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Final Essay

June 6, 2015 / hacjer16 / Comments Off

Jeremy Hacker
Desire and Impressionism

In this essay I will be looking at desire through the lens of impressionism, a style of art popular in France during the late 19^th century. In my analysis, I will be examining Lacanian psychoanalysis and aesthetic theory. In trying to better understand desire, I’ll be studying the social context of France during impressionism’s reign, formally critiquing impressionist paintings, and retroactively tying Lacan’s analyses of desire to these critiques and history.

Based off of Freud’s Id, Ego, and Super-Ego, Lacan lays out his take on the psych as the Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real. The Imaginary is best thought of as image-based, Symbolic as language, and the Real is the ground upon which they both merge to form. (1) In 1965, Lacan introduced the concept ‘objet petit a’ during a psychoanalytical seminar/conference. Lacan stresses that the ‘a’ is to remain ‘small a’ so that it is clearly separated from the big ‘Other’. There’s also a pun in pronouncing ‘objet petite tas’ (a little pile of shit), which is referring to another psychoanalytical discussion, much the same as Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q. (she has a hot ass). It’s important to note that Lacan uses art as a way to discuss the bridging of these realms-the Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real, and that he was an avid art collector and theorist. To Lacan, “the world we see in art is the world of our desire.” (2) This separation from the big ‘Other’ is one the main keys to why desire is impossible to completely attain, and why art is perpetually being transformed and re-constructed.

Slavoj Zizek is a contemporary philosopher who studies Lacan as a way to discuss popular art and culture. “The fundamental point of psychoanalysis is that desire is not something given in advance, but something that has to be constructed… through fantasy we learn how to desire” (3) What I infer from Zizek’s claim is that there is no a priori desire, and that desire is a construct of the mind. Some consequences of this is that you have to create objects and scenarios in order to have desire appear, and that desire is susceptible to social factors such as advertising, religion, politics, and propaganda. It’s common in the psychoanalytical field to discuss desire as something which stems from infancy. As an infant without speech, your desires are met through an ‘Other’, who sees and recognizes you, which allows you to formulate a concept of the self. This fulfilled desire and recognition becomes the basis from which Lacan’s ‘objet petit a’ derives. As we age we can never attain this completely fulfilled desire, thus we create fantasies in an attempt to come close to it. We can also slowly start to see how art comes into play as a construct of fantasy which addresses such unattainable desire. Art becomes a way to project an ‘Other’ in order to see the self, since the self can only be acknowledge through a recognition from another being.

If you create a fantasy, and all you have to piece it together are conservative ideals, then it would not be unusual for your fantasy to be constructed from any other set of ideology. For instance, if you’ve spent your whole life as a practicing Catholic, and you’re an artist, you’ll most likely produce works of art which depict your relationship with Catholicism. Of course there are exceptions, but it would be unusual to see an atheistic image from a Catholic’s hand. Another consequence of this claim, is that since desire is not given, and is not existent without fantasy, it must be continually constructed, and so we see that desire becomes a circular sensation, and that when we come close to fulfilling it perfectly, we become anxious at the thought of losing that drive. Desire, then, is a void-a nothing into which we put our constructed fantasy into.

Lacan claims that “desire cannot really have any object at all, if desire is to remain what it is: the pure negativity of a subject who desires himself in his objects, and who can do so only by perpetually negating himself in them, by negating them as what he is not- a ‘given object’, a thing ‘in-itself’.” (4) The subject and desire thus are separating by an unbridgeable gap between an object. What does the pure negativity, i.e., negation mean, however? Jean Piaget, a developmental psychologist claims that negation is “when an individual realizes that a procedure or process can be reversed, they are said to have realized the concept of negation.” (5) Another Freudian definition of negation is “the paradoxical mechanism which produces the opposite meaning of the enunciated proposition.” (6), which basically means a denial. Lacan’s first half of his definition of desire then starts with a pure negation-a subject who realizes desire of himself in an object, and this is only possible in a perpetual, cyclical process, unperturbed. The subject negates what he’s not, an object, and a thing in-itself-a philosophical term I’m vaguely familiar with, but seems to represent the separation of noumenal (independent of the mind) and phenomenal objects in space (matter). We can infer that the noumenal world is Lacan’s ‘Real’.

So, ‘objet petit a’ is a separation of the self as a maneuver to deal with the unattainable fulfilment from the ‘Other’ as we age. The object of desire is “unknowable, unreal, denatured, sexually neuter … a non-object, a negated object.” (7) We can see that this definition fits into the notion of noumena and that it is not linked to sexuality, as one would initially suspect. In order for desire to give itself an object, it must be organized into imaginary fantasy scenarios. Lacan then deduces that the question of desire’s object is the same as the question of the manifestation of desire’s subject. The latter’s question arises from asking if it is the other self who must first manifest desire to the self, so that the self can manifest desire into the object it is not. This is a question on the possibility of a reversal of the scenario in which desire is created. The answer which Lacan gives is the ‘signifier’, which is put in place for the “presence of the absence of the subject.” (8), and brings us into the Symbolic. The signifier turns out to be the phallus, which is not an organic phallus, but a gender neutral simulacrum. Lacan’s theory on ‘objet petit a’ starts from childhood, in which the demand for the breast ends in a call for a signifier where the subject can now identify themselves as a being. This leads into an examination of Freud’s Oedipus complex, and where symbolic castration comes into play-a falling out of the symbolic order as a consequence from the father figure. Now we see how the gender neutral phallus is chosen as a signifier- it fills the void that is left from this castration. Zizek simplifies this definition with: “The object a is ‘objectively’ nothing, though, viewed from a certain perspective, it assumes the shape of ‘something’. (9)

Now that we have one definition of desire-a self-constructed fantasy which attempts to reconcile the self’s unattainable fulfillment of desire from the ‘Other’-how can we use that to analyze impressionism? Since the ‘Other’ can never fully satiate us, and we ask of art to try to do this, we can analyze any movement of art throughout history to understand desire and what affects it. First, I’ll provide some context of the social environment in France in the late 19^th century, particularly its attitudes toward the public image, art, and censorship.

In the years of 1853-1870, Baron Haussmann, hired by Napoleon III, was charged with renovating the city of Paris, “he [Haussmann] had the unhealthy slums and narrow streets of mediaeval Paris razed to the ground, and opened up huge avenues and boulevards.” (10) Haussmann was dismissed by Napoleon in 1870 due to opposing views that they were spending too much money on the renovation, but with the loss of the Franco-Prussian war and the rise of the Third Republic, the project still continued until the early 1920’s. This project led to a rise in wealthy bourgeoisie patrons living in a new, geometrically pleasing Paris, where common workers had previously lived. The mixture of workers and the bourgeoisie, all while France was enduring political turmoil due to its recent defeat in the Franco-Prussian war, created new social situations, political ideas, and stances. This new setting also provided key ideas and themes for impressionists to explore. In this time of uncertainty and blossoming new ideas, traditional and conventional art entered the political sphere and became questioned, “Issues important to a democratic state … were debated and haltingly put into practice in the early Third Republic.” (11)

