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John Carpenter
Zbigniew Herbert: Dutch
Apocrypha
ZBIGNIEW HERBERT'S SERIES "Dutch
Apocrypha," written during the late 1970s, is intriguing. Why did one
of the finest living Polish poets turn to a parable-like prose genre he
calls "apocrypha" and why did he then choose to write about a small
country like Holland in the 1600s?
True, a collection of Herbert's essays on Dutch
art will soon be published by Ecco Press, to be entitled Still
Life with a Bridle, and containing the "Dutch Apocrypha."
Also, Herbert had written other non-Dutch "apocrypha," for a volume
tentatively titled Attila's Fianc�e to appear in
Polish. But he abandoned the project several years ago, and there is no
sign he will return to it, at least in the form he imagined in the
early 1970s.
The term "apocrypha" is Herbert's own label to
designate an event from history that he himself interprets, feeling
that he must re-present history because conventional historians have
misled us. Herbert's subjects come from Western European history, from
Chinese history, from mythology--all imbued with his experience of
Communist rule in post-World War II Poland.
But Herbert's continuing fascination with Dutch
art--to the extent that he would write a book length collection of
essays on the subject--is perhaps more difficult to explain. For more
than a decade, Herbert had been speaking about "a book on Dutch art" he
hoped to write. This was to be a major scholarly effort, requiring
extensive investigation of seventeenth century documents and looking at
paintings in museums. The center of his interest was clearly the
Holland of the Golden Age of the seventeenth century. He was especially
attracted to the earlier, anonymous Dutch painters who did not call
attention to their personalities--as well as to later artists like
Vermeer or Van Goyen who had found a closeness to the contours of life
Herbert thought had been denied to more recent artists.
Above all, the relationship between art and
society in the Dutch Golden Age seems to fascinate Herbert. As Herbert
mentions in an essay, "The Prince of Art," Holland had no princely
patrons of art as in Italy. Instead, it was the middle classes who
avidly collected. Herbert refers to the "collective hero, the Dutch
bourgeois of the seventeenth century." The painters in turn "tried to
augment the visible world of their small country and to multiply
reality by thousands, tens of thousands of canvases."
Furthermore, Herbert valued highly the
concreteness of Dutch art. His own poetry includes many poems on
objects-"A Stool," "An Armchair," "A Pebble." A whole collection is, in
fact, entitled Study of the Object. It is no wonder
that Herbert found a kindred attitude in such painters as Vermeer, the
painter called "Torrentius," or the many others busy rendering
countless still lives. Holland was certainly the country of the
concrete, the tangible object par excellence. In an essay entitled
"Delta," Herbert asks:
Why precisely in this country are a
great-grandmother's bonnets, a great-grandfather's frock coat made from
Scottish wool, and a spinning wheel preserved with special care--an
almost religious attention? The attachment to things was so great that
pictures and portraits of objects were commissioned as if to confirm
their existence and confirm their life.
Other reasons for Herbert's interest in seventeenth-century Holland are
speculative perhaps, but nevertheless should be mentioned. Like Poland,
Holland is a small country surrounded by powerful and often imperial
neighbors. Consequently the Dutch valued resourcefulness, the careful
management of limited means. They stressed the virtues of defense
rather than offense. Their themes avoided untoward patriotic rhetoric
and self-glorification, an approach which constituted the focus of
another of Herbert's essays on Dutch art entitled "The Non-Heroic
Subject."
Probably Herbert himself could not say why Dutch
art has prompted such an obsession. In the conclusion of his essay on
the Dutch painter Terborch, Herbert admits he can give no tidy
conclusion, only a lesson in humility: "We will never solve all the
secrets of the imagination."--John Carpenter, November 4, 1990
Zbigniew Herbert
Perpetuum Mobile
CORNELIUS DREBBEL WAS a famous inventor
and scholar but his colleagues treated him with reserve, reproaching
him for lack of seriousness. It is a fact he was more inclined to
spectacular demonstrations of his numerous abilities than to carry out
systematic research. This is probably why no university ever offered
him a chair. The royal courts, however, adored him.
In 1604 he appeared in England. Within a short
time he won the sympathy of the higher spheres and the Monarch himself;
the material proof of this was an annual pension paid from the royal
purse, and an apartment in Eltham Palace. Drebbel then became what
might be called a full-time manufacturer of unusual things and
phenomena: a supplier of miracles, producer of bewilderment and vertigo.
According to
contemporary accounts two events in particular (among many) caused a
real sensation and remained for a long time in human memory: a
demonstration of the navigation of a submarine, constructed by the
inventor, which travelled from Westminster to Greenwich without
emerging from the waters of the Thames; and a great meteorological
pageant in Westminster Hall in London before the King, Court, and
invited guests. At the pageant Drebbel's machine hurled out thunder and
lightning; suddenly in the middle of summer it became so freezing that
walls were covered with frost and those who were present shivered from
cold; at the end a warm, heavy rain fell and everyone melted in
delight. There was no end to the applause in honor of this man who, by
the power of his genius, made nature's forces compliant to his will.
Drebbel's head was full of ideas both big and
small, serious and ridiculous, intelligent and completely insane. He
constructed a special ladder to help obese people mount a horse, he
worked out a new system to drain marshy terrain, he built flying
machines (malicious people called them falling machines), he made a
small hammer to hit parasites on the head that was connected to
tweezers which pulled the victim from the hair, he invented a
sensational technological process for dying fabrics, also an effigy
that could be set in the wind and emit frightening cries and moans.
This is just a small number of the inventions of this man of unusual
resourcefulness.
Who was he in fact, a charlatan or scholar?
Because we cannot look inside his soul, which has resided for a long
time in the other world, we must concentrate our attention on what he
left on earth. Drebbel's library in particular, a true curiosity,
provides valuable indications for those who want to study the nature of
his intellect, fertile, with strokes of genius, and undisciplined at
the same time.
The very arrangement of the books makes one think
that Drebbel read scholarly works together with treatises by
alchemists. The writings of Bacon, Leonardo da Vinci and Giordano Bruno
stood side by side with Paracelsus, The Seventh Veil of Isis,
The Temple of Hiram, and The Amphitheater of
Eternal Wisdom. The weed of Gnosis was rampant in the garden
of the natural sciences. On the margins of dissertations in the field
of mechanics, chemistry, and ballistic science Drebbel drew esoteric
diagrams and wrote the sonorous names of the Kaballa: Binah, Geburah,
Kether, which means Intelligence, Force, and the Crown of Knowledge.
