Michelangelo Red Antonioni Blue. Murray Pomerance

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СКАЧАТЬ walk together, speaking of religion because she is going to mass. He tells her it is evident to him she is in love, and insists she is like a cherry tree he read about in a newspaper, that eats its own cherries. The word “aloof,” originating as it does in military taxonomy, does not do justice to her abstractness, which is like that of a nurse ready to give an injection, or to the boldness with which she demands to know whether he believes in God, the humility in which she retracts that question, and the renewed boldness in which she withdraws the retraction. He makes it plain he’s interested in her but she tells him he would do well to abjure physical desires, using the tone of a moral guide, quite as though she recognizes that his search is for truths and goodness, not architecture. The church, finally opening at the end of a narrow street, is the Église Saint-Jean-de-Malte, from the thirteenth century. She sits apart from him and loses herself in prayer—“Throughout the entire mass she remains on her knees,” Antonioni had written originally (Tiber 33), though we do not see her do this—and having wandered among the columns, observing the choir, he sits and falls asleep. When he wakes the church is empty and he must run to find her, but she has disappeared. He scours the glistening nocturnal streets. Then, blocks away at a little fountain, there she is, innocently chalking flowers onto the pavement. He tells her he does not find flowers beautiful because they last a few days and then die (and that is why the Japanese do not grow them). “You are afraid of death,” says she, “I am afraid of life”—meaning, the life that people are leading nowadays. It is night. Rain begins to fall. He continues to follow her, admitting that he could love her, and she slips on the pavement and gets her coat wet. Rather than crying, however, she laughs. Back at her apartment, she enters by way of great wooden doors. He races after her. The stairwell is painted a vivid angelica green and pale Béarnaise yellow, and the carpet is deep Beaujolais red. Outside her door he stands awkwardly, until their eyes meet.

      Both of these people voyage without awareness, in a way. She was going to mass, and did not expect to encounter this young man. Now she has fallen into something of a relationship with him, so that before she can make the transition she is planning for the morrow—the culminating moment of her life at this time—she must first account to him for it, must experience his reaction either directly or in her imagination. For his part, he was on point of delivering a portfolio, perhaps opening the door to a future, with no thought of meeting a young woman he might wish to accompany. “I should accompany you,” he proclaimed at one point. Heading toward a mass, as he surmises, he cannot know that he will fall asleep and awaken lost, disturbed, dislocated in time and space, or that he will be desperate to find her, or that in finding her he will continue a journey upward to a summit that brings, instead of perspective, a riddling fog. “Mental suffering is effectively without end” (Sebald, Emigrants 170).

       Cézanne

      Sebald writes that there is no past or future. I was given one day, as a boy, by a gentle piano teacher, a small book containing black-and-white reproductions of paintings by Paul Cézanne. I had no idea who Cézanne was, or why it was this that I was given, or why, for that matter, I was given anything, but certainly there was a mystery to this book of all possible books, and I found many of the pictures ungainly and aggressive without being convincing and also what a boy’s mind would think disorganized. But the fact that I had been made the gift, and with no pretext and on no particular occasion, haunted me for years, and I treasured the book and bore it with me wherever I went, off to school at a big city in Ontario, then to a small Midwestern college town and afterward, as the 1960s wound to a close, circulating through the cities of the East, still, in all this time, not a particular admirer of the painter whose shadows filled its pages. It was only many years later that I saw his canvasses unmediated by printer’s ink and my own limited imagination—freed possibly by having heard Debussy’s L’îsle joyeuse but also entrapped by a swelling galaxy of curiosities—and found that they constitute the epitome of order and beauty. I was helped some in appreciating Cézanne by Guy Davenport’s four Alexander Lectures at the University of Toronto in 1982, “Objects on a Table: Still Life in Literature and Painting,” lectures soon enough invoked—yet only invoked—in a charming publication called Apples and Pears but not, as it happens, to appear in print themselves for some sixteen years—a depressingly long time, since I had been smitten by them and much of what I wished to read was only hanging in the mist. He had graciously given me a moment to say hello before one of these talks and had seemed delighted that anyone in his audience might have been genuinely stimulated by the connections he was so rapidly and voraciously making as he spoke. So stunned had I been by the range of his scholarship and the mystery of his attachments to paintings, paragraphs, poems, colors, and ideas—his personal warmth in the pewter chill of Toronto’s November seemed to augment and color my already rich experience of listening to him at his podium—that years later, when I mounted four groups of Polaroid SX-70 photographs as an address to Debussy’s Bergamasque Suite, and included for one of the movements a series of still lifes of apples, it seemed obvious to me that I should dedicate the show to him. Accordingly, I sent him slides and he was most grateful, but that was the end of our tangential and charged contact. When sometime after his death in January 2005 I learned that he had arranged for the donation of his organs to medical science, I remember being both struck by the nobility and simplicity of this gesture and deeply confused to realize that the person I had met was in fact now divided; or had always been quite remote from the body he inhabited and was thus more than the eyes smiling at mine or the voice gently but disconnectedly encouraging me or the gracile penmanship—a skill retained from the early twentieth-century days when personality and conviction had to live in markings upon paper—that characterized his little note of thanks. The recurrence of the female form of the apple and the male form of the pear in literature particularly interested him—he spoke of apples and pears as being “married” (Objects 55)—as did the Sherlock Holmes stories of Arthur Conan Doyle, and much painting. Cézanne’s still lifes, Van Gogh’s 1888 picture of his bedroom in Arles, and Monet’s work on the waterways around Paris occupied the central position in these 1982 talks, which ranged over a tremendous amount of material—to me at the time, an entire world—and made a chain of startling connections that I could not now reassemble without the help of a notebook I have stowed away somewhere, or lost, I cannot be sure, a notebook that was red, apple red. At any rate, I came to adore the still lifes of Cézanne, and to marvel at how he had accomplished giving the fruit bulk but also weightlessness, and of course at the shockingly simple and complex ways in which he positioned the peaches and oranges and apples around one another to make compositions that echoed Bach. Cézanne, at any rate, lived in Aix as Niccolo does, and, like Antonioni, was deeply moved by color. In late Cézanne “the sketch is the painting” (Davenport, Gracchus 275). Color, for Cézanne and for Antonioni and also for Davenport, was a reverberation of past events, an echo of echoes, and it occupied time, that same color that Picasso said “is a distraction in a painting” (qtd. in Gracchus 183).

      Aix—old Aix, at least—is a city of sandstone buildings, tiny streets, and a thousand fountains, with the grand, confrontational Mont Sainte-Victoire on its eastern edge among modest, shady groves of pine. It is a place—at least the Aix that Antonioni photographs in Beyond the Clouds is a place—that offers itself to the spirit of the wanderer without making any imposition. As we follow Niccolo and the girl, as we listen to them address one another in an extended dolly that moves down blocks and turns corners and crosses little squares, we have no anticipation of arriving at a summary destination but only, with each of their steps, contentment at the experience of penetrating and then relinquishing a space. Satisfaction is beyond consideration. “Are you satisfied, madame?” the young man asks a middle-aged woman who is passing by, and she smiles indulgently at the ridiculousness of the question; yet we see that she is entirely pleased with her condition, even though it is not a condition of satisfaction. She is hardly bored, or irritated, or even displaced by her lack of satisfaction. Aix removes the question of satisfaction from the equation.

      To experience art is an act of faith. To make art, to paint a canvas, is innocent, an abandonment while also a consumption of the self. Everything is the subject, its distance, its roundness, proportion, history, implication, its weight—which is to say, in Cézanne, its lack of weight, its light. (Color is light, СКАЧАТЬ