Owning Paintings, Rocks, Georg Trakl

The breath of the unmoved. An animal face

Grows stiff in blueness, its holiness.

Enormous is the silence in stone;

​The mask of a nocturnal bird. The soft triad

Fades into one sound. Elai! your countenance

Bends speechless over bluish waters.

​O! you still mirrors of truth.

On the ivory temple of the lonely one

The reflection of fallen angels appears.

Georg Trakl, “Night Poem” (1913)

Paul Cézanne, Garden in Maubuisson (1877). Oil on Canvas.

From T.J. Clark’s If These Apples Should Fall: “The orchard in Garden of Maubuisson’s foreground lay directly behind Pissarro’s house. Pissarro was the Cezanne painting’s first owner.”

This detail set something off inside me. So painters owned paintings by other painters (and a few pages later he details how Degas owned a Pissarro, as well)—it shouldn’t be surprising, but that people for hundreds of years owned paintings by others, probably mostly locals, this sticks out. It was a world rich in anniversaries and people supported others through small-time patronage, but more so their decorations and adornments were the art and crafts of their time. These were the images which ran before their eyes daily.

This struck me the day after listening to an argument between my wife and daughter in the car concerning whether the latter could search the cell phone connected to the audio for the artist known as Kygo—one of his specific songs. Yet my wife would not pass back the device because moving it too far strained the cord and made the music cut out. This standoff over the device went on and on for many minutes—only then, I remembered: Didn’t I just have an argument about a device in the house with my daughter or my wife, probably the former—yes, she’d seen too many videos already and we had to get going on our Sunday drive? Oh dear, so this was life as we lived it now: Does the phone have enough battery, is the wifi down? Think of those days in Provence or even the slight slopes and farmlands of Brooklyn in the 1880s. They were “in” the world and they looked at physicalities—all the modernists were born in such environments, so that in their thirties, when the industrial revolution started in earnest, they were in a keen position to tailor responses to how human life was changing—many of its proponents were also taking the subways in the three capitals of the Western world: London and Paris, and later New York.

I was born in 1974. The world started spiraling into the internet in 1995 and by 2009 I think it would be fair to say that the online world had taken over the real world, as in people spent more of their waking moments (out of work) engaging with screens and the virtual world rather than people, physicalities (things-in-themselves), and views of nature—landscapes. I went to Robert Altman’s Vincent and Theo for a look into the old world, though there it is an oversexed one, with large daubs of violence. But one could also go to Jacques Rivette’s La Belle Noiseuse—knowing that even in 1990–91 there would not be a TV found in the large manor house where the artist, Frenhofer, lived in the south of France. (This can be connected to how our ostensible subject matter has changed—even from the 1990s, which I think still constitutes the last burst of energy both in poetry (translations of Rilke, Rumi, and Hafiz were bestsellers and four poets won the Nobel Prize in that decade) and literature in the US—the megawattage of David Foster-Wallace and Don DeLillo on a more popular scale, perhaps sadly ending in a watered down version of both their work, Franzen’s The Corrections.) We still have pictures in our houses—the obligatory Matisse reproduction and a couple pieces by local painters and photographers, but how often do we look at this space on the wall? We still look out the windows, we still look to see what is happening outside, but then…the tyranny of the screens. They are everywhere—in offices, elevators, at the gas pump. How to meditate? As soon as someone comments on a picture on the wall someone brings out a phone to find the artist, to see where it is located, or if there is more like it—this last being the most critical: “If you liked, then check out…” But why? Why do you need more? Why not just be with what you are enjoying, why the need for more only because it is alike? “Love the one you’re with.” The science and sorrow behind capitalism is obvious. Everything crumbles—we often will not look back at the object that started the conversation because the tentacles of the internet pull us under and if someone starts to check their “messages” and says “Sorry,” then the other person will soon pull out their device to match and the twain won’t meet for some minutes.

