Léo Bronstein, Kabbalah And Art
Brandeis University Press (1980) (N71.B77)
Chapter 1: Prologue
CHORUS MYSTICUS
Alles Vergängliche
Ist nur Gleichnis;
Das Unzulängliche,
Hier wird's Ereignis;
Das Unbeschreibliche,
Hier ist's gethan;
Das Ewigweibliche
Zieht uns hinan.
End of Goethe's Faust II
(to be read anew)
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All of mere transient date
As symbol shows;
Here, the inadequate
To fulness grows;
Here the ineffable
Wrought is in love;
The ever womanly
Draws us above.
translated by Anna Swanwick
(Stonestreet & Co., NY, 1901)
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Once in your life— or twice, or more, fatigue allowing it, you must have met an
object of life and of creation, old or young, that was your meeting with friendship.
A prophetic meeting: the meeting with your spirituality. (p. 3)
Spirituality: to know, that inside and outside all life and all creation, success is
not the contrary of failure; that the two worlds are two dimensions, but not contrary
to each other. Success is to be the achievement of a goal known, open, given. Failure,
achievement of a goal not known yet, hidden and to be discovered.
Friendship is to know this. Prophecy is about this. Spirituality means this. (p. 5)
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1. Dosso Dossi, St. John the Baptist (1520) |
Thus it was one day, when passing through the princely rooms of the Pitti Palace in Florence,
my eye— sliding away from the to forcibly admired and immutable works of the Great, over
the picture-glutted walls of the Not-so-great— met there, crowded high up, irreverentially lost,
this prophecy and this very spirituality: the Giaconda-like erect half-figure of St. John the Baptist,
made one with the Emilian landscape [Plate 1], painted with magic intentions (such, ab initio,
as Friendship had seaaled it there for me— a nerro-electronic chain of reactions-reponses along
memory's feedback deeds: smell-surprise=bliss-and-fear in a handicapped child, the bliss-and-fear of
green-into-greener, the bluer blue in that landscape-glance: handicapped child's bliss-and-fear,
opaque, liquid, gaseous, and the metaphysical protection already in it), by the sixteenth-century
Ferrarese, Dosso Dossi [1490-1542].
* * *
In my memory's feedback deeds I saw floating Degas' convinced and obsessive motto:
Le beau est un mystère.
* * *
What is Dosso's mystère, his-my friendship? Music. And— not side-by-side with,
but via music, Woman.
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Music:
That which makes me, a solid, opaque, moving and serene being— me or Ararat's summit at the Deluge—
become, fire doing this, a restless liquid, transparent, directed, mobile— me or deluge or
tear, or ocean or stream— and then, fire increased, become the gaseous, translucidly light,
fulfilled, agitated and explosive me, the same me, the primeval, elemental atom-gas, the bearer
of astrophyics' creation-bang!, a new being, solid, opaque and serene, severe-and-merciful.
Music. The Giorgionesque Venetian music-secret in Dosso Dossi. Music, so to speak
[Plates 2, 3, 4, 5]. (p. 5) So to speak, I say. For: "Words, words, words!" as, severely and mercifully,
the Poet said long ago. And yet, as another long after him wanted it: Poésie n'est pas faite
avec des idées mais avec des mots.
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2. Dosso Dossi, Melissa (1520), Galleria Borghese, Rome |
Still, in both, the multi-valent intention remains the same: Shakespeare's and Mallarme's arrested
despair of limitations and of insufficiency—" words, words, words!" words around ideas— and,
together with it, their transfer of such a despair into the hope-full act of creation itself: their own words—
their words' plunge into the plenitude of touch-smell-taste-vision-sound-gesture-idea, the total word.
Poet's plenitude. Poet's plunge into and emergence from (his coming out, one with it)
the sound-genesis of man's most ancient meditation: the Hindu Sabda, the in-sound, total, of all
beginnings and embodiments, with no beginnings, no ends in it; more precisely or closely, the pre-spoken
speech, the in-sounding total sound-word, the Hebrew letter-sound Yod, this "cause of causes",
this prophetic plenitude, of the primeval creation's bang ex nihilo, ultimate meditation of
thinkers-kabbalists of old, the sixteenth-century Cordovero in Galilean Saphed, the thirteenth-century
Isaac the Blind of Pasquières, Azriel of Gerona, Abulfia, Gikadilla and others in Provence,
Catalonia and Castile. (p. 10)
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Such, in our own watchful and impatient century, and among its earbest thinkers— helpers—
the plenitude of their in-out despair, the plenitude of in-out insufficiency, and their search for issue.
Despair
In Ludwig Wittgenstein: "Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence
by means of language."
