The Cerasi Chapel (July 12 - Part One)
July 12
At the gallery yesterday I bought a book containing all of the Caravaggios to be found in Rome. The focus of this project is widening. I want to look at and think deeply about them all, and, in doing so, wonder aloud about what it is we value in a work of art. I don’t think that our reaction to a work of art is merely our opinion. I’ve always believed that certain works of art are objectively good, and I connect this goodness, quite naturally I think, to morality. That isn’t to say that a good work of art cannot contain elements we would consider immoral. This is in a way too obvious to go into much here. All one need do is read some Goodreads reviews in which a reader dislikes an entire book because the protagonist was unlikeable. We don’t have to like a book or a painting in order to call it good. I don’t even want to wade into all the discourse around this right now, the quite boring, because obvious, op-eds by boomer, tenured professors (Francine Prose, etc.) about how students need to encounter work that makes them feel uncomfortable. I don’t like it when people talk about art as a kind of vitamin, a big, bitter pill you best swallow. If something makes me uncomfortable in the moral sense — the classic example, though it doesn’t make me uncomfortable, is Lolita - it still has to be “good.” What makes the risk of Lolita worth it is that it’s such a beautiful fucking book. If some conservative librarian wants to throw Lolita out because they believe it could corrupt our youth (though, if it corrupts anything, it would probably be a middle-aged Christian man), they’re throwing it out because of its content — what it says, rather than how it says it. The reason the totalitarian moment we’re living through is so unbearable is because of its privileging of content over those things that make it such that people pay two euro to light up a Caravaggio but don’t so much as stop before the next altar down, which is lit up all the time. And I’m not talking about craft. Craft talk is a Trojan horse for a backwards, racist, classist way of talking about art-making. It’s like the dust-up over Lil Yachty saying that he didn’t listen to rap made before he was born, as if he needed to in order to call himself a rapper. Do I think every young poet should read The Wasteland? Of course. But do I want to be the kind of forty-year-old white guy who says they have to have read The Wasteland? No. Not reading The Wasteland would be like a chef saying they’re not much interested in how the vegetables they buy are grown. They can still cook. But it would be better if they took a walk on the farm and talked to the farmer whose produce they buy.
No, what is good about a work of art is mysterious. That’s why I used the phrase “those things that make it such.” Of course they’re not actually things. Like, it isn’t this brushstroke instead of that one, this line instead of that one, this sentence instead of that one. It’s possible that someone was better at brushstrokes than Caravaggio, but that he was a better painter. Using Caravaggio as an example, one could list a number of things he did well — he made great decisions about which scenes to paint, which point of view to paint them from, how to incorporate modernity into the paintings to reinvigorate the old stories, his use (of course) of light and shadow, his biography (which few who look at his paintings aren’t aware of, and which must in some way impact the way we see them). But put all of this together and you still don’t quite have an answer for why they move us. I should say that I don’t assume everyone loves them. But it can’t be denied that he’s a painter who holds a certain attraction for us. Again, minor as it seems, I haven’t seen another painter in any of the churches in Rome whose paintings you need to pay to see.
So maybe the way to get at this idea of the goodness of a work of art is to use a metaphor I always use with my students. Some people are pickier eaters than others, but we all have taste. Literally. We eat a meal. It was very, very good. Or it was ok. Or we didn’t feel like finishing it. Or we couldn’t finish it. It’s the same with art. I either want to look at a painting or I don’t, either want to keep reading or don’t. I talked about this before. There are certain writers I just flat-out like. It doesn’t really matter what they’re writing about. I like them like I like certain faces. Keats describes this, on his hiking trip in Scotland. He’s watching some traditional Scottish dancers, and says that there was one “exquisite mouth.”
Someone, I don’t remember who, said that a writer is one for whom writing is hard. I’d add to that that a writer is one for whom reading is either extremely easy or impossible. I either read and just want to keep reading forever, or I read and want to stop. It gets to where I begin to feel almost nauseous. Something’s wrong here. Metaphor of the meal — you’ve taken the first few bites. Shit. But it’s even worse. You can cover the meal up with your napkin, or pretend you’re full, take it with you and throw it away. But with reading, you’re basically in someone’s mind. I don’t want to be in most people’s minds. I guess you’re in mine now. Sorry. I spend a lot of time in students’ minds. It’s…not easy. But they don’t really know what they’re doing, mostly. It gets really bad when you have someone who thinks they’re good, that what they have to say you need to know. I was reading a manuscript recently for a thing — early on, there was a whole paragraph about how the writer didn’t really want to write the book they were writing. I thought, “Good. Then don’t.”
What does this have to do with the Caravaggios? Well, I want to see them. I wouldn’t say I necessarily like seeing them. I’ve spent more time watching a single episode of Black Mirror than I’ve spent in front of any of his paintings. But I want them in my life. It makes me glad to know they’re there. It’s this way with books, too. I see certain of them on the shelf, think, “There you are.” The other day in the English-language bookstore (disappointing), I almost bought a book I actually have, just because I was delighted to see it there (By the Lake by John McGahern). It has nothing to do with supporting a writer. McGahern is dead. He doesn’t need me. I need him. I don’t need another copy of the book. I need the book.
