The goat disappears

About "Drunken Silenus" by Morgan Mace

Where does the mentor of Dionysus go so furiously in the canvas of Peter Paul Rubens and what do the quiet streets of Antwerp hide in their cracks? Eduard Lukoyanov learned about this and much more from the book “Drunk Silenus” by art critic Morgan Mace.

All of us, since February 24, 2022, have found ourselves in the face of advancing barbarism, violence and lies. In this situation, it is extremely important to preserve at least the remnants of culture and support the values ​​of humanism - including for the sake of the future of Russia. Therefore, the editors of Gorky will continue to talk about books, reminding our readers that there is still a place for thought and fiction in the world.

Morgan Mace. Drunk Silenus. About gods, goats and cracks in reality. M.: Individual, 2024. Translation from English by Alexey Zygmont. Content . Fragment

All kinds of books about classical art have one thing in common - most of them are unbearably boring. Sometimes you can’t help but think that there is some ancient conspiracy of merchants, museum workers and art historians, the purpose of which is to discourage visitors from art galleries, and turn their empty spaces into slot machine halls with a cryptocurrency exchanger in the lobby. On the lower floors there will be queues of people wanting to throw coins into the “columns”, and on the upper floors there will be elite slot machines, roulette and blackjack tables, between which yesterday’s granny caretakers will politely wander with trays of free gin and tonics. The originals will be distributed among government dachas, castles of oligarchs and skyscrapers of Persian Gulf sheikhs. Before this, the canvases should be digitized and cut into NFT collections.

Art critic and PhD candidate Morgan Mays, who works in Detroit, is not involved in this conspiracy. His book about Peter Paul Rubens, as he himself admits, is the result of a coincidence: Mace’s wife was filming a film about the cartographer Abraham Ortelius in Antwerp, and meanwhile he wandered through the pubs until he remembered that he was in the city of the great painter, famous for his baroque images of vital fat men:

“This thought made me irritated, because Rubens was absolutely not interesting to me. I didn’t even dislike him—I just didn’t care. My next thought was: “I’ll write a book about Rubens.”

After such a confession, the shrewd reader will undoubtedly suspect that “Drunken Silenus” is not a work entirely about Rubens. And he turns out to be partially right. Meis takes as the basis for his Antwerp reflections the classic, but not the most typical, painting by the Fleming, which is included in the title. It depicts the friend-mentor of Dionysus - in fact, Silenus, an eternally drunk, obese demigod, riding around the world on a donkey. In Rubens’s painting, he participates in a seemingly ordinary bacchanalian scene: Silenus is focused somewhere with his entire corpulent body, while a mischievous satyr is trying to snatch a piece of buttock fat from the demigod. In the lower right corner lies a severed goat's head, with another goat sitting above it. Under Silenus’s feet lies some pink, shapeless flesh, in which, after some effort, one can see a bacchante feeding children with alcoholized milk. Among the background figures, a blonde girl stands out noticeably, mysteriously looking straight at the viewer.

To begin with, let us give the following description of this canvas, left by an anonymous Russian-speaking author: “In the shocking carnal form of Silenus, presented drunk, surrounded by Maenads, satyrs, nymphs and cupids, Rubens embodied the earthly, natural principle. In his painting, the artist created the atmosphere of the elements of bacchanalia with the entire figuratively pictorial structure of the work: the almost sketchy freedom of painting technique, the richness of color, uniting the discordance of colors into a single golden stream, conveying the thrill of flesh and the mobility of air masses. In the painting “Bacchanalia,” which is similar in genre and allegorical meaning (1615–1620, Moscow, State Museum of Fine Arts named after A. S. Pushkin), depicting a festival in honor of the god of wine Bacchus, mythological images are depicted by Rubens as bearers of the natural elemental principle, fertility, and inexhaustible love of life.”

