The Meontology of the Left-Handed Painter
Daniel Barbiero
June 2022
Like many of the paintings of Carlo Maria Mariani, Il pittore mancino—The Left-Handed Painter—reads like a painting about painting. A fine-featured, young male figure loosely draped in a Classical manner, crowned with a laurel wreath, sits on a sphere in an otherwise empty, small, and windowless room resembling a cell. With his right hand he holds an upside-down putto with a startled expression on its face, while with his left hand he dabs at the putto’s back with a paint brush. In contrast to the alarmed look of the putto, the painter seems serenely absorbed in what he is doing. And although what he is doing is ambiguous, it appears that he is in fact painting the putto into existence. To the extent that he is, The Left-Handed Painter, with its deliberately anachronistic vocabulary of Neo-classical figures and the strange action it depicts, seems to want to be read as containing some kind of an allegorical or symbolic meaning.
To discover such a meaning may call for what André Breton, in “Marvelous versus Mystery,” described as the dropping of “common sense” in favor of a “divinatory” sense, a kind of augury in which interpretation is guided to go where it wants to go, without previously having known it. Such a divinatory interpretation may bring us beyond a work’s original or intentional meaning. But any creative intention given material form within an artistic practice is liable to being surpassed by meanings implicit in or suggested by those forms and images through which the creative intention is realized; if our creative intentions often only imperfectly fit, and consequently partly escape, the material—languages, to pick the most obviously example—through which we express them, then the converse is the case as well. The meanings suggested by the material through which we express our intentions partly escape and overflow the meanings that our intentions purport to convey; these extra-intentional meanings grant interpretation a certain license. A license for creative misreading, perhaps, but one nevertheless constrained by the limits reasonably set by the material. In the case of The Left-Handed Painter it is a license for an interpretation consistent with the iconography on display, an iconography that—to paraphrase Breton–suggests a meaning of greater impact than that meaning which it explicitly appears to carry.
What the iconography of The Left-Handed Painter suggests is an allegory of the creative meontology of imagination. “Meontology,” which derives from the Greek μή ( me “non”) and ὄν ( on “being”), is the paradoxical understanding of Being as grounded in, or taking its ultimate meaning from, non-being. On this reading, The Left-Handed Painter invites us to read it as an allegory representing the creative power of the nothingness that is the imagination, which is itself representative of the greater nothingness from which Being arises. It is an allegory that begins with the left hand.
The Hierarchy of Handedness
The polarity between left and right is one of the most basic, and probably one of the oldest, of the binary oppositions in the human conceptual scheme. This opposition, grounded in a tendency to divide into two halves, grows out of the immediate and irreducible given of the body, with a specific focus on the relative positions of two of its more salient and relied-upon parts: the hands. The tendency to divide the world into conceptual halves on the basis of the two hands is something that is literally within our grasp, something that is always already to-hand. But to divide reality in two on the basis of handedness is not to divide into two equally weighted parts. As Robert Hertz noted in his classic study, “The Preeminence of the Right Hand,” the right hand is the dominant hand in the left-right binary. Its dominance is based on the active, leading role it takes for most people in their everyday tasks. The right hand “acts, orders and takes,” while the left hand is “reduced to the role of a humble auxiliary…it helps, it supports, it holds.”
Here, Mariani’s painter already is confounding. It only takes one look at his hands to see how he defies the priority Hertz describes. His left hand actively paints while the right hand assists by holding the putto firmly by the ankle. In a reversal of Hertz’s formula, the left hand acts; the right secures. Is this something unnatural?
Not necessarily. The conceptual ascendancy of the right hand over the left may appear to be the result of a natural prevalence of right-handedness over left-handedness in human populations generally, and thus would seem to follow from a biological fact. But as Hertz demonstrates, the dominance of right hand over left isn’t a brute fact of biology or physiology but instead is culturally informed and often culturally enforced. Although the majority of people do appear to have an innate tendency toward right-handedness, those who don’t nevertheless are often trained to right-handedness in spite of their natural tendency toward left-handedness. The dominance of the right hand is thus reinforced by a kind of feedback loop: the right hand is considered dominant because a majority of people are intrinsically right-handed, while at the same time the majority of people are right-handed because the right hand is considered dominant.