One of the democratic ideas now being taken seriously, with regards to art, became freedom of the press. Questions about the methods of censorship and those in power to censor, particularly issues around the nude figure, had arisen. The line of acceptability when displaying the nude figure almost exclusively relied on its academicism and how close it adhered to traditional standards. We can see such ideas through this quote, “but if models or académies, were successfully transformed into art, into the ideal, one might anticipate that reproductions of the finished works of art, paintings, or sculptures of the nude would be less problematic for the general public.” (12), in which the painting and model aren’t seen vulgar since they’ve been elevated to the status of ‘art’, rather than pornography. Naturally, with the rise of the Third Republic and the practicing of these democratic ideas, those in power to decide art’s acceptance to the public began to come under scrutiny from the more liberal patrons. The major figures muscling regulations on the nude are art institutions such as the Beaux-arts, print entrepreneurs, government policies, and the Moral Order, a regime of government that ended in 1877 whose Catholic conservatism exposed the tension between supporters of the monarchy and those of the republic. (13) Even after the Moral Order was disbanded, conservative figures still remained present in the government and courts. These groups’ attention focused primarily on the image, rather than text, so much so that “Images posed enough of a danger to merit fast and efficient repression.” (14) This leads us to question how much sway political forces and censorship has over desire. If we recall Lacan’s quote from earlier that he saw in the world of art a world of desire, then having certain art censored is having desire censored. The desire being censored is of course desire which opposes the censurer’s moral and ideological tenants, and shows a fear in having it affect others in the same manner, supposing they hold the same foundations of character. Thus we have a starting point for established notions of the ‘ideal’ desire in art and how art has the ability to induce desire.

In the 19^th century, two of the major art movements before impressionism were romanticism and realism. Venus, the Roman goddess of love, sex, beauty, and fertility, was a common figure in these art movements, representing the ideal of desire-an embodiment of feminine beauty, in which she was commonly portrayed as a realistic, near photographic image of perfection. Common critique of these art movements was how well you could paint idealized figures, portraying Venus’ mythos as metaphors through romantic or realistic imagery. The established idealized notions of desire had to be agreed upon, not universally, in order for the movement to flourish, and these notions continually come under scrutiny, since desire is never actualizing and art never complete the self’s drive. Before I examine censorship of the nude and the challenging of these traditional ideas (Venus as my encompassing symbol), I’m going to analyze a popular piece of art which crystallizes realism and romanticism.

The Birth of Venus, by William Adolphe Bouguereau, made in 1879, is an oil on canvas painting, 300 x 218 cm, and hangs in the Musée d’Orsay, Paris. The depiction of Venus in the center of the canvas is the main focus point, as the attention of all the other figures, cherubs, naked nymphs, and centaurs blowing conches, fix their gaze upon her. There are not many visible brushstrokes, making the whole painting appear near photorealistic. Venus, fixed directly in the middle, shines brighter than the rest of the figures with her pale skin, giving her an extra aura of allure as the eye focuses on this more illuminated center. There are no imperfections to the tone of her body, no blemishes, and aside from some shadows accentuating the curves of her body, her skin is flawless. Venus is holding her hands up to her hair, bending her neck and body in a suggestive, sexual pose which submits to the academic norms of idealized truth and beauty. Her hair flows long down her back, and is tangerine-red with curls at the end. The women and cherubs all share the same pasty white skin tone, while the centaurs are slightly tan. The ocean Venus is standing upon, on top of a pearly white shell, is a mixture of teal and blue, while the sky behind her presents the only signs of brushstrokes, a muddle of grey, blue and white. There is a dark, shadowed figure in the sky taking the form of the cloud in the back left of the painting, suggesting a creator or godlike figure. It is clear when examining this painting that it’s aimed at the viewer’s potential desire through the fantasy of a portrayed idealized beauty. To me, nothing in this painting suggests modernity, but is rather awash with classical style. The mythological setting, sensual, unblemished Venus, and hyper realistic, romantic atmosphere in this painting are clearly an academic success, and this painting was awarded the Grand Prix de Rome.

What we’ve seen from censorship is that the nude figure was subjected to specific criteria, and any nude image which strayed from adhering to this checklist was seen by some as “corrupting young minds and stimulating lust.” (15) The Birth of Venus can be viewed as a good example of the dominant academic and legal standards of what an acceptable portrayal of desire through aesthetics should be. This leads us into discussion about the Beaux-Arts system and its role governing the art world. “The École was governed by the Académie des Beaux-Arts, itself governed by the Institut de France. The professors at the École were chosen from among the members of the Academie, and the same body also dominated the jury which awarded prizes at the annual Salon, or state-sponsored exhibition.” (16) One can imagine from this structure how hard it would be to enter your paintings into the Salon if they deviated from traditional standards. Bouguereau himself resigned from being one of two presidents of a Salon painting jury in 1879. The frustrations and continual denial of works of art that didn’t meet these academic requirements led to the formation of the Salon des Refusés in 1860, who were granted a seal of approval by Napoleon III in 1863, a move to gain political backing on his part, and which allowed a giant leap away from tradition standards as they no longer had to appeal to the jury’s judgment. (17) Years after this Salon, the Salon des Indépendants was formed in 1884, which was an “attack on the bourgeois mentality of the Salon jury.” (18) This signal shifts how desire was examined through aesthetics, particularly with the way in which the nude is portrayed in these new salons, and a longing to move past tradition.

One major issue that comes from the nude figure, clashing with conservative ideas and traditionalism is prostitution. The painting Rolla, made by Henri Gervex in 1878, had to be defended in court, in which he claimed the painting suggests a moral lesson on the consequences of prostitution. Pointing out symbolic items such as a top hat in the painting, with its connection to bourgeoisie society, a claim was made that Rolla abandoned his privileged place in society in order to engage in a promiscuous, negative affair with a prostitute. The censorship of this painting from the Salon only further strengthens the argument of the ideals imposed on art, and how any deviation from that ideal notion had to have just cause and sometimes be defended in court. The court room used any and every iconic symbol of prostitution in order to show this painting as slanderous, completely missing the point of the painting-to show prostitution in a modern, contemporary light.

When displaying the nude through aesthetics in the public realm, it generally had to be an idealized form, with academic and aesthetic traditions explicitly tied to its viewing. This aesthetic is primarily directed toward male heterosexual viewing, and is being challenged by Salons who are tired of staunch, conservative juries. There are rising feminist voices, by both males and females, who then agitate those who held these standards of public viewing, both in the judicial and aesthetic realms. With the fall of the Moral Order, and the rise of these independent salons, boundaries were being pushed like never before, and the human figure, particularly the feminine figure, became a major aesthetic focal point.