Drebbel thought the world could not be explained
in purely scientific categories, that sometimes the immutable laws of
nature are not obligatory, making room for miracles and dazzling
wonder. Probably this is why he built a perpetual motion machine,
improving it throughout his life (he realized his enterprise was
hopeless from the physicist's point of view). One has to admit that on
this path of madness he obtained certain results. His pendulums,
windmills, spheres of light metal with weight hanging from them moved
for a long time indeed, and when movement stopped, the inventor pushed
them with a finger like a Demiurge, awakening sleepy matter from a nap.
After centuries when my bones have crumbled,
Drebbel thought, and even my name dissolves in mist, someone will find
my clock eternally striking. I don't count on human memory but on the
memory of the universe. I want my existence to be proved like the
existence of God with an unmistakable and infallible proof: from
movement, ex motu.
Zbigniew Herbert
The Hell of Insects
JAN SWAMMERDAM WAS frail and sickly
since birth. He was kept alive only by the art of two eminent
physicians. But efforts to awaken his sleepy humors brought no results.
In school he studied well but without enthusiasm, he did not show any
definite interests. His father owned the prospering pharmacy "By the
Swan" next to the town hall in Amsterdam; soon he became reconciled to
the thought, but not without regret, that after his death his beautiful
shop filled with smells of botany and chemistry, a collection of
natural oddities and a crocodile hanging from the ceiling, would pass
into the hands of a stranger.
After long hesitation Jan decided to study
medicine at the University of Leyden. The family praised his intention
and promised appropriate material aid, nourishing the quiet hope that a
change of environment and scholarly discipline would positively
influence and toughen the wishy-washy character of their only child.
Jan succumbed to the charms of knowledge and in an
exaggerated way-he studied everything. He attended lectures on
mathematics, theology, and astronomy, he did not neglect seminars where
they read texts of ancient authors, he was also enthusiastic about
oriental languages. He gave the least attention to his chosen domain of
knowledge, medicine.
"God is sorely trying your father," wrote Jan's
mother, "adding worries about his son's fate to the torments of old
age. You are wasting this precious time of youth as if wandering
through a forest instead of pursuing a straight path toward your goal.
If within two years you do not receive a doctor's diploma, your father
will stop sending money. Such is his will."
Jan did finish medicine. But during his entire
life he did not dress a single wound. The new passion that never left
him until death was the study of the world of insects. Entomology did
not yet exist as a separate domain of science; Jan Swammerdam
established its foundations.
However the study of the antennae of the dung
beetle, of the digestive system of the wasp or the legs of the mosquito
did not bring Jan either revenue or fame. To make things worse he was
convinced he was wasting his life, devoting it to a barren and useless
occupation. Religious, with inclinations toward mysticism, Swammerdam
suffered because the objects of his studies were creatures on the
lowest rung of the ladder of species, on the garbage heap of nature, in
a neighborhood close to the hot vestibule of hell. Who can perceive
God's finger in the anatomy of a louse? Is not the one-day damsel fly a
splinter of nothingness rather than a permanent brick of existence?
Therefore, he envied astronomers who could study the movements of
planets and discover the architecture of the universe, the laws of
harmony and the will of the Eternal.
At night he was visited by messengers from the
Heavens. They gently persuaded him to abandon his frivolous
occupations. Swammerdam did not defend himself, only apologized. He
promised to reform but he knew he would never have the courage to burn
his manuscripts, his beautiful, precise drawings and observations.
Angels who know the secrets of the heart left him and then a
pandemonium would begin: small creatures flying low, crawling on the
ground, with the devil's faces and the devil's fierceness; they dragged
Swammerdam's tortured soul down into dust and ruin.
The fates smiled on him only once, and ambiguously
at that. The Prince of Tuscany proposed twelve thousand florins for his
collection of insects on condition that Swammerdam come and live in
Florence-a tempting proposition-and that he accept Catholicism. This
last condition was unacceptable for a man tortured by conflicts of
conscience. He rejected the magnanimous offer.
A few years before his death (he died at the age
of forty-three) he looked like a decrepit old man. Swammerdam's weak
body resisted for a strangely long time, as if death despised its
miserable prey and sentenced him to a long agony.
He experienced then that the world which he had
studied descended inside him: it nestled there and ravaged him from
within. Long trains of ants marched through the corridors of his veins,
swarms of bees drank the bitter nectar of his heart, large gray and
brown moths slept on his eyes. The soul which usually flies to infinity
at the moment of death left Swammerdam's tortured body prematurely. It
could not bear the rustle of the wing cases, nor the senseless buzzing
that disturbs the pure music of the Universe.
Zbigniew Herbert
Long Gerrit
GERRIT WAS BORN in a small village near
Veere, and like all the men in his family he was destined for the
vocation of fisherman. In the normal course of events, after a
laborious life he would pass on his boat and house to his sons, while
he would be content with two yards of bitter soil. But nature, which is
usually so careful in allotting shapes to all its creatures, made him
different. To the distress of his parents he grew beyond measure; at
seventeen he reached the height of eight feet and five inches.
Undoubtedly he was the tallest man that ever walked Dutch soil. In a
mountainous country it might have been somewhat concealed; here, on a
broad plain, his height was a constant though unintended provocation.
Endowed with huge strength he was normally quiet,
gentle, and sad. He did not have friends; girls shunned him. Most of
all he liked to sit in the corner of a room and watch how the dust of
the earth swirled in a beam of sunlight.
Not particularly held back by his parents, Gerrit
decided to set forth in the world and make a profession of his anomaly.
He wandered from village to village, from town to town; at country
fairs or popular holidays he broke horseshoes, bent iron bars, threw
barrels full of beer into the air lightly as balls, and stopped a
galloping horse with his naked hands. He competed hard with the other
wonders of nature: a pig with two heads, a six-legged dog, a horse that
knew how to count, as well as magicians, tightrope walkers, swallowers
of melted sulfur, and clowns with stuffed bellies who fell face down in
the mud.
