Whirlwind (1906), by Filipp Malyavin (from A World History of Art)
I know, I know - you're sick of this topic. But I have to find out why this one book, above all books, 'shakes my soul', to paraphrase a review in the Washington Post Book World. In my own words, why this book resonates with the metaphysical nothingness through which I swim - literally resonates like a note and a tuning fork.
(Read back a few posts and remember that this is my virtual identity, so really this is my party and you can just close the browser using that cross-shaped thingie up there on the right. In this world, we all have choices.)
I am rereading it as an experiment. Is this book genuinely soul-shaking or was my soul already shook? As I'm learning, the benefit to rereading a great book is that you can deconstruct why it is a great book. (Or you realise it wasn't really so great, but that's not the case here.)
This paragraph bothers me, but I am going to write it anyway. There are no adjectives that can summarise the horror of the convention of exile in Siberia in the early 20th-century (and for centuries before). Trust me, I have just tried. (See previous post about trauma.) Without trivialising this, the first two chapters bring this horror home. Using something more than words. Something with all the features of psychological unease.
The beginning of the third chapter gives the reader (me) some space, like an interrogator allowing the prisoner to sleep for a few minutes. Probably because he knows the torture that follows will be even more brutal for this respite.
Unlike the first chapter which assaults you until you can't remember a before or see an after, the third slides into the assault, crushing hope with the heel of a boot as one would a cigarette butt. And that is where I am now. Literally and metaphorically. 19 days and 46 pages in.
This is no melodrama, folks. This is my subjective experience of a book that uses me as a tuning fork in a way that only visual art does (again in the absence of words, which sinks into the spaces of me before I have time to hold it still and analyse it) - which I am learning will have to do in the absence of objective truth. (This doesn't mean I have to like it or even value it (it is nothing but a tautology, subjective truth), but there it is. It is all any of us have.)
I sound defensive. I am defensive. Emotions - especially extreme ones - are treated with some disdain, as an hysteria of the feminine world. They are not productive - in fact they may hamper productivity. They are naive; they are the realm of creative eccentricity, which we value as do an ethnological comparison.
Get to know me, the champion of one's emotions - especially those that swim deeper, and you will find that I appreciate logic and knowledge and those good things that bring a sense of objective security. You will probably still call me naive and eccentric, but then you don't know what I have witnessed and know of human nature, which led me to understand that trauma begets trauma begets trauma. That this is as much of a fact as the arc of the Earth around the Sun.
Now, I have just written, deleted, rewritten and deleted the above paragraph over and over. All I can muster up to try to convince you (and myself) that subjectivity has value - the same as that of logic and knowledge and science - is in this book.
Lady by a Piano (1899), by Igor Grabar (from A World History of Art)
No comments:
Post a Comment