The first painting is by Edgar Degas, entitled Woman Combing Her Hair, and was made in 1888-90 by using multiple pastels on cardboard. This painting is currently being displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It is 24 x 18 inches and shows a naked women sitting on the ground, facing away from the viewer, combing her hair. Her legs are crossed and her head is bowed as the comb scrapes upward from her neckline. Not much is discernible in the room, aside from a couch and the she’s sitting on. The brush strokes throughout the painting are clearly visible, and it even seems as if Degas used a comb on some sections. The woman’s hair is red, which resembles most of the Venus paintings I’ve seen, but her skin tone is what immediately strikes me as different. In some parts of her skin there are smudges of green, which are subtle and don’t make her look sickly. The blending of these green accents with tan and brown, create flesh that appears more vivid and warm than the bright, pasty tones in The Birth of Venus. As this woman combs her hair, we suddenly feel as if we’re a voyeur, peeking in on what is probably a routine, daily ritual. This can be seen as a contestation, or simple contrast to the sensual, inviting Venus of tradition, whose role seems to invoke desire in the viewer. There is no show here, it’s but a moment in time which plays with light and color. Are we meant to see this as a statement against voyeurism, or is Degas simply giving us a natural apartment scene? Either way, it seems that there’s an attempt at avoiding desire here, so what is left is a personal introspection and response, rather than being handed desire bottled up. The easiest way to get the full effect of what Degas has done in Woman Combing Her Hair, is to place the image side by side with The Birth of Venus, and immediately the mythology grandiose painting seems a dramatic fiction compared to a banal scene. The normalcy of Degas’ scene brings into question, and I’m sure was postulated by critics, that if anything could be painted, then anything could be great art, which in turn means nothing becomes special. I think this thread of thinking spirals into a lot of modern art themes, and could be placed as a question in examining desire. If any scene could represent desire, then it’s dependent and reactive on the viewer’s response in a public or private space. The response and critique of art, with desire as a lens, thus reveals our personal feelings and judgments, which is analogous to something like a Rorschach ink blot test. With this in mind, we could say part of desire stems from political and religious stances, and yet personal desire still seems trickier as public proclamations could be contrary to one’s true feelings. At what extreme does the public sphere influence personal desire? A close answer to that question, I suspect, is that it’s more than we’d like to believe. In thinking about Lacanian desire, I suspect Degas wants us to examine our personal notions of desire, rather than adhere to the ‘ideal’ desire.

The next impressionist painting I’m going to examine is The Floor Planers, by Gustave Caillebotte, an oil on canvas painting which is 102 x 146 cm. It is currently being shown in the Musée d’Orsay, Paris. What is immediately transparent is the perspective in which the viewer is given by Caillebotte. It is as if we’re standing on the floor, soon to be in the way of the workers. There are no dramatic colors and tones, it is all neutral brown and black, with a window showing pale daylight in the background. There are two men following the parallel, vertical lines of the painting, scraping the floor, while a third breaks horizontally on the left edge of the canvas. As they work, you can’t help feel the rhythm of their work, their muscles exerting as they scrap the floor, not wishing to present a dramatic scene, but rather finish their work. There is a wine bottle on the side suggesting a gift from the viewer as something to take a break over. The curled shavings where these men have gone over previously present a chaos among the rigid parallel lines, and entice your hand to run through them. When compared to more traditional motifs of men in paintings, it’s clear Caillebotte is uninterested in dramatizing these men-he has avoided giving these men particular, unique faces, and dramatic poses. Much like Woman Combing Her Hair, we are in an apartment, The Floor Planers maybe more bourgeois than the former, and peeping in on a casual event which exposes skin. These men are not fully nude, but with their discernible faces, their bodies and form become what we examine most. As one critic put it, in bewilderment over the lack of romanticism compared with traditional male figures, “By all means, gentlemen, paint nudes if nudes are what you’re after. […] But make your nudes beautiful, or don’t do it at all.” (19) I can’t help but feel Caillebotte would have laughed at this critic, because he is clearly not interested in the ‘ideal’ beauty, and these men are desirable in their own right, and directed toward a viewer the critic is selfishly ignoring.
Through fantasy we learn to desire and there is no set object that is the ultimate, perfect object of desire that can fulfill our lack. It’s through aesthetics that the image allows fantasy to be played out, and in the construction of desire, we attempt to fill the lack that the object can provide. The aesthetic object then must allow for a fantasy to fulfill the lacks which are present, thus catering to that lack. If the self has a desire met, it is negated into something new, in which the new desire must seek a new object to fill it. This then could be an explanation as to why conservative traditions came to be challenged in impressionism, since the desires and ideals formulated by some, are non-existent in others. Rolla’s painter, Gervex, was taken to court because it depicted prostitution, and had to be defended on moral grounds, thus showing a fear that desire would be invoked in the viewer, a desire unacceptable by the government who was directing the public’s eye. The term ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ becomes apt here, for when one sees Rolla as a moral dilemma, its creator sees it as social commentary. The Birth of Venus, Woman Combing Her Hair, and The Floor Planers are all dependent on the viewer’s personal fantasies, in social context, to create meaning, and thus become subject to others’ mercy, because when social standards are deviated from, a conflict arises in which each perspective must reconcile with other perspectives. The question then lies on how strong personal desire is to withstand heavy mediation from the public sphere, since desire stems from a lack, and in being provided a possible filler, the temptation becomes palpable. To me, this seems the driving force behind advertisement: show what you don’t have, to create a lack in the subject, who then desires to obtain the unattainable sensation that the object can provide.

Thinking about Degas’ and Caillebotte’s painting with Lacan’s definition of desire in mind, I can’t help but think of them in relation to modern art and Bouguereau’s, The Birth of Venus. If these impressionist paintings show worlds of desire, it’s clear that an introspective examination of the self’s voyeurism is at the forefront, whereas Bouguereau’s painting is trying to provide us with an ‘ideal’ desire. Of course these are my subjective interpretations, but at the heart of art lies an ability to invoke sensations and ideas that can be shared through ‘objects’. When thinking about modern art, what comes to my mind are installations, readymades, shock art, and blank canvases-a vast difference from the nude, although we haven’t abandoned the nude completely. I suspect this is due to our transforming focus of desire through time, and that the artist, never fully satiated, continues to question and push conventions in seeking new realms. Another aspect of the shifting styles of art revolve around political and social contexts. So, what would it mean to make art without desire? I can’t find a satisfactory answer, and it feels that you either address desire, or attempt to make it, both of which are attempts for the artist to gain acknowledgement through recognition.

Bibliography

Levine, Steven Z. Lacan Reframed: A Guide for the Arts Student. London: I.B. Tauris, 2008. 15. Print.
Levine, Steven Z. Lacan Reframed: A Guide for the Arts Student. London: I.B. Tauris, 2008. 32. Print.
Zizek, Slavoj. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1992. Print.
Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel. “Desire Caught by the Tail.” Lacan: The Absolute Master. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1991. 199. Print.
What is NEGATION? Definition of NEGATION (Psychology Dictionary). (n.d.). Retrieved from http://psychologydictionary.org/negation/
Negation and its Reliabilities. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.lacan.com/pfallerf.htm
Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel. “Desire Caught by the Tail.” Lacan: The Absolute Master. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1991. 202. Print.
Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel. “Desire Caught by the Tail.” Lacan: The Absolute Master. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1991. 204. Print.
Zizek, Slavoj. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1992. Print.
Barbe-Gall, Françoise. How to Look at Impressionism. London: Frances Lincoln Limited, 2013. 49. Print
Dawkins, H. (2002). The nude in French art and culture, 1870-1910. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 8. Print.
Dawkins, H. (2002). The nude in French art and culture, 1870-1910. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 13. Print.
Dawkins, H. (2002). The nude in French art and culture, 1870-1910. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 16. Print.
Dawkins, H. (2002). The nude in French art and culture, 1870-1910. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 41. Print.
Dawkins, H. (2002). The nude in French art and culture, 1870-1910. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 54. Print.
De Duve, Thierry. “Why Was Modernism Born in France” Artforum Vol. 52, No. 5, Jan. 2014, 196. Print.
Boer, J. R. J. Van. Impressionism–through Clear Eyes: The Movement and Its Precursors : Museum Boymans-van Beuningen Rotterdam, 19 September-29 November 1992. Rotterdam: Museum ; 8. 1992. Print.
Boer, J. R. J. Van. Impressionism–through Clear Eyes: The Movement and Its Precursors : Museum Boymans-van Beuningen Rotterdam, 19 September-29 November 1992. Rotterdam: Museum ; 8. 1992. Print.
Barbe-Gall, Françoise. How to Look at Impressionism. London: Frances Lincoln Limited, 2013. 197. Print.

