hunger. That is the hunger for meaning. There is only one thing that is truly insufferable, and that is a life without meaning…. There is nothing wrong with the search for happiness. But there is something greater—meaning—which transfigures all. When you have meaning you are content, you belong.”
Elsewhere, van der Post has written, “Art, poetry and music are matters of survival. They are guardians and makers of the unbroken chain of what's oldest and first in the human spirit.”
They do this by reconnecting us to soul.
The Healing Forces of Myth
In the early 1990s I came across an essay in The New Yorker that deeply influenced my view of the relationship among art, history, and politics. The article was written by Lawrence Weschler and focused on the early round of hearings of the Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands. This was the first such session since the Nuremberg Trials after World War II. In admirably even-handed prose Weschler describes a lunch with an Italian judge, Antonio Cassese, who had been serving as the court president for two years. Cassese coolly revealed for Weschler “some of the more gruesome stories that [had] crossed his desk, grisly accounts of torture, rape, mutilation, especially those of Dusko Tadic, one of the most notorious war criminals.”
Weschler writes, “I asked Judge Cassese how, regularly obliged to gaze into such an appalling abyss, he had kept from going mad himself.”
The judge's answer astonishes.
“Ah,” he said with a smile. “You see, as often as possible I make my way over to the Mauritshuis museum, in the center of town, so as to spend a little time with the Vermeers.”
Weschler was deeply moved by the inspired choice the judge had made in dealing with his duty to daily gaze into the face of evil. Coincidentally, Weschler had been making his own pilgrimages to see the Vermeers at the Mauritshuis museum, as well as the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and had discovered some remarkable parallels between Vermeer's era and ours. In seventeenth-century Delft, where the painter created his luminous portraits, life wasn't as peaceful as might be expected from the serenity achieved in his work. Instead, it was a time riddled with war and natural calamity, including a fire that nearly destroyed his hometown. As the Dutch empire expanded around the world, life in Holland was devastated by social unrest, and Vermeer himself was tormented by the financial woes of raising twelve children on his meager earnings as a painter.
To explain the trial judge's intuitive use of painting as a healing balm, Weschler cited the epigraph by Andrew Foyle in Edward Snow's definitive study of Vermeer:
In ways that I do not pretend to understand fully, painting deals with the only issues that seem to me to count in our benighted time—freedom, autonomy, fairness, love.
The Name of the Stone
On the wall next to my writing desk I have hung an oak-framed print of Vincent van Gogh's Haystacks. It represents one of my fonder family memories. What makes the print special is that it was a gift from van Gogh's nephew to my father after my dad escorted him on a V.I.P. tour around the fabled Ford museums and factories of Detroit in the early1960s. As if illustrating the current Myth of the Web of Life, in which everything is connected to everything else, and everyone is within “six degrees of separation,” the print provides a unusual link to an artist whose life and work have been profoundly important to me.
For me the print is a mythic image because it symbolizes the origins of a significant ritual in our family. Around the time of my father's meeting with van Gogh's nephew, he also came to know the son of the painter Auguste Renoir as well. My father relished telling us of his encounters with these men, acting like a field soldier returning from battle and describing how the generals had touched his lapel one cold morning. Soon after he began to disappear after dinner nearly every evening into the cool confines of the basement. There he would spend hours cutting clippings out of art magazines and pasting them into scrapbooks for himself—and me. For three years running my birthday presents were scrapbooks filled with magazine clippings of famous painters, mostly van Gogh and Renoir.
My eyes rove over the painting's golden slumbered fields. Once again, I feel the rare sense of serenity this painting has always given me, all the more moving because of van Gogh's lifelong struggle with poverty, physical pain, and social exile. Favorite passages from his collected letters to his brother crowd my mind. One favorite line comes from a description of a painting he'd done of a ploughed field that shone violet under a yellow sky and yellow sun: “So there is every moment something that moves one intensely.”
I gaze at the furrowed road in the painting for several minutes. What was my father trying to tell me? Curiosity washes over me like a waterfall. This canvas is painted with almost ineffable affection for someone in such pain, and the courage it took to render so stupefies me. Then I recall the plaintiveness in the voice of a letter Vincent wrote to his brother Theo while describing a small cottage at the end of a road: “I am trying to get at something utterly heartbroken.”
Gazing deeply at the painting, I am convinced that my father, stuck in the modern mythic world of “men in gray flannel suits,” was describing his own deep identification not simply and sentimentally with artists in agony, but with artists who transcend their pain with the courage to create beauty in an often grim world.
This ability is what I think of as “the name of the stone.”
In the myth of Sisyphus, the stone that Zeus transformed himself into is exactly the same size as the stone that Sisyphus is fated to push uphill through all eternity. In the poetic picture language of myth, Sisyphus' decision to risk the wrath of the gods is in exact proportion to his burden. The beauty of the soulful imagery is that Sisyphus transforms fate into destiny when he realizes that the weight of that burden will be measured on the scale of his attitude toward it.
Sisyphus in London
We've all met modern versions of Sisyphus. My first encounter with him was in the spring of 1975, in London. The struggle I witnessed there has haunted me ever since.
I had been working for several months for the Park Lane Cleaning Services to earn my passage to Greece and Israel and Egypt. Cleaning flats was an alternately fascinating and humiliating way to pay for continuing travels, but it did pay better than the demolition work I had already tried. Besides, I could work as many hours as I could handle, as many as ninety a week.
After four months of mopping floors, making beds, and polishing silver, my bags were packed for Cairo and only one last job remained. Fortunately, out of all my clients, who included the goalie for the Chelsea football team, the conductor for the National Philharmonic, a dentist working undercover for Scotland Yard, and a famous madam, the Harringtons were my favorite. They were an unusual bohemian couple for the Notting Hill Gate neighborhood they lived in. Mr.Harrington was a professor of economics and history at the University of London, an ex-M5 agent, and a brilliant classical pianist. Mrs.Harrington was an English literature teacher. For sixteen weeks I had gone to their flat every Sunday morning and been greeted with a cup of tea, chocolate biscuits, and the family wooden cleaning kit. I would set to work vacuuming, watering plants, and scrubbing floors, while Mr.Harrington would play Mozart's sublime 21st Piano Concerto on the grand Steinway in his private library of several thousand books and dozens of exotic works of art from their travels through India, Africa, and Asia.
Those mornings were my introduction to the glories of Mozart, the genteel life, and the devotion of two cultured people. I was mesmerized by the way they treated each other with respect and deference, trading anecdotes from their week, and asking each other for hints to the answers to the London Times crossword puzzles.
On that last Sunday morning, I heard the
