LXXXIX
Silence and resonation
“Writing,” says the Mustard Seed Garden, of painting, “must be linked to intentionality,” so that “if no intentionality is being expressed,” “the brush cannot be put to paper.” If intentionality is conveyed, on the other hand, it necessarily follows that …the subjects painted “seem to be looking at one another, even if they have no eyes” and “seem to be listening to each other, even though they have no ears.” [Jullien, …Nude, pp. 103-104]
And in the nude, are not the body “parts” engaged in the process of attending to one another?
Attention Talmudic scholars: getting a witness is not the same thing as witnessing a get.
I’m ready for my clothes brush, Mr. Demille
The dao is the breath, the breath is the dao. To which nothing need be added, nor can anything be taken away.
According to Schelling and the “first German aestheticians,” (via Jullien in The Impossible Nude), the human body reproduces the interrelation between hidden and manifest, the buried and uncovered inherent in the universe: indeed, in both the body and the universe all that can be recognized from the outside is the perfect harmony, the balance of the figure and the rhythm of the movements… [p. 86]
Do not the most “aesthetic” and visually compelling nudes to emerge singly, in pairs, companies and platoons from the Greek Revolution combine anatomical flexion and extension, open and closed joints, expansion and contraction, winding, unwinding, gathering and releasing, wrapping and unwinding, rising and falling – myriad aspects of dynamic opposition – in short, a kind of shi.
Pheidias’s Zeus or Poseidon has not, after all, yet hurled his thunderbolt or trident. The event, the phenomenon, is still pregnant within the processive. The gesture has not fully actualized. We have not yet arrived at drama – it must be projected.
In the implicit connection of heaven and earth via the human form, could it not be argued that the nude, or at any rate certain nudes, manifest the qualitative inseparability of yin and yang, and visually cohere upstream of subject/object and the great Western split as a whole? Is not, perhaps, the nude, particularly the nude sketched or drawn rather than chromatically saturated and heavily framed, a still-vital holdover from a pantheatic, even cthonic moment before the drive toward absolute differientiation forced the binary into schismatic birth? Put more directly, what besides “myth” prevents us from reading Venus submerging into the One as the reciprocal motion of her being born from within the aphros?
There is another consideration too: at the level of anatomy, there is no distinction in the nude between god and mortal, between the divine and material planes. What, then, apart from the idea of the ideal makes of the nude an eidolon and removes it from the great play of “in-tension”?
Are not “essences” projected onto the nude rather than inherent in it? Is the objectification of the nude inherent in its coalescence into form, or is the cultural act of idealizing the nude comprable to a kind of cultural triage, in which a black tag is slipped, falsely, onto the toe of a viable body, enabling the clinician to avoid confronting the fact of its still-pulsing vital signs and all-too-warm spirit-filled flesh?
I’d like the nine-foot-tall walking Triassic crocodile open-faced sandwich with beet hollandaise sauce, please. And a side of duck bacon, crisp.
Carolina Butcher on a raft! Burn a Donald. Anything to drink?
Uh, yeah, an iced almond milk latte.
Brown llewellyn, nuts-o!
Hidden zombie, crouching geek
Still breathing, already immortal
I had heard so much of the cannon fever, that I wanted to know what kind of thing it was. Ennui, and a spirit which every kind of danger excites to daring, nay even to rashness, induced me to rid up quite cooly to the outwork of La Lune. This was again occupied by our people; but it presented the wildes aspect. The roofs were shot to pieces, the corn-shocks scattered about, the bodies of men mortally woulded stretched upon them here and there, and occasionally a spent cannon-ball fell and rattled among the ruins of the tile roofs.
Quite alone, and left to myself, I rode away on the heights to the left, and could plainly survey the favorable position of the French; they were standing in the form of a semicircle, in the greatest quiet and security, Kellermann, then on the left wing, being the easiest to reach…
I had now arrived quite in the region where the balls were playing across me: the sound of them is curious enough, as if it were composed of the humming of tops, the gurgling of water, and the whistling of birds. They were less dangerous by reason of the wetness of the ground; wherever one fell, it stuck fast. And thus my foolish experimental ride was secured against the danger at least of the balls rebounding.
…I was soon able to remark that something unusual was taking place within me. I paid close attention to it, and still the sensation can be described only by similitude. It appeared as if you were in some extremely hot place, and, at the same time, quite penetrated by the heat of it, so that you feel yourself, as it were, quite one with the element in which you are. The eyes lose nothing of their strength or clearness; but it is as if the world had a kind of brown-red tint, which makes the situation, as well as the surrounding objects, more impressive. I was unable to perceive any agitation of the blood; but everything seemed rather to be swallowed up in the glow of which I speak. From this, then, it is clear in what sense this condition can be called a fever. It is remarkable, however, that the horrible uneasy feeling arising from it is produced in us solely through the ears. For the cannon thunder, the howling and crashing of the balls through the air, is the real cause of these sensations.
After I had ridden back and was in perfect security, I remarked, with surprise, that the glow was completely extinguished, and not the slightest feverish agitation was left behind. [Wrote Goethe of his excursion toward the French position at the Battle of Valmy.]
Brunswick formed his infantry in three columns and launched them forward. One French observer commented that “this maneuver was executed with extraordinary precision.” Perhaps Brunswick simply wanted to see if the French line would stand firm against a Prussian onslaught. The French battalions stirred – but not to run. Kellerman had deployed his own battalions in column to charge the Prussians if they dared approach. Riding before his troops, Kellermann now raised his hat on the tip of his sword, crying to his troops, “Vive la nation!” The army thundered back “Vive la nation! Vive la France! Vive notre général!”
