and worn. In the left-hand boot especially, you can clearly sense the shape of a foot, as if it were an organic memory of its owner. The boot's top is folded down, almost inviting the missing foot to slip into it. The painting seemed to me to capture the boots in a way a poet never could.
I used the postcard of the boots as a bookmark, putting a painting to the service of literary endeavour. And then, strangely, I came across the painting again, about a week after receiving the card, which rekindled my thoughts about still lifes. I was doing some idle research on Martin Heidegger, who had been mentioned on a radio programme in conjunction with the idea of artistic originality. I somewhat reluctantly turned to Heidegger's 'On the Origin of the Work of Art',[viii] cheered only by the famous philosophers' drinking song ('Immanuel Kant was a real pissant/Who was very rarely stable,/Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar/Who could think you under the table'). I probably would not have persevered with the essay, for Heidegger can do to language what a hall of mirror can do to images.
But I did persevere, because a central part of his essay, as it turned out to my surprise and delight, concerned my bookmark - Van Gogh's painting of a pair of shoes. Would it shed light on painting, art, the still life and even poetry?
The essay was dense, but I found scintillas of connections. Heidegger seems to distinguish between different types of object and their qualities along with modes of perceiving them. There is equipment (utilitariana, such as shoes or a hammer) which resembles an artwork because both are made. But the artwork is different because it is self-sufficient: whereas shoes and a hammer find fulfilment in being worn, or used to hit a nail, an artwork rests in itself. Equipment differs from a 'mere thing', such as a rock, because it is fabricated and the thing isn't (or not by human hand). An artwork differs from a mere thing, too, for the same reason, but it does share the same 'self-sufficient presence' as the mere thing.
So far so good, but the essay became more interesting with Heidegger's description of his technical terms earth and world, which seemed to get closer to the matter of what a still life means respectively to a painter and a poet.
Earth, according to Heidegger, seems to be the material of an equipment (e.g. the leather of shoes) or an artwork (the marble of a sculpture) but which changes in our perception in relation to each. In the case of equipment, earth is said to be 'used up', which I suppose means exhausted to the point that its nature is dulled, unfulfilled. Conversely, an artwork allows earth to be revealed in its finest form, to 'shine forth'. The artwork is said to 'move the earth' (which is 'sheltering and concealing' in it) 'into the open'. Through art, earth reaches its apogee.
If I read it correctly, an example of earth in its inferior and superior forms might be seen in, say, the bottle and dish of lemons Van Gogh was looking at when he painted a still life of them, and his actual painting of them.[ix] Let us suppose that the earth of the bottle itself (equipment) has not reached its truest expression; there is something lacking in it, or there is some other thing absent that might have revealed its earth in its ultimate splendour. With the painting, however, the artwork has enabled the earth of the bottle - its delicateness yet solidity, the way it distorts the pattern of the wallpaper behind it, the dimples of its fluting - to 'shine forth'.
How does the artwork manage to reveal the earth in its fullness? Through world. This seems to be the set of cultural-historical-social associations within which an artwork is found, and which the artwork actively evokes. A Greek temple brings forth the world of gods, rituals, elegance, reason; a Gothic cathedral a world of candlelit altars, pilgrims, chanting, relics.
So an artwork's earth and its world work in tandem, like yin and yang. Heidegger seems to say that the world needs the material of the earth (e.g. without marble no Doric columns); and the earth needs the vitalizing possibilities of a world. As he says, cryptically: 'The world grounds itself on the earth, and the earth juts through world.'
Earth and world seem to me to point towards the difference between a painter's view of a still life and that of a poet. The painter gives us an intense rendering of an object, in which its material and inner being, its thingness (that is its earth) is revealed; a poet's view of the same still life would, I believe, centre on the flow of associations (the world) stemming from the earth of the object, which provides the imaginative impulse to write. In my view, the painter concentrates on earth, the poet on world (to use Heidegger's terms) but both, to a lesser degree, are consciously or subliminally aware of world (in the painter's case) and earth (in the poet's case).
So what would a painter and a poet make of a pair of old boots, like the ones in my sitting room?
I had in front of me a postcard of what a painter would make of the boots, and it persuaded me that Heidegger had a point in claiming that the artwork makes the earth shine. Van Gogh's painting makes you see leather afresh and to want to go out and stare at a pair of boots.
But what about the poet? What would he/she make of the boots? Would he or she focus on the boots' world, as I suspect, or on their earth, and, if so, how. A possible answer to those questions emerged, to my great surprise, from Heidegger's essay itself.
