Numinous Whirls in Degas’ Study of Nuns

Image of Edgar Degas, Three Nuns, 1871-72. Courtesy ,Victoria and Albert Museum

Riyaz Latif

Contours of Delirium: Rant as a Preface

IN the guise of a prefatory note, I unfurl an exchange which bears no relationship to the near-aphoristic reflections on the line-study of the nuns by Edgar Degas which I offer below in a minute essay…At the risk of compromising the solemn discreetness of my grief – even in the ominous asphyxia of our current days, there is something disconcerting for me about expressing my overwhelming sorrow in the open, especially when all of us are sadly vanquished by insistent suffering in some form or the other – bear with me as I unload the broad outlines of the macabre existential performance of the past months in which life has compelled me to participate. At the end of February this year, we lost my father and my mother’s sister in a span of ten days. Subsequently, in the process of wrapping up in the aftermath of these two deaths, we were struck with the renewed trauma of losing my young cousin to the raging contagion – three deaths in the family in two months. As if to underscore the morbidity of what had unfolded for us, all the three of us – my mother, my sister, and I – reeled from fevers and infections after testing positive for the Covid virus. As I write this note at the end of April, we are slowly recovering, trying to reclaim some shreds of normalcy.

But I concede; given the existence all of us are eking out these days, there is nothing singular about my story; most of us – all of us – have been walking though the myriad flames of the same fire that consumes us. Innumerable dear ones, relatives, friends, acquaintances, near and far, are continually being outwitted by the microbial wrath of the air they breathe. And these are the same dear ones, too numerous to be singled out here, who, in the helplessly fatal times that have befallen them, unchained a colossal nobility of spirit: the amount of love, care, help, and support we have received from all of them, in all ways possible, is the sole reason that we have been able to traverse these ravaging seas of contagion and mortality.

And of course, in the circle within circle of our overturned world, we are all limited in the final reckoning to making emaciated supplications borne out of our mortal confoundedness: what more can we say except allah raham kar; there is no other pleading to do. But even in the delirium of my unrelenting fevers, I suspect that an ill-conceived, invisible grand man in the sky has nothing to do with what we have brought upon ourselves on this earth of mankind. Ill-conceived, because an entity so creatively and majestically beyond any realm of human cognitive bounds seems to have no loftier urge than to have a pathological obsession with individual fates of accidental byproducts of creation like us. If God exists, as someone put it, he shall be of use someday; but I fail to fathom why his fiat lux would be predicated on subjecting his creation to continual trials and tribulations, where everything is being relentlessly judged and chastised. For there is no indication – there never has been – that the Almighty is even conscious of us. E. M. Cioran’s jagged wit rings so insightful when he remarks that we are the Clowns of the Absolute performing for a Creator whose applause has not yet reached a single mortal ear…So yet again, we find ourselves in unfettered labyrinths of vagaries which have to be framed within the bounds of our infirm, inadequate humanity. Yet again, we are hyper-acutely faced with the enigma of Time, and how it has the unerring property of making a pale, diminished distillate out of us. I had often fantasized, following Henri Michaux, I would steer my consciousness through mescaline to write something idiosyncratically prodigious. But here I am, with my clipped wings, reduced to a reliance on doxycycline instead of mescaline! 

And thus, my rant – this mournful meandering masquerading as a prefatory note – inscribes a full circle as it tries to come to terms with the contaminated winds of our rapidly capsizing, disorienting world, as it tries to tragically reach back to what shimmers in front of us as an almost lost, pre-pandemic world in which things had a different valence and meaning … And it is in the process of reaching back, out of the crevices of this world of ours turned morbidly ruinous, that Degas’ sublime, soft lines made their appearance: during the eerie past months overflowing with malaise and mortality, there inadvertently surfaced some early, long-forgotten reflections on a line-sketch by Edgar Degas that I had preserved in form of a pithy essay. This essay, excavated out of the fissures of helplessness, grief, and confoundedness, I offer as a feeble act of salvaging: Degas’ soft swirling lines as emblems of hope, emblems of life. For these were the expressions – they still are, shrouded among the morass of the morbidity that envelopes us –  which were reminders of our existence relatively unfettered from the rudest clasps of existence, where our innocent arguments and vexations still indulged with refinements – thought, writing, expression, art – whose relevance now increasingly comes across to me as a remnant of a rapidly disappearing world.  But during my feverish delirium, Degas’ study-sketch reminded me that there are still songs to be sung on our side of existence, and that is what I have infirmly ventured to share with you below. To all of us enveloped in apprehensions way more acute and fatal, a commentary on a line-drawing by Degas might come across as decidedly inopportune, but dear interlocutors, please indulge me: by unearthing, invoking and presenting the minute essay below, I am just trying to breathe…for all of us. 

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Image courtesy as above

SUBMITTING to the sublimity of his liquescent lines, let us pretend that the core action arrayed in Edgar Degas’ Study of Nuns is gentle twirling, a flowing undulation. Let us reflect on why one is induced to perform these motions, this ritual of dancing. Beyond a mere corporeal articulacy, it is our inner ineffable rhythm aspiring to resonate with the primal cadences enwrapping us, that vitalizes us to tide forth in a lyrically structured abandon, in aesthetically-rooted waves of the body. One dances to enter the dissolution of one’s own static frame, to reverberate with one’s own primal state of nonbeing, to effectuate the desire of transcending the corporeal bounds – not to be and yet pour forth into the beyond. Think of Rumi’s whirling dervishes: their fluid circling invocations in the void are an insistent rite of passage to become the very void that their whirling incessantly shapes. One dances thus, to unfold a new landscape of creation through the agencies of annihilation, inaugurating the act of ironic narcissism for the express purpose of overcoming the shackling circles of self…So let us concede that Degas (1834 – 1917) suggests all of the above and more by the way of summoning some sparse swirling lines onto the silent vacuity of paper. 

