Three Moments from the History of Sincerity
- Sina Najafi -
I heard a story that browsing through a secondhand store, George Bernard Shaw saw one of his books that he had previously given to an acquaintance with the inscription To ________, with esteem, George Bernard Shaw. He bought the book and sent it back to the acquaintance, this time with the added inscription With renewed esteem.
Was Shaw, despite appearances, in fact being sincere? I think his reaction here mirrors Gustave Flaubert, who once saw some graffiti on the Parthenon and was jealous of this stupid (Flauberts word) person's ability not to be beholden to History and Grandeur. Shaw was similarly in awe of his acquaintancesomeone who could so unsentimentally discard his dedicated book.
* * *I have seen the face of a seven-year-old boyLukas, a beautiful, shy boy who lives next door to me with his single motherwith a shattered expression of disbelief and hurt that makes you wish time was reversible. Nothing would be the same ever again for Lukas after that evening two years ago when experience (mine) and innocence (his) tangled like they do, and experience undid innocence, like it does. I had not exactly lied to Lukas, but what I did hurt him more than if I had. UPS had left a box for Lukas mother at our house earlier in the day, and in the evening I tried to deliver the package. Lukas answered the door and seeing the large, beautiful box asked breathlessly, Whats in the box? A very large cookie, Lukas, I gushed, at which words Lukas little face beamed and he reached for the box. It would have been a miraclethe largest cookie in the world. His mother, coming down the hallway to the door, had heard my response and mumbled, Lukas, its not a cookie. They dont have children; they dont understand. I looked at Lukas confused face and realized that the dissonance between my words and truth would forever cast me out of his universe, one that nevertheless had to be rearranged now to accommodate irony and insincerity. The next day I bought a very large cookie, placed it in an oversized box and rang the bell. When Lukas opened the door, I said, in my best prelapsarian voice, Look, Lukas. A box with a huge cookie in it. He looked at me, took the box and closed the door in my face.
* * *I read that in 1908 Picasso threw a banquet at his studio for Henri le Douanier Rousseau. At the end of the night, in the company of Paris avant-garde artists and writers, the self-trained painter of nave scenes turned to Picasso and said, You and I are the two most important artists of the ageyou in the Egyptian style and I in the Modern one. Everyone there would laugh for a long time at this memory, and until his death, Picasso would claim that the banquet was a blaguea joke played by the cosmopolitan avant-garde on the naivet perfected by the tollkeeper on the Seine. But in 1937, when Republican Spain asked Picasso to respond to the aerial bombing of the Basque town of Guernica, Picasso rejected everything he himself had innovated and produced a painting that draws heavily on Rousseau; more specifically, Rousseaus War, or Discord on Horseback, a painting that Alfred Jarry first admired at Salon des Indpendants in 1894 and reviewed in Le Mercure de France. Everythingfrom the warriors broken body to the horse at its centeris done under the sign of Rousseau, who taught Picasso how to be sincere when the time for sincerity had come.