darkness

Franz von Stuck - Inferno (1908)
(detail) VILLA STVCK

i get off the subway, where i was reading. on the up escalator. a noisy crowd comes down across from me, dressed up for saturday night out on the town.

on the wall behind them, i notice a picture. it doesn't belong here, is a thorn in the flesh of this early summer night, so warm and promising. it is outrageous, violent. it's an ad for a museum and no-one seems to notice it. whose idea was it to place this infernal picture of a dominant female figure, submissive men and fiery backdrop in this urban environment?

the picture draws my thoughts back into the book i'd read on the train. Dorian Gray, invincible, lives not his dreams but his nightmares, corrupting his youthful admirers, getting away with murder, escaping retribution, haunting opium dens, pondering his potential for unequalled debauchery.

i come up the stairs, making my way past smiling couples that group around a band of street musicians, playing out of all things Rossini's Thieving Magpie and all i can think of is Alex & his droogs engaging in random acts of gratuitous violence.

Alex & his droogs

for a moment, i feel quite out of place, travelling through the happy evening light, among the lively chatter of bars and market stalls shrouded in my little cloud of gloomy thoughts. but then fortunately i am not a teenager anymore - i can experience situations and the feelings that come with them without having to physically place myself in them, through literature.

what matters is not potential, there is far too much of it and life is too short to ponder it. what matters is what we choose not to realize. i think of it like an inverse allegory of the cave, maybe there is more out there, inside me, that i have not seen but i am better off only seeing the shadows of.

as A Clockwork Orange asks the question of how we can be truly good if we lack the potential to be evil, Dorian Gray asks the reverse question of whether we would realise out worst impulses if given the chance.

it seems to me that the cushy pillows of modern medicine, economic well-being, recreational substances, and city life - we choose to keep relations as close or superficial as we wish - all give us that chance but thankfully, for most of us the answer is still no.

the potential, though, exists, and art can be an outlet for it. so what draws artists to think about darkness, what drew me to the infernal image? maybe the fascination with what is in all of us, curiosity to explore strange possibilities, and discover beauty in them.
entertaining? certainly. educational? probably. boring? never!

i arrive at my destination with a smile on my face and spend a lovely evening barbecueing with friends.

selected quotations from The Picture of Dorian Gray

my italics

The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly--that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one's self.

... a psychological study of a certain young Parisian who spent his life trying to realize in the nineteenth century all the passions and modes of thought that belonged to every century except his own, and to sum up, as it were, in himself the various moods through which the world-spirit had ever passed, loving for their mere artificiality those renunciations that men have unwisely called virtue, as much as those natural rebellions that wise men still call sin.

He sought to elaborate some new scheme of life that would have its reasoned philosophy and its ordered principles, and find in the spiritualizing of the senses its highest realization.

... But it appeared to Dorian Gray that the true nature of the senses had never been understood, and that they had remained savage and animal merely because the world had sought to starve them into submission or to kill them by pain, instead of aiming at making them elements of a new spirituality, of which a fine instinct for beauty was to be the dominant characteristic. As he looked back upon man moving through history, he was haunted by a feeling of loss. So much had been surrendered! and to such little purpose! There had been mad wilful rejections, monstrous forms of self-torture and self-denial, whose origin was fear and whose result was a degradation infinitely more terrible than that fancied degradation from which, in their ignorance, they had sought to escape;

... Yes: there was to be ... a new Hedonism that was to recreate life and to save it from that harsh uncomely puritanism that is having, in our own day, its curious revival. It was to have its service of the intellect, certainly, yet it was never to accept any theory or system that would involve the sacrifice of any mode of passionate experience. Its aim, indeed, was to be experience itself, and not the fruits of experience, sweet or bitter as they might be. Of the asceticism that deadens the senses, as of the vulgar profligacy that dulls them, it was to know nothing. But it was to teach man to concentrate himself upon the moments of a life that is itself but a moment.

Is insincerity such a terrible thing? I think not. It is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities.

