May 9, 2024 : Issue #67

WONDERCABINET : Lawrence Weschler’s Fortnightly Compendium of the Miscellaneous Diverse

WELCOME

This week, in a respite from the horrors of the immediate news cycle, a recollection of Mark Quinn's splendid dirigible in Venice Biennales past leads into a trill of reflections on nursing generally.

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RECOLLECTIONS OF BIENNALES PAST

All the recent coverage of the newest instantiation of the Venice Art Biennale (the sixtieth!) has set me to recalling some of the past versions I myself attended, and in particular that of 2013 (the fifty-fifth) when I got up very, very early one morning and made my way out from the Piazza San Marco across the wide channel to the plaza in front of the St Giorgio Maggiore church (with its Palladio façade) in order to be present for an unfurling that I figured would have to be occurring at some point in the moments ahead, and indeed proceeded to do just that.  I was able to record the spectacle on my iPhone and before saying anything further about it, I invite you to view the mysterious gawp-inducing two-minute spectacle for yourselves (trust me, it’s worth it):

View unfurling here.

WTF indeed. The inflated balloon entitled Breath, the work of the British artist Marc Quinn, anchored a major show of his work at the Cini Foundation behind the church and portrayed a pregnant Alison Lapper, who had been born with a congenital Thalidomide-like condition (no arms and abbreviated legs) in 1965 but nevertheless went on to live a vivid life both as an artist (wielding the paintbrush with her mouth) and presently a mother. Quinn had first portrayed her over a decade earlier in a four-foot sculpture which a few years later got expanded into a 12-foot-high Carrara marble likeness for an at times controversial eighteen-month tenure (2005-2007) atop the prestigious Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square in front of London’s National Gallery. (Some were offended by the sheer naked audacity of the gesture, but others, including Quinn and Lapper themselves, pointed to the uncontested parallel existence of countless classical nude torsos inside the Gallery itself). And indeed, the gesture slowly grew on people, so much so that an even larger inflatable version of the same sculpture proved the spectacular centerpiece of the opening and closing ceremonies at London’s Paralympic  games in 2012, proceeding from there the following year to its star turn there at the tip of the canal in Venice as the figurehead for the entire biennale season.

And breathe the figure sometimes uncannily seemed to do, depending on the strength of the enveloping breezes, a phenomenon I myself captured in another iPhone video a few days later. And indeed concerns over that tendency were the reason that the entire piece was deflated each evening and reinflated every dawn, lest it hurl chaotically free during the windy nights: hence my own solitary vigil that previous morn. 

Lapper’s own remarkable, engaging, and public-facing life alongside her devoted son Parys continued on for several years thereafter before taking a tragic turn in 2019 with the nineteen-year-old boy’s accidental passing, but the bracing image of that Venice balloon literally in-spiring like that every morning continues to blithe my memories.  Aye: the world.

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The Main Event

A BREASTFEEDING MIND-MEANDER

Dedicated to Amani and Shaya, recent arrivals (!), and their dear mothers.

All of which set me to thinking again about the remarkable Ms. Lapper and her baby, renewed research upon whom soon brought me to this photo from just a few hours after the child’s delivery:

That in turn set me to thinking about breastfeeding more generally (bare with me here, please, across the even more leapfroggy than usual series of loose-synaped associations that follow), and in particular about a passage by the great film and sound editor (and longtime friend of this Cabinet) Walter Murch in the forthcoming mega-memoir-manifesto (Volume 1: Suddenly; Volume 2: Something; Volume 3: Clicked) that he has recently been gestating, chapters of which he has been sharing with me for some time now as he’s been going along.

As it happens, one of those chapters (currently slated for Volume 2) reprises a line of speculation that Murch previewed across a public Zoom conversation the two of us held during the Venice Architectural Biennale a few years back, which I in turn featured in the very first issue of this entire Substack. The topic, as some of you may recall, was Murch’s ongoing speculations regarding the way eyes in virtually everyone’s faces almost always line up at the golden mean (the 1.0 division along the 1.632 length) between that person’s chin and their hairline:

—and in turn, as well along the same latitude line bisecting the entire movie screen in almost every plot-significant close-up or even medium-range shot across the decades and across cultures and across directors and cinematographers:

Golden means rampant in Minghella’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, Lang’s M., Coppola’s Raging Bull, Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, and Coppola’s Apocalypse Now.

As had become usual with us, Walter’s new chapter elicited a fresh response from me, as follows, at length:

Thoroughly enjoyed that one and found myself disagreeing with virtually none of it.

But things really began hotting up for me around p. 19 with the discussion of eyes and babes, or rather the respective gazes of the nursing mother and her nursing baby (the doubled valence of that same word, “nursing,” implied in both the giving and the receiving).

