`Just Because, Once, It Was'

If we heed the Polish masters Czeslaw Milosz and Zbigniew Herbert, the Dutch masters of the 17th century set the standard against which subsequent art must be judged. Both found in the Golden Age work of Rembrandt, Vermeer, Hals, Fabritius and others – in their genre paintings, still lifes, landscapes and cityscapes – an embodiment of humanism and the sacred. Consider “Realism,” a 1995 poem by Milosz, translated from the Polish by Milosz and Robert Hass:

“We are not so badly off, if we can
Admire Dutch painting. For that means
We shrug off what we have been told
For a hundred, two hundred years. Though we lost
Much of our previous confidence. Now we agree
That those trees outside the window, which probably exist,
Only pretend to greenness and treeness
And that language loses when it tries to cope
With clusters of molecules. And yet, this here:
A jar, a tin plate, a half-peeled lemon,
Walnuts, a loaf of bread, last – and so strongly
It is hard not to believe in their lastingness.
And thus abstract art is brought to shame,
Even if we do not deserve any other.
Therefore I enter those landscapes
Under a cloudy sky from which a ray
Shoots out, and in the middle of dark plains
A spot of brightness glows. Or the shore
With huts, boats, and on yellowish ice
Tiny figures skating. All this
Is here eternally, just because, once, it was.
Splendor (certainly incomprehensible)
Touches a cracked wall, a refuse heap,
The floor of an inn, jerkins of the rustics,
A broom, and two fish bleeding on a board.
Rejoice! Give thanks! I raised my voice
To join them in their choral singing,
Amid their ruffles, collets, and silk skirts,
Already one of them, who vanished long ago.
And our song soared up like smoke from a censer.”

The world is real and in some way holy, and art embodies and preserves it. This is Milosz’s response to postmodern glibness. He, who endured Hitler and Stalin, revels in reality and laughs at the nihilists: Who are you, he asks, to dismiss reality, in all its potent thereness, with a knowing smirk! I have similar thoughts daily as I drive past the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. The front of the building resembles a playground designed by backward children. Every day I see Sui Jianguo´s “Jurassic Age.” The museum touts it as “one of the most celebrated icons of today´s Chinese Pop movement.” In fact, it’s a man-sized red dinosaur inside a red cage – tacky and pretentious. Herbert includes “The Price of Art” in Still Life with a Bridle, an essay collection devoted to the art and culture of the 16th-century Netherlands. Here’s his conclusion:

“It is we who are poor, very poor. A major part of contemporary arts declares itself on the side of chaos, gesticulates in a void, or tells the story of its own barren soul.

“The old masters – all of them without exception – could repeat after Racine, `We work to please the public.’ Which means they believed in the purposefulness of their work and the possibility of interhuman communication. They affirmed visible reality with an inspired scrupulousness and childish seriousness, as if the order of the world and the revolution of the stars, the permanence of the firmament, depended on it.

“Let such naïveté be praised.”

Such “inspired scrupulousness” is epitomized by The Goldfinch, painted by Carel Fabritius in 1654, the year he died in Delft when a powder magazine exploded. I first saw this painting around 1974, when it served as the cover art of Selected Poems, by Osip Mandelstam, as translated by Clarence Brown and W.S. Merwin – a rare case when you were safe in judging the contents of a book by its cover. In Carel Fabritius: 1622-1654, a catalog and brief biography, author Frederick J. Duparc identifies the species – Carduelis carduelis – and renders a history of the painting and the bird:

“The bird on a chain in front of its feeding-box, seen against a whitewashed wall, is a goldfinch…. recognizable by the red in its face and the bright yellow stripe on its black wing. [So far, it reads like an entry in a field guide.] The goldfinch was a popular pet already in Roman times: Pliny described its ability to learn difficult tricks. The bird’s name in Dutch -- `puttertje,’ which is derived from `putten,’ meaning to draw water from a well – was used as early as the sixteenth century. It refers to the bird’s dexterity in being able to draw its own drinking water (if taught to do so) by hauling up a thimble-sized bucket on a chain from a bowl or glass of water. Goldfinches can also open their own feeding boxes.”

When I see a reproduction of the painting – the original hangs in the Mauritshuis, in The Hague – I think of a sloping field I know in upstate New York, dense with thistles. The favorite food of the goldfinch is thistle seed, and late in the summer the birds light on the stalks, which bob and sway under their paltry weight. Duparc reports the painting was restored in 2003, which further confirmed Fabritius’ devotion to detail – the red spots on the bird’s face, the yellow streak on the wings. In the spring, goldfinches are drab as house sparrows, and their brilliant buttery yellow only gradually reveals itself. In his journal, Sept.4, 1859, Thoreau wrote:

“Three kinds of thistles are commonly out now, -- the pasture, lanceolate, and swamp, -- and on them all you are pretty sure to see one or two humblebees. They become more prominent and interesting in the scarcity of purple flowers. (On many you see also the splendid goldfinch, yellow and black like the humblebee.) The thistles beloved of humblebees and goldfinches.”

Thoreau’s artistry at this point, like Fabrisius’, converges with the eye of a scientist. Art and science become indistinguishable. In 1998, at the age of 87, Milosz wrote a beautiful prose poem, “Watering Can,” that returns to the Dutch masters and reads like a still life in words:

“Of a green color, standing in a shed alongside rakes and spades, it comes alive when it is filled with water from the pond, and an abundant shower pours from its nozzle, in an act, we feel it, of charity towards plants. It is not certain, however, that the watering can would have such a place in our memory, were it not for our training in noticing things. For, after all, we have been trained. Our painters do not often imitate the Dutch, who liked to paint still lifes, and yet photography contributes to our paying attention to detail and the cinema taught us that objects, once they appear on the screen, would participate in the actions of the characters and therefore should be noticed. There are also museums where canvases glorify not only human figures and landscapes but also a multitude of objects. The watering can has thus a good chance of occupying a sizable place in our imagination, and, who knows, perhaps precisely in this, in our clinging to distinctly delineated shapes, does our hope reside, of salvation from the turbulent waters of nothingness and chaos.”

Milosz’s reverence for objects and their “sizable place in our imagination” resembles Herbert’s (in “Pebble,” for instance) Rilke’s and Ponge’s. All stir us emotionally with devotion to detail and fidelity to the mute otherness of objects. Now to Herbert again, from another essay, “The Nonheroic Subject”:

“Freedom – so many treatises were written about it that it became a pale, abstract concept. But for the Dutch it was something as simple as breathing, looking, and touching objects. It did not need to be defined or beautified. This is why there is no division in their art between what is great and what is small, what is important and unimportant, elevated and ordinary. They painted apples and the portraits of fabric shopkeepers, pewter plates and tulips, with such patience and such love that the images of other worlds and noisy tales about earthly triumphs fade in comparison.”