Käthe Kollwitz: Prints and Drawings (1898-1835)
Letters to a Young Poet - Rainer Maria Rilke (1903-1908)
Babette's Feast - Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen) (1958)
KATHE KOLLWTIZ
Kollwitz’s art is suffused with examples of agony, suffering and tension. Her art is that of the soul, a soul in such sorrow that it’s seeking to escape the boundaries that keep it body-bound. As such, nothing from the “outside” can comfort the soul. Think of this as a consequence of living in a material world where two souls can never meet, only pass each other by. This speaks to our alienation from each other. Rilke describes Love, the most intimate, personal and perfect Love, as consisting of “two solitudes [that] protect and border and greet each other.” (p.78). Like two separate worlds in orbit around each other, they can never truly meet and be one.
Kollwitz’s art shows the solitude inherent in experiencing deep grief. One can feel the hollowness of the person in pain and how she is stripped of all that once mattered to her. In the face of such despair, she is utterly alone and has only herself to depend on. In such instances, to seek lasting comfort from an exterior source would bring further disappointment. Personally faced with this, the reality of the exterior world is exposed as the illusion it is.
Kollwitz’s art is a study of how emotional grief is carried by the body. Although the source and the weight come from within the subject, the physical burden of the pain is palpable to the observer. The statue version of “The Parents”, below, shows the differences in how the mother and the father carry their grief. The father, closed off with arms crossed, holds his sadness to himself. He is determined not to show what he’s feeling, as some might expect a “typical man” to do. His chin’s to chest as though he is trying hard to keep from bawling, while the mother shows that the void in her chest may cause her to keel over.
Now here are two versions of a woodcut version of “The Parents”. Although the message in each is similar, the feeling I get from one is different from the other. I prefer the first (below) because of its harder lines, especially those on the mother’s back, over her heart. These particular lines (more than in the other version) seem to express her heartbrokenness, and her weight is more palpably supported by her husband’s hand; he is supporting her weight more completely than in the second version, as you might expect the statue version of the father to do. In the second woodcut, the parents seem to be more melded together. The harder lines in the first indicate that even though they are so close together, they are entirely separate and alone. Kollwitz’s move from lithography to woodcuts is understandable since the definition of the lines in wood etchings stress the outer edges of individuals. For instance, compare the woodcut “Mothers” here, http://www.greatwar.nl/kollwitz/kollwitzmothers.html to her other drawings. One can see that even in groups, these women are, like us all, now and in the end, alone.
Mother and Dead Child. http://www.artnet.com/artwork/184746/421/woman-with-dead-child.html What is the first thing that strikes you about this? Yes, the mother is nude, everything else stripped away. Through her grief, she is brought to the essence of herself, to the most fundamental and most basic feeling she has ever had to endure. At least that’s what I felt. From her bearing and the direction of her pining, I also felt as though she is trying with all her might to pass her own life on to her child. This is a birth and death engraving.
The other noticeable, if not disturbing, aspect is that we cannot make out her face. What we are able to see doesn’t appear human. Would you want to see her face, though? Can such grief even be shared between two individuals? Such intense, irreparable anguish cannot be soothed from anything external. It can hardly be expressed in words, never mind be comforted. I heard this on CBC radio once and thought that this haunting music came close to expressing such pain: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymuF7uG6wis&feature=related
Anyway, on the flip side of the same note, it is the gazes of some of Kollwitz’s subjects that are most evocative of all. Here are examples of some very expressive faces:
- Killed in action: http://picasaweb.google.com/revswain/KollwitzKathe#5414547910363434770
- Germany’s children are starving: http://picasaweb.google.com/revswain/KollwitzKathe#5328356347882879874
- Bread: http://artsearch.nga.gov.au/Detail-LRG.cfm?View=LRG&IRN=645&PICTAUS=TRUE
- Prisoners listening to music: http://www.masterworksfineart.com/inventory/2748
- Death seizes a woman: http://picasaweb.google.com/revswain/KollwitzKathe#5292443231439985938
Perhaps Kollwitz saw her subjects’ suffering as beautiful because any emotion that is so pure is beautiful in its authenticity. The feelings she captured and tried to replicate in her art are not at all veiled by convention. This is precisely what Rilke was trying to capture in himself. He needed solitude to tap into his pure, authentic self. Indisputably, the depth of grief her works portray is on a fundamentally individual – not collective – level. Witnessing its manifest veracity is beautiful.
