Beata Beatrix. By Dante Gabriel Rossetti. 1870. The Tate, London
Authentic synchronicity appeals to me greatly. Not forced. Not contrived. Just lined up like a composed fluke of sorts. Well, not a fluke. Like destiny. Like it had to be. Just so. Just like it ended up being. Inevitable. As William Barrett said, the best art is inevitable.
Dante Rossetti paints Dante’s Beatrice in honor of his own lost love, Elizabeth Siddal. The elder Dante wrote Vita Nuova to honor and recreate his lost love, Beatrice. Dante Rossetti based the painting above on that depiction. Beatrice and Elizabeth. Love after love. Death walks with us and alters us in profound ways. The creation of art, like the creation of life, is given its profundity — when it earns it — because of death, because of its temporary nature. Beginning and end without end.
Why Dante today, you ask? Well, it just so happens that we have a new prose poem by George Spencer that deals with Dante’s people in a very interesting way. Not in the same way as the painting above, and not in the same century. Not even in the same country. You could say it inevitably loses a bit of syncronicity in the translation. On the other hand, neither Dante ever knew the joys of the New York subway or modern attire.
In my writing I try not to ask whether a connection I am finding obeys necessity. When you say “inevitable,” you mean something a little different from that, so that I pay careful attention to your opening. You say “Like destiny” and I like it that it is “like.“
Barrett meant that if artist X had not created it, someone else, inevitably, would have. At least that’s how I take it. Meaning, the work is so “right”, it’s destined to be produced by someone, eventually. All things would eventually have aligned in such a way. Lots of ways to look at that and it’s complicated. But I always like the ring of his pithy saying.
But it is also and before and after question, don’t you think. The synchronicity that the artist comes up with is so fine that it seems to be “already” there, whereas if the artist or writer goes looking for connections that are necessary, and only those, she or he may lose the connections altogether, giving up the spontaneity that paradoxically, “after the fact,” discovers the already there.
It was always thus. A major part of art is to make it new and make it appear that it can’t appear any other way. Spontaneously on purpose. Contradictions R Us. Etc. Yep, if you paint too long, it turns to mud. If you write too much, it turns to chaos and self-indulgence. They say, Wolfe was created by Perkins. They say. The Waste Land was made by Pound. They say. Who knows? Perhaps eventually Wolfe and Elliot would have come to similar conclusions about their work … Probably not. Aside from the inevitable, there seems to be a bit of the four leaf clover involved at times. Pick it up, and you have something special. Not asynchronous, for sure. At least that’s how the legend goes.
All very interesting. Thanks.