THE ARTIST

Redbank Gorge, MacDonnell Ranges, Central Australia, c1936-37

Watercolour over pencil on paper
28.7 x 26.8 cm

Private collection, Melbourne

Image © Albert Namatjira / Licensed by Namatjira Legacy Trust, 2017

THE ARTIST

Some say that art speaks for itself. The truth of the matter is not that it speaks for itself, but that it speaks for the artist. It is the means by which the artist, consciously or unconsciously, strives to reveal something deep inside him that he can only express through his art. It is the symbolic expression of his inner self, of his perception of the world and how he relates to it.

Nevertheless, that does not prevent neophytes such as myself from appreciating art for its face value, whether it be music, dance, theatre, painting, sculpture, literature, poetry, architecture or some other form of expression. My lack of technical knowledge and practical experience of art does not alter the fact that nature has endowed me, like most people, with a fairly keen sense of aesthetics as well as a reasonable dose of curiosity, intelligence and sensibility.

I have done a lot of travelling during my lifetime, both professionally and for pleasure. My childhood friends and family somewhat disparagingly describe me as a rolling stone. I have visited many countries, beginning with my own, Australia, and become familiar with many other peoples’ customs and cultures. In my travels, I have visited some of the world’s major art galleries and museums, chateaux and cathedrals and assisted at numerous exhibitions, ballets, concerts and theatrical performances. But I must say that what I appreciate most is a small number of artists who accompany me in my daily life. While I do not pretend to understand them any more than many other artists whom I also esteem and respect, I feel a greater degree of empathy and humanity in their company.

Among these few artists are the painters Maurice Utrillo and Albert Namatjira. Both were landscape painters. Utrillo was an urban landscape painter and Namatjira a remote rural landscape painter. Both spent most of their lives within a very small area close to where they were born, an aspect of many artists’ lifestyles that has always intrigued me. I suppose it is because it is so diametrically opposed to my own.

I happen to live just a stone’s throw from the modest lodgings on the rue du Poteau at the bottom of the hill of Montmartre in Paris where Suzanne Valadon gave birth, at the age of eighteen, to her son, Maurice. She never told him who his father was. In fact, she never told anybody. Perhaps she did not know herself. Maurice’s birth certificate indicated that she was a seamstress, but as she was young and pretty, she also posed for a number of painters who, naturally, could not resist her charms. Some of the better known were Puvis de Chavannes, Steinlen, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec and a certain Miguel Utrillo y Morlius, a Spanish engineer, journalist and part-time painter, who accepted to recognize Maurice Valadon as his son, all the other painters Suzanne contacted having refused.

Suzanne later had a short-lived affair with the French composer and pianist, Erik Satie who lived up the hill on the rue Cortot in Montmartre. She moved into lodgings with her son Maurice just a few doors down the street from Satie’s apartment, in a small building which has since become the Montmartre Museum. Satie fell madly in love with Suzanne and proposed marriage after their first night. During the five months they were together, he composed the Danses Gothiques and he was so shattered after she left him, he composed Vexations. He never fell in love again.

Satie found work as a bar pianist in the Montmartre cabarets and met Claude Debussy one night in Le Chat Noir. Debussy was fascinated by some of Satie’s weird compositions and they became good friends. He was living with his bohemian girlfriend, Gabrielle Dupont, at the time, just around the corner from Satie and the Valadons, in a shabby little apartment.

All these places have become very familiar to me as I go past them five days a week from Monday to Friday when I do my footing, weather permitting. I say footing because I walk all the way up the hill, climbing up the countless flights of stairs until I reach Place Dalida where I take a brief pause sitting on a wooden bench before continuing on up the rue de l’Abreuvoir past La Maison Rose, so often painted by Maurice Utrillo, and then on up rue Cortot past the Montmartre Museum where Suzanne Valadon and Maurice Utrillo lived, followed by Satie’s apartment a little further along.

La Maison Rose (photograph by Rodney Crisp)

I walk on past the Montmartre water tower and turn left, towards the Sacré Coeur, circling around the back of the church of Saint-Pierre de Montmartre, another favourite subject of

Utrillo’s paintings. It was consecrated 877 years ago, in 1147, and is one of the oldest churches in France. It is the church of the Montmartrois, the people of Montmartre. They never adopted the Sacré Coeur, leaving it to the tourists who seem to ignore the existence of Saint-Pierre de Montmartre. Most of them walk past it without even noticing it.

On 15 August 1534, Ignatius of Loyola, a Spaniard from the Basque city of Loyola, and six of his companions, mostly of Castilian origin, all students at the University of Paris, met in a crypt beneath Saint-Pierre de Montmartre to pronounce the religious vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. That was the foundation of the Jesuit Order of priests, which was given Papal approval through the bull Regimini militantis ecclesiae in 1540.

