Tasting with your eye: on the too much of reality

 

« Savoir  être  superficiel par profondeur. » I extract this maxim from Georges Salles “Le regard” – The look. The deep know how to be superficial – the English explains too much, decompresses the spring, here. English is a good language for punchlines, while French is one for epigrams.

I came upon the name Georges Salles in Adrienne Monnier’s essay about her late friend, Walter Benjamin, published by Mercure de France in 1952. Monnier was Sylvia Beach’s lover – two real live muses, Beach, of course, of James Joyce, and Monnier of a number of writers, including Walter Benjamin, who she first met in 1930 at her famous bookstore/salon. He wrote Monnier a letter when he was on his final flight from the Nazis out of Paris to Marseilles, and then, by a fatal misstep, by way of the Pyrenees to Spain.  

“I keep thinking of you not only in dreaming of Paris and rue de L’Odeon, for which I wish the most powerful and least solicited protective divinities – but also a many of the intersections of my thought.”

A muse in need of a muse.

Georges Salles’  Le Regard was a shared enthusiasm of Monnier and Benjamin. Salles was, officially, an expert on “Asian” art. He was also a great defender of the art of the connoisseur, an art founded not, for him, on signatures, on attribution, but on the ocular enjoyment – like the tongue, the eye has its pure pleasures. Salles was the grandchild of Gustave Eiffel, and the collaborator of Andre Malraux. However, a book about the sensual delight of the visible, published in 1939, was not likely to survive the sensual horror of the war.

«  The certainty of the amateur’s glance is neither more intellectual nor less organic than the selection of a gourmet. Everything happens in the shokc of an impression, confusing to our mind but distinct to our senses.”  Here was a man of a certain radical empiricism: thought follows the senses at a distance, as the kite, as spectacular as it may be, follows the string held by the child. The child determines, in the last instance, whether to bring the kite down or to let it go.

It is the last chapter of The Look that might have truly fired up Benjamin: the day. The author goes out of the museum, away from the paintings and sculptures, and into the streets of Paris to use his heightened optical sense. This return to life is I think something we have all experienced – although for me the experience is going from a movie that has really delighted me or moved me out of the theatre into the streets. Ideally, the movie ends at, say, eight o’clock p.m. on an early spring day. Ideally, the city is New Orleans or Atlanta – and I am in my twenties. The transfer from one realm of fascination to another is a curiously delayed passage – the streets “look” cinematic. This experience is described by no one better than Walker Percy in The Movie Goer. I know the streets that Percy’s character, Binx, walked around. I have a distinct memory of coming out of Prytania theatre dazzled by one movie or another, and walking back across Audobon Park to the apartment in the upper floor of one of the big houses that I shared with Frank. Frank is long gone in my life, a boat that has drifted away, but I do remember the elevation of common life that succeeded seeing some movies, that little extra around things – as Nietzsche puts it in the intro to the Twilight of the Idols, “nothing succeeds without some measure of exaggeration. The too much of force is proof of force.”

This is named, approximately, the “Search” in the Moviegoer. Binx, the narrator, calls it waking up and finding one is in a strange place. “The movies are onto the search but they screw it up.” Or sometimes, when you are young, they give you the impulse. Even movies shown on TV gave me that moment, sometimes.

It isn’t such a long distance from Georges Salles in 1939 in Paris (to whom Benjamin dedicated his last published bit of writing when he was still alive) and me in 1982, walking home from the Prytania movie theatre. An almost equal distance separates me from 1982 and 1982 from 1939. In Seven league boots, I go backwards.