In Which René Magritte Offers Aesthetic Illumination

Traces of the Divine

by KARA VANDERBIJL

The pleasure in surrealism does not lie in its ability to reassure that the world is not so, but rather in the knowledge that that it could be so. It is the idea that perhaps we will wake up in a world where water does not pour but slithers through the air, where a mere step will take us to the Moon. It might be a world in which a pipe is not a pipe, in which a rose by any other name wouldn’t smell as sweet; in which, by rule of non sequitur, we would be incapable of hurting those closest to us.

As its name indicates, the movement emphasized more than reality, and not less. Convinced that reality was unattainable, its adherents conjured a brilliant simulacrum of reality — on one hand, something that looked and felt and tasted like it without being it; and on the other, something that strayed so far from the exact nature of things that it could only call attention to truth. In tampering with our perception — especially our visual perception — they took away from us what we put most of our faith in. They asked us to look, and in so doing taught us we were blind.

Quite literally, then, René Magritte's "Key to the Fields" painting not only represents a broken window, it is a broken window. Upon looking at the shards of glass the observer realizes two things: first, that they are the pieces of a painting, and second, that they also serve the function of a mirror. The painting ostentatiously refers to itself as art by being a window into reality; it shows us life as we think we see it. Yet the closer we get to what is beyond the window, to what is outside, the more we realize that art is much like walking towards Michelangelo’s La Pieta in St. Peter’s basilica: sooner or later we’ll run into plate glass, or oil on canvas, and realize that no matter how many leaves are on the trees, they are still nothing but brushstrokes. We’re looking at a painting of a painting of a painting, and the only real thing is our perception, which is the frailest thing in the world.

Frailty — or limitations both physical and mental — built boxes and frames around concepts we had taken for granted up until the war. Death, represented heretofore in human terms (a putrefying corpse, a robed figure, a dancing skeleton) became the great Finisher; except instead of finishing life, it merely finished art by framing canvases with wood, by hiding humans inside boxes or behind trees, and by creating absurd, albeit ingenious, metonymies. That we find Jacques-Louis David’s Madame Recamier in Magritte’s parody (1951) is solely due to the fact that only a certain kind of box can hold a human, just like our minds fit into certain boxes and hibernate there quite comfortably under six feet of soil.

Yet with the acknowledgement of human limitation came an incontrollable desire to present thought in its purest condition, unbridled by aphorisms, cold logic, or even language. No one explored this more than Dali, whose paintings captured the most fantastical wanderings of the unconscious mind. The Spanish master’s eccentric and occasionally frightening visions bled into his daily life: for example, in order to attract the attention of Gala, who was at the time married to surrealist poet Paul Eluard, he coated himself in goat excrements, dyed his armpit hair blue, and laughed uncontrollably in her presence. Inexplicably — again, non sequitur — Gala found this appealing.

Similar to Magritte’s obsession with bringing to light an apparent contradiction was Dali’s obsession with placing time and space outside of time and space. Thus his predilection for vast desert landscapes filled with degraded, almost unrecognizable objects begins to make sense; the pocket watches in 1931's "The Persistence of Memory" melt not because they are in a desert, but because they have ticked themselves out of existence. Millet’s famous couple, who had bent their heads so quaintly, so reverently over a patch of ground in Angelus, lost their humanity when they ceased to have land to pray over and church bells to pray to. The couple’s aesthetic function remains the same in both Millet and Dali, except that in Angelus they are sowing heaven in earth, and in "Atavism at Twilight" (1933) their bodies are symbolically harvesting hell: a pitchfork and a wheelbarrow.

Magritte took pleasure in hiding his subjects’ faces, whether it was with a piece of fruit or a piece of cloth. "The Lovers" (1928), engaging in an act as simple as an embrace, find themselves fumbling blindly for each other. Dali, on the other hand, concealed the subjects of his paintings behind Gala’s face. In her homely, middle-aged body he found traces of the divine, and at different times she masqueraded as both the pagan and Christian symbols of feminine zeal: Leda and the Virgin Mary.

