Harry’s Place Arts

This is a guest post by Cornelis Gijsbrechts

El mismo escritor a que vengo aludiendo dice que las catedrales, sin ojes que las contemplen, carecen de valor y que son los ojos que hacen las catedrales. … Hasta cierto punto - y no más - esto es verdad, pero ¿no lo es también que las catedrales … los ojos?
 
(This same writer to whom I allude says that cathedrals without eyes to see them are bereft of value and that it is the eyes that make the cathedrals. … This is true up to a point, but no further. Yet isn’t it also true that it is the cathedrals … that make the eyes?)
 
Miguel de Unamuno. A proposito de la catedral de Reims (A Purpose for Rheims Cathedral)

This quotation by Unamuno illustrates the rhetorical device know as antimetabole or chiasmus where through an inversion of letters or words within a text, a radically different meaning is invented or brought into view.
 
One of the central chiasmi of Kleist’s Der zerbrochene Krug is to be found in the name of the original owner of the pitcher, Childerich. His name not only contains a chiastic reversal of the letter designating Christ and Christianity, he also uses his magic pitcher to turn water into wine.
 
Here is what Rodolphe Gasché has to say about chiasm:
 

Chiasm or chiasmus is an anglicization of the Greek chiasma, which designates an arrangement of two lines crossed liked the letter X (chi) and refers in particular to cross-shaped sticks, to a diagonally arranged bandage, or to a cruciform incision. … Originally, as a form, as the form of thought, chiasm is what allows oppositions to be bound into unity in the first place. It is a form that makes it possible to determine differences with respect to an underlying totality. The chiasm, so to speak, cross-bandages the crosswise incision by which it divided a whole into its proper differences.
 
The chiasm is a form through which differences are installed, preserved, and overcome in one grounding unity of totality.

Rodolphe Gasché, Of Minimal Things. Studies on the Notion of Relation

 
Gasché proceeds to complicate this definition of the chiasm by discussing recent theory’s attempt to advance an asymmetrical chiasm, which would undo any totalization created by a symmetrical chiasm. Here interpretive strategies are inevitably undone by the chasm at the heart of the chiasm: the pivotal fulcrum at the core of self-referentiality which not only precludes one from seeing oneself seeing, but also incorporates the blindspot as a frame that circumscribes what one sees.
 
Returning to Vermeer’s ‘The Art of Painting,’ the painter sits on a stool positioned over four black tiles forming a cross. Why is this so? Does the angle formed by the paintbrush and maulstick mirror the tiles’ chiasm? Are there other chiasms in this painting?

A drawing by Hieronymous Bosch may provide some clues.

The perplexed over-the-shoulder gaze of the tree-man might indicate that he is not comfortable with his condition:

why is there a tree growing through him, a tavern in his backside, and boats for feet?

Perhaps it is only the outcome of an idle speculation, but Gijsbrechts cannot look at this drawing without recalling Vermeer’s painter, and is left wondering about the reason for his absent face.

di(t), segno(r) Vermeer, does X mark the spot?  Merry Christmas and a happy New Year, from your saponaceous correspondent, Gijsbrechts. And if you should wake up on Christmas morning and experience the following:
 

“He thought he saw a Buffalo
Upon the chimney-piece:
He looked, and found it was
His Sister’s Husband’s Niece.
‘Unless you leave this house,’ he said,
‘I’ll send for the Police!’”

 
do not worry, it is only a hang-over. And here, finally, is an absolute cracker of a chiasm - Bruce Forsyth’s ‘Nice to see you, to see you, - nice!’