Tag: Egon Schiele

a dream itself is but a shadow

Sigmund Freud c.1885, with Freudian facial hair

Whether or not you agree with Sigmund Freud that “the dream proves to be the first of a series of abnormal psychic formations” or that “one who cannot explain the origin of the dream pictures will strive in vain to understand [the] phobias, the obsessive and delusional ideas and likewise their therapeutic importance,” (The Interpretation of Dreams, 1913 translated by A.A. Brill) dreams are a regular, if not daily/nightly part of human life regardless of culture, language, age etc, and so not without significance. I could go on about dreams like I did about honey in a previous post but I won’t – they are too pervasive popular culture – just everywhere in culture, in books, and plays and art and films and songs (Dreams they complicate/complement my life, as Michael Stipe wrote.) That’s enough of that.

But what about daydreams? If dreams arrive uninvited from the unconscious or subconscious mind, then surely the things we think about, or dwell on, deliberately are even more important. “Dwell on” is an interesting phrase – to dwell is “to live in a place or in a particular way” BUT ‘dwell’ has a fascinating history that makes it seem like exactly the right word in this situation – from the Old English dwellan “to lead into error, deceive, mislead,” related to dwelian “to be led into error, go wrong in belief or judgment” etc, etc, according to etymonline.com : I’ll put the whole of this in a footnote* because I think it’s fascinating, but the key point is that at some time in the medieval period it’s largely negative connotations, to “delay” become modified to mean “to stay.” But I like to think the old meaning of the word lingers in the subtext like dreams in the subconscious.

But I could say something similar about my own use of the word “deliberately” above (“Things we dwell on deliberately”) and even more so the phrase I nearly used instead, which was “on purpose” – but then this would become a ridiculously long and convoluted piece of writing, so that’s enough etymology for now.

The human mind is a powerful thing. Even for those of us who don’t believe in telekinesis or remote viewing or ‘psychic powers’ in the explicitly paranormal sense. After all, your mind controls everything you think and nearly everything you do to the point where separating the mind from the body, as western culture tends to do, becomes almost untenable. Even though the euphemism “unresponsive wakefulness syndrome” has gained some traction in recent years, that’s because the dysphemism (had to look that word up) “persistent vegetative state” is something we fear and therefore that loss of self, or of humanity offends us. It’s preferable for most of us, as fiction frequently demonstrates, to believe that even in that state, dreams of some kind continue in the mind; because as human beings we are fully our mind in a way that we are only occasionally fully our body. One of the fears connected to the loss of self is that we lose the ability to choose what to think about, which is intriguing because that takes us again into the (might as well use the pompous word) realm of dreams.

The Danish actress Asta Nielsen as Hamlet in 1921

My favourite Shakespeare quote is the last line from this scene in Hamlet (Act 2 Scene 2)

Hamlet: Denmark’s a prison.
Rosencrantz: Then is the world one.
Hamlet: A goodly one, in which there are many confines, wards, and
dungeons, Denmark being one o’ th’ worst.
Rosencrantz: We think not so, my lord.
Hamlet: Why then ’tis none to you; for there is nothing either good or
bad, but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison.

“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so” seems to deny any possibility of objective morality, but its logic is undeniable. After all, you or I may think that [insert one of thousands of examples from current politics and world events] is ‘wrong’, but if [individual in position of power] doesn’t think so, and does the wrong thing, even if all of the worst possible outcomes stem from it, the most you can say is that you, and people who agree with you, think it was wrong. Hitler almost certainly believed, as he went to the grave, that he was a martyr who had failed in his grand plan only because of the betrayal and duplicity of others. I think that’s wrong, you hopefully think that’s wrong, even “history” thinks that’s wrong, but none of that matters to Hitler in his bunker in 1945, any more than Rosencrantz & Guildenstern finding Denmark to be a nice place if only their old friend Hamlet could regain his usual good humour makes any difference to Hamlet.

