Mario Sironi has no need to refute any of his previous experiences. For him it was sufficient to follow step by step the needs of his spirit, so sensitive to the effects of painting.
Carlo Carrà , 1931
Some time ago it was it struck me that the components of the word understanding could be reversed and, in that way, as standing under, open up a new meaning for me - to understand could mean standing under the truth of one's nature. The image of standing under a banner amplifies this with the phrase standing for, the opposite of which could be defending against. Something in the person which must be defended against may become understood - initially by being understood by another and by virtue of such an eventuality may gain a shape that can be sustained whereas previously it was locked away out of mind. Two other words help in locating the sense of the experience of understanding as standing under, where we can speak of the capacity to experience being understood. They are assimilate and, as used above, sustain. To say that I sustain my nature is to imply that I bear the pain which otherwise has to be defended against and that I have assimilated a readiness to feel understood in a satisfying way, in a relationship of reciprocity, which gives my experience a place and a meaning. Such an assimilation of meaning, Rilke expresses in lines from his tenth Elegy (Stephen Mitchell's translation).
- How we squander our hours of pain.
How we gaze beyond them into the bitter duration
to see if they have an end. Though they are really
our winter-enduring foliage, our dark evergreen,
one season in our inner year - not only a season
in time - but a place and settlement, foundation and soil and home.
Thus standing under is a settlement, it settles us.
Of course one may say 'I understand', and not, or 'she understands me', but mean something else. It might mean many things. It might mean something like 'I know I do such and such', or 'I have that such and such bad habit'. Does it mean I have an experience of being understood though; have I understood in such a way that it changes my relationship to a problem area in myself so that now what was denied, or attributed to others, is now accepted as mine, my initiative, hidden heretofore? 'I understand what you're saying' may carry no message to the other of being understood, and is very different from a response such as 'I really feel understood by you'. It may indicate a number of things, either you haven't understood or do not want to understand. In rarer cases it may indicate the capacity to be undestood has not developed. In that case there may be an area of unutterable and painful confusion stirred up in an intimate relationship and creating despair of its ever finding a meaning. Attempts to understand would always miss the mark. There is no 'standing-under here. To use the word under would only be in the sense of under the power of something felt to be contrary to nature.
The discovery of the incapacity to be understood is itself a major coup of understanding. For then it is no longer the cause of a persistent grievance that no one, especially the ones closest to us, ever gets it right. Where it remains unthinkable the only way it can be conveyed is by dissatisfaction - pretexts are set up by which the other is made to feel he never understands and as if he is being put through an endurance test, for the ground is always shifting. But the source of it is an unspeakable confusion and the need somehow to communicate a profound frustration.
Someone I knew and loved, towards the end, said to me 'You never knew me'. It was a blow I will never forget and it made me feel guilty and miserable. If I had remembered something she had said to me at the beginning when I had known her for only a few weeks, if I had understood that, not just pretended to, and taken it for a profound example in such a young person as she was, of understanding, it might have been different, at least I would have been able better to balance what was mine and what had been hers. But in truth I could not understand it or the extent to which it challenged me. What she said was this: 'There will be times when if you are with me it will only be that you want to be there because I will not be aware that you are. If then you need the reassurance from me you will be disappointed.' Not only was it understanding, it was commitment. She was standing under the truth of her nature and offering herself to me, as though making a vow.
