Obsession

Earlier this month I visited Zarko and Anne in Cologne and came away with Zarko’s novel A Book about Football, published in Belgrade in 2023. Perhaps my best work, Zarko suggested.

This afternoon I watched Germany play Switzerland play to a draw in the Europe Cup and my thoughts turned to Zarko’s book. I don’t read Serbo-Croatian, but with a scan and the right software and Google translate and a bit of editing I deciphered the first page:

A Book about Football

In the meantime, several days have passed, maybe even more months, and it would certainly be appropriate to say “many years”, when I read in a newspaper that in some city, somewhere in some country, a play was performed in a theater there, in which the actors threw the ball all the time on stage.

Or did everything just seem that way to the person who wrote about that play in the newspaper?

I wasn’t sure what was really in the description of the written play: was football really being played on stage, or was the writer indulging in his fantasies, fueled by the experiences of something that had nothing to do with football? In the second case, football would certainly be an obsession for the writer of the newspaper article; everything that was happening to him must have been part of the football game for that columnist, which never left his mind, I thought.

In those days, after reading the article in the newspaper, I didn’t mind calling the editorial office of the newspaper to ask for the name of the author, signed at the end of the text with only initials. Thus began my acquaintance with a man in the late sixties, truly obsessed with football. At my request, we met to discuss the criticisms that he had been writing for a long time not only for the newspaper in question but also for the local radio, a media institution where I was recently employed. . . .

Yes, I thought, we see the world through what we know, through our specific tastes and desires, through our obsessions.

Book about Football, “which (football) encompasses all of life,” Zarko wrote in his dedication to his dear friend Scott.

In Berlin for the two weeks before taking the train to Cologne, I had been wondering about my three-decade obsession with the standing metaphor. Here a draft of the opening of the essay that will be the final chapter of my book “On Standing: Variations on the Standing Metaphor”:

Standing and Entropy in Berlin

Three Days, Three Museums

After the standing metaphor has proven its range and flexibility in the preceding chapters on major works of literature, art, and philosophy, a final test: three Berlin museums on three successive days with standing as the primary interpretive tool. 

I enter an art museum—the Kunsthistorisches in Vienna, for example, or the Louvre in Paris—and for three decades now I see the paintings and sculptures through an increasingly singular lens: which works explore human identity as Homo erectus? And how do they do that?

My thematic focus has grown sharper over the years, my hearing not so much. Even wearing hearing aids, the woman at the Deutsche Gemäldegalerie has to repeat “twelve Euros” after I think she has said something that a ten Euro bill should cover.

Despite my obsession with standing, I don’t completely ignore other works in this remarkable museum. Today Hans Holbein the Younger’s portrait of Charles V evokes a knowing smile: that chin! that Habsburg underbite! that repressive ruler of the Netherlands who provoked the iconoclasts and Bruegel’s painterly protests! Rembrandt’s densely populated “Sermon of John the Baptist” (1634-35) reminds me of Bruegel’s Protestant John the Baptist preaching in the countryside to a diverse throng of people. Bruegel’s “Two Chained Monkeys” (1562) with Antwerp in the background predicts a coming revolution.

Despite my obsession, I wrote, but my work on the standing metaphor in “Bruegel’s Radical ‘Peasant Wedding'” obviously influences my responses to these paintings.

Hieronymus Bosch’s double-sided “John on Patmos” with the griselle “Passion of Christ” (1500) takes me back to my discovery of Bosch’s “Child Christ” and “Christ Carrying the Cross” painted on either side of an oak board displayed in the Kunsthistorisches Museum just around the corner from the museum’s magnificent collection of Bruegel paintings. The baby learning to walk and Christ brought low in those Bosch works lead to Grünewald, Holbein, and Dostoevsky in another chapter

Obviously, my focus is sharp even in these cases, honed in the decades since I published an article arguing that the standing metaphor is key to the intertwined form and content of Rilke’s Duino Elegies.

And there she is! She stands there like she’s been waiting for me. Nine years, it has been. She’s been in my thoughts more often than she’ll ever know. And of all her admirers, she knows that I’m the only one who pays exclusive (well, almost exclusive) attention to how she stands: Botticelli’s “Venus.”

