Hermit

....The aniconic spirit is restless in its search for the immediate, the primitive and direct experience of reality..the anarchic. It desires, above all else, to be free of nostalgia, memory, legend, myth, and history: to escape itself, to break free from time...Is such an unmediated experience even possible , or is it merely a dream for those who live in these particular times? Is the pursuit of Utopia bound to lead to a catastrophic disaster, to despair and fanaticism?

Schama: the frayed seams that connect and separate two spaces (dihliz)...not boundaries but a visible glimpse of some glowing seal of light over which everything else is unstably superimposed. His 'black on grey', for example, was still soaked with light and yet still somehow tethered to the known world.

Human beings are halfway between nothing and infinity: therein lies his majesty, therein his tragedy. Is it the human being that is this wild horizon, this barzakh, this thin glimmering band of light that separates the black from the white? But why talk only of separation? Are we not bound and free , is there not continuity and discontinuity? Where does night begin and day end?

Rosenberg: In sum, what the new American artists sought was ...the formal sign language of the inner kingdom-equivalents in paint of a flash, no matter how transitory, or what had been known throughout the centuries as spiritual enlightenment.

Perhaps we should, then, think of the intervening light in a different way: as the light within the light, the 'divine darkness'? What is it that Rothko is looking for? The silence of the deserts, the glaciers? But, then, what of his commitment to the human angle? To look to the skies, to leave the cave, must we neglect what lies behind our backs, under our noses?

Gregory of Nazianus: The world is held together by the power and reason of God; one soul, united...["and the creation of the universe is as a single soul"]..creation is a system and compound of earth and sky and all that is in them...more worthy of admiration when we consider the harmony and unison of the whole, tending to the perfect completion of the whole. Outward beauty, as with the moon, is a ladder...'Beauty is the splendour of the True' .

Rothko: The urgency fro transcendent experience was understood , and given official status. The importance of channels, tradition, bridges, ladders. Can we, those without an inheritance, live up to that task?

Heller: The portrait of this situation is Van Gogh.the sunflower, the chair and the boots that are the chance receptacle of all that homeless energy of the spirit which once had its lawful house with Giotto's angels-once a king of kingdoms, now a squatter in boots. Look at this bough of almond blossom, look at this chair-indeed, they get much more than their due of the spirit, almost bursting with its superfluity. It is a mere moment of explosion that separates Van Gogh's objects from the distorted fragments of surrealism.

It is sometimes possible to think of Rothko's paintings as the moment just after the first creation but just as easy to think of them as the afterglow of the final explosion....the absence from our lives of commonly accepted symbols to represent and house our deepest feelings. And so these invade empty shells of fragmentary memories, ..hermit-crabs in a sea of uncertain meaning. We may yet reach the moon..

---Heller

Words strain,

Crack and sometimes break, under the burden

Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,

Decay with imprecision.

___________

The hermit’s hut is a theme which needs no variations, for at the simplest mention of it, “phenomenological reverberation” obliterates all mediocre resonances. The hermit’s hut is an engraving that would suffer from any exaggeration of picturesqueness. Its truth must derive from the intensity of its essence, which is the essence of the verb “to inhabit.” The hut immediately becomes centralized solitude, for in the land of legend, there exists no adjoining hut. And although geographers may bring back photographs of hut villages from their travels in distant lands, our legendary past transcends everything that has been seen, even everything that we have experienced personally. The image leads us on towards extreme solitude. The hermit is alone before God. His hut, therefore, is just the opposite of the monastery. And there radiates about this centralized solitude a universe of meditation and prayer, a universe outside the universe. The hut can receive none of the riches “of this world.” It possesses the felicity of intense poverty; indeed, it is one of the glories of poverty; as destitution increases it gives us access to absolute refuge.

---From anton, via Bachelard