Vermeer in Bosnia by Wechler - Book Report/Review Example

I heard of the recent bombings on the Moscow metro from a friend of mine, not having watched the news myself that morning and generally relying on the fact that main world events tend to reach me by around midday anyway simply from being surrounded by other interactive human beings. After having informed me, my friend dropped his eyes to the ground in a sympathetic manner that one adopts when a friend pronounces the death of his goldfish you never knew. Surely the feeling was genuine, as one cannot help but feel it at such a moment but I pondered whether the root of his feeling was genuine. I did not know the people who died in the Moscow subway, yet my friend quite rationally assumed that it would touch me more, considering it happened in my home town. His rationality was built on the assumption that because I lived there, I was somehow closer to the mental concept of the tragedy. Perhaps I was, but I do not think I felt anything more exceptional than my friend did for those people. It seemed like something you ought to feel sad about, yet in the end we both went to get our afternoon coffee. I think about why we, as people, think that just because we belong to a certain geographical place, the events unfolding there should matter to us more. Perhaps the event would have mattered to me more if I had been in Moscow still. Just like Vermeer who was visibly affected by the war; the war resulted in the “devastation of the Dutch economy and Vermeer’s own … bankruptcy” (Weschler 15), which eventually may have even caused him to die at the young age of 42. Yet, in his paintings, one finds a sense of calm and peacefulness. This sense of calm is so apparent that Antonio Cassese, an Italian judge presiding over the Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal, confides to Weschler that his way of keeping his sanity in front of all the madness and chaos of the Yugoslav war, and listening to the vivid stories of the inhumanity of humans, is to go “to the Mauritshuis museum, in the center of town, so as to spend a little time with the Vermeers” (Weschler 14). The paintings of Vermeer in the Mauritshuis museum offer something akin to that to Weschler as well. He is sure, as are others who have had the chance to gaze upon the paintings and try to find a deeper meaning to them, that something like peace and tranquility is transmitted through these paintings. Albeit there are those (like Snow) who find a very different, and sexual, meaning to the paintings, however, Weschler feels that, surrounded by chaos, Vermeer was trying to instill a sense of calm in them. Weschler also felt this sense of “centeredness, a peacefulness, a serenity” as well as “a sense of perfectly equipoised grace” when he went to see the Vermeers at the Mauritshuis museum (14). It is interesting that Weschler was, at the same time, attending the trials of Yugoslav genocide perpetrators, specifically those committed against the Muslim Bosnians, with new and gruesome details unfolding every day. He went there to find a sense of calm, perhaps a similar feeling to that of Vermeer when he painted these works of art; “[f]or, of course, when Vermeer was painting those images, which for us have become the very emblem of peacefulness and serenity, all Europe was Bosnia (or had only just ceased to be)” (14). Of course, Vermeer, through his paintings, was expressing his need for calm and peace, just as much as Weschler was through his visits to see the Vermeers at the Mauritshuis. This caused me to wonder why the effects of war or human aggression are so potent, whereas the same consequences from a natural disaster are not so devastating for us. In the latter case, we merely go through a brief, and maybe even forced, sense of sadness, perhaps help a little by donating or volunteering, and then move on. Why is it then that the former provokes a deeper sense of sorrow, grief and even counter aggression in us? Why are we angered at each other, but not angered at nature? Why were we so shocked and devastated by the events of 9/11 that we promised to “never forget”, whereas the tsunami of 2004 did not cause such a deep effect on us, especially keeping in mind that the former caused 3,000 deaths, and the latter, 230,000? Perhaps it is because we consider ourselves to be bastions of civilization – we are emblems of rationality – therefore, it is not acceptable for us that someone like us can behave so irrationally and with such a lack of civility. Elle, in Hiroshima, Mon Amour, tries to convince her Japanese lover, Lui, that she has “seen” Hiroshima truly, and knows all there is to know about its destruction. The Japanese man remains unconvinced. However, unbeknownst to him, what she actually means is that she knows what the destruction of the city was like because her own city of “love” was destroyed because of the world war, and she is familiar with a similar story of destruction and desolation. But even if it were known to Lui, he cannot take Hiroshima as a metaphor, because for him it was, and still is, the reality – the reality that killed all of his family and took away all that he knew from him. The bombing of Hiroshima is one event, yet both Elle and Lui perceive it differently. Lui perceives it as something that took away his family and his way of life from him, whereas Elle takes it to be at par with the devastation she felt when her lover was killed. Neither of them is wrong in his/her perception of the event, because even though it is a singular event, yet it can be a metaphor for a multitude of things. Just like for Doty a group of mackerel in a “fresh-fish display” (Doty), were a metaphor for the beauty of unison and collectivism in the universe. Subsequently, he wrote a poem about the beauty of the group of mackerel, taking pains to illustrate how a single fish was nothing in itself; it was the whole group that formed the beautiful pattern. Doty decided that so it is with life too, all