The Form of Feeling

Page II

Comme de longs échos qui de loin se confondent
Dans une ténébreuse et profonde unité,
Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarté,
Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent.

—Baudelaire, “Correspondances”

Baudelaire knew of it, perhaps inaugurated it, and was closer to the heart of the matter. Perfumes, colors, sounds—the roster of forms universally shared need not be visual, just as the associations and that which is associated need not be visual. These are configurations of the imagination, and they may be anything the conscious mind can perceive. For the sculptor, as Read remarked, “they are always of shape,” but shape is not inherently a visual matter, for it is not inherently a matter of solidity, of stabilized, observable structure. It is simply pattern, pattern of any kind, pattern perceived in any way, pattern even of intangibles, pattern that may be felt rather than conceived—an emerging regularization of otherwise indeterminables, a formulation in the imagination.

The correspondence is the form, or a discernable “edge” of it, like what one of the blind men may grasp of the elephant. For Hague, the legibility of his shapes—the universality of them, which is the only possible principle of legibility in abstraction—is not that of observable structure, not that of simultaneously and completely exposed form conceivable to the mind’s eye and coming out of a catalogue of inherited spécial architectonics. Hague found a language that is evident and legible to the senses of the sensitive witness, a lexicon ready for recognition, but it was not a fund of given “shapes”—it was a wellspring of gestures.

There is, it may be loosely called, an archetype of the gesture as much as of the established form: a configuration of motion, grasped as much as a proprioceptive sensation—an awareness of muscular action—as a track cut in the air. There is a language of such actions. It is the stuff of ballet, the articulation of movements that seem to be of an elegant profundity although they are indecipherable as purposive movements, as gestures intended to commit some intent. It is the stuff of magicians, as we know them from storybook tales and legend, sorcerers who worry the air and conjure as much by the slow and sliding intricacies of their hands as by the hypnotic intonations they voice.

These are motions that possess an hypnotic aura, that of themselves seem to conjure a spell, that throw the trance. There is a space that can be opened by the exacting, slow, lyrical, sinuous motions of the limbs and the body, a mesmerizing area of the imagination, a suffusion of the mind in which the thoughts become merely configurations of that dense medium which is the atmosphere of the thinking. The quality of that atmosphere, the near aroma of it, is not a quality of transport but rather an aspect of character after one has been transported—an altered fiber of mind, altered by an extremity of mood, like a chemical change of the spirit, an alchemical alteration: a potency of disposition. That space is a volume of which art is a natural denizen, in which art is the automatic outcome.

Hague’s sculptures are the forms of essential gestures, standing as if Platonic moments of movement committed in wood, as if eternally in motion and infinitely encased in the trunk of a tree. They enact gesture as a language unto itself: sweeping and tortuous lines of shifting effort that draw the eye along their traces even as they stand still and fully visible to the fixed gaze. They are ballets frozen, dances that do not move, dances with no dancers. And as pure gesture, they are pure art—there is no message, no “concept,” no meaning. And they are impervious, indelible forms that ultimately are not forms at all but the active creation that could result in a form, and they are impenetrable to the interpreting mind. There is nothing one can say of the intention that is behind them, except that it and they are sui generis—they are unique elements and are not of a type with anything other than each other. And they cast an aura like a conjuring.

Although Hague denied that he observed the grain of the wood as he worked it—“I do not see the graining at all, throughout my working with the wood”—there is no mistaking that the waving actions into which the artist has carved his works follow and often enhance the intrinsic formations of the growth of the tree. The flow of the lilting movements of the sculpted forms is of a piece with the lilt of the growth of the wood.

It is a rule of sculpting in marble that the form must be sensitive to the material and must not look forced upon the stone—the form must seem to have grown out of the rock, must match and follow its natural action and principle of breakage. Despite his protestation, Hague followed the same law. In each instance here, the wood could well have grown just this way, could have developed from the soil in exactly this manner. And yet, the wood could not have grown this way. These works are nothing natural, they are implicitly artificial, they are as blatantly made sculpture as they are palpably responsive to the natural events of the wood. They embody a human response to the movements of nature. They are the intersection of the human and the natural, the overlapping of the touch of intention and that which has been untouched by intention—the automatic and the imposed. They are neither pure artifact nor pure natural object, neither of humankind nor of nature’s kind. They are some third thing, something pure and unlike anything else, something without a reference—works of art with no decipherable meaning in any other activity of thought.

