In the Preface to The Drunken Silenus (2020), the first volume of Morgan Meis’s “Three Paintings Trilogy”—which continues with The Fate of the Animals (2022), and culminates in the just published The Grand Valley—Meis tells us why he wrote this first book: “I was working on a style.”
He wasn’t writing, he says, because he was particularly interested in Peter Paul Rubens, or even in Rubens’s painting “The Drunken Silenus,” which he does actually talk about in the book of that name, and brilliantly. He was writing because he was working on a style.
But there is a larger dimension to Meis’s goal of working on a style. He is a professor of philosophy and art history. Back in the Preface Meis gives us clues about what to expect when you’re reading a book—actually, three books—dedicated to working on a style that breaks out of the conventions laid down by his profession:
The style would be direct, sometimes even downright agitated in nature. I wanted it to be funny and strange. I wanted it to be shamelessly intellectual at times and shamelessly crude at others. I wanted this style to be able to touch on deep things, profound problems of being alive, but also to let those problems hang unresolved, to raise issues of some import and then also to laugh at them. I wanted to create a style that would unfold in spirals rather than in lines.
But this is Preface-talk. He’s talking about making a style. He’s outlining it. He’s not actually making it. And he’s not telling you, not yet, why he’s making it.
Here’s a passage in the third book, The Grand Valley, where Meis is definitely, beautifully making it. And not, as you would expect, while talking about the book’s ostensible focus, the suite of twenty-one paintings entitled The Grand Valley by the American abstract-expressionist painter Joan Mitchell. He’s spiraling back, doing what he loves best, reaching for a voice or vision that he would never have talked about if he hadn’t been working on a style. A voice or vision that catches him by surprise. In this case, Gertrude Stein’s voice in The Making of Americans. Here is Meis’s voice in response to hers:
There is a question here who is writing. Who is writing at those moments of The Making of Americans when Gertrude Stein has really got herself going and the sentences are repeating and spooling around one another and becoming strange to read and then taking on a weird lyrical quality where the words just sound like something that has nothing to do with what they actually mean, and then the sounds of the words reveal variations in meaning or the sentences get lost in the absurdity of how the words sound and in the absurdity of the events and actions and feelings that the words are supposed to tell us about and the utterly random meaningless shit that is the core of any doing or saying or even as all of this circulates in the sentences on the page, as those sentences are threatening to collapse into complete and absolute gobbledygook there are little poignant reminders that this, this spiraling cavalcade of words and actions and thoughts and feelings, this complete mess of language and increased repetition and slow-building variations on one obsessive thought or image after another, this whole cavalcade of language pouring out over itself is, one comes to realize, also, exactly what it is like to be a person. It is absolute realism. Total surface nonsense as absolute realism. Language tripping over itself in complete stupidity as the expression of what is deepest and most profound or what it is really and truly to be a person, any sort of person. And so in a funny way Gertrude Stein was right in what she said about The Making of Americans in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. It is the telling of “human being” as such.
By reading the paragraph aloud you hear Meis’s voice rise, accelerate, become breathless, then de-accelerate, taking on some of the qualities of the voice he’s reading, “spiraling” as Gertrude Stein’s prose does, but also at the same time maintaining its own distinct rhythms and coloring, and not only because Stein would never have written or given a “shit.” But for both of them, Meis and Gertrude Stein—as well for the visual artists (Rubens, Franz Marc, Joan Mitchell) who are the main focuses of Meis’s trilogy— “making a style” is an activity leading to a result. Making a style opens the possibility of a way of being in the world, a way of delicately, precariously balancing contrasting, often conflicting tendencies within us. And if never resolving them, then opening the possibility of their resolution, if not in this life, then another. If there is another.
Meis calls the goal of all this rushing around of language “absolute realism.” This is where making a style gets you. Making a style peels away layer after layer of bogus certainty about our human destiny as the satyr Silenus did with King Midas when Midas—probably expecting a pat on the back for being so rich and successful—asked Silenus what was the best thing for man. Silenus answered in words that cannot be described as soothing. He said: “The best thing for man is never to have been born. But if he has been born, the next best thing is to die as quickly as possible.”
Making a style has its initial test in Meis’s first book, where he must (as he says in its Preface) “touch on deep things indeed” to express the meaning of Silenus’s terrible truth-telling, the meaning suggested by Rubens’s painting—a painting Meis would never have talked about if making a style hadn’t placed him in front of it in the first place.
Making a style places Meis before other paintings in the books that follow. It places him before Gertrude Stein as well, and before other writers and philosophers. But no matter the focus, working on a style brings Meis back again and again, spiraling back and forth, up and down, to “absolute realism”—that is, to the human person’s confrontation with his or her babbling speechlessness before the inseparability of our love of living with our dread of dying. Working on a style—we could say—brings us to a non-place where we’re surrounded on all sides with Claude Monet’s last painting, Waterlilies: Reflections on Trees. Let Meis be our beautifully tongue-tied guide to this non-place in an excerpt from The Grand Valley:
A possible thought to have, or more importantly, a feeling to experience when looking at the painting Waterlilies: Reflections on Trees, is that the world is floating on itself, that’s to say, there is nothing else upon which anything rests. There is nothing outside. There is nothing but what is, which is engaged in an act of dreaming itself into being through the intense concentration of every bit of its whatness onto that very same whatness, and another way to say this is that the water and the flowers and the trees and the reflections of the trees and the various surfaces and the above-the-water and the below-the-water and the air and color and the light are all one thing, and they relate to one another so perfectly because they were never anything but one another in the first place.
After getting his PhD in English literature, George Dardess taught close reading to his own students until his retirement. Since then he has been ordained a Deacon in the Roman Catholic Church and written several books on Muslim-Christian relations. He has also created the graphic novel Foreign Exchange.
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