Having circled around to the front of the church, I then turn left and walk around the Place du Tertre where the artists install their easels and paint portraits of the tourists. From there I stroll along rue Poulbot past the Salvador Dali Museum which is located in the building where I stayed briefly when I first arrived in Paris many years ago. The rue Poulbot is named after Francisque Poulbot, a painter, poster designer and illustrator, known for his humanitarian work with the poor children of Montmartre. He created illustrations representing the Parisian “titi”, a common term at the time for street children. One of his illustrations was of Gavroche, the popular character in Victor Hugo’s novel Les Misérables.

From there, I turn left onto rue Norvins and usually pause for a few minutes in front of the Commanderie du Clos Montmartre, a small hexagonal-shaped, neo-renaissance style building that houses the wine brotherhood of the Clos Montmartre which produces about 500 litres of wine each year. It is one of the peculiarities of Montmartre.

Another peculiarity, not just of Montmartre, but of the whole of France, is that a glass of wine in a street café costs less than a glass of milk, even though the country produces five times more milk than wine. It is one of the world’s leading producers of wine and fifth producer of milk. But now that I think of it, it is true that I drank more milk than wine when I first arrived in France, whereas now, I drink more wine than milk. They say it is better for your health.

The present grape vines on the Butte Montmartre were planted in 1932, some years after the vineyard of a Benedictine Abbey on the Butte was devastated by phylloxera. The Abbey itself had been destroyed during the French Revolution. The new Gamay and Pinot Noir grape vines were planted by local residents and artists who were determined to preserve the area from rampant urban development. Each year, the October harvest, the Fête des Vendanges, draws thousands of visitors from the wine fraternity in the French provinces. Most of the wine is bottled and auctioned off for charity. I have a bottle of the 1993 cuvée réservée red, which I have not yet opened, sitting on the buffet in my living room.

The oldest wine brotherhood in France is the "Antico Confrarie Sant-Andiu de la Galineiro" formed in 1140 in Beziers, in the South of France. According to the International Federation of Wine Brotherhoods, there are several hundred in activity around the world today, mainly in countries with a long wine growing tradition but, increasingly in the new wine producing countries as well. They organise festive events, wine tasting and other promotional activities for their members. It seems that Australia is one of the rare wine producing countries in the world where the tradition has not yet taken root.

Rue Cortot (Photograph by Rodney Crisp)

We have over sixty wine-grape growing regions in Australia with official Geographical Indication status. Though they are relatively recent on the international market, some of our wines are of world-class quality. They are not easily found in France, but the better-known reds are the Barossa Valley, McLaren Vale, Eden Valley, Coonawarra and Margaret River wines.

Having accomplished my ritual visit to the Commanderie du Clos Montmartre, I finally head for home. As it is downhill all the way, I now revert to jogging, though the long flight of narrow stone stairs drops fairly sharply and I have to go carefully. Most of the streets on the Butte Montmartre are paved with cobble stones which makes the surface uneven and the going rather treacherous. The cobble stones were laid to accommodate cart horses pulling heavy loads of solid oak wine barrels and other provisions in wet weather to avoid getting bogged down. It is easy to strain an ankle if you are not careful.

On leaving the Commanderie I turn back along the rue Norvins a few metres and then left into the rue des Saules. I glance over to the right as I go past the rue Saint-Rustique, and look along it, up to the dome of the Sacré Coeur towering high above the buildings in the distance. Suddenly, the image of another Utrillo masterpiece flashes before my eyes. Reality and artistic representation mingle in my mind and are confounded.

I continue on down the rue des Saules, past a long line of tourist billboards on the stone wall on my left that relate the two years that Vincent van Gogh spent in Montmartre with his brother, Theo, in 1886 and 1887, against a background of some of his distinctive landscape paintings. In those days, Van Gogh could overlook the natural rural scenery of trees, shrubs and green pastures from the village on the top of the hill, that the urban expansion of Paris had not yet overtaken and replaced with cheap housing for the working classes that were constantly pushed further out to the outskirts of the city. It was a good vantage point in those days for his rural landscape painting. Maurice Utrillo, who was to capture the spirit and atmosphere of Montmartre through his urban landscape paintings in his unique, inimitable style, was only three years old at the time.

On reaching the Maison Rose once again, I turn left into the rue de l’Abreuvoir and follow it back down to Place Dalida, then down the two flights of stairs until I reach the café Le Refuge which I enter in order to pick up a copy of my favourite sports paper, L’Equipe, from the rack on the wall near the entrance. On returning outside to a table on the terrace, Cindy, the waitress, automatically brings me my coffee without a word being spoken.

Having caught up with the latest sporting news, and reassured my wife on my mobile phone that I am still alive and well, I leave my €2.30 on the table, put the paper back in the rack near the door, descend the last long flight of stairs and jog the final kilometre back home.