In all likelihood, it was Paul Klee who said that a drawing is nothing but taking a line for a walk. If we embrace an analogous maxim here, the prime visual ambience permeating Degas’ study of nuns is a simultaneous deployment of flowing exuberance as well as restraint in his sensitive brush-strokes to convey the fluidity of movements on paper. This drawing is one of the preliminary studies that Degas did for an oil painting,¹ and in keeping with the spirit of its contents, the feel of the nuns’ whirling is brought into relief through a succession of swooping, expansive, fertile strokes, modulated in their emotional and communicative content throughout their peregrinations on paper. Lines and brush strokes in themselves are inert. It is through their composite relationships that they attain a soft movement, a palpitating valence, paramount to the act portrayed in the study. These brush strokes, by virtue of their transforming intensities, their majestic sweeps, and their subtle fadeouts, make the nuns whirl to the zenith of a transcendent consummation. It is only appropriate to Degas’ frugal temperament that his brush strokes are able to coax out a serene austerity consistently accompanying the dance of the nuns;² they outline an austerity suggestive of monastic reclusion, and a willful renunciation of most material resources. In the softness of their modulations, they invoke visions of a cloistered beauty reminiscent of subtle, exquisite light in a chapel, acts of refined softness such as choral singing or flower-gardening. Degas’ lines inscribe on paper a lofty silence that shapes the altitude of the celestial. 

These masterly brush strokes, with a flowing demeanor of composition, revel in the economy of expression. In their sparsity, ceded to the restraints of a creative withdrawal, they configure the nature of the nuns’ movement on the paper, where the frugal solemnity of their whirling wafts up in all its lucidity. It is a subdued whirling with a purposeful intonation; it is a soft undulation with a sublime aura of absorption, a spiral apotheosis into the Ultimate. It is the “unbearable lightness of being,”³ but at resolute antipodes to the all-encompassing anarchic fury of a force such as Shiva’s Tandava, a force very circuitously encrypted in W. B. Yeats’ apocalyptic verse in The Second Coming: 

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.⁴ 

But in Degas’ study, it is the gentle but ardent brush-strokes, lines that embalm on their being all the attributes of a repose, that enunciate the calm whirling of the nuns. They trace a sinuous humility, an affirmation of the nuns’ serene existence. They knowingly eschew the luxurious countenance and playfulness that marks the rendition of other dancing figures so ravishingly painted by Degas in his sizable oeuvre devoted to Parisian theatres and ballets. Again, the ruminations here wander towards the otherworldly swirls prescribed by Rumi, the soothing mystical circling of the whirling dervishes of the Mevlevi order which conceals at its core a passionate fire of consummation.

Degas’ brush strokes and lines do more: they transcend visuality and permeate into the realms of other sensations. The visuality of the line begins to express a tactile sensation; it begins to make us experience the shy coarseness of the nuns’ robes. At the source of all this is still the vital materiality of the line. But through qualitative sweeps, variations in intensities, accentuation and subdual, it realizes a cogent tactile involvement of corporeal senses. Invoking singular coherence of auditory perception, Degas’ sensitive brush strokes seem to amplify the soft rustling sound of the thick cloth during the whirling of the nuns. It is merely a play of congruent, ascetic brush strokes which conjures up this classic swirling performance, where all our sensory apparatuses are arrested in an equal measure to experience the whirling forms of the nuns shaped up on the paper. Maybe, the authority of his brush strokes to summon all senses to their service is the essence of Degas’ resplendent artistry.

As a preliminary study, the drawing of the three nuns, on its independent merit, is a celebration of the vast possibilities enfolded in the frugality of the line. And Degas is indulgent with his lines; he pampers them. Valéry writes about the young Degas’ meeting with the elderly Ingres, when the older master exhorted him the study the line.⁵ Degas seems to have done more than just study the line. On the one hand, he gave it wings and stretched it to the heavens; on the other, he imparted to it the gravitas of the infinite-density core. In this study thus, Degas’ almost imperceptible hand propels the whirling forms of the nuns to a singular ascension, to a profound altitude. As the nuns perform their soft rotations – dance fashioned by the frugality of Degas’ brush strokes – his lines attain salvation in their whirling. 

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Note
1.Degas’ figure study here, in brush and sepia on paper, is one of four sheets of studies of nuns for the oil painting, "The Ballet Scene from Meyerbeer's Robert le Diable (Robert the Devil)” owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
2. I take cue from Paul Valéry’s characterization of Degas’ frugal temperament. See, Paul Valéry, Collected Works, vol. 12 on Degas, Manet, Morisot (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960).
3. I borrow the phrase from the title of Milan Kundera’s novel. Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 8th impression (New Delhi: Rupa & Co., 1998).
4. “The Second Coming” in W. B. Yeats: Selected Poetry, edited by A. Norman Jeffares (London: Macmillan, 1962), pp. 99-100.
5. Paul Valéry, Collected Works, vol. 12 on Degas, Manet, Morisot (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960).  

Riyaz Latif is an art-historian of Islamic cultures. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the MIT, he taught art-history at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, and Vanderbilt University in Nashville, USA. He emerged as a significant voice in Urdu poetry during the last decade of the twentieth century, and his poems have been published in reputed Urdu literary journals of India & Pakistan. In addition to two collections of Urdu poetry, Hindasa Be-Khwaab Raton Ka (2006) and ‘Adam Taraash (2016), as well as a book of translations into Urdu from European poetry, Mera Khoya Awazah (2014), he has published articles on composite dimensions of literature, culture, art and architectural history. He also translates from Urdu and English, and some of his work can be found in the Annual of Urdu Studies.

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