An Exhibition of Superlative Books: The Quietest Book in the World

 

The quiet book is unopened in front of you.

The world around you can recede for a while to its place of residence.

If you open the book, as you do with a swing of your glasses, language begins.

The past meets you halfway, in a silence of complicity.

The mood may settle, like the muscles in your neck.

Or soon pace down and up and down towards some unexplained expectation.

It could be the Middle Ages, or just middle age.

It could be the Renaissance.

The truck in the street has already turned the corner and gone.

The quietest book, here in front of you, trials the notion of a quiet library.

Sometime you have visited a library yourself.

Footnotes lead to citations for the fallacy of the quiet librarian.  

You read how this notion is demolished once you attend a library conference. The boisterous library, the outspoken library, the talkative library.

These are not common expressions; their librarians can be all these things.

So many words exchanged when the quiet book is banned.

A sing-song of superlatives when the quietest book is reviewed.

Discussion gets deep about the very nature of the quiet book.

Confronted silently by the language of the past, you get to like it.

This language was created just for you.

Though someone was in mind, only who and why?

This language was created just for you, not.

Certain chapters are held together by some silent pact.

After you have turned off the reading lamp, certain sentences keep you awake.

Tomorrow you must return to them.

The quietest book in the world addresses tomorrow head-on.

By then, the voice is being assimilated in your mind.

The sentences are more than just gut feeling.

You find the quietest book in the world is like no other.

You push aside the thought that it is like all the others.

You accept that all books are quiet.

Some are quiet as a dormouse, others quiet as outer space.

Your hearing mechanisms are not tuned to such frequencies.

Reading doesn’t always help.

The literature has not proven that some books are quieter than others.

Hence, you read sipping a cup of tea, their very mystery.

When you enter a library, bookshop, or any booklined space, there is quiet.

They are not anechoic chambers and yet you hear the silence.

Lines of books speak to the future that is you.

Tomorrow is another day, reads the epigraph.

And here you are.

The quietest book in the world stands in for the voices of the generations.

The quietest book may not be labelled thus for sale purposes.

Only the other week you were reading one of your quietest nearby books.

Storms uprooted forests, floods swept homes downstream.

The affable diarist spends hours in coffee houses with voluble friends.

The new music is so loud, conversation at the opera must be curtailed.

The war on the continent is reaching a crescendo.

The plague could put an end to it all.

You could not put it down, even forgot to turn out the reading lamp.

The quietest book was picked up again next morning.

His library grew while increasing blindness hindered full appreciation.

The stone caused groans but his vocal visitors, vociferous opinions.

The city almost burnt to the ground; we are grateful for his account.

One book you will not have read contains the following poem.

It is translated from an Oriental language, from another century.

The forest is here but this morning no sounds may be heard.

Truly no language can speak the silence of fog.

Surely the owls are warm where they dwell.

But cold is everywhere, in the air and the bones.

Thought wishes to share such peaceful solitude

Where soundless immensity traps occasional mist water.

Inside the room the bed is warm and sleeps some more.

Table, fruit bowls, teacups - every object is quiet

But quietest of all on a window ledge is a book

Closed for some time, now in the light again,

The quietest book in the world.

You might enjoy everything I have put into this book.

Descriptions of travel before the pandemic arrived.

Conversations with our friends, some lost for good.

Cartoons of our hopeless politicians, even old Lunkhead.

Drawings that took hours, of the abiding seasons.

Cuttings of thought-provoking facts from the capital’s news sheets.

My efforts at interpretation of poems and scripture verses.

The abiding seasons, that supply pressed flowers and herbs.

You might; or might prefer most times your own window view.

Fog shows by example how to quieten down.

Until a bird song or cracking ice means fog is lifting, with blue hints. 

 Notes for the Poem:

Pictured are two of the quietest books in the world alluded to in the poem: ‘The Diary of Samuel Pepys’ and ‘The Poetry and Career of Li Po, 701-762 A.D.’, biography and translations by Arthur Waley.