Everything floats in "Leda Atomica" (1949), a not-so-subtle allusion to the disaster in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Leda — Gala — almost embraces the swan, whose wing almost touches her, as she’s almost seated, her feet almost resting on pedestals. Even the sea in the background recoils from land, all of it a picture of atoms hanging in suspension. Even in its eerie representation (the weirdest being that Leda has slightly crossed eyes and distinctively eastern European features), there is no mistaking the classic elements of Renaissance art, namely the divine proportion. Espousing the A-bomb to the golden ratio turned this piece, in Dali’s opinion, into the best kind of art: a picture of both mankind’s greatest achievements and its current wondering and wandering.

A man with wings, an overgrown apple in a tiny room, melting watches, and a woman enclosed in a coffin are surreal not because they could never be but because we forget to realize that they could be. Our simplemindedness, our laziness consists of this: that we are constantly and erroneously surprised by what is. Why should we ever be surprised that a rose smells like a rose, or that the sea comes back time and time again to the shore? This is the paradox, the greatest of non sequiturs: waking up and looking at the world as if you had never seen it before, and discovering that this might in fact be the secret formula of happiness.

Kara VanderBijl is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Chicago. She last wrote in these pages about her letter to the editor. She tumbls here.

"Sonia" - Laetoli Steps (mp3)

"Hash of Cash" - Laetoli Steps (mp3)

"Bully Bully Bully" - Laetoli Steps (mp3)

with georgette berger

In Which It Comes Back To Us Corrected

A Letter to the Editor

by KARA VANDERBIJL

Womanhood is an exception to every rule, much like irregular verbs in French. I was always taught that to master these grammatical anomalies, one must first learn the rule and then how to break it expertly, and never the other way around. “After all,” my teacher said, “we learned to fly by keeping our feet on the ground.” The only catch to being a constant exception is that the exception then becomes a rule in itself. French verbs can only be so irregular; after a while, they have to follow some kind of structure. A man couldn’t bleed for a week every month and live, but a woman can.

If the stories are true, woman has been an alarming exception from the very beginning. Eve bloomed from Adam’s rib and never forgot it — why else would she have listened to the serpent, who told her she could again be transformed, and this time into the likeness of the divine? Adam was cursed because he did not live up to his manhood, but Eve was cursed for trying to be God — the ultimate exception. The curse changed her ability to create into a painful endeavor, something that to a woman is a deep and disquieting irregularity. Since then, to be a woman means to be painfully and abnormally conjugated, and to bleed for it.

The day it happened to me, I wasn’t prepared and it took me a while to come to terms. I emerged into the world finally with a sort of half-resignation and disdain, and was shocked when I found chocolate cake and gifts waiting on the kitchen table for me. My mother hung up the phone as I slid into a chair and smiled at me like we were in on some sort of cosmic secret, just the two of us.

"Your aunt says, ‘Congratulations’," she beamed.

"Thanks," I said, but I wasn’t sure if that was the right word.

She looked at me for a moment, almost indulgently, and then stepped over and kissed my forehead in blessing. "Now you're a woman."

That cosmic secret only goes to show that sometimes our bodies are much further ahead than the rest of us. I was twelve and felt no more like a woman than I had before the blood. Yet when it happened, it was somehow much more than a simple biological transformation enabling me to carry children. It was the ticket to a new period of life, one in which I would potentially be allowed to attend sleepovers, wear makeup, and flock to the restroom with other females. And I found, secretly, that I was proud of it — proud not only of its symbolism, but also of the pure physical fact. I was proud to be the exception to a rule, proud that I could lose something so essential to life and yet somehow create life with it. This form of hubris, I believe, all women inherited from the beginning, if only to cope with the fact that they will never be divine.

