'Waiting' with Hendrick Corneliz. van Vliet (1611-75)

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Notes for a presentation to Amherst College FYS 13, Erôs and Insight,given in the study gallery of the Mead art Building, October 23, 2004 , by J. Upton

So, now we are in the Mead art Building, the art museum of your college, with its genuinely remarkable collection of works of art in all media from around the world. Today we will try to engage one of those works of art: a painting by the Dutch artist Hendrick Corneliz. van Vleit (1611-75), a contemporary of Rembrandt van Rijn and Jan Vermeer.

You might be wondering why we are here. Other than contributing to our determined effort to disrupt your habitual—that is, your nonthinking—relationship with the world and each other, what could a painting by Hendrick van Vliet have to do with last Tuesday's class about rational and irrational numbers, finite and infinite relationships, Nicolas of Cusa's “coincidence of opposites” and “learned ignorance,” and, most bewildering of all, Seng T'san, the third Zen Patriarch from ca. 600 C. E.? Have we convinced you yet that H. D. Thoreau's “woods” really are different from the more familiar and probably comfortable “ Concord ”? May I say it? Please remain patient. We are trying to bring you into a world of deliberate thinking ...of deliberate attentiveness ... disciplined attentiveness ... not only to ordinary similarity and difference, but also to explicit contradiction ... and of openness to ever-more-complicated and irreconcilable contradiction; so that, in time, you might truly embrace contradiction/paradox in all of its confusion and wonder as the only real basis of free thinking. Very soon now, we will come the contradiction in the title of FYS 13, Erôs and Insight, and by attending to this most mysterious contradiction at the core of our being and then by embracing it, we will at last be in a position to think about “love” and hence your relationships with the world and each other as you may never have thought about them before. So be patient.

Early in this seminar we asked you to consider a few words of Simone Weil, which you might not have been able to think clearly about at the time. You may not have even understood what it meant to think in this way. Let me read them to you again. Perhaps they will have begun to open themselves to your deliberate thinking. At the end of today's class I will read them again, in the hope that our few moments with Hendrick van Vliet will have brought you another step closer to this unfamiliar way of knowing and thinking, as compared to merely responding thoughtlessly to your world. In Simone Weil's words, you will recognize immediately that our task once more today is to embrace the cognitive contradiction of what Professor Zajonc, through Nicolas of Cusa, called “ ratio ” and “ intellectus ” and I will offer as the intersection of the academic discipline of art history and “art,” or more directly, the contradiction of mere “looking” (however analytically or interpretively) and true “beholding.” So, here again are Simone Weil's words:

“All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception .... Grace fills empty spaces but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void.”

 

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