Bruno Jacobs

Bruno Jacobs

 

The Presence of Emptiness

The poetic experience is more the result of a disclosing, of a revelation than of some inspiration that rather is a consequence of it.

The search for images rich of potential that not only escape but perhaps are even able to counteract the inflation of onedimentional images that we are subject to today (may they be the product of the spectacle or of “art”, which to a large extent has become its more esoteric part) finds support in the heritage from childhood, namely its spontaneous even if diffuse “metaphysics”. The curious look of the child precedes thought and learning, the “cultural heritage” and its aesthetical and ideological implications – how unconscious or indigent, how elaborate or subtle they may be. This leads us out to reality, to places in the tangible world where restless movement ceases and the noise silences, where “material imagination” and meditation are being granted room and can reclaim their right, where confidential experience gets the opportunity to ferment and germinate.

Enigma of a Day: de Chirico, 1914
Enigma of a Day (de Chrico, 1914)

 

“Metaphysics”

Childhood’s metaphysical sense… In connection with this, the earlier works from the 1910’s of painter Giorgio De Chirico appear naturally as an interesting reference: “There is a strange and profound poetry, infinitely mysterious and solitary, which has its basis in the Stimnung of an autumnal afternoon when the weather is clear and a low sun casts longer shadow than in the summer months. It is the extraordinary sensation that you experience in Italian cities and in some of the cities of the Mediterranean coast (…).” (1)

But for De Chirico, it really wasn’t even a question of painting “metaphysically”, but rather to catch an “other”, metaphysical dimension of the world that would exist beyond us. De Chirico rather aesthetisize and manipulate reality out of certain ideas, transcendental preoccupations and a kind of mediumistic vision: an artist. If he was inspired by childhood experiences, Shopenhauer and Nietzsche inspired him at least as much.

This “metaphysical” ambience seems to build on a latent or diffuse tension that imbues the physical presence of certain for the most part insignificant places strengthened by stillness, relative silence and a certain desolateness. Also the prevailing light uses to be of decisive importance, as if the air began to become visible and time become manifest in a peculiar, physical way, as if the constituting details were radiating, as if we could behold the time that has elapsed since their origin.

These are places where stillness gets a disquieting effect – the full presence of emptiness.

It is that casual and unusual in reality that all the sudden feels more real, and often also the absence of human presence (or rather, the traces of human presence) that create a condensation in time that is poetic to its nature.

Urban environments, certain roofs, façade cornices, certain shrubs especially in sunny and hot summer afternoons or nights for that matter; a stillness that sometimes is being accentuated by isolated breezes.

And maybe above all certain industrial environments and ruins about which Miguel P. Corrales so simply and so appropriately could write that: “Now these silent, ghostly solitudes only serve the wandering of the mind”, and whose significance José Manuel Rojo has illustrated (2).

Possibly also a northern counterpart: deserted areas such as desolate mountain areas, parts of the North American West, northern Scandinavia or Siberia where the loneliness, mystery and majesty of nature is being emphasised particularly during motionless bright summer nights (3). And what about the pictures from the surface of Mars, that up to quite recently never seen world in its inaccessibility and virginity, and which are precisely so strong – much more than the pictures from the Moon for example – because they are not much surprising?

But maybe these later environments relate more to only one element that is being amplified, namely the loneliness of things. We come to a stand still, dissolve in the surroundings and life seems to stop.

The enigmatic with certain spots at certain moments – that special both calm and at the same time more or less disturbing ambience – is of course not “mystical” at all and needs in no way to be mystified either. But neither do they catch our attention without reason, as if we happened to behold a kind of concretised and fascinating mirror image of certain of our mind’s tendencies in them, maybe what Freud considered was an inherent striving away from the tensions that life implies back to inorganic condition (4). The immediate, physical and straight poetry of such places is probably one of the strongest expressions for what could be termed a charged poetry of stillness in contrast with a dynamic poetry of movement in which other tendencies prevail, but which nonetheless would correspond to fundamental features of the mind.

Perhaps the urge to interpret or aesthetize such places is then a reaction against, a sublimation of that latent terror that they would be able to cause.

Mars, Viking Lander, 1976
Mars  (Viking Lander, 1976)

 

“Materialist”

It is thus question of a kind of materialist “metaphysics”. It is precisely the objective character of such places in this type of conditions that trigger the subjective experience, nothing else. Today it is moreover in due place to turn away from the irritating “cult of the ego”, from prioritising more or less arbitrary personal interpretations and/ or misplaced charging with aspects that do not exist there, or downright mystify or spiritualise it with what that can implicate philosophically (even if that latter kind of activity also has contributed in fruitful or witty ways). Rather than use or even reproduce places in order to create certain, often aesthetical effects – like De Chirico and many symbolists and later Paul Delvaux or Edward Hopper – it is appropriate to emphasise the step out to concrete experience (5).

Our eyes are for certain not neutral, and we will always be guilty of certain projections – there lies also a tension or contradiction. But why not ponder upon emptiness? To rouse, like surrealist Paul Nougé aimed at – isn’t it in the nature of poetry to confront the world and the conditions of life in a as direct and immediate way as possible?

