Berenson’s Ideas of Phosphorescent Cerebration
If there is anyone who seems to
draw together all that has been said so far, and in a language of concepts and
a treasury of images similar to the figures throughout this essay, it is
Bernard Berenson. Recall that BB, as he
was called, played a very active role in both evalkuating and identifying a
great number of Renaissance paintings from Italy and then in working with
dealers to have them bought and brought to America during the first three
decaxdes of the twentieth century. Though there are questionable aspects to his
work, and doubtful ethics in his collaboration with Joseph Duveen’s company, it
cannot be denied close to half the masterpieces of the Renaissance in American
museums, art galleries and private collections are there because of Berenson.
He also bought and fixed up an old estate outside of Florence called the
Villa I Tatti filling it with an extremely rich and important collection of
paintings and a vast library of books, photographs, journals and manuscripts. At BB’s death, I Tatti was given to Harvard
University and now serves as a major research institute for graduate and
post-graduate students.
Interestingly, in the last years of
his life—and he lived until he was in his nineties, he was both troubled by
doubts about what he had done and also drawn back to his Jewish roots, or at
least, felt nostalgia for the Yiddish home he had grown up in, first in
Lithuania where he was born, and then in Boston where his parents moved when he
was eleven years old. It is with this
rough background sketch that we can start to appreciate what he is saying in
this brief extract from pne of his letters.
July 9th, Il Tatti
Ideas swifter than meteors
cross my mind and in a flash not only disappear but without the faintest trace
of memory. It is of such frequent
recurrence that it must be a characteristic of a brain in decomposition, a sort
of marsh-light phosphorescence.
Literally shooting stars of cerebration, some lighting dazzlingly a vast
horizon. Too swift to note down between
the flash and the forgetting, even if one always stood or sat like St. John as
represented at Patmos, pen in hand waiting for the voice of the Holy Ghost. And may not experience like mine have been
the source of the belief in divine inspiration, or of the Muses?[1]
It as though he had gone to the
same texts cited in other sections of my essay and pulled the key words and
metaphors out and then tossed them together somewhat haphazardly. Let us list, identify and reflect more deeply
on the seven figurative statements and allusions in this diary entry:
(1) Meteors flash
quickly through the mind and then disappear
(2) A brain in
decomposition exudes a kind of glowing march-gas or will’o’th’ wisp
(3) Phosphorescence
serves as a natural phenomenon and a metaphor of intellection
(4) Shooting
stars light up the horizon in an act of cerebration, of an intellectual and yet
at the same time an unconscious act of the will
(5) St. John of
the Apocalypse seated on Mount Patmos waits for Voice of God
(6) Divine
inspiration in general
(7) The
inspiration of the poetic or creative
Muses
Actually there are two parts to his
statement, confused and seemingly disconnected as it seems: first, he offers
three symbolic images for what he experiences as the coming and going of ideas
in his elderly mind (1-4) and then, second, three discussions of inspiration and the abstract nature of such intellection
(5-7). That Bernard Berenson thinks of himself
as inspired in the same way—by physiological processes, by divine intervention
and by an act of the will—as great historical exemplars does, of course, show
his egotism; but why he should wish to be seen I such company rather than in other contexts
still needs to be addressed.
Berenson knows that he is aging and
that his body and mind are starting to fail him. He is, however, overly pessimistic, because he
lives on longer than he ever expected, with his mnind mostly intact, and his
capacity for writing more books unabated. Nevertheless, how he writes and what he writes
about turns out to be different from his past achievements. Before, though sometimes he prided himself on
his abilities as a conversationalist and also needed people to stand near him
to act as stimulants and muses to his thought, most of these people being women
whom he was attracted to and who were in various degrees attracted to him, as a
writer he was often stymied. His
sentences did not flow. His ideas did
not easily form into persuasive forms. He
needed helpers, such as wife mary or one of his many lovers, mistresses and
acolytes to re-write, to argue with him, and thus to accept his objections and
insulting rages; and then professional editors went through his work and he
would have to make agonizing efforts to follow the suggestions that were made
or the changes silently entered on his pages.
But when forced into house-arrest
and then into hiding during the dark days of World War Two, BB began to write
in a new way and about new topics. He
became more autobiographical. He kept
diaries from day to day, about his feelings, his readings, his conversations. He
started to write about his dreams. He recollected his childhood in Lithuania
and in Boston, not in a coherent or continuous way, as he sometimes did in his
earlier books as part of some illustration of the theory of art he was trying
to propound or in his letters—thousands upon thousands of them over nearly
eight decades—where he was describing his hopes and dreams, his ambitions and
plans, his needs and pains. But now,
just as we see in the passage cited above, he becomes self-conscious about the
way ideas come to him: in fits and starts, in flashes of inspiration and
memory, often too fast for him to grasp and record, sometimes too vague and
abstract to fit into words and syntax. For
someone who always wanted to be and to be thought of as rational and
scientific, he now finds his mind leaking or oozing with glowing ideas,
glimpses of memory appearing out of nowhere and colliding with his commonsense
perceptions. Not sure whether these insights, memories and feelings are what he
has created in his own mind or have been evoked from the books, people and
landscape he has visited, he wonders if this whole phenomenon is not what other
historical writers, secular and religious, have had happen to them as well.
In the end, Berenson was not sure. He did not try to formulate a proper
psychological theory, as his friend and neighbour Leo Stein did in his few
theoretical books on aesthetics and psychoanalysis written in later life, or
his wife’s daughter Karin Stephan did in her two books on Bergsonian philosophy
and psychoanalysis before she became too overwhelmed by problems in her life
and committed an early suicide. When he
does publish a few books on aesthetics, history, and ways of seeing and
knowing, he does not really or fully address the phenomenon that breaks forth
in the passage above. That is why we
have to look at a few other writers in the next sections of this essay.
[1] Bernard Berenson, Sunset and
Twilight from the Diaries of 1947-1958, edited and with an Epilogue by
Nicky Mariano, Introduction by Iris Origo (New York: A Helen and Kurt Wolff
Book/Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963) p. 136
No comments:
Post a Comment