Week Nine

May 31, 2015 / hacjer16 / Comments Off

As the semester winds down toward the end, and reflections surface more frequently in relation to the self-evaluation, I feel one of my last journal entries should focus on my experience with Proust this semester. I remember reading the introduction by Kilmartin feeling skeptical, and that I wouldn’t face any issues in reading this massive collection. The way he addressed Proust in a personal manner made me feel a little off-put, and I also began to be scared I’d be reading countless biblical-resembling psalm messages. After reading the first few hundred pages I felt similar to my 12 your old self rifling through War and Peace-absolutely confused by all the names, places, and style of writing. I read Tolstoy’s masterpiece 10 years later, and thoroughly enjoyed it, so I tried to keep in mind that Proust was something like Philosophy-you have to suck at it for a while in order to suck a little less at interpreting it.

One of my most vivid recollections of the earlier readings were the scenes of Cottard, and laughing in my hallway as I put his awkward figure toward someone I knew in real life. Another was when I was basking in the sun, reading Proust and noticing the cherry tree in my front yard losing its pink, milky white leaves. There was a certain appreciation in those seconds in trying to absorb the beauty of a moment which I think would have escaped me without Proust. As the weeks progressed, I began to manage my time better, realizing 30 pages generally took about an hour, which helped subside last minute reading. But, last minute reading was important to me because remembering over 200 pages is like trying to remember the entire Lord of the Rings series scene by scene.

I can’t tell which week it was, but the realization of Proust’s intention of how he creates each character, as impressions rather than creations, mixed with my newfound knowledge of the history and context this series takes place, struck me with awe in how genius writing this actually is. Putting aside all the beautiful philosophical and theoretical parts, I’ve felt myself drawn into an examination of my past, and examining my own self sense of importance slowly deteriorating. Of course this is not a fully life altering experience, and I plan on working through the whole text in the future, but it is a piece of literature well worth attempting in one’s life if they ever wish to take on an introverted examination of self identity.

The biggest impression I’ve gotten from this series is authorship, followed closely by identity and time (obviously), and there’s a certain inspiration in wanting to write that you get when reading this-the pressure to show the world your genius dissipates and you become more interested in sharing sensations.

Week Eight

May 23, 2015 / hacjer16 / Comments Off

If you haven’t read The Death of the Author by Roland Barthes, I highly recommend it in conjunction with Proust’s La Recherche, and should note that it only takes around 5 minutes to finish. In the essay, Barthes is explicitly detailing what theories Proust is analyzing through the narrator, those being the functions of the critic, author, and reader. Barthes argues that the symbol of the author rises with the modern age, and it is in this symbol that we falsely attribute the explanation of their work as belonging to the author. The argument is that it is language which speaks, not the author, and it’s through the author that this language can be performed. Failures of the critics, to Barthes, was that they held the author as an epitomized figure who was thought to “nourish the book,” rather than being “born simultaneously with the text.” (1) The consequences of this is that genius and talent a priori seems to fall, and is rather dependent on experience and tradition. Since language is ‘finished’, what the author composes has already been finished in a theoretical dictionary. One complaint toward the critic, is that once a text is given an author, a limit is imposed on that text which allows its composition to bear an ultimate meaning, thus allowing the critic to be victorious once they discover the author. When writing becomes an act without intending to assign a secret, it becomes a revolutionary activity, “an anti-theological activity.” (2) The final point Barthes brings up is, “Thus is revealed the total existence of writing: a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author.” (3) So, with the death of the author, comes the birth of the reader, and it is only in the reader that literature is possible to exist and be deciphered.

One final note: it was nice to be able to understand this passage as a result from reading La Recherche. “Proust gave modern writing its epic. By a radical reversal, instead of putting his life into his novel, as is so often maintained, he made of his very life a work for which his own book was the model; so that it is clear to us that Charlus does not imitate Montesquiou but that Montesquiou – in his anecdotal, historical reality – is no more than a secondary fragment, derived from Charlus.” (4) How can we analyze the narrator’s plight of becoming a writer, reader, and critic with this essay in mind now, and also the separation of the public/private aspect of the artist?

Bibliography

1.) Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” 1967. Essay. 2.
2.) Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” 1967. Essay. 3.
3.) Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” 1967. Essay. 4.
4.) Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” 1967. Essay. 2.

Project Outline

May 10, 2015 / hacjer16 / Comments Off

Jeremy Hacker
Project Outline

Impressionism and Desire

If a photograph could capture desire perfectly and fulfil our longing of achieving a powerful aesthetic moment, then why bother painting at all? There must be some reason artists, particularly painters, choose to work with particular mediums with a specific choice of what gets put onto that medium. The impressionist painter before the end of the 19^th century began to play with light, time, subjective focus, and a different portrayal of desire, but why? One only has to look at realistic paintings, near photographic in viewing, such as William Adolphe Bouguereau’s, The Birth of Venus, to see what impressionism is potentially and most likely responding to. The woman of this painting is portrayed as a heavenly, godlike woman who stands among cupids in an otherworldly oceanic scene. This painting and Titian’s, Venus of Urbino, both represent the popular, traditional style of depiction of Venus, and painting, which poses the ideal vs the real. With these two paintings in mind, we can look at two Caillebotte paintings, Nude Woman and The Floor Scrapers, and immediately see a shift in perception and reception of art. Nude Woman portrays a naked woman lying on a couch, hardly in a position to care for the viewer, and The Floor Scrapers has an undertone of homosexuality and a brief glimpse of modernism-the idea of scraping out the old and bringing in the new. An immediate contrast immediately surfaces between photorealistic realism painting and impressionism, being their choice of engagement with the viewer and desire’s role in affluence of that view. Realism was held to a high standard of tradition, which art critics didn’t fail to impose on the rise of impressionism, confused and bitter with what they thought shoddy and not well-done painting. The viewer is thus confronted with having to wrestle with the ideas present in these paintings, rather than be pleased with immediate satiation of desire through realism. There’s nothing comfortable about staring at Caillebotte’s Nude Woman, but you can’t help go through a list of questions as to why this piece of furniture is there, who is she, what has happened, etc., whereas in the realistic paintings I’ve brought up don’t leave much room for the imagination as their story unfolds like a fill-in-the-blank picture book.

