In one of the greatest passages of western literature, Dante begins The Divine Comedy:
Midway through the journey of life, I found myself in a dark wood where the right way was lost.
For me, this lovely etching by Martin Lewis, titled Which Way? is the visual equivalent.
We all set out on life's path eager to digest the world, but there comes a point midway through the journey when we realize that the world has been quietly digesting us all along, and that it's likely to win the race.
Like Dante's dark woods, Lewis' blanket of snow covers the road and obscures the landscape. Our puny headlights are outmatched. The road ends ahead but is that a cross or a telephone pole?
I love the mood of this drawing, the fear rising in our chest from uncertainty and the lump in our throat from those stars in the sky.
This image wouldn't be nearly so meaningful if it wasn't handled so effectively. The lighting is brilliant. The control of value is extraordinary. Compare the information Lewis shares (the sharp details in the snow, for example) with the information he withholds (the silhouettes in the car).
A beautifully orchestrated piece.
26 comments:
For a "it's the same - no, it's the opposite" piece of art, the videoclip for Dan Mangan's "Road Regrets" (directed by Jon Busby)
https://youtu.be/hviiGCkVMiY?si=asDiIjjtHDte3oYc
Great values and image. That area of the light above the license plate is handled beautifully, and gives just enough information to justify the silhouettes.
I'll leave off discussing the symbolism so as not to ruin anybody else's fun.
Awesome!
That's an etching!!!? Awesome! Fantastic mood and composition.
A timely reminder of how powerful a static image can be when all of its elements (staging, composition, lighting etc) are created for the purpose of VISUAL STORYTELLING.
Contrast the purposefulness of the image in your mind with any previously discussed examples of fine-arty-effects driven 'studies' (not naming any names, choose an offender for yourself) that exist in the hope that meaning accrues to their vague, painting-for-the-sake-of-painting status.
As others have said the mood of this picture is incredible. The isolation. I didn't know Martin Lewis's work but looked him up and he did a lot of great stuff.
JSL
«Peripeteia, which has been called the equivalent, in narrative, of irony in rhetoric, is present in every story of the least structural sophistication. Now peripeteia depends on our confidence of the end; it is a disconfirmation followed by a consonance; the interest of having our expectations falsified is obviously related to our wish to reach the discovery or recognition by an unexpected and instructive route. It has nothing whatever to do with any reluctance on our part to get there at all. So that in assimilating the peripeteia we are enacting that readjustment of expectations in regard to an end which is so notable a feature of naïve apocalyptic.»
- The Sense of an Ending, Frank Kermode
Which Way, Western Man?
Beautiful piece, even though it’s not very subtle. Reminiscent of Franklin Booth.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
The spectral, vanquished remnant of snowlaced branches bowed in perfect juxtaposition to the downward sway of the wires above, framing the scene's solitude you described so well.
Such pristine clarity and nuance--I needed to remember how to see this way, thank you David.
even though it’s not very subtle
It’s subtle. You blinked.
It’s not. I squinted.
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Postmodern Anonymouse.
'Which Way, Western Man?'
Get off the Kommode and get some fresh air.
Bill
OK,
«Which way, American man?», then.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
xopxe-- This began as a contrast between Dante's words and Lewis' picture on the subject of losing the path. Each medium made good use of its respective strengths. You've contributed a third medium-- a videoclip, which adds the qualities of motion and sound. The video shows an old fashioned car with snow and with stars overhead, but this time when the car goes off the trail it travels at a frenetic pace, goes underwater and finally into outer space.
It wouldn't make sense for the video to show the stillness and quietude of the Lewis etching; that would go against everything the medium stands for. Note how in all three cases the medium shapes the creative direction.
Postmodern Anonymouse-- I read Kermode's book may years ago when I was reading everything I could find about apocalyptic art. I was wrestling with the question of how to make sense of the urge to make art if one was living in penultimate times. I had previously read other essays on literature by Kermode, and found him to be both articulate and profound.
However, revisiting the paragraph you quote, I wonder how I ever waded through it. Man oh man, talk about "an unexpected and instructive route."
