Understanding the Inexpressible: Primo Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved

As described by Primo Levi in his work The Drowned and the Saved, the ultimate effect of the Nazi concentration camps was not just to execute a section of the population; more than life, the camps took humanity itself. Thus, it is implied in Levi’s writings that those who survived the horrors of the Holocaust were, by definition, not the ones who had undergone the full force of the Nazi’s dehumanizing project. They were able to once again return to the human community after their harrowing experience. Levi describes the ones who were forced to see this process through as being the only true witnesses to the worst of the holocaust, an act of witnessing which robed them of all ability to express what had been experienced. This is why Levi describes these people as “those who saw the Gorgon”, to see what they saw was to be lost forever.

Levi, himself a survivor of the Holocaust, explains that for the survivors memory was selective, and sometimes even misleading. As he says: “It has been noticed, for instance, that many survivors of wars or other complex and traumatic experiences tend unconsciously to filter their memories”. The survivors accounts are of a time at which everything human in them rebels, and they would rather forget, or place emphasis on the “relaxed intermezzos” between the worst of their experiences. Furthermore, even in the face of such torments, as Levi recounts, the human mind often seeks to alter its own reality. This is evident in Alberto’s response to the sure death of his father. After he was sent to the chambers, Alberto invented for himself an elaborate myth detailing how his father had survived and had been sent to a camp for geriatrics.

Not only does Levi question the completeness of the picture presented by the survivors, he also notes that the experiences many of them shared were not what the majority of the prisoners actually faced. Indeed, that was exactly how they were able to survive, “by their prevarications or abilities or good luck”. The camps were made to kill people, those who survived, then, were the exceptions and not the rule; they usually had options that were never offered to those who died. These people were called “Muslims” and within the camps they were “the irreversibly exhausted, worn out prisoners close to death”.

Communication, and through it the twin benefits of community and information, was precious within the Lagers. Language was vital in the camps for, as Levi explains, the essence of human life is such that “one can and must communicate, and thereby contribute in a useful and easy way to the peace of others and oneself”. Many of those who survived could either speak German, the language of their captors, or another language which connected them to their fellow prisoners. In knowing German one had a great advantage, for, “[t]hose who understood them and answered in an articulate manner could establish the semblance of a human relationship”. This semblance of a relationship, while not insuring life, prevented one from falling into the”irreversible exhaustion” and extreme isolation of the “Muslim”.

As Levi describes:

“This ‘not being talked to’ had rapid and devastating effects. To those who do not talk to you, or address you in screams that seem inarticulate to you, you do not dare speak… if you don’t find anyone your tongue dries up in a few days, and your thoughts with it.”

Language is not merely a tool, allowing us to externalize the internal world of the mind; it is also constituent and and feeds back into the way our minds themselves work. Without it, we lose an integral part of ourselves. Levi makes this an essential characteristic of the human, making the broad statement: “All members of the human species speak, no nonhuman species knows how to speak”. He further emphasizes the human non-human dichotomy and the effects of losing the ability to communicate when he describes the reactions of the Italians in the camp, who looked around: “with bewildered eyes, like trapped animals, and that is what they had become”. Not only does this loss of communication drastically change the victims’ ways of thinking, but it also pronounced a virtual death sentence for the prisoner. As Levi describes: “In short, you find yourself in a void, and you understand at your expense that communication generates information and that without information you cannot live”.

This is what it took in the camps to make a “Muslim”: the utter loss of the ability to express even the most basic of thoughts,  with it any connection to human community, and a certain death sentence after time spent in cruel labour. These were the people who truly witnessed all the holocaust had to offer, and because of it could never actually express what they saw, for the holocaust did not only kill the person, but the human within. This is why it is only possible to get a third party’s account of the events, that a precondition of understanding them is, paradoxically, never “really” knowing what they experienced, and being only too aware of this divide. In a passage of the greatest importance Levi explains:

We who were favored by fate tried, with more or less wisdom, to recount not only our fate but also that of the others, indeed of the drowned; but this was a discourse ‘on behalf of third parties,’ the story of things seen close at hand, not experienced personally. The destruction brought to an end, the job completed, was not told by anyone, just as no one ever returned to describe his own death. Even if they had paper and pen, the drowned would not have testified because their death had begun before that of their body… they had already lost the ability to observe, to remember, to compare and express themselves. We speak in their stead, by proxy.

