Week 5: Hardy and Cézanne Presentation Follow-Up

-Paul Cézanne, An Old Woman with a Rosary (1895-6)

(http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/upload/img/cezanne-old-woman-rosary-NG6195-fm.jpg)

Thomas Hardy, "Ah, Are You Digging on My Grave?"

(originally published 1913, published in collection 1914)

"Ah, are you digging on my grave 

          My loved one? -- planting rue?" 

-- "No, yesterday he went to wed 

One of the brightest wealth has bred. 

'It cannot hurt her now,' he said, 

          'That I should not be true.'"  

"Then who is digging on my grave? 

         My nearest dearest kin?" 

-- "Ah, no; they sit and think, 'What use! 

What good will planting flowers produce? 

No tendance of her mound can loose 

         Her spirit from Death's gin.' "  

"But some one digs upon my grave? 

         My enemy? -- prodding sly?" 

-- "Nay: when she heard you had passed the Gate 

That shuts on all flesh soon or late, 

She thought you no more worth her hate, 

         And cares not where you lie."  

"Then, who is digging on my grave? 

         Say -- since I have not guessed!" 

-- "O it is I, my mistress dear, 

Your little dog, who still lives near, 

And much I hope my movements here 

         Have not disturbed your rest?"  

"Ah yes! You  dig upon my grave . . . 

         Why flashed it not on me 

That one true heart was left behind! 

What feeling do we ever find 

To equal among human kind 

         A dog's fidelity!"  

"Mistress, I dug upon your grave 

         To bury a bone, in case 

I should be hungry near this spot 

When passing on my daily trot. 

I am sorry, but I quite forgot 

         It was your resting-place." 

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This project made me think more about the medium of each work of art as essential to what it is.  The poem is set up like a joke, all leading up to a "punchline."  A joke requires expectation and result, playing out through growing tension and eventual release, which are only possible through temporality—something a work of writing is good at depicting--not a painting.

The painting plays with expectation and result in another way more inherent to its medium though: space.  I struggled mightily with the painting's strange, obscure background.  Together with my group I was eventually able to grasp onto the wood panels in the wall behind the figure--why don't they line up from the left to the right?  By presenting a pattern (a straight line), Cézanne sets us up to expect continuation--then denies us.  It is the same feeling in the poem--both denial of the woman-in-the-grave's expectations and the reader's.

The project fits into my theme of so far in London of looking at objects, as we have in Nature and Culture, and thinking about them critically.  For the first presentation we did on British Museum objects, I really struggled.  I looked at a teapot and thought, "It's a fucking teapot, why would I ever study this?"  (As it turned out, I thought the group that presented on the teapot had one of the strongest presentations, so kudos to them.)  The experimental table clock by Thomas Mudge that my group ended up choosing seemed more significant to me in that it represented a particular advancement.  Still, I didn't really know why one would study it.

Now I think I'm getting better at finding all the different threads that run through an object.  As an example, I'll use the goa stone container I've been studying for the mid-term project for Nature and Culture.  I've looked at it in terms of its medium (metalwork--gold), style (filigree), and context as a work of art in both India and Britain--all in relation to its medical thread.

Surprisingly to myself, I've been thinking about how I just wish I could've been there for the object's creation to see exactly how and why and by whom it was made, to see its exact birthplace and time, see its journey from India to Britain and its new life there.

Likewise, I thought about the Cézanne painting and the Hardy poem in terms of their contexts and their stories.  I wanted to meet the ex-nun in the painting and to see how Cézanne interacted with her.  I wanted to be in Hardy's head while he wrote a poem that seems to have to be about his dead 1st wife yet also contradicts the tenderness he showed for her in other poems.  But all we have is what we have.  It's a great challenge but really an interesting one.