The Deep Image

The seizure that makes art, that writes, that loves, that is stilled by a landscape, also makes atrocity. One mechanism, morally neutral.

“Enthusiasm” comes from the Greek enthousiasmos, rooted in enthous: “divinely inspired,” “possessed by a god.” Some image, some idea, a strange flash surfaces and takes hold deep in you. You follow it. Carl Jung took the ancient Greek idea and gave it a local habitation and a name. A common layer the image emerges from, the collective unconscious.

The same seizure runs at three scales. Aimed at one person, it is love or hate. Followed and made into something, it is art. Sweeping a crowd, it is frenzy and atrocity, or the opposite, a collective joy, a unification, people held together by an imperceptible thread, not visible but very real.

The crowd is strange. With no centralised force, each person follows the one beside them and a single shape comes out of all of them. Starlings enact this over Rome, thousands turning as one. In 1991 Loren Carpenter put a paddle into the hands of five thousand people at a conference, red on one face, green on the other, and a game of Pong on the screen. With no instruction and not a word between them the crowd split in two, found the game, and played it, surging like one animal.

The mechanism does not change with the numbers. What changes is the self. One person seized can still watch their own motive. A crowd has no self to watch. That is why the danger rises with the scale.

What turns a murmuration into a massacre is an enemy, and the enemy begins as the most ordinary thing there is. At dinner tables everywhere, parents name the other tribe, the ones who are not us, who breed differently, who want what is ours. That seed is in everyone, and mostly it stays talk. What grows it into slaughter is a story that the other is not merely different but a threat, one that must be cleared for us to be safe, and that story is almost always a lie, manufactured by the propagandist and the shadow. Sacrifice the few under a real constraint and you have a hard, tragic act. Run the same sum on a lie and you have atrocity in the mask of necessity. The crowd turns to killing or exile or both the moment it is given a false enemy and a count that says it must go. Take the enemy away and it is the starlings, the song, the game again.

Underneath all of it is a collision of two moral logics. One is arithmetic: the greater good, millions outweigh one, the necessary sacrifice, and it licenses the execution. The other says some acts are simply forbidden, whatever the cost. Dostoevsky put it as Ivan Karamazov, asked to build a perfect world on the torture of one innocent child, who returns his ticket rather than accept it. Every perpetrator here ran the numbers. Some did it howling, some from a desk. Eichmann’s frenzy wore a suit. The resisters returned the ticket.

The propagandist is the artist turned inside out. Where the artist receives the deep image and follows it, the propagandist manufactures it. He engineers pictures to latch onto the deep psyche, set the possession off on purpose, and hand the crowd its enemy. The propaganda image is a counterfeit archetype, a synthetic god.

Jung saw this take a whole collective of peoples. In his 1936 essay Wotan he read Germany as a nation seized by an archetype, an old Germanic god of storm and frenzy risen from the collective unconscious and possessing a whole people. A psychic epidemic. The gods, he wrote, have become diseases.

The enemy is your own shadow, the part of yourself you will not own, so you put it on someone else, the other group, and destroy it there. That is what atrocity runs on. It is why the line between good and evil seems to fall between peoples when it runs through each one. The perpetrator cannot see the line in himself because he has thrown his half onto the victim.

There is the other figure, the one who will not be carried. Joseph Campbell tells a story of a samurai, sworn to avenge his murdered master. He corners the killer, sword raised, and the man spits in his face. He sheathes the sword and walks away. The spit had made him angry, and to kill from his own rage was not the clean thing he came to do. He caught it in himself and stopped. The crowd goes under, every self folding into the one surge. The samurai does not collapse into it. He keeps a step back, and holds the one thing the surge cannot reach.

The gift of seeing ought to do the same: a mind that reads the world should read the fever too and step out of it. The record says it does not. The minds that saw furthest were swept the hardest, and more than once it was they who led.

Ezra Pound, one of the great poets of the century, broadcast for Mussolini all through the war, railing at the Jews into a Rome microphone. Martin Heidegger, the deepest philosopher of his age, joined the party in 1933, took the rectorship at Freiburg, and gave the address that handed the university to Hitler. Knut Hamsun, a Nobel novelist, posted his medal to Goebbels and wrote Hitler’s eulogy. Louis-Ferdinand Céline, one of the great prose voices in French, spent that voice on antisemitic pamphlets that called for killing. Emil Nolde, a major modern painter, was a committed Nazi and antisemite even as the regime branded his own canvases degenerate and tore them off the walls.