I would never say that I don’t want someone to write or paint. I just don’t necessarily want to have to see the painting they paint or read the book they write. And I don’t understand people who will strain to finish a book they don’t like. Why? Though I once finished a novel that was truly awful just to convince myself that maybe my writing wasn’t truly awful. Actually, I liked reading that book, because it was so bad it was entertaining. But I wouldn’t want to make a habit of that. I think that’s different from people who read something because others are reading it. I don’t even necessarily mean book club books. I mean books that people think they ought to read, and, not only that, ought to like. There’s a novel my students adore. I studied with the man who wrote it. Great guy. I can’t make it past the third page. I can hear a critique of this — “Well, give it a chance! Maybe it gets better! Do you really want to read the way Amazon wants us to read, quantifying how far each reader made it through a Kindle novel?”
Ok. I have a controversial answer — the thing that made me put the book down after three pages every time I’ve picked it up, I know that that same thing runs through the whole novel. Because it’s not that I don’t like the first scene, or the tense, or the point of view. It’s the flavor of it.
In a few classes at Stanford I taught a novel I hated because it worked so well with the theme of the class and was by a former Stanford undergrad, a silly-famous writer now. The novel wasn’t bad in the way the novel I read to feel better about my own writing was bad. It wasn’t funny-bad. It wasn’t even bad, actually. It was just…nothing. It tasted like nothing. It was some writing on a page that went on for an unfortunately long time and then it was over. The last time I taught it (I’d given up reading it), I couldn’t hold my opinion about it in anymore. It was a moral travesty, masquerading as a moral novel, and I couldn’t stand it anymore. I spent a half hour bashing a particular sentence. The sentence was a microcosm of the novel as a whole. It was technically grammatically correct. It was relevant to the story. But being inside the sentence was like being in some other sleeper’s nightmare. The students loved it - my rant, not the novel. They didn’t like it either! They just thought they were supposed to. We all agreed that it wasn’t good.
But this same writer we decided wasn’t good sits on stages and talks about their work, their process, their next project. And their agent keeps selling the novels because the previous ones sold, and so the badness is perpetuated, to the point where no one even knows what anything means anymore. And one day the writer will die, and the personality they brought to shore up the work, the way they had of navigating the literary world with the kind of skill lacking in their prose, will fall away, and the books, the poor, poorly-written books, will be left to stand on their own. They won’t all fall at once. It will take some time. But eventually they will, and no one will read them anymore. But the person who wrote them will have had a good life despite their quality.
Gerhard Richter said about his paintings, “They have to hold up here.” Meaning, they have to be strong enough to exist without him.
Great art survives its maker.
Social media is the best thing that ever happened to bad artists, because they can be good at everything except making art, and still make a very good living. But the art they’re making, it dies with them. Caravaggio seems like he was quite a character. His Instagram would’ve been batshit. But he didn’t need social media. His paintings hold up here.
One time I was at a poetry reading in Hell, a.k.a. the Associated Writing Programs conference. This year it was in Seattle. It was a so-called “offsite” reading, meaning it was a reading outside of the massive convention center where the conference takes place. Offsite readings promise to be less funereal. You can put your lanyard in your pocket. You don’t have to wheel a suitcase or whatever around, and pretend to be doing fine mentally. This reading was at a gallery. There was wine. I know because I’d drank a lot of it. It was a reading for a very hip press with a single name that rhymes with grave. As I stood in the back — I never sit down at such things, afraid that I won’t be able to escape if it turns out I absolutely have to — listening to the first few poets, I recognized a certain expression on the faces of those around me. This was in the years before everyone was always on their phones. They were listening, but not hearing. They looked like when you’re in the dentist’s chair, getting bite-wing x-rays, and the technician has stepped out of the room to press the button, and you’re kind of gagging but you know you need to just hold still and it’ll be over soon. So I decided to conduct a little experiment. I decided to go around and ask people, in a whisper, of course, if they were actually enjoying the reading. I probably talked to five or six people total. And after looking at me in surprise, and taking in what I was asking them, each and every one of them admitted, in a tone that was at once apologetic and like it came as a relief to say it, that, no, actually, they weren’t. They looked like children being told, it’s ok, you can touch the flower.
What they needed wasn’t permission to dislike the reading — I could tell they disliked it as much as I did. What they seemed to need was for someone to tell them that it was ok not to like it. I think I might have given each of them a little pat afterwards, like, “Good boy…good girl.” It would never occur to me to go up to someone in the Cerasi Chapel and ask, “Do you actually like this?” I’m not seeing that dentist’s chair expression on their faces, so, until now, it’s never even ocurred to me that it’s something I might ask.