The Butte Montmartre is the highest landmark in Paris. It served as a strategic point of defence for the city. In 1871, at the end of the Franco-Prussian war, when government troops attempted to recuperate the canons from the Montmartrois to stop them from continuing the war, despite the capitulation of the French government, they resisted violently, protesting that the canons belonged to them because they had been financed by public subscription. This immediately triggered an insurrection of the working-class population of Paris. It is known as the Commune. It only lasted two months but caused considerable loss of life and damage to public buildings and monuments.

A well-known folkloric association founded in 1921 that calls itself the Republic of Montmartre, proclaims in its charter that it continues to perpetuate the rebellious spirit and traditions of Montmartre, in addition to its humanitarian work. This is an allusion to the Commune. The organisation of the association mimics that of the French Republic with a president, prime minister and government, ambassadors, parliament and ordinary citizens. Current members include the mayor of Paris, an ex-president of France, as well as a number of other politicians and prominent personalities from various walks of life.

The square at the foot of the Sacré Coeur was named Square Willette at its inauguration in 1927, in honour of the first president of the Republic of Montmartre, the painter, caricaturist and illustrator, Adolph Willette. However, the socialist municipality of the 18th arrondissement of Paris, which includes Montmartre, decided, in 2004, to rename it Square Louise Michel in memory of the legendary figure, Louise Michel, who was a revolutionary, an anarchist and an active communarde during the insurrection of 1871. She spent a number of years in prison on various occasions during her lifetime and was deported to New Caledonia from 1873 to 1880 for her participation in the Commune.

Saint-Pierre de Montmartre (Photograph by Rodney Crisp)

The Sacré Coeur is a Roman Catholic church and minor basilica dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Its raison d’être was determined by social and political forces difficult to imagine today but which continue to remain vivid in the memory of the secularists and socialists of Paris, especially in and around Montmartre. There was an unexpected epilogue to the long history of its construction.

War had broken out in July 1870 between France and Germany, which was under Prussian rule at the time, in what came to be known as the Franco-Prussian War. It only lasted six months. France capitulated in January 1871, putting an end to the siege of Paris which had lasted 132 days. Casualties were heavy, particularly on the French side: 139,000 deaths, 138,000 wounded and almost 400,000 prisoners of war as well as 100,000 interned in neighbouring countries. The Catholic authorities attributed the defeat to divine punishment which they asserted was amply merited due to a century of moral decline since the demise of the monarchy during the French revolution and the deep schism that had developed between legitimate

Catholics and royalists on the one hand and illegitimate secularists and socialists, on the other. In addition, they considered that the redeployment of the French military garrison protecting the Vatican in Rome, to the battle front during the Franco-Prussian War, leaving the Holy See unprotected, was totally inadmissible. They also severely condemned the ruthless assassination by the communards of the Archbishop of Paris and a number of other ecclesiastics during the secular uprising that broke out less than two months after the end of the war.

Legislative elections were held in France in February 1871 for the National Assembly (France had a unicameral legislature at the time), followed by a presidential election in 1873. The monarchists defeated the republicans at both elections with a comfortable majority.

This paved the way for the restoration of the monarchy and the influence of its close ally, the Catholic church, in state affairs. Although the tentative to restore the monarchy failed in the autumn of 1873 due to internal dissensions among the conservatives, the influence of the Catholic church was fully restored and resulted in the decision to erect a basilica, declared of public utility, as an act of repentance, on the site where the Commune originated, on the top of the Butte Montmartre.

Poster of Utrillo’s Rue Saint-Rustique (Photograph by Rodney Crisp)

A decree of the French National Assembly of 24 July 1873, responding to a request by the Archbishop of Paris, specified that the construction of the Basilica of the Sacré Coeur is to "expiate the crimes of the Commune". Construction of the edifice commenced in 1875 and was completed in 1914. The Sacré Coeur was consecrated by the Archbishop of Paris in 1919.

However, public opinion had already moved back in favour of the republicans. A new constitution was approved by a majority of one vote in 1875, and the republicans won a triumphal victory in the legislative elections of 1877. In 1905, they passed a secular law that establishes the separation of church and state, excluding religion from the public sector and relegating all forms of religious expression to the private lives of those individuals who voluntarily adhere to it. The individual rights of freedom of conscience and freedom of religion were guaranteed by the state.

It is clear that the renaming of the square at the foot of the Sacré Coeur by the socialist municipal council of the 18th arrondissement of Paris in 2004, in honour of the revolutionary communarde, Louise Michel, was a barely disguised bras d’honneur to the anti-republican and anti-secular authorities who imposed the construction of the Sacré Coeur.

Revenge is a dish that is best served cold, so they say, and nobody could possibly serve it better than political and religious zealots. They have memories that transcend generations and are never lacking in imagination or guile when it comes to organising the feast.

The religious authorities had waited nearly half a century before taking their revenge on the Montmartrois and the Montmartre communal authorities waited nearly a century before retaliating. No sign of battle or open conflict, a subtle and silent war of insidious, offensive symbolism.