RAINER MARIA RILKE
Let’s quickly compare Rilke (1905) to Oscar Wilde (1890). Although Letters to a Young Poet and The Portrait of Dorian Gray were written within fifteen years of each other, the philosophies on which they are based could not be more divergent. “The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim” (preface, Dorian Gray). Rilke would have agreed that the artist creates beauty but I think he would have argued that the artist himself is so personally and emotionally involved with his art that it would be impossible for him to conceal himself even if he wanted to. As he says, “…you will see in [your poems] as your dear natural possession, a piece of your life, a voice from it. A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity” (p.9). To create beauty just for the sake of beauty (Wilde’s aesthetic philosophy) doesn’t necessarily arise out of necessity. Think of what Babette said at the end of Babette’s Feast (read below…): “Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart to the artist: ‘Give me leave to do my utmost!’” Sometimes it’s necessary, one way or another, to practice one’s art. Do you think Picasso could have done anything but paint?
Rilke is more concerned with feelings as opposed to the superficial 19th century aesthetic movement that Wilde was a part of. To give only two examples, Rilke feels the emotion of some poems that Mr Kappus sends him without being able to describe it. Only after Mr Kappus more fully expresses himself in the letter (presumably describing something about his life) is Rilke able to understand and articulate the source of what he was feeling… (p.5 “Your kind letter, which accompanied them, managed to make clear to me various faults that I felt in reading your verses, though I am not able to name them specifically"). The other example, (p.105), where Rilke considers the news of Mr Kappus: At first it “seems to be good news and the longer I thought it over, the more I felt that it was very good news indeed”. It’s as if his decisions came about by a grand synthesis where he weighed both his gut feeling and his reason.
I sometimes wonder whether anyone can live without Google at their fingertips. It gives people the best of both worlds: isolation and the internet. However, there is no possibility for growth in such a set-up because one is still dialed-in to social networking and “the entire world” at all times. There is no space or opportunity to look within. Rilke might have commented on how sad it is that instead of looking within, we seek affirmation and acceptance from everyone and everything except ourselves. He’d see this as the “easy way” and therefore not worth doing: “almost everything serious is difficult; and everything is serious.” (p.35).
Rilke’s philosophy on living plainly and clearly is reminiscent of Marcus Aurelius’, especially in that Rilke uses Nature as an example: As he sees plants and animals: “patiently and willingly uniting and multiplying and growing, not out of physical pleasure, not out of physical pain, but bowing to necessities that are greater than pleasure and pain, and more powerful than will and withstanding. If only human beings could more humbly receive this mystery…” (p.37). All beings bow to necessities, difficult as these necessities may be, as though Nature’s natural unfolding is Art itself.
Like the sublime workings of Nature, when art is striven for and attained, a grand sublimation of emotion takes place. Since emotion is beyond words, it makes sense: Look at Kollwitz’s work - it’s incommunicable; Rilke is looking for the same emotion in the form of poetry. I’m again reminded of Gaston Bachelard’s quote of what poetry is - “The great function of poetry is to give the situation of our dreams.” Bachlard philosophizes about tender memories from the home he grew up in. Rilke would have agreed with him: The spaces in which one spends one’s childhood are sacred, and the external symbols “are internalized and thereby re-created into something existing both within and without. The environment is then a visible consciousness that parallels the inner consciousness”.
He cherishes his childhood memories and takes a maternal approach to his own creative process. I remember something I once saw written on a bar wall, and its beauty stuck with me ever since. I found the line so beautiful because it recognized that one can fashion one’s own fantasies into memories, and can reconcile not achieving all of the many childhood dreams one had:
“The dreams of my youth have become memories”.
