The blind eyes in Halonen’s self-portrait seem to refer to some kind of inner vision that instead of looking at the sensory world is directed at a spiritual realm. In order to suggest some possible interpretations for the meaning of these blind eyes, I will look into the theme of inner vision in fin-de-siècle art, followed by a discussion of the specific Symbolist motif of the closed eyes. I believe this kind of primarily subject-oriented analysis can certainly offer insight into the self-portrait as well as into Halonen’s artistic endeavours more generally. However, it will become apparent that the painting contains multiple levels of meaning which are manifested in the execution of the work as well as in its subject matter. Hence, in the final section of this chapter I will examine the self-portrait and its theme of blindness in the broader
240 Clark 2005, 64.
241 See Taylor 1989, x.
context of Halonen’s oeuvre in order to generate a level of interpretation that is more directly connected to the work as a whole; that is, an interpretations that takes into account the form as well as the content.
Blindness as a metaphor of transcendental vision has a long history in Western culture. In antiquity it was personified most famously by the divinely inspired seer Teiresias and the blind poet Homer. They may have lost the use of their eyes but they had received something far more precious in compensation: the divine gift that implicated a contact with another world. Blindness in this sense is associated with madness: both are of supernatural origin (caused by the intervention of either gods or demons), and therefore have an element of something sacred. Blindness and madness are considered as both a curse and a blessing.242 The concept of inner vision is found already in the writings of Plato, and it became a central idea in the Neoplatonic tradition. In Plato’s Phaedo Socrates explains that one might lose the eye of the soul if, in trying to understand the true existence, one relies too much on the senses: “... I was afraid that by observing objects with my eyes and trying to comprehend them with each of my senses I might blind my soul altogether.”243 This passage, however, has nothing to do with the arts as such, although it may have inspired later generations of artists to search for artistic expression based on the eye of the soul.
Plato’s relation to art was famously controversial. In book X of the Republic, Socrates explains that poetry is imitation thrice removed from truth; it imitates the visible world which in itself is nothing but a reflection of the world of Ideas. The stories told by the poets were considered by Plato as immoral as well as false, because they would unnecessarily stir the passions of men and blind them to truth.
Hence, although he acknowledges his admiration for poetry, Socrates famously excludes Homer and the other poets from the ideal state.244
In Ion Plato presents his own theory of poetic creation as opposed to the Homeric model. The opposition between the Homeric and Platonic models of poetic creativity constitutes an opposition between the conception of art for art’s sake and art as a means of accessing the truth. According to the Platonic mode, artists are not conscious creators but divine mediators of God’s message.245 This ecstatic theory of artistic creation became a central thread in the Neoplatonic tradition. In the philosophy of Plotinus, the spiritual world is both within us and outside us. The human soul occupies an intermediate position between God and matter, and during the ecstatic state the soul is able to lift itself to the supreme level. Then we can identify ourselves with the divine Self and are moved by its beauty. This higher realm of truth is always within us, and thus this move upward to the supreme level, is also to be perceived as a move inward.246 Plotinus uses the metaphor of sculpting one’s own statue to describe the process of self-development through purification:
