All Joanâs guidance, military and moral, came from a source she called âvoices.â All the blame of her trial was gathered up in this question, the nature of the voices. She began to hear them when she was twelve years old. They spoke to her from outside, commanding her life and death, her military victories and revolutionary politics, her dress code and heretical beliefs. During the trial Joanâs judges returned again and again to this crux: they insisted on knowing the story of the voices. They wanted her to name, embody and describe them in ways they could understand, with recognizable religious imagery and emotions, in a conventional narrative that would be susceptible to conventional disproof. They framed this desire in dozens of ways, question after question. They prodded and poked and hemmed her in. Joan despised the line of inquiry and blocked it as long as she could. It seems that for her, the voices had no story. They were an experienced fact so large and real it had solidifed in her as a sort of sensed abstractionâwhat Virginia Woolf once called âthat very jar on the nerves before it has been made anything.â(2) Joan wanted to convey the jar on the nerves without translating it into theological clichĂ©. It is her rage against clichĂ© that draws me to her. A genius is in her rage. We all feel this rage at some level, at some time. The genius answer to it is catastrophe.
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Bacon has another term for this catastrophizing: he calls it âdestroying clarity with clarity.â(8) Not just in his use of color but in the whole strategy of his compositions, he wants to make us see something we donât yet have eyes for. He goes inside clarity to a place of deeper refreshment, where clarity is the same and yet differs from itself, which may be analogous to the place inside a word where it falls silent in its own presence. And it is noteworthy that for Bacon this is a place of violence. He talks a lot about violence in his interviews. He gets asked a lot about violence in his interviews. He and his interviewers do not mean the A Public Space Issue 7same thing by this word. Their question is about images of crucifixion, slaughtered meat, twisting, mangling, bullfights, glass cages, suicide, half-animals and unidentifiable flesh. His answer is about reality. He is not interested in illustrating violent situations and disparages his own works that do so as âsensational.â He wants to convey the sensation, not the sensational, to paint the scream, not the horror. And he understands the scream in its reality to lie somewhere inside the surface of a screaming person or a scream-worthy situation. If we consider his study of the pope screaming alongside the painting that inspired it, Velazquezâs Portrait of Pope Innocent X, we can see what Bacon has done is to plunge his arms into Velazquezâs image of this profoundly disquieted man and to pull out a scream that is already going on there deep inside. He has made a painting of silence in which silence silently rips, as black holes are said to do in deep space when no one is looking. Here is Bacon speaking to David Sylvester:
When talking about the violence of paint itâs nothing to do with the violence of war. Itâs to do with an attempt to remake the violence of reality itself ⊠and the violence also of the suggestions within the image itself which can only be conveyed through paint. When I look at you across the table I donât only see you, I see a whole emanation which has to do with personality and everything else âŠ. the living quality ⊠all the pulsations of a person ⊠the energy within the appearance âŠ. And to put that over in a painting means that it would appear violent in paint. We nearly always live through screensâa screened existence. And I sometimes think when people say my work is violent that from time to time I have been able to clear away one or two of the veils or screens.(9)
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Bacon says we live through screens. What are these screens? They are part of our normal way of looking at the world, or rather our normal way of seeing the world without looking at it, for Baconâs claim is that a real seer who looked at the world would notice it to be fairly violentânot violent as narrative surface but somehow violently composed underneath the surface, having violence as its essence.
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What fascinates me is to see his [Hölderinâs] catastrophe [a bad translation of Sophocles], at whatever level of consciousness he chose it, as a method extracted from translation, a method organized by the rage against clichĂ©. After all what else is oneâs own language but a gigantic cacophonous clichĂ©. Nothing has not been said before. The templates are set. Adam long ago named all the creatures. Reality is in chains. When Francis Bacon approaches a white canvas its empty surface is already filled with the whole history of painting up to that moment, it is a compaction of all the clichĂ©s of representation already extant in the painterâs world, in the painterâs head, in the probability of what can be done on this surface. Screens are in place making it hard to see anything but what one expects to see, hard to paint what isnât already there. Bacon is not content to deflect or beguile clichĂ© by some painterly trick, he wants to assassinate it right there on his canvas. So he solicits the interventions of chance. He makes what he calls âfree marksâ on the canvas, both at the beginning when it is white and later when it is partly painted or completely painted. He uses brushes, sponges, sticks, rags, his hand or just throws a can of paint at it. His intention is to disrupt its probability and to short-circuit his own control of the disruption. His product is a catastrophe, which he will then proceed to manipulate into an image that he can call real.
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Free marks are a gesture of rage. One of the oldest myths we have of this gesture is the story of Adam and Eve in the garden of paradise. Why did Eve put a free mark on that apple? To say she was seduced by the snake or longing for absolute knowledge or in search of immortality are posterior analytics. Isnât the simple fact of the matter that she was bored? Adam had just performed the primordial act of naming, had taken the first step towards imposing on the wide-open pointless meaningless directionless dementia of the real a set of clichĂ©s that no one would ever dislodge, or want to dislodgeâthey are our human history, our edifice of thought, our answer to chaos. Eveâs instinct was to bite this answer in half.
Most of us, given a choice between chaos and naming, between catastrophe and clichĂ©, would choose naming. Most of us see this as a zero sum gameâas if there were no third place to be: something without a name is commonly thought not to exist. And here is where we can discern the benevolence of translation. Translation is a practice, a strategy, or what Hölderlin calls âa salutary gymnastics of the mind,â(15) that does seem to give us a third place to be. In the presence of a word that stops itself, in that silence, one has the feeling that something has passed us and kept going, that some possibility has got free. For Hölderlin, as for Joan of Arc, this is a religious apprehension and leads to gods. For Francis Bacon it leads to Rembrandt.
One of Francis Baconâs favorite paintings is a self-portrait by Rembrandt. He mentions it in several interviews. What he says he likes about this portrait is that when you go close to it you notice the eyes have no sockets.(16) Let us place this explanation alongside a sentence of Hölderlinâs that haunts me and I canât say quite why. On the right-hand margin of a page on which he had already drafted a poem, Hölderlin at a later date began to write an essay. It contains this strange remark:
Ăfters hab'ich die Sprache, öfters hab'ich Gesang versucht, aber sie hörten dich nicht.
Often enough I tried language, often enough I tried song, but they didnât hear you.(17)
Something about the way the pronouns in this sentence come face to face with themselves reminds me of Rembrandtâs eyes. Those socketless eyes are certainly not blind. They are engaged in a forceful looking, but it is not a look organized in the normal way. Seeing is going on but (is it possible that) seeing is entering Rembrandtâs eyes from the back. What his look sends forward, in our direction, is deep silence. Perhaps rather like the silence that followed Joan of Arcâs response to her judges when they asked her, âIn what language do your voices speak to you?â and she answered: âBetter language than yours.â
