“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Tuesday, April 26, 2011

OOO Painting Corner


Yes it's The Fall of Icarus by Breughel. The lack of a totalizing perspective makes the viewer float around the picture space as if in zero G (why Tarkovsky used another Breughel in Solaris). And Icarus is by no means a central figure. That prize goes to a rough assemblage of water and rocks, as the painting invites us to peer over the unseen cliff edge. The imagery does not imply a single attitude or vanishing point—in a way perspective is a correlationist mode of drawing. It is as if the picture is asking us to see that the objects in it have other sides to them.

The image is also a good example of what Meillassoux calls “the rich elsewhere”—his description for Graham Harman's initial statement about objects. No wonder U of C press chose it (wisely) for the cover of volume 1 of Braudel's series on capitalism, that particular volume and that particular series being great examples of a history that includes nonhumans, as far as was possible at the time. Auden captures some of it well:

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

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