Cartier Bresson and Eliot on the Nature of the “Moment”

 

This piece develops some of the reflections I first explored in my 2019 essay, The Rhapsody of Time Passing. I have been thinking of the phrase "unattended moment" and-the "moment in and out of time" in T S Eliot's Four Quartets. And the "decisive moment" as described by the photographer Cartier-Bresson. There seems to me to be a profound connection between these two descriptions of a moment in time. Here,  I take a wander around that connection.

The Rhapsody of the Instant

There are moments when time behaves itself, and others when it seems to slip sideways. I have long been intrigued by that small perceptual glitch when one glances at a wristwatch and the second hand appears to hesitate, or even move backwards, before settling into its steady march. It is a trivial experience, yet it unsettles something fundamental. The mind expects continuity; the eye reports a stutter. And in that stutter lies a reminder that our access to reality is never as clean or as linear as we imagine.

If time is made of units — seconds, nanoseconds, whatever smallest bead the physicists may one day name — then what occupies the space between the beads? A friend once described this as a kind of cosmic abacus, the universe clicking its way forward. But if that is so, then the gap between the clicks becomes strangely charged: a place where the mind, reaching for the next number, finds instead a moment of suspension. A pause that is not quite time and not quite outside it.

This question — what happens between the units — has stayed with me. It is the same question that animates so much modern literature and art: how to reconcile the measurable with the lived, the clock with the consciousness that resists being parcelled into equal slices.

Bergson's "Pure Duration" and Eliot's Uneasy Struggle

Henri Bergson tried to dissolve the problem by insisting on pure duration, a flow of experience that cannot be chopped into units without doing violence to its nature. Eliot knew Bergson’s thought well; he attended the lectures in Paris in 1910–11, absorbing the promise that time might be experienced as a continuous unfolding rather than a sequence of fatalistic beats. 

But in Rhapsody on a Windy Night, written soon after, Eliot turns away from that optimism. The poem’s speaker walks through the night accompanied by the mechanical tolling of hours — “Twelve o’clock,” “Half-past one,” “Half-past two” — while his mind dissolves into involuntary memories. The clock drives him forward; his consciousness drags him back. No pure duration here. Only the uneasy duet of habit and dream.

Eliot's "Unattended Moment"

And yet, years later, in Four Quartets, Eliot discovers something else: not Bergson’s flowing durée, nor the clock’s rigid divisions, but a moment that arrives unbidden — “the unattended moment, the moment in and out of time.” This is not a moment seized by perception but one that interrupts it. A moment that does not belong to the cosmic abacus at all. It is as if the gap between the beads opens, and something from beyond the sequence looks back at us.

Cartier-Bresson and Eliot - The Contrast: Within and Without

Cartier‑Bresson, working with a camera rather than a pen, found his own version of the charged instant. His “decisive moment” is not outside time but perfectly within it — a fraction of a second in which the world briefly arranges itself into meaning. A boy leaps over a puddle; a cyclist flashes past a stairwell; a gesture, a shadow, a geometry align. The photographer does not create this alignment; he recognises it. His art depends on a taut, almost instinctive attentiveness. The decisive moment is the instant when time, usually so indifferent, suddenly reveals its coherence.

Eliot’s moment, by contrast, reveals its transcendence. Cartier‑Bresson’s is the triumph of perception; Eliot’s is the suspension of it. One redeems time aesthetically, the other metaphysically. And yet both arise from the same human bewilderment: the sense that time is not simply passing but happening — that within its flow there are instants which feel more real than the rest.

Between the Beats

Perhaps this is why the second hand sometimes seems to falter when we look at it. Not because time has stumbled, but because our consciousness has. For a fraction of a second, the mind is caught between the unit and the duration, between the beat and the flow, between the world as it is measured and the world as it is lived. In that hesitation lies the possibility of both the decisive moment and the unattended one — the photographer’s poised readiness and the poet’s receptive stillness.

The instant, it seems, is never merely an instant. It is a threshold. A rhapsody. A brief opening in which time reveals its double nature: the relentless march of the hours, and the mysterious shimmer that lies between them.

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Postscript — Within You and Without You

It was only after settling on the heading The Contrast - Within and Without that I realised how close it sits to George Harrison’s song Within You Without You. The echo is accidental, but perhaps not entirely. Harrison had an instinctive feel for the doubleness of experience — the inner life unfolding at its own pace, and the outer world pressing forward with its demands. His song turns on that same tension: the self moving through time, and time moving through the self.

Harrison’s insight was not philosophical in the academic sense, yet it touched the same nerve that Bergson, Eliot, and even Cartier‑Bresson were probing in their different ways. He sensed that life is lived in two tempos at once: the measurable and the immeasurable, the outward rhythm and the inward drift. To live “within you and without you” is to stand, however briefly, at the threshold where those tempos meet.

Or perhaps he was just a very instinctive songwriter.

Pastel Mist at Dawn

 

Mist at Dawn - 2022

Pastels help softness, diffusion, and tonal harmony. The mist isn’t just a background effect. Maybe a sense of quiet suspension — waiting for the day to choose its shape.