But isn’t life and time in art often life and time with other people, by which I mean a key cog of aesthetic experience is speaking about art with other people or even just being present with them while experiencing art or experiencing the remembering of it—including being next to someone at a film or in a museum. It’s remarkable to speak in shorthand with other readers/viewers about certain subjects, artists, poetic images, etc. The high signs are there—one can throw out a line of Shakespeare without the other being wrought, perplexed in the extreme. There is a medicating of modern day chaos in the sharing of the aesthetic experience, like sitting in a jacuzzi together for our pained backs.

As I’ve gone to local salons with writers/editors/readers in Brooklyn, I’ve noted how they position themselves near certain texts, recalling the time of reading the Sonnets or when they read Bachmann or watched Bergman, as they know they’ve had a cherished time when they’ve been in a relationship with a specific artist and how there will come a time when they will go back to them or when they finally make time for Proust or Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans. I could lean back in my chair at these moments and muse to myself—what abundance there is here and look at how we are nourishing ourselves, nourishing our minds and imaginations and relationships. Harold Bloom: reading develops our memory like no other practice. If we create our own reality—and how could it be any other way?—then I sat in delight at how beautiful this circle of people and their reality was. No belly-aching over the latest political scandals.

Nature can’t help but ensconce the aesthetic experience—even beyond where you read or experienced it. The landscape in the picture, the locations in the film (always in regards to the camera)—these are also nestled in lines of prose or verse. Heidegger seizes on a few lines of Georg Trakl’s “Night Song” in “On the Way to Language”:

. . . Animal face
Freezes with blueness, with its holiness.
Mighty the power of silence in the rock.

“Mighty the power of silence in the rock.” (Gewaltig, ‘silence’ can also be translated as “vast” and “violent”—“Vast and violent the power of silence in the rock.”) One might even think: This is so common-sensical, why must Trakl even sound this? Then Heidegger explains, “The rock is the mountain sheltering pain. The stones gather within their stony shelter the soothing power, pain stilling us toward essential being. Pain is still ‘with blueness.’” His middle line is quite poetic in thought, though maybe not in the robotic syntax of Heidegger. And the key word over all of it is “stilling,” which works in Peter Hertz’s translation in a ping-pong manner because of “still” being “still” and the “ing” putting action into the curious word. “The stones gather within their stony shelter the soothing power”—well, if they do (and I think they do) we don’t see it. The rock soothes and the pain stills inside us—that is, it quiets. (We often make rocks into animal forms or faces to place them, to name them.) Why is Trakl bringing forth this line at this moment anyway? He must be speaking of “essential being” himself—in a way Wordsworth might describe things.

The experience of looking at rock, at stone, at sea, at forests—isn’t this a measure of our aesthetic appreciation as well? When we look at a painting we create meaning and when we look at nature we do the same. The poetic image of a Wallace Stevens metaphor is not different from that sea-stack we stared at on the west coast with the awing Pacific swirling around it—or even our piecing together that sea-stack and the memory of the Wallace Stevens metaphor:

The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze decor,

A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.

Poetic images are in competition for our attention with the lazy images of social media and glitzy films, soundbites of stupidity—these aren’t poetic images and people in the 80s and 90s were right to criticize the MTV cutting in modern films, in the same way that poetry became less imaginative as the 21st Century went on so that many poems aren’t poems, more moralizing sputniks of solipsism that can’t take our breath from us.

We are within our own private board game everyday—in every mood. How far can we go? How far will we get in one day? We are building, but at the same time, nature is guiding us —pulling us along in a magnetic manner—and other people will also serve or aid us in these quests which are their quests. I am in my own tepid silence writing this in a cafe on a Monday morning, surrounded by solo people (like me) on phones and computers, but we are all questers and the young red-haired, round-faced barista smiles as braided hair foments out the back of her handkerchiefed head and lights a room of people constrained in mixed responsibilities that age confers. We are morose and faux-stoic and she is happy, floating—incredibly unalert to how her moving rock shelters our pain. We hear her high laugh and there is hope in the universe before ten am on a cold Monday—more beauty unlocked and handed to those who would like to give it a spin. A Trakl poem coming to life in the city of cities: “Mighty the power of another’s laughter in the rock,” this rock that can “fit” any desire or desiring. “Cortado!”

—Greg Gerke