Depending on your attitude, this can be beautifully melancholy or depressingly so.
BABETTE’S FEAST
Babette’s Feast is beautifully melancholic. Of all the books this term, this short story has to be one of my favourites. I wonder where the discussion for this book will take us in class. Its themes parallel those considered in other works this semester, for example those of appearances, social mores, authenticity, spirituality, blindness, Nature, illusions, authority, vanity…
The setting of the story is “at the foot of the mountains [in a] small town of Berlevaag [that] looks like a child’s toy-town…” (p.23), as though “bastilled” by Nature, to use Wollstonecraft’s expression of a Norwegian town she once observed. In this town, Babette herself lives a life of solitude, never once mentioning her being an artist. At the end of the book, she tells her friends, (p.67) “…I shall never be poor… I am a great artist. A great artist, Mesdames, is never poor. We have something, Mesdames, of which other people know nothing” a space within that nobody can touch. “Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart to the artist: ‘Give me leave to do my utmost!’” (p.68)
It seems that those who understand or at least recognize this depth within, this source of creativity, are able to live more deeply without, in all meanings of that word. They can live without want, and can see the exterior world as it is: overrun with mere trivialities. Moreover, they can truly experience the outside world (the world without) without getting caught up in its pettiness. They see beyond the superficial, beyond what is an inch from their eyes, and can look deep.
Young Lorens, upon seeing Martine (p.26): “There rose before his eyes a sudden and mighty vision of a higher and purer life…” This is his gut reaction to this woman but he feels unworthy of her, possibly because he has no love for himself. As Rilke might have said, Lorens had dirty, undefined edges at the boundaries of his solitude, his being. “He loathed and despised the figure which he himself cut in her nearness. Tender words stuck in his throat as he looked in the maiden’s face…” (p.27). There is often difficulty and resistance to being completely honest and open with someone and to look them directly in the eyes. Perhaps this difficulty arises from the fear of what will be revealed of ourselves: In being intimate with others, we see a mirror of ourselves with all our faults and potentials. This can be terrifying.
However, Lorens “pulls himself together” (p. 27) [p.57 “For how is a man to behave when he cannot trust his senses? It is better to be drunk than mad.”] and becomes the man that Ivan Ilych was. Decades later, Lorens makes the sad realization that “all is vanity!” (p.52), “in what had been profited? Somewhere something had been lost.” (p.53)
“He would let the youth prove to him once and for all, that thirty-one years ago he had made the right choice.” This line reminds me of my grandmother who moved from Slovenia in the 1960s. To this day, she insists that life is (now) better in Canada and that she made the right decision. (Many Slovenian relatives of mine disagree given that she laboured physically for decades in Canada and left a relatively comfortable life in Ljubljana…) Now, whenever she has any visitors from Slovenia, she seeks confirmation that she made the right choice. Recently, less than a week after a relative of mine visited, one of the first questions my grandmother asked her was, “Where is life better, in Slovenia or in Canada?(!)”
Clearly something very special starts to happen during the course of Babette’s feast: “They only knew that the rooms had been filled with a heavenly light, as if a number of small halos had blended into one glorious radiance. Taciturn old people received the gift of tongues; ears that for years had been almost deaf were opened to it. Time itself had merged into eternity.” (p.61). I’m sure the diners did not want the evening to end and I, as a reader, felt the same way.
What touched me most was the idyllic scene Dinesen paints in setting up the dinner itself. She is setting up what could be considered the diners’ highlight of their twilight years. The outside December scene is fantastically Christmassy. p.54 -“Large snowflakes fell densely; behind the sledge the tracks were wiped out quickly. General Loewenhielm sat immovable by the side of his aunt, his chin sunk in the high fur collar of his coat.” Babette’s feast is a Biblical affair, complete with twelve guests. This writing and the ending of this story was reminiscent of Joyce’s moving and final paragraph in his short story The Dead:
A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
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