The human body can move external bodies in many ways, and dispose them in many ways.
The human mind is apt for perceiving many things, and more so according as its body can be disposed in more ways.
(Ethics, Part II, Postulates I–VI, Proposition XIV)
That which is common to and a property of the human body, and certain external bodies by which the human body is used to be affected, and which is equally in the part and whole of these, has an adequate idea in the mind.
Hence it follows that the mind is the more apt for perceiving many things adequately, the more its body has things in common with other bodies.
(Ethics, Part II, Proposition XXXIX, Corollary)
Before you began grinding lenses, you and your brother Gabriel helped your father in his business in Amsterdam, selling olive oil and dried fruit imported from Portugal, from where your father had emigrated. After his death you both took over the business but within two years it went bankrupt, and you moved to Vlooienburg, another district in the city where you learnt the craft of lens-grinding and polishing.
…money has provided a short way to all these things, whence it has come about that the image of money occupies the principal place in the mind of the vulgar, for they can scarcely imagine any pleasure unless it be accompanied with the idea of money as the cause.
But this vice is only theirs who seek to acquire money, not from any need nor by reason of necessity, but because they have learned the arts of gain wherewith to raise themselves to a splendid state. They feed their bodies of course according to custom, but sparingly, for they think they lose as much of their goods as they spend on the conservation of their body…
(Ethics, Part IX, Propositions XXVIII & XXIX)
Study the faces of the new tyrants. I hesitate to call them plutocrats for the term is too historical and these men belong to a phenomenon which is unprecedented. Let’s settle for profiteers. Their profiteer faces have many features in common. This conformity is partly circumstantial – they possess similar talents and they live according to similar routines – and partly it is chosen as a style.
My diagram is based on men from the North. Obviously a portrait of a profiteer from the South would be different, yet I suspect the same tendencies would be apparent.
Their ages vary but the style is that of men in their late forties. They are impeccably dressed and their tailoring is reassuring, like the silhouette of high-security delivery vans. Armor Mobile Security.
Studying their features you have the impression that they have no pronounced, let alone excessive, physical appetites – apart from an insatiable appetite for control. Far from looking monstrous, their faces, although somewhat strained, seem almost bland.
They have foreheads with many horizontal creases. Not furrows ploughed by thought but rather lines of incessant passing information.
Small, swift eyes which examine everything and contemplate nothing. Ears extensive as a database, but incapable of listening.
Lips which seldom tremble, and mouths which take decisions implacably.
They gesture a lot with their hands, and with their hands they demonstrate formulae and do not touch experience.
Their heads of hair, meticulously arranged as if for an aeronautic velocity test.
The assured confidence visible in their faces matches their ignorance, which is also visible.
You described how there are three forms of knowledge. A haphazard form based on hearsay and impressions and never related to any whole. A knowledge, using adequate ideas, concerning the properties of things. And thirdly, a knowledge concerning the essence of things which add up to God.
The profiteers know nothing, but nothing, about either the properties or the essence of things. They are familiar only with their own impressions of their own rackets. Hence their paranoia and, generated by the paranoia, their repetitive energy. Their repeated article of faith is: There is no alternative.
When I’m drawing – and here drawing is very different from writing or reasoning – I have the impression at certain moments of participating in something like a visceral function, such as digestion or sweating, a function that is independent of the conscious will. This impression is exaggerated, but the practice or pursuit of drawing touches, or is touched by, something prototypical and anterior to logical reasoning.
Thanks to the recent work of neurobiologists like Antonio Damasio, it’s now known that the messages which pass from cell to cell in a living body do so in the form of charts and maps. They are spatial arrangements. They have a geometry.
It is through these ‘maps’ that the body communicates with the brain and the brain with the body. And these messages constitute the basis of the mind, which is the creature of both body and brain, as you believed and foresaw. In the act of drawing there’s perhaps an obscure memory of such map-reading.
As Damasio put it: ‘The entire fabric of a conscious mind is created from the same cloth – images generated by the brain’s map-making abilities.’
Drawing is anyway an exercise in orientation and as such may be compared with other processes of orientation which take place in nature.
When I’m drawing I feel a little closer to the way birds navigate when flying, or to hares finding shelter if pursued, or to fish knowing where to spawn, or trees finding a way to the light, or bees constructing their cells.
I’m aware of a distant, silent company. Almost as distant as the stars. Company nevertheless. Not because we are in the same universe, but because we are involved – each according to his own mode – in a comparable manner of searching.
Drawing is a form of probing. And the first generic impulse to draw derives from the human need to search, to plot points, to place things and to place oneself.
To quote Damasio again: ‘…conscious minds arise from establishing a relationship between the organism and an object-to-be-known.’
The generic impulse being what it may be, what is it that suddenly prompts us to start a drawing of a particular object? We carry a sketchbook wherever we go. For weeks we don’t open it; all the while we are observing things without feeling the compulsion to draw them. And then suddenly it happens. We have to draw this.
It seems to me that, when it occurs, the impulse to draw is generated by a similar movement of the imagination, whatever the circumstances or the object to be drawn.