Why does it matter to look at an art style over 100 years old, when modern art already presents extensive questions about art’s importance and purpose? With any artistic medium there is a tradition and history ingrained in it, because an art style doesn’t spring from nothing. I imagine it is a widely held, firm belief that modern art has its roots from impressionist ideas, particularly the way in which impressionism shifted the viewer’s focus, playing with their desire and anticipation. With the change of time come the change of society, yet when one lingers with impressionism they can’t help but see ideas still prevalent today, particularly with the way we address our desires toward sexuality and commercialism. My goal is to look at the poignant themes which impressionism responds to, and correlate those ideas toward modern times, with desire as a main emphasis in both the viewer and artist’s frame of mind. What I’ve done so far is to give a brief explanation of impressionism’s relationship with desire, but I’ve yet to examine desire. Beside the common sense response to the question: what is desire, I’m curious as to what and where desire comes from. In an examination of Lacan’s psychoanalysis of desire, Borch-Jacobsen has summarized Lacan: “Unknowable, unreal, denatured, sexually neuter, the ‘object’ of desire is therefore a non-object, a negated object.” (1) If we’re to look at impressionism with this theory as a lens, then what ideas about human desire can we uncover, particularly with what we choose to pine over, and what can the past say about, and even change, the way we think of the present? With a psychoanalytical approach in examining desire, and viewing how shifts of art styles occur as influenced by culture and time, I will try and show how and what role desire plays through looking at key impressionist paintings.

Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel. “Desire Caught by the Tail.” Lacan: The Absolute Master. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1991. 202. Print.

Week Seven

May 10, 2015 / hacjer16 / Comments Off

“Denying temporal succession, denying the self, denying the astronomical universe, are apparent desperations and secret consolations. Our destiny (as contrasted with the hell of Swedenborg and the hell of Tibetan mythology) is not frightful by being unreal; it is frightful because it is irreversible and iron-clad. Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.” (1)

In trying to formulate something to say about time, I remembered an old essay I read by Borges called, A New Refutation of Time. Rereading it while maneuvering Proust was immensely enjoyable, because I originally read it with idealism and metaphysics in mind. Borges’ argument is directed toward Berkeley’s idealism, but I’m going to use it to examine In Search of Lost Time.

When I picture Proust’s narrator in the process of recalling his earlier years in Combray, particularly the scene with the madeleine, I imagine time as being compressed into the treat, waiting to be unlocked in the mind once tasted. Is the present the sum series of the past or is the past simultaneous with the present? It seems that if the past is simultaneous with the present, then there is no past, only the present, meaning there’s no present without the past, creating an endlessly circular paradoxical headache. I think Borges would refute the idea of time being compressed into a madeleine, which awaits being unlocked, but rather call it a reflection of the past. The subtle difference is that one lives again in the moment, while one reflects it, and to Borges time cannot be regained-it cannot be relived.

The second half of the first sentence I’ve quoted states a “desperation[s] and secret consolation[s]” in idealist notions of time. One is to assume the theory Borges is refuting claims time as not structured a->b, but rather something similar to the madeleine, existing in lumps and possibly eternally recurring. The madeleine then is a source of comfort, because it allows us to slip away from the rigid, unbreakable foundation of a linear sequence, which never breaks in its stretch toward the infinite. Ultimately, this desperation and consolation comes from the fear of death, for the human body is bound to die, and one must come to terms somehow with the acknowledgment of non-existence having once existed.

I find solitude in both Borges and Proust, and being the sort of agnostic, unsure-of-everything kind of person I am, I accept both notions presented here. It seems possible to regain those moments you hold on to dearly, to live in them and stow away the present. At the same time, I’m realistic and accept that time, relative, is a cold, merciless idea which seems inescapable, perhaps due to the dimension we exist in. We must come to terms with parting from ‘good times’, if only to see other good times, or maybe even fall on the bad.

1.) Borges, Jorge Luis. “A New Refutation of Time.” Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings. Ed. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby. New York: New Directions Pub., 2007. 233-234. Print.

Book Report

May 3, 2015 / hacjer16 / Comments Off

Jeremy Hacker
Book Report

Title: How to look at Impressionism
Author: Françoise Barbe-Gall
Frances Lincoln Limited 2013
303 Pages
Art, Art History

I can’t help but imagine artists such as Monet, Manet, Renoir, and Caillebotte who gave impressionism its rise to have been quite sarcastic. I don’t mean this to be taken negatively, but rather view these artists as having chosen humorous sensibility as a response to repetition and staleness. While I think that modern art is either hit or miss and struggles with the same problems of repetition, sometimes relying on shock too heavily, the question almost always lingers as to how, why, and what standards of judgments we/I place on art, and what art even is. With these questions in mind, the artist is left with either freedom of experimentation, or to consciously or unconsciously follow the constituent collection of form and content which create a particular genre of art. It’s not a farfetched idea in thinking that modern art and its attached ideas were born from these sarcastic, impressionism artists, and what Françoise Barbe-Gall has done in How to look at Impressionism, is to recreate a narrative which starts from the rise of impressionism, in a poetic, fluid and carries us into what concludes as the heir of impressionism.

Françoise Barbe-Gall studied art history at the Sorbonne and Ecole du Louvre and is now currently a professor at the Ecole. She has written other books such as How to Talk to Children About Art, and How to Look at a Painting, showing that she has a passion for sharing her love for art and ways in which to view art more succinctly. Françoise is a co-founder of CORETA, a cultural association which she lectures at to promote further knowledge of art. It’s safe to say she knows her art, especially French art.

How to look at Impressionism is a historical narrative which uses key paintings in a series of themes in order to recreate the motifs of impressionism. The themes in order are: getting out of the house, seizing the moment, seduced by appearances, simplifying painting, immersing yourself in nature, and the heirs of impressionism. For each painting, Françoise formally analyses the work, and then gives her own flavor and interpretation, providing rich historical context about the art, its author, and social ideas circulating at the time. Each painting is displayed as a whole in one section, and then broken up and enhanced in another. In this context I was exposed to a closer examination than a normal internet search would uncover. What struck me the most in these close examinations was how indistinct each brush stroke is and what it’s trying to represent. There’s a painting by Renoir called Flirting with the Sun, in which a sailboat shines brightly white on the lake, and there appears to be red and blue figures lying on the boat floor. In the close-up, it just looks like 2 smears of red and 3 spears of blue. This crystallizes part of which impressionism is, for me, in that our perception creates meaning through these quick flashes of light and color, and the artists is attempting to recreate this process through one which doesn’t try to sugar coat what the eye sees. I can’t help but imagine a serious art critic of the time foaming at the mouth in seeing such lackadaisical brushstrokes, which actually creates quite good painting.

I’ve never read a “how to look at art” book before because it seems odd to have someone explain how to look at art to me, but I’ve come to realize how different a painting is once you become familiar with some ideas embedded in its paint. This sentiment made me realize that in reading a book which helps you view art, you must be conscious of how much power the narrator has in influencing your opinion. I think it’s impossible to escape a truly objective viewing of an art piece, and I don’t necessarily find that particular viewing all that interesting, but I do think it’s important to attempt your own personal interpretation of art, particularly impressionism, which at times feels blurry and dizzying. Françoise assuages part of this concern, by which she describes a painting by Monet called Impression, Sunrise, “There is nothing there to understand. All reasoning disintegrates in the face of the simple sweetness of the moment.” (1). This helped paint another picture for me of impressionism, because my initial thoughts was that these paintings were carefully designed to each deliver some latent social commentary, but what we get is a moment in time being frozen by an artist’s impression of a moment. These artists weren’t necessarily interested in creating masterpieces, they just wanted to explore and live in these moments, portraying new ideas and new experiences. The word impressionism itself implies thoughts or feelings without much evidence. This clear cut definition brings a contender forward quickly, mainly the viewer who expects art to be a well formulated, well thought out, and carefully constructed.

