On portraiture, ceiling staring and Montaigne cheat codes
Today, let's start our fool's journey on portraiture and journaling...
Dear reader,
How do we even start? First, let me know that I am happy to come to you. I was wondering if I was even gonna start writing.
Besides my work, I do not write enough. I try to journal every day, but often there are long moments when my daily practice falls through. I often feel have a bad memory: I forget what I did last week, what I ate yesterday. What I often do is a recollection of my days, looking through my Instagram posts, and my messages with my dearest ones, through my google calendar. What a weird time we are living in that I need to sort through what is left of my thoughts… Most of them come mediated by some proofs of existence through the web…
I journal without any important breaks for more than a year, which is, for me, more than a victory. It started as a tool for my healing practices. I wanted to make sure I am doing what I want and need to do:
- prepare and develop the projects that I want.
- do magic and research.
- have some grounded memory which helps my general mindfulness.
Between my public self (via Instagram and online presence), and my discrete and private self (that I share with a few people close to me), I wanted to publish something more mindful. For example, I developed my journaling practices around daily-journaling practices, short random thoughts, and seasonal envisioning as checking with myself. In a way, maintaining my journal was to build a bridge with my past and future self, to create a conversation of care, and to allow more mental space for phenomenological brain continuity. Temporal Brain continuity sounds pretty dry, but it mostly means that I am just trying to have a calm, resilient, mindful and present “I” to face adversity and do what I want/need to do.
What am I? “C’est Moi que Je peins [It is me that I paint]”, wrote Montaigne in the first lines of his Essays (1580). We often talk about the Essays as attempts of Montaigne's to make an elation with “I”. We know the modern self doesn’t come from Descartes like many think. Briefly, Descartes created a panopticon for the self as a new scientific paradigm. Montaigne did not build this thing but would have created a new opening and perspective on our phenomenological experiences.
When we hear about Montaigne, we tend to focus on his conceptualization of the Subject, while the action of how he is “painting it” becomes invisible. This is in my sense too much forgotten. The action “painting/writing” gives a temporality on one side but limits on the other side what is the “subject”. While painting with a brush and colours a portrait is a 3 dimensions-only object, the Essays develop a new kind of “portraiture”, which would give us (at least) one new dimension, a certain continuity through time. Through ethical discussions, aesthetic considerations and philosophical reflections, Montaigne's goal was to draw as closely, as rigorously himself, with a new perspective. But this perspective is not built on a static self but shapes a temporal, grounded in his world, practices and ethos.
Archeology of writing processes
For some years, we can enjoy seeing where Montaigne was dictating his Essays to his secretary in a 3D research project that you can discover yourself here. This reconstitution, made by years of research, with multidisciplinary approaches, gives us back how could the Librairie have looked in Montaigne’s tower (yes, his library and office were in a tower of his castle). We can imagine Montaigne walking around the space, as he wrote in his Essays, looking at the books on the little desks, going in rêveries looking at the windows or to his ceiling where quotes of mostly just ancient European philosophers are written. Crazy as it is, there is so much to say that a complete archeological work was published in the Montaigne laboratory in 2000 (Legros).
The ceiling there would have played a particular role in what modern would see as the mystical decor that Montaigne had created (Legros, 2000, p.225). For me, it is important to state that Montaigne was truly playing with his mind before the scientific modern methodology (which afflicted philosophy as well!). His way to do philosophy was then phenomenologically not scientific but still skeptical and reflexive. The arcane of his Essays were only for him an experiment to try to see what he was seeing, reading himself through the passing time, projecting himself. We can imagine him reading the different quotes written on the two main wooden beams of his ceiling (with a part of the beam crossing the photo here), written on a drawing of rolled papyrus while walking perpetually in a circular room.