A useful introduction to anechoic chambers is found here:

https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/anechoic-chamber-worlds-quietest-room/index.html

Arcimboldo -- The Librarian: Meditation

Philip Harvey

He stares into the past that made him. We are all doing this, increasingly as we grow older. We have to find a way to explain how we got here. Our experience slowly informs us that there was a time before our own experience, to which we also belong. He stares from 1562 at a lifetime of transformations. Water can be turned into wine but clay still cannot be turned into gold. Not everything pleases him, it can never be all pleasure, yet he knows he belongs to discovery and its consequent treasures. He is full of this discovery, it has made him, we could almost say. He stares across the Atlantic Ocean to what nature does that is different and equally abundant. Within him he contains that information, though he calls it Legend and Report and Assay and Proclamation and Statute. Certainly, nothing in his own constitution would be quite the same without discovery, or its companions, conquest and exploitation. From 1562 the past is a tumult that he would rather keep under wraps. Why, only in living memory England has closed its monasteries and Germany has freely set up its own church and friends of his remember their grandparents talk about the end of the East at Byzantium. The Emperor here in Prague is restless for knowledge too, permitting into his orbit every kind of theorist and experimenter, as if he were the centre of the universe. It is not altogether with a clear equanimity or composure that the Librarian knows these tumults are related to books. That it was books in increasing numbers that enhanced discovery of the differences in people’s minds. He keeps himself together, he doesn’t fall in a heap, has at least these things to keep him going. But authority has come at a cost. His identity must resolve contradictions between one page and the next, or at least live with those contradictions. 1562 stares at the past as at a dream of lost glories. The ruins of the ancients keep him on his mettle. For even though manuscripts are old hat and the scroll could belong in one of the Emperor’s cabinets of catchy curiosities, he must not become conceited. It would be dangerous to presume that you know it all; people like that often finish up being thrown out the window, especially in Prague, where it is a more effective solution than exile.

He belongs in the present and can do no other. We are all doing this, possibilities reach out to impossibility. Probability thrashes it out with improbability. His masters want to emulate the ancients, why the Emperor himself would be the King of May. It is a topsy-turvy world, for sure. The green mantle over his left shoulder is that of a Habsburg prince. He though is not a prince but a philosopher, grinding out the slow meal for a new recipe of life. The mantle is stylish, it sends the message. But like the rest of him, it belongs in the present where rust and moth destroy, where princes give with one hand and take with the other. He would copy the prince, he also values his status. In 1562, that can amount to an impressive library. Books made him and he is made of books. Splendid things every week come to his attention. How solid is the present. Or should that be a question? How solid is the present? Carefully bound books seem a sure assertion of his place. Those papers that are his fingers write the laws we belong with. It’s all impressive enough, but is there not something stiff in the manner? Is he too straight-up-and-down to be believable? And will we ever know what he really thinks? Is he, for all his show of knowledge, a closed book? Outside in the streets of Prague the market is orderly racket, a walkway of vivid bartering, somewhere for animals to huff and toy stars to explode. The Vltava is rowdy with geese and trading boats. Whereas in here the silence is closed in. And anyway it’s never like this the rest of the time. Only now has he collected himself together sufficiently to stand a chance with posterity. Most times he’s all over the place, Philosophy at the window over there, History where it happens beyond the stairs, Law when something very wrong happens, only how wrong? His Science side is waiting for updates, his Theology looks tight but will it stand the next test? Why, his whole being could collapse into the proverbial, or turn into a pile of tomes for re-shelving. So for the moment he keeps a straight face, combines an aura of knowledge with a figure resolute with a little brief authority.  