Such, at any rate, was Dorian Gray's opinion. He used to wonder at the shallow psychology of those who conceive the ego in man as a thing simple, permanent, reliable, and of one essence. To him, man was a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex multiform creature that bore within itself strange legacies of thought and passion, and whose very flesh was tainted with the monstrous maladies of the dead. ... Were his own actions merely the dreams that the dead man had not dared to realize?

Dorian Gray had been poisoned by a book. There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realize his conception of the beautiful.

Wilde side of DOB

so i currently live in a furnished apt and recently i decided to grab a classic book from the shelf that i'd always wanted to read - The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde.

i could not have chosen a better book, as i am now finding out. consider these excerpts:

wikipedia

the strange expression that he had noticed in the face of the portrait seemed to linger there, to be more intensified even. The quivering ardent sunlight showed him the lines of cruelty round the mouth as clearly as if he had been looking into a mirror after he had done some dreadful thing.

But the picture? What was he to say of that? It held the secret of his life, and told his story. It had taught him to love his own beauty. Would it teach him to loathe his own soul? Would he ever look at it again?

This portrait would be to him the most magical of mirrors. As it had revealed to him his own body, so it would reveal to him his own soul.

and compare them to these from another book i read recently, Milan Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being:

Tereza tried to see herself through her body. That is why, from girlhood on, she would stand before the mirror so often. And because she was afraid her mother would catch her at it, every peek into the mirror had a tinge of secret vice.

It was not vanity that drew her to the mirror; it was amazement at seeing her own "I." She forgot she was looking at the instrument panel of her body mechanisms; she thought she saw her soul shining through the features of her face. She forgot that the nose was merely the nozzle of a hose that took oxygen to the lungs; she saw it as the true expression of her nature.

Staring at herself for long stretches of time, she was occasionally upset at the sight of her mother's features in her face. She would stare all the more doggedly at her image in an attempt to wish them away and keep only what was hers alone. Each time she succeeded was a time of intoxication: her soul would rise to the surface of her body like a crew charging up from the bowels of a ship, spreading out over the deck, waving at the sky and singing in jubilation.

he crew of her soul rushed up to the deck of her body. ... to look in the mirror and beg her soul not to abandon the deck of her body for a moment on this most crucial day of her life.

as humans we are fascinated by the subject of the duality of body and soul. do we recognise ourselves in the mirror? do our bodies represent our soul or do they hide it? i won't go into the problem of defining a dividing line between body and soul (i think that is impossible, more on that when i write about free will) but i think it boils down to a match between our exteriour and our self-image.

now have a look at these excerpts, first from Oscar Wilde. the charactor of Lord Henry says:

It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style. They affect us just as vulgarity affects us. They give us an impression of sheer brute force, and we revolt against that. Sometimes, however, a tragedy that possesses artistic elements of beauty crosses our lives. If these elements of beauty are real, the whole thing simply appeals to our sense of dramatic effect. Suddenly we find that we are no longer the actors, but the spectators of the play. Or rather we are both. We watch ourselves, and the mere wonder of the spectacle enthralls us.

here's what Kundera has to say about this:

Early in the novel that Tereza clutched under her arm when she went to visit Tomas, Anna meets Vronsky in curious circumstances: they are at the railway station when someone is run over by a train. At the end of the novel, Anna throws herself under a train. This symmetrical composition-the same motif appears at the beginning and at the end-may seem quite "novelistic" to you, and I am willing to agree, but only on condition that you refrain from reading such notions as "fictive", "fabricated", and "untrue to life" into the word "novelistic." Because human lives are composed in precisely such a fashion.

Beethoven bust at Walhalla

They are composed like music. Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence (Beethoven's music, death under a train) into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual's life. Anna could have chosen another way to take her life. But the motif of death and the railway station, unforgettably bound to the birth of love, enticed her in her hour of despair with its dark beauty. Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.

It is wrong, then, to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences (like the meeting of Anna, Vronsky, the railway station, and death or the meeting of Beethoven, Tomas, Tereza, and the cognac), but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty.

it seems Kundera found reading Wilde rather stimulating, and so do i. recommended reading for students of the human condition.