Véronique Plesch – Where to Go from Here?

Lost on Life’s Path

We’ve all been there, but nobody said it better than Dante: “In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to myself in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost.” (“Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita / mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, / ché la diritta via era smarrita.” Inferno 1:1–3). Simply put, where to go next when a sense of direction, of purpose, seems to be lost? In his illustration for the Commedia’s first verse, Gustave Doré places Dante in the center of the composition, surrounded by somber woods, heading towards an impenetrably black background. He turns towards the viewer, slightly hunched over, his face betraying anxiety.

When lost, how does one get back “on the right track”? One solution, Dante suggests, is to find a guide. After he encounters two ferocious animals (a leopard and a lion), Dante meets the ancient poet Virgil, who declares: “You must hold to another path . . . if you wish to escape from this savage place” (Inferno 1:91–93). Doré depicts the two men their backs turned to us, inviting the viewer/reader to accompany them in their journey. Dante walks behind Virgil, who is crowned with laurel. They head towards a bright opening in the distance, followed by a third wild animal, a she-wolf. This is the beginning of a long visionary and initiatory journey in which Dante, led by Virgil and other guides, will travel through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven.

In the first verse of Dante’s original Italian, the word rendered as “journey” is “cammin,” path. The word recurs at the very end of Inferno, when Dante writes: “My leader and I entered on that hidden path to return to the bright world; and, without taking care for rest at all, up we climbed, he first and I second, until I saw the beautiful things the heaven carry, through a round opening. And thence we came forth to look again at the stars” (Inferno 34: 133–39). In Doré’s illustration, as Virgil points up to the skies, Dante still follows him, but this time, as opposed to the opening image, he stands upright, ready to continue his transformative pilgrimage.

Which Way?

Life as a path is extraordinarily enduring a metaphor. In this painting by the German expressionist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, the viewer is made to stand on a path that forks in a verdant landscape, facing a laburnum tree whose distinctive clusters of golden flowers echo a yellow moon in the night sky. In the summer of 1912, Kirchner, one of the founding members of the avant-garde movement aptly named Die Brücke (“the bridge”—a bridge to the future), spent time on the Baltic Island of Fehmarn. To Kirchner, Fehmarn must have felt blissfully isolated (a bridge connecting it to the German mainland was not built until 1963) and sunny, thanks to a remarkable microclimate (Fehmarn is known as “the sunny island”). In stark contrast to his bustling urban scenes, Kirchner paints a landscape devoid of human presence: the viewer, like the painter, is alone facing the fork on the road. The summer Kirchner spent in 1912 on the island marked a turning point in his development as he noted in a letter to a friend: “There I painted pictures that are absolutely mature, insofar as I myself can judge. Ochre, blue and green are the colours of Fehmarn, and the coastline is wonderful. At times with a South Sea opulence, amazing flowers and thick fleshy stems.”

The motif of the fork in the road as a symbol for life choices is, in my view, no better illustrated than in Annibale Carracci’s Hercules at the Crossroads. The painting, meant for the ceiling of the Farnese palace in Rome, is also called The Choice of Hercules. As I always remind my students, at the time there were no titles in the modern sense of the word, only references to the subject matter. In this case, the two titles are correct: the hero finds himself at a crossroads and must choose between two paths. Right in the middle of the composition, Hercules sits on a rock and leans on his club. The figure of Virtue, demurely dressed as a Roman matron, stands to his right and points up to a steep and rocky road leading to a mountain top where Pegasus, the winged horse, awaits, framed by lush vegetation. Next to her, a poet, crowned with laurel, holds a large book, ready to record the hero’s feats. Sensual Pleasure stands on the other side, alluringly dressed in flowing sheer fabrics, with theatrical masks, playing cards, and musical instruments next to her, inviting the hero to a shady path. Hercules looks straight ahead and ignores the women. Although his muscular body bears witness to his physical strength, his brooding facial expression betrays his uncertainty. 17th-century author Giovanni Pietro Bellori explains that the story comes from an ancient author, Prodicus of Ceos and was meant “to instruct youth in virtue,” for it is indeed that path that the hero will choose. Bellori adds that “a palm tree with glorious outspread branches [that] rises behind the youth [is] a very certain presage of his victories.”

The two women who come to entice Hercules are a little bit like the angel and the devil who so often appear in popular imagery. As a life-long reader of Tintin, I immediately think of this image in which the hero’s dog (Milou in the original edition, Snowy in the English translation) finds himself having to decide whether to fulfill the mission to deliver a message to get help for his master or be tempted by an enticing bone. The dilemma is embodied by an angel and a devil who bear the features of the wire fox terrier. The angel reminds Milou of his duty while the devil insists on how appealing the bone is.