of us have an individual role to play, yet it pales in comparison to our role as a unified whole. As Doty puts it, “The poem was written some six months after my partner of a dozen years had died of AIDS, and of course everything I wrote--everything I saw--was informed by that loss, by the overpowering emotional force of it.” He came to the conclusion that “what matters is perhaps not our individual selves but our brief soldiering in the broad streaming school of humanity--which is composed of us, yes, but also, goes on without us.” We are, on our own, just a drop in the ocean of humanity; no matter how important we are to someone, or in our own estimation, our withdrawal from the world does not stop anything important from occurring or happening. As they say, life goes on. Merely a group of mackerel made Doty come to this conclusion; however, what is interesting is that perhaps nobody else would have come to this conclusion upon observation of the same phenomenon. The beauty of the metaphor is precisely that; there is no exact definition or precise slot for the metaphor as all of us will interpret everything according to our own experiences and personality. We can always find ourselves in a metaphor, and that is what makes metaphors so delightfully subjective and relative. Perhaps that is why that the same paintings of Vermeer that evoked a sense of calm, serenity and peace to Weschler and Cassese, cause Snow to attribute a sense of love, beauty and independence to one of the same paintings of Vermeer. In our days and times, love and independence are the most pertinent issues – we yearn to have love and independence in our lives, and are constantly seeking it in the world. But for Cassese, they served the purpose of helping him not to go mad when faced with the madness and inhumanity of his fellow human beings, who were so bent upon revenge and useless vengeance, that they committed acts of such horrible nature against each other. Whether it is the Serbs against the Muslim Bosnians, or the Americans against the Japanese, we can become so mad with our feelings of anger and hatred, that we often forget it is our fellow humans that we are perpetrating the crimes against. That which is the blessing of the metaphor is also its curse: everything is subjective and everything will be interpreted in light of the observer’s life and experiences. Vermeer’s paintings have not changed – they are still the same as when he painted them – yet there are so many interpretations that they have been subjected to that one is lost in all of them. Nobody can ever say with surety that his interpretation of the paintings of Vermeer are exact, or that they know the exact message Vermeer was sending to his audience via his paintings. Lui wanted to escape his memories of Hiroshima bombings just as much as Elle wanted to escape the memories of her killed lover; Cassese wanted to escape the narratives of horrors just as much as Weschler; Doty wanted to overcome the loss of his lover and find the meaning of life. All of them found solace, or their answers, in metaphors. For Lui, Elle’s story of her killed lover, where it was people who not only killed her lover, but made her suffer for falling in love with the “wrong” person, and their subsequent meeting was a metaphor for life moving on, and life continuing to get better despite all the horrors of the past. Elle found the city of Hiroshima a metaphor for her lost love, and for her too, the message of “life goes on” was clear when she looked at how the city of Hiroshima was repairing itself and coming to terms with its past. Cassese and Weschler found their needed metaphor of peace in Vermeer’s work in the Mauritshuis museum. Doty saw a display of mackerel and was convinced, through them, that his lover’s death did not mean the end of life, as it was the collective and not the individual that was important. But did these respective things or events have the same deeper meaning assigned to them? I think that is not important, for it does not matter what an event signifies to others, it is our own interpretations of it that causes us to bring about effective changes in our lives and personality. We make our own metaphors. All of us carry within ourselves a little amount of “metaphors”, so when we come to a situation where we need to explain ourselves or our feelings, we do so through these metaphors. We are all frail, humans and there come times when we are really overwhelmed and need an outlet where we can not only come to peace with our surroundings but by what is inside us as well. Weschler shows how Vermeer did that by resisting to paint anything explicitly connected to war, yet at the same time making war’s absence so conspicuous that one cannot help but think of it and wonder why he did not paint it. Doty too, in an effort to remind himself that he needed to move on from his sorrow and get back to living his life, used his mackerel inspired metaphors to tell himself how we are all basically a part of a bigger plan, therefore, the absence of just one of us does not really matter; we need to persevere. As Doty states, “Naively, I hadnt realized that my mackerel were already of a piece with the work Id been writing for the previous couple of years--poems that wrestled, in one way or another, with the notion of limit, with the line between being someone and no one. What did it mean to be a self, when that self would be lost?” References Doty, Mark. “Souls on Ice.” Contemporary Poets on One of Their Own Poems. Eds. Robert Pack and Jay Parini. Hanover, NH: Middlebury College Press, 1997. 70-77. Print. Hiroshima, Mon Amour. Dir. Alain Resnais. Perf. Emmanuelle Riva, Eiji Okada. Argos Films, 1960. DVD. Snow, Edward. A Study of Vermeer, Revised and Enlarged Edition. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1994. Print. Weschler, Lawrence. “Vermeer in Bosnia.” Vermeer in Bosnia: Selected Writings. New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 2004. 13-26. Print. Read More