Saturday, September 21, 2024

Night at the Sympophony: Berlioz, Gershwin, Ravel, and Dvorak


  Had an opportunity to go to the symphony last night, first show of the season.  Had absolute nosebleed seats due to a strange price hike, hopefully only for the season debut and not a regular change, but they were alright.  Different perspective looking down on the orchestra rather than up at it (I'm usually in the cheaper seats right in front, being hoi polloi), and actually the chairs they had in the upper rings were more comfortable.  May have to consider being up here more often.

Berlioz - Roman Carnival Overture, Op. 9

This first one also made the least impression on me.  Listening to it again this morning I still find it "nice", but also like I'm... not sure.  I can hear story-like parts in the tambourines being tumblers, or the general energy of revelers, but nothing somehow hooks me.  I don't mean that I'm waiting for something to enjoy but that I'm lacking in some kind of understanding.

Berlioz Is a great, one of those you always listen to with pleasure because  you never risk getting. bored.

YouTube comments are always a risk, especially since you can count on every comments section to be full of nothing but rapturous praise that says more about the lack of discernment in the writer than the music, but this one strikes me as having that right level of straightforward groundedness.  As I listen to this song I'm not familiar enough with the music conventions to know that it's surprising; I feel a little jerked about at times when it suddenly changes, but without any deeper means of anticipation than, "It will continue on the same" (a rather basic extrapolation) these sudden tacks are not satisfying as they would be to somebody who knew more.  So I'm going to leave this one on the back burner for now.

Gershwin - Concerto in F

I didn't like this piece particularly either, but unlike above I did feel like I walked out with something more understood.

First, I'm just not a big Gershwin fan.  Not that I've listened to a lot of his, but the feeling I have is that he's very... the phrase I want to use is "above the clavicle" but that requires a bit of explaining.

When I analyze my own emotions one of the general senses I have is where they are experienced in my body, on a scale which descends from the back of my throat downward.  At the top are just the little day-to-day feelings; the mild annoyance at people honking at each other, the enjoyment of a WoW dungeon that went well, etc.  As I descend into the upper chest weightier feelings come into play, whether it be more genuine anger or well-being, or other more nuanced feelings like grandeur (more on that below).  By the time I hit the abdomen it's the deeply-felt sensibilities, like the sadness that seems to trickle down an invisible "heart spine" or those feelings that pool deeply.  They also seem to be moving "backward", felt toward the posterior rather than anterior.  Then there's something a bit below that, and also somehow even more back, below the navel, that I'm going to pass over except to note that I don't think it's a mistake that it's where the root chakra was identified, or why the Greeks called the sacrum ('sacred' bone) the hieron osteon.

Anyway, back to the main topic, the point is that Gershwin never touches in me anything more than the surface, like a bunch of little breezes riffling the water.  Which makes him very fun but also nothing that earns my fervor.  Yet, what I really did get last night was how he used the piano.

While in concertos it's natural that the piano takes a somewhat leading place, in Gershwin it's like it was an... independent place.  I had this distinct sense, especially during the first movement, that the piano was a person and the rest of the orchestra was the city.  The piano would tinkle out its feelings, which were given an extension in the rest of the surroundings; he's leaving home energetically, and entering the bustling crowd the rest of it agrees.  But then there would be times where the orchestra would "say" something and the piano would respond, like the helter-skelter of traffic starting off and resulting in a bit of quick-time panic in the poor pedestrian.  Moreover, the piano isn't lost in the noise, a point that I find rather key.  Urban industrialism is rarely romanticized, and part of that is the anomie it can produce, the sense that one is nothing but a speck in a flood of humans.  But Gershwin's basic optimism prevents this; yeah, the orchestra is big and loud, but it isn't overwhelming.  The individual still maintains his place in it.  Combined with the fun inventiveness of how he could transmute what, in my experience, is rather grating city noise into pleasant notes without losing the essential "beat" of it, romanticizing the heavy beats of machinery, I have to give full credit to what he did accomplish.  Now to go back and watch Fantasia 2000's rendition of Rhapsody in Blue again because it's so much fun.

Ravel - Pavane pour une infante défunte (Pavane for a Dead Princess)

My dad and I had an interesting conversation about this afterward.  It was the encore piece from the pianist after the Gershwin, but both our distance and the way it was played had an effect.

First, the distance: we just could not get any of the more subtle texture of piano music from our seats.  That's fine for Gershwin who is loud anyway, but for Ravel, who is conveying a kind of diaphanous flow (I had an image of translucent petals kind of folding down repeatedly) it was quite detrimental.  It made the music feel less weighty than it ought to, with only the "pretty" tones reaching us while the subtle sadness did not.

Which is the second point, was that while I'm not familiar with the piece my dad is, and he noted that it was played with a more restrained approach.  It's easy to interpret music about a dead girl in a way that is far too sentimental and sloppy, and so the counter-tendency is to not give into those impulses.  Unfortunately, this may equally rob the piece of its poignancy, and that's what it seems like happened.

So as I listen to it on YouTube I can hear more of what it was meant to be, but through a combination of effects I don't think it was quite what it should have been last night.

Dvorak - Symphony No. 9 "From the New World"

This was the feature attraction, and it did deliver.  It didn't feel like an hour at all, and, aided by previous familiarity, as I listened I had a real "chest sense" of what was going on.

The first movement is energetic, but more than that it is... it gives a distinct sense of opportunity.  Perhaps it's because I've heard this kind of song in the background of pioneer movies (likely copied), but it conveys the energy and rush, the idea (even if fading in Dvorak's time) that there was a West to be won, and that one could go there to achieve it.

The second movement I'll forever associate with Shinsekai Yori as their "going home" song (hence the header image), and with that in mind I can't help but also be reminded of De Tocqueville's commentary on the centrality of domesticity in American life:

Agitated by the tumultuous passions that frequently disturb his dwelling, the European is called by the obedience which the legislative powers of the state exact.  But when the American retires from the turmoil of public life to the bosom of his family, he finds in it the image of order and of peace.

Yes, there's all this crazy energy in the first movement, of absolutely unquenchable acquisitiveness that drives the American attitude toward all things, but there is also this lovely serenade at the end where you really go home.  In the middle of this massive, energetic symphony there is an island of peace.

Speaking of which, the third movement is back with a vengeance and it has... it's like danger without fear.  Some months ago I shared this Remington painting, The Stampede:


 It reminds me of that.  There's undoubtedly danger; it's a stampede during a rain storm, after all.  But the rider isn't terrified.  He's got the knowledge, the skill, and just the guts to remain in command of himself with enough to spare for his half-panicked horse.  It's that sense of overmastering that comes with the optimism and acquisitiveness, one that openly acknowledges the risks but does not shrink from them.

Which is almost what the last movement reminded me of... but not quite.  I had the hardest time characterizing it, because it's dynamic, full of back and forths in a way that would convey something of struggle, of upward swings followed by downward spirals.  It's less-straightforward than the type of heroism above which can simply plunge on in the same manner.  It's met with many setbacks and problems, but as is characteristic of the whole tenor of the symphony, triumphant in the end.

What I finish this with is a kind of curious self-reflection.  I don't think of myself as particularly American, and certainly not holding many traditional American views, but combined with other observations I've read/seen of what is the best form of our vital character, it did give me a bit of pride in what my whole culture is about.  It's a moralizing culture, a religious one in fact, that likes uniting its values to material results.  This can lead to crass consumerism, but it also believes deeply that the world is within one's grasp if you just conduct yourself accordingly.  The optimism in a better future, for the individual and society, is almost deranged, setting no bounds on what cannot be accomplished without sufficient gumption.  Dvorak's selection of themes, weaving in the native tunes but giving them a higher interpretation, seems to me to truly capture this strange mixture.

