<nettime> Joyeux Printemps: Let's Talk Narrative

[Max Herman via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

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Suppose you lived five hundred years ago somewhere.

Walking around in Holland or Italy, maybe Spain or Asia Minor.  Lots of medieval open markets, churches, poor people of course, rich dukes and princes in brocade on horseback here and there.  But there was also a lot of new technology about: dyes for cloth, yarn-machines, more leather than ever before, boats, and even people shaping different colored metal into all kinds of funny shapes, not just circular, many inks and paints.  You have a favorite puffy hat and a handheld notebook you tote around town.  Using your stylus and this plenum you can compose infinite texts and images and send copies anywhere on the planet in just a few months.  You're on top of the world!  

Yet your conscience bothers you.  There is still so much slavery, cruelty, greed, and simple blindness to so much.  Yes there is lots of junk being made at breakneck speed, plenteous consumption, but strange antiquated doctrines about imaginary feuds are still being warred over with casualties piling up to heaven.  There is no sign of slowing, quite the opposite: even the metal you need for your horse statue has been taken away for cannons that Ferrara might fight France.  

This irony is not lost on you.  You manage the city's water, which even with a nearby river is a task requiring all your architect and engineer skills.  You sit by the river and watch the ripples -- that's your job.  Fail, and it's off with your head.  So you keep on.  But the population is too much, the facilities are overflowing, more chickens in every pot, feathers all over, and last week's party detritus clogs your carefully planned channels.  It's like a deluge!

In addition to your beloved notebooks, which really are pretty good, there are lots more regular books (as we now call them) starting to appear.  They are printed by metal in funny shapes now that there is so much more to go around.  You can read, and do, often, even though you prefer your own words to be in notebook form so no one can switch the letters on you, and hence corrupt your meaning and from said corruption produce "infinite children" (figli infiniti).  You read Dante, who points out a lot of bad stuff about the world you live in and how it can lapse into the even worse at any moment even though it thinks itself so modern.  You brood on this.  It troubles you.

Then what?  Or, as Leon Battista Alberti said, parent of European cryptography, fifty years prior, "Quid tum?"  You despond much of the time, but this gets old and irritates.  You are not accustomed to abject defeat even though you are fine leaving commissions half-finished from time to time.  Will everything you like in the world be overrun by cheap goods showering down from the sky and excrement expulsing from your neighbors and fellow citizens?  Fires of war crushing every spirit nigh unto Archimedes?  The image displeases.  You make images, and have made many, of many kinds, for many eyes, why not one more?  One that might tip the scales to the least-worst side.  A true image....

How though?  Images generally land in the fire if they try to differ, followed soon by the brushes and paints that made them, the painter, and then the painter's students and friends and neighbors for good measure.  Stocks, dungeons, coliseums, gallows, and the public pyre are all too ever-present for your liking.  You think.  You plan -- it's what you've trained for all this time!  You know even animals and birds of the field can be most intelligent and usually are.  They give you hope.

You know robots, and make them.  You know clocks.  You know rebus, image, symbol, allegory, mapping, and metaphor.  You taught yourself astronomy and how to write your own way (no small feat), even maybe like honest Abe Lincoln on the back of a shovel outside a log cabin.  You know rivers, philosophers, and princes, algebra and human anatomy, but remain yourself legally a peasant.  What image do you make?

Call it a puzzle -- something veiled, on time delay, like Dante's Beatrice the bringer of blessings, teacher and guide, who can never be destroyed because she's already been transmuted into spirit form up high in the sky.  That gets you half way there, but only half.  You need, like Anni Albers, to engineer a fabric on the interior, not just the "epidermis of the cloth."  You can't embroider.  You hope to help your adoptive country experience meaning, avoid the panic of manufactured inferiority, and hence mend the world.  You respect ancients like Apelles, whose greatest image in paint was Calumny -- unfair accusation -- but like Albers, you don't worship them carte blanche.  Like Albers and her ancient Peruvian teachers, who made textile imagery when there was no writing to be found, you see the brilliance in simplicity and experience meaning in nature as well as craft.  You work with your hands, at many tasks, retaining contact with the real, "tactile sensibility."  So you set to crafting, engineering, architecting, by design and with a plan.

Pentimenti?  No problem; you love layers.  Eye contact?  Sure why not.  Hand gesture?  Check.  Hyperlinks?  Easy as pizzelle.  River, geology, vortices, Beatrice, blood vessels, fabric and physiology, all there as you wrote:  "Begun by me, Leonardo of Vinci, on the twelfth day of July 1505.  Book entitled 'Of Transformation,' that is, of one body into another without diminution or increase of substance."  That's the day you added the bridge to the background of your portrait of the smiling lady teaching humans how to follow experience and experiment too rather than always just reason, tradition, and robes of authority.  That was the day the portrait really matched to the Proemio.