This is why Levi describes the true witnesses of the holocaust as “those who saw the Gorgon”, for to truly see it was to lose all that makes one human. It is not a paradox to say that the only witnesses were those who could then never bear witness, for that in itself was the very state that the true witnesses were reduced to. The circumstances of the “Muslim” were so distant from those which we can imagine because the Holocaust had finished its work. It is humbling and awful insight, and should give some pause for thought when we seek to speak about such things, and for such people, to realize that we seek to speak of a thing in some ways beyond the communicative capacity of any human language, and that our grasping signs, our subtlest, most penetrating statements, can always only be at best second hand, the impression of the shadow of a borrowed signifier, whose actual owners took it along with them on their inexpressible journey to the end.

For More Information:

Levi, Primo. The Drowned and the Saved. Trans. Raymond Rosenthal. New York: Vintage International, 1988.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Drowned_and_the_Saved

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primo_Levi

Zirco Circus and Ultraviolet Detours

Often playfully macabre, theatrical, and possessing an impressive and creative dedication to all the possibilities of black light, I first met James “Zirco” Fisher at the Bazaar of the Bizarre where he was promoting a number of his diverse projects. Aside from being a part of the dark ambient group “Squid Lid”, Zirco Fisher also does an array of illustrations including his “Disfigures of Speech” series, one of which is shown below:

Whether DJing or performing their own work, Squid Lid’s shows are a sight to see, for throughout they constantly change up their fantastical, black light costumes to things ever more outre and strange.

Which brings me to the second topic of this post. Black light, or ultraviolet light was discovered by Johann Wilhelm Ritter (1776-1810) in 1801 Ritter, an acquaintance of such figures as Goethe, Alexander von Humboldt, Herder and Schelling, was part of the early naturphilosophie movement in Germany at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Like several naturphilosophen, he held that a base principle of nature was that of polarities. The discovery of infrared light had been announced in 1800 by the British astronomer William Herschel, and Ritter reasoned that there must be something on the other side of the spectrum, and went about devising elaborate means of detecting it.

Ritter was also infamous for his tendency to perform often excruciating electrical experiments on almost every tissue of his own body, but that is a story for another day.

For More Information:

http://squidlid.com/

http://disfigures.blogspot.com/

https://www.facebook.com/JamesZircoFisher

https://www.facebook.com/SquidLid

http://thebazaarofthebizarre.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultraviolet

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Wilhelm_Ritter

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Herschel

Life from the Unliving

“I shall never forget the sight. The vessel of crystallization was three-quarters full of slightly muddy water — that is, dilute water-glass — and from the sandy bottom there strove upwards a grotesque little landscape of variously coloured growths: a confused vegetation of blue, green, and brown shoots which reminded one of algae, mushrooms, attached polyps, also moss, then mussels, fruit pods, little trees or twigs from trees, here and there of limbs. It was the most remarkable sight I ever saw, and remarkable not so much for its appearance, strange and amazing though that was, as on account of its profoundly melancholy nature. For when Father Leverkühn asked us what we thought of it and we timidly answered him that they might be plants: ‘No’, he replied, ‘they are not, they only act that way. But do not think the less of them. Precisely because they do, because they try to as hard as they can, they are worthy of all respect’. It turned out that these growths were entirely unorganic in their origin; they existed by virtue of chemicals from the apothecary’s shop, the ‘Blessed Messengers’. Before pouring the waterglass, Jonathan had sprinkled the sand at the bottom with various crystals; if I mistake not potassium chromate and sulphate of copper. From this sowing, as the result of a physical process called ‘Osmotic pressure’, there sprang the pathetic crop for which their producer at once and urgently claimed our sympathy. He showed us that these pathetic imitations of life were light-seeking, heliotropic, as science calls it. He exposed the aquarium to the sunlight, shading three sides against it, and behold, toward that one pane through which the light fell, thither straightway slanted the whole equivocal kith and kin: mushrooms, phallic polyp-stalks, little trees, algae, half-formed limbs. Indeed, they so yearned after warmth and joy that they clung to the pane and stuck fast there. ‘And even so they are dead’, said Jonathan, and tears came in his eyes, while Adrian, as of course I saw, was shaken with suppressed laughter. For my part, I must leave it to the reader’s judgment whether that sort of thing is matter for laughter or tears.”

This passage, in Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn, as Told by a Friend, by the novelist Thomas Mann (1875-1955) features the work of the French biologist Stéphane Leduc (1853–1939), who attempted to show, with his artificial life, the chemical basis of development and growth through the processes of osmosis and diffusion. In her book Making Sense of Life the philosopher of science, Evelyn Fox Keller (1936-present) dedicates a considerable portion of her first chapter to a study of Leduc’s synthetic biology in an exploration of what it means to understand organisms, as opposed to other aspects of nature.