Amid charlatans, fortune-tellers and rat catchers,
in a deafening racket of drums, trumpets, and the shouts of dancing
processions, in the smells of meat, garlic, and sweet pastry, Gerrit
towered high above like a mast--and let us admit it, he earned little.
In his blue eyes lurked the worry of a father of a numerous family;
Gerrit's numerous family was his huge, never-satiated body.
One autumn morning of 1688 Long Gerrit was found
in an alley not far from Nieuwe Gracht in Haarlem. He was lying with
his face down; his doublet was soaked in rain and blood, he had been
stabbed repeatedly with a knife. Most likely there were many murderers,
and the cotton pouch with money on his chest led one to believe it was
not a robbery. The body was given to the University of Leyden, so he
did not even have a decent burial. A few preachers, however, mentioned
the murder in their sermons; one of them who was carried away by
rhetorical fervor said Gerrit was dealt as many blows as Julius Caesar.
It is not clear why this elevated analogy was used.
Perhaps the preacher wanted us to understand that
the healthy republican spirit bestows equal hatred on giants and on
caesars.
Zbigniew Herbert
Home
ONE CAN SAY with slight but certainly
not great exaggeration that before travel began, a map existed first.
Just as originally the hazy and impersonal outline of a poem has
drifted for a long time in the air before someone dared bring it to
earth, giving it a shape understandable to men. Thus maps, the music of
sirens' songs and challenges for the daring suggested to the Dutch a
bold plan to navigate to China by a northern passage: a dark, narrow,
icy corridor rather than the commonly used tropical route, full of
murderous pirates and equally murderous competitors.
The matter must have been treated in full
seriousness, because the Estates General established an award of 25,000
florins for whoever would successfully realize this intention bordering
on madness. Two experienced men of the sea, Captain Jacob von
Heemskerck and the Pilot Willem Barentsz, set out with a crew and two
ships on a great reconnaissance. It was May 1597. The green strip of
land quickly disappeared from the eyes, and after barely three weeks
the sailors were surrounded by an inconceivable polar world. On June 5,
one of the deck hands shouted that he saw a flock of huge white swans
on the horizon. These were actually mountains of ice. The sailor's
mistake indicates not so much poetic imagination as a poor knowledge of
polar hell.
After many dramatic episodes, adversities of
weather and fate, struggles with an ever more incomprehensible
environment (these wonders increased gradually, allowing partial
adaptation), less than four months after leaving Holland further
navigation became impossible. The ships were imprisoned by autumn ice
on the shore of Nova Zemlya. A decision was made to winter there. For
this they needed a house.
By happy coincidence
they found wood on the island, brought by ocean currents from Siberian
forests. It was hard as rock but they managed with this resistant
material. The ship's carpenter died at the beginning of construction;
the frozen earth did not want to accept his mortal remains, and his
body was buried in a crevasse of ice. Time was running out-the days
were shorter and shorter, the temperature fell in an appalling way.
Those who worked on the construction complained that when they put
nails in their mouth according to the carpenter's custom, they froze to
their lips and had to be torn off with the skin.
On the third of November the last board was
finally nailed to the roof. The happy sailors decorated their home with
a branch formed out of snow.
So here was the house: a miniature of their
homeland, a shelter from frost and the polar bears that hunted the
Dutchmen. There was hardly a day they did not meet them eye to eye;
rifles, flintlocks, muskets, halberds and fire were used but did not
help much; the stubbornness and persistence of all these animals were
almost human as they would suddenly appear like white, bloodthirsty
phantoms, climbing the roof and trying to enter through the chimney.
They sniffed and panted threateningly at the house's door.
The chronicler of the expedition rarely permits
himself to express emotions except for pious sighs to the Creator. At
one point in his report he adopts the emotional term "beast" for the
bear, and uses it until the end. In the middle of a polar night the
bears' siege came to an end and polar foxes appeared; the chronicler
has a tender and warm term for them, "creatures." They obediently
entered the traps that were set, provided meat (it tasted like rabbit)
and fur. Once again it was shown the mythical brotherhood of men with
those on all fours contains a certain dose of hypocrisy.
On earth that was not destined for man in God's
plans, on the cruel, dazzlingly white and blindingly black chessboard
of fate, stood a house. A fire set in the fireplace gave more smoke
than warmth. Icy wind played in the cracks caulked with moss. Sick with
scurvy and consumed with fever, the men lay on bunks that hung from the
walls, snow burying the small house and its chimney. The polar night
confused all measures of time and reality. At the end of January the
sailors succumbed to a collective hallucination just like wanderers in
the desert who have visions of an oasis-they saw an unreal sun above
the horizon. But the funereal darkness of polar night was still to last
for a long time.
It would be a mistake to think the hibernation of
the Dutch was a kind of passive resistance. On the contrary, the energy
that sparked from them is cause for admiration. They were busy,
bustling like good Frisian peasants on their barren holdings. They
carried wood for the fire, nursed sick companions, repaired the house,
some of them wrote about the peculiarities of the surrounding world,
they hunted, intricately practiced culinary arts, read the Bible aloud,
entered four to a barrel while the ship's barber poured hot water over
them; he also cut their hair, which grew amazingly fast as if the body
wanted to cover itself with fur. They sewed clothes and shoes from the
hides of the animals they caught, sang pious and indecent songs. They
repaired a clock that constantly froze, a clock that was consolation
that time is not an abyss or black mask of nothingness but can be
divided into a human yesterday and a human tomorrow-into a day without
light and a night without glimmer, seconds, hours and weeks, into doubt
which goes away and hope that is born.
He who struggles with the elements in a deadly
contest, with an adversary a hundred times stronger, realizes he has a
chance only if he concentrates all his attention, will, and cunning to
counter the blows. It requires a special reduction of the entire
personality, a degradation to animal impulses dictated by instinct. It
is necessary to forget who one used to be. What counts is only the very
moment of thunder, fire, storm, blizzard and earthquake. Any human
surplus, any superfluous thought, feeling or gesture can bring
catastrophe.
