That’s what happens, and that’s what happened for no specific, exact reason to my friend Santo Spatola.
AMONG THOSE YOUNG MEN, there were a great number of remarkably creative minds, forced to bang their heads against the wall to come up with something new to say, a new way of painting, or of stopping painting, or of starting to paint all over again. They considered everything that had been done right before them to be tremendously important, and they felt a responsibility to renew it. They had to burn their bridges with the recent past or else, contrariwise, pay homage to it, in all seriousness or in jest. In effect, when you visit any collection of twentieth-century artwork, with its halls organized thematically, it is shocking to see the implacable historicizing tendency of the works of nine artists out of ten, year after year, decade after decade, the shifting succession of styles, of periods, of the movements they joined or turned away from—without being an expert or a specialist, any museumgoer ought to be able to assign a certain canvas to the year it was painted, or come within a good approximate range, so “dated” is it, for the most part. All of a sudden, one fine day, everyone or nearly everyone starts painting a certain way, and then just as suddenly they stop. Just as is the case with fashion, they can tell that behind the scenes there pulses a fickle marketplace that demands the new, the updated. Now, there is far less of a compact front in literature, there are fewer movements and wholesale shifts every decade or five years, a writer can perhaps go on writing the same way for forty years, or else change with every book: they’ll find followers or be ignored individually, on a case by case basis. At least that’s the sensation I have about it.
Whatever the case, it was perhaps precisely in the period I’m telling you about that, in the visual arts too, the scholastic compactness of the various movements cracked and then shattered, and the artists began advancing in scattered order, each following her or his individual path, paths that intersected and often became tangled, forming switchbacks and knots, but certainly didn’t march along in parallel. It was a lucky thing and to the same extent, a catastrophe. Artworks ceased to come to each other’s rescue, the way they do in museum halls dedicated, say, to Cubism or Informalism, where you find paintings side by side that justify each other, the good ones save the ugly and insignificant ones, the insignificant ones form the backdrop, the horizon of the understanding against which the good and beautiful ones stand out. Outside of the surrounding context of mediocre artworks and ham handed attempts, even certain masterpieces would remain, so to speak, mute, uncommunicative, while all the rest would be swept away. I wouldn’t know, honestly, whether among the works of the painters I spent time with there are any that deserve the description of masterpiece. Perhaps that designation at this point can be used only in a relative or specialized acceptance (for example “a masterpiece of the horror genre,” “a masterpiece match-winning goal”), thereby distorting the original meaning of an absolute value.
Santo Spatola never painted a masterpiece, but on more than one occasion he expressed a quality that was decidedly out of the ordinary. He liked to dream up titles for his canvases, or else his friends would find them for him. I coined a few myself, for example, L’arto fantasma (The Phantom Limb, my favorite), and then Troppo umano (Too Human), Cul-de-sac, Il sogno rosso del coraggio (The Red Dream of Courage, a punning title, where in Italian segno and sogno, badge and dream, are close cousins), Lutto incompleto (Incomplete Mourning).
It was easy and it was fun. The title was conceived separately, and if it sounded good, it could be paired with a canvas in an enigmatic manner, leaving those who viewed it the job of establishing a relationship, or really, the absence of any relationship.
But his finest painting is still Domenica è sempre domenica.
20
IT WAS A DARK PAINTING, even though it was done with bright and vivid colors. It depicted a battle, being waged in uncertain fashion: first of all, it wasn’t clear who was fighting whom and why. Rushing in from the left, men in colorful uniforms were bursting into the middle of a wood, whirling swords and daggers, but they were blindfolded, so they were having a hard time regaining their orientation. Also on the left, in the extreme foreground, were two of those men, richly arrayed, perhaps the generals of the army launching the charge in the background, or else a couple of deserters, with very tall plumed hats. As if utterly indifferent to what was occurring behind them, they were killing time by showing each other two small round hand mirrors like those that women carry in their purses to check their makeup, but any attempt to see their reflections in these mirrors was foiled by the fact that these two men, like all the others, were in fact blindfolded. Seen from up close, the blindfolds covering their eyes were actually made of flesh, or skin, a skin speckled with scales, and yet almost transparent, like the skin a snake sheds. On the right, perched high in the trees, or bound with ropes to the trunks of those same trees, or else clinging to lianas that dangled from above the treetops and even beyond the rosy clouds that quilted the sky (these dark lines cut the scene at angles, giving it a visual rhythm), were a number of adolescents, boys and girls, smiling as they watched the soldiers attack, resisting their onslaught by pelting them with such household objects as chairs, cushions, flowerpots, shoes, watering cans, transistor radios, kitchen utensils, and bathroom accessories, depicted down to the smallest detail. Also in the foreground, almost obstructing the center of the painting with their masses, a number of slaughtered horses, belly up, and numerous victims of the clash, both young people and soldiers, some of them seated or lying face downward, with their hands tied behind their back.