Unlike physicists, Keller observes, biologists do not look for a “theory of everything”, strictly speaking, for:

“Just as the diversity of life, rather than its unity, has historically commanded the respect of life scientists, so too, [she proposes], the epistemological diversity of their aspirations demands our respect as historians and philosophers of science.”

This epistemic shift places a much greater emphasis on the role of description in explanation, leading Keller to conclude that:

“A description of a phenomenon counts as an explanation, I argue, if an only if it meets the needs of an individual or community. The challenge, therefore, is to understand the needs that different kinds of explanations meet.”

Since needs vary by time and place, so too do the explanatory terms that are seen to address them. “Theory”, “knowledge”, “understanding” are such fluid, historically contradictory terms, and their fluidity emerges, in part because:

“As evolutionary beings, there is some extent to which it can not make sense in its entirety.”

These observations place a much greater emphasis on analogical, metaphorical thinking, even while undermining traditional claims to the kinds of understanding they can potentially lead us to. In my previous post on the role of analogical reasoning in Anton van Leeuwenhoek’s study of microorganisms, I pointed out some of the ways in which it helped Leeuwenhoek come to terms with, and develop a working knowledge of, his microscopic observations, while at the same time, by contemporary standards, led him to draw erroneous, though understandable conclusions about the life processes of the creatures he was studying. Synthetic life, based, as it is, on an emphasis on the continuity between the organic and inorganic worlds, is another area that lends itself well to these kinds of considerations.

Whether seen in reductionistic or vitalistic terms, crystallization in particular, and the formation of minerals in the earth in general has a very ancient connection with living matter in western thought. Ancient and medieval alchemy was premised, in part, on the thought that metals gestated in the earth, and had a kind life, could be killed, and reborn in the alchemical furnace.

Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) and other early modern alchemists were particularly taken by “the vegetation of metals”, chemical phenomena such as the “Tree of Diana”, Arbor Diana, a dendritic amalgam of crystallized silver, created from mercury in a solution of silver nitrate.

Johann Christian Reil (1759–1813), who coined the term psychiatry in 1808, used crystallization as a powerful metaphor in his attempts to show how knowable forces could be responsible for the existence of life, while later naturphilosophen would use it to demonstrate the vitality of all of existence, the symmetries between the human and the natural worlds, and thereby the efficacy of using analogy, metaphor and introspection in their attempts to understand it.

In 1836, Andrew Cross (1784-1855) a British electrical experimentalist claimed to have produced insects through a process of electrocrystalization and presented his findings in Bristol at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. While not the inspiration for Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein as is commonly believed, (Frankenstein was written in 1818) it did serve as evidence for the self-organization of life in Robert Chambers’ best selling and controversial work, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, published in 1844. The self-organization of nature, whether found in evolutionary or nebular theories, was considered a particularly dangerous concept in England during the 1830s and 40s because of its political connotations for the self-organization of society, instead of a top down model in which a supreme ruler, i.e. God, governed absolutely. Because of the potentially damning political consequences, Chambers chose to remain anonymous for his entire life, but his work is now credited with making evolutionary theories acceptable to the British middle class, creating an environment in which Darwin, having agonized over whether or not to publish his view for almost twenty years, could present them with far less chance of legal action being taken against him.

In an interesting way appeals to analogical or metaphorical reasoning, with all of it’s promises and pitfalls, does seem to consistently undermine established political and epistemic structures, and in some ways is to explanation what the Protestant Reformation was to Christianity, a leveling of authority as each observer is given a new sense of confidence in the validity of their own observations, no matter how seemingly aberrant.

And as for the consequences this has for the creation of living or, semi-living things? Strange, one can only hope.

For More Information:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Mann

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephane_Leduc

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evelyn_fox_keller

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Crosse

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diana%27s_Tree

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Christian_Reil

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturphilosophie

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Isaac_Newton

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vestiges_of_the_Natural_History_of_Creation

http://www.councilforresponsiblegenetics.org/genewatch/GeneWatchPage.aspx?pageId=236&archive=yes

http://www.lumen.nu/rekveld/wp/?p=604

Keller, Evelyn Fox. 2002. Making Sense of Life: Explaining Biological Development with Models, Metaphors and Machines. Cambridge: Harvard University.

