Still life with jar, cup and apples FWN 737 1877 60.6cm x 73.7
In the summer I can see the big top tent of the annual circus over in the park, and this painting reminds me of its opening ceremony: the ringmaster, the green vase, is introducing the first act: the teacup, who stands tall to take the applause, and his troop of apple acrobats, who line up on the right, to summersault over their cousins to the left, on the flying white carpet. This isn’t still life, this is a choreographed performance. The lip of the green vase, on the right side, bows slightly to the teacup, and further down it quivers, chest bulging, in the excitement of anticipation; the teacup acknowledges the ringmaster’s introduction - the dark coloured strip of paint running down the left hand side of the teacup. And then the imaginary diagonals zoom down from the top of the green vase, over the cup and down to the stage, as if spot lights searched the white cloth of the arena.
“Grappling directly with objects” as Cezanne put it later, became an essential part of his practice. “They buoy us up. A sugar bowl teaches us as much about ourselves and our art (as a famous Old Master). People think a teacup has no physiognomy, no soul. But that changes every day too, as with people. You have to know how to take them, coax them, those little fellows.” The sadly departed historian and biographer, Alex Danchev expressed it this way: For Cezanne, “Objects lived full lives. They were sentient, recalcitrant, and changeable.”
At the heart of the era which brought about the Industrial Revolution, there is a wedge; a wedge hammered between science and spirituality; this wedge re-appears over and over again : between soul and body, the spiritual and material, the mental and the physical, the human and the non-human. Kandinsky summed up Cezanne with these words: “Cezanne made a living thing out of a tea-cup; or rather, in a tea-cup he realized the existence of something alive. He raised still-life to such a point that it ceased to be inanimate. He painted these things as he painted human beings, because he was endowed with the gift of divining the inner life of everything. His colour and form are alike suitable to the spiritual harmony. A man, a tree, an apple, all were used by Cezanne in the creation of something he called a ‘picture’, and which is a piece of true inward and artistic harmony.”
Nowadays we come slowly, and often somewhat reluctantly, to understand that the wedge between science and spirituality is both scientifically and spiritually inadequate for the way we now know things are. On the one hand, we know that stuff is made up of atoms which are all vibrating with energy; and on the other hand we think we experience stuff as fixed, out there, separate from us – a world made of objects. And again, on the one hand, we know that we ourselves are made of a little community: I am made not only of human DNA, but half of me is non-human DNA. And yet, I think I experience myself as human, an individual, more than simply a ‘thing’, I’m a human person!
And what we experience is not false; it’s all true; it’s just not all of the truth that there is!
We can think of the world as made up of ‘things’. Of ‘substances’. Of ‘entities’. Of something that ‘is’.
Or we can think of it as made up of ‘events’. Of ‘happenings’. Of ‘processes’. Of something that ‘occurs’. Something that does not last, and that undergoes continual transformation, that is not permanent in time.
The destruction of the notion of time in fundamental physics, is the crumbling of the first of these two perspectives, not the second.
It is the realization of the ubiquity of impermanence, not of stasis in a motionless time.
Thinking of the world as a collection of events, of processes, is the way that allows us to better grasp, comprehend and describe it.
It is the only way that is compatible with relativity.
The world is not a collection of things, it is a collection of events.”
The Order Of Time, by Carlo Rovelli, theoretical physicist, Marseilles, France; published 2019
How delightful, and refreshing,
to sit and
discover myself anew
being an event!