Hermannsburg, or Ntaria as it is now called, has little in common with Montmartre and despite the fact that the weather is fine most of the year, I doubt that I would want to go there to do my footing five days a week. It is located 125 km west of Alice Springs and was originally set up as an Aboriginal mission by two German missionaries. The town and surrounding land were handed back, in 1982, to the traditional owners who were granted freehold title.

Albert Namatjira was born there in 1902, when Maurice Utrillo was 19 years old. For the first thirty-three years of his life he did not have a family name. It was quite common for Aboriginal people to have just a first name or even just a nickname. His parents called him Elea and he was baptised Albert by the missionaries. He signed his paintings Albert and only adopted his father’s totemic name, Namatjira (“flying ant”), in time for his first solo exhibition which took place in Melbourne in 1938. Maurice Utrillo was eight years old when he received his family name from his mother’s chivalrous Spanish friend, Miguel Utrillo y Morlius.

Albert Namatjira was one of the first full-blooded Aboriginal peoples to obtain Australian citizenship. Six of them saw their names deleted from the Northern Territory’s register of wards of the state in 1957. Unfortunately, what was intended to be an exceptional privilege, created a series of situations and events that produced exactly the opposite effect. It was more of a handicap than a privilege. Albert and his wife, Ilkalita, baptised Rubina, discovered that as she and the children remained wards of the state they would not be able to live with Albert in the house they were planning to build in Alice Springs.

The following year, Albert was charged with supplying alcohol to a member of his tribe,

Henoch Raberaba, who was also a landscape painter, and sentenced to six months imprisonment with hard labour. He had been condemned under white man’s law for respecting Aboriginal tribal law of sharing resources. After a public outcry and two appeals, the sentence was reduced to three months, but he finally served only two months of open detention.

Lutheran Mission, Hermannsburg (Photograph by Ludo Kuipers, 1990)

Australian citizenship had brought Albert and Ilkalita Namatjira nothing but pain, grief and misfortune. Nevertheless, citizenship was granted ten years later, in 1967, to all our indigenous compatriots, many of whom continue to experience the same difficulties as the Namatjiras integrating European culture and conciliating it with their own traditional culture. Obviously, this is not something they brought upon themselves. They had no say in the matter. It was imposed on them by the British Crown and government who decided to colonise the country, without regard to the sovereign rights of the indigenous peoples who had occupied it for over 60,000 years. We, non-indigenous Australians, have inherited the problem. The onus is on us to solve it as intelligently and as humanely as possible. But, unfortunately, we do not appear to be any closer to succeeding today than we were in 1958 when Albert Namatjira was sentenced to prison. In fact, the problem seems to be getting worse.

According to the 2016 census, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples represented 25.5% of the population of the Northern Territory and 84% of the prisoners. Their prison rate was 13 times that of the non-indigenous population. In Queensland, they only represented 4% of the population, but 32% of the prisoners. Their prison rate was 11 times that of the non-indigenous population. The suicide rate, for the whole of Australia, of the 5 to 17-year-old Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, was 5 times that of non-indigenous youngsters of the same age bracket. This raises serious questions as to the effectiveness of the $33.4 billion the federal government spent directly or indirectly on Aboriginal affairs for the period 2015-2016. We have obviously got something wrong, somewhere along the line.

It is interesting to recall that in New South Wales, which has by far the highest Aboriginal population in Australia, a number of early decisions of the Supreme Court held that Aboriginal people were not subject to colonial criminal laws for crimes committed by themselves upon themselves. In 1829, in Rex v Ballard, Justice Dowling declared:

“Until the aboriginal natives of this Country shall consent, either actually or by implication, to the interposition of our laws in the administration of justice for acts committed by themselves upon themselves, I know of no reason human, or divine, which ought to justify us in interfering with their institutions even if such interference were practicable”.

Much to my regret, the wisdom of that judgement of Justice Dowling, nearly two hundred years ago, seems to have been lost in the sands of time.

Steinlen and Emilie (Photograph by Rodney Crisp)

On his release from prison, Albert Namatjira was in a severe state of depression. His spirit was broken and he had given up the struggle. He no longer wanted to paint and died of a heart attack three months later, on 8 August 1959, less than a fortnight after his 57th birthday and just four years after the death of Maurice Utrillo in 1955. He was buried the following day in Alice Springs (Mparntwe, in the local Arrernte Aboriginal language).

Maurice Utrillo was buried in the Cimetière Saint-Vincent de Montmartre. The image of the tomb he shares with his wife, Lucy, flashes through my mind every time I go past the cemetery when I do my footing. I also glance across to the statue of Steinlen holding his wife Emilie affectionately under his arm in the little square just opposite the cemetery where they too are buried. Their tomb is easily recognizable because it has a tree growing on top of it, right at the back of the cemetery, a little further up the hill from the Utrillos’ tomb. I imagine the tree’s roots have been holding them both affectionately in its arms for some years now, all three, tree roots and couple, inextricably intertwined in a fond embrace.