Anyway, so that was the night at the symphony.  The number of "mehs" that started it out perhaps belie that I did enjoy it throughout, and that even if I wasn't touched by several pieces I still derived something from them.

Masters of the Short Story #3: Flaubert


Flaubert - A Simple Heart

Okay, this one won my heart.  While some of these stories have left me tantalized or reflective, let alone moderately appalled, this one gifted me with tranquility.  After I was done I looked around my apartment full of distractions and realized I had no desire for anything other than a bit of life, so I put my shoes on and walked out the door.

What to say about it?  It's a life.  It's a hard life and in many ways it's a pitiable life.  But it is not a regretful life, and in that there is a peculiar kind of dignity that does not stand on the greatness of her character nor her achievements.  I do not like that some people try to characterize her as 'saintly', because that misses the point.  She was a creature of her place, with good instincts, but let us not lay out the carpet and blare the trumpets before her coming.  I don't think she'd much like that anyway.

That's really how Flaubert honors her, too.  I've never read anything by him, but I can see the realism that he is known for.  It's a type of objectivity which at first may appear clinical, but in depth is true pathos: nothing is imputed to her, good or ill, which she does not warrant.  She is simply shown to us as she is and thereby understood and cared for as just that.  How many people have been like her in history, with an understanding extending not beyond their own experience, and their affections no further than their arms could reach?  Laugh at her should you wish, for she does not even know where Havana is, but what knowledge she does have is her own, earned.

It is the parrot, perhaps, that best exemplifies this hard-won wisdom.  The Holy Spirit has baffled theologians for millennia, and I am in agreement with Kenneth Clark that, "Our concept of the Trinity has been permanently weakened by the fact that art never evolved an adequate symbol of the Holy Ghost."  Without metaphors we are so curiously lost, and while the dove is a lovely abstraction, any real interaction with that species teaches you that it is not quite the ethereal mouthpiece you would imagine.  So why not a parrot?  It can speak, it had a personality, it cared about her and she for it.  The priest might throw up his hands at such simplistic ponderings, but for her it made it real and so she was able to act on it: 

The sowings, the harvests, the wine presses, all these familiar things the Gospel speaks of, were a part of her life; they had been sanctified by God's sojourn on earth... [But] she found it difficult to imagine His person, for He was not only a bird, but a flame as well, and at still other times, a breath.  She thought perhaps it is His light that hovers at night on the edge of the marshes, His breath that moves the clouds, His voice that gives the bells their harmony!  Thus she sat in adoration, delighting in the cool walls and the peacefulness of the church.

As for Church dogmas, she did not understand or even try to understand them.  The priest gave his sermon, the children recited, and she finally fell asleep.  It is that last detail which cements this is no feigned belief.  When she does not understand she can do no other than be human and succumb to drowsiness in comfort.  Saintly?  The word isn't worth bothering with here because it merely obscures the important details.

And it's really the details that sum to something more.  There is realism because one wishes to make a social statement.  There is realism because one wishes to reject supernatural beliefs.  There is realism in the unformed chaos of life, smothering us with details that have no place.  This is realism because it grasps that our lives are just details, and are not less for it.  "Fifteen minutes later, Felicite was settled in her new house."  The house that she would meaningfully live in for the rest of her life, determined by accident and decided without fanfare.  Absurd?  The word isn't worth bothering with here because it merely obscures the important details.

I do not really know how to end this; I feel that despite my efforts I have not really captured it, because to capture it I would have to write it.  Things happened, but they weren't part of a greater drama, and therefore were free to be meaningful just as they were.

Masters of the Short Story #2: Poe and Gogol

 

Poe - The Black Cat

So, surprising nobody, the Poe story is a Gothic horror, full of the uncanny and emotions in extremis.  Following on our [in the Discord's] talk about Frankenstein, I grateful that it was only peppered with them rather than basted, which in a condensed short story was just the right amount to give it the necessary flavor.

That said, supernatural thrill by and large leaves me cold, so while I can objectively comment on these aspects it doesn't really tug on anything in me in a way that I find compelling.  The comparison that comes to mind is with The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.  I could veritably feel the London fog leaking out of the pages and I have an immense respect for both what Stevenson achieves in a literary sense as well as his thematic core - that after having read several Stevenson books I can see in him a real tug-of-war between what he sees as proper, civilized behavior and a kind of independent, masculine vitality that is being smothered by it.  The part that's really lost when most people talk about that book is that Jekyll without Hyde is really quite milquetoast, and that while the latter is abominable he nonetheless contains that part of Jekyll which is effective and even virile.  It's worth much more than the simple good/bad parts of humanity that it gets portrayed as.

Which returning to The Black Cat, it has a core in PERVERSITY.  That word is even specially bolded when it shows up, such that we can't miss what is on Poe's mind.  That this man is acting in a way contrary to what he knows is good; intentionally acting in that way precisely because he knows it is contrary.  That's the rub, that PERVERSITY is a real human phenomenon, and that it is little accounted for by any rational explanation of human nature.  This is really quite worth something, and definitely worth even more in the time it appeared.  But where Poe then loses me is the connection to the supernatural.

In this story, there is a fundamental link between the PERVERSITY of man and the eerie vengeance of spiritual nature.  It's hard to put a finger on exactly how, but it's a uniting of the sense that there are irrational depths to both humanity and the world, and that the expression of one elicits the action of the other.  If the man had acted rationally nothing would have happened to him, but because he somehow broke through the membrane of his own little rational mind he also broke through the thin barrier between this world and another that lies adjacent, and it took great pleasure in punishing his PERVERSITY for going against the order of things.

Which all this is very interesting, and again from a literary standpoint impressive... but for me it also has little take-home.  The one psychological observation sits like a lone jewel amidst what otherwise feels like a heap of macabre props.

Gogol - The Overcoat

This one I'm still pondering, and apparently just must read Nabokov's essay on.  But before I gain more opinions from others I do like to try and form my own from what I can see.

The first and foremost is that I don't quite know what Gogol's view is.  If I didn't know any better, I'd think he was like some proto-Dickens with this tale, enumerating the woes of the lower class with one of its longsuffering members in this heedless urban society.  But... it doesn't have the right flavor for that.  Dickens' poor people are too often blandly virtuous but Akaky here is... just pathetic.  He's longsuffering, but he's so small minded that his simple joy in copying comes in part from his inability to do anything else, his simple joy in an overcoat coming from his inability to conceive of anything else.  To celebrate the small comforts can be a kind of peasant virtue, but Akaky venerates it; it is raised to such a level that it passes beyond our admiration to concern.  He's a half-dysfunctional little creature that was named on accident. 

Which is what left me puzzling, because the plot is so predictable by today's standards (what, he lost his prized overcoat?!?  No way!) that all I could think on was what it was Gogol was doing.  The small biography included by the editors noted that Gogol was critical of society but wasn't really writing to change things as a social crusader.  That he eventually became a religious fanatic and died under his own self-inflicted privation adds fuel to the sense that whatever Gogol was, he wasn't your usual secular-minded do-gooder.  Is it just pure sensitivity to suffering in these meaningless ways?