Anyway, daydreams or reveries (a nice word that feels a bit pretentious to say); its dictionary definitions are mostly very positive – a series of pleasant thoughts about something you would prefer to be doing or something you would like to achieve in the future.
A state of abstracted musing.
A loose or irregular train of thought occurring in musing or mediation; deep musing – and there’s a school of thought that has been around for a long time but seems even more prevalent today, which values daydreams as, not just idle thoughts, but as affirmations. Anyone who has tried to change their life through hypnosis or various kinds of therapy will find that daydreaming and visualising are supposed to be important aspects of your journey to a better you. In a way all of these self-help gurus, lifestyle coaches and therapists are saying the same thing; as Oscar Hammerstein put it, “You got to have a dream,
If you don’t have a dream, How you gonna have a dream come true?” But is making your dreams, even your daydreams, come true necessarily a good thing?

patriotic vapour trails spotted this winter

I seem to remember once reading that if you can focus all of your attention on something for 15 seconds you’ll remember it forever (not sure about the duration; if you Google stuff like this you find there are millions of people offering strategies to improve your memory, which isn’t quite what I was looking for). Whether or not that’s true, every time I see a vapour trail in an otherwise blue sky, I have the same thought/image – actually two thoughts, but “first you look so strong/then you fade away” came later and failed to replace the earlier thought, which must date from the age of 9 or 10 or so. I realise that people telling you their dreams is boring (or so people say, I never find it to be so), but you don’t have to keep reading. I can see the fluffy, white trail against the hot pale blue sky (it’s summer, the sun is incandescent and there are no clouds) and as my eye follows it from its fraying, fading tail to its source, I can see the nose cone of the plane glinting in the sun, black or red and metallic. It looks slow, leisurely even, but the object is travelling at hundreds of miles an hour. I know there’s no pilot inside that warm, clean shell (I can imagine feeling its heat, like putting your hand on the bonnet or roof of a car parked in direct sunshine; only there are rivets studding the surface of this machine). I’m shading my eyes with my hand, watching its somehow benign-looking progress, but I know that it’s on its way to the nearby airforce base and that others are simultaneously flying towards other bases and major cities and soon, everything I can see and feel will be vapourised and cease to exist. I had this daydream many times as a child, I have no idea how long it lasted but I can remember the clarity and metallic taste of it incredibly clearly. Did I want it to happen? Definitely not. Was I scared? No, although I remember an almost physical sense of shaking it off afterwards. Did I think it would happen? It’s hard to remember, maybe – but I wouldn’t have been alone in that if so. But anyway, the interesting point to me is that this wasn’t a dream that required sleep or the surrender of the conscious mind to the unconscious – I was presumably doing it “on purpose”, although what that purpose was I have no idea; nothing very nice anyway.

Childhood hero: Charles M Schulz’s Charlie Brown

Probably most of us carry around a few daydreams with us, most I’m sure far more pleasant than that one. I can remember a few from my adolescence that were almost tangible then and still feel that way now (I would swear that I can remember what a particular person’s cheek felt like against my fingertips though I definitely didn’t ever touch it. As my childhood role model, Charlie Brown would say, “Augh!” Charles M. Schulz clearly knew about these things and still felt them vividly as an adult (as, more problematically, did Egon Schiele, subject of my previous article; but let’s not go into that). Most of the daydreams we keep with us into adulthood (or create in adulthood) are probably nicer baggage to carry around than the vapour trail one, unless you’re one of those people who fantasises about smashing people’s heads in with an iron bar (who has such a thing as an iron bar? Why iron? Wouldn’t brass do the job just as well and lead even better?) beyond the teenage years when violent daydreams are almost inevitable, but hopefully fleeting.

But thinking about your daydreams is odd, they are, like your thoughts and dreams, yours and nobody else’s, but where they come from in their detail seems almost as obscure as dream-dreams. Perhaps Freud would know. I have a couple of daydreams that have been lurking around for decades, but while I don’t believe in telekinesis or even the current obsession with affirmations and ‘manifesting,’ apparently I must be a bit superstitious; because if I wrote them down they might not come true innit?

 

*Old English dwellan “to lead into error, deceive, mislead,” related to dwelian “to be led into error, go wrong in belief or judgment,” from Proto-Germanic *dwaljana “to delay, hesitate,” *dwelana “go astray” (source also of Old Norse dvelja “to retard, delay,” Danish dvæle “to linger, dwell,” Swedish dväljas “to dwell, reside;” Middle Dutch dwellen “to stun, perplex;” Old High German twellen “to hinder, delay”) from PIE *dhwel-, extended form of root *dheu- (1) “dust, cloud, vapor, smoke” (also forming words with the related notions of “defective perception or wits”).

