An Unwritable Book
The second entry in Morgan Meis’s Three Paintings trilogy finds a master writer pushing past his own limits under the eye of that which is beyond us all.
Review by J.C. Scharl
It’s hard to know how to review a Morgan Meis book, and the more books he writes, the harder it gets. That is, I think, precisely the point. Meis’s last book, The Drunken Silenus (part one of the Three Paintings trilogy, published by Slant Books), tackles the question “What is the best thing for man?”, knocks it flat, and gives it a concussion. Part two of the trilogy, The Fate of the Animals, is the tale of a painting whose artist thought it was almost unseeable, is enamored of the unsayable—yet by the final page, Meis has come terrifyingly close to saying just that.
Morgan Meis is not everyone’s cup of tea, and The Fate of the Animals is the most Morgan Meis book yet. Take that as you will. For my part, I found the book shatteringly beautiful. The Fate of the Animals is not “urgent,” or “important,” or “timely,” or any of the other things people tend to say these days when they want you to read a book. It’s simply beautiful, and true, and good. It will make you afraid. It will make you terribly sad. It will make you look at the world and think about God, and it will make you wonder. That’s about all you can ask a literary book to do.
So what is the book about? There are several ways to answer that question, and none of them is quite complete. It is about a disturbing painting called The Fate of the Animals from 1911 by a so-so German painter named Franz Marc; it is about painting itself, what it can do and what it cannot do; it is about seeing, sight, vision, revelation, apocalypse, about what our eyes can show us and what they cannot; it is about World War I, and death, and gardens; it is about God; it is about the whole central problem of everything, which is why does something exist instead of nothing, and why is it this something?
No matter where we go, who we meet, we find ourselves standing again in front of the painting The Fate of the Animals, considering that fate, and the fate of the man who painted it, which is (we discover) the fate of us all.
The book begins with an extended consideration of the battle of Verdun, in which Franz Marc, the hero of our tale, died. This is important: we begin with a death. We already know how the story is going to end. In case we missed it, Meis will remind us over and over (and over and over) throughout: this man dies alongside Europe at Verdun. The man who painted this marvelous painting; the man whose beautiful letters we are reading; the man who, we discover, developed a way of seeing past the skin of the world to some kind of spiritual Reality—this man is dead, killed in a battle that robbed Europe of a generation.
From there, we meet a cast of strange characters, from D.H. Lawrence and a possible angel (or demon) bookseller to Edgar Degas, Arthur Schopenhauer, Paul Klee, and Odin. We travel to strange lands, from the whitewashed tomb of an art museum in Basel, Switzerland, to the cleft between the roots of Yggdrasil the World-Tree, both of which, in Meis’s odd universe, are in the neighborhood of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. But no matter where we go, who we meet, we find ourselves standing again in front of the painting The Fate of the Animals, considering that fate, and the fate of the man who painted it, which is (we discover) the fate of us all.
By now, dear reader, you already know if this is a book you would like to read, so I am not going to say much more about the content because there are actually spoilers. It may seem impossible for a book of art criticism to be spoilable, but this one is; there are at least two great turns, two particular apocalypses that I could spoil for you by mentioning them here. So I will not. But the fact that this book has spoilers should intrigue you.
When I read The Drunken Silenus, I felt I was seeing a writer at the peak of his powers.
I have admired Meis’s writing for many years. He has been honing his voice for decades in shorter-form essays, making it possible for him to write these odd book-length essays in the Three Paintings Trilogy. Previously I described The Drunken Silenus as a “book of essays,” and that is inaccurate; it, and Fate like it, is a single essay broken up into sections out of charity to the reader. Meis has a firm grasp of classical languages, and Fate sometimes feels as if it ought to be written in Greek, with no paragraph breaks, punctuation, or even spaces between the words. That deluge of signs would be just right for the voice of this trilogy.
All that is to say that when I read The Drunken Silenus, I felt I was seeing a writer at the peak of his powers. The first part of Fate is quite similar in voice. However, about three quarters of the way through this second entry, something shifts. It is a discernable shift; I think any careful reader will notice it.
Here is what happens: Meis is often a cheeky writer. He is also a mystic. He is a follower of the sublime; he is trailing it, looking for signs of its passing. He is trying to write about something that by its very nature is beyond the scope of words. This often leads him to a chuckle, a little helpless shrug, some wordplay, and then he directs his attention elsewhere. It’s as if he’s circling the sublime and must dodge off whenever he gets too close.
That is, at least, until the end of Fate. Somewhere in the blank space between the end of Chapter 19 and the beginning of Chapter 20, something changes. In Chapter 19, he is still saying things like, “[this] brings us to the heart of the matter, the heart of everything, if we can be a little pretentious about the matter.” That heart, he finds, is this (in the words of his painter, though not original to him): “all being is flaming suffering.”
And from this point on, Meis’s voice changes. The best way I can describe it is that he allows himself to gaze, longer than he has gazed before, at the mystery of existence. He doesn’t look away. He looks and looks and looks, and rather than moving around to look at another angle, he simply looks more deeply into the same spot. By drawing out the looking, he seems to attain a new kind of vision. This is not an exaggeration, and we find it in the voice; the voice of the last pages of this book is different. It is a distillation of the most sincere, most passionate, most lovelorn notes to be found in Meis’s writing across decades. It is as if, after circling, he has at last drawn near enough to see the outlines of the thing he seeks—the thing, of course, being God.
This book is, I dare say, unique. It is a book about a painting that the painter considered unseeable, by an author who considers his point unsayable, and yet, by accepting these limitations on what can be seen and said, it becomes a revelation. This book itself is a little apocalypse. Read it if you dare.
The Fate of the Animals: On Horses, the Apocalypse, and Painting as Prophecy was published by Slant Books on September 15, 2022. You can purchase your own copy here.
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