Which brings me to Russian supernaturalism.  It left me a little bemused in The Queen of Spades and the the result is the same here too.  This means something to the Russians, a ghost that is far more than a Western ectoplasm, but a corporeal being revenging itself; underneath Russian Orthodoxy, it's as though death is still held in the primitive view, not as ascendance but a continuation where the worst in spirits, rather than their best, comes out.  Akaky in life would never have ripped a coat from somebody else, yet his poltergeist does so with hideous satisfaction.  And the introduction at the end of another ghost gives the sense that the Russian world is full of these things; perhaps full of poor Akakys who have been destroyed by this world, but apparently full of another superstitious level that is at all times exerting a great impact.  There is undoubtedly something here to get about the Russian mind.

So with that, I remain in a state of suspended judgement.  I know The Overcoat is important (I wish I didn't; I hate altering judgements knowing something is important), and that I've got at least one Nabokov essay to read on it before I even attempt to close the book, but that's where it stands.

A reply from somebody:

Ooooh. I'll just check again if I've read this particular Gogol.
And I very much enjoyed reading Black Cat, but I immediately knew before even reading your thoughts that it wouldn't be to your taste. :) The perversity theme is really just Poe himself, he can't help it.
Roald Dahl compares favourably to Poe, I think, as a purveyor of the macabre.
He's perverse as well, but has a surprising breadth of interest and imagination.

Not having read much Poe, it in some way reminds me of Van Gogh.  As one fellow artist (I forget which) said on seeing one his paintings: "You, sir, are insane."  Not in the literal sense, but in a profound maladjustment to this life.  That he was also a remarkable artist (although he aspired to be a preacher first, in inverse of Gogol) then completes the tale.  The narrative people love is that genius and insanity are close to each other, and that there is something somehow exalted yet spooky about somebody who is "plumbing the depths of the mind" to bring us this art.  But I don't think this is correct in how they relate to each other.  Neuroticism can certainly support the artistic temperament (as well as the religious, I might again add), but it isn't a pre-requisite, and I'm not at all convinced that it is necessarily more profound.

As such, when I look at a Van Gogh, with its eerie discoloration of reality that turns our view uneasily inward to his state of mind, there is a genius in his ability to convey but I'm not sure a genius in what he is conveying.  This is how I'm feeling about Poe, although again with admittedly fewer data points to compare.  Compulsive drinker and gambler, dissolute, marries his 14 year old cousin only to have her die young due to the impoverishment he subjected her to, and then passes away shortly later himself.  None of this militates against being a great artist, or even having great insights (thinking of Dostoyevsky here), but I also have a hard time romanticizing this kind of a life and the perspective it led him to.

So yes, to observe that PERVERSITY is a thing is a piece of psychology worth noting, especially for anybody who would be overzealous in reducing us to rational or evolutionary or any other simplified axioms.  Humans are just a bit odder than that.  But the resonance it has with the everything else, the exaltation of extreme emotion, even negative ones, as insight in itself, is something I do just reject.

[Addendum: read the Nabokov essay on The Overcoat, but not feeling enlightened by it unfortunately.  Mostly just reminded of how insufferable I find him.]

Reply again:

Agreed. I think the popular notion of insanity being inextricably linked to creativity is  fallacious; in Russia's golden period you had madmen like Gogol and Dosoyevsky but also paragons of sanity like Chekhov. But what is true is that morbidity does seem to support a worldview conducive to art of a particular kind.

I wouldn't put Gogol and Dostoevsky into the same category of 'madmen'.

But that aside, what I think a dose of neuroticism supports is the quest for meaning.  The basic search, philosophical, moral, or religious, starts when something is not right with the world; something doesn't fit, like a dislocated shoulder, and the continual pain drives the need to put it back in its place.  The problem to me seems that being completely smothered in anxious, paranoid fear, or superstitious mania, or total dissociation from one's surroundings and body, tends to prevent proper progress either.

Take Gogol.  Going by The Overcoat, and Nabokov's analysis of it, it's absurd.  But it's absurd in a very particular way, one in which there is a sense that there is only a thin skein of rationality overlaying a malicious irrational nothingness.  In his later life he snaps into religious extremism, begins styling himself as the mouthpiece of Jesus Christ, and fasts himself into unwellness and death.  Clearly he had more than "a dose" of neuroticism; he was completely steeped in what we would regard as mental illness, his "breaking through" to another state of mind only being commemorated because of his supreme artistic ability to share it.  The actual mental life he experienced is not one I think anybody actually wants, except in idle-ignorant moments thinking it would so very romantic to have a life so, erm, vivid.

Masters of the Short Story #1: Balzac, Pushkin, Merimée, and Hawthorne


 Finding my mind blocked by an inexplicable haze when trying to read my current books, I picked up a 1972 compendium, Masters of the Short Story sitting on my shelf which had been purchased and abandoned here by my father when he had previously visited.  His bookmark was still placed in the middle.  I decided to start at the beginning which, owing to my general ignorance of the topic, I presume to be roughly chronological.  At least, it begins with Balzac and ends with Camus, and it seems quite unlikely that "27 great stories" are authored by people whose names would fit between them alphabetically.  Either way, just finished the first few and thought I'd sketch down some thoughts.

Balzac - A Passion in the Desert

He smiled, shook his head knowingly, and said, "Well known."
"How 'well known'?" I said.  If you would only explain to me the mystery I should be vastly obliged.

Once when I was writing my analysis of Pale Cocoon it came into my head to title it, "What Was She Looking At?"  It was a bit of an inspired choice, if I do say so myself, because the entire work centers around giving context to an "answer" which cannot be understood otherwise.

Passion has this same element.  Before us ostensibly is the answer, but what we lack is the vision to make it comprehensible.  That's the purpose of the story, and I admit it surprised me because what rudimentary knowledge I had of Balzac had him painted in my mind as a man of society.  He was writing The Human Comedy after all, with the implication in my mind that I would be hearing a lot about the socialites of Paris.  Instead we're stranded far from any of that with none of the usual props used to maintain our interest.  It's the reminisce of an old man, so we know he survives, and the events which would normally form the height of the tension are glossed over.  His capture is prelude, his killing the leopard and subsequent rescue a postscript.  Which is another way of saying the real focus, the real "action", lies elsewhere, and lends to the story a kind of contemplativeness despite the thrilling adventure it recounts:

"Yes, but explain---"
"Well," he said, with an impatient gesture, "it is God without mankind."

Then the final lines, which make it complete.  It is to the story's credit that I'm still trying to formulate the relationship of it all.  It is somehow a reflection on the start, an event which hushes the beginning chatter and despairs of explaining itself to the impertinently ignorant.  These man and woman are making table talk of something that is quite beyond them, and the old soldier is like a Zen master who knows that his second answer will be as cryptic as the first to the uninitiated.

[Addition since I have read a few more: it reminds me of the stories of Stevenson and Conrad.  Balzac, having mastered the human scene, seems in this unusual moment to also trace its limits and give a small glimpse of what he thinks lies beyond.  And it is only in the desert, away from other people, that we can come to such a view.]

Pushkin - The Queen of Spades

I have little to say about this one.  The editors' preface describes it as eminently Romantic, and Romantic it is, with strong vices, midnight confrontations, death, specters, and insanity.  This is a case where I was carried along more by the art of the writing than what was said, and indeed I found myself rather enjoying the characterization of the side-flavor Tomsky more than the main actors.  It really was a bit of genius how this personality, who plays no larger role in the story except to connect through rumor the main characters, nonetheless is granted a kind of detailed shallowness that is memorable.

Mérimée - Mateo Falcone

Simple, spare, short, but with economical clarity... and unfortunately the editors spoiled it for me.  Their opening description tell you exactly what is going to happen, and this is a tale where you are best going into it blind.  It's not that it's bad otherwise, since I think works that rely wholly on their "twist" are short-lived, but that its point is not punctuated as clearly.

