Find the way, without knowing where you are going

14 Variations by Siddho Varza on a Theme by Paul Cézanne, with an essay titled, Painting and Happiness

Siddho Varza
Woman with a Fan
14 Variations on a Theme by Paul Cézanne
2022-2024
Acrylic, sand, Conté crayon and charcoal on canvas.
ca. 60 x 50 cm (x 14)
siddhovarza.com

Theme
Paul Cézanne
Madame Cézanne with a Fan, 1878-1888
Oil on canvas, 92 x 73 cm
Emil Bührle Collection, Zürich

Painting and Happiness

I am not a painter. I paint but I don’t know how to paint. I have only very little painterly ability. The hand is unable to follow the brain.¹ This is a great blessing.

The initial trajectory of a creative impulse usually follows one of four paths:

I want to. I can. I will.
I want to. I cannot. I won’t.
I want to. I cannot. I will try to, despite inability.
I want to. I cannot. I will learn and overcome inability.

There is yet another direction:

I want to. I cannot. I will, embracing inability.

The first is the domain of the extremely gifted, the second of the whimsical, the third of the enthusiast (the amateur), the fourth of the vocational and the fifth of the magical.

A child’s first recognition of an inability to create magic as the cause of an often “invincible sadness” is the opening premise of Giorgio Agamben’s wonderful short essay Magic & Happiness,² delineating the incommensurate relation between happiness and that which can be achieved purely through effort and ability, with magic (the miraculous) being the only exception which allows a consciousness of a truly deserved happiness – a happiness which is “the one we could never dream of deserving.”³

When I was five or six years old and living with my grandparents in Iran, for 12 weekends in a row I insisted on being taken to see the film The Thief of Baghdad.⁴ Near the end of the film there is a scene in which the young thief, needing to quickly reach his friend to save him from imminent execution, steals a carpet and prays to god to temporarily forgive his sins, giving the carpet the magical ability to fly him quickly to his friend.

Our old house in Iran was full of Persian carpets and I was certain that one of them had the ability to fly, if only I could follow the exact ritual depicted in the film. Every week, I would try to memorize every word and gesture from that magic-carpet scene and, every time I was back home, I would drag a carpet into my room, lock the door, open the windows wide, sit on the carpet and repeat the words and gestures as best as I could remember to make the carpet fly. And each time I failed, I was certain that I had missed a clue and once more insisted on seeing the film again. When the local cinema stopped showing the film after 12 weeks, I kept on downheartedly trying, no longer sure that I could ever correctly remember and repeat the one essential magical word or gesture successfully.

I am therefore no stranger to that childhood sorrow of which Agamben speaks. But, in an essay full of opaque and enigmatic lines, it is another sentence which evokes more pertinent memories.

Implicit in expressions such as, or experiences involving, effort, ability, merit, achievement, success, etc., and the happiness resulting from them, is the notion of the I (the self, the ego). Agamben however, posits enchantment (via magic or the miraculous) as the prerequisite of the self for a true (and blessed) happiness:

“Only one who is enchanted can say “I” with a smile[.]” But, the only “I” which I can experientially associate with both enchantment and happiness is precisely the one in which the I itself is absent! A sudden encounter with unexpected beauty is an example, or the fleeting moment in meditation, in which there is an isness, (an intense presence) without an I, or a pure self (being) without identity.

Several millennia of eastern mystical traditions, writings, art and poetry, especially Buddhist and Zen, abound with discussions of, guidance towards, and descriptions of, an absent I, the extinguished self (the empty mirror, the blown out candle) as the essential requisite for the ultimate happiness (Nirvana), and this must also surely be a reason why many stone statues of the Buddha depict his face with an enchanted (and enchanting) smile.

But, in this world of the unenlightened, without ability there is little accomplishment, merit or achievement. Here, the ubiquitous I is firmly attached to ability. Inability however precludes the I. Ability is most often a product of learning, practice, the past. Inability however is pure presence. With ability the future is known, defined; without it, the future is the uncharted and forever new. Ability has a destination; inability only direction.⁵ Ability is a persistence towards a goal; inability is incessant hesitation. Ability moves mostly in straight lines; inability’s line is a constant wavering. Ability is rooted in order; inability dithers on the bounds of chaos. Ability is grounded in the known (knowledge); inability is an opening towards the unknown.

A happiness consequent to ability is coalescent with the self. Inability sidelines the self, creating a gap (a crack) through which a miraculous, enchanting force can enter the work and take over. Perseverance (waiting, patience) and a tremendous effort are required, but only until the effort can be discarded and the moment grasped and affirmed. Intention and expectation become detrimental; desire and need, barriers. An intense sensitivity (vulnerability)⁶ is the key, together with a simultaneous doing and watching (absorbed and fascinated yet separate). Then, as if by magic, discrepant points across fields and layers of the possible attract each other and conjoin (harmonize). Then, almost literally, the painting begins to paint itself, leading the way. If the accidental and chance (misfortune) often jeopardize ability, in inability they are necessities which become more than just possibilities and more even than probabilities. But the risks have to be accepted, accidents have to be provoked and chaos embraced. Then, suddenly, every throw of the dice lands the winning number or, rather, any thrown number always wins. This is more than luck or purely accidental. It is not, and cannot be, the product of merit or any ability. It is magic. And (unlike ability) it does not gratify – it stupefies (enchants) and, with it, an evanescent joy erases (temporarily at least) the remnant traces of that invincible childhood sadness.⁷

Notes

1, “The hand is unable to follow the brain.” This sentence defines precisely what is meant by “inability” in this text. Modern painting and the advent of abstraction have broadened the meaning of the term “ability”. Ability no longer only describes, or applies to, the painter who, for example, wants to paint an apple which looks like an apple, and can, and does so. If another painter wanted to paint an apple, which may or may not look anything like an apple (according to his own choices and stylistics) and can, and does so, then, he still has ability, even though this might not be obvious to everyone. (Hence the common philistine criticism directed at much modern painting: “Anyone could paint that!”)

2. Giorgio Agamben, Profanations, Chapter 2: Magic & Happiness (Zone Books, 2007).

3. Even an incomparable genius such as Mozart could write:
“To live respectably and to live happily, are two different things; but the latter I could never do without witchcraft[.]”
(“Gut leben, und vergnügt leben, ist zweierlei, und das letzte würde ich ohne Hexerei nicht können[.]”)
W. A. Mozart, Brief an Joseph Bullinger, (Aug. 7, 1778).

4) The Thief of Baghdad (London Films/United Artists, 1940).

5) See: Osho, The Beloved, Volume 1, Chapter 6: Direction Is a Non-Ending Process (Rebel Publishing House, 1999).

6) “Cézanne: With each touch I risk my life.”
From: Robert Bresson, Notes sur le cinématographe (Éditions Gallimard, 1975).

7) In this paragraph I have tried (unsuccessfully) to express something which is perhaps fundamentally inexpressible, even though I have diligently described my own working process. But I hope any artist, even those of great ability, might recognize in the above a certain affinity with the procedures through which the ineffable enters their own work.

Searching for motivation to start writing while looking through a small diary of “notes to myself”, written over several years of painting, I came across the following line: