Goya and the Perennial Function in Modernity: The Black Paintings as a Crisis of Return
Goya and the Perennial Function in Modernity: The Black Paintings as a Crisis of Return
Goya and the Perennial Function in Modernity
The Black Paintings as a Crisis of Return
The Black Paintings occupy a unique position within the history of consciousness.
They are frequently interpreted as documents of pessimism, madness, political despair, aging, or psychological collapse. While each of these interpretations contains truth, none fully explains the extraordinary power of the works.
The deeper significance of the Black Paintings may lie elsewhere.
They may represent one of the first great modern manifestations of the perennial function after the collapse of its traditional symbolic containers.
The Perennial Function Before Modernity
For most of human history the descent into depth occurred within stable cultural structures.
The cave.
The mystery cult.
The temple.
The church.
The mythic cosmos.
The underworld possessed a map.
The descent possessed orientation.
The community possessed a framework capable of integrating what was encountered.
The boundary-crosser descended.
The boundary-crosser returned.
The experience became transmissible.
The function survived because descent and return remained united.
The Modern Rupture
Modernity introduces a new condition.
The depths remain.
The need for descent remains.
The human organism remains unchanged.
Yet the traditional symbolic architectures begin to disintegrate.
The old maps lose authority.
The old cosmologies weaken.
The underworld survives.
The pathways back become uncertain.
The perennial function becomes increasingly isolated.
The descender continues descending.
The community no longer knows how to receive the return.
Goya’s Position
This is the historical position occupied by Goya.
The Black Paintings emerge after war.
After political collapse.
After illness.
After deafness.
After the erosion of confidence in both reason and social order.
Most importantly, they emerge in private.
Painted directly upon the walls of the Quinta del Sordo.
Not commissioned.
Not exhibited.
Not intended for public consumption.
The paintings were not offerings to a culture.
They were encounters.
The walls of the house became a private cave.
The descent moved indoors.
The underworld became domestic.
The ancient function survived in isolation.
The House as Cave
The Quinta del Sordo functions almost as a modern equivalent of the Paleolithic cave.
The comparison is not symbolic but structural.
The cave and the house perform the same operation.
They separate the individual from ordinary reality.
They create a bounded environment for descent.
They become containers for confrontation with depth.
In Paleolithic culture, images emerged upon cave walls.
In Goya’s late life, images emerged upon house walls.
The location changes.
The operation remains.
The artist enters the depths.
The walls become a record of the encounter.
The Eruption of Depth
What makes the Black Paintings so disturbing is their apparent lack of mediation.
The figures do not behave like traditional allegories.
They do not explain themselves.
They do not comfortably inhabit inherited symbolic systems.
Instead they appear to erupt.
They feel less painted than uncovered.
Less invented than encountered.
Something beneath ordinary consciousness appears to have surfaced directly.
The paintings resemble strata becoming visible.
The depths exposing themselves.
The images arrive with the force of emergence.
Saturn and the Abyss of Time
Saturn Devouring His Son is often interpreted psychologically or mythologically.
Yet the painting exceeds both categories.
What appears is not merely a mythological figure.
What appears is time consuming its own creations.
Generation devouring generation.
History feeding upon itself.
The image feels primordial because it exposes a process rather than an event.
The painting confronts consciousness with the violence embedded within becoming itself.
The Dog
The Dog may be the most important painting in the entire series.
Almost nothing happens.
A small head emerges from an immense field of emptiness.
Yet the image possesses extraordinary power.
The figure appears suspended between existence and disappearance.
Consciousness confronts immensity.
The self confronts depth.
The painting strips reality almost completely bare.
What remains is exposure itself.
The solitary awareness confronting the abyss of process.
The Collapse of Cosmology
The crucial difference between Goya and earlier descenders lies here.
Dante descends through a structured cosmos.
Orpheus descends through a mythic cosmos.
Mystics descend through theological cosmologies.
Goya descends after the maps have begun collapsing.
The depths remain.
The architecture does not.
The underworld survives.
Orientation becomes uncertain.
The paintings therefore record a historical transition.
The perennial function persists.
Its traditional containers disintegrate.
Between Orpheus and Rimbaud
Goya occupies a position between the ancient descender and the modern visionary.
The descent remains genuine.
The return becomes unstable.
The artist continues performing the perennial function.
Yet the map is no longer guaranteed.
The Black Paintings therefore anticipate Rimbaud.
The abyss remains accessible.
The structures capable of integrating it weaken.
The paintings become records of contact without complete cosmological stabilization.
The Sedimentary Interpretation
Within the framework of sedimentary consciousness, the Black Paintings assume an even deeper significance.
They cease appearing as representations of external subjects.
They become manifestations of deeper strata becoming visible.
Fear.
Mortality.
Animality.
Time.
Violence.
Exposure.
These are not merely themes.
They are layers of emergence surfacing within consciousness.
The paintings resemble geological exposures.
The depths revealing themselves.
The walls becoming cross-sections of the human condition.
Goya’s Historical Importance
Goya may therefore represent one of the first great modern practitioners of the perennial function under conditions of symbolic collapse.
The cave survives.
The descent survives.
The encounter survives.
What disappears is the certainty of return.
The Black Paintings stand at the threshold between ancient cosmology and modern fragmentation.
They reveal what happens when consciousness continues descending after the old maps have ceased to function.
Final Thesis
The Black Paintings are not merely documents of despair.
They are records of the perennial function operating within modernity.
The walls of the Quinta del Sordo became a private cave.
The artist descended.
The depths responded.
The images emerged.
What appears in the paintings is not simply madness, mythology, or pessimism.
What appears is one of the earliest modern encounters with depth after the collapse of the traditional symbolic orders that once mediated it.
Goya stands at the beginning of a lineage that would later include Rimbaud, modernist fragmentation, and the search for new forms of return.
His achievement lies not in solving the problem.
His achievement lies in preserving contact with the depths during the moment when the old maps began to disappear.