Namely, I knew the son was going to be killed by the father from the beginning.  But what get us is the grim dawning of what is happening at the end, because even knowing what was coming I half didn't believe it based on how the father was acting.  It's not that he was misleading, but that he was so unerringly committed to it; no doubts, no qualms.  If he had sadness, it was nothing compared to his unwavering values.  He is a supreme creature of his place and time, and like Brutus (not the Caesar-killing one) he was perfectly content to have his offspring sacrificed for transgression what he believes is right.

The women weep, but he is not swayed in his choice.  While revulsion is the natural reaction, I can't help but find that Mérimée has captured something more than heartless brutality.  He lives on the edge of the outlaw area, but is not one; his skill in marksmanship somehow tied to his perfect adaptation to his role.  It's like how Tolstoy leads off Hadji Marad by likening him to a thistle he finds by the side of the road, a hearty plant that has made that place its home.  Again, I just wish it hadn't been spoiled.

Hawthorne - Wakefield

I admit, I went into this one with a bias: I don't have fond memories of A Scarlet Letter.  There's something abjectly didactic about Hawthorne that even I, who doesn't mind a bit of moralizing in my stories, still have trouble digesting.  It's the strong flavor of Puritanism that hasn't been really shaken off, even if he doesn't quite share the old values.  But as it went on he conquered my prejudice, and I can even point to the line where my opinion turned a corner:

"A morbid vanity, therefore, lies nearest the bottom of the affair."

What's remarkable about this story is that it's an unremarkable person doing a remarkable thing for believably unremarkable reasons.  That's... I'm not sure I've encountered that as effectively before this.  We can credit to this act a strange accident of character.  His 'quiet selfishness, that had rusted into his inactive mind', 'a peculiar sort of vanity', and 'a disposition to craft, which had seldom produced more positive effects than the keeping of petty secrets, hardly worth revealing.'  None of these elements are noteworthy in themselves, but they conspire together with circumstance, and it's that which really speaks to me, for even if Hawthorne and I are worlds apart in many ways, we're the same in our sense of contingency in human life.

Poor Wakefield!  Little knowest thou thine own insignificance in this great world!"

Here is this man who just... somehow wants to emphasize that he matters.  That he will go away and watch as the world changes, like an inverse It's a Wonderful Life wherein nothing really changes but he feels strangely confirmed in it anyway.  That he thinks he can step back into it at the end is the height of folly, as though somehow the world revolves around him and therefore couldn't possibly ever fail to incorporate him.  Which I don't know Hawthorne's total view, but there are flickers here that he's onto a fear of a world without God.  That a man like Wakefield can remove himself from context and just... vanish, and that this usual bustle of connections only falsely confirms us as having orientation.  Just Wakefield is too small-minded to grasp the implications while we're left to wonder about them.

[Another addendum: after writing this I spoke with several people about it and developed my thoughts more fully.  I came to appreciate that this story has the structure of a morality play but none of its content, that Hawthorne's decrying and exclamations were like a Greek chorus, coming in to offer their comment on the story in a ritualistic fashion where his readers would expect them to speak up, but that without the usual actors of God, the devil, etc. they are curiously misplaced.  Even if Hawthorne is no longer a Puritan he still possesses a fascination with our sinfulness, here demonstrated as an acme of smallmindedness acting out its unreflected impulses, an extreme case of what are otherwise the normal operations of the human mind.]

Thursday, August 1, 2024

Updating Willendorf

"The connection between beauty of form and sex is extremely obscure, and is perhaps one of those subjects better left alone." - Kenneth Clark, The Romantic Rebellion

 [Note: I say "we" a lot in this essay.  This is because I'm male, and while there may be female readers my primary audience is that of other heterosexual males.]

I recently put up a post about prehistoric art, and just this week I had a curious comparison.  While wandering around the University of Lausanne campus during a scientific conference I came across this sticker on a urinal divider:

Just a porny little anime-based drawing, the sort of thing that somewhat humorously, somewhat worrisomely, is beginning to overtake actual images of women in our world.  But it oddly reminded me of the original above with her hand positioning, and I thought to myself, "Willendorf is alive and well."  Since then it's been in the back of my mind and I've realized it's an ideal jumping off point for a wider discussion.  But first, jewel beetles.

 

Giant jewel beetle (Julodimorpha bakewelli)
males on a beer bottle

Bugs First, Always

Animals don't really perceive the world.  Or, to be more precise, perception consists of ordering their input, and of extracting from that the patterns they most care about.  This process can be streamlined to save quite a bit of neurological processing if the analysis eschews constructing a complex interpretation in favor of using a few simple stimuli that act as cues for relevant factors.

In insects, fertility of the female is a function of her size: larger females produce more eggs.  Therefore, it behooves males to seek out the largest females they can find, since those are the ones that will produce the most offspring and maximize the males' reproductive fitness.  These, you could say, are the most attractive females to their little beetle brains, and since size is limited by nutrition it can't be falsified.  Female size is a true signal of their potential fecundity, and the program need do nothing more than identify fellow beetles and then pursue the sexiest ones.

In its natural habitat this system worked just fine; there was nothing else resembling the jewel beetle in the surroundings so only focusing on a few simple features was sufficient.  But then humans came to Australia and manufactured beer bottles.  These orange, shiny, dimpled, and above all large objects check every box in the male jewel beetle attractiveness inventory.  The result was that male beetles swarmed the bottles littered along the roadside, ignoring real females in the process because they couldn't compete with this impossible standard.  They were actually at risk of going extinct due to the males' neglect.  Luckily for the beetle, the story ends happily because the Australian government recognized this threat and mandated a change in bottle color so it would no longer be so alluring to the beetles.  The males returned to chasing actual females and the species has since recovered.

Now, this phenomenon of being over-stimulated by an exaggerated cue is not isolated to insects, and is common enough to receive its own term: "supranormal stimulus."   It is when something "cracks the code" of an organism's perceptual system, whether intentionally or not, and gets it to respond more strongly than it ever would to the naturally-occurring version.  You can probably see where this is going.

Male humans are as interested in mates as male jewel beetles are, and we share at least one major criterion: mate fecundity.  For primates this is not directly related to size but more nebulous qualities such as health and youth; a young woman is far more likely than an older one to conceive and carry to term, and it is around about 20 years of age that she has the highest potential lifetime reproductive potential.  This is the pivot point which male interest focuses, and while we're a bit more sophisticated perceptually we nonetheless rely on a few basic cues to assess this trait.


 Getting Waisted

Lets start at the hips.  Males like wide hips, presumably because they indicate not only sexual maturity but good childbearing potential.  But width is not assessed on an absolute scale, since as I mentioned before it isn't large women who are necessarily more healthy.  Instead it is measured as a ratio between the circumference of the woman's waist to her hips (known as the waist-to-hip ratio, WHR).  Given that vision from a single perspective cannot directly measure circumference, we effectively estimate it instead by a pair of lines, one measured roughly at the narrowest point of her torso while the other at the widest point of her hips.  Comparing these two gives an immediate sense of the woman's shape, which mathematically is expressed by dividing the upper length by the lower.  In cross-cultural studies, a WHR of about 0.7 +/- 0.1 is considered about normal/attractive, with some cultural variation:

From Wikipedia

Our anime girl, who I'm going to call Lausanne, is on the extreme end of what would be considered attractive (it is, however, closer to the cultural norm of East Asia).  This is really pushing the impression of how wide her hips are, and so tantalizing us with extreme femininity; she screams "woman" more than an actual woman does.  But an artist has to be careful here, because going for a supranormal stimulus by simply exaggerating traits risks passing the invisible line from arousing to amusing, the girl becoming a bobble-bottomed doll instead of a potential mate.  Luckily for the artist, there are a few tricks they can employ.  