This short paragraph wonderfully demonstrates a certain cultural inertia, which invariably prevents not only from enjoying classical painting, but also from somehow perceiving it. From the second grade of children's art school, sitting between the plaster heads of Laocoon and his sons, dried pumpkins, various jugs and other garbage that serve as improvised nature, we memorize the formula for the rest of our lives: Rubens is fat, shiny bodies, Rubens is healthy hedonism, Rubens is the triumph of life over death.

Morgan Mays, from the above description, would probably go crazy, if expressed in the language he chose to write this “hooligan”, funny, but at the same time sad and witty book, in which philosophical stand-up, to make it not so sad, is woven into sad discussions about the fundamental principles of human existence on earth - extremely pointless.

At least the central character of Rubens’ painting was convinced of the latter. We have somehow been taught to think that the wise, good-natured Silenus is a cheerful reveler, a comic character, an appendage to the frantic Bacchus. Mace, however, recalls that a legend is associated with him, revealing the fundamental principles of bitter drunkenness. King Midas, greedy for gold and knowledge, satiated with wealth, wars and murder, thought about the meaning of life. Lost in thought, he gave the wisest Silenus a drink and pestered him with the question: “What is best for a person?” He probably didn’t like Silenus’ answer: “[For a person] it is better not to be born at all. The second most important thing is to die quickly.”

If you keep this thought in your head, Rubens’s canvas will obviously sparkle with completely different colors, not those written in the regular catalog for the exhibition. In Mace's interpretation, this picture is extremely tragic, and Silenus in it has a clear goal - to die as quickly as possible. That is why he gets drunk to such a state when reason disappears, personality is erased, a person (and in this case, a demigod) moves somewhere, but at the same time, in general, does not go anywhere:

“Silenus cannot belong to life because he cannot die. Silenus cannot be dead, since he is connected with life [the mentorship of the endlessly born and dying Dionysus]. His life is not a life; This is living death, which is not death at all.”

Starting from these troubling thoughts, Mace makes a valuable observation that may be a revelation to those who now perceive the collective Emil Cioran as an unreasonably whining decadent who had the misfortune of being born. “Living is hard, not living is much easier,” says the arrogant folk wisdom on this matter. And so it is. But not really. Mace points out that “not living” first of all means “never experiencing the pain of being individual, when only the whole is valuable and important.”

It is difficult to disagree with this clarification. Indeed, in theory, it is possible to survive any grief, except the most unbearable, when the human body goes into self-destruction mode. But how to survive the fact that you exist, you are unique, you have your own set of qualities and properties that you may love in yourself, or maybe you hate; in general, do you have strong feelings about something that has absolutely no meaning in the general flow of existence? After all, even those who defend individuality and individualism as the highest ideal are still disingenuous, because they are talking about a certain conditional “value” that should be common to everyone.

Anyone who thinks about this plot runs the risk of going mad twice within his own madness. And it happens here and there. But does madness, Dionysian or in the medical sense of the word, provide salvation from the endless stream of meaningless living? For an answer, Mace turns to the main anti-hero of his book - Friedrich Nietzsche and his “Birth of Tragedy”, where through the figure of Silenus the special ability of the Greeks is shown to peer into the abyss of terrible existence.

This anachronistic plot twist is the remarkable virtue of Drunken Silenus. Indeed: if Silenus will never die, and Dionysus will forever be torn to pieces by participants in bacchanalia, then what prevents us from weaving into Rubens’s canvas a half-mad philosopher who was born two hundred years after the Flemish painter lay in his grave?

The author of the book is harsh and unfair towards Nietzsche - as he, however, deserved. His tone is accusatory and merciless. If Mace comes across a reference to the fact that the idol of Nietzsche and the Nietzscheans, Richard Wagner, called his main fan an onanist, then he will carefully consider this fact from all possible angles and put Nietzsche’s handjob in the title of the chapter. If Mace remembers how amusingly Nietzsche extolled himself as the main hero of the Franco-Prussian War, in which he did not even participate, then he will stop the flow of his own bile only with a titanic effort.