“In the pastoral peace and silence of the moment, which seems to hold the promise of an eternal spring, the railway heralds the opposite-the flight of time.” (2) What Françoise is referring to with this elegant statement is Monet’s, A Train in the Countryside, which displays one of the most prominent themes prevalent in impressionism and modernism-the railway. It’s in this painting and Caillebotte’s, The Bridge of Europe [English], I realize a sense of yearning in impressionism-a desire to hold onto the moment, and a recognition of the swiftness and harshness of time. With the train interjected so cleanly and smoothly into the curvaceous hillside of Monet’s painting, and the straight rigid lines of a bridge pointing toward the city, I see perspective so clearly and obviously grasping ahold of my vision. I am guided by the artists to follow their perspective and see in this moment the passing of time and quickly changing world.

After the introduction to the each theme, Françoise presents a popular counter painting which impressionism responds to. For the third theme, seduced by appearances, it is Jules Lefebvre’s, La Verite, which comes under examination in its idealized depiction of a naked woman, and its academic richness in technical skill and form. I appreciated Françoise’s analysis of these counter works because they did not slander them, particularly, but rather gave something to put impressionism in relation to which helps understand what makes a particular art style unique and worth examining. Directly flipping this page showing Lefebvre’s painting, we see Renoir’s, Study, Torso, the Effect of Sunlight, which immediately throws rigidity to the wind and feels as unfiltered as possible. “They were in effect choosing to convey a different kind of truth, no less tyrannical in a sense, than that of the moralists of the past. Theirs was the truth of accurate perception…” (3) This passage which introduces the third theme made me instantly think of realism, and got me questioning what separates impressionism from realism. I think what the impressionists were trying to do was somewhat realism, but rather than paint the reconstructed moment into actuality, they focused on those parts of an impression which captured the eye, thus losing the fine details around the edges.

For the theme of, simplifying painting, Françoise claims, “Impressionism marked the death of the subject as it had thus far been defined,” (4) which melds seamlessly into the next chapter, immersing yourself in nature. It’s no surprise with modernity that impressionism adopted its loss of individuality. With the growing cities, distances shortened, and time speeding up, I look at Manet’s, Bar at the Folies-Bergere, which shows a waitress in a crowded ballroom/bar, eyes glazed and staring at nothing, and realize that look on her face doesn’t merely just represent somberness, but shows keenly that lack of individuality, in which Manet has masterfully depicted modernism and French culture in a moment of time through paint. I’d seen this painting before and interpreted as her just wanting to go home, or wishing to be one with the crowd, but hadn’t realized it could be the face of modernity, lost among a crowded milieu.

Overall I enjoyed this book and was impressed by the interpretations Françoise brought forward. In almost every painting she had a story fabricated to explain what was going on and how she saw it. This immersion in each painting seems sparked my imagination and helped form a better picture of what impressionism is to me. As for my opening paragraph, I can’t help but think those questions would bore these artists, as they were more interested in preserving time rather than appeal to critics.

Citation

Barbe-Gall, Françoise. How to Look at Impressionism. London: Frances Lincoln Limited, 2013. 12. Print.
Barbe-Gall, Françoise. How to Look at Impressionism. London: Frances Lincoln Limited, 2013. 79. Print.
Barbe-Gall, Françoise. How to Look at Impressionism. London: Frances Lincoln Limited, 2013. 119. Print.
Barbe-Gall, Françoise. How to Look at Impressionism. London: Frances Lincoln Limited, 2013. 163. Print.

Week Six

May 3, 2015 / hacjer16 / Comments Off

I couldn’t have been older than 12 when I first became confused on what having a girlfriend meant. I remember crossing into the neighbors yard where an old, yellow, rusty, broken down SUV sat, and having this question. One of my conclusions was that a girlfriend was someone you kissed, and that nobody else was allowed to kiss them. With this in mind and when everyone in the house would be asleep, I would practice my kissing on a stuffed Tigger doll. My first kiss was actually pretty nice-it was snowing and our boots were making slushy sounds in the road. I asked if we could kiss, nervous and shaking, not from the cold, and knowing she had had a few boyfriends before, I was confident that she wouldn’t be shy. It was quick and I felt like a hummingbird, airless and rosy cheeked.

Who we desire and what we pine for is an interesting thought experiment. I believe desire is not exclusive to any particular gender, but someone more conservative than me would argue otherwise. Desire to some extent comes from the social environment, and our inherent will to mimic behavior. We imitate at an early age in order to learn, and it’s hard to deny we are influenced by fads in our early years. If we’re not influenced, we’re strongly moved to oppose the fad rather than ignore it. Does this commercial behavior apply to our desires for humans as well? If we’re not superficial in our designs on who becomes restricted to us, where do the list of qualifications arise from if not out of thin air?

In thinking about how curious it is to label someone as your partner, separating them from ‘friend’ if ever so slightly, and the role commercialism has in manipulating desire, Lacan has an interesting idea about desire which is interpreted by Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen as: “Not being real, the ‘object’ of desire is not natural, either… The ‘object’ of human desire is neither the object that saturates a need… nor the fixed and preestablished object of instinct; it is, properly speaking, their negation.”(1) In other words, there’s a void in us that gets continually filled by our creation of desire. There’s no actual object that can fill this desire, otherwise there would be nothing left to want, so desire itself is a manifestation of our own fantasy or creation. Rather, it’s negating the object we choose to fill that void. My question as a young boy can be tied into this ‘object’ of desire. What I was questioning was how odd it seemed to basically own someone, because if they weren’t faithful to me, then they’d be breaking some sort of mutual partner contract. Thinking of having a lover in this context makes me less judgmental toward Swann and the narrator of Proust’s “Search,” because having a lover is in fact a mutual ownership, where sides take different stakes of levels of ownership. So, we place humans into this void, hoping to negate our need for desire to be filled, only to then realize it’s not what we thought it would be. We may be satiated, but true 100% bliss seems almost impossible to attain, for even if it’s reached, reality is waiting to swallow you back up and make you desire more.

Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel. “Desire Caught by the Tail.” Lacan: The Absolute Master. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1991. 201. Print.

Green

April 30, 2015 / hacjer16 / Comments Off

July 22, 2012
Logar, Afghanistan 01:00

As I walk past him I contemplate whispering “fuck you,” because he got to lie on the hill while we trudged on. I think about that near whisper a lot, and question whether I in fact did utter those words, the implication being that my last words to him were sarcastic and somewhat antagonizing. Being chosen to do the main part of the mission was hip, and even though I wouldn’t mind lying on that hill to only pull security, my heart raced with the prospect of my first raid. Those seconds I walked passed him have been replayed in my mind thousands of times, of which I scream at myself to tell him to move. The next day, after all the horror embedded itself into us, the bomb squad showed us all the IED’s we walked past, footsteps inches from the pressure plates. I’ve tried to come up with some sort of fate as to who was chosen would die that night, but all I can come up with is bad luck and chance.

The sweat from walking would collect salt piles on our shirts after multiple klicks, even in the dead of the night where that unforgiving Afghan sun wasn’t present. In the blackness, all you see is a circle of muddled green. It’s like an old television from the 90’s, whose screen flickers white and black, thousands of Dalmatians scrambling across the surface, yet here the white is green. Objects are blobs of smeared green and black. Twisting the lens changes your depth perception, and you must become proficient in knowing the right twists to avoid falling into deep dried riverbeds called wadis. We had only been in this country for a few days and were doing missions of which we’d been advised should have been toned down, so as to become more familiar with the territory, combat and war.

