varia

Frantz Fanon (born 20 July, 1925; died 6 December, 1961), from a photograph likely taken in the late 1950s.

‘A world divided into compartments, a motionless, Manicheistic world, a world of statues: the statue of the general who carried out the conquest, the statue of the engineer who built the bridge, a world that is sure of itself, that crushes with its stones the backs flayed by whips: this is the colonial world.  The native is a being hemmed in; apartheid is simply one form of the division into compartments of the colonial world.  The first thing that the native learns is to stay in his place, and not to go beyond certain limits.  This is why the dreams of the native are always of muscular prowess; his dreams are of action and aggression.  I dream I am jumping, swimming, running, climbing; I dream that I burst out laughing and span a river in one stride, or that I am followed by a flood of motorcars which never catch up wih me.  During the period of colonization, the native never stops achieving his freedom from nine in the evening until six in the morning.’

[…]

‘But let us be clear: what matters is to stop talking about output, and intensification, and the rhythm of work.

No, there is no question of a return to Nature.  It is simply a very concrete question of not dragging men toward mutilation, of not imposing upon the brain rhythms that very quickly obliterate it and wreck it. The pretext of catching up must not be used to push man around, to tear him away from himself or from his privacy, to break and kill him.’

-from The Wretched of the Earth, 1963 (originally 1961; translated from the French by Constance Farrington)

Fyodor Ivanovich Tyutchev (born 5 December, 1803; died 27 July, 1873), in a photograph of c. 1860

‘When Life is But a Round of Crushing Care…’

When life is but a round of crushing care
And, a great heap of stones, lies heavy on us,
There suddenly, God knows how, why, upon us
A joyous mood descends… Of balmy air
A breath comes from the past and, o’er us drifting,
Invades the heart, its fearful burden lifting.

At times with autumn’s coming is it so,
When empty lie the fields, when bare the groves are,
And paler turn the skies - and of a sudden, over
The darkened earth a damp wind starts to blow.
A fallen leaf it chases with elation
And to our hearts of spring brings a sensation.

-translated from the Russian (translator unknown)

Christina Georgina Rosetti (born 5 December, 1830; died 29 December, 1894), pictured above in an 1877 portrait by her brother, Dante Gabriel Rosetti (1828-1882)

Uphill

Does the road wind uphill all the way?
Yes, to the very end.
Will the day’s journey take the whole long day?
From morn to night, my friend.

But is there for the night a resting-place?
A roof for when the slow, dark hours begin.
May not the darkness hide it from my face?
You cannot miss that inn.

Shall I meet other wayfarers at night?
Those who have gone before.
Then must I knock, or call when just in sight?
They will not keep you waiting at that door.

Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak?
Of labour you shall find the sum.
Will there be beds for me and all who seek?
Yea, beds for all who come.

Rainer Maria Rilke (born 4 December, 1875; died 29 December, 1926), pictured above in a drawing, made c. 1900, by Leonid Pasternak (1862-1945) (the father of Boris Pasternak).

‘It is frightening to think how many things are made and unmade with words; they are so far removed from us, trapped in their eternal imprecision, indifferent with regard to our most urgent needs; they recoil at the moment when we seize them; they have their life and we have ours.’

-from the correspondence of Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Ulrich Baer

Samuel Butler (born 4 December, 1835; died 18 June, 1902), in an 1873 self-portrait, now in the collection of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu, New Zealand.

From Butler’s dystopian satire, Erewhon (1872), which depicts a fictional country and society in which victims of misfortune and illness are considered deviants and are tried accordingly:

‘…I shall perhaps best convey to the reader an idea of the entire perversion of thought which exists among this extraordinary people [i.e. the inhabitants of Erewhon], by describing the public trial of a man who was accused of pulmonary consumption—an offence which was punished with death until quite recently […]

The sentence was as follows:-

“Prisoner at the bar, you have been accused of the great crime of labouring under pulmonary consumption, and after an impartial trial before a jury of your countrymen, you have been found guilty. Against the justice of the verdict I can say nothing: the evidence against you was conclusive, and it only remains for me to pass such a sentence upon you, as shall satisfy the ends of the law. That sentence must be a very severe one. It pains me much to see one who is yet so young, and whose prospects in life were otherwise so excellent, brought to this distressing condition by a constitution which I can only regard as radically vicious; but yours is no case for compassion: this is not your first offence: you have led a career of crime, and have only profited by the leniency shown you upon past occasions, to offend yet more seriously against the laws and institutions of your country. You were convicted of aggravated bronchitis last year: and I find that though you are now only twenty-three years old, you have been imprisoned on no less than fourteen occasions for illnesses of a more or less hateful character; in fact, it is not too much to say that you have spent the greater part of your life in a jail.

