Levitan, the Height of the Horizon

One

A wide horizontal surface.

Below there is a road.

A wide dirt road.
Two wheel ruts run along it.

Beside it another narrow path is attached.

A path made by people walking.

The road begins at the lower left of the surface and recedes to the upper right.

It narrows as it goes.

And it disappears at the horizon.

The horizon is low.

It is about a third of the way up the surface.

Above it is all sky.

The sky is most of the surface.

There are clouds.

Heavy.
Gray and white mixed.

It looks as though rain is coming, and as though it has just stopped.

The field is dry and yellowed.

The grass is low.

Far off there is something very small.

It could be a church roof. It could be a tree.

There are no people.

There is a road and no one walking on it.

That is the strangest thing on this surface.

A road comes into being from people walking.

If no one walks, the road disappears.

So there were people on this road.

They are only not here now.

Two

Isaac Levitan was born in 1860.

In what is now Lithuania.

At the time it was the western part of the Russian Empire.

The family was Jewish.

They were poor.

They moved to Moscow.

In his early teens his mother died, and after that his father died.

He was left alone.

He attended the school of painting.

There is a story that he could not pay the fees and was excused.

There were times he had nothing to eat and nowhere to sleep.

The story goes that he slept in the school without permission.

He had a gift for painting.

He painted landscape.

He painted the fields and rivers and forests of Russia.

He was a friend of the writer Chekhov.

The two men knew each other's work.

In 1892 he was expelled from Moscow.

There was a measure to remove Jews from the city.

It happened even though he was a known painter.

He stayed in the country and returned later.

Around that time he painted a road.

It was the road to Siberia.

The road that people being exiled walked.

He did not paint people in that picture.

He painted only the road.

He died in 1900.

He was forty.

His heart was not good.

He lived briefly and painted a great deal.

Three

Here is the argument of this chapter.

On wide flat ground the height of the horizon becomes the grammar.

Much of Russia is flat.

There are no mountains.

There is nothing to block the sight.

Then what has to be decided on the surface reduces to one thing.

Where to put the horizon.

This one thing settles the meaning of the picture.

Raise the horizon and the ground widens.

The affairs of the ground become the center.
Walking and working and living.

Lower the horizon and the sky widens.

The affairs of the sky become the center.
Weather and time and passing.

He usually lowered it.

He left the sky large.

Here we need to look again at Williams in Chapter Eight.

Williams was also a painter of wide country.

And he removed the horizon.

On the same wide ground one man lowered the horizon and the other erased it.

Why the difference.

Because the sky differs.

The sky of the Australian interior is mostly bright and unchanging.

There are few clouds and the color does not shift.

It is a sky without speech.

Where there is no speech there is nothing to paint.

So it is erased.

The sky of Russia changes.

Clouds gather thickly and the seasons turn greatly.

The winter is long and the spring comes suddenly.

Things happen in the sky.

Where things happen is painted large.

A land where the sky speaks and a land where the sky is silent.

The same width begets a different grammar.

Three things follow.

First, the height of the horizon becomes the meaning.

This is a very small decision.

It is a question of raising one line or lowering it.

And that decision settles the whole of the picture.

Grammar is like that.

Small and unseen, and it settles everything.

Second, a road becomes time.

A road is space and it is also time.

To go to the far end takes days.

So paint a road and you have painted days.

And if that road is the road of exile, the meaning of the time changes.

It becomes time from which one does not return.

Third, one can speak of people without people.

This is his strongest method.

There are no people on the road.

And the people who walked that road are seen.

He said what is present by way of what is absent.

In Part Three we looked at the void.

Here it is not void but absence.

Not an empty place but an absent person.

He could have painted them if he wished.

He decided not to.

Paint them and it becomes those people's story; do not paint them and it becomes the story of everyone who walked.

Four

Stand before Byun Shi-Ji's surface.

First look at what is alike.

Both made one line the master of the surface.

For Levitan it is the horizon of land and for Byun Shi-Ji the horizon of sea.

On both surfaces that one line divides above from below.

And both often set that line low.

They leave the sky large.

There is a second likeness.

Both handled exile.

Levitan painted the road the exiled walked.

And he himself had been expelled from a city.

Painting another's exile, he may have been painting his own place.

Byun Shi-Ji's root sentence is this.

Life is exile. Art is blessing.

Not institutional exile but exile as the condition of a life.

Both painted from a place they had been driven out of.

There is a third likeness.

Both used dry color.

The dry fields of Russia and the dry grass of Jeju.

A low color with yellow running through it.

Now look at the difference.

The largest difference is the nature of that line.

Levitan's horizon is the end of the ground.

The place where the ground goes on and passes out of sight.

One can walk to that place.

Walk there and there is another horizon at that place.

Byun Shi-Ji's horizon is the end of the sea.

One cannot walk to it.

You have to take a boat, and even in a boat you do not reach that line.

The end of a continent and the end of an island are that different.

The horizon of a continent is a promise.

There is something over there and one can go.

Even if the going takes days, one can go.

The horizon of an island is a wall.

There is something over there and one cannot go.

But here one thing is laid over another.

Jeju has the story of Ieodo.

An island said to lie somewhere in the sea.

Those who go do not come back.

The painter left writing about that island in his own hand.
(Korean Culture and Arts Foundation oral history, 2004–2005, pp. 23–26)

So that horizon is a wall and a promise at once.

One cannot go, and one believes something is over there.

This overlay is the condition of an island.

The exile of a continent is walking and the exile of an island is staying.

There is a second difference.

Levitan erased the people.

He left only the road and took the people out.

Byun Shi-Ji raised a person.

He set one old man in an empty field.

The methods are opposite.

One speaks by removing and the other by leaving.

Remove and it becomes everyone's story; leave and it becomes one person's story.

And the results come close.

In Levitan's empty road we see the people who walked.

In Byun Shi-Ji's old man we see the people who remained.

One person was painted and many are seen.

Because there is no face.

There is a third difference.

The length of time the two men had differed.

Levitan died at forty.

Byun Shi-Ji lived to eighty-seven.

On Jeju alone he painted for thirty-eight years.

What is reached in a short time and what is reached in a long time differ in kind.

Short makes density and long makes layers.

Levitan's surface arrives at once.
Byun Shi-Ji's surface has to be come to several times.

There is no ranking here.

The time given differed.

Five

The road recedes and disappears.

There is no one walking.

And the people who walked are seen.

On the surface of a distant island there is a horizon.

Above it one small boat floats.

Whoever is aboard is not seen.

On one side there is a road and no people.
On the other there is a boat and no people.

Both surfaces are the place of someone who has left.

One line settled it.