First, you'll notice that I didn't draw my measurement line at the hip's widest point but where the underwear straps reach her outline.  That's actually me highlighting a trick: the contrast of black-on-pale draws our eyes, and so we measure her there rather than at the widest point. The result is that despite her extraordinary proportions, which we take in at a glance and generally regard favorably, our subconscious arithmetic is not outraged by the excess, causing us to both appreciate her width while still finding it safely reasonable.

The second artistic device is the use of contrapposto, or an uneven pose where most of the weight is placed onto one leg:

From Pahoozi et al. 2017: Waist‑to‑Hip Ratio as Supernormal
Stimuli: Effect of Contrapposto Pose and Viewing Angle


Exactly why this is effective is not known, but from a glance at the images above it is obvious, at least to heterosexual males, how much more attractive the bottom row is than the top.  It is funny, but you'll notice below that I use Lausanne's left side, the one with the raised and emphasized hip, in my figures; I did this unconsciously, without premeditation, and it was only later that I noticed my "choice."  I just knew it was right.  Now, if I had to venture a guess as to why this stance is so pleasing, it is because it emphasizes the curviness of the woman's outline, which is another powerful stimulus alongside the WHR, to which it is closely linked.  This exaggeration of the curve makes her body all the more shapely between waist and hip, but it does so without tripping our "eerie" sense even as the girl pushes into unrealistic dimensions.  The result is a genuine supranormal stimulus, where Lausanne has a body structure beyond what we would find attractive in real life but in art is distilled sex.


Looking at the original Willendorf by comparison it is clear she doesn't match this at all.  Attempting to measure from her narrowest waist to the hip (which isn't even her widest point) you get an appalling 1.08.  What does this mean?  It could suggest that standards have changed, and that all this talk of evolutionary preference is bunk, but considering the global nature of WHR preferences mentioned above I would be surprised by that.  I suspect in this case that people who have suggested she was not crafted for attractiveness but abundance and long life are correct.  It reminds me of the depictions you see of Maitreya, or the Buddha of the Future, in Chinese restaurants: 

Nobody looks at this and thinks, "Yeah, this is a depiction of ideal male physique."  But that's not his purpose.  He's fat to represent the goodness of the future; things will be better even if we're suffering now.  I can't help but feel that the original Willendorf's proportions were probably meant to invoke similar, if more primitive, sentiments.  She'll involve some attractive elements here and there, because why make a woman ugly when she could be otherwise, but when you're living near starvation at the edge of the European ice sheet your dream is first of women who are fat and fed, not lovely.

But if there's a difference between Willendorf and Lausanne in the hips there's an agreement in their treatment of the thighs, legs, and feet.  While wide hips with a concave midriff are #1, plump thighs are not far behind (as are shapely buttocks, which produce curviness from a side view, but as the anime image is frontal we'll be neglecting those in this discussion).  Lausanne is not so ample as Willendorf, but she's still plenty soft, and with her legs pressed together they produce a lovely slope away from her hip.  In fact, another diagram is in order:

By making her stand with her feet together her leg turns inward, which produces a clear, compelling art which our eyes trace with ease.  There is no doubt at a glance what shape this woman has, an effect that would not be so nice if she were standing with legs straight (again, see the contrapposto above).  

On top of this, the diagram shows why what little clothing she has is where it is.  Thigh-highs are odd if you think about them; why would covering skin be a turn-on for so many males?  This image helps answer that: because it's not about what they cover but what they emphasize that's important.  Like with the underwear straps mentioned above they produce an eye-catching visual contrast, here at the mid point of her thigh.  Above this point she only gets more interesting and below it males become increasingly bored; knees and calves elicit no intrinsic sexual interest, so the best way to artistically utilize this "worthless" space is to have it emphasize what is above (feet are in a strange spot due to foot fetishes, which are likely the result of the feet and genitals lying next to each other on the somatosensory cortex; a case where a wiring error, not evolutionary psychology, is the explanation).  There's a good reason designs like Rin Tohsaka are quite popular with the boys even if there's only a little bit of skin between skirt and sock.

This is all good biology, but I think there is also something "artistic" going on here: she's got a bit of vertical symmetry.  There's about as much skin between her breasts and hips as there is between her hips and thigh-highs, the region of interest again being roughly bisected by her hip joint.  I'm unaware of any evolutionary argument for why this would be important, and since thigh-hights weren't around the last few million years it's hard to believe this is adaptive.  Instead it seems to me one of those first whisperings of where our sense of raw physical eroticism runs into one of the elements of beauty, and that while her sex is clearly carrying the image something small is also gained by this element of pictorial construction.

The last topic to cover in this region are the lines extending up from her mons pubis

Males like a smooth curve and a slight bulge between the pubic region and the navel.  However, emphasizing this presents an interesting artistic conflict.  There are really two V's in the region, both with their vertex at the point of maximum sexual interest, yet trying to accomplish two separate things: her hip (underwear) line needs to be obtuse to emphasize her width, while her pubic mount and vulva have a plunging motion from being narrower. The latter in particular is quite important; it shows up everywhere in nude art, and in fact has allowed for the omission of many other details (like the labia) while still keeping the figure somewhat convincing and arousing.  However, it's not so simple in real women, and this is better seen in the Willendorf:

Although she is extreme, her artist has nonetheless stayed closer to anatomical reality.  In real women the hip line is synonymous with the public line, at least at first, and there is often no natural extension of the pubic shape up toward the navel.  This is made clear with how my annotations don't follow the lines of the Willendorf's body; the hip joint is curved, not straight, sharing the pubic line at first and only diverging higher, while the pubic lines simply end with the belly fat.  But for whatever reason this construction doesn't appeal to us as much; like with the clear curve of the hip above, we are more engaged by the emphasis of simple features than complex constructions.  As such, while Lausanne lacks both realism and detail, she has a few key lines in just the right spots, and by honing in on these cues evokes the effect more powerfully than real anatomy.  I suspect this is the attraction of narrow bikini bottoms, which also differentiate this pair of lines (again, with real hip-thigh junctions being a curve):


It's a summary of this section in a single image.  WHR of 0.75, contrapposto that produces an arc, a picture framed from mid-thigh to mid-upper torso, and a clear differentiation of the key lines in the genital region.  But Lausanne has one final advantage: she is not real.  Even models must have their bikini strings go upward, past the widest point, to hold the garment on, but in fiction they are free to be placed wherever we derive the most pleasure.

 


Insert Boob Joke Here

Moving to the upper body now, there's simply and most obviously the breasts.  You can't miss 'em.  But unlike curviness and WHR, large breast size is not universally associated with attractiveness; hers are just large because the Japanese seem to have imported the American standard since WW2, a fact that is somewhat funny considering the East Asian body type is rarely so buxom (nor, of course, is the Caucasian).

