More Interesting Ideas

Knowing his name: Celebrating the centenary of James Baldwin’s birth by Fred D’Aguiar (The Times Literary Supplement) makes me wonder about the madness of America. I have read a little of Baldwin, what is important is that we - white Americans - cannot see all of our country until we see what those we have dispossessed, oppressed, and marginalized see. Why did Martin Luther King, Jr. see the hope of America when Donald J. Trump attracted so many white males? 

Baldwin’s sentences load his characters with everything their environment throws at them, then he looks at them and marvels at how they managed to survive their times. He says his father “went mad”. Madness, Fanon’s outcome, awaits all who succumb to the mental and physical duress of living in white-run American society. Baldwin ranges from abject social despair to flights of spiritual overcoming. He mimics that charm of uplift credited to Black Americans, who, in the face of annihilation, respond with the blues, jazz, liberation theology, not to mention the dancing of Bojangles, the Nicholas Brothers and Josephine Baker.

Art in a State of Siege  by Joseph Leo Koerner (Marginalia Review of Books) came in today. I was not sure what to make of it, at first. The reviewer staked out our times as a state of siege.

But what most of all causes Bosch to teeter on the brink of change are the emergency states into which his works plunge us. A state of siege is at once the subject, the origin, and the very ground of Bosch’s art. This makes him relevant today, with some 200 million people around the world living in declared “states of emergency,” and with our own president, having shattered the norms of his office, advancing now to our laws. Bosch portrays the ordinary man as a creature pursued by present dangers rushing blindly towards a future catastrophe. The peddler painted on wings of a triptych looks backward towards the murderous thieves and snarling dog, oblivious both to the crack in the footbridge ahead and to the gallows that hover over him.

But when in human history have there not been people "pursued by present dangers rushing blindly towards a future catastrophe"?

Perhaps this paragraph attracted me because of my former profession:

“State of Siege” is a modern term. It derives from Napoleonic legal theory and belongs to the doctrine that a ruler can assume total power whether or not a territory is actually besieged. Such a siege was, by definition, “fictive” or “political.” This use distinguished the state of siege both from the state of peace, where law prevails, and the state of war, where necessity overrules the law. The state of siege sounds more concrete than what is termed a state of exception, because it conjures a physical wall between inside and outside. But the early nineteenth-century jurists who coined the term did so to define emergency measures taken against internal foes.

However, where modern legal theory seeks to make the enemy more concrete, illusionists like Bosch work in the opposite direction: they turn enemies more ghostly. This is because, according to a Christian understanding of the time, all hostilities are pale shadows of the showdown between Satan and God.

Before 1517, the sense of being under siege, whether externally or internally, made people feel that they lived on the eve of something singular, huge, imponderable, but inevitable: not the beginning of a new historical era but the end of history per se. At bottom, Bosch’s paintings are all Last Judgments, and it is useful to remember that Dürer’s leap to fame followed from his woodcuts of the Apocalypse. That means his confidence—evinced by his deliberately epochal self-portrait—that history would continue after the ominous year 1500, was perhaps more a sigh of relief that the end had not yet come.

Even in 2000, I thought the end of humanity was a joke. Twenty-four years later, I may be old enough to believe the end is coming for us. I feel certain that we have killed ourselves off as a species. God may have promised not to destroy us, but given free will can He not let us will ourselves into extinction. I am even more certain that what we call civilization can easily die, leaving humanity to its own devices.

There seems to me to be the hard repression of dictators - the secret police coming in the middle of the night and people disappearing into gulags and concentration camps and helicopters hovering over the sea. Then there is the softer tyranny of the herd - lynching parties and book-burning parties. Exile can be from the nation or the local community or from the hearts of others.

I took the title for this essay from the contemporary artist William Kentridge. Writing in 1986, Kentridge employed the phrase “art in a state of siege” to describe the condition of artists working in South Africa under apartheid law. “The pictures I love,” wrote Kentridge in 1986, “are not for me. The great Impressionist and post-Impressionist works, like the paintings of Seurat in London, are those which give me the greatest pleasure. Immediate pleasure, in the sense of a feeling of well-being in the world. They are visions of a state of grace, of an achieved paradise… This state of grace is inadmissible to me.”

This expulsion of grace from the artists living under a wicked legal system leads Kentridge to say: “Lyricism seems to need a … clear conscience. And here in South Africa, more than in most other places, one’s nose is rubbed in compromise every day.” Another paradise stands closed, as well. 

To acknowledge that one is in a state of siege, as Kentridge tried to do, is to recognize the government’s abnormality and its violence, because the tendency will always be to grow accustomed to political or legal outrages. Kentridge termed this stance “urbanity,” or the “refusal to be moved by the abominations we are surrounded by and involved with.” The state of siege is not the subject of Kentridge’s art but rather its starting point and its arena.

If white supremacists have their way with this country, apartheid South Africa may be where we will need to take inspiration from.

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