Yesterday, a few friends and I visited the Met in New York and got a look at Michaelangelo's first painting. This was completed around 1488, oil and tempura on wood, by Michaelangelo of the Sistine Chapel and of the beautiful naked men in marble. The artist must have been in his early teens at the time, and I found it interesting that he produced a painting so rife with the idea of "torment," or of being cast from a space of comfort to a space of liminality where the loss of what defines the self suddenly is equivalent to being eaten by wild beasts.
While I was quite captivated by elements of the painting-- the metamorphosis that is in proces--, the fantastically shaped beasts seem to be acquiring fish-like characteristics; the contrast between the earth below and the point where Anthony is in torment; the lack of a heaven above Anthony etc. more and more it made me think about the idea of torment. What "torments" us? And why does torment have a space of its own? Why is it that our torment tears us from what we have and what we know?
Torment, as we know it, comes from the good old Romance languages, and implies immedietely torture, and the infliction of suffering. I've been reading a lot of Dante recently, and I would argue that torment is not so much a problem of the characters in the Inferno who suffer the same punishment over and over again, but one of those in Purgatory. The sufferer is not one who is physically gnawing the same skull over and over again, but the figure who in Dante the poet's mind, has an ounce of repentance in him. I want to say that the figures in Inferno, those who rejected or did not know Christ do not suffer the same way as those who did, those who are in Purgatory. Purgatory implies waiting, it also implies the liminal space that St. Anthony is occupying in this painting. In both cases, there is a recognition of the possibility of something to come, but no promises. I think the idea of torture in torment comes from the knowledge that there is another possible state of being-- This is not a former state, rather this is an unknown, for someone once tormented can never return to what was. Instead, the possible state of being is now one that is unfamiliar, and almost threatening in the sense that it may never come.
Flaubert, a literary beloved of mine, loves torment. His most favored approach towards torment is through the idea of temptation-- his St. Anthony work is called La Tentation de Saint Antoine. But Emma Bovary and Frederic Moreau are closer to us in the way that they enter states of torment inspired mainly by temptation. After Emma's desire for Paris, and Frederic's for Madame Arnoux-- these characters no longer exist in their original spaces. Rather they now occupy liminal, unreal spaces of desire. Emma "would live and die equally for Paris" and in this desire separates herself from the physical space of Rouen. Frederic too, in his love for Mme. Arnoux detaches and casts himself into a space of torment that is never quite satisified till perhaps the very silent end.
I've rambled on from early Renaissance to the modern period-- and so I think it's time to stop. But I think there is something to be thought about-- do we actively seek torment when there is nothing else? Or is it temptation that we lean towards, that eventually deserts us and leaves us to the mercies of torment, a veritable Calypso from whom only the Odysseuses of life can escape?