However your work might still be overlooked.  You didn't want that.  Yes time delay but please.  So you put some rhetoric into your other book, just a plan really but easy enough for any decent intern to flesh out the way you fleshed out the underwater feet so well for Verocchio before going indie, your main book in fact, the Treatise on Painting, Trattato della Pittura, which you rewrote from Alberti's sagaciously to seize the high ground and use what was already accomplished as an ally (which is only fair anyway and perfectly honest to boot).  In fact it did actually get printed first, early and often, right on time.

That book had a "section 33," in which you compared the mechanical intelligence which would fill the planet with manufactured shit, e.g. your prophecies "Of Selling Paradise" and "Of the Cruelty of Humans," to the non-mechanical, the true science which can learn and harmonize with nature and every reality inner and outer.  You even used ALL CAPS, like they would for demagoguery in the next millennium: WHICH SCIENCE IS MECHANICAL, AND WHICH IS NOT MECHANICAL.  You defended hand work, that goes through experience, the five senses, even the line of the pen which leads to drawing and painting, the sung note, the seen and heard, felt and learned, akin to mathein pathein.  Not data bits repeated and programmed, Machiavelli's golem-prince of this world.  Rather that something different, call it a bird, which you love more than anything else and want to be and stay part of not just while you're living but even after that, later, in people's memories, libraries, workshops, and dreams, indeed the earth's vegetative soul itself and those things of the highest price.

But it's not just section 33.  You know it will be a tricky lift for whoever connects the dots first and you don't want to leave them desperate and despondent.  So you make a clincher, or to be precise, something that looks enough like one to encourage the pure of heart.  What's that?  Well, it's like the t-shirt you see at local soup establishments who sell the wonderful basil and chili infused broth with rice noodles called pho.  The shirt says "Let's Pho," not flat-out like your shirt "'Je m'appelle Esperienza.' --La Joconde," which was sent to France very like your own living body once was, during the Olympics of 2024, and worn to the Louvre in the room with your image in it as an amusement, like when you filled up a washed intestine with air in the middle of a great room pushing everyone there to the walls by an invisible balloon, making them laugh and puzzle, then explained it as being "like virtue, going from something small to something great."  

"Let's Pho" is a joke like Shakespeare also loved to make.  It says something naughty without saying it.  How?  Well, what it says doesn't quite compute.  People do double-takes.  "Pho isn't a verb!  What verb goes there?  Oh right.  Ha ha!"  Happy smile, the smile of getting and knowing something happy.  Break the spell.  Help people.  Comedy vérité.  

So what was your Let's Pho?  Maybe there wasn't one.  Maybe like Calvino, you died of an aneurysm before getting to Cambridge to read your lifetime achievement award lectures to the American Undergraduates of Harvard Yard.  But maybe there was.

In the introduction to your Treatise on Painting, which if any of your notes were ready to print a la Gutenberg they were these, you tell a simple story: a courtroom drama.  You are being accused of bad work.  People in ceremonial robes, authorities with power and tradition, reason and law behind them, are saying you are no good.  You reply.  You defend yourself, which is what Apelles did by means of the Calumny (he had been accused by a jealous subpar painter of plotting against the administration to get him out of the way, same as Claudius perhaps, or more aptly, Iago the Invidious).  You call a witness, a noble lady, like Beatrice: Esperienza, who was your main theme in the Trattato section 33 though unpersonified.  

You explain to your accusers, in this intro to your book on how to paint pictures, that Experience, now a person, is your maestra and teacher, and that moreover, she taught the masters who wrote the books your accusers wear as memorized robes without having woven anything themselves.  You say, let me make my own clothes (knowing full well you already did and are just summating for the ladies and gentlemen of the jury como Perry Mason style, como teatri).  

You also say, in your closing paragraph, the slam-dunk of all slam-dunks one could say, you having been able to bend iron bars and jump over someone's head it is said, some very strange words. 

They go like this in English, on the first page of the first issue ever of the Leonardo journal named after you, printed by MIT in Paris January 1968 (itself a very strange year):

They will say that I, having no literary skill, cannot
properly express that which I desire to treat of;
but they do not know that my subjects are to be
dealt with by experience rather than by words;
and (experience) has been the mistress of those
who wrote well. And so, as mistress, I will
cite her in all cases. 

Next page, it being Paris after all, says it a little different:

"Ils diront que, faute d'avoir des lettres, je ne peux bien
dire ce que je veux exprimer.  Or, ils ignorent que mes
oeuvres sont plutôt sujettes de l’expérience que des
paroles d’autrui; et l’expérience jut la maîtresse
de ceux qui écrivirent bien; et moi aussi, je la
prends pour maîtresse, et en tout les cas,
je l’alléguerai."

In Italian, per the famous Jean Paul Richter translation of Leonardo, for the Queen of England and the Prince of Wales, which did not see the light of day until 1883 (fourteen long years after Pater had written "all the thought and experience of the world had etched and moulded there"), too late perhaps to turn aside the tragedies of 1914:

"Diranno que per non avere io lettere non potere ben dire 
quello, de che voglio trattare or no sano questi
que le mie chose son piv da esser tratte dalla sperietia, 
che d'altra parola, la quale fu maestra di chi bene scrisse 
e cosi per maestra la in tutti casi allegherò."

