La Visite
The Meaning of Life
Rembrandt painted many images of himself from when he was a young man until shortly before his death in his sixties. I find these some of the strangest images of a person recording himself. I wonder what it was like for him as an old man looking at how he had noticed himself in his twenties? It feels as if he discovered an answer to: what is the meaning of life?
Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn – Self-Portrait With Dishevelled Hair, 1628
He realised that it’s an answer, not a question. It’s an answer to another question: what’s the effect of life? The effect of life, an effect of life, is to drive us to look for meaning. A lot of the time this is a terrible distraction from the over-arching, and ever-dawning realisation, as life goes on, that we can know nothing at all for certain.
Life might be better served by paying attention and gathering what’s happening than breaking away to dream up explanations. Conclusions. I don’t see anything final in Rembrandt’s self portraits. There is a looking on, perhaps a looking after, in the sense of some kind of care, and there is a deep sense of presence. These are not surface pictures, even though they concentrate so profoundly on his appearance; nor do they only go deep. These are pictures from the outside and from the inside at the same time, which might also go on to suggest something to us about what life means.
Centre of the Universe
We thrive when we feel centred. However, if we are at the centre of our own little universe, as if we are the sun, how do we stand in relation to everyone around us?
We need to feel centred and at the same time be de-centered.
The feeling of being at one with ourselves doesn’t come from standing in the middle of things so that all revolves around us. It comes from inside ourselves. Our feelings always do. Feeling good or feeling bad it’s we that give ourselves our feelings.
Love is not an extract from another person. Love is what I might feel in relation to somebody else. I might feel love and I might feel loved. Both feelings are mine.
All love is narcissistic and narcissism can be a very good thing. Paul Federn wrote about non-pathalogical narcissim, that good ‘ego feeling’ that can hold us together. That way I might ‘feel myself’ today.
Rather than think of centred and decentred as opposite poles on the same axis what if they were simply different? They might then coexist. Their coexistence wouldn’t have to be paradoxical.
We can imagine situations in which we ask for things. If we notice our need to feel centred and find it through being receptive to other people, balancing what we need and want with what they need and want a universe of universes might be possible.
Pathological, bad narcissism involves people who do not acknowledge their need to feel centred. They go ahead and take the centre. If the world does not revolve around them so that the people in their lives do not behave predictably or in ways that satisfy their stellar demands, then for them something is wrong. They will do all they can to gain and remain in control.
Dutch Interior
Dutch Interior paintings can feel strangely fulfilling. They present the security of small, special worlds while remaining incomplete and unresolved. Rooms in which intimate scenes play out open onto the uncertainty of whatever lies outside. Doors and windows give onto scenes we can only partly see, the rest of which we have to imagine. In these paintings we find a sense of the future we might recognise to be true: a future that is uncertain. We move from something we almost feel we should not know, a glimpse of a private moment, towards a place we can only ever begin to know. These are paintings that fulfil both our need to know and our desire to be teased, which offer up the consequences of knowing too much and not enough.
De Hooch gives us domestic scenes like the one above: ‘Woman Reading and a Child with a Hoop’. In a darkened room a little girl in a golden yellow dress looks through a doorway at a man standing looking at somebody or something else. A woman sits next to the little girl, in the corner of the room, holding a book. She seems to be caught between reading and realising something has affected the little girl. It is as if she is about to look up from the book. There are windows to the room through which I can see other windows and, in the distance, trees. However, the room’s windows seem to disconnect these things. They and the doorway have something of a dream about them. Every opening in the room should, according to what we know about rooms and what is outside of them, lead onto a space that is connected, inter-related, part of the same thing. It’s uncertain whether the world we see through each opening has everything in common with the world we see through the others.
In the foreground there is a little dog and a monkey. Both are agitated, maybe helping us realise something about the little girl’s state of mind. The little girl holds a hoop in her left hand and perhaps a stick in her right hand. Her right hand is raised but is it to roll the hoop or catch the attention of the man outside? She wants the man’s to turn back to her. He’s gone. Perhaps she feels on her own, not even in the same place as the woman beside her. The woman has been somewhere else, lost in her book. What does the woman feel when she realises how the little girl feels?
There is a painting on the wall in the room and unfortunately the reproduction here is too poor for us to see it properly, but a woman in the painting sits in a way that begins to mirror the woman sitting reading in the room. Some of us may want to know more about that painting or about the painting hanging above the woman reading the book. Some may be happiest with its obscurity. This painting offers us so many different ways to think about what is seen all too clearly and what is not really seen at all. One reality sits next to another without ever properly announcing itself: the little girl and the woman; the windows and the view outside. De Hooch takes us into our imaginations and a feeling of the future.