The apparent sense evolution in Middle English was through “to procrastinate, delay, be tardy in coming” (late 12c.), to “linger, remain, stay, sojourn,” to “make a home, abide as a permanent resident” (mid-14c.). From late 14c. as “remain (in a certain condition or status),” as in phrase dwell upon “keep the attention fixed on.” Related: Dwelled; dwelt (for which see went); dwells.

It had a noun form in Old English, gedweola “error, heresy, madness.” Also compare Middle English dwale “deception, trickery,” from Old English dwala or from a Scandinavian cognate (such as Danish dvale “trance, stupor, stupefaction”); dwale survived into late Middle English as “a sleeping potion, narcotic drink, deadly nightshade.”

what do you look like?

A few years ago a friend sent me a photograph of the ten-year-old us in our Primary School football team. I was able, without too much thought, to put names to all eleven of the boys, but the biggest surprise was that my initial reaction, for maybe a second but more like two seconds, was not to recognise myself. In my defence, I don’t have any other pictures of me at that age, and even more unusually, in that picture I’m genuinely smiling. Usually I froze when a camera was pointed at me (and still do, if it takes too long), but I must have felt safer than usual in a group shot, because it is a real smile and not the standard grimace that normally happened when I was asked to smile for photographs. I could possibly also be forgiven for my confusion because in contrast with my present self, ten year old me had no eyebrows, a hot-pink-to-puce complexion and unmanageably thick, wavy, fair hair; but even so, that was the face I looked at in the mirror every day for years and, more to the point, that gangly child with comically giant hands actually is me; but what would I know?

My favourite of David Hockney’s self portraits – Self Portrait with Blue Guitar (1977)

In a recent documentary, the artist David Hockney made a remark (paraphrased because I don’t have it to refer to) that resonated with me; your face isn’t for you, it’s for other people. And, as you’d expect of someone who has spent a significant part of his long career scrutinizing people and painting portraits of them, he has a point. Everyone around you has a more accurate idea of what you look like than you do. Even when you see someone ‘in real life’ who you are used to seeing in photographs or films, there’s a moment of mental recalibration; even if they look like their image, the human being before you in three dimensions is a whole different scale from the thing you are used to seeing. I remember reading in some kids’ novel that the young footballer me liked (I’m guessing Willard Price but can’t swear to it) that when being shown photographs of themselves, the indigenous people of (I think) New Guinea, not only weren’t impressed, but didn’t recognise them as anything in particular. Like Hockney, they had a point; if the Victorian people who invented photography hadn’t grown up with a tradition of ‘realistic,’ representational art would they have seen any relationship between themselves as living, breathing, colourful, space-filling three-dimensional organisms and the monochromatic marks on little flat pieces of paper? The response of the fictional New Guinea tribespeople is actually more logical than the response (surprise, wonder, awe) that’s expected of them in the novel.

Hockney went on further to say that portrait painting (if the sitter is present with the artist) gives a better idea of a person than photography does. At first this is a harder argument to buy into in a way, but it has its own logic too. A photograph, as he pointed out, is a two-dimensional record of one second in time, whereas the portrait painter creates their also two-dimensional image from spending time in the company of the sitter and focusing on them, a different, deeper kind of focus, since it engages the brain as well as the senses, than the technical one that happens with a lens, light and film or digital imaging software. A camera doesn’t care what you are like, it just sees how you look, from that angle, for that second. Maybe my big 10-year-old smile really is representative of how I was, but from memory it doesn’t represent that period for me at all.