The handful of Dutch sailors exposed to the utmost
ordeal transgressed these iron rules at least two times. They added a
human accent to the laws of struggle with impersonal nature. But
perhaps it was not just a risky extravagance or sentimental song about
attachment sung in the icy wilderness, but an important element of
self-defense. Both events are related to their new home. Because-after
all-it was a home.
On January 6, 1598, the day of Epiphany, without
paying any attention to what was happening outside, the shipwrecked men
decided to celebrate the holiday as in their homeland. Even sober
Captain Heemskerck gave in to the madness, giving an order to measure
out to the crew from diminishing supplies a sizeable portion of wine,
and two pounds of flour; with this they baked a plumcake and biscuits.
The mulled wine with spices put the crew in such high spirits they
started to dance; many times they went through their favorite
"bungler," a hat dance, and a reel. They arranged a contest to decide
who would become the Emperor of Nova Zemlya, and selected an Almond
King. He was a very young sick sailor, Jacob Schiedamm, who died soon
afterward, but on the memorable evening he smiled for the last time, to
his companions rather than the world. The chronicler says everything
took place as with their dear ones in Holland, which he summons only
once with the solemn incantation "patria."
It is not known who first had the idea-it might
have been a product of collective imagination-but when the house was
finally built (to tell the truth it was a dog house) they decided to
give it some style. A triangular portal was painted in black over the
low door, and the two windows were placed symmetrically on the front
wall (the house was without windows). An eave made from ship boards was
arranged in tiers and nailed to a flat roof. Soon it was swept away by
a snowstorm, clearly hostile to these aesthetic subtleties.
When on June 13, 1598, they started back on two
wretched boats no one had the courage to turn their head back and look
at the deserted home-that monument to fidelity with a triangular
portal, and two false windows where pitchy darkness lurked.
Zbigniew Herbert
Spinoza's Bed
IT IS AN amazing thing that our memory
best retains images of great philosophers when their lives were coming
to an end. Socrates raising the chalice with hemlock to his mouth,
Seneca whose veins were opened by a slave (there is a painting of this
by Rubens), Descartes roaming cold palace rooms with a foreboding that
his role of teacher of the Swedish Queen would be his last, old Kant
smelling a grated horseradish before his daily walk (the cane preceding
him, sinking deeper and deeper into the sand), Spinoza consumed by
tuberculosis and patiently polishing lenses, so weak he is unable to
finish his Treatise on the Rainbow. . .A gallery of noble moribunds,
pale masks, plaster casts.
In the eyes of his biographers Spinoza was
unmistakably an ideal wise man: exclusively concentrated on the precise
architecture of his works, perfectly indifferent to material affairs,
and liberated from all passions. But an episode in his life is passed
over in silence by some biographers, while others consider it only an
incomprehensible, youthful whim.
Spinoza's father died
in 1656. In his family Baruch had the reputation of an eccentric young
man who had no practical sense and wasted precious time studying
incomprehensible books. Due to clever intrigues (his stepsister Rebecca
and her husband Casseres played the main role in this) he was deprived
of his inheritance. She hoped the absentminded young man would not even
notice. But it happened otherwise.
Baruch initiated a lawsuit in court with an energy
no one suspected him to have. He hired lawyers, called witnesses, was
both matter-of-fact and passionate, extremely well-oriented in the most
subtle details of procedure and convincing as a son injured and
stripped of his rights.
They settled the division of the estate relatively
quickly (clear legal rules existed in this matter). But then a second
act of the trial unexpectedly followed, causing a general sense of
unpleasantness and embarrassment.
As if the devil of possessiveness had entered him,
Baruch began to litigate over almost each object from his father's
house. It started with the bed in which his mother, Deborah, had died
(he did not forget about its dark green curtains). Then he requested
objects without any value, explaining he had an emotional attachment to
them. The judges were monumentally bored, and could not understand
where this irresistible desire in the ascetic young man came from. Why
did he wish to inherit a poker, a pewter pot with a broken handle, an
ordinary kitchen stool, a china figure representing a shepherd without
a head, a broken clock which stood in the vestibule and was a home for
mice, or a painting that hung over the fireplace and was so completely
blackened it looked like a self-portrait of tar?
Baruch won the trial. He could now sit with pride
on his pyramid of spoils, casting spiteful glances at those who tried
to disinherit him. But he did not do this. He only chose his mother's
bed (with the dark green curtain), giving the rest away to his
adversaries defeated at the trial.
No one understood why he acted this way. It seemed
an obvious extravagance, but in fact had a deeper meaning. It was as if
Baruch wanted to say that virtue is not at all an asylum for the weak.
The act of renunciation is an act of courage-it requires the sacrifice
of things universally desired (not without regret and hesitation) for
matters that are great, and incomprehensible.
Zbigniew Herbert
Letter
IT WAS ACCIDENTALLY discovered in the
1920s-to be exact in 1924-in an antique book shop in Leyden. Three
sheets of cream-colored paper of the dimensions 11.5 by 17 centimeters,
with traces of humidity, but the handwriting well-preserved, the small,
clear letters completely readable. An unknown person had pasted the
letter onto the inside of the cover of an old, once very popular
romance called The Knight with a Swan published in 1651 by the
Amsterdam firm Cool.
The majority of scholars have written skeptically
about this discovery, for example Isarlo, Gillet, Clark, de Vries,
Borrero, and Goldschneider; only a young poet and historian from
Utrecht, van der Velde (parenthetically stabbed with a dagger in
mysterious circumstances not far from Scheveningen), fiercely defended
the authenticity of the letter to the end of his life. According to the
young scholar its author was none other than Johannes Vermeer, and its
recipient Antony van Leeuwenhoek, a naturalist whose merits in the
field of improving the microscope are well known. The scholar and the
artist were both born in the same year, on the same day, and spent
their entire lives in the same city.
The letter shows no traces of corrections or
subsequent interpolations, but it contains two spelling mistakes and a
few changes of letters; obviously it must have been written in a hurry.
A few lines have been crossed out so decidedly and energetically that
we will never learn what foolish or shameful thoughts were covered
forever by the blackness of the ink.