A sort of shy self-awareness followed, as new curves found their shape as gently as fine penmanship. First shaky and then smooth, they were the outward expression of this lovely and hidden thing, like a beautifully written letter. I learned to use them like I learned to use new words: syllable by syllable, meaning by meaning. At first I was as concerned about my femininity as I was concerned about my writing — worried that it all promised a unique and engaging story that I would never be able to tell. I perfected my handwriting, spending long hours copying my notes from class, giving the proper attention to spelling and grammar. Je suis, j’ai, je suis, j’ai, je suis, j’ai…

My mother warned me about the stories I should never tell, namely that I should never look a man in the eye on the subway and that I should never respond when they called from doorways or alleys. I learned to look through people on the street as if they were windowpanes, to pretend that they didn’t exist except as modifiers in time’s sentence. Once a man put his hand on my knee in the train and I whispered fiercely, "Don’t touch me!" I was terrified of being a direct object and even more terrified of becoming an indirect object, one that men followed or whistled to on the streets. I learned to keep my face impassive and to tell stories only to those who would listen, behavior that was later reinterpreted as aloofness.

For a few years, I had to commute a great distance to get to school and left home early in the morning, long before the sun came up. The streets were empty and I was lonely in the way a woman is lonely when caught in the tension between what is and what should be, stretched and parsed both descriptively and prescriptively. I was younger and taller than most of the men I took the bus with, and I wondered what they thought of me standing there with them before seven o’clock. I imagined the stories that my clothes told them, the stories I would have told if I thought they would listen.

It was during those morning commutes that I began to feel as if I were being followed. I remembered what my mother had said and refused to look back over my shoulder, keeping the story to myself in defiance. Yet I was fascinated by the thought of someone knowing me by another name than I knew myself, calling me elle instead of je — "she” instead of "I" — conjugating me in a tense I had never known since I could not step out of my own skin. I flirted with this idea and punctuated it by taking a different route to the train; after all, I had always been told to avoid the predictable when being followed, just as I had been taught that all good stories start with beginnings that taste like champagne. The follower, a strange conglomeration of parental authority and romantic ideals, slashed a red pen through my charade and reminded me that I had to play by his rules. I began to wonder if he thought my scarf was askance, that I used too many semi-colons.

Loneliness in a woman is a bitter thing, bitter because Adam’s loneliness was solved and hers was not. It is lonely to be the subject of every sentence you write, no matter how long they are or how many modifiers you find it in you to use. Loneliness, too, is a form of hubris — a blatant refusal to acknowledge the shame in being an exception, which is a crime worse than simply refusing to follow the rules. For a long while I let the Editor prescribe my goings and doings, and loved when my day came back free of red ink. I found the irony in the French term les règles and decided that to be a woman was of no greater significance than the difference between a dash and a hyphen.

I worried that my perfume was too sweet, that I had forgotten to check for split infinitives.

When I turned twenty, somebody asked me to tell them about a time I was the only one not dancing in a nightclub in Barcelona and I found myself wondering why they wanted to hear it. Since it was no longer possible to see people as windowpanes, I used everything I had learned about tone and told stories as if they were for the people I was telling them to. It was with surprise, then, and disappointment that I ultimately realized I had preferred being considered a direct object than being considered a subject. As a result, I unwittingly uncovered the difference between the way men interact with women in America and the way they interact in France.

When I moved to Chicago, I found that men would come and talk to me if I had a book in my hands and a cup of tea on the table. None of them would sit down, though; they were content to ask me what I thought of the book, if I liked it or not, while standing awkwardly with their hands in their pockets. The Editor wrote notes in the margin on how they would think I was one of those people if they caught me reading Stieg Larsson, and a hipster if they caught me reading Ayn Rand, and how I should just stick with the tea and remain aloof. Besides, I was reminded, in all likelihood none of them had read Pascal.

Loneliness, however, is a more brutal editor than self. I continued to bring books to coffee shops, and I found the men to be kinder critics; unable to tell the difference between a dash and a hyphen, they would only see curves like gentle penmanship, writing all the words they loved and understood best.

Kara VanderBijl is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Chicago. You can find her website here. She last wrote in these pages about the second handers.