The example of Mario Sironi (1885 -1961)
Mario Sironi is an important Italian painter whose work carries a particular charm for me from the moment I first saw a small painting of his Gasometro in the Estorick Collection gallery in London. Renato Miracco writes in the introduction to an exhibition of his drawings he curated in 2002, that Sironi was 'a creative personality of extraordinary emotional intensity', an observation filled out by Carrà in the words quoted above as following 'step by step the needs of his spirit'. His contemporaries noted Seroni's 'cognitive anxiety'. Miracco writes 'It was precisely this anxiety - which on a number of occasions, was to lead Sironi into periods of profound depression - coupled with his stature as an artist and his undoubted intellectual capacity, which was to mould him into a draftsman for an era, and which pushed him to forge the compositional foundations of an entire historical period that was to influence generations of modern painters.' The analogy between this artistic drive and the metapsychology of the drive towards personal integrity and relationship is well expressed by Sironi's famous contemporary Carrà. '... every form carries within itself an aspiration to complete itself with another complimentary form, totally necessary to the integral expression of it temperament (elliptical, angular, spherical, cubic, conical.' This statement of Sironi's Carrà saw as a personal approach to the metaphysical truth. For an artistic soul like Mario Sironi, 'the poetic truth is the metaphysical truth', wrote Carrà. 'Concrete and abstract enemies have been reconciled and fused into a sole artistic reality, external and internal are reunited.'
A comparison with De Chirico (Miracco)
De Chirico's world (viz Song of Lovein my article on Screen Memories)' is one in which man has lost all his human qualities and become a shadow, transformed into a mannequin awaiting an "unexpected revelation". In Sironi's work the human figure oppressed by the new urban reality, does not become a hollow mannequin but an entity rich in painful emotion'.
What has this to do with understanding? For me the urban landscapes in particular are a revelation a way of seeing and experiencing myself in my environment; it is to do with how to be with strangeness, with standing under what may seem painfully jarring and irresolvable.
An imaginary scenario.
A man with a need to be of assistance, let us imagine, is attracted to a woman who brings out in him a comforting sense of being a knight in shining armour. His need is strong to the point of insistence, let us say, such that it would be difficult for him to be deflected from this purpose and, if persuaded to back down, he would always revert to it as if no one had previously attempted to decline his offer or put their point of view. This could be construed less as helpfulness, as a form of control and might even be thought to conceal a fear of helplessness and to operate in order to banish the fear of not being needed. Suppose the attraction of the damsel in distress were strong enough to cause this man of property and master of the house with an established place in the community to leave behind a dependent wife with a mind of her own, the underlying tensions of a grown-up family with long-standing scores to settle, and go to live with the woman he now loves with a view to making the situation permanent.
What then? Part of the reciprocal attraction the woman may feel to this man, let us suppose, is his attentiveness and tireless availability, popping up like Jebedee, and ready with suggestions, which in the event often just showed that he was grasping at straws; things would get broken perhaps, but 'no matter'. People’s opinions, along with a certain reserve about his abilities, tended to be swept aside. Perhaps she found these weak spots endearing. She was, we have to think, a competent enough woman, not without a sense of humour.
At first all goes well. But soon a source of mounting frustration begins to emerge. He is not allowed to help. He is baffled by this and redoubles his efforts as if he has second sight into the fact that his woman is helpless and really does need him to take over. Objexcts around him, at least in the mind of the woman, of a sudden take on a more fragile quality. The situation only gets worse as he thinks up more and more ways to convince her of his considerateness and that she needs his help, while she, ostensibly believing that no one can do it better than her, gets more and more overburdened as though unable to let anyone lighten her load. The adage, 'If you want to do something properly, you must do it yourself' comes to mind. At any rate, I am imagining that a situation seems to be growing where two people living together in a small area, compared with what he has been used to, are gradually being driven to distraction by one another. The breaking point is approached as he becomes more and more unable to do anything to lift the black moods his partner seems to have become prey to. For no reason at all, as far as he can fathom, she goes out of communication, becomes ill, and retires to her room, silently refusing his ‘untimely’ cups of tea. Alternating with this she expresses a jealous anxiety that he does not abandon her.
Let us suppose that, like the man who coped with his presentiment of being useless, she had something to conceal from herself, something that only began to resurface once she was in an intimate relationship. What could it be? Her black moods which seemed to make it impossible for her to say what was wrong, but which the man was experiencing as aimed at him, might seem to suggest that she suffered from not being able to sustain a sense of being understood, and thus offers of help she experienced as impositions demanding grateful acceptance but which only rubbed salt in the wound of having no sense of what it was to be understood, a situation, it could well be imagined, as incommunicably dreadful as her partner's painful sense of being sidelined, and for which she was unable to get relief. What is she to do but draw the curtains and be ill?