242 Barasch 2001, 30-36.
243 Plato: Phaedo, 99e.
244 Plato: Republic, 595a-608b.
245 See Bays 1964, 3-4.
246 Hadot 1998 [1989], 26-27.
Withdraw into yourself and look. And if you do not find yourself beautiful yet, act as does the creator of a statue that is to be made beautiful: he cuts away here, he smoothes there, he makes this line lighter, this other purer, until a lovely face has grown upon his work. So do you also: cut away all that is excessive, straighten all that is crooked, bring light to all that is overcast, labour to make all one glow of beauty and never cease chiselling your statue, until there shall shine out on you from it the godlike splendour of virtue, until you shall see the perfect goodness surely established in the stainless shrine.247
Representing an ordinary man, according to Plotinus, is not art. Art as imitation of reality had no more worth for Plotinus than it had for Plato. But Plotinus perceived the possibility of another kind of art that would have the potential to access the truth, the eternal model, behind the appearances. Connection with this higher realm can be achieved by turning inward and relying on the vision of the inner eye. In order to understand, one must refuse to see: “you must close the eyes and call instead upon another vision which is to be waked within you, a vision, the birth-right of all, which a few turn to use.”248 Pierre Hadot, who has studied the metaphors of vision in the philosophy of Plotinus, writes that “[t]he metamorphosis of inner vision thus has its counterpart in the metamorphosis of physical vision.” We can discover the world from within ourselves, and in the same way we can learn to see the spiritual dimension behind the appearances.249
The idea of artistic inner vision is something that has been rediscovered and revived several times throughout the history of Western art. The literary historian Gwendolyn Bays has called it the “perennial philosophy of poetry.”250 In the aesthetic theory of Romanticism the concept of artistic inner vision gained unforeseen importance as it came to be associated with the newly conceived idea of the creative imagination. For William Blake, for example, the imagination represented a mystical union with the absolute; the world of imagination was the only thing that truly existed. Blake’s understanding of the concept of imagination stemmed largely from the occult and esoteric tradition of Jacob Boehme, Paracelsus, and Swedenborg. The concept of imagination, understood as uncontrollable fantasy, has often carried negative connotations in Western culture, but in the occult tradition it has always been held in high esteem.251 Imagination is in this context understood
247 Plotinus: The Enneads, I, 6.9.
248 Plotinus: The Enneads, I, 6.8.
249 Hadot 1998 [1989], 35.
250 Bays 1964, 3. In her book Orphic Vision. Seer Poets from Novalis to Rimbaud, Bays offers a comprehensive and insightful account of the Romantic myth of the poet as a seer. However, some of her views on the organization of the human mind containing a “superconscious” as well as an unconscious realm, and her ideas about the potentially beneficial effects of psychedelic drugs may from today’s perspective appear controversial to say the least. On the idea of the artist as seer in the nineteenth-century see also the section “Priest, Seer, Martyr, Christ” in the exhibition catalogue Rebels and Martyrs. The Image of the Artist in the Nineteenth Century.
Sturgis & Wilson 2006.
251 On the concept of imagination in occult thought, see Gibbons 2001, 92-102. Gibbons has pointed out that
“(t)he writers who were responsible for the Romantic rehabilitation of the imagination were deeply versed in mystical (and especially Behmenist) writings: Blake, Coleridge, Schlegel, Tieck, Novalis, Schelling, etc. It is true, nevertheless, that there were also non-occult sources for the Romantic thought about the imagination. Even
as the faculty for perceiving the ideas in a state of ecstasy. For Eliphas Lévi (Alphonse Louis Constant), one of the key figures of modern occultism,
“Imagination is in effect the soul's eye; therein forms are outlined and preserved;
thereby we behold the reflections of the invisible world; it is the glass of visions and the apparatus of magical life.”252 Bays describes the Romantic seer-poet as “one who possessed magic vision of the kind which could be found both in the wisdom of ancient Magi and in the modern discovery of Mesmer.”253 Franz Anton Mesmer’s discovery of magnetism, which later found a more scientific formulation as hypnotism, seemed to offer scientific proof for the ancient phenomenon.
Swedenborg was a major inspiration for mystically inclined artists and writers throughout the nineteenth century. But even if Swedenborg was often stated as the origin of these ideas it is not very likely that many artists or writers actually had direct contact with the oeuvre of the Swedish mystic. Swedenborgianism was transmitted particularly in the context of modern occultism, particularly through the popular doctrines of Mesmerism and freemasonry.254 Eliphas Lévi published in the 1840s a long poem called “Les Correspondances” which served to popularize the Swedenborgian theory of correspondences, and was a possible source Baudelaire’s poem “Correspondance.”255 In addition to Baudelaire, Balzac was an important transmitter of Swedenborgian ideas in the nineteenth century. The concept of inner vision has a central place in Le Livre Mystique (1831-1835), a trilogy of novels containing Louis Lambert, Séraphita, and Les Proscrits. The character of Louis Lambert in the novel of the same name is a prime example of a Romantic visionary.
The gift of inner vision, that is, the ability to perceive “the things of the material universe and the things of the spiritual universe in all their ramifications original and causative” is called “le Spécialisme.” It is the ability of the greatest human geniuses.