Earlier in that book, angel and devil are there as Milou succumbs to the temptation to drink the whisky that drips from Captain Haddock’s rucksack, with obvious negative consequences. Often considered Hergé’s most personal and favorite album, Tintin au Tibet was created at a time when he was battling depression. Hergé’s biographer Pierre Assouline believes that Hergé “put the best of himself” into a book that is, as a result, “a portrait of the artist at a turning point.” As the album came out, Hergé separated from his wife and moved in with his lover. Assouline concludes that with this book “he seemed to have come to terms with himself.” The impetus for this adventure is a dream Tintin has that convinces him that his friend Chang has survived a plane crash in the Himalayas. Not so surprisingly, Tintin, Haddock, and Milou spend a large portion of the book walking along mountain paths.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Twists, Turns, and Stops

The road of life is not easy or straight-forward and the same is true for artistic creation. How often does one change one’s mind: erasing, covering up, starting all over again, or even destroying the work? Sometimes, these creative twists and turns may be still visible. One such “pentimento” (from the Italian verb pentirsi, “to repent”) is still discernible in Albrecht Dürer’s Knight, Death, and the Devil.

Discussing the engraving’s genesis, Lynda White notes:

It is the horse’s stance that seemed to trouble Dürer in his preparatory drawings. He experimented with the position of the right rear leg, drawing it twice. In the final print he continued to have difficulty with this leg, finally transforming its original position into isolated blades of grass. Two shorter blades of grass appear beneath the horse’s hoof and echo its outline. Two longer blades appear to rise behind the leg, where they form two stark white lines across the dog’s darker fur. These two blades conform to the position the leg would have assumed had the hoof been left in its original lower position.

Artmaking is about decision-making, and sometimes figuring out what to do next can be challenging, if not plain paralyzing. This is exactly what is depicted in another of Dürer’s three Meisterstiche (“Masterprints”): his embodiment of the melancholic temperament, which at the time was associated with creative genius. In this engraving, which Erwin Panofsky considered a “spiritual self-portrait” of the artist, the personification of the temperament is surrounded by a slew of objects, most of them associated with geometry, a field that held great importance for Dürer, who penned treatises on the topic. The feminine figure (because of the grammatical gender of the word used to refer to the temperament in Latin), sits motionless, in a pose we instantly associate with that of a thinker. Her face is shrouded in shadows: she is thinking dark thoughts. Coincidentally, in an unfinished book for young artists, Dürer cautioned against a tendency he knew all too well, perfectionism, declaring that it could lead to melancholy.

The Way Out

When one feels “stuck,” assaulted by doubt, uncertainty, perfectionism, and even anxiety, one needs a guide (like Dante’s Virgil) and that is what Dürer’s book, Ein Speis der Malerknaben (Nourishment for Young Painters, c. 1512–13) was meant to provide. Closer to us, the practice of the studio “crit,” which first appeared two centuries ago, at the Écoles des Beaux-Arts in Paris, when successful, is aimed indeed to offer such assistance.

In the theme description for this issue, we included a long list of the possible strategies artists might use to find a way out of a creative dead-end or a dry spell (choose your metaphor!). In my Winter 2024 Musings, I quoted André Breton’s wife Simone recounting the birth of the game of Exquisite Corpse and how her husband “shouted with joy” recognizing in it “one of the sources . . . of inspiration he loved so much to discover.” Such automatic techniques are indeed a great way to open up the flow of creativity and the Surrealists used a wide range of them: frottage, grattage, fumage, decalcomania—the list goes on of the means that “provoke” the artist’s unconscious. I am tempted to say that Dürer would probably agree with the Surrealists that overthinking and even rationality can hinder creative activity.

Although poet, writer, and visual artist Henri Michaux refused to become an official member of the Surrealist movement, he was nevertheless close to their ideals and methods. This is reflected, for instance, in his experimentation with psychotropic drugs and, in particular, in the drawings he did after taking mescaline, the active ingredient of the peyote cactus. Born in 1899, three years after André Breton, Michaux left his native Belgium to move to Paris in the 1920s (he eventually became French). In 1955, he tried mescaline several times and drew after the third experiment while the drug’s effects were still palpable.