I think of Albert Namatjira as a bicultural (Euro-Aboriginal), remote rural, watercolour landscape painter of the first half of the 20th century. Whereas I see Maurice Utrillo as a French monocultural, urban landscape painter of roughly the same period, even though he commenced painting a little earlier. Neither of them can be said to have had any formal training in their art, but both received encouragement and advice from more experienced artists: Rex Battarbee for Albert Namatjira, and Suzanne Valadon for her son Maurice Utrillo. Battarbee had studied commercial art in Melbourne and later became a self-taught landscape painter. Suzanne Valadon was an autodidactic portrait and landscape painter and quite a remarkable woman, having risen from poverty and social insignificance to fame and relative affluence during her lifetime through her painting. She was a close friend of Edgar Degas who bought some of her paintings and used his influence to help her become the first female painter to be admitted to the prestigious Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. André Derain, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque were among the celebrities who attended her funeral, in 1938, at the Cimetière parisien de Saint-Ouen, a Paris cemetery extra muros, just north of Montmartre, not far from where I live in the 18th arrondissement.

Redbank Gorge, MacDonnell Ranges, Central Australia, c1936-37

Watercolour over pencil on paper
28.7 x 26.8 cm

Private collection, Melbourne

Image © Albert Namatjira / Licensed by Namatjira Legacy Trust, 2017

While Albert Namatjira and Maurice Utrillo were worlds apart, geographically, culturally, ethnically and socially, I feel that they also have much in common. I sense the harmony, the silence, the simplicity, the spirituality and the beauty fashioned by undisturbed nature that emanate from their paintings. Even though the decors are different, the landscapes of both artists are peaceful and reassuring, far from the demands, tensions and anxieties of daily life. They incarnate the calm serenity that time alone can produce and reveal the beauty that nature alone can create. The artists are no longer of this world, but their spirits live on in their paintings. Their presence is almost tangible. I have interiorised some of their landscapes and contemplate them at leisure in my mind.

Apart from his early period, there are no signs of people, animals, birds or any other living creatures in Albert Namatjira’s paintings. The streets are usually silent and empty in Maurice Utrillo’s urban landscapes too. It is, perhaps, for that very reason that they command my attention. They seem to have some important message to convey which they want me to apprehend and from which nothing should distract. I feel compelled to concentrate my mind and focus on their tableaux. But I sense that their landscapes are painted with a poetic vision of mystical significance which I do not understand. Still, I am happy to feel their presence and to enter into communion with them. Another distinctive feature of many of Namatjira’s paintings are the white ghost gum trees of his remote rural landscapes. A similar distinctive feature of Utrillo’s paintings is his white period.

Namatjira extracted soil from the hills of the landscapes he was painting and used it as pigment to paint them. Utrillo mixed plaster with zinc white to paint the old, ramshackle buildings in his urban landscapes. Namatjira often painted from memory. Utrillo often painted from postcards and also from memory. Namatjira was imprisoned for sharing alcohol with a member of his tribe. Utrillo became an alcoholic when he was 18 years old and was interned several times in psychiatric hospitals. Namatjira was born and raised in a Lutheran mission. Utrillo painted so many portraits of churches and cathedrals, he seemed to be obsessed by them. He became a fervent Catholic and was baptised at the age of 50. Both were prolific artists, often repeating the same landscapes over and over again.

Both lost the desire to paint before they died, Namatjira in a terrible state of despair and depression, Utrillo having finally found the appeasement that had been lacking all his life. His mother had taken the precaution of arranging for his marriage when he was 52 years old to Lucy Valore, the widow of a Belgian banker. Lucy successfully took over the relay from his mother, managing his affairs and maintaining stability in his life. Suzanne Valadon died peacefully three years later, in 1938, the year of Albert Namatjira’s first solo exhibition in Melbourne.

Maurice and Lucy lived in a comfortable home in Le Vesinet, one of the chic outer-suburbs on the western side of Paris, where Maurice learned to play the piano, wrote poetry and lived a quiet life. He died on 5 November 1955 at the age of 72 in the Splendid Hotel in Dax, a town in the south-west of France near the Spanish border, reputed for its feria and hot thermal springs. Lucy had taken him there for treatment of a lung disease he had contracted.

Mount Hermannsburg (Photograph by Ludo Kuipers, 1992)

Albert Namatjira and Maurice Utrillo were exceptional artists who managed to surpass the influences of their day and develop their own personal styles. Their landscapes were the product of their natural talents, the singularity of their childhoods, and the dramatic events that punctured their lives. Their vision and creativity remain a constant source of inspiration.

