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would think disorganized. But the fact that I had been made the gift, and with no pretext and on no particular occasion, haunted me for years, and I treasured the book and bore it with me wherever I went, off to school at a big city in Ontario, then to a small Midwestern college town and afterward, as the 1960s wound to a close, circulating through the cities of the East, still, in all this time, not a particular admirer of the painter whose shadows filled its pages. It was only many years later that I saw his canvasses unmediated by printer’s ink and my own limited imagination—freed possibly by having heard Debussy’s L’îsle joyeuse but also entrapped by a swelling galaxy of curiosities—and found that they constitute the epitome of order and beauty. I was helped some in appreciating Cézanne by Guy Davenport’s four Alexander Lectures at the University of Toronto in 1982, “Objects on a Table: Still Life in Literature and Painting,” lectures soon enough invoked—yet only invoked—in a charming publication called Apples and Pears but not, as it happens, to appear in print themselves for some sixteen years—a depressingly long time, since I had been smitten by them and much of what I wished to read was only hanging in the mist. He had graciously given me a moment to say hello before one of these talks and had seemed delighted that anyone in his audience might have been genuinely stimulated by the connections he was so rapidly and voraciously making as he spoke. So stunned had I been by the range of his scholarship and the mystery of his attachments to paintings, paragraphs, poems, colors, and ideas—his personal warmth in the pewter chill of Toronto’s November seemed to augment and color my already rich experience of listening to him at his podium—that years later, when I mounted four groups of Polaroid SX-70 photographs as an address to Debussy’s Bergamasque Suite, and included for one of the movements a series of still lifes of apples, it seemed obvious to me that I should dedicate the show to him. Accordingly, I sent him slides and he was most grateful, but that was the end of our tangential and charged contact. When sometime after his death in January 2005 I learned that he had arranged for the donation of his organs to medical science, I remember being both struck by the nobility and simplicity of this gesture and deeply confused to realize that the person I had met was in fact now divided; or had always been quite remote from the body he inhabited and was thus more than the eyes smiling at mine or the voice gently but disconnectedly encouraging me or the gracile penmanship—a skill retained from the early twentieth-century days when personality and conviction had to live in markings upon paper—that characterized his little note of thanks. The recurrence of the female form of the apple and the male form of the pear in literature particularly interested him—he spoke of apples and pears as being “married” (Objects 55)—as did the Sherlock Holmes stories of Arthur Conan Doyle, and much painting. Cézanne’s still lifes, Van Gogh’s 1888 picture of his bedroom in Arles, and Monet’s work on the waterways around Paris occupied the central position in these 1982 talks, which ranged over a tremendous amount of material—to me at the time, an entire world—and made a chain of startling connections that I could not now reassemble without the help of a notebook I have stowed away somewhere, or lost, I cannot be sure, a notebook that was red, apple red. At any rate, I came to adore the still lifes of Cézanne, and to marvel at how he had accomplished giving the fruit bulk but also weightlessness, and of course at the shockingly simple and complex ways in which he positioned the peaches and oranges and apples around one another to make compositions that echoed Bach. Cézanne, at any rate, lived in Aix as Niccolo does, and, like Antonioni, was deeply moved by color. In late Cézanne “the sketch is the painting” (Davenport, Gracchus 275). Color, for Cézanne and for Antonioni and also for Davenport, was a reverberation of past events, an echo of echoes, and it occupied time, that same color that Picasso said “is a distraction in a painting” (qtd. in Gracchus 183).
Aix—old Aix, at least—is a city of sandstone buildings, tiny streets, and a thousand fountains, with the grand, confrontational Mont Sainte-Victoire on its eastern edge among modest, shady groves of pine. It is a place—at least the Aix that Antonioni photographs in Beyond the Clouds is a place—that offers itself to the spirit of the wanderer without making any imposition. As we follow Niccolo and the girl, as we listen to them address one another in an extended dolly that moves down blocks and turns corners and crosses little squares, we have no anticipation of arriving at a summary destination but only, with each of their steps, contentment at the experience of penetrating and then relinquishing a space. Satisfaction is beyond consideration. “Are you satisfied, madame?” the young man asks a middle-aged woman who is passing by, and she smiles indulgently at the ridiculousness of the question; yet we see that she is entirely pleased with her condition, even though it is not a condition of satisfaction. She is hardly bored, or irritated, or even displaced by her lack of satisfaction. Aix removes the question of satisfaction from the equation.
To experience art is an act of faith. To make art, to paint a canvas, is innocent, an abandonment while also a consumption of the self. Everything is the subject, its distance, its roundness, proportion, history, implication, its weight—which is to say, in Cézanne, its lack of weight, its light. (Color is light, and that is why color is everywhere.) But to look at a painting is an affirmation of the self, because in this act we struggle to believe in the existence of the qualities we admire. We elevate art, but not without the expenditure of effort that also produces an elevation of the self. To see the world clearly, as Cézanne saw it, is to diminish the self to a point, but in order to admire someone else’s vision of the world one lifts it onto one’s shoulders. One is working, after all, to convince oneself that this is an Original—special, worthy of considered attention—but then suddenly, as though on the opening of a door into a grand arena, one sees or hears all of it with a new and surprising clarity, and it is all present and accounted for, effortless, pristine, full, in a flash, and then originality disappears as a consideration, becomes trivial in the face of what the work actually is. Yet is this vision or this audition not something like what occurred for and to the artist at work? For an instant we have the opportunity to share that vision or audition by performing it again, by repeating history. (In the brief interlude directed by Wenders, when Mastroianni painting the Mont Sainte-Victoire is interrupted by Moreau stepping up to converse with him, this is what he tells her, too: that the meaning for him in copying the original Cézanne resides in trying to experience what the painter experienced, and this is not copying.) The artist, it is certain, labors with the conviction that such an audition, such a perception, is possible, surely for the artist who regards the world but also for those who come to the work of art. He shows or perhaps sings the world in such a way that others can know how he saw it, or heard it open itself and sing to him, through the obstruction of daily life—and not just obstruction but continual obstruction and darkness, that rent to be paid, the paint dry upon the palette, the bon mot slipping away into those moist blue recesses of the absurd and the undiscovered. Or the opinions of the strangers standing next to one’s elbow, always too informed. The world must finally vibrate so that it rises off the map: Mont Sainte-Victoire ceases to be that stalwart lump at 43° 32' N, 05° 39' E and becomes an ineffable presence. If one listens carefully to a choir in a church, if one gives oneself entirely to each voice and the combination of voices, one can also hear the stones from which the vibrations of these voices are recoiling. It is the stones, as much as the music, that have the power to put one to sleep, since by way of those who sing the stones themselves have voice, just as by way of the painter the mountain speaks or as by way of the filmmaker the space of the urban intérieur (which Walter Benjamin described, “furnished and familiar” [Gunning 106]), its cherished objects or its lack of things, its paintings even standing upon the floor, its plate glass partitions, is permitted to enunciate the world.
Voices
It is rather evident to the eye, even disturbingly so as we watch, that as they walk through the city, the girl almost never looks at the young man. Speaking through the voice of an off-camera narrator in To Make a Film Is to Be Alive, a documentary about the making of Beyond the Clouds that is published on the DVD, Antonioni explicitly draws attention to the fact. She needs, says this narrator, “no reassurance from him. Security is not what she needs. A serenity verging on indifference seems to pervade her.” This is surely difficult, if only because serenity is sacred while indifference is mundane. The girl is unruffled, but she is also a little stiff, as though the force of attraction exercised by his hungry ministrations and gaze has made her capable of falling from a kind of pedestal that is gliding