Of course, every drawing has its own raison d’être and hopes to be unique. For every drawing we start, we have a distinct and different hope. And every drawing fails in its own unforeseeable and particular way. Nevertheless every drawing begins with a similar movement of the imagination.
All aircraft, whatever their power or load or destination, take off from a runway following the same aeronautical routine; otherwise they don’t get airborne. And in the same way, all spontaneous (as distinct from ordered) drawings ‘take off’ and are upheld by a similar imaginative movement.
And it is this movement – which is complex and paradoxical, as are many things which touch our hearts – it’s this movement that I want to try to define or describe.
Maybe a drawing I made of the Russian writer Andrei Platonov can help. Platonov was born in 1899 and died in Moscow in 1951. His father was an engine-driver. He himself began working on the railways when he was fifteen. Then he was trained as an engineer specialising in land reclamation, and soon began writing as a journalist about life and events in the remote, immense and often devastated Russian countryside. He witnessed the Civil War, and later the enforced collectivisation of the land and the monstrous famines that followed it. In the Second World War he was a war correspondent at the front. Apart from writing for the press, he also wrote for himself. Stories provoked by what he had witnessed. Stories that implored to be written. Some were published during his lifetime. Most had to wait half a century to be published in Russian after his death, and then to be translated.
I began reading him ten years ago and have come to admire him more and more. He was, in many ways, a p
recursor of the storytellers of whom the world today has need.
Reading Platonov, I try on occasions to picture him. He never talks about himself directly, but his voice, as he guides us through modern history from one extremity to another, is instantly recognisable, a voice which is passionate and calm, furious and patient.
‘ “You won’t forget me now?” Lyuba asked as she said good-bye.
‘ “No,” said Nikita, “I’ve no one else to remember.” ’
I have at hand a number of photos of Platonov. It’s easy to picture him. As a child. As a railwayman. As a journalist. As a father. But the photos place him inexorably in the past, whereas his words as I read them or reflect upon them are present and immediate. I want to see him now, beside his book of stories, open on the table in front of me.
In search of this immediacy, I suddenly started to make a drawing of him from one of the photographs. It was taken on his wedding day in 1922.
As I drew I had the impression of making a self-portrait. Not of myself but of him. (We are not alike either physically or psychologically.) It was his voice and the photo which had to lead me to this self-portrait. He’s wearing a disused, stripped soldier’s tunic. Clothes were in short supply. The word self needed to stop being a noun and needed to acquire the drive of the preposition towards.
Towards this man who, in face of the famine and drought which accompanied the end of the Civil War, had decided the previous year to stop writing. He argued that because he was a technically qualified land engineer, he was unable in the present situation ‘to engage in contemplative work such as literature’!
Towards such defiance of hope without illusions.
When I stopped working the drawing, it looked too undisturbed and too self-centred. Somebody with that kind of defiance would be unlikely to feel at home in a self-portrait. My error had been to overlook this. Platonov, it’s true, was more immediately present in the sketchbook than in the photograph. But he had an urgent appointment to keep elsewhere.
What to do?
Next day, I was rummaging in my shoulder bag to find my mobile telephone because I wanted to send a text message, and I came upon a railway ticket for a journey in a TGV which I had made a week earlier. From Geneva to Paris. This train’s speed, when running at its fastest, is around 300 kilometres per hour. The maximum speed of the trains which cross and re-cross and cross again Platonov’s stories was less than 100 kilometres per hour.
On the back of the ticket I had written notes for a speech I was to give at a political meeting. There was a reference to Simone Weil, who died nine years before Platonov, and a quotation from César Vallejo, who died thirteen years before. All three struggled for the same cause. My notes were practically illegible because the ticket had got wet and the ink had run when I was walking in the rain the next day.
When I later picked up the sketchbook with the portrait of Platonov I remembered the ticket. And for the hell of it I placed it at the bottom on the drawing. It seemed to offer the disturbance that was being asked for.
The disturbance of distances. A disturbance that can only be accommodated if one takes an ‘aerial’ view in which kilometres become millimetres, yet in which the size of our human hearts is not reduced.
Platonov was a master of such distances. In 1946 he published a story about a soldier from the Red Army returning home after years of absence. In this story Distance and Intimacy sit very close together.
‘Ivanov went up to his wife, put his arms round her and stood there with her, not moving away, feeling the forgotten and familiar warmth of someone he loved …’
‘While he sat there the whole family bustled about in the living room and in the kitchen, preparing a celebration meal. Ivanov examined, one after another, all the objects around the house – the clock, the crockery cupboard, the wall thermometer, the chairs, the flowers on the window sills, the Russian kitchen stove. They had lived here a long time without him, and they had missed him. Now he had come back and he was looking at them, getting to know each one of them again, as if they were relatives whose lives had been poor and lonely without him. He breathed in the familiar, unchanging smell of the house – smouldering wood, warmth from his children’s bodies, a burning smell from the grate. This smell had been just the same four years ago, it had not dispersed or changed in his absence. Nowhere else had Ivanov ever smelt this smell, although in the course of the war he had been in several countries and hundreds of homes; the smells there had been different, always lacking the special quality of his own home. Ivanov also recalled the smell of Masha, the scent of her hair, but that had been a smell of leaves in a forest, of some overgrown path he did not know, a smell not of home but once again of unsettled life.’
