( thus i spoke, when faster
than i could imagine a spirit
led me forth from my own home
to a place i thought i'd never go.
-- holderlin " patmos " )
"There is, in London, a painting that moves me as much every time I go and see it. It is a self-portrait painted by the late Rembrandt. His later paintings are usually characterized by an extreme coarseness of stroke, rendering everything subordinate to the expression of the moment, at once shining and sacred, and still unsurpassed in art, with the possible exception of Hölderlin’s later poems, however dissimilar and incomparable they may be—for where Hölderlin’s light, evoked through language, is ethereal and celestial, Rembrandt’s light, evoked through color, is earthy, metallic, and material—but this one painting which hangs in the National Gallery was painted in a slightly more classically realistic, lifelike style, more in the manner of the younger Rembrandt. Old age. All the facial detail is visible; all the traces life has left there are to be seen. The face is furrowed, wrinkled, sagging, ravaged by time. But the eyes are bright and, if not young, then somehow transcend the time that otherwise marks the face. It is as though someone else is looking at us, from somewhere inside the face, where everything is different. One can hardly be closer to another human soul. For as far as Rembrandt’s person is concerned, his good habits and bad, his bodily sounds and smells, his voice and his language, his thoughts and his opinions, his behavior, his physical flaws and defects, all the things that constitute a person to others, are no longer there, the painting is more than four hundred years old, and Rembrandt died the same year it was painted, so what is depicted here, what Rembrandt painted, is this person’s very being, that which he woke to every morning, that which immersed itself in thought, but which itself was not thought, that which immediately immersed itself in feelings, but which itself was not feeling, and that which he went to sleep to, in the end for good. That which, in a human, time does not touch and whence the light in the eyes springs."
(min 2:30)
So powerful. Faces of the elderly contain so many stories, many of which will never be known or once known, will pass out of existence with the listener.
ReplyDeleteYouthful eyes within the aging face.....similar to the mind which remembers doing the complex tapdance and sends messages down to the feet....but the feet will now only shuffle.
Thank you for this post....lillian
thanks, lilian. i find v interesting how the author analyses a painting, compares it with a poem of holderlin, taking for granted that different artistic forms are but expressions of a single search and, ultimately, uses a painting to convey a philosophical idea ( that there is something in human beings that time does not and will not touch ). the result reminds me of those long passages at " la recherche" where proust devotes entire pages to the feelings a vermeer or, even better, the imaginary vinteuil sonata, a certain work of art causes on the person enjoying it. i would tend to think that proust would write it more elegantly and might be able to draw more from this painting but then there is no shame in not writing like proust ( or translating like montcrieff), i am biased by my own liking of proust, and how elegant this author really is only norwegians will ever know... after reading like 80 pages i think he is a proustian a la kerouac with his spontaneous prose. genuinely intrigued. will keep reading. a s.
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