Leonardo from Vinci

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Leonardo da Vinci, The flights of the Mind, Charles Nicholl, Penguin Books, 2005.

During his lifetime, Leonardo da Vinci was not considered the greatest visual artist of all time.  No, his personal lot was difficult, and endlessly trying.   He was an illegitimate son, a homosexual, a genius without peer, and always dependent for financial support on petty, vain, narrow-minded, and falsely pious rich men of medieval Italy.  He suffered fools continually.

A genius can’t really know what non-genius is like, and so life is puzzling, other people are baffling. The genius feels oppressively different and lonely and can be driven to seek expression, if not in this life, then for in the future.   This is how it was for Leonardo.  His work speaks to us 500 years later. His genius was visual, as Mozart’s was sound, his creativity futuristic, astonishing the world to this day.

“My advice is not to trouble yourself with words unless you are speaking to the blind.”

Three paintings:  The Lady with an Ermine, La Belle Ferronniere, and Mona Lisa are exquisite masterpieces. Leonardo presents his subjects radiant, unposed, mysteriously bemused, elegant, and subtly but powerfully defiant. We look at them, and they look at us.  We sense that they are unmistakenly people, individuals with thoughts, and hurts, and hopes, individuals who have a story.  There is a feeling of intrigue, something has happened. Leonardo doesn’t just capture pose, and clothing, and expression, he captures mentation, one can feel them thinking.  And they have dignity. Leonardo feels for them, and wants us see and feel for them also.  They are prisoners of sorts, sexual prisoners, sold into marriage by their families, to rich, older men.  They are confined – perhaps like him – by sexuality, the circumstances of the times, by the mediocrity of the powerful.  And so, too, with his Jesus. In The Last Supper, his Jesus is a person, not an icon.  This Jesus has resignation, disappointment, regrets, friends, and human needs, and is resigned to being misunderstood.

Leonardo’s paintings are astonishingly few. Late in life he regrets this, yet one senses that an element of purpose limited his output.  A subtle protest, perhaps, as if he felt it a blasphemy to give his artistic gifts over to the despicable, undeserving wealthy.  He was most proud of his work on medical illustrations, created from laborious dissections of human cadavers, carried out in the hospitals full of the unpretentious, common humanity.  He hoped to aid medical knowledge and treatment. This was his way to contribute his talents to the deserving.

Leonardo sensed the mystical in visual experience.

“Observe the flame of a candle and consider its beauty.  Blink your eye and look at it again.  What you see now was not there before, and what was there before is not there now.  Who is it who rekindles this flame which is always dying?”

Tambourine Man

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March 1966

Playboy:  “you’ve said you think message songs are vulgar.  Why?“

Dylan:  “Well, first of all, anybody that’s got a message is going to learn from experience that they can’t put it into a song.  I mean it’s just not going to come out the same message.  . . .you’ve got to respect other people’s right to also have a message themselves.”

Bob Dylan went to the University of Minnesota for less than a year.  He read Immanuel Kant’s  A Critique of Pure Reason and then quit.  Kant talked of the ‘understanding’ as opposed to the ‘reason’.  By the ‘understanding’, he meant the a priori – the instinctual knowing that a human is born to have without being taught.  His deep belief is that art, any art, that is true, speaks to the ‘understanding’, and not to the ‘reason’. He tries to convey this to Playboy, without success.  In the process he reveals – and it is startling to see it now in retrospect – that he had this conviction about art and his intention to honor it in his work, at a very young age, after barely growing up in Hibbing, Minnesota, after just a short time in college.

In this interview he continually rejects categories, particularly political categories, and intentions or plans for his artistic direction.  The interviewer just doesn’t get it, and Bob is forced to give diversionary answers to questions he has already answered.

“I’m not an IBM computer any more than I’m an ashtray.  I mean its obvious to anyone who’s ever slept in the back seat of a car that I’m just not a schoolteacher.”

Dylan is trying to say that he will follow his muse, here and now, using his medium.  He won’t describe its meaning or its effect on others.  It is not about descriptive words, he is saying, or that is what it would be – descriptive words.  The song art will either grab you or it won’t.