They are pure unto themselves, as is the character of Hague they are marked by and effuse. They are purely the actions they configure, and that fact raises a significant question. If they mean nothing in any conventional sense, if they are only the forms that appear out of the actions they commit, why then are they not simply pure design? Why are they not just enormous bric-a-brac, or pieces of furniture to no realistic purpose? Are they art at all, art in any sense that warrants serious respect?

But, why is ballet not merely a cavort? How is it that a manner of movement the body can adopt, one that has no reference outside the contingencies of its own art form, no ties to anything other than its own inner laws, can be something more than a prancing about? Yet, it clearly is far more, and by that alignment, one can know there is an answer to the question of Hague.

The answer begins with the air of portentousness that accompanies these works, and that acquires one’s senses the moment one enters the gallery. There is a livid presence to them, a density of impression and a looming quality in more than their literal, physical stature. They impart a sense of a deep significance—of significance devoid of meaning.

As pure gesture—motions captured in wood that signify no thought, no motivation, no purpose—they are thoughts of a different order. These works, like ballet itself, are the thought that gesture is, the language of the unintended reflex, the thinking of a mind that moves us when we are not aware of our movements, when we are not cutting them to plan. They are of the mind that breathes us, that orchestrates our stances, that designs and tailors in intricate details our expressions and postures. They are the thoughts we do not know we have, or rather, that have us. For, what is the meaning of a gesture? It is the natural expression of the mathematical computations, the ticking calculations, of our involuntary responses—the lyricism of our other selves.

And, what is emotion other than gesture, other than a caliber of movement? Consider how we talk about feelings—there is the language of gesture everywhere in it. We speak of a sobbing sorrow, of a wringing anguish. We refer to a giddy happiness, and a fuming anger, and a swelling pride, swelling like a chest. And bitterness is a taste in the mouth. We feel no feeling without feeling it through the body, and the body feels no feeling without its commission as an action, and that action is as much of our inner selves as the subjective sensation we prefer to “think” a feeling purely is. But that is merely what we think. We speak of it differently from the way we think it. The gesture is the emotion, and the sculpture of Raoul Hague is the essential expression of emotions, emotions too complex for the simplicity of names, wrought in their natural forms of actions. His works speak not the language of concepts but the articulations, in dactylic measures, of the dense suffusions of moods.

In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the haughtiest and most mendacious minute of “world history”—yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die.—

One might invent such a fable and still not have illustrated sufficiently how wretched, how shadowy and flighty, how aimless and arbitrary, the human intellect appears in nature. There have been eternities when it did not exist; and when it is done for again, nothing will have happened. For this intellect has no further mission that would lead beyond human life. It is human, rather, and only its owner and producer gives it such importance, as if the world pivoted around it. But if we could communicate with the mosquito, then we would learn that it floats through the air with the same self-importance, feeling within itself the flying center of the world. There is nothing in nature so despicable or insignificant that it cannot immediately be blown up like a bag by a slight breath of this power of knowledge; and just as every porter wants an admirer, the proudest human being, the philosopher, thinks that he sees the eyes of the universe telescopically focused from all sides on his actions and thoughts.

—Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense”

Philosophers like to talk of thought as deliberate, as meaningful, as “meant,” for that is the warrant of their authority, the stipulation for the significance of what they do—it is their unexamined assumption, their Achilles heel. Or it is for most. Some got it right.

For there is the growing possibility, the increasing likelihood, that thought is not the carrier of content, or representations of that which is not thought adhesived by something or other that is pure and non-representative thought, but rather merely actions of mental life, movements of something intangible, or what appears intangible to us as we think of it—pure gesture, simple activity like insect feelers lacing and unlacing, simple reflex action of the organism. There is the mounting chance that thought is not a receptacle, not a housing for meaning, but a meaningless “rumination” of muscular reactions proceeding by organic impulse—simply happening. That thought is just steam over the kettle—mere byproduct.

| page up |

Continue| Reading | Page III