In an extended paragraph, part of which is reproduced here, Heidegger suddenly describes what he perceives is the world revealed by Van Gogh's painting of boots. In doing so, he also sheds light on their earth. Now obviously this is different from Heidegger writing about the actual pair of boots Van Gogh painted. He is describing a painting of the boots, not the boots themselves. All the same, I was intrigued to read how he would respond to the painting. Given the opacity of much of his language in the rest of the essay, this paragraph stands out:
'From the dark opening of the worn insides of the shoes the toilsome tread of the worker stares forth. In the stiffly rugged heaviness of the shoes there is the accumulated tenacity of her slow trudge through the far-spreading and ever-uniform furrows of the field swept by a raw wind. On the leather lie the dampness and richness of the soil. Under the soles stretches the loneliness of the field-path as evening falls. In the shoes vibrates the silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of the ripening grain and its unexplained self-refusal in the fallow desolation of the wintry field.'
What has happened is that Heidegger has flicked a switch, from analytical to evocatory, from explanatory to imaginative, from philosopher to poet. He has created in prose a poetic world of Van Gogh's boots. In doing so he has shown quite persuasively how the earth and the world of the boots interact to the mutual advantage of each. The 'worn insides' and 'rugged heaviness' (earth) of the shoes gives rise to the evocative 'accumulated tenacity of her slow trudge' (world); and the 'loneliness of the field-path as evening falls'(world) seems to accentuate or deepen the boots' leather (earth), which embodies the soil's dampness and richness.
More than demonstrating his own ideas of earth and world in an artwork - in this case, Van Gogh's boots - Heidegger also shows how the artwork, with both its earth and world working off each other, actually turned his own writing from prose to poetry.
As Heidegger says elsewhere in the essay, the difference between earth in equipment (actual boots) and earth in an artwork (painting of boots) is that between language used to function in the everyday and the language that the writer brings to its highest state: 'To be sure, the poet also uses the word - not however like ordinary speakers and writers who have to use them up [my italics], but rather in such a way that the word only now becomes and remains truly a word [my italics].' Which is not far away from T.S. Eliot's 'Only by the form, the pattern,/Can words or music reach/The stillness ...' And also reminiscent of Karl Kraus's, 'My language is the universal whore whom I have to make into a virgin'.
It is as if the artwork has elicited from Heidegger his best words in the best order, which is, after all, one definition of poetry. From a pair of old boots, a painter created an artwork that showed them in their splendour, which then inspired a philosopher to write in poetic prose.
It may be that the writer (as the example of Heidegger seems to show) gains more inspiration from an artwork depicting an equipment or a mere thing - than the actual equipment or mere thing itself. But for me there is something heroic in the way a painter can create an earth-centred work of art out of an equipment or thing. To make luminous a pair of old boots, or a lemon or a tree is a gift that seems to me to be the essence of the painter's special talent. [x] It needs, at its highest level, the sort of vision possessed by the mystic Teilhard de Chardin, for whom the very fabric of the earth - rocks, soil, minerals and metals - was vital. He once wrote of the world gradually appearing to him as 'fire and light'.
In my view, it is good for poets to be reminded of the simplicity and beauty of objects in themselves, of the earth of things, and of the genius of the painter when depicting still lifes. As Van Gogh said: 'It is ... the language of nature which one should listen to, the feeling for the things themselves [my italics] for reality is more important than the feeling for pictures.' Things, objects, are more mysterious than we think they are, and painters, not poets, are the hierophants who lead us into their mystery. As Cézanne said: 'People think how a sugar basin has no physiognomy, no soul. But it changes every day.'
[i] One poem that conveys a sense of trying to capture a still life (or still death) is Ted Hughes's 'View of a Pig' in Lupercal. Hughes's animal poems have the visual concentration of a painter, but he goes far beyond the 'depicted object' into his own mythic realm.
[ii] John Carey, What Good Are the Arts?, Faber and Faber, 2005, p. 217.
[iii] Ibid., p. 225.
[iv] Blake's painting of the sick rose is in its own way full of 'indistinctness'. The caterpillar and the nearby 'spirit forms' on the leaves draw out imaginative speculation. Turner's 'The Angel in the Sun' or the modern painter David Inshaw's 'The Badminton Game' are two works, which, off the top of my head, combine clarity with that positive 'indistinctness' which Carey claims for literature.
[v] Leonardo's views on painting and poetry can be found in his notebook and Paragone: see Paragone: A Comparison of the Arts translated by Irma A. Richter. London: Oxford University Press, 1944. 36-69; and The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci translated by Jean Paul Richter: Volume 1, p. 654, 1888 (reprinted by Dover Books, 1970).
[vi] The idea of painting relying on space, and poetry on time, and therefore being suited to bodies and actions repectively, was developed by Gotthold Lessing in his essay 'Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry'.
[vii] The painting of the 'shoes' was done in 1886 and resides in the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.
[viii] 'On the Origin of the Work of Art', translated by Albert Hofstadter, pp. 80-102, in The Continental Aesthetics Reader by Clive Cazeaux, Routledge, 2000.
[ix] 'Still Life with Bottle and Lemons on a Plate' is in the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.