Is it real without a heartbeat?

Portraits by Ferdinand Hodler of the mother of his newborn daughter Paulette (1913), Valentine Godé-Darel (already ailing with a lung disease, 1914) and himself (age 60, with roses) (1914)

Painting as Initiation Process

Possibly Ferdinand Hodler was looking for a heartbeat in all his paintings of landscapes and seasons and Eurhythmic postures exploring the living that is also dying. Isn't every artist worth treasuring, though, asking of us all to tell him what we feel without a heartbeat? That we might look for one all the harder? To my mind, Hodler seems to have been driven by a sense of the parallel to the planetary. He knew how easy it is to say that we don’t care but he was always looking to capture the fear that is the pain we refuse to bear. If you ask me, Hodler was one of those painters who painted to become initated in the work of love (i.e true colour).

Helpful to the Process of Initiation.

It helps anyone when money doesn’t mean much to them; especially an artist: it keeps them objective and in search of something Higher.
It helps to not be afraid of solitude and never to confuse it with loneliness. There is no truth in fighting life’s battles alone, but we can afford the lie when that’s the way it's got to be, while we are waiting for our true love to arrive on the scene.

Unhelpful...

It hinders when everybody keeps telling you how to beat the odds. It won’t help to feel the heat. Their fire is not the passion of one’s own truth.

They cannot know how you feel by feeling for you. It does you wrong and then you spend the rest of the day healing your heart into its former restless mess. (At least there it lies in its true dog basket.)

Are You Short-Sighted?

Hodler was looking for a love that matched his own. He never kidded himself and knew it would be hard to find. He may even have been a little surprised when he did find it in Valentine. And less so when it prooved near impossible to keep once he had found it. First, she may have had to vie with his ego (or his talent, which is not that far removed from being one and the same thing; see Edgar Allen Poe's, very short story: "The Oval Portrait"); and then she was doomed to die of a lung disease. Is love always tragic? Or is this just our inability to see beyond earthly conditions?

How To Be Far-Sighted

Hodler looked to the rhythms of life, the lay of the land, especially where winter changes in to spring, and summer into autumn, and sure enough found always death, all around, all the time, with each beep, beep, beep of the heart monitor of now. His obsession with photography (there is no greater early 20th century selfie-taker!) But this confirmed the transcendental holiness of love all the better. We ought not to do anything without this first and foremost for our conscious attention span.

Feel The Heat

Okay, so it may lower the tone of my honouring this artist that I may have borrowed for my outline of this piece from the simple lyrics from Heartbeat by Eric Kaz, Wendy Waldman, sung back in the day by Don Johnson (not really worth much of a listen, sorry to say, but be my guest to refresh your memories of alligators - on board, not under the bed this time -, over-priced real-estate, and pastel jackets), but may this not detract from the fact that Hodler was authentic in his discovery of the stupendous power there is in the Thought of Death, that is Reality Known, which can be absorbed in your Conscious Awareness of every waking second through which moves gracefully the whispering of the unmanifest, the instant before its birth in the second which will tick away again.

Sonnenuntergang am Genfersee von Caux aus, 1917

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- photos of Hodler to be found in

- A little more on Hodler to be found here (buy the book if you are wealthy enough!).

- Love Letter found in