“It is all very well for you to say that you came of unhealthy parents, and had a severe accident in your childhood which permanently undermined your constitution; excuses such as these are the ordinary refuge of the criminal; but they cannot for one moment be listened to by the ear of justice. I am not here to enter upon curious metaphysical questions as to the origin of this or that— questions to which there would be no end were their introduction once tolerated, and which would result in throwing the only guilt on the tissues of the primordial cell, or on the elementary gases. There is no question of how you came to be wicked, but only this— namely, are you wicked or not? This has been decided in the affirmative, neither can I hesitate for a single moment to say that it has been decided justly. You are a bad and dangerous person, and stand branded in the eyes of your fellow-countrymen with one of the most heinous known offences.

“It is not my business to justify the law: the law may in some cases have its inevitable hardships, and I may feel regret at times that I have not the option of passing a less severe sentence than I am compelled to do. But yours is no such case; on the contrary, had not the capital punishment for consumption been abolished, I should certainly inflict it now.

“It is intolerable that an example of such terrible enormity should be allowed to go at large unpunished. Your presence in the society of respectable people would lead the less able-bodied to think more lightly of all forms of illness; neither can it be permitted that you should have the chance of corrupting unborn beings who might hereafter pester you. The unborn must not be allowed to come near you: and this not so much for their protection (for they are our natural enemies), as for our own; for since they will not be utterly gainsaid, it must be seen to that they shall be quartered upon those who are least likely to corrupt them.

“But independently of this consideration, and independently of the physical guilt which attaches itself to a crime so great as yours, there is yet another reason why we should be unable to show you mercy, even if we were inclined to do so. I refer to the existence of a class of men who lie hidden among us, and who are called physicians. Were the severity of the law or the current feeling of the country to be relaxed never so slightly, these abandoned persons, who are now compelled to practise secretly and who can be consulted only at the greatest risk, would become frequent visitors in every household; their organisation and their intimate acquaintance with all family secrets would give them a power, both social and political, which nothing could resist. The head of the household would become subordinate to the family doctor, who would interfere between man and wife, between master and servant, until the doctors should be the only depositaries of power in the nation, and have all that we hold precious at their mercy. A time of universal dephysicalisation would ensue; medicine-vendors of all kinds would abound in our streets and advertise in all our newspapers. There is one remedy for this, and one only. It is that which the laws of this country have long received and acted upon, and consists in the sternest repression of all diseases whatsoever, as soon as their existence is made manifest to the eye of the law. Would that that eye were far more piercing than it is.

“But I will enlarge no further upon things that are themselves so obvious. You may say that it is not your fault. The answer is ready enough at hand, and it amounts to this—that if you had been born of healthy and well-to-do parents, and been well taken care of when you were a child, you would never have offended against the laws of your country, nor found yourself in your present disgraceful position. If you tell me that you had no hand in your parentage and education, and that it is therefore unjust to lay these things to your charge, I answer that whether your being in a consumption is your fault or no, it is a fault in you, and it is my duty to see that against such faults as this the commonwealth shall be protected. You may say that it is your misfortune to be criminal; I answer that it is your crime to be unfortunate.

“Lastly, I should point out that even though the jury had acquitted you—a supposition that I cannot seriously entertain—I should have felt it my duty to inflict a sentence hardly less severe than that which I must pass at present; for the more you had been found guiltless of the crime imputed to you, the more you would have been found guilty of one hardly less heinous—I mean the crime of having been maligned unjustly.