The whole thing might have been taken for a game, like hide-and-seek or blind man’s bluff, in a particularly sadistic version, given that the soldiers, the boys, and the girls all seemed blissfully contented, and smiles also flickered on the faces of those who had been taken prisoner, tied to the tree trunks, or who lay bleeding and dismembered on the ground, so that you wondered if their wounds were only feigned or else if they might be healed at the end of the battle.
Because of its surreal grandiosity and the movements of mass and the details, as well as the hovering brutality, Domenica è sempre domenica reminded me, adjusting for the necessary differences, of the cover of a well-known Frank Zappa album, The Grand Wazoo. But when I told Spatola that, he wasn’t best pleased. Perhaps he would rather have heard his painting compared with a battle scene by Paolo Uccello, which is certainly where he had taken the terrified horses from, or else to the mosaic depicting Alexander the Great victorious at the Battle of Issus, his eyes elongated all the way to the temples.
“But how did you come up with it?”
“I just did.”
“You don’t even know yourself.”
“Sure I know. From my fears. You see them?”
I thought he was referring to the prisoners and all the blood spilled. Or the blindfolds over their eyes.
“They’re right here,” and he pointed to two men in the foreground.
“Look closer.”
I leaned in toward the painting and those two enigmatic figures. I saw nothing.
“It’s the plumes.”
“Those are your fears?”
“Yes. The colorful plumes on the hats.”
Shivers ran down my back. In effect, it was a very childish work of art, almost naïve, though still technically impeccable. As I admired it, I felt the certainty, as in fact I was saying above, that it would not establish the career of its creator. It was out of step with its times, painted in a classical style, with the chilly composure of, say, Poussin, without, sadly, possessing his splendor, with the animated vigor of murals from the twenties or thirties, and it was totally devoid of that pop detachment, it didn’t relish the facile advantage of citation or reference that would have made it possible to treat that material like any other, that is, with a fatalistic, ironic shrug.
Precisely because it was candid and explicit, its playful violence was unbearable. It left viewers horrified and discontented
. And then there was the title. This time, it had been coined by Spatola himself, and it was in effect very distinctive, very representative of his way. Domenica è sempre domenica. Upon a second reading, and even more so, upon a third or a fourth, it didn’t sound at all ironic, as you might well have guessed upon a hasty viewing: that painting by Santo Spatola really was any ordinary, tragic Sunday in life.
THAT WAS THE DEADLOCK in which Santo Spatola found himself, only a little older than me, once he passed the age of thirty.
I continued to see him until about fifteen years ago, then we fell out of touch.
Of the painters mentioned and their entourage, many are in the vanguard, some are barely eking out a living, or they’re doing something else, I couldn’t say whether some of them have given up art entirely.
I’ve had limited success with my books, but among writers I can hold my head up high, figuratively speaking, because I’m not among my colleagues very often, nor am I able to display any particular pride; still, when I’m among them, I don’t feel that I’m a pariah.
It’s different for painters: a painter who doesn’t sell his canvases, who has shows in second-ranked galleries, by the time he reaches fifty or sixty, it’s as if he no longer existed, and he runs the risk of dropping, or being downgraded, almost to the level of those who paint as a pastime and keep their easels in their broom closets at home. Since it is permeated, impregnated with money in every single pore, the world of the visual arts is the most violently hierarchical of them all: yes, certainly, in literature there are awards or the number of copies in print to serve as gauges, but it’s still theoretically possible that you could be a fine writer, or at least a decent one, or even an illustrious writer, and recognized as such, even without winning prizes or while selling only small numbers of books . . . since it is difficult to measure literary worth, and there exist no pitiless market quotations to certify it.
21
ACCORDING TO CERTAIN PHYSIOLOGISTS, cruelty and aggression are nothing more than the degeneration and intensification of the survival instinct: seeing another person’s blood flow guarantees that I’m not seeing my own. The pleasure of witnessing harm done to others, with the assorted accompanying Latin proverbs, nowadays considered to be so many disgusting relics of the past, derives from the comforting sensation of not being the victim of that same harm. Certainly, from this sort of relief it’s only a short step to actual enjoyment, for its own sake, caused by the suffering of others, also known as sadism, or one’s own suffering, also known as masochism. The delicate nexus of pleasure and pain is thus established and perverted for all time.
One proceeds by way of intensification. Intensification causes a continual series of shifts between levels until the senses are overthrown. You start with tickling and you wind up being burned alive. Intensification can lead from the noblest sentiment to the most benighted frenzy. Loving with all your heart, you take one thing for another. A kiss turns into a bite. Did I kiss her? Did I kill her with a kiss? Did I kiss her or did I tear her limb from limb? If it was a mistake, which of the two things was mistaken?
Her breasts arouse me
only if I can ravage them.