In general, there is little beauty in the denunciation of those who died long ago and after death were repeatedly denounced, trampled and laid out in the safe urns of the global cultural columbarium. However, in this kicking of a skull with a thick mustache there is something charming in its own way - Mace, with his mockery, seems to transport Nietzsche to the center of Rubens’s canvas, giving himself the place of a satyr that haunts us. In the process of these metamorphoses with space, time and human roles, the author of “Drunken Silenus” does not seem to notice how, when feeling Nietzsche’s bottom, he became infected with black melancholy from him:

“In fact, everything here is war. Under the cover of dreams there is an endless war. The true face of Antwerp is war and murder. If the houses of Antwerp looked as they really were, a history of war and murder would be written on their facades. Enduring, constantly renewed war and murder. Antwerp streets are quiet and beautiful, and it’s always drizzling there. In fact, they should be moaning about war and murder.”

This is one of the leading motives of Mace's book - through Nietzschean logic, he tears away the veils of reality, behind which hides a single war, lasting from the siege of Troy to the present day. And what helps him come to this conclusion is not the Fallout universe with its famous motto, but an alarming canvas with a plump drunkard and a mysterious girl, glaring at him with an unearthly gaze that expresses who knows what.

(We cannot resist, in parentheses, not wishing Mace’s wife to dedicate her new film to, say, the Patriarch of Antioch Ignatius Philip I or, for example, the Emperor Heliogabalus , so that her husband could wander to his heart’s content in melancholy longing through the quiet and beautiful streets of Diyarbakir and Homs, respectively. For everyone else, we strongly recommend: if you have the opportunity to visit Antwerp, be sure to go to your local zoo, they have a great aquarium.)

And yet, on those pages where Mace escapes the temptation to tear out his beard and break his glasses, shuddering with horror at the universe, his book takes on unexpectedly comforting properties. At these moments, his verdicts on the so-called civilization timidly retreat into the shadow of a witty, wild and, most importantly, comforting letter. Reading this book forces you to forget everything you supposedly knew about Europe with its painting, in order to lift your swollen eyelids and finally see what is hidden behind the layer of paint and begin an independent search for related meanings - that is, it completely and completely copes with the “educational” task.

So, while reading “Drunken Silenus,” we discovered a wonderful object of painting that we must share. It looks like this:

If you believe the description on the website of the auction house that sold this masterpiece in its mediocrity for 5,500 euros, we have before us a copy of Rubens’ “Drunken Silenus”, made by a certain K. Schubert in the 19th century. Notice how gracefully the author removed all the problems and contradictions inherent in the original: pieces of pink flesh formed into neat babies, littered with non-alcoholic fruits, their mother stood up and grabbed a tambourine, wedging herself between the black satyr and the excitingly mysterious stranger, who now became just a woman blushing from drinking. Silenus's eyes are closed - he is just tired and goes to take a nap. The boy holding the sacrificial goat is now occupied with something completely different. There is no trace of the severed head. Somewhere between the original and the copy, the goat disappears. The tragedy is over, and most likely there was no tragedy.

“The act of visual creativity in itself is a joke, and we all pretend that it is not a joke or a trick, but, again, it is a joke and a damn serious one in the sense that it is a joke and a trick that reveals something, which exposes the shadow nature of reality itself. Therefore, the false reality of the picture is not so false at all,” sums up Morgan Mace, speaking of something completely different.

And he is, of course, right.

In general, “Drunk Silenus” is a wonderful book for preventing suicide and at the same time getting rid of the obsessive fear of death. While reading Mace’s book, you can’t help but think about how easy it is to leave this world, in which “civilization” does nothing remarkable except endless self-destruction followed by self-rebirth. On the other hand, it’s stupid and boring to run away from here while so many jokes are still not understood, and philosophy suddenly becomes a funny science for the most unexpected reasons, when there’s usually no time for laughter.