So we human chicks are perhaps similarly programmed to respond to our mothers’ eyes: babies lock on to those eyes as they suck on the nipple, drinking in the love coming from the eyes along with the mothers’ milk. And those eyes may become ‘supernormaled’ in a neurological groove, somewhere deep in our brains, at the golden ratio between hairline and chin.

Funny how what began as an auditory evocation of a primordial womb tone in your earlier work {see here} has now opened out onto a similarly originary investigation into the visual implications of nursing. (Interesting in this context, too, how nursing requires placing the infant in a location quite similar to where she was prior to birth, vis-a-vis her mother’s heartbeat and voice and digestive sounds, etc.)

Anyway, maybe I responded so powerfully to this passage because over the last several weeks I’ve been reading a separate though complimentary set of speculations on the originary import of breastfeeding (in this case as the taproot source of the entire artistic enterprise and experience) at the start of Alva Noë’s new book Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature. See the following excerpts:

Western art abounds with depictions of the nursing mother. The display of the Mother and Child is central to Christian religious thinking, so this isn’t surprising.

Madonna del latte, Andrea Pisano (1343-7)

But it may be that pictures of the suckling infant are important to us for reasons that go beyond our interest in the life of Jesus. Breast-feeding, after all, is basic to our mammalian biology; it is also, for the vast majority of us, our first opportunity for nurturing love. In fact, or so at least I propose, breast-feeding is also a key to understanding the very nature of art; the fact that pictures of nursing mothers are so common may point to one of art’s abiding features: art is always concerned with itself.

{…} Let’s explore this issue more fully by taking a concrete look at the activity of breast-feeding itself. Notice, it has a characteristic shape. Mother cradles infant, placing the breast—or a bottle, for my purposes this difference doesn’t matter—to the infant’s mouth. Baby sucks; then, let us imagine, it nods off. Mothers respond by gently jiggling the infant and in this way drawing it back to the task; this is a spontaneous reaction of mothers, not something they learn or are taught. Baby resumes sucking. A movement or sound or noise startles the baby. It stops sucking. Mama jiggles. Baby starts sucking again. Soon it nods off. Mama jiggles. And the cycle continues. As the baby grows older, and stronger, and as the mother gains more confidence, the process gets smoother and more efficient. But the basic issue—getting the baby to eat enough before it falls asleep—is something that requires attention and negotiation.

{…} It is one of the important ideas of this book that art and its problems have their origin in this vicinity.

{For the full passage, see here.}

Or maybe it’s because, I’ve been watching (albeit from a distance, via a series of progressive photographic captures) the evolution of a marvelously embodied painting that our friend Gerri Davis (Trevor Oakes’s wife, and as such the bride from the solar eclipse wedding where as you may recall I served as rabbi a few years back) has been doing of her own vantage upon her baby Artemis nursing, to wit this:

Gerri Davis’s painting of Artemis Nursing.

{This being one of a whole series of such “Madonna and child” studies, featuring Artemis and her eventual baby brother Loïc, all of which are viewable here.}

Your chapter features that great photo of the mother and babe gazing deep into each other’s eyes,

and we’ve spoken before of that moment captured in my own “Sara’s Eyes” talk piece,

of the way that a baby’s eyes seem to lock onto the other’s eyes (rather than mouths, noses, or ears), gaze fixing on gaze, almost from the moment of birth, as if by way of a sort of visual sucking reflex. But what’s interesting to me in Gerri’s painted image is how gazing and sucking (and being suckled) form a continuous loop. And note how the horizontal center line of the entire painting seems to run right between Artemis’s gazing eye and her sucking mouth. And yet, I am pretty sure that even with her face turned horizontal rather than vertical, from her mother’s point of view, Artemis’s gazing eye seems to be placed at the Golden Mean of the vertical line running from the tip of her upper ear down to where her forehead falls behind her mother’s breast. Just as her mother’s eyes—the object of the baby’s returned gaze—likely fall at the Golden Mean of the expanse between her (Gerri’s) chin and hairline.

Which in turn brings us back to that discussion we two were having a while back about torso as face and face as torso from my Everything that Rises book.

New York Times Magazine cover and Magritte Le Viol.

If we take seriously the notion of the torso as a face—with the bottom of the pubis as the tip of the chin, and the clavicle as the hairline, as it were—well then, the succor-giving nipples “naturally” read as eyes, eyes that as it were gaze out at us. (cf. Rilke’s “Torso of Apollo”) If you then look at a line-up of standing nudes (in art or in photography), isn’t it also the case that the nipples occur at the golden mean between the top of the head and the bend of the model’s knees? Not sure about that last, but I think so (consider for example this consumately odd instance.)

No wonder your editor son-in-law cameraman’s toes curl at violations of the natural relation.