NOW, THERE IS A HYPOTHESIS that explains sexual cruelty as a form of atavistic throwback. According to this theory, the stimulus of hunger would be analogous or even identical to the sex drive, evidence for which can be found in those lower orders of animal species where individuals devour their sex partner during copulation or immediately afterward. It is no accident that we talk about a sexual appetite: the functions of copulating, killing, and feeding have only divided in later stages of development, in which animals learn to keep them separated. Only in nature it is the females that kill the males: it wouldn’t make any biological sense for the male to kill the female after inseminating her. So that’s a theory we can dispense with.
ACCORDING TO OTHER SCHOLARS, what sex and violence have in common is the state of exaltation, excitement; they seek their object with lust, they want to take possession of it at all costs, they manifest themselves in physical action generated by psychomotor agitation. A sex act, if the witness were to be imagined as having no idea of its purpose, if this witness were completely and entirely clueless and naïve, say, a Martian, might easily be taken for an act of violence. Exactly as it is described by Gioacchino Belli, for example, in a famous sonnet: as a physical clash between glassy-eyed beasts, who puff and clash, beak to beak, “e ddajje, e spiggne, e incarca, e strigni e sbatti” . . . (“It’s knock, push, poke n’ squeeze, a thrashen a twat n’ tool”) the gestures, the sounds and noises, the mechanics of the thing might seriously make up the picture of an assault, offer proof of some great suffering. One of a pair of lovers might sometimes be unsure whether the moans of the other are caused by pleasure or pain. And a child who may have chanced to see his parents having sex, through a crack in the door carelessly left ajar, will interpret this scene of love as this: “Daddy is hurting Mommy.” What arguments could we bring to bear to persuade him otherwise? Sex chooses the same forms in which to express itself as do hostility and suffering: the body is riven by the same convulsions, the nerves at play are the same, and so are the muscles, whether we’re embracing someone or strangling them, and in the final analysis they are gradations of the same force. Pleasure quickly veers off into annoyance or pain, in the taut strings of the nerves, capable when plucked of producing an angelically sweet sound or an anguished scraping drone, with the slightest shift in pressure. The tendency is accentuated in psychopathic subjects, who are frequently incapable of distinguishing between their own actions in terms of meaning, or gauging them in intensity, frequently devoid of moral or rational inhibitions. Brutal acts therefore become indispensable to their sense of pleasure, they integrate with it or replace it entirely. It may well be true that, as a philosopher once stated, sexual desire is brother to murder: but only a psychopath can revive that family kinship.
A couple of months ago, the streets were full of posters advertising what we might call an art house porno, based on the confessions of a nymphomaniac, featuring photographs of naked actors as they were having, or perhaps we should say, acting out orgasms: they all seemed to be experiencing, in the midst of their pleasure, something painful, a stab of pain, a spasm of anguish and disgust. As if a misfortune had befallen them. Which is, actually, pretty realistic.
WE STRUGGLE AGAINST INHUMAN TEMPTATIONS with the assistance of two different forces: one supplied by reason, capable of overcoming negative impulses by means of a process of reflection, while the other rests on our sentiments, which are instinctively repelled by certain malicious or obscene acts. Heart and brain, rational and moral ethics summon up more or less the same precepts, and they are almost always obeyed, otherwise any given individual’s life would be nothing but a succession of criminal acts. And so giving in to evil and brutality is by no means a simple matter: it requires battering down a double barrier of inhibitions. You would have to be at least one of the following things: a) incapable of reason, an idiot; b) devoid of feelings and emotion, that is to say, an affectless sociopath; c) both things.
The emotionless imbecile will therefore be the ideal subject, the perfect actor of any and all cruelty.
UNLIKE THOSE WHO MURDER their wives out of jealousy, or their fathers out of hatred or some vested interest, or their business partners, or their personal enemies, or whoever it is they feel betrayed them, or those who get in the way of their objectives—the emotionless imbecile is not interested in the slightest who he kills: his brutal intentions aren’t directed at anyone in particular; if they were, he’d be less pure somehow, he’d be entangled in resentments and calculations and it would become a personal matter. Within given categories (for example: women) his victims are interchangeable. Just as anonymous as the force that drives him to kill are the individuals that he targets. He wants to act, act, and only act, and murder is, without a doubt, the most effective action available, in the sense that its effects are indelible, unlike what happen
s as a result of any other action. The prerogative that constitutes the primacy of murder is the fact that it is irreparable: there are no replacements, there can be no reparations, it isn’t possible to carry out some sort of exchange, and what is contrived by the institution of the vendetta and the reprisal, or their stylized version, what we refer to as justice, does nothing at all to erase what has happened—if anything it reprises it, it causes it to proliferate. It is a fire that refuses to be extinguished. A mark. The murderer is at the same time the one who wears the mark and the one who inflicts it. He may have the sensation, therefore, that his is a specific task, which he does nothing more than to carry out, like those who transmit a message without being expected to know or understand it, exactly as a courier ought in fact to do: do nothing more than to deliver it, taking to the recipient what has been entrusted into his hands. Choosing that recipient is above his job description. But who is the sender, what name goes on the return address?
The Catholic School Page 121