However, what does seem to be universal is that attractive breasts are shapely, specifically conical-spherical.  That is, when they are smaller they form gently convex cones, something easily seen even in ancient Egypt (Tomb of Nebamun, New Kingdom):

The dancing girls possess this smaller, youthful shape to their breasts (I also did some quick measurements, and even from the side they have a near-0.7 WHR; in life their single waistband would have alluringly emphasized this).  But this isn't necessarily an indicator of age, and can also be applied to more mature women with good effect (Woman in a long undergarment, Hashiguchi Goyo, 1920):

As breasts become larger it is infeasible for them to retain this shape.  Instead they are drawn with a conical "cap" but gain width to match their length.  The result is that they become more spherical, expanding from their base on the chest before tapering again at the end (detail from Femme Nue, Thomas Couture, 1855):

India's artistic history has taken this to even greater extremes, with the well-endowed goddesses of its temples and shrines having practically spherical breasts (as well as WHR's of a nearly-disturbing 0.6):

Despite the overall differences in size, the breasts in each case remain geometric amalgams of sphere and cone.  My guess is that this exists because younger women tend to have firmer breasts, so there's a certain basic delight in that shape, but I don't know if there's any data to support that.  I just know that I find the shape pleasing (especially in the wood block cut by Hashiguchi Goyo, which is one of my favorite nudes/semi-nudes in art).  Then, as they get larger, the spherical rendering helps convey a sense of mass while still retaining some of the shape, as perfect spheres would just be odd.

Now, I'm taking this time here to detail artistic breast structure because we're about to run into some issues.  In the pornographic modern race for greater stimulation we've been led into depicting ever larger breasts (I'll let you google "large breasted anime girl"), and there's a problem with having breasts both large and shapely: gravity.

Breasts don't have much supporting internal structure; no bones, no cartilage, they hang by skin and loose connective tissue.  This means that real breasts of any size quickly lose their conical-spherical shape and become flattened-cylindrical.  In the Willendorf this effect is not particularly appealing but is somewhat compensated for by an appropriate physique; she's heavy, so her breasts are heavy too.  At least they match.  But as moderns we don't want large girls, we want thin ones, and though a slender creature such as Lausanne would never sport such melons they are nonetheless expected to retain their idealized shape and appeal.  After all, she's not supposed to simulate but stimulate, and for this an artist cannot look to life but must bridge the gap with pictorial construction instead.

First, there's how to indicate their size.  All breasts start in about the same place on the chest so from a frontal view it's how far down they go that's the measure.  Here they reach all the way to the waist, at which point they exhibit the desirable spherical shape to emphasize heft.  But this makes no sense.  It means that her tremendous breasts were flat against her chest for several centimeters then mysteriously expanded outward into spheres when they reached her stomach as though that were their starting point.  This just... doesn't happen, and would be extremely unattractive if it did; hanging breasts are concave on on top, not convex, and even if they were this "ideal" shape the resulting dumbbell would not be a turn-on in a real woman.  In fact, if you look closely you can see an aborted bit of cleavage between her hands where the breasts should have begun:

It's like the artist started drawing the breasts in their proper location, with the curvature beginning near the base like it should, and then realized something was amiss with trying to maintain that all the way down.  There's simply not enough room on the chest to fit two balloons like that, and any attempt to do so looks absurd since they would not only have to be comically spherical but also filled with helium to defy gravity with such a shape.  

But speaking of the hands, though, they do help give a kind of false justification for this arrangement.  As with the knee and lower leg, males have little sexual interest in the upper arm (except in proximity to the chest), and none in the more distal portions; no one ever wrote an ode to an elbow.  The Willendorf is an honest admission of this: her arms are nothing more than undetailed coils of Play-Doh, irrelevant for attractiveness or health, whose only purpose is to drape across the breasts in emphasis of their size.  This was the pose that originally caused me to make the comparison with Lausanne, and in her the function remains the same.  Arms hanging straight down aren't attractive, and even interfere with the sense of curvature, so they need to be put to work somehow, and here it is to frame the breasts by subtly pushing down and pressing them inward while giving a measure of their girth (the spherical portion is as wide long as her forearm is long).

But I find this cover up interesting, because despite their location she's not actually exerting any pressure with them; they're just resting on the shelf, as it were, indicating in anime language her slight modest uncertainty (see below).  Yet by being where they are they nonetheless provide us with an artistic justification for both why the breasts are so low on the body as well as why they would be squeezed enough to produce such appealing cleavage (which we are given a special window to view); without this rationalization, or clothing to force it, breasts like this would naturally swing wide.  In fact, this is another strange error in her construction: her left nipple is pointed straight forward while her right nipple is almost 45 degrees to the side.  This is to try and suggest that just as her lower body is turned slightly to her left, so her upper body is turned slightly to the right in a seductive twist, but the breast has gone too far relative to the shoulders and the result is perspectival nonsense.

In sum, unlike her hips which could be drawn from (exaggerated) life, this portion of her body is one long string of artistic coverups to adjust for the fact that innate preference for shape and cultural preference for size do not mesh.  No flesh-and-blood girl could be built like this.  In addition, the attempt to produce all the desirable effects in a single image is not even coherent; like Egyptian art, where multiple viewing angles are combined into a single perspective, it emphasizes what we find important in the subject but not how they actually appear.  You couldn't even create a satisfying plastic figurine of her shape.  Yet nonetheless it works, at least for me, and once again what would be repulsive in reality becomes sexy in art.

 


The Top of the Matter

Now we're onto the last section, the head and face.  Surprisingly, despite the amount of attention we give to faces as humans there seems to be relatively little in terms of innate preferences.  More symmetrical is better, and studies suggest that rounded eyes and lips may be more attractive, but beyond this cultural influence and personal preference run the show.  Once again, the ancient and un-self-conscious Willendorf demonstrates the issue best: she has no face.  It has no bearing on fertility so she gets the equivalent of a bag put over her head.  It's not that I don't think ancient men couldn't find women's faces attractive, but that if she is really more of a token, a distillation of the idea that she stands for, then just as her feet became knobs and her arms limp ropes, so too does she not require a face to exemplify either bounty or fecundity.

So looking at Lausanne, the question is not what she can tell us about biology but what she reveals about the particular preferences of her intended viewership.  But before I go on to that, I want to indulge myself in an extraneous detour about hair because I find it interesting.

---

When you present to tribal peoples images of those from other cultures and record where they point, you find that most of the time is spend scrutinizing the hair.  Body hair is a protective structure in mammals, both against physical abrasion as well as for general thermoregulation.  Humans likely kept our head hair because it shielded the exposed top of our body and sensitive brain from the sun.  Yet far in excess of the needs of this basic function hair styles exhibit incredible variety across the globe, and even between neighboring peoples.  Why?  One argument I find interesting is that we have secondarily co-opted it for group identification.

As you walk around, hair is one of the most easily-identifiable aspects of a person.  It can be seen at a distance and is on display almost continually.  Similarly, what styles of hair people use is a clear marker of what group they belong to.  In the past this was primarily dictated by one's tribe, but in the individualistic modern world it has become a way to for us to advertise our values and who we identify with (our "ideological tribe" if you will).  For instance, males in the West use relatively short hair with a clean trim to suggest a kind of unassuming conformity with the status quo, while crew-cut suggests a military-conservative outlook and longer hair a kind of liberal individualism.  In contrast, medium-long hair in women is the default, with very long being a kind of ultra-feminine princess (like Lausanne), and short/asymmetric tending to signal the "opposite" in lesbian or bi (these currently being in vogue even for heterosexual women due to cultural trends):

If this is the case, then it reinforces why there would be no innate preferences for particular styles.  We want healthy hair, because we want healthy mates (notice how glossy Lausanne's hair is), but beyond this it doesn't contain any reproductive information.  It's more important that we're open to internalizing our tribal marker, and this wouldn't work if every tribe liked the same thing.  Which, it's times like these that I'm reminded of ants.