Some Images in Paint and Pencil

 

A few images created over time 2010-2018. Mostly acrylic on wood blocks, but also pencil sketches and a couple of  larger pieces 

Eduardo Paolozzi: General Dynamic F.U.N.

Featuring in the exhibition space at the Woodstock Museum this month is the touring exhibition of silk-screen prints from Eduardo Paolozzi. It is on show until February 9th and features a series of fifty screen prints and photolithographs created between 1965 and 1970. These screen prints are firmly rooted in the pop-art movement, and pre-date the more famous iconography of Andy Warhol: both artists employing techniques which allow for replication of the work in various modes of colour and sequence.

A swift look through the comments made by contributors to the visitors' book encouraged me in the view that I was not alone in finding the mainly-chaotic in this well-organised presentation. A sense of humour and detachment helps to get the best of these images. I came away echoing the thoughts of the majority about this heap of images from advertising, films, cartoons, screen and cultural icons and much else by way of cultural ephemera. The art presents a window to the minds of generations now, that have been exposed constantly to multifarious and random ideas and images from all directions, putting upon us a constant pressure to sift and sort through so much input - so that in the end we must rest with the flow in a place which may or may not fit a coherence.

© http://wutw.co.uk/eduardo-paolozzi-general-dynamic-f-u-n-the-oxfordshire-museum/

Momentarily I called to mind the commercial work of Robert Opie. He, like Paolozzi had passion for advertising ephemera as a boy and young man, and I remembered him from one summer maybe 50 years ago now, where I lodged in his house in West Ealing and was surrounded by tins and packages of famous consumer goods and commercial brands, which later formed a minuscule part of what has come to be a major collection and commercial enterprise. To each their own: art or commerce in ephemera, the subject for reflection today.

From Robert Opie Collection
© https://www.museumofbrands.com/time-tunnel/ 

Encounter Near Cefn Coed : A Memory

This picture by Van Gogh, painted in 1890, two months before his death, appeared in the recent (May 2019) Van Gogh and Britain exhibition at Tate Britain. It is called “At Eternity’s Gate: Sorrowing Old Man” and was made in the institution at St. Remy de Provence. 

At Eternity’s Gate: Sorrowing Old Man

At the exhibition, it appeared below a paraphrased quotation by the artist, written in 1880. The paraphrased quotation  was:

“You may not always be able to say what it is that confines you and yet you feel I know not what bars … and then you ask yourself Dear God, is this for long? Is this forever? Is this for eternity?”

The word “bars” triggered in me a memory of a ditty I wrote 45-odd years ago now, where the word “bars” also appears. The ditty follows below.

Encounter Near Cefyn Coed

Cefn Coed Hospital is a mental health facility in the Sketty area of Swansea, Wales. It is currently managed by the Swansea Bay University Health Board.

A man was a joker and wandered the park
And he met with a stranger, alone
He asked, in a hurry, in the lateness and dark
For a hint of the secrets he’d known

He should have been wiser, but nevertheless
His mind was the kind that would roam
The reason was hard, it was everyone’s guess
He’d not come from a broken up home

“Won’t you tell me, my friend” he said as he stopped
“What you’re doing out here in the night?
And can you explain why your hair is all cropped
And your coat isn’t buttoned up right?”

“It’s not easy for me,” the other replied
“To show you the place I have been
All my life I have tried, to finish the ride
On an endless and circular dream

I was born in a pain, as I think, I don’t know
I cannot remember so well.
These strange things you see I had hoped would not show
They belong to another, you can tell?

Now I amble alone all over the earth
Though my wisdom would reach for the stars;
And all because of a difficult birth
Which has put my whole world behind bars.”

A man was a joker, and wandered the park
And he met with a stranger alone
He learned in a hurry, in the lateness and dark
How secrets are a burden, once known

Swansea: May 1973

Raphael: Massacre of the Innocents

 Coincidentally, the day before the 100th anniversary of Paschedale, we visited the exhibition of drawings by Raphael at the Ashmolean Museum. These cartoons were well-described by experts who now know in great depth, how they emerged from various iterations on the paper by use of electronic screening and scanning processes.

Raphael: Massacre of the Innocents

Most affecting for me in terms of subject matter was No 70: a line drawing of "Massacre of the Innocents", the subject being the attempt by Herod to destroy all the male children in Bethlehem in an attempt to destroy the infant Jesus. The image had sharply defined short lines building up to the shapes of limbs, hands, arms and a composition of dramatic action which defied easy analysis. Simply speaking, a stark build-up of an emotional drama, made more vivid by the sense of an event encapsulated in a scratched-out moment of incompleteness, snatched out from a moment in time.

From the exhibition description: A woman is running towards us, mouth open in a scream, a baby cradled in her arms. The violence around her seems to part and give passage through the slaughter. What the open pathway through the heart of the horror really gives however, is a heartbreaking visual connection between our eyes and her pain. To look into that terrified face is to feel the full pity of her plight. It is impossible not to be gripped by an overwhelming compassion.