 

Prints

But even reproductions – above all photographs – succeed sometimes in representing and even accentuating the totality, the stillness and the silence that characterise these places, or maybe mostly in “saving” those elements from time, in “immortalising” them and thereby preserving and even strengthening their metaphysical character (old photographs of certain urban environments with only a few people present for example).

 

Isn’t the “essence” of photography, these ghosts, light captured in chemicals in a way metaphysical, “concrete metaphysical”?

Photography is by no means as objective as one readily wants to think, but can though because of its “documentary” character be used in a different way than painting or language for that matter with its deceitfulness and arbitrariness. An old stereotype example for all this remains the countless, unwearied sunset photographs. For sure it deals with a more dramatic, too general, very conventional and particularly worn out type of “materialist metaphysics”, but is however an interesting case as it is, despite everything, precisely the combination of calmness and uneasiness and the particular actualisation of time that characterise these sunsets and make them synonyms with poetry in the eyes of the broad public.

Is popular opinion lying?

 

(1) Memoria della mia vita (1945).

(2) Cerámicas, atuneras y minas cúpricas; Miguel P. Corrales (Salamandra 8/9, Madrid 1997-98). Also Ruido de cadenas – El sentimiento gótico en la arqueología industrial; José Manuel Rojo (Salamandra 10, 1999).

(3) As if one could hear or feel the vegetation live and the “soul of nature” whisper. Certain Scandinavian so called national romantics around 1900 have in their best moments constituted a kind of rural equivalent to De Chirico, as if they intuitively understood and tried to find their way back to those roots that are ancient poetry’s when the earth still was very sparsely populated.

(4) “The dominating tendency of mental life, and perhaps of nervous life in general, is the effort to reduce, to keep constant or to remove internal tension due to stimuli (the “Nirvana principle” to borrow a term from Barbara Low) – a tendency which finds expression in the pleasure principle, and our recognition of that fact is one of our strongest reasons for believing in the existence of death instincts.” Beyond the Pleasure Principle; Sigmund Freud (1928).

(5) A certain melancholy, a certain nostalgia and maybe even a certain exoticism that belong to such places has made it possible to utilise them for aesthetic, cultural purposes. Likewise, the interest from pre-romantics and romantics for ruins and certain landscapes can probably be said to have contributed to the rise of tourism (even if it is mainly a question of more spectacular places). It is then the impressive aspect of certain places – purely physical or also the knowledge of the place’s special, for example historical role – that takes the upper hand and not unprejudically because of the place’s own, often modest character. But we are leaving the subject here. The somewhat too naivistic nocturnal milieus of Paul Delvaux which are encumbered with disturbing naked women and other irrelevant figures who totally ruin what could have been of a certain interest with these paintings.

 

Originally published in Salamandra 13/14, Madrid 2003-4.



 

wineglass for lovers

surrealist object:  "Wineglass for Lovers"

 

Poetic Spaces

Originally published in Salamandra 15/16, Madrid 2005.

 

Nothing stops with the individual.

The ego presents that strange property of being at one and the same time hermetic and porous.

– Paul Nougé

 

Which are the landscapes that have shaped us?

What do we expect from a place?

Certain places, the stubborn seriousness and the intimacy of things and of nature – which incidentally and frequently include strong doses of an often dull humor – become a silent antipole of sorts, maybe even an insult against the spectacular, against the mediocre superficiality of the medias and easy entertainment.

The loneliness and the radiance of things and the “metaphysics” of the physical world are a phenomenon that tends to become almost commonplace when one pays attention to it, as if a certain timeless dimension were an inherent part of it.

One of the most important critical and most positive tasks of the poetic spirit today is maybe to put this “immediacity” and its experience in opposition to the cultural and what could be called its out-distancing or artificiality. The life of the inorganic, the presence, mystery or ”full emptiness” of things , all possess a very healthy subversive function – an excellent point of departure.

Porous man, contrary to today’s alienated and hyperactive ideal, ponders, seeks to partake of, and lets himself be imbued with the mute surroundings rather than command and subjugate them.

 

* * *

 

One of the main characteristic features of poetry has been said to be condensation. And isn’t it also precisely this condensation that we sometimes perceive in certain places which we sometimes feel that we share common points of contact with, possibly connecting with more or less unconscious aspects of our mind?

Poetically and thus above all other more or less bewildering values, i.e. that makes us see with a changed perspective – or with eyes of stone, of wood or of water – something diametrically different from the merely impressive or fashionably flashy.

It is a kind of condensation that we recognize or have a presentiments of from within our dreams in which the surroundings or landscapes can be experienced as particularly loaded. The same often applies to places as we remember them or think we remember, and no less to places from childhood or which have been influenced by childhood’s mentality.

They may be more or less illusory or deformed, but once in a while we meet specific correspondences in the present, in reality, objectively so to speak.