All insects are coated in waxy molecules called cuticular hydrocarbons (CHCs) for protection against desiccation; think of it like an equivalent of hair, except for water regulation rather than heat.  Just like hair it is presented on the outside of the organism, which makes it easy to assess on another individual, and as a result has been repeatedly co-opted by different insect groups for communication.  Social insects have done this in the extreme, where CHCs not only play a role in life-stage and caste identification, but differentiation of nestmates from non-nestmates: if you smell right you're admitted to the colony, but if you don't you are attacked without restraint.  And the interesting thing is that just like hair, ants don't come wired to like a particular smell; after all, that would make no sense when what they really need to do is adopt a preference for their colony (tribe) and discriminate against others.  A curious case of convergent evolution if this thesis on hair is true in humans as well.

--- 

Returning to the issue of sexual interest, the most salient aspect is the face, specifically her expression.  It is a long-standing puzzle in the history of female nudes (and Lausanne is close enough to nude) to find an appropriate attitude for the subject to have.  Women don't expose themselves casually, and typically are not happy having their body gazed upon by unknown males.  Therefore, in order for any nude picture or painting to make sense there has to be some kind of implicit explanation, and hence justification, for the situation.  Historically this was often accomplished using Classical settings or myths, but in the case of a solo image like this there is no context.  All we have is her attitude, which with her eyes locking with ours she is clearly aware of being looked at, and so we need some idea of what our relationship is.

First, the fact that she's not outraged or mortified would suggest that she's willingly put herself in this situation.  Yet she also has a slight blush of shyness, which suggests she's not used to it, and a quizzical tilt of the head, as though she's asking for an opinion.  Combined with the pseudo-modest position of her hands "covering" her breasts, she's like a shy girl asking of her boyfriend, "Does this please you?" and just a bit worried about the answer. 

I've encountered similar constructions before, rather common in anime, and it seems to me that what we're seeing is a compromise between the socio-biological preferences of submissiveness and purity.  This girl placed herself under our power of scrutiny; she wants to please us and so we have the right to examine/ogle her and even make further demands.  Moreover, she is "ours".  While she's bearing her body, her attitude toward it is decidedly virginal: she's not used to being exposed, doesn't particularly like it, and despite her body being out there for the world to see is really only directing it at "me".  This is a powerful cocktail, because human females are picky and human males unusually jealous (for reasons I will be passing over, but it's a fascinating topic in its own right); getting to this stage signals success and sex in the not-too-distant future.

However, before everybody reads the above as a litany of slavering male passions infringing on female autonomy, I think it's worth backing up and examining how these same building blocks are key to intimacy as well.  In private interactions these are tender signals: "I trust and care about you enough to do something that is a little hard but I know you will appreciate."  It's only when they're dragged into the light and exploited for pornographic purposes that they become degraded.

Similarly, the hard truth is that for somewhere between 1/3rd and 1/4th of males, domination is linked to sex.  There is no shortage of pornography out there in which the girl is unwilling, hurt, and humiliated.  Even the original Aphrodite of Knidos was unhappily exposed in her bath:

 

At the end here, I want to go philosophical, and it seems appropriate considering how we've steadily ascended.  Starting at the hips near the locus of sexual activity the demands were fairly pre-programmed; the hip-to-waist ratio, the curviness, the soft thighs and the triangular vulva, these are essentially non-negotiable.  Moving upward to the breasts culture and personality began to play a larger role, but there were still certain key constraints.  I've never met a heterosexual male who said he didn't like shapely breasts or an hourglass figure.

But on reaching the head, and particularly the face, we begin to encounter something higher and more malleable.  I hardly touched on evolutionary explanations, and those that I did are really only one option; the "shy girl" motif here is far from the only attitude that males may find attractive, and may not even be the only one that appeals to the same person.  I, for one, simply cannot enjoy any abusive pornography, and while Lausanne's permissive gaze is clearly pandering, it is most important to me that she not be an unwilling participant, and for this I have my culture to thank.  It brings us to a differentiation I made in a recent conversation: that what is beautiful, what is pleasant, and what is erotic are not unlinked... but not synonymous either.  Take for instance this shot from Hyouka:


I love this image because whoever planned it knew exactly the feeling of looking at the nape of the neck of the girl you care about; there's something about that little stretch of skin that is just so wonderful in that context.  You could try to hammer it into some evolutionary psychology mold (neck muscles are the most sexually dimorphic in the body, so this is a signal of sexual difference and femininity, therefore fertility, etc. etc.) but I think it just fails.  Something in the experience does not reduce to eroticism; it is simply pleasant, even if not completely separate from the whole dance of bonding and sex.  It reminds me the issues of emergence we now face in many areas of science: that there are levels of complexity, and that these beget levels of causality, where it no longer is informative to explain things by reducing them to lower/simpler phenomena.  The next few decades I suspect will be revolutionary and I hope help salvage sexuality from the Freudian pit it has occupied for the last century.

I started this off this essay with a quote from Clark about the mysterious link between beauty and sex, and how it might be best left alone.  It's honestly good advice; more than a few artists have been dragged over a cliff by it, starting with what they found beautiful or pleasant in the feminine form but ultimately losing control and being overwhelmed by the eroticism.  It's not that sex is bad in itself, but that, to quote Clark again, "Eroticism is so strong a flavor that it [destroys] the balance of sense and form [necessary for good art]..."  This applies to the balance of one's own thought as well.  You're playing with fire as a male, and even working (somewhat) academically on this piece I found the topic soon began to feel "sticky"; dwelling on it too much it becomes like a cloying smell that you can't shake even when you're done, and your thoughts turn to it once again in spare moments.  It's just too easy to convince yourself that the pursuit of further erotic imagery is for beauty or understanding when it is nothing more than stimulation.

From Sabishisugite Lesbian Fuuzoku ni Ikimashita Report,
notably written by a woman (read right to left, forgive the language)


But the reason I think it is worth the risk nowadays is because of the rise of feminism.  It's too late in the essay to enter into the subtleties of this vast topic, except to say that I think we're far from working through all the implications of both sexes having equal input on society and that one of those is how men are to frame their feelings toward women going forward.  The vulgarity with which women are often regarded is appalling, but as I've tried to emphasize above we can't just declare such sentiments off-limits and be done with it.  A woman with a good figure will continue to elicit a mental wolf whistle, if not an audible one, and this impulse needs an outlet which is acceptable to both parties.  Otherwise repressed feelings putrefy and ooze forth in increasingly disgusting forms.  Similarly, it represents a challenge to our art, for like the jewel beetles we can now produce artificial forms which are impossibly more stimulating than the reality can ever be; how we address this going forward will be as important for female self-esteem as it will for male satisfaction.

So while I've flown a bit high starting from a bit of softcore anime porn, and I certainly wouldn't give Lausanne credit for being anything more than that, it's an important topic to me both personally and socially.  There needs to be some respect for the intense sexual response males have to the female form, and that it cannot be switched on and off at will; to carelessly stimulate it as our society does has side effects for us all.  But it isn't just a negative.  It needs to be appreciated for what it is, which is what I have started with here, but also allowed to be more than what it is currently granted, for it is the foundation and gateway to tenderer feelings as well. That remains for the future.

Tuesday, July 16, 2024

The Clarity of Prehistoric Art

 

I've recently started in on another art compendium, The Visual Arts: A History, one of those start-to-finish histories that are an opportunity to not just see the art but learn how somebody who has a broad enough vision to write one of them thinks.  I owe an immense debt to the first one of these I read, Gardner's Art Through the Ages, because of the variety of interesting observations and subtle insights it offered into the topic.  It really was one of the best summers of my life, sitting outside in the shade of a tree in the morning, reading, transcribing snippets, and writing my responses to them.