Mann, Thomas. 1948. Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn, as Told by a Friend. New York: A.A. Knopf.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20906-lifelike-cells-are-made-of-metal.html

strand beast: http://www.strandbeest.com/

Fugitive Flights: Nick Cave and Wings of Desire

While perhaps a somewhat dubious honour to the Australian musician, when I first heard Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds I was struck by how effectively he seemed to have tapped into a particularly “American Gothic” sense of sin and felony. At any rate, his appreciation for the work of Johnny Cash is certainly evident in his collected discography, narrating, as it does, dark scenes of love, death, crime and condemnation with classic goth rock wedded to country tunes and ersatz organs that scream out of a religion in which the Devil is everywhere, and salvation so very, very fleeting.

These themes are very well brought out by Pernille L.G.’s accompaniment for “Up Jumped the Devil”, which is an excellent example of an artistically sophisticated fan-created music video, and speaks to the positive effect of YouTube in exhibiting these kinds of projects to a much broader audience than they might have otherwise enjoyed. The use of stop motion animation for the bones, the manipulation (and incineration) of paper characters and the skillful setting of the action to the rhythm of Nick Cave’s music set this out from the bulk of similar videos.

Speaking of artistically inclined movies, I was also quite enthused to learn of Nick Cave’s appearance in the film Der Himmel Über Berlin – Wings of Desire, in the English release. A meditative romantic fantasy starring Bruno Ganz and Otto Sander as the weary and world-curious angels Damiel and Cassiel, and also featuring Peter Falk (of Columbo fame), Wings of Desire is a worthwhile and important film, and a poignant snapshot of Berlin in the 1980s, before the fall of the wall.

So I suppose the theme of this post has been the way in which art begets art, and speaks to its diverse globe-spanning influence, from America, to Australia, Germany and Denmark, Pernille’s base of operations. Indeed, I can think of few things more fugitive, or fulfilling.

For More Information:

http://www.youtube.com/user/TheLovelyCreature (Pernille’s Youtube channel)

http://www.nickcaveandthebadseeds.com/home

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Cave

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wings_of_desire

The Glassy Essence of Life

Coming to Dresden without much prior research I happened upon the Blaschka House, which, sadly, is not usually open to the public except on special occasions, but does serve as an excellent excuse for a blog post.

The collection of specimens crafted from glass by the father and son team of Leopold (1822-1895) and Rudolf Blaschka (1857-1939) was a rich and rare anomaly of biological modeling. While they largely produced elegant glass replicas of plants, they also made a number of sea anemones, squid, octopai, jellyfish and other invertebrates, several of which can be found in the art gallery at Cornell. The bulk of the collection, however, is held in Harvard after the Blaschkas signed an exclusive ten-year contract with the university in 1890.

When Rudolf died in 1939, he had no apprentices and no one to learn the craft skills behind his glass work. Many of the techniques used to create the Blaschka models were thus never revealed, and I believe they remain unknown to this day.

The choice of materials, glass, is interesting for a number of reasons. Glass was not the most immediate, or common material for such models in the nineteenth century, it was difficult to safely transport and difficult to work with when compared to wax. While it did have an advantage over more common, dead specimens, in being able to preserve the colours and structure of the living thing being modeled, it nevertheless took a great deal of time to make and perfect, and tasked the detailed memory and skill to produce a convincing replica.

There is, I suspect, an interesting, largely untold story about the quest for the basic unit connecting the organic and inorganic worlds in the nineteenth century with the Blaschka’s choice of materials. It culminates in what Bob Brain from the University of British Columbia has termed the “Protoplasmania” at the end of the century. Protoplasmania, a strand of nineteenth century culture that connects Thomas Henry Huxley’s undue excitement over Bathybius haeckelii, what he thought was the original source of all life and turned out to be a chemical artifact of specimen preservation, to french parapsychologists’ attempts to use high speed photography to capture images of ghostly ectoplasm, evidence of the ability of space itself to store memory, and Edward Munch’s “Scream”.

Ernst Haeckel (who lent his name to the short lived Bathybius haeckelii) was also invested in the glassy essence of life. His celebrated Kunsformen der Natur featured a wide array of

glassy radiolarians, whose silicate shells and startling symmetry lent them an alien, primordial appearance.

Haeckel was a friend of the Blaschkas, and lent them books from his library when they were called upon to work on a series of marine invertebrates. It is more than likely, then, that the material choice was not just an artistic statement, but was deeply embroiled in the theories about life and nature involved in protoplasmania, which tied together so much of the art and science of Fin-De-Siècle Europe.

For More Information:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_and_Rudolf_Blaschka

http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/June10/BlaschkaCollect.html

http://blaschkagallery.mannlib.cornell.edu/ernstHaeckel.php

http://www.artknowledgenews.com/Leopold_and_Rudolph_Blaschka.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Haeckel

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunstformen_der_Natur

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cienne/104865885/in/set-72057594070875957/

Brain, Robert. (2010). “How Edvard Munch and August Strindberg Contracted Protoplasmania: Memory, Synesthesia, and the Vibratory Organism in Fin-De-Siècle Europe”. In Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, Vol. 35, No. 1.

