On art, artists, and Bergman

German poster for The Silence (1963)
Art by Dorothea Fischer-Nobisch

I want very much to tell, to talk about, the wholeness inside every human being. It's a strange thing that every human being has a sort of dignity or wholeness in him, and out of that develops relationships to other human beings, tensions, misunderstandings, tenderness, coming in contact, touching and being touched, the cutting off of a contact and what happens then. --from Ingmar Bergman Directs (1972) by John Simon

Isn't that simple and lovely? Long ago, I was obsessed with Ingmar Bergman, and when I bump into his words, I sometimes feel a little melancholy.  How strange it is to think in this tender way of human wholeness in a world that projects a public image that rages for entertainment and dislikes reflection and what Melville called "deep diving."

I took a course on Bergman with poet R. H. W. Dillard when I was in college, and one of the texts was Four Screenplays of Ingmar Bergman. In it, there's a passage where Bergman talks about Chartres, and how wonderfully satisfying it must have been to be an anonymous artist who felt that his gift was from God and so had both confidence and a natural humility. For that artist, being lauded as better than others does not even register as a thought. Bergman expresses longing for a time when an artist might make, say, a portrait head for the cathedral and be pleased with knowing what he had made, and with knowing that it was a piece of a more complex work created by many people for a great purpose. (Perhaps there's a link to the image of Christians as lively stones that make up the church, all part of something much larger--"like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house" NRSV 1 Peter 2:5.) In his own time, Bergman sees the modern artist as bringing all things out of himself, an effort that is lonely, over-obsessed with the individual, and leads to a state where artists "bleat" news of ourselves constantly but are unable to see one another. Artists are not built up into a cathedral in his view but are caught in a miserable pen sheep. In that image from Bergman, each artist appears isolated within what should be a flock. No shepherd appears.

How comic we will appear in a hundred years, with our heavy use of The Ministry of Sanctioned Words (latest installment being the chiding of professors for using "triggering words"--I wrote a piece about it yesterday but decided that one was entirely too satiric for posting!), our ruling passion for celebrities (red-carpet gods of the day in designer suits and gowns), our jettisoning of literature in the academy in favor of theory and an obsession with judging art through various -isms. To be an artist with these sorts of things held in mind means to de-nature one's work, to run after things that don't matter, and to be always self-conscious about political stance--all things that destroy the natural flow of art. How much lovelier it is to grow like a tree among trees by a stream, rooted and flourishing, sending out fresh leaves and blossoms--and all the while, those little green factories in the leaves go on transforming the air so that others may breathe.

Borges, Blake, Christ, and art

Public domain image; see Wikipedia citation.
Best reproduction is here. www.blakearchive.org

Here's a post for a Sunday, a post for Lent... Reading a Borges interview made me think of that singular visionary, William Blake, sitting with his wife in the garden at Felpham, or glimpsing angels among haymakers, and or spying them up in a tree, the bright wings spangling the branches like stars.

Borges on Christ as artist

Jorge Luis Borges to Denis Dutton:

 ...I don’t know who said that, was it Bernard Shaw? — he said, arguments convince nobody. No, Emerson. He said, arguments convince nobody. And I suppose he was right, even if you think of proofs for the existence of God, for example — no? In that case, if arguments convince nobody, a man may be convinced by parables or fables or what? Or fictions. Those are far more convincing than the syllogism — and they are, I suppose. Well, of course, when I think of something in terms of Jesus Christ. As far as I remember, he never used arguments; he used style, he used certain metaphors. It’s very strange — yes, and he always used very striking sentences. He would not say, I don’t come to bring peace but war — “I do not come to bring peace but a sword.” The Christ, he thought in parables. Well, according to — I think that it was Blake who said that a man should be — I mean, if he is a Christian — should be not only just but he should be intelligent ... he should also be an artist, since Christ had been teaching art through his own way of preaching, because every one of the sentences of Christ, if not every single utterance of Christ, has a literary value, and may be thought of as a metaphor or as a parable.

Christ the Word and art

Borges called himself an agnostic. His description of Christ as working through style, metaphor, and parable seems highly appropriate for a savior called the Word. (In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the word was God. John 1:1.) That comment about every sentence of Christ being of literary value certainly sounds like Blake. In fact, "every sentence" being of literary value fulfills Blake's ideas about unceasing praise, which is art.

Blake, the Laocoön, and art as the Tree of Life

Borges's reference reminds me of the inscriptions circling Blake's depiction (etched and engraved in intaglio) of the famous Laocoön and his sons group (circa 200 B. C. - 70 A. D.), which he perceives as portraying God with Adam and Satan. Blake's copy-work dates from around 1815, but the winding, colorful inscriptions were added more than a decade later. These lines are fascinating, and many of them pronounce on the intersection of Christ and art.

A selection of William Blake's art-related inscriptions around the Laocoön, Copy B (Essick collection):*

Prayer is the Study of Art. 

Praise is the Practise of Art. 

The Eternal Body of Man is Imagination, that is God himself. 

It manifests itself in his Works of Art (in Eternity All is Vision) 

The Old and New Testaments are the Great Code of Man

Art is the Tree of Life   God is Jesus 

The Whole Business of Man is the Arts 

Jesus His Apostles and Disciples were all Artists 

Christianity is Art and not Money    Money is its Curse 

Israel delivered from Egypt is Art delivered from Nature and Imitation 

You must leave Fathers and Mothers and Houses and Lands
if they stand in the way of Art

Without Unceasing Practise, nothing can be done   Practise is Art

*Ampersands signified by "and"

It's interesting how these interrelate. Evidently unceasing "practise" means unceasing praise, since praise is the "practise" of art. All of life, then, becomes praise that expresses itself as art. And art is visonary, flourishing, and apparent in lives that might not, on the surface, appear to be devoted to art as we now think of it.

Dryadic: among beech and maple

No matter how much the old beech raised up arms
against us, we could not help but laugh,
even when it boomed and whistled.



Little forests sprang up on the elephant's foot...



The wish bone of the giants.



The dryad drew the parrot into the tree
where it stayed, dimly visible from the outside.



Lithe Willendorf Venus. Not stone but tree.