He stares into the future, that will be totally unfair to all his achievements. We are the future, for example, who do not know what he really wants to achieve and cannot imagine what a Librarian in 1562 might possibly be up to, and will not care a fig. Just as we care not a fig for the Emperor looking like a green grocer’s window, though we find him curious enough. In his coat of many covers, the Librarian projects the certainties of 1562. Rumours of war, signs in the heavens, the brilliant carnivale of the court – these seem at times just a side product of the certainty of these books. They are the very latest technology, their beings inside and out a testament to the greatness of the new. Some of us gaze in wonder, some of us check the price tags. His future is something we know more about than he can guess, but who are we only hindsighters? By the time it is agreed that the Earth goes around the sun and the sun is a minor star and let’s turn the page, he will have been taken from his imperious place in the palace, heaved across the frozen Baltic Sea, and stacked up in Swedish obscurity. He, who entertained to a nicety the courtiers and boffins of the sparkling age, will rest quietly as an outdated encyclopaedia, if that, for the occasional attention of humourless rationalists. The snow will fall outside. 1562 will be 1625 will be 1652 and so forth. He will be like a joke that has gone flat with time and is not even funny anymore, a joke that another age enjoyed till it split its sides. His future is to be defined by the cut of his cloth. His books are the limit of what was known, not the limitlessness he felt he embodied. And yet the future will not be blind to his existence. It will ponder him as a conundrum, a quirk of humanism, the necessary manager of new thoughts. Even his outfit may come back into fashion, or sprout leaves to reveal the true nature of his calling. The future will try to make a context in which to understand, even if context disappeared or ‘disapapered’ (as the Irish Portmanteau, himself a montage, would say) under Thirty Years of unloving unneighbourly War. The future will try to rewrite the Librarian and in the process make up a new Librarian who is one more collation of collective thoughts. The future flew in the body of a huge metal bird all the way to the fishing town of Stockholm, just to walk down the gilt passageway where the Librarian waits, ready for the latest reference question, ready to show you what he has in store.

Arcimboldo -- The Librarian: History

Philip Harvey

The Prague court of Rudolf II was one of the great centres of the later Renaissance. The emperor gathered about him alchemists and scientists, astrologers and astronomers, authors and artists of every kind. Creativity was the keynote, compatibility less so. One artist whom Rudolf inherited from his father’s reign, and who for this reason has strangely become synonymous with the history of Prague, was the Italian painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1526-1593).

Arcimboldo enjoys a unique place in Western art, with opinion divided about the exact value of his work. He took everyday objects and used them as montage portraits, so for example his four personifications of the seasons use stock from the green grocer to fashion human heads. He created portraits of Rudolf II himself in this fashion, leaving us to ponder whether we are staring at someone “younger than springtime”, the top banana, the apple of our eye, or an old fruit. The fascination with Arcimboldo’s paintings is not just that they are talking points, but that they challenge our own ideas about their exact purpose. One such painting utilises drapes, books and papers: ‘The Librarian’ (circa 1562).

Arcimboldo’s paintings seem to exist in the borderlands between symbolic archetypes and deliberate satire. From our distance it is hard to tell sometimes whether one of his masterpieces, the Emperor portrayed as the Roman god Vertumnus, is a marvel of imperial claims, or a sly dig at the pretensions of an indulgent humanist. His painting of a man with a face made of a fish and a pig is grotesque, surely, but viewers at the time knew instantly who the person was from the likeness and may have treated it as no more than a game of identification. Today we conjecture as to whether it is even the Swiss Reformer John Calvin. It’s guesswork. Not that Arcimboldo’s audience were naïve. The sixteenth century is rife with satirical portraits and maybe Arcimboldo has taken ideas from these send-ups of rulers and turned them into serious art works. They have become what we would call concept art.

‘The Librarian’ has literally been constructed from books. The resemblance to a human being provokes the riddle about what came first, the books or the person. It steps over the line of characterisation into that space where a person is defined by what they do. At this level we are trapped in the lazy thinking that wants to summarise someone up by a simple equation of a librarian as a mere organiser of books, or of books being the things that shape that person. It is objectification.

Lazy is a word that has come to mind for a reason. Scholars believe that this is not just a portrait of any librarian but of Wolfgang Lazius, which is the Latinized name of Wolfgang Laz (1514-1565), one of the Brains Trust of the Habsburg courts. Like others in this stellar world of multi-skilled polymaths, Lazius was an Austrian physician, cartographer, historian, and bookman. One commentator writes, “You will note that Arcimboldo has painted the librarian's paper ‘fingers’ clutching a stack of books acquisitively. Over 400 years later, Lazius still hasn't been able to shake the reputation that he obtained records by whatever means necessary ... including theft.” (Shelley Esaak) With such knowledge of motive and history we look at the painting in a new way.