Nietzsche Among the English

It is unfortunately common that when I tell people of my studies of Friedrich Nietzsche one of the first things that they mention is his decent into apparent insanity, then his use by the Nazis, his favour among angst-ridden teenagers and finally his association with a collection of murders. For better or for worse I have made of these exchanges a certain kind of explanatory performance, and yet the question of the murders still largely escapes my comprehension. I suspect, however, that it has less to do with Nietzsche than with how he was translated and received by the English speaking world.

The English speaking world has historically had the most abhorrent reactions to his writings. From the sordid case of Leopold and Loeb, the murderers from the University of Chicago to Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, the Canadians Atif Rafay and Sebastian Burns, and the recent shooting in Tucson, Arizona, unhinged and unstable anglophones have claimed him as their bloody muse, or else panicked and pained commentators have sought to attach him to the crimes by way of some shaky explanation.

With some delay, in the nineteenth century Nietzsche’s writings appeared in English to fascination, confusion and no small amount of outrage, an outrage which was in no ways mollified by the editing and commentary of one on Nietzsche’s early translators, the aristocratic apologist Thomas Common (1850-1919).

In 1989 Alfred Russel Wallace condemned Nietzsche’s views of morality as narrated by Common for its element of “social darwinism”:

But perhaps the most erroneous and most vicious of Nietzsche’s principles, according to Mr. Common, is that enunciated in the last sentence of (5)–“And it is still more absurd to advocate, . . . that the inferior class should be allowed to breed like vermin, and that their spawn should be supported at the cost of the better classes.”

Yet questions of translation, editing, and commentary cannot account for the grisly wreckage. Even in Germany, Nietzsche’s posthumous reputation was fed into the more virulent channels of eugenics and nationalism, edited and arranged by his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, as she courted first the Kaiser’s and then the Nazi’s support. Indeed, the claim belief that there is something inherently fascist in Nietzsche’s thought is not born out by the wide spectrum of political thinkers who would like to claim him as an ancestor, and to reject him for this particular appropriation is to likewise reject Darwin, the Bible, Shakespeare and every other cultural resource that any opportunistic individual or regime could use to bolster its own authority. In this regard, the particular cases of violent appropriation are much more difficult to understand than the larger, national ones. Though they are of a kind.

I have been unable to find any indication outside of the English speaking world of similarly inspired crimes as those of Leopold and Loeb, and it seems to me as if a combination of alienated, intellectually inclined youth and a culture of violence in the context of a particularly English tradition of reading Nietzsche is the closest explanation that can be found. Many people shake their heads, and say that those inclined to violence will find justification in any way they can, and this remains the case, yet it is also true that that which has the greatest power over us must have it for good and for ill.

The only other option is to create nothing great at all, and even then the answer is at best uncertain as to whether or not it can assuage the erratic blood lusts of the human animal.

For More Information:

http://people.wku.edu/charles.smith/wallace/S540.htm

http://people.wku.edu/charles.smith/wallace/S549.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_and_Loeb

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Common

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elisabeth_F%C3%B6rster-Nietzsche

Gilman, Sander L. The Nietzsche Murder Case. In New Literary History Vol. 14, No. 2, On Convention: II (Winter, 1983), pp. 359-372.

Superman, or Detour on the Way to the Last Man?

While searching Top Documentary Films the other day I came across this documentary about the life and times of Superman. Generally, I’m not that much of a fan of Superman myself; Batman has always struck me as the more rewarding character. After seeing this film I found another reason why:

In 1932 the young and as-yet unknown creators Jerry Segal and Joe Shuster distributed the story “Reign of the Superman” about a villainous telepathic madman called “Superman” with plans for world domination. This superman comes directly from a translation, common at the time (for example in “Man and Superman” by George Bernard Shaw), for the concept of the Übermensch, coined by the German Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Later, the creators re-framed the character, moving from the earlier Superman’s mental abilities to the buff and burly hero we know today. In the dual character of Superman and Clark Kent, the man of steel now presented an uncomplicated moral compass playing itself out under the crafty combination of the everyman and exceptional man who satisfies our own fantasies of power at the same time as he appeals to our common weaknesses.

