Somehow I wish that man sculpted kennels, or shells, of one sort or another, things on his own scale, that he created objects differing greatly from from his own mollusk shape but proportional to it (I find African huts fairly satisfactory in this respect) instead of those enormous monuments that merely illustrate the grotesque discrepancy between his imagination and his body (or else his ignominious social and sexual mores), instead of those life-size or larger than life-size statues (I'm thinking of Michelangelo's David) that merely portray the body. I wish man would try to create, for himself and future generations, dwellings not much larger than his body, which would comprise all his imaginings and reasonings, that he would devote his genius to a work of adjustment, not of exaggeration – at the very least that genius would recognize the limits of the body that bears it.
Notes Toward a Shellfish, 1942, from Francis Ponge: Selected Poems, 2012, tr. C.K. Williams, ed. Margaret Guiton
When we were having a book printed in France we complained about the bad alignment. Ah they explained that is because they use machines now, machines are bound to be inaccurate, they have not the intelligence of human beings, naturally the human mind corrects the faults of the hand but with a machine of course there are errors.
Paris France, 1940, by Gertrude Stein
Tuesday, December 29, 2015
a work of adjustment, not of exaggeration
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human -size has its appeal also; the psychological extremes between the two(galactic and cozy)obviously represent in a certain way the capabilities of consciousness. i don't know if any artist i've ever been familiar with has attempted to plumb the depths of that difference; seems to offer a new universe of possibility... well, philip k. dick, maybe...
ReplyDeleteI wonder how an artist would do it. You have artworks that operate by comparing extremes of scale, but is that enough? (I'm thinking of those Chinese landscapes that give you tiny people, huge mountains, and blank gaps representing the drama of space -- or there's the work of Julie Mehretu, her massive Cairo; or even one of the cathedrals Ruskin admired with the small marks of the hand on the figures standing in contrast to the bulk of the building around them.)
DeleteSince I'm reading Ruskin's Modern Painters, I'm thinking a lot about Turner. It came to me a couple of weeks ago that one thing Turner shows us is how the landscape, the world out of doors, is primarily sky, a great deal of sky. Our towering mountain ranges are, when you compare them to the immense sky, just low ripples of stone against the horizon, ornaments on the edge of the sky.
DeleteThere deserves to be sub-genre of landscape called landandskyscape.
DeleteAn interesting idea, that man's life is no larger than his body. A wrong idea, but interesting. Wasn't it Thoreau who said that you only needed a living space the size of a coffin? Life is more than the life of the mind, though. A house is more than a container for bodies.
ReplyDeleteHave you read Ponge? He's a bit more slippery than that.
DeleteI haven't, but now I'm interested. Slippery is good.
DeleteI should read Stein's Paris book. I read Hemingway's A Moveable Feast not that long ago; I feel the two memoirs must go together somehow.
ReplyDeleteTell us if you try that experiment. I haven't.
DeleteHemingway is so much more straightforward than she is, and the unsaid portions of her sentences are so much more ambiguous.
The university bookstore is even now acquiring a copy of the Stein for me.
DeleteHer wilfulness fascinates me. It's a kind of aristocracy. It is not war that I am living in, she says: it is war-time, and there is a difference. War-time is "very interesting." There are more dogs and chickens around in war-time than in peace-time, and the dogs are more likely to kill the chickens during war-time. A little girl named Helen Button knows this. Her dog did not kill a chicken but one day it found a dead one and brought it to her. And so on.
DeleteDifferences in size also lead to differences in other ways: http://irl.cs.ucla.edu/papers/right-size.html
ReplyDeleteThank you. I enjoyed that up to the moment when the writer decided that the amount of work he had put into the words "scale" and "large" and "small" was going to be enough to make an unrelated and undeveloped point sound thoughtful, which it didn't.
Delete