When I was living in my old family home in the bush on the Darling Downs, it only rained about once every five years and, when it did, the Myall creek broke its banks and we were flooded out. The same phenomenon now seems to be occurring with the winter snow in Paris. As far as I can recall, the last time there was any snow to speak of was in the winter of 2013. Perhaps it will snow again this year. I hope it does. I have been walking and jogging regularly through Utrillo’s coloured landscapes on the Butte Montmartre. I miss the melancholic landscapes of his white period in which he expressed the tristesse, despair and sentiment of alienation that oppressed him most of his life. It was during this period, from 1909 to 1914, that his art attained its apogee without ceding anything of its simplicity.

Every five years more or less corresponds to the rhythm of my trips back home to the Darling Downs where I still have an extended family, but no longer a close family. Time has taken its toll. At least I am free to go walkabout through some of Albert Namatjira’s iconic Central Australian landscapes when I visit my father’s grave in Tennant Creek, about 500 km north of Alice Springs on the Stuart Highway. Albert Namatjira is just as much a link to my homeland now as the members of my extended family.

Rodney Crisp is an Australian author and freethinker who lives and writes in Paris near Montmartre, the favorite haunt of the 19th-century impressionist painters, between the modest lodgings in which Suzanne Valadon gave birth to her son, Maurice Utrillo, and the elegant bourgeois apartment of Paul Cézanne.

The Cog of Love

Photographer - Tobi Brun

Birth is not the beginning of life. It is its continuance. Life is a self-sustaining process that began about 4 billion years ago. Living cells are constantly being renewed, some more frequently than others. Life is relayed by the individual members of each species, in exclusivity, to the next generation of the same species.

The most plausible explanation of the genesis of life appears to have been provided by the ancient Greek philosopher, Democritus (460 BC – 370 BC) who is reported to have observed that “Everything in the universe is the fruit of chance and necessity”.

Jacques Monod, the French biologist, a 1965 Nobel Prize winner, later accredited and developed that theory in his book “Le hasard et la nécessité” (Chance and Necessity) published in 1970. From this it is deduced that “Life is a spontaneous, evolutive, sensitive and reproductive process triggered by the fortuitous encounter of complementary elements of matter and energy in a favourable environment” (chance in this context being understood as meaning a “random variable” and necessity an “inevitable” event).

The invasion of life on Earth has been overwhelming. Every nook and cranny of the planet has been colonised – from the unfathomable depths of the deepest oceans to the summits of the highest mountains. According to the National Geographic Society :

“Scientists have estimated that there are around 8.7 million species of plants and animals in existence. However, only around 1.2 million species have been identified and described so far, most of which are insects. This means that millions of other organisms remain a complete mystery”.

But even though life is highly invasive, adaptable, and tenacious, Earth’s biodiversity is in jeopardy due to pollution, climate change, and population growth to such an extent that It is estimated that half of all species of life on Earth will be wiped out within the next century.

The fight for survival is engaged and mankind, like all other species, will also come under threat of extinction unless we somehow manage to reverse the current process of degradation and destruction of the ecosystem.

We know very little of the motors of life but observe, not without some apprehension, the gradual evolution of species due to biological processes such as mutation, natural selection, symbiosis, and genetic drift. Some of the motors, particularly so far as the animal kingdom is concerned, are to be found in the survival instinct which protects and preserves life allowing it to continue to prosper and propagate.

The survival instinct is part of what the biologists call our autonomic nervous system (ANS) or, more simply, our involuntary nervous system, which is a network of nerves that regulates unconscious body processes. It is the part of the peripheral nervous system responsible for regulating involuntary body functions such as heartbeat, breathing, blood pressure, body temperature, immune system, emotional responses, sexual responses, and many others.

The biologists have established that neurotransmitters and receptors are an integral part of the ANS. It appears, therefore, that what had previously been considered a purely physiological process (of “fight or flight”) involves much more than just unconscious body processes. It also involves unconscious mental processes. Intellectual, psychological, and sociological unconscious mental processes such as morality, altruism and love not only play a key role in the maintenance of peaceful and harmonious co-existence within society, but also in the preservation and propagation of life. They are just as much a part of the survival instinct as the unconscious body processes.

Like the involuntary body functions, the involuntary mental functions of morality, altruism, and love are all cogs that keep the wheel of life turning.

No doubt the specialists who carry out research on such natural processes have noted the correlation of these involuntary mental functions with the survival instinct but there appears to be no mention of it in any of the scientific and academic publications available to the general public. What is sure and certain is that it is not something that would be of the slightest interest to the authors of the plethoric popular literature of cheap paperbacks that deal ad infinitum with the apparently inexhaustible topics of crime and romance.

Involuntary body functions such as heartbeat, breathing, blood pressure, emotional and sexual responses are not love. They are not even signs of love. Many people, especially popular romance writers, confound these body functions with love and present them as such even though lovers are not the only ones who experience them. Rapists, paedophiles and all sorts of sex offenders, deviants, imposters, and profiteers experience them too.