In that moment, Brunswick lost the battle, for his precision infantry had inspired not frear but defiance among the citizen soldiers. Brunswick halted the attack after it had proceeded only 200 paces. The cannonade continued.
[Later that afternoon,] seeing how well the French bore up and noticing that their cavalry still stood to their horses, Brunswick said with resignation, “Gentlemen, you see by what kind of troops we are faced.”…About 4:00 p.m. he summoned a council of war and declared, “We do not fight here.” [John A. Lynn, “Valmy.” The Quarterly Journal of Military History. Vol. 5, No. 1. Autumn, 1992]
During the six-hour artillery duel (in which approximately equal armies of 35,000 on each side faced one another), the French and “Allied” forces suffered combined losses of 450 dead and wounded.
Brunswick, aka Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand, Fürst und Herzog von Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, was considered the foremost military strategist of his generation. His combined force of Prussians, Austrians, Hessians and French émigré troops totalling 84,000 men had invaded France on the same day in August 1792 that the Parisians stormed the Tuilleries palace and arrested King Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette.
After fruitless negotiations, post-Valmy, to guarantee the position and safety of the French monarch, Brunswick’s army, greatly demoralized and increasingly depleted by dysentery and dessertion, trickeld back across the border they had recently crossed with the objective of a quick cabinet campaign aimed at taking Paris and quashing the Revolution. Of the invading 42,000 Prussians, only 17,000 returned.
Of the evening immediately after the battle, Goethe, who had been traveling in Brunswick’s entourage, sensed around him a feeling among the Prussian soldiers quite the opposite of “cannon fever.” In an attempt to lift their despair, he is reported to have said: “From this place and from this day forth commences a new era in the world’s history, and you can all say you were present at its birth.”
According to news reports, a 37-year-old woman, Tina Nguyn, was killed on the afternoon of Tuesday, March 17, while walking on West 12th Street near 7th Avenue. Published accounts differ somewhat, but the essential facts appear to be that she was struck by a 4’ x 8’ x ¾” sheet of plywood torn off the fence of the construction site on the opposite side of the street by a freak gust of wind. Knocked against the wall of an apartment building, Ms. Nguyn, in falling, hit her head on a protruding metal standpipe and it was this that caused her fatal injury.
The construction site from which the plywood panel emanated will be, in the fullness of time, a gynormous, 200 unit condo development, The Greenwich Lane, where starter apartments begin at $3.65 million and max out at $26.5 million. The Greenwich Lane, which borders Greenwich Avenue, takes up the entire footprint of the defunct St. Vincent’s Hospital complex. The architects tore most of the hospital down, but retained some of the more picturesque brickwork façades. Propped up with huge diagonal braces from within the pit, the gap-windowed façades gave the site an odd Potemkin village-like quality until they were anchored to the steel and concrete structure of the new buildings.
Spokesbots for the developers, the Rudin family, issued the statement: “What happened is tragic and devastating. We extend our deepest condolences to the family.” While the contractor, Turner Construction said: “We are deeply saddened by the death of a pedestrian who was walking near the construction site on West 12th Street. Our thoughts and prayers are with her family during this very difficult time.”
Several news outlets reported that a “stop work” order had been issued and that “workers were reinforcing the fencing,” but by late morning on Thursday, construction was demonstrably proceeding hammer and tongs.
West 12th Street, near the James Beard House, and the City and Country School, is, indeed, not to be mistaken for Valmy. No iconic mill serves as the symbolic spinning hinge of great historical forces, much less the “cannon fever” occasioned by the roar of gunpower and hurling projectiles culminating in perfect storm of revolutionary sunburst. Merely deeply banal forensics.
To the right, between the Quik Park exit and entrance ports one can see the standpipe. Across the street, to the left, the reattached plywood hoarding. Small in the frame, but visible, and affixed with clear tape to a parking regulations sign just in front of the green awning poles, an improvised floral memorial to Ms. Nguyn – born Tram Thuy, but “known to her friends” and colleagues at Keller Williams NYC realty where she worked, as Tina.
It may be said, along the lines of Clausewitz’s dictum: war is a mere continuation of politics by other means, that the artillery exchange at Valmy constituted a social debate carried out by cannon. The guns on each side were of approximately the same number and range, but the French cannon represented the spirit of Goethe’s “new era,” as much as any republican ideology. In the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War, twenty years earlier, French military reformers led by Jean-Baptiste Vaquette de Gribeauval, commander of artillery, had argued for the re-engineering of the army’s cannon along the lines of lighter, more mobile guns bored to closer tolerances. Eventually, de Gribeauval prevailed over the old guard, and the King gave his assent.
It is worth noting, for whatever resonance it may have, that Valmy is, as the crow flies, about twenty-five miles from Varenne-en-Argonne, the town where Louis XVI, Marie-Antoinette and their retinue (disguised as traveling bourgeois) were apprehended while attempting to reconnoitre with counter-revolutionary forces massed near the border at Montmédy. And this just a bit over a year prior to the seminal cannonade. The fuite à Varennes thus constituted a hinge moment of another kind. By attempting to reclaim his divine right, the King shunted the political tide unwittingly leftward, away from constitutional monarchy and thereby greatly accelerated the momentum toward the advent of a royalty-free republic.
“Be witty this minute! Use me for example,” demands Louis XVI of Baron Ponceludon in the film Ridicule. “But sire, the king is not a subject,” replies the baron (wittily).
Indeed he no loner can be, partcularly since he has said “use me,” and thus proclaimed himself an object.