Were things not as I have imagined, were she someone able to feel a satisfaction in being understood and anticipated she might have been able to come and go and meet an over-controlling man with some humour and self-assertion while staying in communication in order to work through to a mutual understanding. But here the basic incapacity to be understood (the lack and the yearning for the inconceivable) meets in the other the inability to understand. He feels thwarted, wrong-footed. His partner's very presence stirs up in him more and more the misery of feeling surplus to requirements.
To use Carlo Carrà’s language of poetics, how can the ‘enemies’ be reconciled, the external appearances and the internal realities be reunited on analogy with what Mario Seroni achieved poetically ‘step by step’ and through painful depressions, a new way of seeing for a generation. ‘De Chirico spoke of the “unexpected moment” the moment when we seem to see things for the first time.’ It is what Walker Percy in his novel The Moviegoer called ‘the search’ an imminent sense of being ‘on to’ something, a moment of seeing beyond ‘everydayness’. I would use the word ‘chink’ or ‘interstices’. Carrà called such moments ‘apparitions of ordinary things’. Sironi saw this in the outskirts of Milan in the confrontation of man and machines, the relationship between steel and concrete and the fragile nature of mankind, a vision superseding the pastoral harmony between man and nature which had been swept away by the industrial age. ‘This is the true goal of Mario Sironi, his real objective’, Miracco claims, ‘to reach a compositional purity without depriving the new suburban reality of any of its anxiety, framed by “photographic” compositions and illuminated by a squalid electric light.’ It is not the idealised relationship, but the relationship to the given, which makes sense of the act of understanding as the attitude of standing-under.
In the imaginary scenario such an 'unexpected moment' might conceivably occur. For the man it might be a depressing shock that he carries a sense he never knew about of being useless when he had always thought of himself as capable. He might say to himself, 'This is something that drives me. It may account for the disaffection of my children, and here I am in a situation which makes this clear to me. This is why I am here - to discover just that!' For the woman a glimpse through the interstices, or branches of her history might bring a profound realisation that she has always had a sense of being unable to convey her reality and that it is for all the world as though she is neither seen nor heard. She might go on to see how that could be closely related to her dread of being left. 'How can I be heard,' she may say to herself, 'when I cannot hear myself? But now I hear and this relationship has brought me to this.' For him, without such a moment, (and this is the set-up) she has the authority to take away his sense of being de trop; she accepts him, he imagines, on just such terms, as someone who will be eternally grateful for his interventions. For her part, without knowing it, she ascribes to him the role of hearing what she is unable to speak. She may not consciously realise that not to be appreciated for what he thinks he has to offer is death to him. Without the 'chink', the 'apparition', the collusion is doomed to a culture of blame. He is proved to be useless and she may be crying for help but, as in a bad dream, her cry is silent; no one hears, not even herself. For each their worst fears are in process of materialising.
‘The painter has had to travel a long path confirming his pictorial conceptual experiences’, wrote Carrà. The path to understanding ourselves in relationship to others is long and painful too.
Mario Sironi Perifera
Tout ce que l'on dit de nous est faux; mais pas plus faux que ce que nous en pensons. Mais d'un autre faux
Paul Valéry
To start with I would like to contrast Valéry's pensée with the much better known French proverb Pour comprendre tout est de pardonner à tous: 'to understand all is to forgive all'; it may help to differentiate the meanings of the word understanding
between the dynamic and the non-dynamic. I'm using the word dynamic to refer to a basic dual tenet of psycho-analytical thinking, namely that understanding leads to change, and that change is understanding. There are several ways in which the verb understand is used that definitely does not entail psychic change and to those Valéry's priceless adage aptly applies: 'Everything they say about us is false, but not any more false than what we think we are, just a different sort of false'.