Love is something else. It is not a physical function. It is a mental function which the American Psychological Association defines as “any cognitive process or activity, such as thinking, sensing, or reasoning”. Not all species have been endowed with mental functions by nature. They are the privilege of the animal kingdom of which humankind is an eminent member having descended from a common ancestor with the chimpanzees and gorillas about seven million years ago.

The essence of love is placing the well-being of another above all else irrespective of the cost to oneself and without the slightest expectation of anything in return.

Romance, passion, emotion, adoration, affection, possessiveness, religious considerations, love at first sight, kindness, gratitude, admiration, idolatry, generosity, physical attraction, sense of security, wealth, social status, intelligence, affinity, complementarity, companionship, respect, tenderness, projection, concern, care, sympathy, pity, empathy, endearment, warmth, friendship, attachment, loyalty, liking, soft spot – are just some of the many sentiments that may accompany love or, perhaps, be mistaken for love.

Love is not a passing whim or a fleeting impulse. Either love is or it is not. If it is, it always will be and if it is not, it never was. Love does not depend on the other. It depends solely on oneself.

Love plays an important role in maintaining the bond of heterosexual mating couples during the process of reproduction which, in the case of humans, takes about eighteen years from conception to maturity and autonomy. It plays a similar role with LGBT+ couples, some of whom adopt children or have children with the assistance of modern artificial reproductive techniques or through surrogacy.

Survival being the principal preoccupation of all animal species, including mankind, there is safety in numbers, which is a good incentive for forming a couple with someone you can trust. Love is not the only reason for forming a couple, it can be as much an alliance as anything else. By the same token, love can be shared just as well outside the couple as inside it and some couples even seem to fall in love with themselves, they look so much alike.

As for our kindred in the animal kingdom, given the current state of the art of science, we do not know for sure if they are capable of love as defined for humans but indications are they could well be, perhaps to a lesser extent as their reproduction cycle is much shorter than ours.

Marc Bekoff, professor emeritus of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Colorado, Boulder in the United States, recounts the story of two dogs: a female, Tika and a male, Kobuk :

« Late in life, Tika developed a malignant tumour and had to have her leg amputated. She had trouble getting around and, as she was recovering from the surgery, Kobuk wouldn’t leave Tika’s side. Kobuk stopped shoving her aside or minding if she was allowed to get on the bed without him. About two weeks after Tika’s surgery, Kobuk woke their mistress in the middle of the night. He ran over to Tika. Their mistress got Tika up and took both dogs outside, but they just lay down on the grass. Tika was whining softly, and their mistress saw that Tika’s belly was badly swollen. Their mistress rushed her to the emergency animal clinic in Boulder, Colorado, where she had life-saving surgery.

If Kobuk hadn’t fetched their mistress, Tika almost certainly would have died. Tika recovered, and as her health improved after the amputation and operation, Kobuk became the bossy dog he’d always been, even as Tika walked around on three legs ».

If, in fact, animals are capable of love as defined for humans, the difference in environments and lifestyles between wild animals and domesticated animals necessarily influences and determines their mating habits. Some mating habits are opportunistic and sporadic. Others are stable and regular. Yet others are monogamous lifetime relationships.

On this score, the similarities between us humans and our kindred in the animal kingdom are about as evident as the evolutionary differences that have shaped us all over the past seven million years or so. Though much has changed, we still have a lot in common. We continue to share 98.8% of our genome with the chimpanzees, 75% with chickens, and even 60% with banana trees – not to mention, of course, the rest of our kindred in the animal kingdom as well as all the other life species.

The evolutionary transformation of mankind has been quite spectacular and extremely rapid on the cosmic scale. The American social anthropologist, Lewis Henry Morgan (1818-1881) indicates in his magnum opus “Ancient Society” (1877) that while we are unable to determine the exact timeline of our ethnic evolution, it could have taken about 60,000 years for us to emerge from our original state of savagery to a primitive state of barbarism and another 35,000 years to progress to a more advanced state of barbarism before attaining an initial degree of civilization about 5,000 years later.

Our mating habits during this initial period of civilization were probably not very different from what they had been prior to civilization. Dominant males in many animal species treat their females and offspring as property and behavioral patterns of large portions of human society were not much more evolved if at all. It was not until the late 19th century and the early 20th century that democratic countries phased out their so-called covert marriage laws or the equivalent so that wives and their children were no longer considered as chattel (property) and were granted the legal statute of persons with attendant rights.

In underdeveloped countries, women remain submitted to the authority of men, passing from father to husband and, ultimately, to son. Whereas in developed countries, the two World Wars were catalysts for women's emancipation (somebody had to do the job while the men were at war). But even that has not prevented gender discrimination to continue to be endemic worldwide. Full emancipation only concerns a privileged minority of women. The majority live in underdeveloped countries and, apart from a few notable exceptions, they largely remain subjugated.