"Burden of Tomorrow" - The Tallest Man On Earth (mp3)

"The Drying of the Lawns" - The Tallest Man On Earth (mp3)

"Love Is All" - The Tallest Man On Earth (mp3)

In Which We Receive It After It's Been Used

The Second-Handers

by KARA VANDERBIJL

Some of us are clever, and a select few of us may grow up to be wise. But we are very rarely the beginning of anything. Our ideas are like thrift-store sweaters: worn, loved, discarded, and then arranged on cheap plastic hangers by color or size for the next wearer. 

Case in point: as a small child, I never considered our occasional trips to Goodwill as something to look forward to. I am not sure when it began but by the time we were growing up in the '90s, thrifting for new threads attracted a certain stigma among children whose parents could afford to buy them brand new clothes at the mall. Personally, I found the idea of secondhand shopping distasteful. Who wants to wear clothes that smell like their previous owners, never feel clean no matter how many times you put them in the wash, and don’t seem like your clothes even after you come home and put them in your drawer? 

Yet what had so repulsed me as a child became infinitely alluring when, naïve and living on a tight budget, I stumbled across a set of expert thrifters in college. Like me they had grown up in modest-income homes but unlike me they had turned their childhood misfortunes into an opportunity. These were the people that liked to call themselves “old souls”, and for them nothing was more full of soul than clothes somebody else had worn and imbibed with memory, music on vinyl, and black-and-white films. While I desperately tried to look like a fashionista (when really I just looked like I had walked right out of the Target online catalogue), they caught some of the spirit of the ‘60s with their skinny ties and old corduroy trousers and faded sundresses. They walked around campus like gods, reading Nietzsche and Sartre, radiant in their aesthetic revolution. 

I’d like to think that my fascination with these people stemmed from the bitter and melancholy depths of my own tortured, artistic soul. But really it was probably something akin to impatience or that briefly confusing period between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one when everybody is trying to discover who they actually are, sans parents and money and what have you. Far from being tortured or artistic, I was simply human — and, briefly sidetracked from the divine, I began to worship a fictitious Idea of myself.

It was harmless at first. I found myself in fast-moving cars towards Hollywood, unofficial heaven of secondhand clothing — the irony of which was lost on me until much later. I cut my hair short and listened to jazz and blamed everything on consumer America. I read Jack Kerouac at the suggestion of a friend, and romanticized the Idea until my thrifted sweater sprouted into a hitchhiker, a skinny boy with a cigarette in the corner of his mouth who had been in the back of everybody’s car and wanted to discover truth and beauty. All the while Facebook told me I was deep: a “twenty-something” (somewhere along the line it was no longer profound to note the second digit) of the world, who read Hamlet, Nausea, and On the Road. You could easily find me by searching for people who liked Sylvia Plath, tea, and rain, and pretty much anything before it became popular. Moody and enigmatic, my status updates were “liked” by people who obviously wished they had half as much soul. 

A couple of damp Los Angeles winters came and went. The Idea grew threadbare as I tried to stretch it over its own flaws. One February I discovered that I hated James Joyce, and the thought worried me. Too many people found out I had spent long hours of my childhood listening to Celine Dion. My favorite film, far from being Jules et Jim, was Breakfast at Tiffany’s. 

I compensated for these superficialities by intellectualizing popular culture, something English majors do far more of than they should in order to earn their degree. Everything, even why Don Draper eats Ritz crackers in an episode of Mad Men, gained a deeper meaning. Like most people I had studied The Great Gatsby in high school and believed that all of life was the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock: an elusive, organic thing of vast and multiple significations. In my speculation I somehow thought I was the lone Gatsby on the lawn with my arms stretched towards its infinite possibilities, alone in my understanding of its complexity and potential. In all this it became incredibly important for people to agree with me. After all, the true meaning of everything doesn’t mean anything unless people agree with you. 

Not once did it occur to me that I might actually be Nick Carraway, the spectator of something great — not its origin. Nor did it occur to me that if the Idea had been a Facebook page, I would have been a mere fan of it among ten thousand other people wearing skinny jeans and beat-up brown oxford shoes and thrifted sweaters. Instead of gaining soul I had simply taken a snapshot of what I thought soul was and had used it as a profile picture: a mere fabrication, what I wanted people to see when they clicked on my name.

