Zazen or Ah Zen?

photo of Eugene O’Neill by Alice Boughton

There’s an argument to be made that if everyone were mindful and lived in the moment, that little art would be produced. Are Waiting for Godot or Madame Bovary about living in the moment? It’s certainly unlikely that Flaubert did. However, both had to be conversant with a non Zen attitude (even though there are scholars who have made Zen interpretations of Beckett’s work), as was Chekhov, whose three sisters are constantly dreaming about going to a mythic Moscow that’s the representation of all their dreams and desires—ditto the windmill chasing Cervantes describes in Don Quixote and the “pipedreams” that Eugene O’Neill’s characters suffer from in The Iceman Cometh. Cervantes, O’Neill, Chekhov, Beckett, and Flaubert all understood the enormous power that that  which has yet to be has over that which is. But the sensibility is also a description of imagination. By allowing the imagination to fly from what is to what could be, almost all creators are charter members of the romantic movement, even though the styles in which they work might flirt with the most advanced forms of post-modernism. Yes, it can be argued that all imaginative work partakes of the romantic agony. Even though actually influenced by Zen, John Cage’s 4’33," a work in which there is time, but no sound seems to be reaching for something beyond itself. If nothing else the open space allows in an ineffable flow of non-existence. Any thought, feeling, or even melody can occupy the emptiness, the black hole opened up by the artist’s erasure of all signposts of a familiar present--at least in so far as musical form is concerned.

Paris Journal: Paul Durand-Ruel

Courbet's “Femme a la vague” (1868)

The Musee du Luxembourg has devoted a show to Paul Durand-Ruel ("Paul Durand-Ruel, The Gamble of the Impresssionists"), the Impressionist impresario who also conformed to Flaubert’s dictum about being “regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” In this case the work was selling and promoting the likes of Monet, Manet, Renoir, Sisley, Cassatt, Morisot, Delacroix, Millet, Courbet, Degas, Cezanne. Ruel conformed to the bourgeois part by being a monarchist and Catholic, having five kids and selling art right out of his house. Cezanne painted Vollard who was also a dealer of his work and the current exhibition begins with portraits of Durand Ruel and his children by Renoir. If a picture speaks a thousand words, then the French have a way of saying things that are suggestive of a thousand pictures. Here is a particularly evocative quote that introduces the exhibition: “Elle invite a s’interroger sur le role d’une figure, celle du marchand, longtemps lassise, dans l’ombre, dans la formation d’un gout et de hierarchies artistiques encore perciptibles aujourd’hui.” The crux is that the exhibition highlights a role, of the merchant, which has been often kept in shadows. It’s a dubious premise since dealers (like Vollard) and collectors (like Leo and Gertrude Stein) have long been a subject of inquiry by critics and art historians. Of course in the contemporary art world the likes of Leo Castelli, Mary Boone and Larry Gagosian have achieved a super star status. While Durand-Ruel is described as a family man there was a little Hugh Hefner in him. His interest in topless beauties is manifest in both Courbet’s “Femme a la vague,” (1865) and Renoir’s “Etude Torse Effet de Soleil” (1875-6) Either that or his business acumen trumped his morality, in his opting for what would plainly sell. Monet’s “Le Jardin de l’artiste" (1877) is an impressionist masterpiece that merits the trip to the exhibition in and of itself. Durand-Ruel eventually started a gallery on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan where he positioned himself to deal with wealthy American collectors like the Havemeyers. Baudelaire makes a cameo appearance in Manet’s “La Musique aux Tuileries" (1862) which is another one of the jewels of the exhibit.