Specialism binds together the notion of the inner eye with intuition: “The perfection of the inner eye gives rise to the gift of Specialism. Specialism brings with it Intuition. Intuition is one of the faculties of the Inner man, of which Specialism is an attribute.”256 Although not physically blind, Louis Lambert’s exceptional genius derives from his capacity for inner vision. His destiny, in the end, is to become entirely isolated from the rest of the world, his existence reduced into a trancelike silence. This is the melancholic position of the artist genius: his exceptional
some of these, however, lead back ultimately to esoteric thought; e.g. The Shaftesburian tradition, which itself was grounded in Neoplatonism.” Gibbons 2001, 99.
252 Cited from McIntosh 1972, 149. According to McIntosh, Lévi's significance in the history of occultism is that
"he helped to change the popular concept of magic. Whereas magic had hitherto been regarded by most people as a means of manipulating the forces of nature and by many as a dangerous superstition, Lévi presented it as a way of drawing the will through certain channels and turning the magician into a more fully realised human being."
McIntosh 1972, 152.
253 Bays 1964, vii.
254 See Wilkinson 1996, ix. On the widespread influence of the occult in French nineteenth century literature see also MacIntosh 1972, 195-205.
255 Wilkinson 1996, 24-26, 217-220.
256 Balzac 1889 [1832] 253.
sensitivity renders him capable to understand things that are impossible to communicate to ordinary human beings.257
Balzac’s knowledge of Swedenborg’s works was probably limited but he was an important transmitter of the literary myth of Swedenborg as first and foremost a mystic.258 This perception of Swedenborg is reflected also in Aurier’s description of him as a “génial halluciné.” Aurier presents Swedenborg as a somewhat questionable authority, prone to the most grotesque ramblings, but a visionary genius none the less, and a model for all artists who are seeking to express truths beyond appearances.259
In his essay on Gauguin, Aurier also refers to Plato’s famous metaphor of the cave. With this metaphorical description Plato illustrates the distinction between truth and mere appearances. For Aurier, Gauguin represented an artist who had broken his chains and escaped from the cave. If for some people his vision seemed distorted, it meant only that they were still prisoners of the cave, thinking that mere appearances were the truth. Aurier returns to this thought in his second article on Symbolist art, “Les Peintres symbolistes,” in which he writes: “Almost all of us are prisoners of Plato's cave, who see nothing but shadows, and deny the luminous sky and the reality of things.”260 The reference to the metaphor of the cave illustrates a central point in Aurier’s Symbolist aesthetic: that art was not about appearances. The Symbolist artist’s aim was not to represent the world as it appeared, not to imitate it, but to create art that was directly connected with a higher realm, here described as the Platonic world of Ideas. Hence, the concept of artistic inner vision and the idea of the artist as a seer were more than mystically inclined quirks. The essential tenet of this doctrine constitutes an aesthetic point of view that continued on to the twentieth century – and one that still holds its validity today. That is, the idea of art as a means of arriving at new knowledge.
257 Bays has suggested that Louis Lambert can, in fact, be considered a kind of self-portrait presenting two different aspects of the author’s personality: “Louis is Balzac the seer or the 'spiritualist', while the je of the story is Balzac the artist and man of the world, the 'materialist'.” According to Bays, this can be seen as a manifestation of the spiritual dilemma of the author: if he becomes too absorbed in mysticism, it may suffocate the artistic side, and he could end up in complete isolation like Louis Lambert. Bays 1964, 105-106
258 Wilkinson 1996, 156-184.
259 See the quotation from Aurier’s essay “Le Symbolisme en peinture – Paul Gauguin” in the beginning of this chapter. Aurier continues: ”Ailleurs, dans un traité rempli, au reste, des plus grotesques divagations, le même Swedenborg, de l'autorité un peu contestable duquel je ne voudrais cependant point abuser, surtout en des questions d’art, écrit ces phrases profondément divinatrices, que je souhaiterais voir en épigraphe de tous les traités d’esthétique et méditées par tous les artistes et par tous les critiques ...” This is followed by a lengthy quotation from Arcana Coelestia, in which Swedenborg explains the theory of correspondences. Aurier 1893, 210.
260 “Presque tous, nous sommes les prisonniers de la caverne platonicienne, qui, ne pouvant voir que les ombres, nient le ciel lumineux et la réalité des êtres.” Aurier 1893, 301.