"The results of philosophy are the uncovering of one or another piece of plain nonsense and of bumps that
the understanding has got by running its head against the limits of language. These bumps make us see the value
of the discovery!" And "...any interpretation still hangs in the air along with what it interprets, and cannot
give it any support. Interpretaions by themselves do not determine meaning." And "My aim is to teach you to pass
from a piece of disguised nonsense to something that is patent nonsense." (p.10)
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3. Dosso Dossi,
Circe and Her Lovers in a Landscape
(1525) National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. |
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4. Giorgione,
The Tempest (1508)
Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice
[Notes: presence of Giorgione's Tempesta] |
"Language is a labyrinth of paths. You approach from one side and know your way about;
you approach the same place from another side and no longer know your way about." (p. 10)
And Despair's in-out: "But we understand the meaning of a word when we hear or say it;
we grasp it in a flash, and what we grasp in this way is surely something different from the 'use' which
is extended in time!" "Remember that the look of a word is familiar to us in the same kind of way as its sound."
"What is your aim in philosophy? To shew the fly the way out of the fly-bottle."
"But isn't it our meaning it that gives sense to the sentence? (And here, of course,
belongs the fact that one cannot mean a senseless series of words.) And 'meaning it' is something in the
sphere of the mind. But it is also something private! It is the intangible something only comparable
to consciousness itself. How could this seem ludicrous? It is, as it were, a dream of our language."
"...'When we mean something, it's like going up to someone, it's not having a dead picture (of any kind).'
We go up to the thing we mean. 'When one means something, it is oneself meaning'; so one is oneself in
motion. One is rushing ahead and so cannot also observe oneself rushing ahead. Indeed not." Yet: "Yes:
meaning something is like going up to someone." (p. 11)
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And: "'I noticed that he was out of humour.' Is this a report about his behaviour or his
state of mind? ('The sky looks threatening'; is this about the present or the future?) Both; not side-by-side
however, but about the one via the other."
"Though— one would like to say— every word has a different character in different
contexts, at the same time there is one character it always has: a single physiognomy. It looks at us.—
But a face in a painting looks at us too."
"The evolution of the higher animals and of man, and the awakening of consciousness at a
particular level. The picture is something like this: Though the ether is filled with vibrations the
world is dark. But one day man opens his seeing eye, and there is light."
"Again: I do not 'observe' what only comes into being through observation. The object of
observation is something else." (p. 11)
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5. Titian,
The Concert (1510), Palazzo Pitti, Florence |
"'Now I am seeing this', I might say (pointig to another picture, for example). This has the form
of a report of a new perception. The expression of a change of aspect is the expression of a new
perception and at the same time of the perception's being unchanged."
"We find certain things about seeing puzzling, because we do not find the whole business
of seeing puzzling enough."
And no contradiction should be seen, I think, between this vision of despair's battle with
both despair and hope, in later Wittghenstein, and his earlier but definitve legacy as summarized
for us by Bertrand Russell: "Every language has... a structure concerning which, in the language,
nothing can be said, but... there may be another language dealing with the structure of the first language,
and having itself a new structure, and... to this hierarchy of languages there may be no limit."
The plenitude of inter-translatability of all languages— the languages of tongue, eye,
ear, hand, etc.— and the presence of loss in it:
a) the unforgivable loss of solitude (where a word is a word, a gesture is a gesture,
an idea is an idea),
b) the mystery of that very loss being gain— the mystery of solidarity in it,
the mystery of solitude-solidarity.
And all poets— the poets of words, of sounds, of gesture, of abstraction and of touch
and smell— know: that all mystery, the secret of a secret, is that which is when where and what it is
and not any disturbed else. Ancient wisdom's invention, today's existentialist cliché: everything
is nothing, has the nothing in it, for without this nothing everything would not be anything.
Shelley's "To defy Power, which seems omnipotent; ... to hope till Hope creates /
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates."
* * *
... The secret of Dosso Dossi: the word music and— not "side-by-side" with but "via"
the word man in it, the word Woman in it.
* * *
So to speak, I said.
"And to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life." Wittgenstein interrupts again
here, threatens and helps those who need such help. "I shall also call the whole, consisting of language
and the actions into which it is woven, the 'language game'." (p. 12)
The woman. In Dosso Dossi. Perhaps in all that is meant by creation here.
(The giving and bearing of life, the giving and bearing it to death.)
The Woman. A word and a discovery. But discovery is always the discovery also
of the else in the discovered.
Here as plenitude, as continuity— without distances in it: the "else" of what is far—
in time and in space—
and what is close, is the same. Such is the confession of a poet:
the secrecy and the silence of the poignant in it.
The same-else in it.
The Woman. Not Graves's White Goddess (but this too); not even the man's pain-quenching
desire of the perfect curve, the sorceress's perfect breasts— male's existential plenitude.
(But this too, of course.) Not even depth-psychology's archetypal, Faustian descent into the Mothers'
abode and Faust's depth-ascension back to that pain-quenching fulfillment of plenitude— Goethe's
beautiful Helen. (Yet this too.) Ant not Woman liberated (the woman-female in her that no longer kills
all female rivals, the woman-male in her that will no longer kill all males-rivals, woman's liberation
of man, thus). But the Metaphysical Woman— the Secret Woman: this most concealed word in the
concealed Jewish language-game: the Shekhinah.
To her is dedicated what follows, to the end. (p. 13)
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Notes:
2. Dosso Dossi, Giovanni Luteri (ca. 1479-1542), a Ferrarese painter of renown. Pupil, according to Vasari,
of Lorenzo Costa. It was Venetian painting, that of Giorgione above all, which all his life
influenced and inspired him. He worked for Dukes of Este; was highly appreciated by them and
their sophisticated court. Ariosto was his friend.
