Perception: Or Things and Their Deceptiveness
Gimme a pigfoot – Bessie Smith, 1933
1.
Napoleon had the same pretension for his teeth; indeed, his teeth were nice, but they were not as splendid as his hands. – Alexander Dumas, Les compagnons de Jéhu, 1857
There is little point in encouraging a safe set of habitual actions. Think of a swarm of flies, a school of fish or a flocking murmuration of swallows; each individual element moves about randomly until it strays too far from the centre of the swarm, at which point it turns back. Now think of things with no centre. A city, the weather, a starry sky, a plankton bloom, a supply chain. Or your self.
You know this. Don’t get caught in time traps: forget breakfast, it’s over, and lunch will come, and go, and dinner, too. Remember Napoleon's maxim: “The stupid speak of the past, the wise of the present, and the fools of the future.” You can predict probabilities, the likelihood or unlikelihood of this or that possible or impossible outcome, but only when you know all the terms, and you never know all the terms. So you lose what you know, or what you thought you knew. It decoheres, the clocks get lost in the clouds and the clouds become the clocks, even the most cloudy of clouds, and the clocks become the clouds, even the clockiest of clocks.
“The truth goes through three stages,” said Napoleon. “First, it is ridiculed; second, it is violently attacked; finally, it is accepted as self-evident.”
Poe once said, in between episodes of brain fever, that everything we see and seem is but a dream within a dream. He wasn’t too far off: the perception of who we are and what we are doing, and how we feel about this – our so-called state of mind about our so-called quality of life – these are constructs. Fantasies. Hallucinations.
2.
You push the button, we do the rest. – George Eastman, 1888
Those years in Paris. Those hours in the Mazarine library. I parked my bike next to a noseless statue of Voltaire and sat at a desk next to a noseless Plato. And I stunk like hell!
At one point, just before our short-lived and disastrous association with Joseph Beuys’s people in Berlin, we were selected to direct a shoot of a Brazilian transvestite exposing themselves in front of La Joconde. Though it was a Tuesday and the Louvre was closed and we had received prior written clearance from the museum director, the security guards, affronted by our lack of respect for so venerable an oeuvre, saw fit to forcibly intervene, using flashlights and nightsticks, and, in the resulting melee, during which I lost my glasses and injured my wrist, we became separated from the photographer, a nervous young man named Ping or Pong, whom we had met through a friend.
When he didn't return to the hotel that night, we assumed he had been arrested.
The next morning, as prearranged, we flew to Chad. Six months later, the photographs appeared in a magazine under the young man's name and accompanied by an article on love and cannibalism. The young man, it turned out, during his stay in Paris, had murdered his mistress and eaten several kilos of her corpse.
Fir legal reasons which I will explain, I cannot show you any of the photographs.
The article and photographs attracted considerable attention, not least from the so-called art world. A legal imbroglio ensued, doggedly pursued in the French courts, and it was decided that the photographer, now incarcerated, held the rights to the photographs because he had operated the camera. In the eyes of the law, it didn't matter that we had conceived of the project. It didn't matter that it was our idea. In the eyes of the law, the technical element prevailed. You press the button, you take the picture, the picture, the image, is yours for the taking. We appealed twice and lost both times. We took the young man to court in his native country and lost again. Then we learned that the entire event had been orchestrated from the start. It had been some sort of test. What it could possibly mean, what significance it might have, I could not at the time imagine.
Months later, however, long after the Beuys episode and the first two Chad expeditions, it struck me. The transvestite had had their back to the camera; they were sitting on the protective barrier – a red velvet-covered chain suspended between two brass stands – with their torso twisted in such a way that their legs, penis and testicles faced the camera, while their upper back, shoulders and face were directed towards the painting, and their figure completely eclipsed that of Mona Lisa, so only the landscape behind her – jagged mountains, a misty lake, a canal, a medieval bridge over a winding river – was visible.
In this position, the transvestite's posture called to mind, albeit in a parodic manner, the reversed figures in Casper David Friedrich's landscape paintings.
In the early part of the nineteenth century, during a period when interest in Friedrich's symbolist works were at an all-time high, works of his like Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, Hiker above the Sea of Mist and Woman Facing the Setting Sun, were considered projections of the glorious absolute within, a state of total harmony between all that is nature and spirit in God.