To the extent that it is fostered as a culturally-sanctioned preference, handedness is situated within a conceptual space permeated by culturally-informed significance; consequently, it is a meaning-laden and meaning-conveying phenomenon over and above its fundamental role in the division of (literal) manual labor in practico-mechanical activity. The hand is a symbol as well as a tool; it is a marker within a system of markers and one whose symbolic reach is encompassing enough, and easily enough understood, as virtually to overshadow its practical function in everyday life. In fact, the hierarchically-organized opposition of the right hand to the left, and the universal fact of the constant reliance on one’s hands to do things, makes the right-left opposition the source of an easily grasped symbolic figure for other hierarchically structured binary relationships, particularly those based on the relative value or worth of the two constituent elements. And what these relative values are is clear. As Hertz asserts, “to the right hand go honors, flattering designations, prerogatives…The left hand, on the contrary, is despised.” This isn’t always the case, though; in one notable exception, the left hand does get honors, although of a reduced kind. Plato in Book IV of the Laws puts on the left the honors due to the inferior gods of the underworld, reserving for the right the honors due the Olympian gods. Inferior honors are inferior, but honors nonetheless. But Plato’s admittedly qualified exception to the rule only serves to underscore that the Classical hierarchy of handedness follows the usual pattern. Plutarch in Isis and Osiris relates the fact that the Pythagoreans considered the left side the bad side, and G.E.R. Lloyd, in “Right and Left in Greek Philosophy,” makes the point that the Greeks not only assigned the left hand to the inferior position, but went so far as to have used euphemisms to refer to the left. That ill-omened side could not even be named directly.
In short, within the symbolic order, the right hand is the hand of the positive and of affirmation; the left hand is the hand of the negative and of negation.
With handedness being an element within a symbolic order with the flexibility and transposability to stand for binary divisions within many different domains, its suitability to serve as the organizing trope of an allegory about painting—which of course is itself a craft intimately involving the hands—is perfectly intuitive. Which leaves us with these questions: Where does Mariani’s painter fit into this binary economy of worth as symbolized by handedness? Does his left-handedness conform to the established hierarchy of right-superior, left-inferior? Or does he somehow subvert it instead, demonstrating by the example of his activity the priority of the left hand over the right?
The Two Paths
In the introduction to his poem “On Nature,” the Eleatic philosopher-poet Parmenides tells of a dream or vision in which as a young man he encounters an unnamed goddess who initiates him into knowledge of the truth of things. The goddess tells him that there are only two paths that thought, in its investigation of truth, can follow: the path of Being (“that [it]‘is’ and that it is not possible that [it] ‘is not’”) and the path of non-Being (“that [it] ‘is not,’ and that it is necessary that it ‘is not’”). But it is only the first path that should be taken and not the second since, she continues, “Being…is ungenerated, indestructible, complete [and could not have grown] from what is not…For if it was [generated] it is not…[and] you could not know that which is not…There only remains the word of the path ‘is.’” The choices the goddess offers are between the way of Being and the way of non-Being, between pure positivity and pure negativity, between ungenerated plenitude and unproductive nothingness. And only the first of these ways is the way to take.
Although Parmenides’s goddess doesn’t characterize them as such, we easily can characterize the two ways in terms of the left-right polarity. We can say that the path of Being—the path of that-which-is–is the right-hand path, and that the prohibited path of non-Being—the path of that-which-is-not–is the left-hand path. At the metaphorical forking of the ways, the right-hand way is the right way.