“I do not hesitate therefore to sentence you to imprisonment, with hard labour, for the rest of your miserable existence. During that period I would earnestly entreat you to repent of the wrongs you have done already, and to entirely reform the constitution of your whole body. I entertain but little hope that you will pay attention to my advice; you are already far too abandoned. Did it rest with myself, I should add nothing in mitigation of the sentence which I have passed, but it is the merciful provision of the law that even the most hardened criminal shall be allowed some one of the three official remedies, which is to be prescribed at the time of his conviction. I shall therefore order that you receive two tablespoonfuls of castor oil daily, until the pleasure of the court be further known.” ‘

-from Erewhon (182)

Joseph Conrad, born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski (born 3 December, 1857; died 3 August, 1924), pictured above in a photograph from 1863.

‘Sometimes, stretched at ease in the shade of a roadside tree, we watch the motions of a labourer in a distant field, and after a time, begin to wonder languidly as to what the fellow may be at. We watch the movements of his body, the waving of his arms, we see him bend down, stand up, hesitate, begin again. It may add to the charm of an idle hour to be told the purpose of his exertions. If we know he is trying to lift a stone, to dig a ditch, to uproot a stump, we look with a more real interest at his efforts; we are disposed to condone the jar of his agitation upon the restfulness of the landscape; and even, if in a brotherly frame of mind, we may bring ourselves to forgive his failure. We understood his object, and, after all, the fellow has tried, and perhaps he had not the strength—and perhaps he had not the knowledge. We forgive, go on our way—and forget.

And so it is with the workman of art. Art is long and life is short, and success is very far off. And thus, doubtful of strength to travel so far, we talk a little about the aim—the aim of art, which, like life itself, is inspiring, difficult—obscured by mists—It is not in the clear logic of a triumphant conclusion; it is not in the unveiling of one of those heartless secrets which are called the Laws of Nature. It is not less great, but only more difficult.

To arrest, for the space of a breath, the hands busy about the work of the earth, and compel men entranced by the sight of distant goals to glance for a moment at the surrounding vision of form and colour, of sunshine and shadows; to make them pause for a look, for a sigh, for a smile—such is the aim, difficult and evanescent, and reserved only for a very few to achieve. But sometimes, by the deserving and the fortunate, even that task is accomplished. And when it is accomplished—behold!—all the truth of life is there: a moment of vision, a sigh, a smile—and the return to an eternal rest.’

From Conrad’s Preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897)

‘“Let Heaven look after what has been purified.  The wind and the rain will take care of the ashes.’”

From the end of Victory: An Island Tale (1915)

‘Our story continues, full of sound and fury, with a little harbor, like in a Conrad novel…’

-from Pierrot le fou, a 1965 film by Jean-Luc Godard

Georges-Pierre Seurat (born 2 December, 1859; died 29 March 1891), Une baignade, Asnières (The Bathers at Asnières) (1883-1884; oil on canvas, 201 x 300 cm), in the collection of The National Gallery, London.

‘In Seurat’s Baignade, […] there are plenty of things to suggest that the idyll is awkward as well as dignified: the sheer unlikely neatness of the bathers’ clothes, to start with, the boots and bowlers and concentric straw hats; the dim profile of the central boy (the “lout,” as my mother insisted on calling him); the careful outlines of figures and grass; the doll’s-house trees, the smokestacks and gasworks, the frantic rower going off frame.  We would not need to know the unpleasant facts about the great collector sewer [which, in fact, existed in the far distance, near the smokestacks] to realize that this was an unfashionable place to swim.  The figures appear to be floating freely, self-absorbed and separate, each perfect in its artless way, sharp-edged and individual.  They would not be here except for the landscape, by which is meant the factories as well the river, the sewer as well as the grass.  So the landscape has to be painted in a way that agrees with the figures: it has to be awkward and hieratic like them, but also lifelike and composed.  The piles of clothes are put against the glittering water, smoke against sunlight, bland against pungent colours, the lout on the bank alongside the ephebe in the water shouting to the other shore.’

-T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (1984)

‘M. Seurat has succeeded in rendering the sight of the human figure in sunlight; but […] has forgotten to go any deeper or further.  Take off the husk of coloured fleas that cover his figures, and there is nothing underneath: no soul, no thought, nothing—a nothing in a body whose contours alone exist.  Just as in his painting of the Grande Jatte [1884-1886], the human frame becomes rigid and hard; everything becomes still and ossified.’

-Joris-Karl Huysmans, review of the Salon des Independents, 1887