I would say that the importance of these two beams in the structure of the house could suggest that the 8 citations structured the space: looking through the multitudes of citations on the smaller beams, the reading flow of the two main beams could be read as an anchor for the thoughts. Here is what we can read after the modern archeology work:
IVDICIO ALTERNANTE (unknown)
[The discernment going and coming (our translation)]
AKATAΛΗΠΤΩ
[I can’t conceive]
ΟΥΔΕΝ ΜΑΛΛΟΝ
[Equally]
ΑΡΡΕΠΩΣ
[Do not lean]
ΟΥ ΚΑΤΑΛΛΒΑΝΩ
[I do not conceive]
EΠEXΩ
[I wait]
EKEPTOMAI
[I examine]
MORE DVCE ET SENSV (unknown)
[Follow usage and instinct]
While the total of citations present on the ceiling does not merge under one concrete theory (Legros, 2000) these 8 citations can be easily seen as a way to balance methodologically a skeptic inquiry, a line of thoughts, a self-looking at itself. Except for two (who are at opposite ends of the two beams) which the author has not yet been determined, all other 6 citations are from Sextus Empiricus.
The Sextus praxis of inquiry
While it seems highly doubtful to get the full Essays from the written sentences on the ceiling themselves, I have the intuition that Montaigne wanted to stay present (or has we said modern stay mindful) to his inquiry. It seems like he was influenced by a method way older than him, taken notably to Sextus Empiricus. Being not considered in our modern days as a predominant figure of classical greek philosophy, it seems like a plausible marginalized voice in academia (Ribeiro, 2021) to trace the importance of lineage with Sextus to Montaigne. This little detail has still a major impact since it brings new light to the in-coming project of a scientific method developed with Descartes. Contrary to the rest of the ceiling, the citations written on the two main beams don’t call to disembodied and scattered principles, but to a grounded technique based on personal experience through the space. We could, if you want, think of Montaigne’s tower as a ship that he is trying to use to memorize, discover himself and write it on paper through the resonance of others’ text and ideas of the world.
The Essays as self-portraiture might today seem unprovocative while still brilliant, one thing that commentators should have more discussed in my opinion is how Montaigne crystallized what will become an impensé, a not-thinkable thought through our modern days, that is:
“myself” is hard to seize. I just can’t hold complete directionality to my life, lol. That is just impossible.
Every day, I am hurt by the fact that myself is constituted of different things, that I am not, even for myself, seizable truly and perfectly. This project was and can only be one of some kind of megalomaniac, that only some extreme wealth could bring down on earth. This wealth and power-over involve de facto the presence of others, even in the words of Montaigne, which is described by MORE DVCE ET SENSV (Follow usage and instinct) on his ceiling. Through his life and the work behind his Essays, Montaigne tries to remember and understand the (non-)fixity of the self, while the world is falling apart around him. The religious wars of France, the arrival of ancient philosophy coming from Constantinople and the Plague were on everybody’s mind. It does not sound like a super stable time to me.
Personally, when I think about it, I don’t remember most of the greek citations I learned in my past life at university. I had to learn at some points to memorize specific lines, in greek, from Plato’s Republic when I was doing my undergrad in France. I remember that line 429b is quite important… What is written? I do not know. I don’t remember most meals I have each day, and I could make up the number of people have been seeing last week. I do not remember most of my fun party nights, the (major) errors I made, the harm I had done or the hard break-ups I had. These memories are there, often mediated by the apparatus of modern living: computers, photographs, social media posts, textos.
But I feel like a connect sometimes better with long-term processes, that go way beyond myself. I feel the call of my body, the traumas and experiences of sickness, injuries, and past troubles. I connect with my past and my ancestors which lie under the surface of my life, and I am trying to see how their lives impact me still today in such an important way. I try to connect with my body, and find sources of feeling, going over numbness and overstimulation from the modern world. My journaling work has been helping me a lot and created as I was writing an opening. What about you? How journaling has been nurturing your personal power and capacities?