The right-hand way takes us to an understanding of Being as something indivisible, ungenerated and eternal, while the left-hand path leads us to the opposed notion of Being as the finite product of the dynamic of becoming, in which there is a time before Being came into being and thus is not, having its being in the mode of not-yet-being, and a time at which Being perishes, at which time it once again is not, now having its being in the mode of no-longer-being. Becoming posits the nothingness of non-Being as the matrix from which Being arises and to which it returns, in time; in its denial of the eternality of Being, the way of Becoming is the way of negation and hence of the left-hand.
This is the way of the left-handed painter, who paradoxically shows that it is the forbidden left-hand path that is the path to truth—a truth different from Parmenides’ truth of the permanence of Being. The truth the left-handed painter reveals is the truth of nothingness as the ground of Being.
The Path of Non-Being & Its Reversal
If the left-handed painter is painting the putto into existence he is bringing into being a being that had no being before this initial moment of its becoming. It is the left-handed painter’s hand—his left hand—that sets the putto’s becoming into motion. Thus Mariani’s painting would appear to be an allegory about the coming into being of Being from nothingness. It is that, but it also is something else. Its allegorical meaning goes deeper to point to the source of this initial moment of becoming. What it implies is that the ground of this newly-becoming being is the non-being of the imaginary as the left-handed painter imagines it—something non-existent posited against the reality of what-is, a negation of what actually exists in the name of something that doesn’t yet exist (or that can only exist as an unreality—as a purely imaginary thing, a thing of pure negation).* The putto is the product of the nothingness that is the left-handed painter’s imagination as well as his hand.
And yet the negation inherent in the mode of non-being particular to the imagination is not a pure nothingness. Its negativity doesn’t consist in the necessary impossibility of its being brought into being but, paradoxically, is facilitated by a positivity of its own. This positivity consists in the possibility of bringing into being something new, something—and this is the meaning of the movement of its negation—other than what already is. It is a possibility grounded in the relationship between that negation brought into play by the imagination against the reality of the world, and the world into which imagination erupts in its movement of negation. Negation, in the guise of the imagination of what is not, is the ground of the possibility of the being of something other than what is. In the movement of the imagination the positivity that is the world as it is encounters the negativity of the imagination of what is not; out of this encounter comes the potential positivity of something that is not yet, but that will come into being. In a sense, a droll Law of the Motion of the Imagination: from an imaginative negation arises an equal and opposite affirmation. This new positivity may consist in a new state of affairs in the world, or it may take the form of the material image of the purely imaginary. The form of a painting, for example.
The Convergence of Paths
It is on this paradoxical ground, at once of negation and affirmation, that the left-handed painter comes into his own. He materializes an image from the nothingness of his imagination by fixing it on canvas. Here he appears to take a turn as radical as it is unexpected—a hairpin turn that reverses the left-hand path of non-Being and brings it into alignment with the right-hand path of Being.
Or rather, a right-hand path. If the left-handed painter’s bringing the imaginary into being doesn’t exactly put him onto Parmenides’ path of Being as the uncreated and indivisible, it does at least bring him to a path in which Being is a possibility opened up by the negative movement of non-Being. And by affording this opening out to possibility, he puts in motion a reversal of the hierarchy of value between the right and the left hands. To the left hand now goes the honor of making possible the bringing into being of something new, and the prerogative of opening the given up to the possibility of being other than what it is. This reversed hierarchy, with its transvaluation of values, is captured in the disposition of his hands: the left hand acting, the right hand holding.
Thus the meontology of the left-handed painter is a meontology in which nothingness is the ground of, and midwife to, the possibility of Being—a positive meontology. His moment of artistic creation enacts in miniature the coming-into-being-out-of-nothing that conditions our existence and is on display all around us. The meaning of his meontology is demonstrated as he realizes its positive moment, the moment of breaking out of nothingness that is the condition for the possibility of Being—the zero moment from which Being may arise. By painting the putto into existence, the left-handed painter reveals Being as Becoming: as an event or happening, as both a finitude and a positivity whose enabling condition is exactly that negation that opens up the possibility of its coming into being. His meontology announces the possibility of ontology.