There and then, however, in the Louvre in 1977, the landscape itself was painted. It wasn't nature, it was Leonardo Da Vinci. And the reversed figure wasn't Friedrich's hiker above the sea of mist, or his woman facing the setting sun, but a Brazilian transvestite tarted up like a Belle Époque sex worker. And the fact that the rights to this image had passed from the artist to the technician furthered the doubling effect.
The essay that accompanied the photographs made the point even clearer:
In contrast to the physical, this system is not only complex but also in a state of constant flux. To know what forms these structural relationships take at any given time, we need to monitor them constantly. Where is Casper David Friedrich's God now? Where is nature? Is this not precisely the art in which an infinite amount of work remains to be done, in which genius can still blaze its own trails – even if they are not entirely new? It embraces everything that presents itself to the eye, and through it we catch a glimpse of a seemingly new world within the existing one.
3.
Would he like it would Napoleon would Napoleon would would he like it. If Napoleon if I told him if I told him if Napoleon. Would he like it if I told him if I told him if Napoleon. – Gertrude Stein, “A Completed Portrait of Picasso,” Vanity Fair, 1924
Napoleon believed that it only took five minutes for the outcome of a battle to be decided. You plan and project, manoeuvre and prepare, and then the moment of crisis arrives. Bang. If your vision is strong, if your control of those few key moments is total, the enemy's rout is assured; if, however, you slip, if the moment comes and you are not aware of its arrival, your defeat is inevitable.
Goethe described him as a “man of granite” — “What could he not and did not venture? From the burning sands of the Syrian deserts to the snowy plains of Moscow, what an incalculable number of marches, battles, and nightly bivouacs did he go through? And what fatigues and bodily privations was he forced to endure? Little sleep, little nourishment, and yet always in the highest mental activity. When one considers what he accomplished and endured, one might imagine that when he was in his fortieth year not a sound particle was left in him; but even at that age he still occupied the position of a perfect hero.”
And yet, on St Helena’s, during the final months – the exiled Emperor had, for the first time in his life, a toothache. “I found him with his face wrapped up with a handkerchief,” his dentist, O’Meara, writes in one of the clandestine letters. “‘What is the most terrible ache? What is the sharpest pain?’” he asked. I answered that it was always the most immediate one that was the worse. “‘Well, then it must be this fucking toothache!’”
In Paris last week, twenty-three false dentists of Syrian nationality were arrested. False? They performed extractions and crowns for people too poor to afford a real dentist. Could anything be less false? They carried black bags and made house calls. They helped people.
Obsession, said Johnson, is the first attack of Satan, antecedent to possession. I sometimes wonder, I look around, look down, see our legs scrabbling. For what?
It’s hard to lead a cavalry charge, said Adlai Stevenson, if you think you look funny on a horse. In one battle, Napoleon’s forces stood halted at the foot of a bridge over a wide ravine, seized by fear of Austrian cannon fire. Napoleon knew that if they didn’t cross the bridge the battle would be over, his Empire destroyed, his World Spirit off its horse and on its back in the dust, legs kicking in the air like an overturned beetle. He tore the flag from the standard bearer’s hands, spurred his mount and galloped onto the bridge shouting, “Forward to save your general!” His soldiers roared as one and rushed onto the bridge. Five minutes later, the Austrian army threw in the towel.
Can you see any of us there? Galloping onto the bridge? Don’t make me laugh.
Yet he suffered from spongy gums. The right side of his jaw was chronically swollen. He finally took his surgeon’s advice and accepted to undergo the first surgical procedure ever performed upon his person – the extraction of a canine from the upper right jaw. O’Meara had him placed directly on the ground – another first. “He was far from brave,” wrote Lieutenant Colonel Gorregner, secretary of Sir Hugh Lowe, who was under the impression that the tooth was “barely rotten and could have been filled.” O’Meara was forced to have Napoleon held in place by three men. Betsy Balcombe, who was present, is said to have exclaimed: “What? You complain of pain caused by a minor operation? You who fought countless battles and passed through a hail of bullets, and was injured a dozen times? I am ashamed for you. But, whatever, give me the damn tooth!”
Haemorrhoids, by the way, cost him the Battle of Waterloo. He could not mount his horse. Two days before the battle, his doctors lost the leeches used to alleviate his pain and overdosed him with laudanum. He was reeling.
And contrary to the Jacques-Louis David version, he crossed the Alps in 1800 on the back of an ass.