The handwriting with its pointed letters, "v"
written like an open eight, a somewhat wavy movement of the pen as if
someone was speeding up and then suddenly stopping, reveals a striking
similarity if not identity with the only preserved signature of Vermeer
in the register of Saint Luke's Guild in 1662. Chemical analysis of the
paper and ink allows us to date the document at the second half of the
seventeenth century. Everything indicates, then, that the letter could
have been written by Vermeer's hand yet we lack irrefutable proofs. We
know that technically perfect falsifications have been made.
All those who spoke against the authenticity of
the document put forward numerous arguments, but to tell the truth they
are not too convincing. Scholarly prudence and even a far-reaching
skepticism are undoubtedly praiseworthy virtues. But one could sense
something between the lines of the critical remarks that no one clearly
stated: the main reservations were caused by the letter's content. Let
us suppose that if Vermeer wrote to his mother-in-law Maria Tins,
asking her to lend him a hundred florins for the baptism of his son
Ignatius, or let us also imagine he offered one of his paintings to his
baker van Buyten as a guarantee against a debt, I believe no one would
protest. But when after two and a half centuries the Great Mute speaks
with his own voice, and what he says is an intimate confession, a
manifesto and a prophecy, we don't want to accept it because we have a
great fear before a revelation, and a lack of consent to a miracle.
Here is the letter:
"Undoubtedly You will be surprised I am writing
rather than simply dropping by your laboratory before dusk, as so often
happens. But I think I do not have enough courage, I do not know how to
tell you to your face what you will read in a moment.
"I would prefer not to write this letter. I
hesitated for a long time, because I really did not want to expose our
long friendship to danger. Finally I made up my mind to do it. There
are, after all, things more important than what unites us, more
important than Leeuwenhoek, more important than Vermeer.
"A few days ago you showed me a drop of water
under your new microscope. I always thought it was pure like glass,
while in reality strange creatures swirl in it like in Bosch's
transparent hell. During this demonstration you watched my
consternation intently, and I think with satisfaction. Between us there
was silence. Then you said very slowly and deliberately: 'Such is
water, my dear, such and not otherwise.'
"I understood what you wanted to say by that:
that we artists record appearances, the life of shadows and the
deceptive surface of the world; we do not have the courage or ability
to reach the essence of things. We are craftsmen so to speak who work
in the matter of illusion, while you and those like you are the masters
of truth.
"As you know my father owned the tavern
'Mechelen' at the market place. An old sailor often came there who had
wandered all over the world, from Indochina to Brazil and from
Madagascar to the Arctic Ocean. I remember him well. He was always
quite tipsy but told splendid stories, and everyone gladly listened to
him. He was the attraction of the place, like a big colorful picture or
exotic animal. One of his favorite stories was about the Chinese
emperor Shi Huang-ti.
"This emperor ordered his country to be
surrounded by a thick wall, to shut himself off from everything that
was different. He burned all books so he would not have to listen to
the admonishing voice of the past; he forbade cultivation of any of the
arts under penalty of death. (Their complete uselessness was blatantly
clear when they were compared to such important tasks of state as
building a fortress, or cutting off rebels' heads). Thus poets,
painters, and musicians hid in the mountains and remote monasteries;
they led the life of exiles tracked by a pack of informers. On the
squares, piles of paintings were burned, fans, statues, ornate fabrics,
objects of luxury and all things that could be considered pretty. Men,
women and children all wore the same ash-colored clothes. The emperor
declared war even on flowers; he ordered their fields to be buried
under stones. A special decree announced that at sunset everyone was to
be at home, the windows tightly covered with black curtains because
(you know yourself) what incredible pictures can be painted by the
wind, clouds, and the light of sunset.
"The emperor valued only science. He showered
scientists with honors and gold. Every day astronomers would bring news
of the discovery of a new or imaginary star. In servile fashion it was
given the name of the emperor, and soon the entire firmament teemed
with luminous points of Shi Huang-ti I, Shi Huang-ti II, Shi Huang-ti
III and so on. Mathematicians labored to invent new numerical systems,
complicated equations and unimaginable geometrical figures, knowing
only too well their labors were sterile, of no use to anyone.
Naturalists promised they would develop a tree whose crown was embedded
in the ground and whose roots reached the sky, also a wheat grain as
large as a fist.
"At last the emperor wished for immortality.
Physicians performed cruel experiments on men and animals to discover
the secret of the eternal heart, the eternal liver, eternal lungs.
"As it often happens with men of action, the
emperor desired to change the face of the earth and sky so his name
would be inscribed forever in the memory of future generations. He did
not understand that the life of an ordinary peasant, shoemaker, or a
grocer was far more worthy of respect and admiration, while he himself
was becoming a bloodless letter, a symbol among countless symbols of
madness and violence monotonously repeating themselves.
"After all the crimes, all the devastation he
caused in human minds and souls, his own death was cruelly banal: he
choked on a single grape. To remove him from the surface of the earth
nature did not exert herself to produce a hurricane or deluge.
"Probably you will ask: why do I tell you all of
this, and what is the connection between the story of the foreign ruler
and your drop of water? I will most likely answer you not very clearly
or coherently, hoping you will understand the words of a man who is
full of forebodings and anxiety.
"I am afraid that you and others like you are
setting out on a dangerous journey which might bring humanity not only
advantages but also great, irreparable harm. Haven't you noticed that
the more the means and tools of observation are perfected, the more
distant and elusive become the goals? With each new discovery a new
abyss opens. We are more and more lonely in the mysterious void of the
universe.
"I know that you want to lead men out of the
labyrinths of superstition and chance, that you want to give them
certain, clear knowledge which according to you is the only defense
against fear and anxiety. But will it really bring us relief if we
substitute the word necessity for the word Providence?
"Most likely you will reproach me that our art
does not solve any of the enigmas of nature. Our task is not to solve
enigmas, but to be aware of them, to bow our heads before them and also
to prepare the eyes for never-ending delight and wonder. If you
absolutely require discoveries, however, I will tell you that I am
proud to have succeeded in combining a certain particularly intensive
cobalt with a luminous, lemon-like yellow, as well as recording the
reflection of southern light which strikes through thick glass onto a
gray wall.