I graduated in a secondhand dress. 

"When did you start liking thrifted clothes?" my mother asked. 

Before they were popular, I thought. Before Zooey Deschanel wore them. "I’ve always…" I repeated the beginning of a pre-recorded response against the fading but-still-there nasty feeling that I hadn’t always and didn’t actually. I remembered that Nick didn’t get shot at the end of The Great Gatsby because he only wrote about Gatsby, wasn’t Gatsby, could never be Gatsby. Those who don’t do, teach; those who don’t do, write; those who don’t think, steal thoughts. 

"I’ve always been a second-hander."

They say that mid-life crisis happens between the ages of forty and sixty, but even at the green age of twenty-something you can look at the mirror like you look at a stranger. I remembered I was twenty-two and decided to start saying so, as the word Something only remains mysterious on its own and becomes far less so when paired with unsubtle Twenty. I remembered that I loved expensive clothing, clothing that didn't smell like anything yet but the inside of a store, clothing that nobody would ever wear but myself. I listened to Celine Dion, and danced. I celebrated sunshine instead of rain and drank espresso like a fiend. 

I got rid of Facebook and made some new friends. 

Naturally, none of these things took away the Idea, and none of them stopped me from being a second-hander. After all, I owe my existence to a woman who carried me for nine months, I owe many of my convictions to how my parents brought me up, and I got most of my facts at school. I like tea because I spent hours and hours in a Japanese teahouse as a teenager and I write wordy sentences because my French teachers taught me to do so. We're all second-handers to begin with. One day, we wake up on a hanger and wonder how we got there and where we’re going. 

In fact, that's how Ayn Rand’s 1943 novel The Fountainhead opens. A naked man is laughing, standing on the edge of a granite cliff. His name is Howard Roark, and he has just been expelled from a school of architecture because he refused to conform to tradition and design Renaissance-inspired buildings. 

As the novel progresses, we learn that Roark's (and Rand's) fight is less against tradition itself than it is against those who gain their identity from tradition. Howard Roark’s nemesis, Peter Keating, embodies the spirit of the age by designing buildings that people call beautiful because they identify with them. Keating's buildings are shaped by power, social mores, and convention; Roark’s come to life naturally, inspired by the environment around them, and celebrate mankind’s free spirit and its individuality. 

As one might expect, Howard Roark gains very little positive renown. Instead, all of New York mocks him and shuns his art, afraid of what it represents. Ayn Rand calls these New Yorkers "second-handers", people whose aim in life is "fame, admiration, envy — all that which comes from others." They’re the people who go to "cultural endeavors" such as university lectures and "don’t give a damn, but sit there in order to tell their friends that they have attended a lecture by a famous name." They’re the people who don’t ask, ’Is this true?’, but rather, 'Is this what others think is true?’

And yet, far from discouraging her readers to acknowledge tradition, Rand shows its usefulness in informing and its uselessness in creating a hero. One cannot admire the Peter Keatings of the world because they don't make the sacrifices or embrace the difficulties involved in becoming a hero. Similarly, one cannot help but admire Howard Roark for his settled persistence, content in his singular creation. He owes his creation to what he learned from tradition, but not his identity. 

He’s unsettlingly free. 

I'd like to read The Fountainhead and believe that I have enough soul to be Howard Roark. I'd like to believe that I, too, could do the hard and necessary things in order to accomplish something great. I don't know that I would. I’m not strong enough on my own to believe in something I can’t see, something that hasn’t proven popular or functional or beautiful. 

But sometimes being human also means pressing your ear to the pavement and listening to the rumor of something far away, something that belongs to all of us, something that might give us enough soul or enough courage, something we take secondhand and build on. 
 
Kara VanderBijl is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Chicago. You can find her website here. She last wrote in these pages about IKEA and Breakfast at Tiffany’s. 

"Don't Push" - The Exit (mp3)

"Darlin'" - The Exit (mp3)

"Italy" - The Exit (mp3)