The description given in this documentary about Clark Kent by Gene Simmonds was also quite striking, contrasting Nietzsche’s superman with the “greatness of the meek, the mild” exemplified by the mild mannered reporter, he inadvertently makes the man of steel into the champion of slave mortality, which needs to constantly look outside of itself to the “powerful few” to designate its own contrariety as “Good”.  The morality of those who are oppressed is in constant danger of being simply a reaction, or resentful reflection of the oppressors system of morals. This is why Nietzsche designates it a slave morality, because it always needs to follow, as opposed to master morality, that constantly looks nowhere but itself. He calls the driving force of slave morality “ressentiment”, and as depicted by this documentary, superman becomes a kind of embodiment of this understanding of the world.

If superman is an icon of one of the ways that the modern world understands itself mythological, then it does not bode well for popular culture’s future insights into the human condition, for it is, in essence, merely running over old ground once again.

In other words: Be careful what you myth for.

For More Information:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superman

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubermensch

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_man

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ressentiment

Nikolai Kalmakoff

Chimera, 1926

The Sphinx, 1926.

There is a considerable dearth of information on the internet about the Russian Symbolist painter Nikolai Kalmakoff (1873-1955). He had roots in Russian, Italian and French art, and during his time in Paris around 1934, is reputed to have been deeply involved in occult practices. He is said to have become a recluse after the failure of his art exhibition of 1928, and ended up in a hospital for “indigents” later in life.

Primate, 1927.

In any event, he has re-sparked my interest in the Symbolist movement of the nineteenth century which spread across literature, music and art. It is a movement which has received relatively little attention compared to its romantic cousin, more gothic, more enchanted with the forbidden, but it touched upon the work of such notable French artists as Claude Debussy (1862-1918) and Charles Baudelaire, and payed homage to the German philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860).

Rat with Jaws of Gold, 1927

For More Information:

http://www.artmagick.com/pictures/artist.aspx?artist=nikolai-kalmakoff

http://www.wenaus.org/tjweb/artist/220

http://www.artvalue.com/auction-results–39820—18—–1—-KALMAKOFF-Nikolai-Konstantinovich.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolist

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.379064602113888.84986.121612214525796&type=1

Symbolism, Art Nouveau and Art Deco. New York: Sothebys, 1980.

Faust and Alchemy, Redux

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s (1749 -1832) epic poem Faust presents us with a highly unconventional representation of the devil in the figure of Mephistopheles. He is a malevolent force, yet brings about good despite himself. Aware of this, he still performs his duty in Faust’s corruption, and in his eventual salvation. This devil-as-saviour motif is perplexing from the standpoint of traditional Christian doctrine, though it did correspond with contemporary ideas expressed in the writings of William Blake (1757-1827) and Lord Byron (1788-1824). Yet to truly understand the role that Mephistopheles plays in Faust we must look deeper still, into the shadowy light of the alchemical and Gnostic sources that were so influential in Goethe’s formative years. Mephistopheles is inextricably connected to the Ouroboros serpent, the alchemical motif of a snake devouring its own tail. This interpretation not only helps us to understand Mephistopheles’ individual role in the drama of Faust but can shed new light on the entire structure of the Faustian narrative.

In the first part of Faust Mephistopheles is twice directly connected with the serpent, in the Prolog im Himmel and then in Wald und Höhle. In the Prolog im Himmel he brags that he will quickly return to heaven and declare his victory: “No doubt; it’s a short journey anyway. / I’ll win my wager without much delay. / And when I do, then, if I may, / I’ll come back here and boast of my success. / I’ll make him greedy fort he dust, the way / The serpent was, my famous ancestress!“. For Alice Raphael, author of Goethe and the Philosophers’ Stone, this is the first indication that we should see Mephistopheles’ role as something other than that of the traditional devil, but rather as that of the Ouroboros in both its destructive as well as constructive qualities. According to her Goethe knew of the Gnostic Naassenes, or Ophites, probably through Geschichte der Schlangenbrüder by J.L. von Mosheim. As she says, they worshiped the Naas, which in Hebrew was Nachash (serpent) and was the numerological equivalent of Messiah. In this regard the Naas was: “in primitive times a cult object, later a matriarchal power, and finally a symbol of wisdom. [There is a hidden reference to the Serpent in Faust, Part I] not as the traditional temptress of Genesis, but as ‘Frau Muhme,’ Goethe’s allusion to the female divinity of the Ophites”. In this scene Mephistopheles describes his motion as circular (from heaven to earth to heaven), and his serpent ancestor’s hunger for dust. On the one hand this could be seen as referring to the bible, yet given his later confession that he seeks to specifically destroy all matter it could instead be interpreted in terms of the Ouroboros’ symbolic role of breaking down matter in the alchemical vessel into prime matter, so that it may be purified.