I have been researching with my book club ( we have a project launch next week on December 1st. Come see us!). We have been trying to develop our reading group for the summer around what happens to the Self at the End of the World. Looking at the processes that made the Self such a global inquiry with Montaigne helps us also see how the self has never been cleared out. It might also help us to see that this project of individualization at its source is an experimental process and that other experimental processes can do else. These processes involve new ways outside of an individual-oriented project like modern sciences and philosophies want us to think. We are dependent on each other even when we have rational thoughts. This undermines the whole modern idea that makes the individual responsible for global cataclysms and the only accountable agent. We are intertwined webs of things and linked with visible and invisible beings. In my humble opinion, we need to create our ethics around this, not in opposition.
The gay agenda of the Self
While the world was going under, it seemed like Montaigne was gaining stability through his love with La Boétie, his gay dead lover. I would like to add a little to this already long inquiry here: How his love affair with La Boétie and his gayness is constitutive of a gap between the public self, written in French, and the Montaigne homoerotic self? La Boétie is a prominent figure of the 1500 century and died some years before Montaigne’s essays from the Plague. The library was apparently made as a memorial to La Boétie. But wouldn’t it be nice to see love and empathy as a way to connect and turns Montaigne's Self theory against Montaigne's definite queerness?
Following other researchers, we can start to build a second, semi-closet, esoteric, but probably well-known Montaigne Self(-portrait). The Essays’ citations which are brought and curated with many greek philosophers would apparently (Beck, 1990) have had often a sexual undertone to the Essays. It is also a well-known fact that Montaigne had a more than “friendly” relationship with La Boétie. This new light on Montaigne brings us a new element to the cheat codes to write himself (and what becomes “the self”). His dialogue with La Boétie (and homoerotic lineages) is part of the vessel. Montaigne had the intention and desire to write the Essays for his love. This presence was also written in the Library. Over the highest shelve of the circular library, we could have seen the new lost dedication to La Boétie:
Dulcissimi suavissimiq. sodalis et conjunctissimi, quo nihil melius vidit nostra ætas, nihil doctius, nihil venustius, nihil sane perfectius (…).
[The sweetest of the sweetest relationship and greatest conjuncture, that our age has never seen better, more learned, more charming, certainly not more perfect (our translation)…]
(Bertrand, 2015)
Surrounded by the remembrance of La Boétie, Montaigne's writing works were connected to his deep affection. The cold writing vessel of the self becomes something new: We are far from a simple recipe to get and grasp the self, I have to say. Furthermost, translation and processes of citations are powerful tools of continuity, discovery, transgression, movement… What else could we dig up?
I will probably come back on Sextus, on what this obscure philosopher might have to give us the keys for. I might come back to love and friendship with Montaigne and La Boétie. Anyway, next time, I might dive into familial traumas and continuity, we will see. I will try to make this happens every two weeks for now. Let’s jump on this journey with my p0stdaizisms! Thank you to share the love (if you did love it). I would love to build a community around new epistemologies and philosophical practices!
Also, keep updated, a podcast with a dear friend will start soon! Queer communes PODCAST (as a constellation of care and solidarity) is also on its way!
Short bibliography
Archéovision, Restitution 3D de la « librairie », 2015. https://montaigne.univ-tours.fr/category/multimedia/3d/.
Beck, William J. “The obscure Montaigne: the Quotation, the addition, and the footnote.” CLA Journal 34, no. 2 (1990): 228–52. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44322374.
Bertrand, L. “Inscriptions du « cabinet » et dédicace perdue de la librairie”, 2015, retrieved online. https://montaigne.univ-tours.fr/autres-inscriptions-de-la-tour/.
Demonet, M.-L. “Une reconstitution vraiment virtuelle de la bibliothèque de Montaigne.” La Revue de la BNU, 21 | 2020, 82-93.
Legros, A. Essais sur poutres. Peintures et inscriptions chez Montaigne. Paris, Klincksieck, 2000. 421 pages.
Montaigne, M. les Essais, Reproduction de l'exemplaire de Bordeaux. Paris, Hachette, 1912.
Ribeiro, Brian C. Sextus, Montaigne, Hume: Pyrrhonizers. Brill, 2021. https://brill.com/display/title/60353.
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