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ANDREI RUBLEV
Somehow honouring
Andrei Rublev as a saint
feels wrong.
The role of the painter being
to honour the saint,
it is like saying
the poet who honours
the beloved is
the beloved.
The saints are,
almost by definition, not
doers - at least
their holiness isn't in their doing.
The saints
qua saints
can't paint
can't sing, can't
write poetry and when
they paint, write poetry
and sing, they aren't
being saints, only as
nothing are they saints, and all that
painting, singing, poetry is a
longing for that nothing. Things being
as Heidegger says, the gift
of time, Rilke's
admiration for the dead was, surely,
an intuition
of that nothing which -
by definition - can't of itself
be interesting, can't
even be beautiful, so
the beauty of the painting,
of the poem, of the song - its interest - is,
necessarily, false, or is at best
(as Gleizes said of Cézanne)
a signpost, pointing the way
pointing the way back,
back to that nothing
where all the ladders start
in the original holiness
of the heart.
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