Art as self destruction

Thomas Mann, in his novella ‘Death in Venice’, famously wrote: ‘Evil is a necessity. It is the food of genius’. Though the concept of ‘evil’ has changed a bit since Thomas’ time (both the writer and the saint), the idea remains as powerful. In Visconti’s film version, the protagonist, a musician of strict morality who believed in leading ‘a balanced life’ and art as ‘an abstraction’ (based on the composer Gustav Mahler) is mocked by his friend (alter ego) as having achieved the ‘perfect balance’ in his life. ‘Now the art and the artist has become one’, his friend jeers at him, ‘both hitting rock-bottom.’

Always drawn towards the conflict of the rational Apollonian mind vs. the self destructive Dionysian creativity (thanks to Nietzsche who I guess first pointed out the classical conflict), Mann’s lines set me thinking once again. I could immediately recall some famous examples of art (and artists) shining through the depths of darkness:

• Dostoevsky’s guilt stricken womanising (he toured Europe with a girl half his age while his first wife was dying of tuberculosis), compulsive gambling (which ruined him again and again), and amidst all these (topped by his ever increasing epileptic seizures), managing to create some of the greatest masterpieces ever written


• Mozart’s pompous, boastful and showy shallowness, his perverted jokes, lies, obsessive flirting, secretive gambling - and The Figaro, The Magic Flute, the Don Giovanni...


• Einstein’s womanizing, his cruelty to his own children and complete apathy towards his wives and many mistresses


• Goethe, ‘that venerable saint from Germany’ writing lustful poems (Marienbad Elegy – thanks to Google) about his sexual desire for an 18-year-old boy. This I guess was when he was in his sixties or seventies


• Da Vinci’s relationship with younger boys whom he took as pupils and then went on to exploit


• Oscar Wilde's love affair with blackmailers and male prostitutes, young choir-boys, crossdressers, and homosexual brothels of nineteenth century London contrasts beautifully to his immortal creations. In a recent visit to his grave in Paris, I found these words written: ‘Here lies the best man that ever lived’ – I couldn't have agreed more


• Picasso’s passion for women was probably outmatched only by his passion for art


• Our own Satyajit Ray no less; though unnecessarily portrayed as the ‘picture-perfect family man’ by the obsessive Bengali media - Ray's work, like all the above examples, I guess, could stand on it's own

The more I think about it, the more the distinctions get blurred into a complex psycho-causality which is way beyond the capability of my mediocre mind to decipher. Hesse had made an attempt in his novel ‘Narcissus and Goldmund’. Mann himself wrote the story after being drawn to young teenage Polish boy in a Venice hotel.

Picture: A Roman sculpture of Venus at the British Museum

October 28, 2009

An Autumn Sonata

No words or pictures can truly describe the beauty and melancholy of an English autumn. One could only experience it unfolding day by day before one's own eyes; each day like a mosaic from a painting more beautiful than the one before, each day like the last cacophonic burst of a musical splendour before the approaching doom. The sharp chill in the air, the mythic temporal harmony rising from somewhere deep inside, the chirping of birds, the silent prayer to let time stop – that’s how the contemplation of autumn appears to me.

The change of season also reminds me, strangely enough, of another city thousands of miles south: a city which I had known and loved so intimately, which had been my homeland, and makes me feel at exile anywhere else in the world. Normally around this time of the year, winter slowly starts descending on the smog-filled rickety streets of that city, which had now been left behind by an entire generation. What had once been beautiful is now only a helpless haunting memory; like life itself, an endless elegiac yearning.

Ithaca, as always continues to remain elusive, hiding behind the perennial mist, forever beyond understanding…

October 26, 2009

The Last Scene of Act I

With each passing day, the melancholy of the autumnal air is becoming thicker and thicker. Every morning, as I leave for my office, I tend to take the longer route through a nearby park; walking along the mounting piles of dead leaves which seem to cover the morning earth with almost a maternal love, like a thick shroud. Sometimes, in the afternoon, as I sit at a café with a cup of Americano (most often the cheapest option), I look at the distant trees lining the Broadway; the gentle rustle bringing-in the subtle but inevitable fragrance of decay. And I go back to watch the movies, read the books, and live through the weekdays and the weekends, sometimes taking pictures of the fallen leaves as I pass by, marking my days in the calendar. During the long evenings, I often fail to remember if it’s my first autumn, or have I died here before. I fail to remember many things as I sip my wine and think about the increase in heating bills with the approaching winter (all the while looking at the TV screen where the Bergman or the Truffaut DVD would continue guiltily). I think of all the people I had known in the past, people with whom I had once shared a passionate drink or an evening of naïve argument; who are now no more than strangers, living many milky-ways away. I think of the many imaginary lives I’ve lived, the many wishful thoughts of adolescence, the many self-ridiculed dreams of youth. I think of the years I’ve spent running – from place to place, from room to room, from books to books, from lives to lives, each time a disappointment, each time a bigger failure than the once before. And now as I once again sit at my café and sip my Americano gone cold, the movies and the books and the rooms seem to fade out. All I can see in front of me is the approaching autumn; the piles of fallen, abandoned leaves.

With my last fading strength, I wish I could ask like a child: what had life been like?