It is about a given, “ready made” poetry that is , physical, sensual and for the most part, quiet, and which surpasses the conventional poem in its ability to affect us.

The more condensation the more poetic?

A sandy desert or the surface of the ocean – not to mention the sky – maybe are among the poetically most obvious places precisely because of their overwhelming simplicity.

* * *

It is said that, terrified when darkness fell, they went towards
sunset, believing that daylight would never return.

  • Statius; Thebaid IV, 282.

 

The myth from antiquity about the terrible loneliness of the first humans in the world actualizes the fact that beauty and a certain type of space and time related poetry like the one evoked precisely by sunsets can also be associated with horror and anguish, these motive forces in existence.

Thus we have the great experiences from the past to start with.

Certain places can be perceived as poetic for cultural reasons, because of references of poetic character, contaminating an otherwise scarcely remarkable place. Sometimes it can be a combination of different cultural aspects. Dodona in ancient Greece with its rustling oracular oaks or the ziggurats of Persia with their connection with the firmament, or the also ancient Greek and subsequently medieval “ sidereal geography” – important buildings, temples, cathedrals or roads arranged according to the patterns of the starry sky or the Milky Way as in the case of the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostella in northern Spain (1) – are but a few such examples. And today maybe these naked and prosaic lawns between the runways of airports – in their own way a reflection of our indigent times – , always similar in the whole world and in silent communication with each others.

There are also locations – often insignificant ones – that obtain poetic qualities owing to a certain atmosphere, a certain mysteriousness or a certain disquieting character. It can be desert places, tentatively labeled “metaphysical places” (2) or locations that are quite simply unusual , often in a subtle rather than manifest way.

Certain remote areas retain a poetic energy due to their geographic peculiarity – like Iceberg Alley west of Greenland and all the others that I don’t need to mention – despite the fact that their diffuse and therefore imaginative side has been altered by their profitable media value.

Others get their poetic character from the contrast or conflict that emerges there: ruins in nature or nature , when it has invaded an urban environment , as in many “worthless” places in cities (3).

Also , these environments have been poeticized by man by way of an added detail, a certain intervention or in a deliberate, thorough way. It is found, to start with, in the cave paintings of Altamira in Spain or Lascaux in France , among others, with a beauty that seems to be strengthened by their old age, or even better, the secret rock paintings in northern Australia. In contrast to the prehistoric cave paintings from Europe and the Americas that remain at least partly enigmatic, there is still a living relationship among certain aboriginal groups with the sacral and significantly less naturalistic rock paintings so harmonically spread throughout the landscape, often in the open.

Additional poetic places have a more or less latent poetic side revealed or enhanced through lyric meditation, subjective projection or intense focused interpretation (4).

Finally, and maybe above everything else, these places manifest their poetic quality through references that engender, stage or manifest correspondences with the rocks, in the vegetation, in the air or in the surrounding light ; : places as physical analogies, maybe materializations in the space and time of a representation, a concept or aspects of our mental life.

We investigate these kinds of places and maybe a few more like those places that temporarily become poetic, once in a while, for a brief moment under certain circumstances, at a certain time of day or of the year, maybe solely in a particular type of weather or if precipitously abandoned – as if escaping prevailing time and space or contrarily, as crystallizations in the midst of the ordinary or the indigent .

Such spots can sometimes be dimly seen or discerned in the dark, in the interspace between rational understanding and the old idea that what isn’t seen doesn’t exist or almost; a lack or an absence of the poetic kind.

What remains ultimately is the unpredictable thing in itself.

 

  • 1)  Guy René Doumayrou, La géographie sidérale ( Paris 1976).
  • 2)  Bruno Jacobs, The presence of emptiness, 2003.
  • 3)  Or atoposes. The surrealist group in Stockholm dedicated itself in the late 1990’s at the study of various types of such “worthless” places. See also Miguel P. Corrales’ text published here in English translation.
  • 4)  See for example Eugenio Castro En la montaña del Torcal – Sésamo multiplicado ( Madrid 1997) or the interpretation of an island in the Stockholm archipelago during a one day expedition by members of the surrealist group in 1999 (Lucifer, Stockholm 2000).

 

 

Addendum:

 

Between the sky, the sea, and earth – the memory of the memory of the waves

Salina Tres Amigos, San Fernando (Cádiz) in Andalucia, southern Spain, is an abadonned saltwork along the highway, one among several similar ones that together cover a significant area around the Bahía de Cádiz. The Atlantic ocean can be perceived on the horizon behind the long shallow basins, wide mirrors reflecting the low light clouds.  On the right is the stream with its banks of black mud at low tide and thousands of small shy crabs.  The peculiar magnetism and deep significance of the place remain to this day utterly mysterious to me.  And so the memory more than the imperceptible persists of this ancient salt that led me to the words of the French poet René Char, who on a certain night half a year earlier had inspired a little poetic, oneiric object:

The man who carries with him the evidence on his shoulders
Keeps the memory of the waves in the salt depots.

 

(29 Sept. 2003)

 

 

 

 

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