The next time Mephistopheles makes an appearance alongside a serpent he does so in his role as instigator and agitator of yet more circular action in the play. Faust, after a moment of calm reflection, is yet again driven by the “fire” of desire to pursue the maiden Gretchen for his pleasure. Before he does so, however, he curses Mephistopheles for disturbing his quietude with the insult: “Snake! Snake!” This in and of itself will come as no surprise, for even in orthodox Christianity the serpent is seen as being a sign of the devil. What is perhaps more telling in this scene is its thematic circularity, a circularity which, when seen in light of the whole work, is a fundamental component of Faust’s redemption. It occurs almost immediately after Faust, in a high point of spiritual reflection, muses to the Erdgeist, the earth spirit: “You added a companion, who already / Is indispensable to me, although / With one cold mocking breath he can degrade me / In my own eyes, and turn your gifts to nothing“. Faust’s dubious companion compels him forwards at the same time as he pulls him back to baser desires. In his unconventional role as guide and saviour, Mephistopheles had already joked that Faust should bring some poet with him in the style of Dante being led through hell and purgatory by the poet Virgil.

Might I suggest you take along / With you some well-known poet? He will teach / you many things his thoughts will reach / Out far and wide, all sorts of virtues crown / Your noble head at his behest […] [A]nd while / You’re still a young warm-blooded man, [he will teach you] / How to fall in love by a prearranged plan. / The result, I’m sure, would be well worth meeting; / Mr. Microcosm!’ shall be my respectful greeting.

Yet the devil’s great irony here is that he himself is the guide who will lead Faust through a carnival of experiences to become the microcosmic reflection of the macrocosm.

The image of the serpent as saviour, in the most blatant of alchemical formulations, had already appeared in Goethe’s Das Märchen, published in 1795, thirteen years before the publication of Faust: One. According to Ronald Gray in his text Goethe the Alchemist, Goethe encountered the destructive-creative principle of the Ouroboros in numerous forms. As he says: “The self-destruction implicit in the rotating serpent was identical with the ‘putrefaction’, or death to self, spoken of elsewhere. Only when man’s lust had completely consumed itself ‘by revolution’ […] could he appear again in his former angelic splendor […]. It was necessary to yield all personal desires and become one with the universe”. Seen in this light, the excesses that Mephistopheles leads Faust to on Walpurgisnacht can be made sense of in terms of the logic of the Ouroboros, for only when Faust’s lust has consumed itself will he able to become “one with the universe” or “Mr. Microcosm”, his soul purified like alchemical matter through a successive series of decompositions and reconstitution.

This esoteric trajectory is already present in the earliest and most blatantly alchemical scene in the beginning of Faust: One, Vor dem Tor. Faust, who having the night before contemplated suicide by poison, is seen walking among people while talking about his father’s ambivalent work. He was an alchemist:

With the initiated few / He practiced in the Black Laboratory, / Mixing, by this or that strange recipe, / Elements in an ill-assorted brew. / Thus in tepid immersion he would wed / The Lily to the Lion bold and red; / Then with intenser heat he forced his bridal pair / From one glass chamber to the other – by and by / The Young Queen was engendered there, / The rainbow-hued precipitate: this, then, / Was our specific.

When looking at Faust as a whole, this passage takes on a much deeper significance when we compare the physical processes of his father’s alchemy to the spiritual alchemy which Faust himself undergoes. In terms of the direct alchemical language the “young queen” in the glass could be seen as Helen of Troy, who Faust sees in the mirror in the witches kitchen (which is not so different from “die schwarze Küche”, or black kitchen of the alchemist). The movement from one glass vessel to the other could be interpreted as the movement from Gretchen to Helen, or the cyclical, but progressive development of the plot from Faust: One to Faust: Two. The „Red Lion” and the „Lily” were symbolic in alchemical language to the male and female principles in nature, being the first to join in chemical union before the “Young Queen” can be engendered. This would be conjecture if not for the unifying theme of the “Brautgemach”, the bridal pair of masculine and feminine qualities that seek their balance and perfection in the alchemical vessel. In many ways this search for the “Divine Feminine” to match himself with is Faust’s ultimate goal, and serves as an overarching theme.