"The tools we use are indeed primitive: a stick
with a bunch of bristles attached to the end, a rectangular board,
pigments and oils. These have not changed for centuries, like the human
body and nature. If I understand my task, it is to reconcile man with
surrounding reality. This is why I and my guild brothers repeat an
infinite number of times the sky and clouds, the portraits of men and
cities, all these odds and ends of the cosmos because only there do we
feel safe and happy.
"Our paths part. I know I will not convince you,
and that you will not abandon polishing lenses or erecting your tower
of Babel. But allow us as well to continue our archaic procedure, to
tell the world words of reconciliation and to speak of joy from
recovered harmony, of the eternal desire for reciprocated love."
Zbigniew Herbert
Epilogue
CORNELIS TROOST, TEXTILE merchant and
unknown hero of history, is dying.
It is not true our entire life appears in front
of our eyes before death. That great recapitulation of existence is an
invention of the poets. In fact we sink into chaos. Within Cornelis
Troost there is a confusion of days and nights, he does not distinguish
Monday from Sunday, he confuses three in the afternoon with four in the
morning; when he is alert he waits, listening to his own breathing and
his heart. He asks for a clock to be put on a table in front of his
bed, as if hoping he will experience the grace of cosmic order. But
what is nine o'clock if it does not mean sitting at the desk in the
office, the noon hour without the stock exchange, four o'clock from
which dinner is taken away, six o'clock without coffee and a pipe,
eight o'clock deprived of all meaning because they have removed the
table, supper, family, and friends. O holy ritual of everydayness,
without you time is empty like a falsified inventory which corresponds
to no real objects.
The angels of death keep vigil at his bed. Soon
the naked soul of Cornelis Troost will stand before the Highest Judge
to account for his deeds. We who know little about divine matters, are
interested in a human, unimportant question: was he happy?
Friendly fate led him by the hand that memorable
April day when half a century earlier he wandered through huge, noisy
Amsterdam, clutching a letter that recommended him to a relative who
was a shoemaker. It contained a request to kindly accept the boy and
teach him the profession. That letter, conceived by a teacher in the
country, had only one drawback: there was no address.
Then, as it happens only in fairy tales, a
handsome man dressed in black appeared before the lost boy: Baltazar
Jong, a textile merchant who without asking many questions took him to
his house, gave him a bed in the attic and entrusted him with the
responsible function of message boy. Thus without effort or merits
Cornelis passed from the purgatory of twine and lasts-which seemed to
be his destiny-to the heaven of silks and laces. Such was the beginning
of a stunning career, as it is only a natural course of events and not
a career when the son of a mayor becomes mayor and the son of an
admiral becomes an admiral.
Cornelis Troost commendably passed all the steps
of the merchants' profession. He was a conscientious and zealous
apprentice, scribe, warehouseman, accountant, salesman favored by the
ladies because of his constantly pink cheeks, finally a kind of
personal secretary of Jong. Then he changed his quarters from the
attic, which meant he was now treated as a member of the family, not
numerous but upstanding and consisting of the master, the lady of the
house, and a daughter.
At about this time he performed an unusual deed:
carrying an important, confidential message, he skated the distance
from Amsterdam to Leyden in less than an hour along frozen canals.
(Ungrateful human memory has not recorded this fact as it deserved).
Mr. Jong took care to put a healthy soul in the healthy body of his
pupil. He sent him to dancing lessons, taught him the flute and a few
Latin proverbs. The one Cornelis liked most was Hic Rhodus, hic salta,
and he would insert it in his conversations with important persons only
too often, sometimes even without much sense.
Mr. Jong was a man of broad horizons, educated
and subtle. He had collected a sizeable library. The Classics stood in
the first rows, while shamefully hidden behind them were passionate
accounts of faraway voyages that were to push his grandson to the
stormy life of an adventurer. He bought paintings, and was interested
in astronomy. In the evening he strummed a guitar and read Latin poets;
he preferred, however, his native Vondel. He systematically enlarged
his collection of minerals. Above all he adored Livy, oysters, Italian
opera, and light Rhine wines. His sudden death plunged his family and
friends in genuine sadness. He died as stylishly as he lived-at a full
table, as he was lifting a sponge cake dipped in wine to his mouth.
Without waiting for tears to dry Cornelis Troost
asked for the hand of the daughter of his deceased master, Anna. He was
not moved by a mercenary motive, at least he did not think so, although
at the same time he realized he had entered his adopted family not by
the front door but by the attic. At this moment he felt as noble as
Perseus who frees Andromeda chained to the rock of an orphan's mourning.
His proposal was accepted (who could better lead
the business of the firm?) and the wedding was arranged quickly (the
malicious said too quickly). It was not too ostentatious as
circumstances did not allow it, but the tables bent under the food and
beverages. Because of an excessive number of toasts washed down with
wine, grain spirits, rum, and beer, Cornelis spent the wedding night in
a state of complete unconsciousness.
A year after the wedding an only son was born,
given the name of Jan at baptism.
The firm (it carried now the name "Jong, Troost
and Son") was doing excellent business thanks not only to favorable
conditions but above all to Troost's talents and his unusual merchant's
intuition. Born a peasant, he knew his countrymen were conservative to
the marrow of their bones. One would think the owner of a large textile
store would be interested in fashion. Troost simply ignored it,
considering it a nuisance like a runny nose which from time to time
bothers an organism full of healthy habits and tastes. If he paid
attention to the "latest rages" of fashion it was only in the domain of
accessories: ribbons, shoulder straps, buckles, and eventually
feathers. He firmly believed that true elegance does not demand a
broken line or richness of colors but is satisfied with the calm,
simple line of a cut, as well as noble black, purple, and white. He was
also, if one may say so, an ardent patriot of native industry. He was
convinced-and persuaded his clients-that the best wool comes from
Leyden, the cotton from Haarlem has no competition, Amsterdam's silk
fabrics are truly without equal, and there are no better velvets on
earth than those from Utrecht.
Cornelis Troost, owner of the firm "Jong, Troost
and Son," worked untiringly six days a week, but he devoted Sundays and
holidays entirely to his family. From early spring until late fall,
after hearing a Service, the Troosts would set out on faraway
excursions to the "Three Oaks," the dunes, or to an inn "Da Zwaan"
situated in a picturesque and secluded spot. Here is a picture:
Cornelis marches in front (always some hundred feet ahead, as if
bursting with the memory of his old skating exploits), silent Anna is
walking with small steps behind him. The servant with a basket of
monstrous dimensions full of victuals, and small noisy Jan riding a
cart harnessed to a goat, close the procession. Both parents spoiled
their only child beyond all imagination. A rest. Lunch in the shade of
old elms: cream, wild strawberries, cherries, rye bread, butter,
cheese, wine and cake.
