AND ANOTHER THING
Heidegger, creative obsession and the Salute Church in Venice
PAUL JOHNSON
Lst Friday I attended a brilliant lecture at the Royal Institute of Philosophy given by Michael Inwood of Trinity College, Oxford. Inwood is our leading authority on Hegel but more recently he has turned to the formidable and mysterious Martin Heideg- ger. In about 1953, I remember J.P. Sartre saying that Heidegger was the most impor- tant philosopher of the 20th century, adding that even he found him 'difficult'. George Steiner ranks him, along with Wittgenstein, as 'dominant' in our age. I knew that Hei- degger was a Nazi of sorts — his political trajectory is set out in Hugo Ott's biography — but I found it hard to understand why non-Nazis, indeed violent anti-Nazis, found him useful. I started to read Being and Time, and found it not merely difficult, to use Sartre's term, but impossible. As Charles II wearily remarked of his nephew by marriage Prince George of Denmark, 'I have tried him drunk and I have tried him sober, and I can make nothing of him.' Now along came Inwood to ask, 'Does the Nothing Noth?' and in the course of an intense hour, illumi- nated by sparkling metaphors and images, brought the thinking of this obscure, repel- lent man to life.
Heidegger was obsessed by Nothing. When Cordelia uses the word, Lear angri- ly replies, 'Nothing can come of nothing —speak again.' But as the superb Ian Holm performance showed this year, an entire play comes out of that nothing. By arguing that Nothing is not really nothing but something else, Heidegger, or rather his interpreter, Inwood, showed that we can pose a number of important ques- tions, including the vital one, 'Did God create the universe out of nothing?', and in some cases move towards answers. It was Heidegger's view that man is poised halfway between the angels and the insects, and that metaphysical speculation — examining the nature of nothing, for example — is what pushes him away from the insects and towards the angels. He thought that 'ordinary people', as opposed to scientists and philosophers, unconsciously engage in metaphysics — the science of things transcending what is physical or natural — and the metaphysi- cian's work is to make explicit the deep transcendent anxiety from which we all attempt to flee by feverish worldly activi- ty. I learned a lot in an hour, and it occurred to me that Heidegger's relent- less puzzling about metaphysical concepts was a good example of creative obsession.
Working at my new book, I am becom- ing slowly aware of the importance of obsession in the creative process. It oper- ates at any number of levels, At the lowest level —journalism, for instance — I find that my temporary obsession with the iniquities of Britain's Porkie-in-Chief has proved illuminating and enables me to see what is wrong with the British media as a whole. The characteristics of an iniquitous individual — his gossip-column approach, his mendacity and malice, his appetite for character assassination, his inability to see good in human beings and his determina- tion to emphasise all that is mean, dirty, selfish and degrading in mankind — is merely a heightened version of the media's collective persona. By investigat- ing Porkie, I am now much clearer in my own mind why the media is in such a deplorable moral state, and even how to put it right.
At a higher level, I find obsessions punctuate the creative process as regular- ly as commas and semicolons. Shorn of his obsession with the perfect and total music drama, Wagner would have remained a better-than-average routine composer, and Proust, deprived of his time/memory bewitchment, might have been nothing at all. An obsession with realism is at the heart of the creativity of artists as diverse as Donatello and Car- avaggio: it drives them and inspires them to great work. Some would say that Turn- er was obsessed by the sun, or rather by the way in which light (principally sun- light) alone gives meaning to material things, just as Constable was obsessed by slow-running water and its effect on veg- etable life exposed to its lustrations. I do not know of any great painter, or any minor one for that matter, who was not obsessed by particular images, though in most cases they change every year or so.
I am currently obsessed by the Salute church in Venice. The importance of Venice to painters should never be under- estimated. I noticed that at the last show of my watercolours in London all my Venice pictures sold quite quickly, whereas my Norwegian fjord ones, which I thought bet- ter, were overlooked. Patrons like Venice pictures and partly because they have been there and enjoyed themselves, partly because Venice offers matchless opportuni- ties for obsessive displays of virtuosity, both detailed and panoramic. Canaletto could have gone on painting Venice for a thou- sand years without repeating himself or exhausting his interest and invention, and every one of those works could have been sold ten times over. Glynn Boyd Harte, who is a characteristically obsessive painter, in that he gets gripped by a particular image and the problem of rendering it in two dimensions, finds Venice a prime loca- tion. His little book on the city, published by Hamish Hamilton, shows him returning again and again to reflections in glass and water, and the corresponding patterns sun- light on water throws up on buildings. His obsessions were shared by Sargent, whose best work was done in Venice, and whose bravura canvas 'The Rialto', c. 1909, show- ing gondolas in the shadow of the bridge's arches, is being sold in New York by Sothe- by's next month.
My obsession with the Salute springs not just from the shape of its dome, so special and so fiendishly difficult to get exactly right, but from its whirling but- tresses, which remind me of a certain kind of liquorice allsorts I had as a child, but whity-grey instead of black. I am also mesmerised by its special relationship to the Dogana or Customs House, which stands in front of the church at the entrance to the Grand Canal. I have done a huge watercolour of the Dogana to the left of the Salute, and now another, even larger, crayon drawing — or rather, mixed media, as they say nowadays, as I have used body colour, gouache, tempera, ink and watercolour as well. It is on a special kind of card with which I am clumsily striving to get a coppery-green effect rem- iniscent of G.F. Watt's 'Hope', currently on display at the Tate's Symbolist exhibi- tion. This second one shows the Dogana in the foreground.
I am already planning a third and a fourth picture, and am ransacking my port- folios for relevant sketches. Where will it all end? It will end, as usual, when another obsessive image shoves the old one aside. I use the word obsession not to denote a psy- chological disorder, but in its original sense: to besiege. You besiege a topic until it falls, like a city, and then you possess it. Heidegger seems to view metaphysics as man's road to freedom. It occurs to me that each successfully resolved obsession is a milestone along that road, to freedom in art and freedom in man.
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