Chekhov’s Enlightenment

Flaubert once said “Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” In an essay entitled “Chekhov’s Enlightenment”(The New Criterion, November 2012) Gary Saul Morson comments, “What really set Chekhov apart from other intellectuals, including most today, were his openly petit-bourgeois values. I can think of no other great writer who so forthrightly defended middle class virtues as a prerequisite for human dignity. Medicine suited him, not only because of his acute sensitivity to human suffering but also because of the high value it accorded to proper habits, respect for one’s surrounding, and, most bourgeois of all good hygiene.” Thus the very title of Morson’s essay should be taken with a grain of salt. Rather than Enlightenment figures like Locke, you might say that Chekhov had more in common with Edmund Burke to the extent that his skepticism and anti-millenarianism were rooted in the doctor’s understanding of the complexity of pathology and the fact there weren’t always simple remedies (a.k.a. enlightened solutions) for every malady. Morson quotes Chekhov thusly on the trendy progressive poseurs of his day, “Our young ladies and political beaux are pure fools…all their inactivity sanctity and purity are based on hazy and naïve sympathies and antipathies to individuals and labels, not to facts. It’s easy to be pure when you hate the Devil you don’t know and love the God you wouldn’t have brains enough to doubt.” Turgenev’s Basarov was the perfect model for this kind of dictatorship of the intellectual. In his famous lines from “The Second Coming,” Yeats iterated the humanity of a similar sensibility, “The best lack all conviction while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity.” 

Min Kamp

Photo: Kjetll Ree

The Times’ Larry Rohter reported on the Norwegian author Karl Owe Knausgaard’s 3600 page memoir, My Struggle which naturally cites the kahuna of infamous memoirs, Mein Kampf  (“He Says a Lot, for a Norwegian," NYT, 6/18/12). Since Mein Kampf is still illegal in some countries, Min Kamp (in Norwegian) has appeared under aliases. “In Germany, the first two volumes of Mr. Knausgaard’s ‘My Struggle’ have sold well, but under the titles ‘To Die’ and ‘To Love,'
” Rohter remarked. Actually the notoriety of Knaugaard’s memoir seems to derive not from the association to Hitler, but due to the frankness with which he talks about things like his father’s alcoholism and his wife’s “bipolar condition.” However ultimately the question comes up why would anyone want their life story to be compared to Hitler’s? Most writers and people not only dislike being compared to Hitler, but usually go overboard to dissociate themselves from his memory. No matter how candid and confessional one is being, ultimately only a self-mutilator would want to say about Mein Kampf what Flaubert famously said about Madame Bovary, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.” Rohter's Times piece did little to throw light on the reason for Knausgaard choice of title beyond quoting the author as saying that both Mein Kampf and Min Kamp are “about the construction of self.” One might have imagined the choice of Mein Kampf as a title from a shock jock like Sacha Baron Cohen whose most recent movie The Dictator turns Osama bin Laden into a subject of satire. But Min Kampf, whose sixth volume, according to Rohter, does include the author’s own essay comparing the eponymous Mein Kampf to his own, is as deadly serious in its subject matter as was Hitler’s. Imagine how history would have been changed if Hitler hadn’t taken himself so seriously. What if Hitler had turned his ideas into the subject of a standup act—something along the lines of a Sacha Baron Cohen routine— that played in Weimar Germany? Would Knausgaard still have expropriated the title 86 years later?

Consciousness is Destiny

Freud said “anatomy is destiny”, but one wonders if consciousness hasn’t become the rogue player making  personality into a more labile affair. How can one talk about sexual identity without cracking a smile? Flaubert said “Madame Bovary,  c’est moi.” Aren’t we increasingly becoming our own creators. Is self invention our most viral secular heresy? Can for example a middle aged married supposedly “heterosexual male” have the sensibility of a woman who loves other women? Or more bluntly have you  ever looked at the person you are making love to and wondered what they are? Some marriage counselors have pointed out that we all marry our same sex parent. Therefore a woman making love with her husband is really making love to another woman. Our woman in question has simply married a man who reminds her of her mother. Objection! you will cry. The man has an appendage called a penis which the mother, unless she had reconstructive surgery following her pregnancy, did not. But isn’t too much being made of the penis in an age when sex change operations have become so sophisticated and readily available. Granted the Supreme Court is unlikely to include vaginoplasties with the issues it undertakes to rule on when it considers the constitutionality of Obama’s health plan. For good or bad sexuality has become an intellectual and even ideological affair. Yes biology is involved, but it’s the brain rather than the genitals that is calling the shots.