Notice the last word of this last word: "allegherò," ou en Francais, "alléguerai."
 
I will attach, I will allege: a lawyer word Leonardo probably learned from his kind old granpa growing up in Vinci.

It rhymes almost exactly, almost but not quite, with "allegoria."  Might such a half-rhyme give your fans, in their moment of deepest misery after five centuries of defeat, the following grand sourire or at least the chance or dream of one, enough to curse the darkness or even light a candle:

"Diranno que per non avere io lettere non potere ben dire 
quello, de che voglio trattare or no sano questi 
que le mie chose son piv da esser tratte dalla sperietia, 
che d'altra parola, la quale fu maestra di chi bene scrisse 
e cosi per maestra la in tutti casi allegoria."

They will say that because I am not a true writer I cannot 
well say what I want to discuss now, but these people
know that my things are more to be drawn from experience 
than from other words, which was the teacher of those who 
wrote well and so allegory is the teacher in all cases.

allegherò allegoria

alléguerai allégorie

allegherò un'allegoria

&c.

Of course this hail-mary to the one-yard-line, as you well know being part Fran Tarkenton, might not get caught.  But you knew it might, you did your best, and that's all that can be asked of anyone after five hundred years.

April Fool!  :)


Max Herman
Leonardo.info/is-everyone-a-leonardo
https://leonardo.info/sites/default/files/media-uploads/davinci_articles.pdf 
(see pp.97-99 for the Proemio to the Trattato and alléguerai / allégorie)

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>From Leonardo's Trattato della Pittura, section 33:

"WHICH SCIENCE IS MECHANICAL, AND WHICH IS NOT MECHANICAL.
They say that cognition born from _experience_ (esperientia) [emphases mine] is mechanical, and what is born and ends in the mind is scientific, and whatever is born from science and ends in manual operations is semi-mechanical.  Yet it appears to me that those sciences are vain and full of error which are not born from _experience_, mother of every certainty, and which do not terminate in known _experience_, that is, their origin, or middle, or end does not pass through any of the five senses.  Now if you so greatly doubt the certainty of everything that passes through the senses, with how much greater mind should we doubt things that rebel against the senses, like the knowledge of God, and the soul, and the like, things about which there are always disputes and contentions, and truly it so happens that where reason is lacking there is always shouting instead.  This does not happen in the case of things which are certain.  Thus we will say that where there is shouting, there is no true science, because truth can only end one way.  When the truth is made public, the quarrels are eternally destroyed; but if quarrels rise again, a lying and confused science, and not certainty, is reborn.  Now the true sciences are those in which _experience_ has penetrated the senses and silenced the tongues of the adversaries.  _Experience_ does not feed its investigators on dreams, but always proceeds on the basis of first truths and known principles, successively and in true sequence towards the end, as it is noted in the first mathematics, that is, number and measure, called arithmetic and geometry, which treat discontinuous and continuous quantities with the utmost truth.  Here no one will argue whether two threes make more or less than six, nor whether the angles of a triangle are less than two right angles.  Every argument is eternally silenced in these sciences, and they are enjoyed by their devotees in peace, which the lying mental sciences cannot do.  If you would say that these true and noted sciences are of the species of mechanics, for they can be finished only manually, I will say the same of all arts which pass through the hands of writers, a species of drawing, which is part of painting.  Astrology and other [sciences] pass through manual operations but begin with mental operations as does painting.  Painting begins in the mind of the speculator, but it cannot come to perfection without manual operation.  The first operation of painting is to put down its scientific and true principles, which are: what is the umbrageous body, what are primitive and derived shadow, and what is light, that is, darkness, light, color, body, figure, position, distance, nearness, motion, and rest.  These are comprehended only by the mind, without manual operations, and this is the science of painting which stays in the mind of its contemplators.  The operation which can be born from the mind is much more worthy than the contemplation, or science, previously mentioned."

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Anni Albers, excerpts from "Weaving at Black Mountain College":

from 1938:
"For only by simplicity can we find meaning, and only by experiencing meaning can we become qualified for independent comprehension."  [In the very next paragraph she adds the danger of not doing so -- from her PoV in the abyss-edge year 1938.]  "This often leaves the student oscillating between admiration and uncertainty, with the well-known result that a feeling of inferiority is today common in both individuals and in whole nations."

from 1944:
"The world goes to pieces; we have to rebuild our world.... How much of today's confusion is brought about through not knowing where we stand, through the inability to relate experiences directly to us.  In art work experience is immediate.... Too much emphasis is given today in our general education to intellectual training.  An overemphasis of intellectual work suggests an understanding on a ground which is not the ground of our own experiences.  It transposes understanding into assumed experiences which can be right but may be wrong."

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See also R. Zwijnenberg, re Auerbach, Alberti, "labyrinthine gaze," Trattato 33, and the inability to represent multi-perspective culture as one cause of democracy's collapse in 20cQ1 Europe.  "The Writings and Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci: Order and Chaos in Early Modern Thought," Cambridge, 1999, pp. 48-49, 125-30, and 185.  
He agrees with the Esperienza hypothesis overall.  

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