The painting of John the Baptist,
executed around 1520, now in the Palazzo Pitti,
belongs to the most characteristic and creative period of the artist. With the exception of one modern
critic (W.G. Zwanziger, Dosso Dossi [Leipzig: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1911]) this work is ascribed
to him, not to his "Romanized" brother, Battista (see Felton Gibbons, Dosso and Battista Dossi
[New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1968]).
In 1531, with his brother and assistants, he decorated the splendid palace-castle of Cardinal
Clesio, Bishop of Trent, the Castello del Buon Consiglio
in Trent, and 1532, the Villa Imperiale in Pesaro.
Dosso Dossi
was the typical product of Ferrarese "Mannerist" court art, imbued with the
Venetian rather than with the dominant Roman-Florentine aesthetic ideas of the era. (p. 105)
3. Yod: the first letter of the
Tetragrammaton. "... Y H V H— the 'lost word'— was
above all others the 'saving' name in the tradition of Israel..." It is known as the name "of which
every consonant reveals and symbolizes one of the four aspects of fundamental degrees of divine all-reality....
It was exactly on account of the direct outpouring of divine grace brought about by the invocation
of the name Y H V H that the
traditional authority in Israel found it necessary, even before the
destruction of the second Temple, to forbid the spiritually fallen people to invoke, or even
merely to pronounce the tetragrammaton [replaced by the name
Adonai... and
Yah, the
first half of the Tetragrammaton]." (Leo Schaya,
The
Universal Meaning of the Kabbalah,
tr. from the French by Nancy Pearson [London: George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., 971], p. 145) "Thus
the letter yod... in Y H V H and Yah,
is revealed on the discursive level as the
sacred ideogram of the undifferentiated unity of ten
Sefiroth for yod
has the numerical value of ten..." Ibid, p. 151.
4. Ludwig Wittgenstein,
Philosophical Investigations, tr.
G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967), p. 47.
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Chapter 3: The Road of Meditation
Paul Klee on the spiral:
Changing length of the radius, combined with peripheral motion, transforms the circle
[Klee's "purest of mobile forms"] into the spiral. Lengthening of the radius creates a
vibrant spiral. Shortening of the radius narrows the curve more and more till the lovely
spectacle dies suddenly in the static center. Motion here is no longer finite, and the
question of direction regains new importance. This direction determines either a gradual
liberation from the center through freer and freer motions or an increasing dependence
on an eventually destructive center. This is the question of life and death.
— Paul Klee,
Pedagogical Sketchbook
(1953), p. 53,
Here is Klee's primeval infinity-substituting point—
zimzum— the root of roots of all his
in-emanations:
the concealed-manifested "universe of discourse" of Klee's line-colour-meaning,
the sefirotic Plenitude-Vagueness
of his imagery (Plates 23, 4, 25, 26).
But Klee also said: "Passing on to infinite movement, where the actual direction of movement
becomes irrelevant, I first eliminate the arrow. Through this act heating and cooling-off,
for instance, become one. Pathos (or tragedy) turns into ethos [italics mine], which encompasses
energy and counter-energy within itself." For Klee knew the primeval Error and the primeval Restoration
(tikkun) and Torah's "moral imperative" of the Drama and of the Presence: Klee knew, his
line-colour knew the beauty and the lure of despair; they knew how "Hope-creates /
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates." His was the poet's meditation: (p. 67)
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26. Paul Klee: Heron (1924) |
Open yourself—
your gate in the depths,
underground cell, set me free,
who senses light of lights.
Bright hands come
to grasp me, and
joyously, a friend
speak these words:
Come, you beautiful
images of wild beasts,
rise from your cage
that fingers glide sweetly
through flaming hide.
And all is one as of old
in God's garden:
day and night
sun and splendor of stars.
(In the paradise of those
who tremble with poetry.)
Diaries of Paul Klee, 1898-1918
p. 239, entry 863, Munich, 1909
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And just as the road of Origins and Loyalty, the road of Purity, ended at the "pure" shtieble— the Grass!
the Cow! the Woman!— of Baal Shem's great-grandson, so the road of Meditation ended here. It ended behind the
vacated space-point (tehiru-
zimzum) of infinity's withdrawal into itself— the no-thingness— and
the memory of the "pure" Presence there— the first spark, the Shekhinah! It ended behind the "Garment"—
malbush— of both the visionary (the world of the image-touch, of Image-la-Folle, image-substituted)
and the conceptual (the world of the image-concept, image-proof-correspondence); behind both the perfect finite circle
(man's solitude in the cosmos) and the never final multi-directed line (man's solidarity in the cosmos):
The end of Kabbalah's and Paul Klee's road— Paul Klee's together with all his visionary-conceptual
companions through all ages and all places on earth.
The road of Meditation ended here in a sudden, sharp and unexpected curve. And continued:
the very same road with a brusquely changed direction. And I changed its name. I called it, when I saw it
and entered it, the road of Companions. (p. 68)
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(11-19-2013)