The symbolic and physical transformation from one colour to another in the alchemical vessel is another leitmotif played out through the Faust epic. The “peacock’s tail”, or a rainbow-like effect produced in the furnace when the path to the philosopher’s stone is drawing near is echoed in a variety of forms throughout the narrative. The “rainbow-hued precipitate” mentioned by Faust in the previous quotation is the most clear example of this, but there are others. The various periods of colour change represent different renewals of the spiritual cycle that Faust undergoes. This renewal is seen in the beginning of the second part of Faust when he exclaims while contemplating a waterfall: “The rainbow blooms, changing yet ever still […]. I watch a mirror here of man’s whole story, / And plain it speaks, ponder it as you will: / Our life’s a spectrum-sheen of borrowed glory“. This passage is preceded by a discussion of fire and consumption by fire, and then moves to something much akin to the alchemical water’s constant action of flux and reflux, herein mirroring the restlessness of Faust’s own passions, but also the rest in restlessness that offers some hope for a conclusion to his work.

The seemingly paradoxical juxtapositions of alchemical fire and the alchemical waters, destruction and renewal, find another representative in the epic through the use of various potions. Following the discussion of the alchemical work of his father, Faust claims to have poisoned thousands. While this is consistent with his study of medicine, insofar as he was trying to cure them but chooses to cynically interpret his own actions, it could also be seen in light of the ambiguity of the alchemical pharmakon (the ambiguity of the ouroboros itself), which is both medicine and poison. This is in keeping with the chemical motifs that are seen throughout the work; firstly, with Faust’s intent to poison himself, then his failed attempt to cure the plague victims in his youth, the potion of longevity given to him by Mephistopheles, his accidental poisoning of Gretchen’s mother, and even the Homunculus, born in a bottle.

They psychologist Carl Jung (1875-1961) described Faust as an alchemical drama through and through, though he himself did not explain in detail how it could be interpreted as such. With this brief discussion I hope to have shown that an alchemical interpretation of the drama is indeed a worthwhile pursuit. With this in mind it is possible to gain a better grasp of Mephistopheles’ role, and where it may have come from. If we see Mephistopheles as the Ouroboros of the Alchemists and Gnostics (and not merely as the Christian Satan) he maintains the traditional associations of the devil, such as destruction, the obsession with the material, fire and the serpent, but gains all the other roles he plays in Faust. The destruction he brings is inextricably bound with creation, which is purified through cycles of fire, be they physical or metaphorical. These cycles tend to be brought about either directly though his catalyzing acts or through pharmakon which share in his inherent ambiguity. It is in this way that Mephistopheles as the Oroborus can serve Faust as Vergil did Dante, allowing him to explore the whole circle of creation: “And with swift steps, yet wise and slow. [Go] [f]rom heaven, through the world, right down to hell“!

Bibliography:

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Faust: Der Tragödie erster und zweiter Teil, Urfaust. München: C.H. Beck oHG, 2007.

—-. Faust: Part One. Trans. David Luke. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

—-. Faust: Part Two. Trans. David Luke. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Gray, Ronald D. Goethe the Alchemist: A study of Alchemical Symbolism in Goethe’s Literary and Scientific Works. Connecticut: Martino Publishing, 2002.

Nuttall, A.D. The Alternative Trinity: Gnostic Heresy in Marlowe, Milton, and Blake. Oxford: Clarendon Press: 1998.

Raphael, Alice. Goethe and the Philosophers’ Stone: Symbolic Patterns in ‘The Parable’ and the Second Part of ‘Faust’. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_Ricardo_Falero

Albrecht Dürer, the Northern Renaissance Man

Knight, Death and the Devil

The German artist Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) was the artist of the northern renaissance; the somewhat delayed and chillier version of the renaissance in Italy. This was the major precursor to the protestant reformation. Dürer’s depictions of nature, portraiture, religious triptychs and symbolic scenes can be read as a tangled, yet elegant map of the rich intellectual firmament of that age. He was a vortex of his time.

Dürer is credited with illustrating one of the earliest European depictions of a rhinoceros and of military artillery. His woodcut Melancholia I is a rich, symbolic puzzle hiding a zoo of medieval and renaissance icons of melancholy, and I hope in a later post to write an article on how it connects with Goethe’s Faust and depictions of the medical radical and alchemist Paracelsus.

An artisan sympathetic to the work of Martin Luther, he nevertheless sustained much of the catholic tradition of religious artwork. In this way, like few artists of his time, he stands between the two polls at the break of the reformation.

Galileo, Kepler and Nietzsche commented on his work, as well as many other early modern and modern authors, such as the German W.G. Sebald. His works have been returned to time and time again for inspiration and reflection, yet few outside of the academic community seem to know much about him. Any artist, writer or philosopher seeking to understand their origins should turn to Dürer’s works, and see within them something of where next to venture.

For More Information:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albrecht_Durer

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Renaissance