It couldn’t have been more than 50 paces past that almost whisper when the sky lit up. Outside my circular green vision I see a flash, and second later a peal of false thunder, and immediately we all fall to the ground thinking it to be a mortar. The flash in the sky was like the sun unveiling its face for a moment, only to hide back into the curtains of the night. There was only one flash, the sound, and silence. In that silence the dawn of comprehension falls so heavily and swiftly, that you begin to feel sick and dread the idea of someone being hurt. I remember begging to myself, “please no,” hoping everything was alright, but the suspicion of the truth creeping its way up. After those intense moments of silence, the radio breaks the stillness and we hear the cry, “we’re hit.” We break composure for a moment in our race back up that hill. My friend lost 40 pounds in that run, not immediately of course, but in the months to come of which he thought if he’d only run faster, they would still be alive.

At the top of the hill our medic is beside the person who moments ago I almost whisper jokingly to. I see him as a blob of green, hard to decipher through that crackling green television, and notice that this blob is missing shapes which normal blobs have. I hear a forceful plead, “stay with me Horsley,” and then my leader says, “keep going, he has no chance and there’s more.” In these moments truth is nonexistent. In my mind he was completely fine and we were going to save everyone. Minutes later there were more flashes, and more screams, and once the calm settled, a voice whispers in my ear the names. My salt soaked shirt comes into my consciousness and I am shivering, reflecting the names, their faces, and those last days with them. My eyes well and he says we’ll cry about it later, but for now we have to get home. There are coyotes circling around a new blob which enters into my television.

We’re on that hill for over 10 hours, and they tell us not to look, but it’s impossible not to, and there’s evidence splayed across the sand everywhere. They shoot at us and I want to give up, to sink into that sand in sorrow, but the fear that comes into existence, and which takes a few months to control, pushes us to take cover behind what little rocks we can.

A few weeks before, we’re in Vicenza, Italy, and it’s the 4th of July. One of the deceased asks me what true love is, and says he’s going to learn Italian over the deployment. In the tiny wooden cots we’re stuffed in while stationed in Afghanistan, we pack up his How To Learn Italian for Dummies book and ship it to his mother. The empty beds silently yell at us, as we recall the day before in which we sprayed shaving cream everywhere. It’s under the fireworks that we’re both drunk and he comes to me, being one of the oldest of the group, sincerely wondering what true love felt like. He is normally shy, quiet, but when socializes explodes into this mousy, smiling, sporadic tiny kid who laughs and runs around everywhere. I don’t know if I answered his question satisfactorily, but it sorrows me to know he never got the chance.

A few months after this day, when some of us got over the fear, and some of us remained on the base, I’d began reading a poetry book by Cummings which was mailed to me. In those dingy rooms where sand pervaded everything, I’d found a truth lurking in poetry which I believe was only possible through being in such an alienated environment, stifled with the constant threat of death and terror. You think before you deploy that there is a force watching over you, and when you arrive there, you realize all you have are the people you’ve gotten drunk with, cried with, and traveled with for the past years. There’s no closure in watching your friends die, and in poetry I found an expression of feeling which normal literature couldn’t purvey. I wrote a poem called bodies, and whenever I read it those days come flashing back, and I know I’d never have been able to write such a thing without that particular experience. It’s in this reflection that I’m aware the worlds of experience lurking behind people’s words, and that with a little scrutiny, you can uncover a moment in time encapsulated by what a writer chooses to say.

Week Five

April 27, 2015 / hacjer16 / Comments Off

In retrospect it seems nearly impossible to explain the fear I had of this particular sound. It confuses me why I never thought of it being an alarm clock, and I question now if that’s even what it was. I also wonder why nobody ever stopped this horrendous noise, because it would play through the middle of the night. Its first introduction to me was during a dream, in my childhood, in which I woke up crying and crawled to the corner of my room, fearful of moving and waiting until the sun came up. I spent a lot of my childhood on that floor, and continued this habit until my mid-teens. It became my safe spot, that furry, charcoal gray and black carpeted floor made in the early 90’s.

I would sneak into the living room in the middle of the night, after being awakened from this sound, and peek through the slits of the blinds, trying to stealthily unveil the source of evil emanating from this bleating, nightmarish rhythm. Just across the street was a streetlight, and its light shone heavily on the side of the house I slept in. Deep in my gut, I felt as if this sound was bellowing from the darkest parts of the night, fixating on torturing my sleep and introducing anxiety into my life.

When I was around 16 and living with friends and girlfriends, I always had to have a movie playing before I fell asleep. Silence and blackness terrified me, and I’d focus on the ringing in my ears so intensely that no amount of exhaustion would succumb to slumber. I’d go through phases of different movies, and their playback loops of the DVD menu would ingrain itself in my head. If I awoke early, but was too sleepy to turn the T.V. off, I’d fall asleep again and that loop would be incorporated into my dreams. It’s not hard to recall the Harry Potter or Shrek DVD menus to this day. It’s during this phase that my sleep phobia was its worst. I’d catch myself in the cusp of sleep’s grasp and a jolt of fear would surge through me as I thought I was dying. This incorporation of death and sleep began hard to shake off for many years.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the narrator in Proust’s “Search”, and I can’t help but feel linked to those moments in the bedroom where sleep becomes a giant in the corner. It’s funny how much you can remember of your past in reading someone else’s words, and in what arrangement words can be put so as to unlock the doors of memory. In a way it brings some relief knowing I’m not the only one who has/had a somewhat childish fear.

Week Four

April 26, 2015 / hacjer16 / Comments Off

Arriving at the Vicenza airport 4 years after my first landing there, I recalled my initial fantasies of what the future would hold and compared them with the reality. The initial fantasies were unmet, but the reality was an unexpected journey that changed my life irrevocably in both good and bad ways. What I thought about when getting off that bus to fly home to Seattle was the friends I’d lost, that feeling of depression when great times come to an end, the nights downtown, the beautiful cities, and that I’d bury my involvement with the military as much as possible, taking it as but one experience and moving on. In watching most of The Sorrow and The Pity, a lot of recollections of my year in Afghanistan surfaced, coupled with other memories, and in thinking of writing these journal entries, I decided to bring up some of those memories for this class reluctantly.

When we landed in Afghanistan, the surrounding mountains and environment gave me what I retroactively can now call the most sublime (Kantian) moment in my life. We were all waiting for these supposed mortar attacks anxiously, for that moment we would no longer be cherries. A few days days later, two of my best friends died, and about 7 people were wounded, some severely. We stayed with the bodies over 12 hours to ensure they got back to the base, being shot at multiple times. When the explosives unit came, they showed us the footprints we’d made, crossing over a dozen bombs. It was like stepping in the one empty box in a full 10×10 minesweeper game. I think about those footprints of mine often, and Salazar who was lying on one for about half an hour. A couple of people were shot those final moments before we finally managed to clean the place up. In the ride back to base I’d laid on someone’s leg wound on accident, in which he laughed and said “do you mind?” Moments before that my buddy Espinoza and I had machine gun rounds snap inches in-between our heads, scrambling in the dust trying to find cover behind the tires. It was pretty funny and terrifying, because I’d said we were going to get shot sitting like that just moments before. The reason I bring some of these moments up is that the group of 30 we’d come with had dwindled to less than 20 and we’d come closer than ever before since the 2 years we’d been together. The one person in charge of us turned out to be a coward which surprise us all greatly, and reminded me of the French who took the German’s side in France during World War II.

