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| William Gass [Philip Guston] |
Rodin’s
surfaces are there to suggest a reality that can only be inferred,
just as fingers or a face, by gesture or expression, disclose a
consciousness that would otherwise be indiscernible. Sculptures are
things: they start as stuff, stuff taken from stuff like rock or
clay, and they stay stuff until the artist gives them a determinate
form so that, through that form, they may have life. The poet’s
problem is precisely the opposite. Language is our most important
sign of elevated awareness, but language has weak presence. Though
often on paper, it possesses no weight. A poem is like a ghost
seeking substantiality, a soul in search of a body more appealing
than the bare bones mere verses rattle. . . . the poet must also be a
maker, as the Greeks maintained, and, like the sculptor, like every
other artist, should aim at adding real beings to the world, beings
fully realized, not just things like tools and haberdashery that
nature has neglected to provide, or memos and laws that society
produces in abundance, but Ding an sich, as
humans often fail to be, things in themselves. . . .
Rilke’s
animism is poetical, of course, but is also, in its way, religious,
for it requires respect for all things equal to the respect we tend
to show now for only a few, since we prize so little even in the
things we prize. It gives value, as Rodin did, to every part of our
anatomy, to each muscle movement — stretch, twitch, and fidget; our
physical features — a silk soft earlobe, tawny limb, or crooked
finger; or facial expressions — grimace, smile, or howl; as well as
the very clay we come from (at least in his workshop) — wood block,
slab, and plaster pot. Moreover, it endows even the accidental
encounter of different parts — my hand on your shoulder —
with its own dignity as a legitimate state of affairs. . . .
the
surfaces of Rodin’s work, which his studio light makes lively,
implicitly rely upon a philosophical principle of great age and
respectability . . . Since the effect in question is one of
animation, it may seem odd that the principle involved is that of
inertia. A body at rest will remain at rest — a body in motion will
remain in motion — unless something else hectors or hinders it.
When that interference occurs, the stone or the ball or the dog at
the door will resist; it will attempt to restore the status quo,
strive to save its situation, maintain its equilibrium, preserve its
life. Spinoza called the tendency to stay the same the object’s
conatus. It is
popularly thought of as the principle of self-preservation. All
things would be self-sufficient, as windowless as Leibniz’s monads,
if they could. The condition of the fetus, which is automatically
fed, protected from every outside shock, surrounded by an embalming
ocean, growing as it has been programmed to grow, is ideal. We are
pushed out into the world; we are forced by circumstances both inside
us (hunger and thirst) and outside (sensation and harm) to cope, and,
as Freud argued, we are repeatedly compelled to reduce the unsettling
demands of our desires to zero.
A
limp that tells the world we are compensating for an injury becomes a
habit hard to break even when its cause has healed and there is no
longer any “reason” for it. Except that the limp wishes to
remain. Our stutter wants to stay. Our fall from a ladder would be
forever like a cast-out angel if we didn’t fetch up in a lake of
fire or at least on a floor. The fire, moreover, eats its way through
every fuel it’s offered only because it is eager to stay burning
like that bright gem of quotation fame. As the naked models move
about Rodin’s studio, he observes the participating parts of their
bodies until he can catch, in the middle of an action, the very will
of the gesture, its own integrity and wholeness. . . .
the
elements of a work of art must form a community which allows each
element its own validity while pursuing the interest of the whole. A
word, if it could have had a choice, must feel it would have chosen
just the companions it has been given, so that when it glows with
satisfaction, it also makes its line shine.
Moreover,
the unity of a sculptural fragment, when imagined alongside a
correspondingly severed limb, insists upon its own superiority, for
it can flourish quite apart from any body, whereas both amputation
and amputee are damaged possibly beyond repair.
Rainer Maria Rilke (tr. Wm Gass):
Buddha
As
if he listened. Silence. Depth.
And
we hold back our breath. Yet nothing yet.
And
he is star. And other great stars ring him.,
though
we cannot see that far.
O
he is fat. Do we suppose
he’ll
see us? He has need of that?
Sink
in any supplicating pose before him,
he’ll
sit deep and idle as a cat.
For
that which lures us to his feet
has
circled in him now a million years.
He
has forgotten all we must endure,
encloses
all we would escape.
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