Given that, this new one would certainly have a lot to live up to and I admit, it's not on the same level.  Part of it is the time difference; I read the 6th edition of Gardner's, published in 1975, and so it avoids much of what I consider degenerate in more recent art commentary.  This book being revised in 2009 is prone to milquetoast statements that seek to judge nothing and so, ultimately, say nothing.  These authors just don't have the same depth of sensibility.  However, it does have a few advantages, not the least of which is color pictures; I spent some time on my phone with Gardner's locating equivalents on the internet, only to have to peer at them on a 5.8" screen.  But the one relevant benefit here lies with the prehistoric art, for unlike many other aspects of art which I don't think our understanding has improved, and has often degenerated, our knowledge of prehistoric artifacts has only increased, and I was delighted at the collection.

First, let's start with one I had seen before, the Venus of Willendorf (c25,000 BC):

Now, I'd never given a second thought to this thing, my first reaction being that it was somewhat grotesque in its faceless paean to female features.  But one of the lines in the book forced me to take a second look:

The exaggerated rotundity of the body has a yielding fleshiness, felt rather than seen.

And I realized they're right.  This is a hunk of sandstone, and while I was preoccupied over the off-putting obesity I failed to appreciate that I, without any effort, had judged it as a perfect depiction of corpulent flesh.  That was actually the magic, that I'd forgotten what I was looking at in favor of what it depicted.  It got me, and while I'm still not attracted to it, I can it the credit it is due.  But I had no such reluctance with the next piece, the Venus of Brassempuoy (c22,000 BC):

I found myself just staring at this one.  It's beautiful.  Yes it is simple, but somehow it has elegance with its spherical head resting on an elongated neck, like the famous Nefertiti bust in Berlin (and far better to my eye than the Madonna with the Long Neck of Parmigianino).  The eyes are merely indents with hints of pupils bored in, but somehow the brows make it expressive, if not of a specific emotion then of a general disposition of confidence, even regality.  It's not hard to imagine her as some Mesopotamian queen, hair braided and flowing down the curvature of her neck.  Which that's the last thing: I can almost still sense the original shape of the ivory here.  Ivory is made of concentric layers, and the "skin" of her neck is one of them; she has that aspect that Michelangelo speaks of when he says he's just freeing a sculpture from the stone.  It's like a subtler version of the spearthrower from Montrastruc (c12,000 BC):

What a remarkable usage of the natural shape of the bone.  You can see what it once was, probably some leg bone with the haunches being the bone's trochanter and the head the ball-socket.

Some of this usage of natural form also extends to the cave art, like the Goddess of Laussel (c20,000 BC):

The rock naturally curves outward there, and while we can never know exactly what it looked like before the carving it's a reasonable guess that it had a form rather similar to what we see now.  It reminds you that ancient artists saw people and animals in the clouds and rocks and such too, and that one of the natural jumping off points is expanding on these initial impressions.  The book makes much of the potential symbolism, that the ram's horn appears to be a moon, and that it has 13 notches that correspond with the 13 phases of the moon, but I admit I have my reservations.  It's not that I don't want to attribute such relatively advanced symbolism to these people, it's that at least from where I stand I find the connection tenuous.  Fertility goddess?  Certainly; not hard to believe that given her proportions.  But advanced union of female cycle, lunar cycle, and annual cycle into a single integrated symbol?  I'd want more data before I credit that.

Which really gets back to an issue that has fascinated me for some time, and that is the eerie ability of primitive peoples to produce very compelling images with a relative sparsity of concepts.  I've already gushed over a few statues above, and the next few left me even more in awe:


On the top are carvings on the wall of Addaura Cave in Sicily (c8000 BC), the bottom is Matisse's The Dance (1910).  The early 20th century saw a real turn to "primitivism" as European art looked for other sources of inspiration, and in the process of this much of it involved the paring away of inessentials.  No more of the ultra-detailed academic art of the 1800s, we just want to depict the feel of something without the unnecessary bits.  Matisse wanted to convey the kind of stretching human bodies go through in motion, and in the process get at the essence of what it's like to move as a human.

But I dare say the cave art did it better.  The figures are even more clear than those in The Dance, with fewer distracting aspects, and while we're somewhat lost on the context (many are wearing masks, a few appear prone on the ground; why?) the postures are unmistakable.  It is complete economy of form.  Now, this is a far cry from most cave etchings, which struggle to render humans better than awkward stick figures, but the fact that this was accomplished so early is a testament to this artist and how such precise observation, even in the absence of anatomy, can produce compelling people.  And my respect only deepened:


Once again, on the top we have The Thinker and Sitting Woman of Hamangia (c4000-3500 BC) and on the bottom Henry Moore's The King and Queen (1952).  Like Matisse, Moore is trying to get at the essentials here.  Just a few details, a pose, and you get what you need to have a sense for these things.  Yet again here, I have to give the medal to the older work.  I still have to think just a little about Moore's statue while the ancient work is unmistakable.  The pensiveness is immediate and there is not the slightest hitch one has in appraising the forms.

Which is another profoundly interesting subject to me: these people on the left are on their way to being geometerized.  Their arms, legs, and necks are cylinders; bulged cylinders to give them life, but still cylinders.  The shoulders are wedges, and the heads a kind of rounded pyramid.  Yet it again all works.  And what's amazing is that these figures are ~4.5" tall without having the slightest sense that they would be out of place next to Moore's life-sized depictions.  In fact, as I've written this I've been reminded of another parallel, this time in painting with Picasso's Rites of Spring (1959):


It's the same sort of basic compellingness from only a few rounded shapes, although part of its import is the sense of depth that isn't required from a sculpture.

What I really learned from all this, ironically, was what modern art had been trying to do.  I knew in theory what it was practicing, in an abstract (hah) sort of way, but now with reference I could really see the goals when they were achieved even better.  It's like when a 19th century architect (I frustratingly have forgotten who) had been fighting against the bonds of Neo-Classicism and considered Greece and Rome "the enemy", but he eventually went to Athens and saw the Parthenon for himself and was amazed.  He realized this was what the moderns were attempting, and failing, to recapture, and after that he gained quite some more respect for the original.  While I don't think Matisse and Moore and Picasso are by any stretch failing to capture something, I think the originals did it better, and now I feel quite edified for learning about them.

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An addendum to this that came to me over the night:

I'm still working on appreciating Greek art.  I find this primitive art easy to appreciate in part because it requires so little context or concept.  It just is, and in looking at it the most important thing I need do is strip away my preconceptions rather than have any additional ideas.  In this way the prehistoric art, at its best, is a kind of perfection of an unadorned mind.

But Greek art is different.  There are ideas there, big ideas, subtle ideas.  It reminds me of Mill's admonition that everybody ought to learn Greek and Latin; not because he thought they were the end-all, but that he thought within their idiom they reached a kind of perfection that was inspiring by its mere existence.  In other words, it wasn't imitation that Mill wanted, for some of their sentiments are in fact rather limited (what's the good life?  For the Greeks it seems to mostly be poems about wine and symposia), but just knowledge that such peaks were out there.

It really leaves us with a conundrum, because as our thought has generally become more complex as it has added more and more to itself over the millennia, the ability of art to express a sum-total worldview perhaps becomes rarer.  I can get primitive art because there's nothing more to get than basic humanity, and perhaps one day I can get Greek art because of its type of formal perfection, but I still don't know what kind of art would fit us now...