"... they saw that dawn had already come to the east, with the beauty and color of a rose, and all the stars had been scattered, save only the lovely mistress of Heaven, Venus, who guards the confines of night and day. From there, there seemed to come a delicate breeze, filling the air with biting cold, and among the murmuring woods on nearby hills wakening the birds into joyous song." -- The Book of the Courtier, Baldassar Castiglione (translated by George Bull)."And first of all Aristophanes dropped off, then, when the day was already dawning, Agathon. Socrates, having laid them to sleep, rose to depart; Aristodemus, as his manner was, following him. At the Lyceum he took a bath, and passed the day as usual. In the evening he retired to rest at his own home.
Symposium, Plato (translated by Alexander Nehamas).
Tonight, I'm going to blog about sunrise. Given the intense nature of my last post, I think this week is for things-that-are-not-infernal (though I might break my pledge about not doing more D). The first excerpt is from the ending of a famous Italian Renaissance text called the Book of the Courtier-- a group of courtiers, men and women both, sit with their Duchess and discuss what form and practice the ideal courtier should take. The second excerpt is from the Symposium, a text by Plato, in which a group of men, attended to by women, sit, drink, and discuss the ideal forms of love. There are various similarities between the two texts, but the one that interests me most, and that stood out for me even as a college freshman is the use of sunrise, dawn, a new day to mark conclusion. A month or two after reading The Courtier, I was to read Madame Bovary (all in the much-beloved HUM Sequence at Princeton), and this time I would see sunrise on the occasion of Emma's funeral, and once again, it would hit me-- why a new beginning at the point of ending?
As a freshman, I had various theories about this, dawn as a metaphor for gender reversals, dawn as a device for peripeteia in texts that wish to either imitate or parody the classical tradition etc. Right now, I want to put forward a simpler reading: something has gone horribly awry in these texts right before the moment at which they are meant to end; something that when written has become problematic. The richness of dawn and possibilities of a new today, then, are devices meant to soothe not only the reader, but also this very perturbed text. True enough, in the Book of the Courtier, an argument on the abilities of women to love had just begun, in the face of the court's duchess. In the Symposium, Socrates has just rejected the advances of his friend Alicibiades whose speech on love only confirmed and elaborated upon his own. I don't want to write too much about Madame B. just yet, but indeed, her death, though coming, is both disturbed and disturbing.
Sunrise, I am inclined to think at this moment, would not be a necessary element of the text if it had progressed without rupturing so close to its conclusion. This idea of a text's rift with itself, of course, gives birth to a thousand other questions--why would an author not be careful? why should he lack divine control over his creation etc.? There are several answers to this one-- the text could be based in reality (as has been argued in the case of the Symposium), or the text wants to have a kind of reality and is still not mature enough to handle it, or that the author himself craves dissonance the size of a tiny tragedy-- too small to be noticed, small enough to be painted over with shades of daybreak.
Of course, we have two completely different kinds of text-soothers here. The Renaissance sunrise is highly stylized, and deeply sensual. Socrates' sunrise, on the other hand, lasts only a second. But it marks his decision to normalize, to spend a day in the baths, in his home, in the lap of the ordinary rather than a night orchestrating the battle between eros and philos. They are both equally relevant here, however, because they both give rise to the idea that light, new days, baths, and breezes can somehow fix the mistakes of the night before. A day spent in the intense beauty of the ordinary is somehow required for the mortal who has stumbled briefly while testing his limits. In other words, the bodily and the earthly are very much a part of the spiritual and the ethereal. And sunrise, as often as we sing, paint, write and dance about it, is deeply ordinary, the beautifully ordinary.
P.S. I couldn't resist an image for a post about something so often painted. Up there is Aurora Taking Leave of Tithonus (Franceso Solimena, 1704, Getty Museum)-- in other words, the dawn goddess taking leave of her Trojan lover. I am not quite sure how it informs the argument I've just made, but it's something worth thinking about.
As a freshman, I had various theories about this, dawn as a metaphor for gender reversals, dawn as a device for peripeteia in texts that wish to either imitate or parody the classical tradition etc. Right now, I want to put forward a simpler reading: something has gone horribly awry in these texts right before the moment at which they are meant to end; something that when written has become problematic. The richness of dawn and possibilities of a new today, then, are devices meant to soothe not only the reader, but also this very perturbed text. True enough, in the Book of the Courtier, an argument on the abilities of women to love had just begun, in the face of the court's duchess. In the Symposium, Socrates has just rejected the advances of his friend Alicibiades whose speech on love only confirmed and elaborated upon his own. I don't want to write too much about Madame B. just yet, but indeed, her death, though coming, is both disturbed and disturbing.
Sunrise, I am inclined to think at this moment, would not be a necessary element of the text if it had progressed without rupturing so close to its conclusion. This idea of a text's rift with itself, of course, gives birth to a thousand other questions--why would an author not be careful? why should he lack divine control over his creation etc.? There are several answers to this one-- the text could be based in reality (as has been argued in the case of the Symposium), or the text wants to have a kind of reality and is still not mature enough to handle it, or that the author himself craves dissonance the size of a tiny tragedy-- too small to be noticed, small enough to be painted over with shades of daybreak.
Of course, we have two completely different kinds of text-soothers here. The Renaissance sunrise is highly stylized, and deeply sensual. Socrates' sunrise, on the other hand, lasts only a second. But it marks his decision to normalize, to spend a day in the baths, in his home, in the lap of the ordinary rather than a night orchestrating the battle between eros and philos. They are both equally relevant here, however, because they both give rise to the idea that light, new days, baths, and breezes can somehow fix the mistakes of the night before. A day spent in the intense beauty of the ordinary is somehow required for the mortal who has stumbled briefly while testing his limits. In other words, the bodily and the earthly are very much a part of the spiritual and the ethereal. And sunrise, as often as we sing, paint, write and dance about it, is deeply ordinary, the beautifully ordinary.
P.S. I couldn't resist an image for a post about something so often painted. Up there is Aurora Taking Leave of Tithonus (Franceso Solimena, 1704, Getty Museum)-- in other words, the dawn goddess taking leave of her Trojan lover. I am not quite sure how it informs the argument I've just made, but it's something worth thinking about.
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