“I saw her standing there” those nine years ago and today I see her still standing after nine years and more than five centuries. S. Botticelli, who loved her first, loved her so much that he painted this very Venus several times. Her sister resides in Turin’s Galeria Sabauda. One was perhaps seen in Germany by Lucas Cranach the Elder. Others may have been burned in 1497 by the prudish Dominican Giolamo Savnarola in his “Bonfire of the Vanities.” Most famously, she rises from the sea on a scallop shell (1484-86). In that painting, “The Birth of Venus,” she isn’t alone but in the company of several figures including one who holds clothing to cover the new-born Venus when she reaches shore. She stands on the scalloped shell less firmly, I think, than she does the solid grey surface here in Berlin.

I study her feet, leaning in close, inscribing her arches with my eyes, noting the weight that presses her left foot into the ground—yes, presses, see the slight indentation. Her right foot touches the ground more lightly, knee slightly bent, the stance known as contrapposto. I’ll think more about that in a moment, but first the feet, without which independent standing is impossible. The toes are long and thin, the ankles strong.

I rise from her feet, stretch my back. Two people who have entered the room are looking at me. In the presence of a nearly life-sized and full nude woman I am bent over her feet. She stands on her feet, I could tell them. That wouldn’t help.

I follow the curves of the contrapposto, a more interesting standing, more welcoming, more supple than the upright stiffness two feet planted on the ground would create. From the weight-bearing foot the leg sweeps up to the hip shifted to her left. The line of the torso rises straight from her weight-bearing foot. Her head reclines to the right. Hers is a complicated, complex, curved standing, balanced and strong, relaxed and beautiful.

Her navel is centered above the true center of the painting, her vulva covered by swirling hair, lush golden hair hiding and yet suggesting the sex below. So much golden hair descending and disappearing and bursting forth, controlled as hanging braids, free and wild and unaffected by gravity otherwise. Her breasts, one hidden by a hand, the other free. Her expression modest, her glance to the side . . . not interested in a viewer, not uninterested either, simply not interested.

Against the black background, above the strip of ground, she stands alone. Other than the title, there’s no hint of a Greek goddess. Unaccompanied by anyone, by anything, simply alone. Alone for me. Alone for whomever owned the painting. Alone for any viewer.

What erotic difference does it make if a nude is standing or lying, upright or reclining? Does Botticelli’s standing nude enhance or subtract from the erotic pull of a nude? As if to enable contemplation of that question, Pierro di Cosimo’s “Venus, Mars, and Amor” (@ 1505) hangs next to Botticelli’s “Venus.” Venus and Mars lie stretched out in postcoital bliss, accompanied by a rabbit, by Amor, by a butterfly, and by an expansive landscape.

Botticelli’s Venus, in all her glory, feels more distant to me. Standing alone against a black background, she is there to be seen. She invites my gaze. Only my gaze. I, of course, am standing before her. She reminds me that I’m standing, that I can stand, that I share her tenuous ability to defy gravity. This is not a love story.

…and so on, the work, I fear, of a true pedant.

Contents

Introduction

Upright Like the Gods: Standing and Human Identity

Swollen Foot: The Oedipus Story and Sophocles’ Oedipus

Vermin: Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis”

Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies: Poēsis and the *sta Constellation

“How does it stand with Being?”: Martin Heidegger and the Standing Metaphor, 1935-1936

Entropy, Standing, and Being: Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing

Standing, Humination, and Resurrection (Auferstehung, Anastasis) 
[Hieronymus Bosch, Matthias Grünewald, Hans Holbein, and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot]

Withstanding Time: Poems as Monuments 
[Leslie Norris, Percy Shelley, Robinson Jeffers, Mark Jarman, Wendell Berry, John Ashbery, and Robert Hass] 

Arresting Time: The Nunc Stans

Postures of Power: Pieter Bruegel’s Radical Peasant Wedding

As I Stood Fighting: Stasis and Power
[William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and Toni Morrison’s Home]

Erection as Self-Assertion 
[Heinrich von Kleist’s “The Marquise of O . . .” and Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz]

Alternatives to a Phallogocentric Metaphor 
[Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Adriana Cavarero’s Inclinations: A Critique of Rectitude, and Luce Irigaray’s This Sex Which Is Not One]

Standing and Entropy in Berlin: Three Days, Three Museums