Postscript: The Contingency of the Left-Handed Painter
The path of imaginative non-Being—the left-handed path of the left-handed painter—does not arise within a larger nothingness of indetermination. The imaginative act through which the left-handed painter brings non-Being into being, and thus opens up the possibility of Becoming and with it the possibility of the advent of Being, doesn’t take place in a vacuum. The left-handed painter may negate what-is in favor of an imagined what-might-be, but in doing so, he doesn’t inevitably fall into the trap of solipsism. True, the imaginative act through which he negates the existent by projecting onto it the possibility of the not-yet-existent is the act of an individual. But that act takes place within a given lifeworld—within a nexus of the practices, language, symbols and other significances that afford a human group a shared, often spontaneous and unarticulated understanding of its world. It is an understanding that constitutes a kind of collective interpretive matrix or order through which a world is structured and made intelligible to its inhabitants. It is inherited and contingent, the product of actions and interpretations taking place within the history of the group.
The collective interpretive order of the lifeworld the left-handed painter inhabits defines the horizon of possibility within which his imaginative act can arise. To an extent, his imagination is the imagination of the interpretive matrix of his lifeworld, which constitutes the koiné or common language which provides him with the vocabulary and rules of linkage which he “knows” by virtue of his having assimilated them through his own acts of interpretation, which have taken place within the context of his own personal history. And having done so he effects a translation of koiné into idiolect, from collective imagination into his own imagination, giving him his own interpretive perspective on his world and on the collective understanding that lights it up for him.
And so the putto that the left-handed painter paints into being may ultimately trace its origin back to the interpretive koiné from which the left-handed painter inherited it, and which made it possible for the left-handed painter to imagine it in the first place. But it is the left-handed painter’s imaginative act that gives it a concrete existence and significance. His appropriation of the figure of the putto entails a hermeneutic act by which an element from within the koiné of images proper to the left-handed painter’s lifeworld is assimilated into his idiolect and reinterpreted in light of his history and of the specific, situated project within which it now takes on its current meaning.
Hence the allegory of the left-handed painter reveals another layer of significance. In addition to symbolizing the event of Becoming into Being from the non-Being generated by the imagination, it symbolizes a new turn in the play of meaning through which one grasps oneself and one’s place within one’s world by assimilating and making one’s own the meanings and symbols of the one’s lifeworld it is a positive turn presupposed by the negating projection of the imagination. By virtue of this turn the putto being painted into being by the left-handed painter reveals itself to be not the putto of the collective imagination, but the putto of the left-handed painter, endowed with the possibility of a significance only he, and perhaps we, can imagine.
* These remarks concern imagination in its negative function vis a vis the given—its negation of what is in favor of what is not (yet). Imagination also has a role in affirming the given—a cognitive role through which the invisible aspects of the visible are apprehended–but that is a discussion for another time.
André Breton, Marvelous versus Mystery, in Free Rein, tr. Michel Parmentier and Jacqueline D’Amboise (Lincoln, NE: U Nebraska Press, 1995).
Robert Hertz, The Preeminence of the Right Hand: A Study of Religious Polarity, tr. Rodney and Claudia Needham, in Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3 (2): 335-57.
G.E.R. Lloyd, Right and Left in Greek Philosophy, in Methods and Problems in Greek Science: Selected Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge U Press, 1991).
Parmenides of Elea, On Nature, in Early Greek Philosophy Volume V: Western Greek Thinkers Part 2, ed. & tr. André Laks & Glenn W. Most. Loeb Classical Library 528 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U Press, 2016).
Plato, Laws, Volume I: Books 1-6, tr. R.G. Bury. Loeb Classical Library 187 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U Press, 1926).
Plutarch, Isis and Osiris, in Moralia, Volume V, tr. Frank Cole Babbitt. Loeb Classical Library 306 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U Press, 1936).
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Daniel Barbiero is a double bassist, composer and writer in the Washington DC area. He writes on the art, music and literature of the classic avant-gardes of the 20th century and on contemporary work, and is the author of the essay collection As Within, So Without (Arteidolia Press, 2021).
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