I was wrestling with the question of how to make sense of the urge to make art if one was living in penultimate times.
«It is not to be expected of critics as it is of poets that they should help us to make sense of our lives; they are bound only to attempt the lesser feat of making sense of the ways we try to make sense of our lives.»
- The Sense of an Ending, Frank Kermode
Kermode seems to suggest that apocalyptic thinking, i.e. living in penultimate times, as a cultural mode (or metanarrative, if you will) is fundamentally an expression of the sense of an ending for «men in the middest». Predictions of the end of the world are more likely to be made by those who have passed their «middest». Thus, the golden age is always behind us, the ragnarok of the empire is always near, and the dream of Heaven always following. The end isn’t only imminent in the stories we tell, it is immanent in our culture.
Which way? Well, there is only one that will suffice. And on the road to Damascus, even on a winter’s night, it will be made clear - even if you have to squint for the values to click into place.
Where there’s peripeteia, there’s irony.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
Postmodern anonymouse-- Doomsayers have always been counterbalanced (fortunately, plus one) by optimists. Go back about 13.8 billion years and the big bang should have produced exactly equal amounts of matter and antimatter, after which every particle of matter should have been annihilated instantly by its companion particle of antimatter. But due to perhaps the greatest of all cosmic mysteries, there was a slight asymmetry so that all the matter we see today was able to survive. Something in our blood has been anticipating the call of that final annihilation ever since.
But I think Kermode would be mistaken to assume that "Predictions of the end of the world" are wrong simply because it hasn't happened yet. Any good lawyer at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission will tell you that "Past performance is no guarantee of future results."
And if you insist on better philosophical chops than a lawyer at the SEC (as if there could be any) David Hume's great fame as a philosopher rests primarily on his axiom, "That the sun will not rise tomorrow is no less intelligible a proposition, and implies no more contradiction, than the affirmation, that it will rise."
The odds of an apocalypse were pretty remote back when people expected it to come from a wrathful god but in a world of nuclear proliferation there's not a single Las Vegas bookie who wouldn't give the odds serious consideration. As I've probably mentioned here before, Arthur Koestler wrote that our calendar era "A.D." (or BCE) should have been reset after Hiroshima as A.H., signifying a new common era in which the clock is ticking.
I was wrestling with the question of how to make sense of the urge to make art if one was living in penultimate times.
It's prayer with a practical result; it transfigures shattering emotions into a poetic surrogate self, to make them beautiful and communal in a proxy form. The flow state of meaningful creation is itself transcendent. But the proxying-out of the internal chaos is also a relief, and its expression as aesthetic-poetic forces in clockwork structure is a balm to all. Art keeps happening because of these tandem services to artist and audience alike.
TLDR: It's a prayer, it's a relief, it's an escape, it's a community service that redounds community back to the artist.
"Peripeteia, which has been called the equivalent, in narrative, of irony in rhetoric"
Peripeteia requires a total reversal of fortune. What we have here in Which Way?, if we are to speak in terms of rhetoric, is a Dilemma. (In narrative-speak, The Crisis Choice.) Though not between the cardinal directions left and right, obviously.
"Now peripeteia depends on our confidence of the end; it is a disconfirmation followed by a consonance; the interest of having our expectations falsified is obviously related to our wish to reach the discovery or recognition by an unexpected and instructive route. It has nothing whatever to do with any reluctance on our part to get there at all. So that in assimilating the peripeteia we are enacting that readjustment of expectations in regard to an end which is so notable a feature of naïve apocalyptic."
It would be nice if an AI were developed to take pretentious and dense academic gab and strip it of its lexical mystification and mindless noticing and nuances so we can read the banalities actual on offer straight.
If we think about everything we aren't actually thinking about anything.
Come on, now - Kermode very obviously isn’t saying that the end of the world isn’t nigh - he’s commenting upon the relationship between the idea of the end of the world and that surplus of human consciousness that dooms us to the knowledge of our personal end.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
It's prayer with a practical result; it transfigures shattering emotions into a poetic surrogate self, to make them beautiful and communal in a proxy form
Sublimation, as Zapffe would have it.