It was not only the artists. Konrad Lorenz, who would take a Nobel for understanding animals, joined the party and bent his science to its theory of racial purity. Philipp Lenard and Johannes Stark, both Nobel physicists, denounced Einstein as Jewish corruption and built a Deutsche Physik to replace him. Leni Riefenstahl, the most gifted filmmaker of her generation, made the regime its masterpieces. Marinetti and the Futurists, who had thrown the whole past overboard to invent the future, called war the world’s only hygiene and marched into fascism singing.

And it was not only fascism. Maxim Gorky, the conscience of Russian letters, toured a Soviet labour camp and came home to praise it, then put his name to a book that called a canal built on corpses a triumph of the soul.

These were not dull people. They were the most perceptive of their age, and it did not save them. Seeing the world is not the same as watching yourself, and most of them never turned their gaze round. Some did worse than get swept in. They built the machine.

It is all made in paint, and the paint is not a delivery system for the idea. A photograph is not empty. A great one holds the whole of a person in a fraction of a second, often more than a sitter would give a painter. So the painting does not rescue the face from neutrality. It does something slower. The photograph is taken; the painting is made, over months, every mark a decision, the painter living with the face far longer than anyone would choose, a murderer’s or a child’s. The instant becomes a long looking, and no one looks at a face that long without being implicated by it.

There is a tradition for what that looking does to the image. Gerhard Richter painted the Baader-Meinhof dead from police and press photographs and dragged the certainty out of them, grey on grey, blurred, the fact dissolved into doubt and grief, no verdict offered. Chuck Close did the reverse, rebuilding a face from a gridded photograph, cell by cell, at the size of a wall, the likeness laid bare as a thing assembled, abstract up close and whole from across the room. A painting can dissolve a photograph or rebuild it. In neither is it any longer a captured instant.

This work is photorealist, worked through the dark and light of Caravaggio and Rembrandt, and the position of each painting is found at the easel, not before. What it refuses is to signal villainy. The perpetrator is given the same human depth as anyone, so the viewer feels the pull, even the kinship, before reaching the label. The horror is not in the picture. It is in what they felt. The projection, handed back.

At this scale, in oil, the face is no longer a document held at arm’s length or scrolled past on a screen. It is larger than you. You stand under it, and it will not be dismissed.

None of this is psychopathy or damage to the brain. It is the ordinary mind, the same one that makes the art. That is the hard part, and the reason it is worth painting. The hand that follows the image and the hand that signs the order are the same kind of hand. The difference is not the proclivity. It is what moves the hand.

Sources and notes

The etymology of enthusiasm: Greek enthousiasmos, from entheos, having the god within.

The collective unconscious and the archetype: C. G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, Collected Works vol. 9. The reading of Nazi Germany as collective possession, the psychic epidemic, and the line that the gods have become diseases: Jung, Wotan, 1936, in Civilization in Transition, Collected Works vol. 10. “A local habitation and a name” is Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, act 5, scene 1.

Starling murmuration as local rules without central control: Craig Reynolds, Flocks, Herds, and Schools, SIGGRAPH 1987. The audience Pong experiment: Loren Carpenter, SIGGRAPH 1991, described in Kevin Kelly, Out of Control, 1994, chapter 2.

The shadow and its projection onto the other: Jung, Aion, Collected Works vol. 9ii.

The two moral logics: Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, 1880, book 5, chapter 4, Rebellion, Ivan returning his ticket. The framing of the dilemma, the happiness of millions against the torture of one innocent child: Isaiah Berlin, in conversation with Bryan Magee, Men of Ideas, BBC, 1978.

The samurai who sheathes his sword: Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth, 1988, page 75, where Campbell also cites the Irish saying, is this a private fight or can anybody get into it.

Ezra Pound’s wartime broadcasts on Rome Radio, 1941 to 1943, led to his indictment for treason. Martin Heidegger joined the NSDAP in May 1933 and delivered the rectoral address at Freiburg that year. Knut Hamsun sent his Nobel medal to Joseph Goebbels in 1943 and published a eulogy for Hitler in Aftenposten, May 1945. Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s antisemitic pamphlets include Bagatelles pour un massacre, 1937. Emil Nolde was a party member and committed antisemite whose works were nonetheless shown in the Degenerate Art exhibition, 1937.

Konrad Lorenz joined the NSDAP in 1938; his 1940 writings aligned his biology with the regime’s racial doctrine. Philipp Lenard and Johannes Stark led the Deutsche Physik movement against Einstein’s so-called Jewish physics. Leni Riefenstahl directed Triumph of the Will, 1935. F. T. Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto, 1909, called war the world’s only hygiene.

Maxim Gorky visited the Solovki camp in 1929 and praised it; he edited and fronted the 1934 volume celebrating the White Sea-Baltic Canal, built by forced labour.

Gerhard Richter, October 18, 1977, fifteen paintings, 1988, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Chuck Close’s gridded portraits from photographs, from Big Self-Portrait, 1968, onward.