In addition, women have always been and, to a large extent, still are the victims of male violence. Beating wives and children has long been tolerated by society.

It has been suggested that the characteristic of male aggressiveness, observed in all mammals (including mankind), reptiles, birds and other vertebrates, may be due to the testosterone hormone present in far greater quantities in the males of each species than in the females, though no conclusive evidence has been forthcoming, so far, in this regard.

Judging from the results of various studies that have been carried out on the causes of family violence it seems that the predominately male aggressors are not a homogenous group. They are diverse and varied. What they obviously do have in common is that they knowingly and willingly commit their ignoble, bestial acts that are constantly repeated over long periods often lasting several years and are therefore entirely responsible for them.

Domestic violence is a common feature of all countries and all cultures, even the most advanced. Thousands of women die each year, around the world, as a result of blows received from their husbands or domestic partners in an atmosphere of general indifference. In 1999, the United Nations declared 25 November as the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women in an effort to provoke public awareness of the problem.

The love cog has an uphill battle pushing the wheel of life on to the next cog to keep it turning. True love is a very scarce commodity in a commodity-scarce market. The declaration of the 39th president of the United States, Jimmy Carter, following the death of his 96-year-old wife when he, himself, was 99 years old, came as a breath of fresh air :

« Rosalynn was my equal partner in everything I ever accomplished, She gave me wise guidance and encouragement when I needed it. As long as Rosalynn was in the world, I always knew somebody loved and supported me ».

Nothing about romance, passion, emotion, adoration, affection, or religion, in that eulogy – just the ultimate expression of the essence of love.

Rosalynn and Jimmy Carter were married for 77 years. They were the longest-married presidential couple since George Washington was unanimously elected first president of the USA in 1789.

It is amazing that there is so much confusion and ignorance of such a natural instinct as love. The term has been used and abused to the point where successive generations have little or no idea of its true signification.

To throw some light on the subject, neuroscientists decided to research the brain functions that cause people to fall in love. Scientific research was carried out on a small rodent known as the prairie vole, found in grasslands in the central United States and Canada. The prairie vole was chosen for the clinical experiments because, like us humans, it is a mammal and also mates for life.

After several decades of research, the final results seemed to indicate that a molecule called oxytocin was the hormone responsible for forming social bonds in prairie voles, humans, and various other species. However, more recent research, the results of which were published in the American neuroscience journal, “Neuron” in 2023 found that prairie voles without oxytocin receptors also form pair bonds. So, we are back to square one on that score.

Well before science decided to undertake research on the brain functions that cause people to fall in love, a long list of philosophers and religious leaders have expounded their theories on the subject.

Plato and Aristotle considered there were many different types of love: erotic love, friendly love, familial love, universal love, long-lasting love and self-love. As for Socrates, Plato cites in extenso in his “Symposium” the long dialogue Socrates is reported to have had with the prophetess, Diotima, in which she declares that “love is of immortality”. She explains :

« For love, Socrates, is not, as you imagine, the love of the beautiful only.” “What then?” “The love of generation and of birth in beauty.” “Yes,” I said. “Yes, indeed,” she replied. “But why of generation?” “Because to the mortal creature, generation is a sort of eternity and immortality,” she replied: “and if, as has been already admitted, love is of the everlasting possession of the good, all men will necessarily desire immortality together with good: Wherefore love is of immortality.” »

Love is of immortality because “generation is a sort of eternity”. That rings as an echo of the rationale exposed here that morality, altruism, and love are cogs that keep the wheel of life turning.

Christianity teaches that love is an attribute of God. Whereas in Islam there are four types of love: love between a man and a woman, love among the members of society, love of the Prophet Muhammad, and love of Almighty Allah. “Love God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your might”, “love the stranger”, and “love your neighbor as yourself” are the edicts of Judaism.

In Hinduism love is devotional, or for a divine purpose. In Buddhism it is universal, for enlightenment, and for all humankind. Confucianism teaches that love is in actions and duty of a person as a part of his society. A core concept is “ren” which means benevolent love or compassion The focus is on duty, action, and attitude in a relationship rather than love itself.

No matter how it is conceptualized, people continue to fall in love and life goes on despite all the wars and destruction it has engendered. Life has accomplished its colonization of Earth but, in doing so, it has also generated a process of self-extinction that seems irreversible.

If life is to survive, it must find a new haven somewhere in this vast and constantly expanding universe in the not-too-distant future – on the cosmic scale, of course.

Rodney Crisp is an Australian author and freethinker who lives and writes in Paris near Montmartre, the favorite haunt of the 19th-century impressionist painters, between the modest lodgings in which Suzanne Valadon gave birth to her son, Maurice Utrillo, and the elegant bourgeois apartment of Paul Cézanne.