I understand that fear he probably was wrenched with, because he’d been blown up hours before and thrown meters away, and had to endure losing one of his soldier’s days within arriving. We had expected him to be courageous, to be that figure to hold our hands, but he abandoned us in despair, and I can’t possibly be mad. You can never gauge what a person will be like during moments of extreme stress, no matter what pre-established notions you have of them. It’s odd seeing someone so built and buff scramble around so afraid during a firefight.

The one thing I didn’t realize before joining the military, was the love these old veterans had for us young cherries. During those initial months in Afghanistan I realized how much I hated war, and how pointless being there was. I already had a semi-disgust for the military, but this cemented a deeper hate for those higher unknown powers at work in decisions for America. I am anti-war to this day, but in some sick way I’m glad I got to experience war firsthand. The reason I joined really fell on a love that fell apart which lasted a few years and my desire to go out in a bang. Rarely I came across people who actually wanted to be in the military, and if they did, they were almost always really, really patriotic. What also struck me was the intelligence most of these people I lived with had. Most weren’t academically smart, but had a high degree of street smarts. My branch of occupation was typically considered for the dumbest of the military, but a lack of intelligence and common sense would have gotten you moved quickly.

Once you deploy and then come home, you come across the cherries back at home who missed the deployment, and you see that innocence in their eyes and long for it. All you care about in training them is to make sure they’re going to get the chance to also come home when it’s their turn to deploy. The burden lies heavy when you lose someone in your platoon, and is a constant, daily reminder.

Our leader rarely if ever went out on missions with us, and we never got replacements, having to do the full deployment with triple the amount of normal missions tasked out to each individual. He was one of the strongest (physically) person I’ve ever met. He won multiple wrestling tournaments and was an instructor at a prestigious combat school. We thought he’d be this badass dude that was going to protect us, but he spent most of the deployment in the gym. My squad leader was an Iraq vet, tiny and skinny, and smoked a pack a day. The first firefight I was in, our platoon send the 6 of us out to deal with it, being the golden squad of the platoon. It started with them shooting at us in their dried up river bed systems-wadis. Our platoon set up an L, and we went out the side, and crossed this small empty field. They started laying into us with machine guns, less than 150 meters away. I remember using blades of grass as cover, and firing my machine gun, feeling so proud that I was protecting my 5 squad mates as they had to retreat, running their asses off in the extreme heat. This skinny guy didn’t give a fuck, and had no break in clarity, while I was scrambling and disoriented. It took a few weeks to get the fighting down and not lose vision. Fighting in Afghanistan is hell. Not only do we carry hundreds of pounds of equipment, but we’re facing people wearing rags and familiar with the territory, able to blend in quickly with the locals. I don’t know if I killed anyone, but it gave me a shell shock feeling knowing friends with multiple kill counts. I asked myself why we were there daily, always wondering if I should just put up with the penalty of not fighting anymore. The punishments of abandoning your duty during a deployment is extremely severe. I decided to make it through, if only to do what I could to keep what little people we had left alive.

When we had the ceremony for the two that died, days into our deployment, while saluting the portraits of the fallen, a staff sergeant from another platoon yelled “Wombats” at the top of his voice (Wombats being our platoon name). I normally cringe at anything military related-wearing dog tags, salutes, marching, cadences etc.-but this yell was the most beautiful, tragic, and heart wrenching sound I’d ever heard in my life. Being a Wombat was something that had deep roots in our brigade, memories you hear while being smoked for hours down “the hallway”. If there’s any one strong moment in which post memory resonates for me, it’s the feeling of walking down those barracks hallways, recollecting the memories handed down to me-“this person died, this person went to Legion Co., that used to be my old room.” We had a creed that went, “pork chop pork chop, greasy greasy, beat that team, fucking easy easy, Gooooooo Wombats.” It’s from 3000 Miles To Graceland, and it was the weirdest shit ever. Whenever someone died on the base in Afghanistan, you would hear Taps being played, and salute the helicopter flying away with the body. I remember someone died a day before he was to fly home. The day our 2 friends died, we heard Taps over and over and over. During the summer, that song feels like it is endlessly playing. I remember thinking there was no point in believing I was going to come home, and the fear of death actually left me until I came home from Afghanistan. I remember rolling that phrase, “the fear” and “I lost the fear,” off my tongue all during the deployment. Once you lose the fear, you become comfortable there in its simplicity and seeing dead bodies doesn’t strike you as hard. The routine is just like any other place, except you don’t worry about bills, rent and debts.

A few days after the Wombats yell, I’d survived a near atomic explosion. They said it was the biggest vehicle suicide in the history of the war. It turns out that the semi carrying these explosives was turned around at my checkpoint, and decided to go around the wall and blow up at the side. I remember looking at the vehicle x-ray machine and then suddenly being hit by a massive shockwave. Everything went black and I reached my hand up to make sure my buddy Espinoza’s top half was still there. He crawled down the hatch and we asked each other if we were okay. We got on top of the vehicle and looked at the mushroom cloud next to us, amazed. There were tents everywhere, and I mean everywhere. The debris was as far as the eye can see. It killed a ton of people, but I never saw them, and we left that base a few days later to go to another base. Flying away I was struck with a hopeless, entrenching feeling of despair that we’d lost two amazing people for absolutely nothing, and I started to question that day if I was even alive. The rest of the deployment was a miserable grind, always waiting for an explosion which would take your legs off, or having to gauze a carotid gunshot wound.

Salazar’s mother flew to Italy for a lost soldier’s family get-together. The company gathered money for their flight to Italy, and then showed them around the city for a week. Horsley’s family didn’t come and wished to never speak to us. I talk to his brother every now and then, but other than that, I respect their wish entirely. Salazar’s mother is a wonderful woman. They have a daughter with cystic fibrosis, and I remember Salazar sending all his money to help with her surgeries. We had a toast to his mother, and my squad leader gave a heart-wrenching speech. He broke down in tears during it, saying he was sorry he couldn’t bring her little boy home. That is a guilt I can honestly say is with me every second of my life. I’m not sure how easy that is to get across, but the few of us Wombats left from the deployment all share that burden. When at “our” bar in downtown Vicenza, where the bartenders each had drinks named after us, I had a moment with a buddy where we looked at each other, nodded, and he said “me too.” We both were thinking of him, and it was comforting knowing my pain was shared. There’s something about losing someone in war that wrenches your soul harder than any other death I’ve ever witnessed. I think about the World Wars often and the immeasurable amount of pain the world took on from those years. My usual silence about my involvement with the war makes me relate easily to those old war veterens-it’s hard to speak of war to those who haven’t experience it. And most of all, it’s hard to speak of it when you are shamed of being a part of it, while being proud of those brave enough to have endured it with you.

The days of coming back to Italy, drunk and ecstatic, walking around the parks and taking the bus downtown, were blissfully peaceful. As time goes, it’s easier to feign normalcy, but the wounds of seeing such monstrosities stays in my memory, and reminds me of what mankind is capable of, and the importance in doing whatever it takes to strive for peace, no matter how ignorant and childish a wish of such is. As for my memories, I doubt I’ll ever talk about them as brief as this again, and when I die, I know they will no longer exist unless I’ve shared them.

Jeremy Hacker

In Search of Lost Time