“Colleges are like old age homes” – anything that blocks one’s access to the ‘understanding’ is deadening, a form of suicide.  “Protest” music – “topical” music – is dead music because it is applies reason to the artistic process.  What is reasoned cannot communicate with the understanding.

“Hey Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me” – this is his plan – to follow his artistic intuition and communicate to those who will hear it.  That is all an artist can do.

“I don’t know about other people’s sympathy but my sympathy runs to the lame and crippled and beautiful things.  I have a feeling of loss of power – something like a reincarnation feeling”. His urge is to Surrender to an inner sense.

He seems to know there is a price.  People want explanation, they want certainty, they want to belong. They will seek to believe in order to belong.

Dylan is willing to be disappointing.  He is willing to pay the price.  He has paid the price.

“I wouldn’t think twice about giving a starving man a cigarette.  But I’m not a shepherd.“

Hoping for Spalding Gray

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“Tell me a horror story, Daddy”.

“. . . Look around you, son.  . . . What do you see?”

There is the abyss, the secret that life is ultimately empty and meaningless, that none of us really matter.  It is that existential horror of being.  We could dwell on it, but that would make it very hard for us to live.  Life is tragic, it is full of loss, it ends in death, it can be unspeakably cruel. Yet most of us seem to rather easily avoid thinking about it.  Somehow, we keep up optimism, and have a trust that horrible things won’t happen to us.

Some people simply can’t ignore this horror of being, and when they are also exceptionally perceptive and insightful, they can live with a deep and puzzling loneliness of being different, a gnawing sense of being unable to have validation.  They often try, sometimes in charming and creative ways, to reach ‘normal’ people, but they fail and have despair.

Spalding Gray comes to mind.  He invented the creative monologue.  He gave us lively, theatrical expositions of mental journeys, musings, perplexity.  Over and over he portrays deep experience, combined with a sense of missing attachment.  He has some kind of inability to feel comfortable the way everyone else seems to feel comfortable, some kind of disconnection with himself.  He recounts life episodes of failing to act in his own best interests, like when he can’t bring himself to be on the Johnny Carson show.  He is not sure why he is who he is.  “Why don’t I have children?   Was it a decision I made or did it just happen?” He feels lost, and is puzzled that others don’t feel lost also.

Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, presents a retrospective of his work, Spalding Gray: Stories to Tell. Actors read poignantly and theatrically from his journal notes. Spalding is delightfully animated with wonder, doubt, and chagrin.  We learn that he was annoyed, indeed obsessed, by his step daughter’s repetitive playing of the bouncy song “I get knocked down, but I get up again da da da da da da da da da”. Spalding mocks this. He derides it.  It is funny, but he is emphatic. He wants us to know about this.  He wants us to know that his song really, really gets to him.

Having children is an element of reprieve for him, but ultimately he can’t go on.

The program ends with a large screen photo of Spalding.  In full view he is there – his puzzled, glint-eyed, emphatic, dramatic, funny, bemused expression.  He makes sense.  There is a sense of relief for him, gratitude, and even joy.  He can be known after all, he is seen.  It is all the more precious as we know he was never sure.

About Bob

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“I fought with my twin, that enemy within, ’til both of us fell by the way”

Human minds herd, mentally, the way animals herd in movement.   A few will start off in a certain direction, and then, at an accelerating pace, the rest follow.  There is wisdom in the crowd.  There is madness in the crowd.  We do GroupThink.  We seem made to believe something when others do too.

Rare individuals, it seems, are immune to this.  What everyone else does automatically, they won’t do at all.  They need to be different.  They don’t follow the crowd, they don’t follow fads. In fact, they often start fads. They set themselves apart.  Malcolm Gladwell, in The Tipping Point, calls them Innovators, and describes  how fashion marketers search for these types to foresee future trends.

All personality is strategy for social success.  Being stubbornly different can be a way to avoid comparison.  Combine this with a special talent or intelligence, and you can have a cultural creator, a ground breaking artist. Bob Dylan may be one of them.

