The Warrior and the Unsolvable Riddle

An article written by a Classical Ideals Art Club Student, Rhett Haboush

Dear Readers,

What follows is a guest post written by one of my Art Club students whom I have worked with for many months. This is an essay he wrote about two very important paintings that depict an eternal problem for man: how to move forward when all seems lost. Perhaps you will find through his words some recognition, and some inspiration for your own problems and how art can guide you out.

If you would like to send Mr. Haboush comments about his work, you can contact him at: rhett.haboush@gmail.com

Megha Lillywhite

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Art jostles us out of our daily stupor and leads us through a pathway of beauty and narrative. In art there is myth, and in myth we find meaning and structure to life, its challenges and their resolutions. One of these problems is the insurmountable challenge which seems impossible to resolve with action. In our action-centered western world, we believe that only solutions that involve reason and action are useful. The eastern world reminds us that action is not the only way to solve problems and that surrender and pause, too, are important tools for a warrior to master. Two paintings describe this dilemma in a powerful way: Knight at Crossroads by Viktor Vasnetsov and The Sentry by Carel Fabritius.

In Viktor Vasnetsov’s ‘Knight at Crossroads’ we see a warrior on horseback facing a desolate wasteland. There are skeletal remains and stones scattered across the landscape, eerily resembling a graveyard. He is reflecting on a foreboding message inscribed on the stone before him. “If you go straight ahead, there will be no life; there is no way forward for he who travels past, walks past or flies past.” The warrior is dejected and hunched on his horse. Even his dispirited horse lowers her head in performative defeat. He has lost the will to even hold a weapon, his lowered spear pointing directly downward at the bones of another man and another horse, victims of the terrible despair he is now facing and perhaps foreshadowing his future. There are ominous ravens animated from his arrival. The time is twilight, an enchanted moment of transition when day shifts to night or when night shifts to day, adding to the allegorical significance of this moment.

Viktor Vasnetsov was part of a group of Russian painters known as ‘The Wanderers’ who were interested in establishing an authentic and nationalistic Russian identity through their artwork. Vasnetsov turned to fairy tales, for ‘fairy tales tell us a lot about a culture and how they view the world’ and fairy tales are a unique expression of a culture’s identity. In this painting he portrays the legendary Russian epic folklore hero, Ilya Muromets, in a trying moment on his journey. Ilya Muromets faces an insurmountable problem. The fairytale Vasnetsov depicts in his painting serves as an allegory for what we may face in our own lives. What does one do when faced with an insurmountable obstacle where all hope is seemingly lost and death is the only answer? Do you despairingly resign or do you lift your spear and charge onward, ignoring the message? Both choices lead to death. But there is a middle way: the way of stillness and humility. 

Viktor Vasnetsov, 1882, Knight at Crossroads

Carel Fabritius’s painting, ‘The Sentry’ depicts another desolate young man, a Dutch soldier slouched on a dirty street. His disheveled military uniform, which he still wears with his helmet and rifle, creates a dissonance between him and his civilian environment. The city around him is architecturally out of order. The structures make no functional sense: a staircase that leads to a door that seems to lead nowhere, a misplaced arch and column, a tunnel leading toward an unusual and impassible level change. There is a stone etching of what might be a monk or a priest standing over a pig, but we only see his legs and the meaning is disjointed from the painting’s subject. Fabritius also paints a civilian walking in the background, but we also only see his legs, further adding to the sense of disconnection between this soldier and his society. There is a small black dog sitting attentively beside him, as if saying, “wake up, there is work to do!”

Carel Fabritius, 1654, The Sentry

The soldier looks dead, but it is his spirit that is dead. He lives in a society that rejects him. The Anglo-Dutch war had just ended and it turned out very badly for the Dutch. Not only was his class superfluous, they were used as scapegoats by the government for their own foolishness, and for the failure of the commanders to achieve a better outcome. So these soldiers became “a depressed and forgotten class in the community,” idling about and purposeless in their lives.  

How many men today, born to be heroes of their own lives, find themselves in desolate conditions of heart and mind? Look at the man, confused and striving for purpose, who just can’t find ground to step on, blaming his society, maybe justifiably so. Or look at the incel, afraid to let a woman see and love the real him. Or look at the drug addict. How often do you see miserable men wasting their entire opportunity at life, turning to drugs to escape the despair of their failed journeys?