Paschendale Remembered: July 29th 2017

New every morning is the Love.
Paschendale remembered in the News:
It has been a hundred years since, but
There is the danger of the flaccid mind
As if those horrors were left behind.
Tell this to the people of Mosul,
Tell this to the people of Yemen.
Let us not be fed with too-comfortable methodologies
To tickle the sentimental core.
                                                                  - DB July 2017

Images from a Shed

Here are a few pictures/sketches which emerged from my shed at Benjamins Cottage in Kelling in 2013. I confess to a certain nostalgia for the shed, the location, the quietude.

The song is “Shady Lane” by Snowgoose. I found it on the July 2012 “Now Hear This” compilation of new releases which came with the now sadly defunct “Word” music magazine. This was a fine publication: music old and new, with in-depth interviews and  deep knowledge delivered with panache.

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John Craske - A Delicate Life

I am reading a book by Julia Blackburn, who spends her time between Suffolk and Italy. Her book pursues the life and art of one John Craske, local man to Norfolk: fish- and sea-connected born 1881 and who after the 1914-18 war at the age of 36, fell into some kind of mental stupor, from which he hardly recovered.

c. John Craske Postcard Painting
- The Duigan Collection

The book, suitably enough, is called “Threads” and is a meditation on loss and memory, with scenes local to North Norfolk, and reports of conversations in her pursuit of this man’s story.

John Craske spent most of his “saner”  time from 1923 painting images of the sea, and later, when too ill even to stand, he took to his bed and embroidered instead of using paints for these images. They are extraordinary in detail.  He is more or less forgotten, and Julia Blackburn has written in an affectionate and often moving way about her attempt to find traces of him in the memory of local people, and in museums / homes where his work remains scattered, abused and forgotten.

More about John Craske is here.

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In homage to John Craske, I made the picture below. It takes the shape of one of his boats, on a sea of my own making. The top bit was chiselled by God over time – it is the grain and the colour of the wood I am using.

Brown / White Study

Der Lesender Klosterschüler

This wooden sculpture is by Ernst Barlach (1870-1938), the German expressionist sculptor, printmaker and writer. I came across it in 1969 in the novel by Alfred Andersch “Sansibar oder der Letzte Grund” (Zanzibar or the Last Reason), and it made a deep impression on me.  I only saw the actual carvings by Barlach much later in Nuremberg in 2003: these were exciting to see, but the photo in the text book remained iconic in my mind.

The figure, made in 1930 is now in the town of  Güstrow, in Northern Germany,  where Barlach lived until his death in October 1938.   Though a supporter of the German cause in the First World War, Barlach grew to despise the futility of war and developed a pacifist position at odds with the rise of Nazism in the 1920s. His sculptures were seen as degenerate art, but Barlach did not passively accept the destruction of his sculptures, but protested the injustice, and continued to produce.


From 1933 Barlach’s sculptures were removed from churches and public spaces. In 1936 and 1937 the persecution grew more intense:  Barlach’s galleries were closed, public art collections removed and sculptures torn down. Even his collections of drawings were not allowed to appear in book form. This was tantamount to a complete ban on working and without doubt contributed to Barlach’s early death in 1938.

Sansibar oder der Letzte Grund

In the novel, the Reading Monk has a central role as a trigger of consciousness and is a starting-point for the external action. “Sansibar oder der Letzte Grund” is about moral choices in a tale of escape, pursuit, persecution, crises of faith and political disenchantment. The statue, which must be smuggled out of Nazi Germany as an act of defiance, is a focus for the inner dialogue or practical desires of each of the five protagonists in the tale.

Among those characters is  Knudsen the rough-and-ready fisherman to whom the task falls to take the figure to Sweden. He is touched by the figure as “a strange creature from wood in the dark”. The Boy, his helper and the seeker of the “Last Reason” to leave his home, is captivated by the aura of the character.

Helander the priest the sculpture embodies an age-old spirituality that is timeless, in stark contrast to the indifference of the populace to the rise of a godless and inhuman regime. To save the figure will be an act of defiance and a show of his faith. Not least, a show of faith to himself, which is sorely tried by the absence of God and His failure to act against the totalitarian state.
For Judith, the monk is one who can read all he wants, and is free to read anywhere. As a Jew in flight from Germany, this is emblematic of her bid to escape from a place where reading is done only in a background of fear and entrapment.

Gregor, the Communist Party official tasked with the safe removal of the figure to Sweden, is the character most in thrall to the Reading Monk.  He recalls his time at the Lenin Academy when the reading was intense, but all about getting lost in the uncritical acceptance of words echoing party ideology. Gregor can see that this monk is very different. He is not lost. He reads easily, attentively and closely. But he also one who is able to close the book, stand up and turn his attention elsewhere, and do something entirely different and of his own choosing.

Gregor’s reaction echoed my own in those days. But for me the emphasis was different. This Reading Monk was enjoying an engagement in study and a peace in spirit. There would be a time to walk away, to have new experiences.  But whatever these were, there would always be this place of serenity awaiting.

Images of the Lesender Klosterschler and Barlach

Barlach website:  http://www.ernst-barlach-gesellschaft.de/

See a later retrospective : Two Small Figures and a History of Introspection