That space the Evil One abstracted . . . and attention gained with forked tongue . . .

This morning I was awakened by the ‘tsk-tsk!’ of a stonechat. In Provence or thereabouts they call the bird Le Tarier pâtre (the Shepherd’s Auger because it sounds like persistently abraded rock). When I hear it, I always imagine a spectral sculptor in the hills chipping away at an invisible statue of Demeter, the goddess of grain.

‘Tsk-tsk!’ It’s an imagined space with a qualitative volume.

The substance of shadow.

‘We see least with borrowed eyes,’ my art mistress once said with emphatic earnestness in my last term at school, and I’d vowed then to always question the witness of my own sight, particularly as a favoured elementary visual exercise of hers was the study of ‘counter-shapes’, that is, those structural underpinnings that give substance to a figurative composition, such as the interstices between limbs or objects and their interplay with shadows.

Perception Psychology test card.

This concern for close compositional observation very often finds expression in my fiction. Take this sentence from my narrative, Dispossession, an account of a vulnerable woman’s banishment from her family home and of her feverish scheming to revenge herself of the treacheries of her younger brother (Sister Morphine, Salt, 2008). She confesses:

            I felt neglected and vulnerable, held together weakly by will alone, 
            like a house shored up by its own shadow. 

In this case, of course, the shadow – not the house – is the powerful counter-shape that’s representative of the lost domain.

So I continue to brood on the latent power amassed in certain undiscovered counter-shapes and sometimes I’m rewarded when the art of an Old Master, when viewed afresh, unexpectedly yields – with the delayed action of a time bomb – a revelation whose explosive force is the greater for being granted five centuries after the device was primed.

Hidden emblemata revealed.

I need write little more in explanation when the subject of my recent discoveries (this past Monday) is shown to be Albrecht Dürer, hero of the German Renaissance, and when the once hidden emblemata can be seen exposed here on this page in the two drawings I’ve presumed to deconstruct, stumbled upon while riffling through a catalogue of the Dürer oeuvre.

You can see the shadowy interstices here that Dürer identified when he subtly assays the conflict between Piety and Sin – Good and Evil – for in each case the interstice of the ubiquitous Serpent appears, insinuating evil into the devotional duties of knelt prayer and priestly injunction (the First Commandment). 

Is there truly a subliminal message in these interspaces of Dürer’s art? A century and a half after these images were made, the tremendous words of John Milton in Paradise Lost told of the Great Adversary whose stratagems as Tempter to suborn mankind resounded as an ordained truth . . . so, in this consideration of the latent potency of counter-shapes in religious art I think it apposite to conjoin those words with Dürer’s prophetic images, for surely they are precursors of ‘that space the Evil One abstracted’ perceived by the blind poet from out of his own darkness. 

‘. . . the brute Serpent in whose shape Man I deceived:
that which to me belongs is enmity . . . between Me and Mankind;
I am to bruise his heel. . .’

‘That space the Evil One abstracted stood from his own evil . . .

To me shall be the glory sole among the Infernal Powers . . .’

 

‘The Potentiality of the Plane’ . . . Postscript (October 3rd 2021)

I’ve just read this by a mystic concerned (like the poet he venerated, Gerard Manley Hopkins) with the mysteries of spiritual ‘indwelling’ and the co-inherence of interrelationships . . .

‘I think in a line [as one who is sequentially conscious] – but there is the potentiality of the plane.’ This perhaps was what great art was – a momentary apprehension of the plane at the point of the line . . . the Praying Hands of Dürer . . . the Ninth Symphony – the sense of vastness in those small things was the vastness of all that had been felt in the present.

                                                              Many Dimensions by Charles Williams 1931

See also: 

O Fruit of that Forbidden Tree whose Mortal Taste Brought All Our Woe . . .

https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2019/10/o-fruit-of-that-forbidden-tree-whose.html

and

Et vocavit Adam nomen uxoris suæ, Eva . . . de ligno autem scientiæ boni et mali ne comedas. 

https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2019/09/et-vocavit-adam-nomen-uxoris-su-heva-de.html

•

Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, 

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html
and Listen Close to Me (2011)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html 

and A Bad Case (2015)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html

Scene Glimpsed by Nietzsche from his Carriage Window on Ascension Day, May 10th 1888, Year Zero.