I glued the railway ticket to the drawn portrait. Andrei Platonov thus seemed to be present.
The imaginative movement which prompts the impulse to draw – whatever the subject may be – repeats implicitly the same pattern that the story of Platonov’s portrait illustrates explicitly.
There is a symbiotic desire to get closer and closer, to enter the self of what is being drawn, and, simultaneously, there is the foreknowledge of immanent distance. Such drawings aspire to be both a secret rendezvous and an au revoir! Alternately and ad infinitum.
Whatever the mind understands under a species of eternity, it does not understand owing to the fact that it conceives the actual present existence of the body, but owing to the fact that it conceives the essence of the body under a species of eternity.
(Ethics, Part V, Proposition 29)
Now I can make it simpler. There are photos of the American folk singer Woody Guthrie in which his look, the expression of his eyes, resembles Platonov’s. They had other things in common. Both lent their voices to those without a voice, and both confronted dire rural poverty. Guthrie’s principal subject matter was what the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl droughts of the 1930s did to small farmers in Texas, Oklahoma or the Dakotas. How they lost their mortgaged homes, had to take to the road with their bundles, jump on freight trains or trek, and somehow make it to California where they believed there was work.
Guthrie was a charismatic performer and guitar player and a natural improviser. He sang old songs, and he sang many new songs written by himself to old tunes. One of these is entitled ‘So Long, It’s Been Good to Know You’. He puts these words into the mouths of the thousands who had to take to the road from the city of Pampa on the west Texan plain during the Depression.
On the radio I heard recently a recording of him singing this song, whose refrain he had changed to: ‘Hold on, hold on, it’s been good to know you’. Or so I thought. Perhaps I misheard. No matter. Like this, it’s a refrain which addresses the subject of any drawing which has insisted upon being put on paper.
‘Hold on, hold on, it’s been good to know you’.
Melina, my granddaughter, asked if she could draw in the sketchbook. I hand it to her, and she sits at the table, bent forward in concentration. I leave her there. Later she shows me the finished drawing.
You see?
Tell me, I say.
Can’t you see? Two eyes.
I thought they were necklaces.
Why then should there be two? Two eyes. First, I drew one, and then I had to do the second.
A BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Baruch or Benedict Spinoza was born in Amsterdam on November 24, 1632. His parents, Jewish immigrants from Portugal, were well-off merchants. Rembrandt lived a few streets away from their home. At the Jewish High School Benedict studied the Talmud and Torah and the Old Testament. He was a precocious and brilliant scholar, but for all his brilliance he failed to show respect to some of the rabbis and set a bad example. The authorities tried to silence and accommodate him by offering him a stipend. He turned it down, as he turned down all offers of patronage throughout his life. There was, one day outside the synagogue, an attempt to make cold meat of him, but it failed. Finally, when he was twenty-four, he was definitively banished and excommun
icated from the Jewish community. The words of the cherem pronounced against him by the synagogue declared that: ‘The Lord shall destroy his name under the sun and cut him off for his undoing from all the tribes of Israel, with all the curses of the firmament which are written in the book of the law.’
During the next twenty years, until his early death at the age of forty-four, he read and thought, he explained and contested Descartes, he made notes, he reflected, he wrote with the most sustained energy, yet, as it were, anonymously. He wrote about freedom as few others have done. He corresponded with scientists, he met and discussed with friends. But he wrote his books in Latin, which was not an easy language for him. And he refused to publish them in his lifetime. He addressed posterity. He lived – in whichever town it was – in two or three modest rooms. The only family inheritance he demanded was his parents’ four-poster bed. He was fascinated by optics. He drew. He apparently drew a self-portrait in which he is disguised as the Neapolitan fisherman revolutionary Masaniello, who had become a legend when Spinoza was fifteen. He smoked a pipe. He polished lenses to make a living. And he lived surrounded by friends who were sustained by his calm, his frugality, his cheerful humour, his pertinence and his manner of being adequate.
‘I do not presume’, he wrote in a letter, ‘to have discovered the best philosophy, but I know that I understand the true one.’
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work would never have existed without the help, encouragement and support of a number of people whom we’d like to name.
First, Beverly, to whom our sketchbook is dedicated.
Also: Alex, Anne, Arundhati, Bernard, Bob, Claude, Colin, Colum, Ellen, Emmanuel, Fatiah, Gareth, Hans, Isabelle, Jean-Michel, John, Joschi, Katya, Sister Lucia, Maria, Melina, Michael, Michel, Nella, Nuria, Pierre, Pilar, Ramon, Rema, Robert, Rostia, Sandra, Sarah, Simon, Tilda, Tom and Yves.