Forty years on, he is still with us, still producing unpredictable, original, compelling music.  A star in his 20’s, he’s a star in his 60’s. Relentlessly unique, his first act was to create his own name.  He felt “born to the wrong parents”.  And in all these years he has resisted explaining himself, resisted defining himself, resisted being categorized.  He won’t let us have him.

To many, this has seemed contrived, a publicity stunt.  It doesn’t help that he often performs badly.  It seems purposeful.  He almost seems compelled to now and then produce a lousy album.   He accepts honorary degrees without saying anything.  Those who have recorded with him will say that he is a highly practiced and skilled craftsman of the song writing, phrasing, guitar playing, and, yes, singing art.

Of all our cultural stars today, he will be the one, from our time, to enter the pantheon of singular american creative artists – artists like Mark Twain, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Steinbeck, Frank Lloyd Wright, Andrew Wyeth, Georgia O’Keefe.  Someday we will be quick to say to our grandchildren or great grandchildren: “when I was young I saw Bob Dylan”.

From the very beginning, he seems to have been precociously aware of the essential artistic imperative to stay fresh, stay true, unaffected, uncontrived.  All of his evasions, and dodgings have served to prevent the self consciousness that can kill the art engine, steal the muse, stop the flow, make the work mechanical or predictable.  Art isn’t art, after all, if it comes from the brain rather than the soul, from the head rather than the heart, from theory rather than experience.

How did he know this so young?

“They say every man needs protection, They say every man must fall, Yet I swear I see my reflection, Some place so high above this wall”

Vincent

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New York Review of Books,  March 25, 2010, “The passions of Vincent Van Gogh“, Richard Dorment.

Vincent Van Gogh is the archetype of the troubled artist, the insane person whose insanity empowers creativity in his art.  Craziness is part of being creative, so it goes.  Yet, does it?  In Vincent’s case, his art was a compensation, it helped make him sane, and when it was assaulted, his sanity and art were broken.

Vincent Van Gogh was eccentric, and socially very difficult.  His social failures haunted his life.  Life is a search by the self for effectiveness, a niche, ‘something that works’.   People are driven to find a sense of mastery, a feeling that they can accomplish what they need.  Vincent was no different.  But he failed at teaching, at preaching, at romance, and at friendship.  His only enduring connection, his brother, encouraged him to do art.

Once he focused on art, he became an ardent learner and self teacher, and he spent hours drawing, painting, and studying other artists, in circumstances of destitution and despair. And then by chance, he went to Arles.  There, with his skills developed, his gifts of concentrated perception could match the rich, visual beauty of sunny southern France.  He found artistic flow, and produced great works of intensity and power.

In the Hermitage, in St. Petersburg, Russia, in a small side room, with a silent babushka attendant in the corner, one comes upon Landscape with Carriage and Train in the Background, painted the year of his death, 1890.  One is drawn to faint brush lines, along side the wagon wheel of the carriage, crude strokes of dark color on the whitish road.  One slowly realizes they are shadows. . . on water, and the road is . . .wet! . . . And then, with a jolt, one sees that the green fields are wet, it has just rained and there is the smell of wet grass.

It is no mystery that during his time in Arles, he did many self portraits and portraits of others.  He was literally building a personal self.  His growing confidence led him to seek artistic and personal connection from other artists.

Unfortunately, it was Gauguin who came to visit.  A misanthrope and narcissist, Gauguin had little inclination to feel sympathy or regard for others.  He left his wife and family without support, to do what he pleased.  Far from engaging Vincent, he relentlessly criticized him, and questioned his methods and his work.  He tried to change Vincent’s expressionism, his manner of painting what he saw – the very essence of his art.  Gauguin wanted egotistical symbolism, nihilistic sentiment.

After nine weeks with Gauguin, Vincent drew a knife towards him, but then retreated in panic and later cut himself. He cut off his own ear. Gauguin left Arles. Vincent eventually committed suicide.

Did the vain Gauguin need to undermine a superior talent?

In Vincent’s last painting, Wheat Field with Crows, menacing black crows descend on the yellows, reds, and blues of southern France.