The resulting abstract pen-and-ink “mescaline drawings” have a distinctively nervous calligraphic and “all-over” quality. The great Mexican poet Octavio Paz wrote about Michaux’s “mescaline experience”: “Forms, ideas, and sensations intertwine as though they were a single, dizzyingly proliferating entity.” In Misérable miracle, Michaux details how among the different sensations in which vibrations feature prominently, lines take center stage:

Lines, more and more lines, which I am not sure I really see, though already distinct and fine (which I feel?) which I begin to see (how tenuous they are this time!) and how ample their curves, so very ample! I notice that at moments they disappear and again their amplitude, really extraordinary compared with their thinness, and I know that the color white, which I am soon going to see, will be slightly violet, though I can still see nothing but the light, light gray of the spidery threads which boldly, rhythmically, incessantly stride over empty space. (113) . . . with mad speed, hundreds of lines of force combed my being, which could never reintegrate itself quickly enough for, before it could come together again, another line of rakes began raking it, and then again, and then again. (125)

Michaux had been interested in calligraphy for a long time, but under the drug’s influence, letters turn into physical sensations:

Enormous “Z’s” are passing through me (stripes-vibrations-zig-zags?). Then, either broken “S’s,” or what may be their halves, incomplete “O’s,” a little like giant eggshells a child has tried to draw without ever succeeding.

 

These shapes, like an egg or an S, begin to disturb my thoughts as if they partook of the same nature. (122)

When he opens a book, he sees “letters, letters that remained letters, the lines of letters foreign, expressing nothing” (168)

Reading Paz’s introduction, it occurs to me that through his dual practice of poetry and the visual arts, Michaux was attempting the impossible: to reach a place “by definition indescribable and incommunicable, in which meanings disappear . . . a total vacuum and a total plenitude.” Scary as it might have been, the experience of mescaline opened up new paths for him.

Dante conceived of his journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven as a pilgrimage and one might say that for Michaux, ingesting the drug led to a transformational trip, in which he left behind the reassuringly familiar. Considering pilgrimage—a practice that appears in all religions and finds many secular embodiments—cultural anthropologist Victor Turner greatly benefited from the work of Arnold van Gennep, who had studied what is known as “rites of passage.” Such rituals occur at times of change and transition and have a tripartite structure, starting with rites of separation in which the individual is detached from their environment, followed by a stage in which they are suspended in a liminal state, and concluding with the transformed subject brought back into their community. As Van Gennep reminds us, limen is Latin for threshold and separation rites often involve the actual passing of such an architectural feature and, more generally, of a physical movement. That is why Turner focused on the central stage when he studied pilgrimage and dubbed it a “liminoid” phenomenon.

Dante’s voyage through the afterlife was a pilgrimage and Kirchner’s Fehmarn a liminal place, away from society. As we saw, the artist himself recognized the transformative effect that the island had on his art. But the Colby picture reminds us that change is difficult and daunting: we find ourselves, just like Kirchner, Dante, Hergé, and Hercules, at a crossroads. But there is more: the tree that appears between the two paths, that occupies more than half of the canvas, is not just a beautiful tree that reflects the lushness of the island’s microclimate. Also known as “golden chain” or “golden rain,” the laburnum is poisonous: all its parts—bark, leaves, flowers, pods, seeds—contain cytisine, a substance toxic to humans and animals. But it also possesses medicinal properties known in several cultures: the laburnum is, to borrow a Greek term, a pharmakon (φάρμακον), both poison and medicine. Perhaps this reminds us that what harms can also, when used in the right dosage, be positive, a source for healing and transformation.

In other words, being stuck can lead to new paths—that is, if you are willing to keep moving.

 

References

Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri. Vol. 1, Inferno. Ed. and trans. Robert M. Durling. Oxford University Press, 1996.

Assouline, Pierre. Hergé. Paris: Plon, 1996. English: Hergé: The Man Who Created Tintin. Trans. Charles Ruas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. (Quotes are on p. 191 and 192.)

Bellori, Giovanni Pietro. The Lives of Annibale and Agostino Carracci. Trans. Catherine Engass. University Park and London: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1968. (See pp. 19–21 for Hercules at the Crossroads.)

Hergé. Tintin au Tibet. Tournai: Casterman, 1960.

Grisebach, Lucius. Kirchner, Cologne: Taschen, 1999. (Quote is on p. 92)

Michaux, Henri, Misérable miracle (la Mescaline). Monaco: Éditions du Rocher, 1956. A translation of excerpts by Louise Varèse appeared that year in the Paris Review 15 (1956) and in 1963 in book form with Octavio Paz’s introduction, published by City Lights in San Francisco. The 2002 edition (New York: the New York Review of Books, 2002), contains additional translations by Anna Moschovakis. Michaux’s mescaline drawings will be on view this winter at the Courtauld institute, 12 February–4 June 2025 (see here).

Turner, Victor. “Pilgrimage as a Liminoid Phenomenon.” In Victor Turner and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture: Anthropological Perspectives. New York: Columbia University Press, 1978. 1–39.

van Gennep, Arnold Les Rites de passage (1909, augmented edition, 1969, 1981). English: The Rites of Passage, trans. Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960.

White, Lynda S. “A New Source for Dürer’s Knight, Death, and the Devil,” Source: Notes in the History of Art 2.2 (1983): 5–9. (Quote is on p. 6.)