It would be nice if an AI were developed to take pretentious and dense academic gab and strip it of its lexical mystification and mindless noticing and nuances so we can read the banalities actual on offer straight.
I absolutely agree. Sometimes, the complexities are necessary for precision and nuance. But more often than not, it’s bad writing - and therefore, bad thinking.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
"Beautiful piece, even though it’s not very subtle."
Nothing beautiful is without considerable subtlety. If you felt the effect, you didn't see it coming; even if the effect is that of overwhelming power subtlety must be playing a leading role.
"Reminiscent of Franklin Booth."
You mean Edward Hopper, a friend of Martin Lewis' and fellow noir star.
Booth was very much not Noir. Booth did very few deep night scenes and even fewer scenes with high-contrast light and shadow. He seemed antipathetic toward the thick, weighty, and meaty mass of things. His sensibility was far more in line with the turn of the century Arcadian dream-world of Pyle, Parrish, Brangwyn, and others.
"Sublimation, as Zapffe would have it."
Zapffe's collations are rather a point of trivia, aren't they? Just as T.S. Eliot's naming of "Objective Correlative" for something narrative artists had been doing for centuries is trivial.
Postmodern Anonymouse wrote "Kermode very obviously isn’t saying that the end of the world isn’t nigh - he’s commenting upon the relationship between the idea of the end of the world and that surplus of human consciousness that dooms us to the knowledge of our personal end."
The end of the world and the knowledge of our personal end are two very different things. It's comparatively easy to find meaning in the face of our personal end; a thousand, thousand generations have faced and passed that test. In fact, people are far more likely to sacrifice their individual lives as long as they believe in posterity.
What set me off on my quest was the possible extinction of life on earth altogether. I wasn't asking for Kermode's guarantee that the end of the world isn't nigh; the passage you quoted ("Predictions of the end of the world are more likely to be made by those who have passed their «middest». Thus, the golden age is always behind us, the ragnarok of the empire is always near, and the dream of Heaven always following. The end isn’t only imminent in the stories we tell, it is immanent in our culture.") makes it sound like the end of the world is a chronic cultural fear, a familiar middest life crisis, the knowledge of which should anesthetize our anxiety. That's not what I'm talking about.
The Book of Revelation can very much be understood as not merely such an instantiation of men in their middest predicting the end of the world as coincidental with the looming threat of their own - it is an ur-text of apocalyptical thinking as a deeply ingrained metanarrative in our culture.
It shouldn't be too difficult to observe how generation after generation has expressed, as a constant of history, this accelerationist drive to immanentize the eschaton, be it from a Christian, Marxist, techno-capitalist, artistic, neoreactionary, left, right, up, down etc etc position.
The end of the world is always imminent, in art as well as in politics. Not because it actually is (even though it might be), but because it is immanent.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
>>>>>>>>>>>"The Book of Revelation can very much be understood as not merely such an instantiation of men in their middest predicting the end of the world as coincidental with the looming threat of their own - it is an ur-text of apocalyptical thinking as a deeply ingrained metanarrative in our culture."
I want to see Postmodern Anonymouse's bad life drawings again, but up close this time. I'm thinking now that they were AI generated, and shown to us small so we couldn't tell they were faked. The whole "Postmodern Anonymous" persona seems too on the nose as a clichéd woke google-trained LLM.
Whoever is creating this years long prank, you have way too much time on your hands!
~ FV
Boggle
I suspect you are far more attuned to how form and content are inseparable than I am. The piece led my thoughts to Booth primarily because of the superb handling of value vis-à-vis the supposed limitations of the chosen medium.
Regarding Zapffe, yes, the idea isn’t novel, but was specifically shared as extension of my comments on the idea of the end of the world as a cultural constant, and a source of both inspiration and anguish.
The surplus of consciousness must find outlet - in one way or another.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
As so many have already said, a stunning image.
The first thing that hit me was the shadow of the telegraph pole writhing up the wall and away from the headlights. Looking at it moment longer I can't help seeing it as the spirit of those skeletal bushes.
Thanks for posting this David.
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