The Red Bridge
In his travel memoir From Sea to Sea, Kipling tells a story he heard when visiting Japan. There is a place, near Nikko, where the river is crossed by two bridges: a grey one in general use and ‘a sacred bridge of red lacquer that no foot save the Mikado’s may press.’ The story behind these bridges is as follows:
Long ago a great-hearted king came to Nikko River and looked across at the trees, up-stream at the torrent and the hills whence it came, and down-stream at the softer outlines of the crops and spurs of wooded mountains. “It needs only a dash of colour in the foreground to bring this all together,” said he, and he put a little child in a blue and white dressing-gown under the awful trees to judge the effect. Emboldened by his tenderness, an aged beggar ventured to ask for alms. Now it was the ancient privilege of the great to try the temper of their blades upon beggars and such cattle. Mechanically the king swept off the old man’s head, for he did not wish to be disturbed. The blood spurted across the granite slabs of the river-ford in a sheet of purest vermilion. The king smiled. Chance had solved the problem for him. “Build a bridge here,” he said to the court carpenter, “of just such a colour as that stuff on the stones. Build also a bridge of grey stone close by, for I would not forget the wants of my people.” So he gave the little child across the stream a thousand pieces of gold and went his way. He had composed a landscape. As for the blood, they wiped it up and said no more about it; and that is the story of Nikko Bridge. You will not find it in the guide-books.
This is, I suppose, a story about art, or more precisely about the relationship between art and suffering. Which is to say, this moment of casual violence — too casual, too wholly disconnected from any affect in the king even to be called sadism — represents, the story is saying, the difference between mundane art and great art. There is dark levity to Kipling’s telling here, but he’s making a serious point about art for all that.
It is, I think, at root a religious idea, though the root is very deeply buried. The idea is this: art requires suffering. Suffering — of the tortured artist creating it, of the Learish, Antigone-y people upon whom the art is based, or indeed of both — is the yeast of art. I call this religious because, as an empirical observation, religion began with this understanding: we placate God by killing somebody, or something. We slice Isaac’s throat or, when an angel shimmers into being beside our right hand and hold back the knife, we substitute a sheep. But blood absolutely has to be kneaded into our worship, it seems, for it to be real. It shows we mean it. It shows we’re serious. And I suppose we’ve carried over that attitude into our art. Django Reinhardt is a great guitarist because his hands were burned and deformed. Jimi Hendrix is an even greater guitarist because he died young. Not that their immense talent is irrelevant to these judgements; only that there are thousands and thousands of guitarists with similar levels of skill. Django and Jimi soar above them for reasons that go beyond their fingering and strumming. Similarly: tuberculosis and his early, agonising death confirmed and cemented the greatness of Keats; Beethoven’s deafness copestones his brilliance as a composer; Sylvia Plath’s depression and mental illness are the very stuff of her genius as a poet. And so on, through a thousand examples.
Perhaps there is some profound ontological or perhaps spiritual truth in this, or perhaps we should take a more materialist ‘there’s no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism’ line here. On this latter approach, the ‘suffering artist’ myth is actually the inadvertent revelation of the buried truth of all culture texts, that they are reared on the bones of the oppressed. For those who believe the former, the artist’s suffering is perhaps the Christlike necessity for a Christlike redemption of the hideousness of the world: ‘we are the wasters of the planet,’ says George Steiner in No Passion Spent, ‘and the builders of death-camps. Ninety-nine per cent of humanity conducts lives either of severe deprivation — physical, emotional, cerebral — or contributes nothing to the sum of insight, of beauty, of moral trial in our civil condition. It is a Socrates, a Mozart, a Gauss or Galileo who, in some degree, compensate for man. It is they who, on fragile occasion, redeem the murderous, imbecile mess which we dignify with the name of history.’ The problem with the former view is that it rusks reducing art to a mere superstructure of human misery, sieving away all beauty and majesty and wonder. But the problem with the latter view is much greater, I think. It leads us back to Kipling’s story of the red bridge. The nameless beggar so abruptly beheaded is one of the burdensome and unproductive multitude that Steiner despises so very much, rendering his death not a tragedy and not a crime but rather an act of poesis, beautiful and important. Bollocks to that.
This was at the core of the recent NBC Hannibal TV series, with Bryan Fuller reinventing the ‘serial killer as devil’ of the books and movies into ‘serial killer as beautiful artist whose medium is murdered human beings’. I’m honestly not sure how seriously this show takes itself: how tongue-in-cheek it is. It seems to take itself very seriously indeed, but perhaps that’s just extraordinarily well-tooled irony. I’d certainly hope so.