Egon Schiele in his studio c.1915 (left) vs his 1913 self-portrait (right)

But I might never have written this had I not been reading Frank Whitford’s excellent monograph on the Austrian expressionist painter Egon Schiele (Thames & Hudson, 1981). Schiele is famous for (among other things) his twisted, emaciated and fanatically awkward self-portraits. The man he depicts is scrawny, elongated, intense, sometimes almost feline and utterly modern. Schiele in photographs, on the other hand, is quite a different presence. He sometimes has the expected haunted look and the familiar shock of hair, and he poses almost as awkwardly, but otherwise he looks surprisingly dapper, civilised, diminutive, square faced and elfin. But if we think – and it seems logical that we do – that the photographs show us the ‘real’ Schiele, then the descriptions of those who knew him suggest otherwise. “a slim young man of more than average height… Pale but not sickly, thin in the face, large dark eyes and full longish dark brown hair which stood out in all directions. His manner was a little shy, a little timid and a little self-confident. He did not say much, but when spoken to his face always lit up with the glimmer of a quiet smile.” (Heinrich Benesch, quoted in Whitford, p.66) This description doesn’t exactly clash with the Schiele of the photographs (though he never appears especially tall), but it’s somehow far easier to identify with the dark-eyed, paradoxically shy and confident Schiele of the self portraits. In his own writings, Schiele seems as tortured and intense as in his paintings, but in photographs he appears confident, knowing and slightly arch.  His face, as Hockney says, may not have been for him, but he seems to have captured it in his art in ways that his friends and acquaintances recognised, and which the camera apparently didn’t.

Schiele in 1914 by Josef Anton Trčka (left) vs his 1911 self portrait (right)

Which, what, proves Hockney both right (portraiture is superior to photography) and wrong (Schiele knew his own face)? And anyway, what does that have to do with the 10-year old me? Nothing really, except that the camera, objective and disinterested, captured an aspect of me in that second which may or may not have been “true.” Objectivity and disinterestedness are positive qualities for evaluating facts, but when it comes to human beings, facts and truth have a complicated relationship. Photography, through its “realness,” has issues capturing these complexities, unless the photographer is aware of them and – Diane Arbus and Nan Goldin spring to mind – has the ability to imbue their work with more than the obvious surface information that is the camera’s speciality. But manually-created art, with its human heart and brain directing, naturally takes the relationship between truth and facts in its stride.

One final example that proves nothing really, except to my satisfaction. Around the year 1635, the Spanish painter Diego Velázquez was tasked with painting portraits of the assorted fools, jesters dwarfs and buffoons whose lives were spent entertaining the Spanish court. Most of these people suffered from mental or physical disabilities (or both) and were prized (I think a more accurate word than ‘valued’ in this context) for their difference from ‘normal’ people; in the same way as carnival “freaks” into the early 20th century in fact. Although these people were comparatively privileged, compared to what their lives would have been like had they not been adopted by the Royal court, their position in the household was more akin to pets than friends or even servants. Juan de Calabazas (“John of Gourds; a gourd was a traditional jester’s attribute) suffered from unknown mental illnesses and physical tics. In a time and place where formality and manners were rigidly maintained, especially around the monarch – where a misstep in etiquette could have serious or even fatal consequences, buffoons like Juan entertained the court with unfettered, sometimes nonsensical or outrageous speech, impulsive laughter and strange, free behaviour. Whereas in normal society these people would be lucky even to survive, in the Court their behaviour was celebrated and encouraged. Velázquez is rightly famous for the empathy and humanity with which he painted portraits of these marginalised figures, but although, as Wikipedia (why not?) puts it; “Velázquez painted [Juan] in a relatively calm state, further showing Velazquez’s equal show of dignity to all, whether king or jester” that seems an unusual response to the portrait below, It’s not untrue, but for me at least, Velázquez’s process of humanisation is painful too. The knowledge that this man lived his life as a plaything of the rich and powerful, alive only because they found him funny is troubling enough. But that pathos seems to be embodied in the picture and you know, or it feels like you know, that Velázquez didn’t find him funny, or at least not only funny. It’s something like watching David Lynch’s The Elephant Man compared to looking at the Victorian photographs of the real Joseph Merrick. Seeing the photographs is troubling, seeing Lynch’s cinematic portrait is too, but it’s deeply moving too.

Juan de Calabazas (c.1635-9) by Diego Velázquez

All of which may just be a way of saying that a camera is a machine and does what it does – recording the exterior of what it’s pointed at – perfectly, while a human being does, and feels, many things simultaneously, probably not perfectly. Well I’m sure we all knew that anyway. I eventually got eyebrows, by the way.