In the early afternoon the family would come to
the inn "Da Zwaan," famous for its excellent cuisine and situated near
a major road crossing. Gallows stood there; one could tactfully go
around them by choosing a path through the meadows. Inside the inn it
was always crowded and noisy. Heavy odors of tobacco, lamb fat, and
beer wafted in the air. Cornelis Troost usually ordered hutsepot-one
could not find a better one in all the United Provinces-a salmon in
green sauce, incomparable crepes, and candied chestnuts (he would put
them thoughtfully in his pocket fearing a sudden attack of hunger on
the way back). Washed down with a double beer from Delft, all this put
body and soul in a state of satiated melancholy.
The return would take place slowly, in reverse
order: Jan rode in front, next to him the servant freed from her
burden, behind them Anna fearfully looking back, and at the end
Cornelis, who would frequently stop. As if suddenly struck by the
beauty of existence and the loveliness of nature he craned his neck and
greeted the passing clouds with loud singing not completely concordant
with principles of harmony:
Good evening, good evening,
my dear Joosje
or:
Lush oaklands, lovely crags
Noble witnesses of my pleasures
If now or several years later Cornelis Troost was asked whether he was
happy, he would not have known what to answer. Happy people, just as
people who are healthy, do not ponder about their own condition.
O Wonderful clock measuring weekdays and
holidays! It is true that Cornelis Troost never stood in the blinding
glare of great historical events. But could one say that in the drama
of the world he played a secondary role? He met his fate of textile
merchant as others meet their roles of warriors, heretics, or
statesmen. He rubbed against history only once, fleetingly, as in a
dance-it happened during the visit of a foreign monarch.
At that time Troost was an Elder of the guild,
and he went to the town hall for the welcoming ceremony wearing an
orange sash, yellow ribbons below his knees and at his shoulders. He
wore a fanciful hat decorated with black ostrich feathers which with
every breath of wind almost took flight. From the depths of his heart
he hated these clothes, pompous as costumes of opera singers, but he
did not regret this masquerade because he saw the monarch face to face,
that is, from a human perspective. Later he repeated an endless number
of times: "I saw him quite close, and you know he is pale, fat, small,
about half a head shorter than me." He was bursting with great
republican pride.
After the reception there was a procession in
honor of the monarch, combined with shooting into the innocent sky. For
the second time Troost had an occasion to try out his beautiful
Florentine rifle. The first time it happened in his own garden when he
fired at an owl suspected of disturbing the peace at night. The stock
of the rifle was decorated with an engraving of "The Judgment of Paris"
against a background of a vast mountainous landscape. Cornelis valued
this part of the weapon most, considering the metal pipe a superfluous
addition.
After these historical events life continued to
roll in its ordinary groove. Business went splendidly, but Jan gave his
parents constant troubles and worries: he did not study, ran away from
home and preferred the company of total scoundrels. The prodigal son
always returned to the bosom of the family, however, where a biblical
scene full of tears, repentance, and forgiveness took place. It seemed
that in the end matters would settle down favorably for everyone. Only
Anna was getting weak, and so it was decided to accept a third servant;
among many candidates a young Frisian peasant by the name of Judith was
selected.
Her beauty was not dazzling, but it awoke in the
soul of the master of the house hazy, sweet memories of distant
childhood. He liked her very much, and gave her ribbons and barrettes
matching her red, fluffy hair, asking her not to tell anyone about it.
He persuaded his wife to permit Judith to help him in the store in the
evening. It might have happened two or three times that they stayed
alone and locked the door with a key. But the bad tongues of the
neighbors gossiped about the scandal. Anna suffered ostentatiously but
in silence.
Cornelis started to go more often to the barber.
He played the flute for hours. He became talkative, loud, and
excessively gay. One day he confided to Anna that he wanted to order a
portrait. A painter was recommended who lived on Rozengracht. He was,
or else had been, a fashionable portrait painter and was also known for
his religious scenes. Festively dressed he went to him: the name
escaped his memory, but passersby showed him the house. The painter
received him not too politely. He had closely set, piercing eyes, and
the thick hands of a butcher. He was dressed in a long, stained apron
and had a strange turban on his head. All of this would have been
bearable, but the price for the portrait that this boor gave him-three
hundred florins-confused Cornelis (he immediately calculated it against
yards of good woolen fabric). An embarrassing silence followed. At last
the painter declared that he could portray Cornelis as a Pharisee, and
then the price would be considerably lower. At this point it was the
hurt pride of the textile merchant that took over. He wanted to be
represented as he was, at the peak of success, in a gentle glow of
happiness but without unnecessary symbols and decorations, with his own
large head surrounded by luxuriant hair, his keen eyes looking into the
future with confidence, a thick nose, the mouth of a gourmet, and also
strong hands, resting near the frame of the painting, in which one
could entrust not only the business matters of the firm "Jong, Troost
and Son" but also the fate of the city (at the time Cornelis dreamt of
being a mayor). It is not surprising that the contract for the painting
was never signed. Later someone gave him the name of another famous
portrait painter from Haarlem; but he did not contact him because his
mind was preoccupied with serious problems and worries.
One never knows when or from where a storm will
come that shakes the foundations of a house (and it seemed it was
eternal), and in the sudden flash of lightning show the emptiness of
plans arduously put together during an entire life. Jan, the only son,
the hope and future heir of the firm, ran away from home for good. He
left a letter that he had found a job on a ship, and even gave its
name. But it was quickly discovered there was not such a ship. Thus
only a grim supposition remained that the boy-in fact already a man-had
joined the pirates, those scoundrels who throw the Bible, rosary, and
logbook overboard and finish a life of crime in dungeons or on the
gallows.
For the first time Troost felt wronged, helpless,
and humiliated. Anna suffered also but quietly, in the depths of her
impenetrable maternal being. On the other hand the extensive suffering
of Cornelis encompassed many different spheres of his soul: he was
frightened by the unexpected blow of fortune which had been
well-disposed until now but suddenly revealed its true, sneering face.