The Knight and the Sentry relate to the common modern man, silently facing the ostensibly ‘unsolvable riddle’ of his existence. We can turn to art, to myth, and find that we aren’t alone in our problems.

In the Sentry’s state, our healthy instinct is to get up and put one foot in front of the other. But look at the world displayed around him. Where would he start? Where does he plant his foot for the first step toward a better life when the next step has no ground under it and when the environment has no sense to it? Like the Knight in Vasnetsov’s painting, there is no sensible course of action that the Sentry could take.

The best thing to do is...nothing. In the ancient spiritual tradition of Taoism, one of the highest virtues was called ‘wu wei’ which means, ‘sitting quietly doing nothing.’ This allows you to find a transcendent place beyond the thinking mind, the mind that has no clue on how to work out this problem. More importantly, wu wei helps us transcend and reset the mind that is dejected and has given up even trying to solve the problem. This is meditation and it releases the congested psyche to reveal solutions it couldn’t before to see insights that you couldn’t before. Your thinking becomes original and inspired.

Looking at this painting, I put myself in the knight’s position. I take a deep breath. I pet my horse. I look out. I sit and do nothing. I feel softly into things. I might access something deeper, wiser in me. I might not. How do you think Moses parted the Red Sea? This knight, if he is true of heart, perhaps can access a secret and unique path, through the impassible death field, but only if he accesses the secret path within himself first.

And if I, the Sentry, adopt the same virtue. I lift my head. I take a deep breath. I see the dog and pet it. I make contact with reality. And I sit and do nothing. My field of vision broadens. My perspective shifts. I might notice the warm sunshine. I might notice what an odd predicament I am in. Then I might start harmonizing my vibe with God. Then my environment might start making sense. Then I might know the first step to take.

By doing nothing, they detach from the problem, and a solution might appear to the Knight or the Sentry. He can better observe his surroundings and calculate what the next step is. In an inspired state, solutions might appear to him that he may not have thought of. As Archimedes found the solution to measuring the density of gold when he sat in a warm bath to relax. As Julius Caesar figured out how to defeat Vercingetorix and capture Gaul by simply reposing and realizing he could build a wall while surrounded by the enemy. Some similar solution may come to the hero, who is courageous enough to lean into stillness rather than fester in feverish despair.

Artists have a wonderful position of being able to express an image without having to explicitly explain its meaning. This invites the viewer to participate in deciphering it. They get to see an image, capture its essence, and let it soak into their imaginations and enrich their lives with its unique significance for them. Did Vasnetsov think of a young man’s journey in life when he painted the Knight? Surely he did. He was thinking of the Russian identity and the struggle for manhood. Did Fabritius do the same with his Sentry? I’d say so. Without telling us how to think, artists paint an image rich with beauty and meaning, enthralling the viewer’s heart and mind to take it in and articulate its meaning with their own unique, and yet universal, life experiences. 

These paintings are relevant today because they inform us that the solution is not going to be found in the problem.They remind us of the ancient and even mythological counsel that you have to step out of the problem so you can see it from a different perspective, often a physical shift in perspective, but more often an inner shift of perspective. A lot of life feels hopeless today. There seems to be a lot of obstacles and sabotage in the world, communally and globally. But also within our own psyches.

These paintings wake us up and out of the apathy begotten by spiritual fatigue by giving ground and meaning to the hopeless free fall of illusion and resignation we feel living in a sloppy world. They give us ground to organize our own psyches, to refrain from the maddening momentum that only drives us further down a hole of confusion and thwarted growth. We may leave our own self-absorbed obsession with the unfair hopelessness of circumstances, within and without, looking at these paintings and seeing ourselves in the subjects. We have left our mind. We have found a new perspective. Then we may get a glimpse of ‘sitting down doing nothing’ and then we may do it consciously, leaving the level of thinking we were wasting our time with, and find a deeper wisdom to see clearly where we are, what we want, and what we can do, being revived back into the center of our lives, on the path of growth and resolution.