by Mark R. DeLong
A few years ago I shared a draft of a sonnet sequence with a poet from the Northwest I had followed for a while. I asked him if he’d give the piece a once-over and provide some critique, and his reading was perceptive and useful for me. One comment drew my attention in particular: “I fall flat on ‘beauty,’ ” he wrote. “This is the one place in the poems the image turns outward into metaphor that cannot be touched — ‘beauty’s hidden folds’ is a no-thing” he wrote, pointing out at the last line of the second sonnet.
I thought about it, wondering about beauty and no-thingness, and thinking that beauty must be something more than an empty word or a placeholder for some substantial thing that is a “better” thing. Then, I admitted and still do admit that I don’t really know what beauty is, aside from maybe being something in the “eye of the beholder,” perhaps an evaporated no-thing, really.
Nell Painter discusses her “lying twentieth-century eyes” and how “[t]hinking like a historian misled me as an artist” not too far into her memoir Old in Art School (2018), a book I picked up when I was thrashing through the first year or so of my retirement. For I had toyed with making a turn like Painter, who wrapped up an eventful career teaching and researching history at Princeton and leaped into undergraduate study of art at Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers and then an MFA at Rhode Island School of Design. She was finishing her sixties when she graduated with her MFA. Read more »
The first time I became aware of Friedrich, many years ago, I was in Zurich to meet an elderly Jungian psychoanalyst—my head stuffed with theoretical questions and eerie dreams with soundtracks by Scriabin. Walking down the Bahnhofstrasse, I passed a bookstore window displaying a stunning art book with the elegant title Traum und Wahrheit (Dream and Truth) and a simple subtitle: Deutsche Romantik. I didn’t yet speak German, but I knew enough to be interested. The book was too heavy for my luggage. I bought it anyway and had it shipped.
What lured my eye to the cover as I passed by was a partial view from one of my now favorite Friedrich paintings, Das Große Gehege (The Great Enclosure)—a cool marshy landscape evoking real ones I would later see from train windows. How could just a corner of a painting have such power? It was the light, the late afternoon saturation of yellow, the black shadowed trees, and the hint of evening gloom already visible as gray on the horizon even though the sky above was still blue. I was captivated.
One of nature’s most endearing parlor tricks is the ripple effect. Drop a pebble into a lake and little waves will move out in concentric circles from the point of entry. It’s fun to watch, and lovely too, delivering a tiny aesthetic punch every time we see it. It’s also the well-worn metaphor for a certain kind of cause-and-effect, in which the effect part just keeps going and going. This metaphor is a perfect fit for one of the worst allisions in US maritime history, leading to the collapse of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge after it was hit by the container ship MV Dali on the morning of March 26, 2024.
Consider again the wooden desk. It was once part of a tree, like the ones outside your window. It became a bit of furniture though a long process of growth, cutting, shaping buying and selling until it got to you. You sit before it as it has a use – a use value – but it was made, not to give you a platform for your coffee or laptop, but in order to make a profit: it has an exchange value, and so had a price. It is a commodity, the product of an entire economic system, capitalism, that got it to you. Someone laboured to make it and someone else, probably, profited by its sale. It has a history, a backstory.
All of this is the case, but none of it simply appears to the senses. Capitalism itself isn’t a thing, but that doesn’t make it less real. The idea that all that there really is amounts to things you can bump into or drop on your foot is the ‘common sense’ that operates as the ideology of everyday life: “this is your world and these are the facts”. But really, nothing is like that: there are no isolated facts, but rather a complex, twisted web of mediations: connections and negations that transform over time.
A cinematographer would recognize this as a crane shot, or its replacement, the drone shot. This crane or drone doesn’t move. It defines the POV (point of view) of the painter, and shows how far his perspective can reach and how much he can cram into the in-between, that 2D surface which expands vertically with every higher angle of his POV, as in this crane shot from Gone with the Wind. 