Against Nature

Dream of Arcadia (1838), Thomas Cole 

1. Schiller: The ancient Greeks, by living close to Nature, were naive geniuses who lived better lives than we do and created better works of art because of their ability to maintain a natural state of honesty, simplicity, and virtue that innately worked within the forms of nature.
2. Schiller: Modern society has advanced beyond Nature, and in becoming disillusioned with the society he entered when he left childhood, longs to return to the childlike, naive, and natural state that is so much better than civilization. 
3. Me: Ancient Greeks painted their pristine temples all sorts of gaudy, rather Victorian colors, a illustrative difference between the traditional ideal of the pure Greeks and the reality, which I imagine was both more colorful and Hobbesian (nasty, brutish, and short). 

Landscape with Aeneas at Delos (1672), Claude Lorraine

We have the luxury of admiring the natural now that we are not forced to survive in it, just as Schiller has the luxury of idealizing it in this essay. Did the ancient Greeks idealize a nomadic, hunting and gathering past as more virtuous? Is the whole history of civilization really one of degeneration? I don't think so. This is only the beginning of Schiller's On the Naive and Sentimental in Literature, that I started reading after this discussion, and his basis for the two types of poets, so I'd have to say so far I'm not buying it.

Et in Arcadia Ego (1637), Nicolas Poussin

Nature's First Green is Gold

Nature's first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf's a flower;

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf,

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day

Nothing gold can stay.

This poem by Robert Frost was running through my head as I was hiking and camping the Appalachian trail this weekend. Now that I am back in the city and all the greens have been replaced by grays (sky, sidewalks, buildings), the wealth of green seems all the more precious and fleeting. In my mind, they seems as glittering and varied as they do in Klimt's The Park, a riot of densely undulating color.

Natural Connections

Bush, Cole Bay, Anguilla

Maelstorm, 2009, Roxy Paine

Assemblage in shape of teepee, Anguila

Metropolitan 139, 1961, Jean Tinguely

Rainbow over the valley, St. Maarten

Hell Yes, 2001, Ugo Rondinone

Also, I did not get a picture of this, but coming back on the ferry from Anguilla I saw a sky just this color blue over the distant hills of Saint Maarten, and a single star had the same electrifying effect that this moon does.

The Sleeping Gypsy, 1897, Henri Rousseau


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