WHAT IS WRITING?
It is true that one might, by convention, confer the value of
signs upon them. Thus, we talk of the language of flowers. But
if,
after the agreement, white roses signify "fidelity" .to me, the fact
is
that I have stopped seeing them as roses. My attention cuts through
them to
aim
beyond them at this abstract virtue. I forgot them. I no
longer pay attention to their mossy abundance, to their sweet stagnant
odor. I have not even perceived them. That means that I have not
behaved like an artist. For the artist, the color, the bouquet, the
tinkling of the spoon on the saucer, are
things,
in the highest degree.
He stops at ¢e quality of the sound or the form. He returns to it
incessantly and is enchanted with it. It
is
this color-object that he
is
going to transfer to his canvas and the only modification he will make
it undergo
is
that he will transform it into an
imaginary
object. He
is
therefore as far as he can be from considering colors and signs as
a
language.
1
What is valid for the elements of artistic creation is also valid
for their combinations. The painter does not want to draw signs on
his canvas. He wants to create a thing.
2
And if he puts together red,
yellow, and green, there is no reason for the ensemble to have a
definable signification, that is,
to
refer particularly to another object.
Doubtless this ensemble is also inhabited by a soul, and since there
must have been motives, even hidden ones, for the painter to have
chosen yellow rather than violet, one can affirm that the objects thus
created reflect his deepest tendencies. Only they never express his
anger, his anguish, or his joy as do words or the expression of the
face; they are impregnated with these emotions; and in order for
them to have crept into these colors, which by themselves already
had something like a meaning, his emotions get mixed up and grow
obscure. Nobody can quite recognize them there.
Tintoretto did not choose that yellow rift in the sky above
Golgotha to
signify
anguish, nor to
provoke
it. It is anguish and
yellow sky at the same time. Not sky of anguish or anguished sky; it
is an anguish become thing, an anguish which has turned into yellow
rift of sky, and which thereby is submerged and impasted by the
proper qualities of things, by their impermeability, their extension,
their blind permanence, their externality, and that infinity of rela–
tions which they maintain with other things. That is, it is no longer at
II