Sunstruck, a green hill. 

The lone tree bleeds green shadows.

Racial memory!

Anonymous: after Adrian van der Venn
The Sun Striking a Small Mirror
Engraving from Emblemata by
Johannes de Brune, 1624.
(1888 was Nietzsche’s Year Zero for Umwertung aller Werte, 
‘Revaluation of All Values’. So we might assume the rigour of his
thought would have at once rejected the mediation of Christian atavism 
in interpreting such raw phenomena as a tree and a hill and the sun,
reproachful, lest he see them shrivel into the absurd artifice of the
emblemata of Redemptory Faith — the one immortal blemish of mankind.)

•

From Logos to Blood.

Hannah Arendt seems to almost explain Nietzsche when she writes of another conflicted cradle-Christian in these terms: ‘The main thing was to have no illusions and accept no thoughts – no theoretical systems – that would blind you to reality.'

Nietzsche’s mission to reforge the German language and fashion it into a revolutionary polemical weapon is as reformative as Luther's and Goethe’s trail-blazing testaments to enlightenment, yet characterised by a new muscular effortlessness that made his Thus Spake Zarathustra an exemplar for modern aphoristic brevity.

The reader of Nietzsche’s works can trace this reshaping of German and Germanity in – remarkably – a single key text composed of one recurring phrase that seems to stand as an article of faith across four centuries for five Germanophone thinkers: Luther, Goethe, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and Hess.

The text? The New Testament (John Verse 1, Chapter1): ‘In the beginning was the Word . . . ’ 

Luther’s Bibel (1522): Luther rejects the original Greek concept of Logos (wisdom) for the primal Wort, the Word of incarnate belief.

Goethe’s Faust (1808): Faust determines to restate John Verse 1, and hesitates on the word ‘Word’, wavering between choices of ‘Thought’ and ‘Power' until, finally, he settles on ‘Deed’. — ‘Und schreibe getrost: im Anfang war die Tat! And write assured: In the beginning was the Deed!’

Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra (1885): ‘I have brought the German language to a state of perfection. After Luther and Goethe, a third step had to be taken . . . look and see . . . if vigour, flexibility, and euphony have ever consorted so well in our language . . . my style is . . . a play of symmetries of every kind . . . This enters the very vowels [assonance]. Once spirit was God, then it became man, and now it even becometh populace. I love only what a person hath written with his blood. Write with blood, and thou wilt find that blood is spirit.’

So, at the end of the 19th Century, the upholder of the German spirit no longer hesitated between Word, Thought and Deed when the sought-after impulse towards creation appeared to him to be a belief in Dionysian Blood.

Until . . .

Hermann Hess’s Peter Camenzind (1904): ‘In the beginning was the myth.’ (Opening sentence of first novel by a tyro-mythologist.)

Before the return to a post-Luther Goethean tradition.

Ludwig Wittgenstein On Certainty (1951) written in the year of his death.  As to the perception of truth revealed by language ‘ . . . it is not a kind of seeing on our part; it is our acting, which lies at the bottom of the language-game.’ (Then Wittgenstein quotes Goethe’s Faust) ‘. . . and write with confidence “In the beginning was the deed.” '

•

Palimpsestic effect on the senses.

For a similar palimpsestic effect on the senses see the House that looks like Hitler:
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2017/07/a-simile-is-deceived-appearance-house.html

For an intimate insight into the psyche of a committed Nazi, whose Anglophobic thoughts are preserved within the covers of Goethe’s Faust, see:
Between life and death . . . January 14 1944 . . . Franz Lüdtke’s ‘Ostvisionen’ for Colonisation to the Baltic Coast

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2018/02/between-life-and-death-january-14-1944.html

•

Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, 

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html

and Listen Close to Me (2011)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html 
and A Bad Case (2015)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html

Of Blauwe Curaçao or Crème de Ciel : a Meditation on a Painting by Meindert Hobbema, 1689.

                                        The V of the avenue,
                                        recedes to the sky:
                                        a wineglass of blue
                                        vinum ambrosiae.

The Avenue at Middelharnis
by Meindert Hobbema, 1689.
National Gallery, London.
(Reimagined at the Cocktail Hour.)