He felt stripped of his good name and merits. A cruel sentence
constantly returned in his thoughts: "I am now just a father of a
criminal." He lost faith in the only human immortality which expressed
itself in the hope that the name Troost-surrounded by human respect and
trust-would be repeated forever in the guild of textile merchants.
What is more, the affair with Judith (according
to Cornelis there was no affair) was becoming more and more notorious.
Indeed after closing the shop he stayed longer and longer with her,
ample cause for gossip. Acquaintances answered his greetings with a
wink and an impish smile which probably meant, "Well well, we did not
know you were such a brave boy." On the other hand during church
service his neighbors in the pew preferred to stand on the stone floor,
to let him know the void surrounding him expressed severe rebuke. For
the good of the firm, therefore, he decided to let the girl go. He
accompanied her to the square from which carriages were leaving in the
direction of Hoorn; he hugged her in a fatherly way, pressing into her
hand fourteen florins and eight stoovers.
She disappeared in the crowd. He did not know
whether she entered the carriage. If she went to the tavern on the
other side of the street "At the Black Cock," which had the worst
reputation (sailors hungry for cheap love knew it well), her fate was
sealed. This thought and especially the lustful images associated with
her haunted him for years.
He worked with his old energy, but without the
enthusiasm that gives wings to all enterprises. Sometimes it happened
that he refused to buy large shipments of merchandise even on
advantageous terms, saying: "I leave it to the young; now I make the
rounds of my estate and check walls, locks, and chains." The business,
however, went no worse than before. In the spring Anna died.
Now he was alone. He thought for some time that
he should crown the memory of himself and Anna with stone. It was to be
a bas-relief built into the wall of Nieuw Kerk representing the couple
holding each other's hands, with a quotation from the Bible underneath:
"Thus I repent and do penance in dust and ashes." But the common sense
of Cornelis, which never abandoned him even when he approached spheres
not subject to reason (rarely, it is true), suggested that he who truly
humbles himself before the Lord does not erect marble monuments to
himself. He pushed the temptation aside. "A simple plaque on the floor
of the church will be enough," he said, surprised at his own modesty.
The new idea liberated unsuspected reserves of
initiative, inventiveness and enthusiasm. He managed to convince his
exceedingly economical guild brothers (for years he had been dean of
the guild) it was necessary to build an orphanage. The spirit of a
young entrepreneur entered Cornelis, more, an apostle of a cause. He
tried to be everywhere at once: he organized collections, banquets, and
lotteries to add to the funds of the enterprise, he approved plans,
supervised the progress of construction, conferred for hours with
masons and carpenters about every detail. He liked to stroll in the
courtyard of the future orphanage and draw with his cane against the
sky the still nonexistent walls and windows, floors, mouldings and
steep roof.
He spent evenings at home "in the yellow room"
whose windows gave onto the garden. An armchair upholstered with red
cordovan stood there in which Mr. Jong (how many years ago it was) read
his Latin poets half aloud. It was the most venerable piece of
furniture in the household, like a flagship commanding a flotilla of
beds, tables, benches, chairs, abysmal wardrobes, and cupboards.
Cornelis would take a few books from the library at random and sink
into that armchair, leafing through the last number of the Dutch
Mercury in which there was always so much interesting news about
floods, court intrigues, the exchange, miracles and crimes. He did not
read much; he listened to the hubbub of the street and murmurs in the
house. A strong smell came from the garden of narcissus, wild roses,
and saffron.
As he let himself be carried away by sounds and
smells he had the experience that time was no longer docile. Before,
during his youth, he was its master; he knew how to stop or accelerate
it like a fisherman who imposes his own rhythm on the current of a
river. Now he felt like a stone thrown to the bottom, a stone covered
with moss over which a mobile immensity of incomprehensible waters was
rolling.
The book would slip off his knees. He fell into
torpor. More and more often the servant had to wake him for supper.
Soon after his birthday which was celebrated with
pomp (he had turned sixty), he fell sick. The doctors diagnosed a
jaundiced fever, recommended peace, and gave assurances that the
patient would quickly return to health. Cautious Cornelis made a
testament and ordered that debts be paid back ahead of time. The state
of the firm was as follows: assets, 12,000 florins; liabilities easy to
collect, 9,300 florins; 5,100 florins in valuable papers and shares in
the East India Company.
He was getting weaker and weaker, now he no
longer got up from bed. The physicians prescribed herb compresses,
different potions: quinine wine, tincture of aloes, extract of gentian.
They also let his blood, and in the end recommended that spider heads
in walnut shells be applied to the chest of the patient; and if that
did not help, verses from the Bible would be substituted for the spider
heads. Clearly science was discretely giving way to faith.
Every day around five-it was a sunny, very warm
summer-an old friend of Troost would come, Abraham Anslo, once a
preacher famous throughout Holland, today a silent old man with a
sparse gray beard and permanently tearing eyes. He sat at the foot of
the bed. They smiled to each other, their dialogue taking place beyond
words and time. The patient had a huge need to confess his doubts,
spiritual perplexities and anxieties. He could not understand the Other
World at all. The empty blue skies frightened him. Very likely it was
an impious rebellion of the imagination, above all of the pagan senses.
He was absolutely unable to understand how one can exist without a
house, without creaking stairs and a banister, without curtains and
candelabras; also without the cloths which had surrounded him
throughout his life. What implacable force takes away from us the
coolness of coarse silk, black wool flowing through the hands like a
gentle wave, linen recalling the surface of a pond covered with ice,
velvet tickling like moss, laces that seemed to whisper women's secrets?
Anslo would leave before dusk, and touch the hand
of his friend with cold fingers for goodbye.
Not much time remained.
Tomorrow, day after tomorrow a servant would
enter with breakfast and give a short cry.
Then they would cover all the mirrors in the
house, and turn all the pictures to the walls so the image of a girl
writing a letter, of ships in open sea, of peasants dancing under a
tall oak, would not stop the one who wanders toward unimaginable worlds
from going on his way.
(Translated from the Polish by John and
Bogdana Carpenter)
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