The proverb, apart from the religious ring it has where a two-person scenario is constellated, links understanding with the remission of the need to judge (another). Seen as an intrapsychic state it makes 'understanding' synonymous with 'self-acceptance'. Calling it forgiveness may suggest connivance, in the sense that confession and absolution does not imply necessarily psychic change. Understanding in the sense I wish to use it is not the same thing as an indulgent state where price, both to the other and to oneself, is not reckonned with. To understand is to under-write the cost, sustain the experience of loss or damage that cannot be reversed. Valéry's adage pinpoints the trivialisation of understanding and I will try to show that this is a basic defence that justifies my use of the word 'refusal' in the title.
Understanding involves knowing, but in what sense? It is not the knowledge of a universal truth, yet it is knowing something to be true, but to resolve the paradox, I understand when I know something to be true to my feelings; it is the sense of there being no lie involved. There may be, and there likely will be, contradictory feelings. I understand when I know I hate something or someone and am not confused by the fact that I love that same thing or person. I understand that I can feel more than one thing at the same time and each does not negate the truth of the others.
I will consider several contexts in which the word may occur to indicate an established antagonism between the ego and the self and contrast these with the paradoxical eureka of true understanding. But first I must explain that the way in which I am using the word understanding involves the exercise of discrimination, in particular the ability and the willingness to discern the presence of a lie in any representation of my feelings. It rules out placatory behaviour or adherence to attitudes.It searches for modes of speech which will not import manipulation and be true to seeming contradiction. It is not action to or upon anything. It may be beyond expression in words, but present in reserve. It entails the inner work of thought. And thus 'refusal' is the correct word when it comes down to detecting the lie that vitiates knowing. The opposite of understanding the complexity, or may I say, the simplicity of complexity, is equivocation and the ambivalence that underlies it.
In contrast - omniscience - the refusal of uncertainty, reduced ad absurdum in the figure of Inspector Clusot and his refrain: 'I knew that'. Omniscience proper is not just an uneasy pretence. It is an impregnable form of defence in which distres suffering is split off and encountered as a quite alien experience. It is encountered in the constant second-guessing an sentence-completing which ward of new thoughts deemed to be threatening, or suggestive of an invitation to further suffering, a frame of mind in bleak contrast to Keats' 'wild surmise', his lovely phrase for the dawning of understanding.The omniscient is under the illusion he knows, is immune to surprise and in opposition to dependence. Suffering for him is a disease to be evacuated however possible.
Understanding and uncertainty, however, are closely related. To be opinionated is a different story which can be heard, for instance in the smug assertion, 'I know my own mind,' with the pursing of the lips and the closing of the throat that attends it. It is easy to detect a refusal to understand in the seemingly contradictory declaration, 'I know my own shortcomings', and here it is evident that what is absent is the will to think further about it. 'You take me as I am' would be one paraphrase 'I don't need to be told' another.
'I don't know what compels me to do what I always do that ends up spoiling anything that at first seemed either exciting or promising' is less of an entrenched position and represents a loosening because of the presence of curiosity and may be a plea to be able to understand. It may, however, conceal the unconscious mechanism of resistance that precludes understanding, locating the fault elsewhere or in the mind going blank. It is more than anything a statement of depletion where the active element is missed. This addictive compulsion can be seen to be connected to an omnipotent structure where understanding threatens to open the door to unbearable feelings of helplessness and worthlessness.
Behind prejudice and discrimination (against) is the active element of projection of such unwelcome parts of the self - outcast, exile, sybarite, as well as unrealised parts of the self such as concern, stability, simplicity, truthfulness, self-assertion. These give rise to the envy of what the other has which the envious is without - he feels deprived rather than understanding he has been hampered in developing his inherent capacities. As long as they reside in others - outside of the self - they torment, look in resentfully like exiles, create uneasiness and anxiety, seem to spy or see through us, set up a paranoidal disposition. They seem to have been left behind and got rid of, but they lurk behind every bush along the way. As long as that remains the status quo understanding is in effect being refused.