Laura Thain on Thu further extends the background. “Scholars read The Librarian in two distinct ways. The contemporary reading (which much subsequent scholarship has acknowledged or substantiated) argues the portrait was a personal attack levied at one Wolfgang Lazius, HRE Ferdinand I’s court historian in the Habsburg court at Vienna, for his vain and inaccurate scholarship. Yet K. C. Elhard argues instead that Arcimboldo’s painting criticized not poor scholarship but poor bookmanship—that is, it levied a critique against ‘materialist book collectors more interested in acquiring books than reading them.’” 

Like much else in Rudolfine Prague, this painting fell victim to the subsequent extremes of the Thirty Years’ War. Many of Arcimboldo’s paintings were lost or destroyed. This one was snaffled by the invading Swedish Army as part of the booty, which is why to this day it hangs not in the great gallery at Hradcany Castle in Prague but in Skoklosters Castle near Stockholm. Indeed, Arcimboldo’s works disappeared from the scene for centuries, whether due to changes in taste, or neglect, or the usual wasting of time itself.

Reception history does not clarify precisely when Arcimboldo was rediscovered in the 20^th century, though commentators are firm in the view that Salvador Dali was inspired by him and that he came again to general attention in the 1930s. This puts at odds those art historians who, for example, like to say that Arcimboldo was 350 years ahead of Cubism. Planes and sections are a feature of ‘The Librarian’, but the painting is a world apart from Picasso, Gris, and Braque. Arcimboldo’s purposes are altogether different from those of Cubism, his draughtsmanship is precise and realistic, and his worldview is almost perverse in its Mannerism. One wonders (doubts is a better word) if a Cubist ever saw Arcimboldo before World War One or what he would have made of Arcimboldo’s wacky presentations. Their own obsessions with the picture plane owe most to the breakthroughs of their immediate predecessor, Paul Cezanne.

Nor can we say with any confidence that Arcimboldo was a Surrealist before the fact. The Milanese and the Hapsburgs of the 16^th century went mad over him, but cool heads prevailed for 300 years and his star went cold. We can see why the Surrealists were attracted to Giuseppe Arcimboldo: his daring anthropomorphism, his morphing of the natural with the extreme and grotesque, his prodigious alchemy of the everyday and the dreamlike. Personally though, I find the connections between the Mannerist Arcimboldo and Surrealism more a matter of 20^th century fellow feeling and inspiration, less so a matter of kindred intentions. The Italian is playing a game of witty artifice, not an intensive exploration of dreamscapes and alienation. 

Any study of this artist has also to acknowledge the French literary theorist Roland Barthes. His book length essay on Arcimboldo addresses the “visual articulation of the intersection of man and nature”. As Thain on Thu says, “Barthes fixates on the way the artist employs rhetorical tropes into his painting—metonymy and paradox, for instance. For Barthes, Arcimboldo is a ‘rhetorician and magician’ because of the structural semiotics he represents in his paintings; each part of what we recognize as a face is a discrete element meaningless in isolate, but when assembled, the elements of his paintings produce meaning in a sum greater than their parts. While Barthes argues that these “puzzles” are a metaphor for language, they also strongly exhibit Arcimboldo’s debt to Florentine Neoplatonism in their commitment to displaying meaning only as a composite body.  When dissected, they cease to speak.” Perhaps the best way of abstracting her words is to say that Arcimboldo demonstrates, rather blatantly, Barthes’ view that meaning is a construct, and that our sense of what is being conveyed depends mainly on the components of the work, be they words, images, or some other medium. Certainly Arcimboldo appears at a time in Western art where game playing has become central rather than peripheral to the artistic act. He leads the way into the Baroque.

Meanwhile we enjoy ‘The Librarian’ from a different time and perspective altogether, as can be appreciated when we visit the gallery down the corridor here.

SOURCES

Barthes, Roland. Arcimboldo. Franco Maria Ricci, 1980.
Demetz, Peter. Prague in Gold and Black : the History of a City. Penguin, 1998.
Esaak, Shelley. In: About.com Art History, 2008, on an Arcimboldo Exhibition held in Paris and Vienna.
Graham-Dixon, Andrew. The Librarian by Giuseppe Arcimboldo, at http://www.andrewgrahamdixon.com/archive/readArticle/221
Thain on Thu, Laura. The Fate of Arcimboldo, the Fate of the Book, 2012, at http://viz.dwrl.utexas.edu/content/fate-arcimboldo-fate-book