In that specific context, incidentally, consider Adolphe Menzel’s Herculean portrait of his own (which is to say, a dwarf’s) right foot (also discussed elsewhere in Everything that Rises):

Fascinating there that the golden mean of the vertical line running from where the light gives way to dark there at the point where the top of the foot feeds into the bottom of the leg (roughly contiguous with the horizontal line connecting the two sides of the ankle, with the leg itself reading as the “neck” to the foot’s “face”) on up to the tip of the maximally extended second toe—I think that mean occurs at the point where the shadow of the big toe falls onto the other otherwise lit up saddle of the foot, or for that matter, at the line where the bottom of the toe strains to lift the toe from the plane of that foot. (The foot-face hence staring back at the viewer.)

Returning to the question of order which you also raise—how the mind endlessly endeavors to draw order from chaos—and the (to me, utterly new) insight that the word “order” feeds back to Latin ordo, which is to say the locus where threads interpenetrate on a loom—it’s also worth noting that the “matrix” of the loom (the technical term for that criss-cross pattern of intersecting threads) in turn wends back to the word for mother, mater (loom and womb, in that sense), a primordial word which of course also feeds into the word “matter,” which is to say material reality. As in Shakespeare’s originary query: “What’s the matter?”

Which in turn reminds me of that great passage from the middle of John Greenleaf Whittier’s poem, “The Prayer of Agassiz”:

Said the Master to the youth:
“We have come in search of truth,
Trying with uncertain key
Door by door of mystery;
We are reaching, through His laws,
To the garment-hem of Cause,
Him, the endless, unbegun,
The Unnamable, the One
Light of all our light the Source,
Life of life, and Force of force.
As with fingers of the blind,
We are groping here to find
What the hieroglyphics mean
Of the Unseen in the seen,
What the Thought which underlies
Nature’s masking and disguise,
What it is that hides beneath
Blight and bloom and birth and death.
By past efforts unavailing,
Doubt and error, loss and failing,
Of our weakness made aware,
On the threshold of our task
Let us light and guidance ask,
Let us pause in silent prayer!”

With “prayer” suggesting Audio to the light’s “Visual.” (Don’t you wish that fortune cookies were capacious enough to accommodate that whole wide passage?) (And incidentally what a great middle name Whittier had himself, and how apt.)

Let’s see. I keep coming back to the point you graze in passing towards the end, the business of the screen itself, there in the dark, as a sort of face staring back at us staring at it: hence the charged quality of the golden mean horizontal as the thing we first, or at any rate primarily, gaze upon: a privileged zone that stays privileged, news that stays new. I especially liked Peter Rosenfeld’s observation on your p. 35 about how we should:

“Consider this. Stop what you are doing at this second and quickly look out a window that is close to you. What part of the window frame did your eyes immediately land on? Yup, there it is: the Golden Ratio. You went there instinctively and then shifted your gaze to the street or the bird or whatever. {and so forth} “

I might expand that observation further out. What does it mean to turn to face the world? The phrase of course connotes that we face our own face toward the world, but it also suggests that we project a face onto the world, we actively “face” the world, which is to say that we transform the world into and hence experience the world as an as-if face facing back at us (the screen in the movie house hence being but a focused instance of a much wider phenomenon).

I wonder in this context whether the Oakes Twins are onto something in noting how the brow ridge above our eyeball enforces a sort of foreshortening of our upper visual field: simply gazing outward toward the horizon, our eye takes in more below than it does above because of the interference of the brow above. (To see higher we have to pivot upward at the neck joint.) Within that “natural” (in the phenomenological sense) visual field, the horizon hence naturally falls, I would bet, at the golden ratio of the vertical expanse from bottom to top.

All of which is to say that (at our best, anyway, our most receptive, our most focused) we face the world face-to-face, which is to say I to Thou in Buberian terms.

Which in turn, in closing, reminds me of that wonderful passage from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s journal which I believe I’ve shared with you before, to wit:

I have before now experienced that the best way to get a vivid impression and feeling of landscape is to sit down before it and read or become otherwise absorbed in thought. For then when your eye happens to be attracted to the landscape, you seem to catch nature at unawares, and see her before she has time to change her aspect. The effect lasts but for a single instant, then passes away almost as soon as you were conscious of it. But it is real for that moment. It is as if you could overhear and understand what the trees are whispering to one another, as if you caught a glimpse of a face unveiled, which veils itself from every willful glance. The mystery is revealed, and after a breath or two becomes just as great a mystery as it was before.

An intriguing rhyme off the Whittier poem passage above—and for that matter another great potential Fortune Cookie entry should such cookies ever expand enough to contain it.

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ANIMAL MITCHELL
Cartoons by David Stanford, from the Animal Mitchell archive

animalmitchellpublications@gmail.com

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