It's spring in India

The mango trees are
flowering ...

What language do you dream in?

Little girls from different cultures who sing, shout and chant in Hebrew, and one eight year who says she dreams in Hebrew. A charming scene but these are children of migrant workers who live in a place where 'it is illegal for migrant workers to have children.' What a chilling line to read so early in the morning.

A little girl who’s never been to her mother’s land and is conscious of only a few words of its language is now facing deportation from a land whose dominant society itself suffered centuries of wandering, living beyond the pale, rootless except in their faith. Aye, aye, aye, aye, a-y-e as they say in Poland and probably a few other places too.

The first time I visited Italy, I heard a sound that wrapped around me like a warm blanket, bringing with it a new experience; a feeling of security. Nothing could hurt me as long as I heard the rhythms of that language, as long as I had the protection of the people who spoke it (or so I thought at the time - I was very young and the young are allowed to trust).

I so remember the sense of shock I experienced when many years later during a seminar, Professor Herman Rappaport talked about the primacy of language to our sense of being. When I asked what he thought of the denial of the mother tongue, he, multi-lingual himself, looked directly at me and said; ‘it is an act of violence’ - a moment of connection in that room.

To be allowed to own your language, your sense of being, and your culture, to belong to the land in which you live - not tolerated but truly belong - is valuable indeed. So who is being discussed here? Less clarity now around this rupture isn’t there? So I’ll leave it to Rotem Ilan, head of the Children of Israel, protesting against the children’s deportation, to summarise:

For 20 years Israeli governments have turned a blind eye to these children. They are now part of the fabric of this country. They go to school here. They celebrate the same holidays as us. If there is something we [Jews] have learned from our history is that you must not, you cannot deport children.

Primo Levy said, ‘It happened, therefore it can happen again, this is the core of what we have to say.’ And let’s remember that we’re living in reactionary times and regard what’s under our own noses.

Can the spectacular view from a space platform see this epistemic paradox that says everything is true and some things are false?

Google Earth can see this, the 2005 Holocaust memorial in Berlin:

Jonathan Jones, questioning the aim of the memorial, states that ‘what needs to be explained is why memorials have grown in importance for those who have no personal reason to grieve.’

For me, this memorial is more than an appropriation of someone else's grief, it stand as a warning to us all - pity 'tis that we still need it - that something can start to happen in small and reasonable ways and, like the beginning of a hardly perceptible wave, it can wash aside our humanity with its own reasonable force, leaving us to wonder how it could have happened. The memorial's architect, Peter Eisenman, said, 'the stelae are designed to produce an uneasy, confusing atmosphere, and the whole sculpture aims to represent a supposedly ordered system that has lost touch with human reason'.

Ghosts, to have or to be, and some weighty bricolage

To have, to hold, to posses, avoir, habere, avere…

Avoir du pois, a kind of weight so named to distinguish it from the Troy weight and so it starts…

Just read The Penelopiad in which Margaret Atwood’s revisionist mythology effectively deals with the dreadful Helen’s narcissism. When speaking to poor old Pen of the waiting game, Helen says:

You wouldn’t have any idea of how exhausting it is, having such vast numbers of men quarrelling over you, year after year. Divine beauty is such a burden. A least you’ve been spared that!’

(I like Penelope’s character; she’s pissed off with the neutrality of the Asphodel Fields, preferring to discourse with spirits in the darker grottoes.)

Then I pick up Elizabeth Grosz to read, ‘The narcissistic woman is described as vain, shallow, skilled in artifice, but above all, she is bound up with the desire to be loved. What threatens her most is the loss of love.' Bugger.

Where does that leave us all in our quest for love? Devoted to the masquerade apparently, seeking impossible, imaginary tests of love, tied inextricably to the ghosts of a pre-oedipal past.

Because the love we wish to return to is no longer available to us in the way we might wish – the safety and nurture of the womb - we reach a market economy of demand outstripping supply. Poor exhausted mother, never ceasing to produce; she produces in her offspring feelings that were planted with the sound of her voice and her body even before they were born.

The single most important sound in the world to each and every one of us comes from our mothers. Whether or not we like it, whether or not they abandon us, whether or not they praise or censure us, it was always there from the beginning and it is back to there we want to go. They are our strength and our weakness.

This is all getting a bit serious so bugger Lacan – (well it gets the penis closer to the phallus – cuts out the middle (wo)man) – let’s have some fun.

This is the wonderful Mme Deinsac, an 1835 steel engraving, current market value: 35 euro. Current emotional value: priceless.

I love this picture. I bought it on a day trip to France with some friends when I was feeling as pissed off as Mme Deinsac looks. We went into a bricolage where I saw this bookplate and laughed out loud – she so mirrored the way I was feeling she came home with me. Who or whatever pissed off Mme Deinsac did a pretty good job and I’m really sorry the world dealt her such a bad deal but her expression is so interesting, staring accusingly straight at you, Atwood’s Helen would be a poor competitor.

This brings us nicely to this podcast of Stephen Vizinczey (who studied under Lukacs) talking this morning about his 1965 novel, In Praise of Older Women - nicely resurrected by the BCC’s strategic marketing targeted at the affluent greys: http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/today/

Well it could only be this, the song that sparked the thought, that set the mood, that was nicked from a friend...

Per te mama, sempre la piu bella

It was inevitable that eventually I would turn to see how women have been portrayed by women and was delighted to find a contemporary blog that treats the subject: http://womenpaintingwomen.blogspot.com/ Inspired by a discussion on how female figurative artists are approaching women as subjects, the blog was started by Sadie J Valeri, a classical realist oil painter and here’s a desirable example of her work. Enlarge the image to see the artist's reflection.

With glee then I dived into the site to find an almost unremitting landscape of female representation in virtually lifeless forms - alternately looking down, gazing into the middle distance - less enigmatic than dull.

A few beacons of hope on this dismal horizon showed subjects actually doing something but it really was enough to stall that line of enquiry until I was directed to Louise Bourgeois.

Anger, betrayal and jealousy – now at least these are emotions we can do something with, and a thirty foot spider made of steel and marble called Maman – great. Even greater is a person in her nineties engaged with themes that obsess her still. And still producing, albeit in textiles easier on old fingers. Look at the energy in her image in this photograph by Annie Leibovitz.

The things that hand has created, the life this woman has led - 'From traumatized childhood to fierce old age’- so what if she doesn’t always tell the truth about her life. People like this can spin their own webs and in doing so can beguile us.

People then can make their lives if they persist - “A woman has no peace as an artist until she proves over and over that she won’t be eliminated” said Bourgeois. She also said, “My best friend was my mother and she was deliberate, clever, patient, soothing, reasonable, dainty, subtle, indispensable, neat and as useful as a spider… I shall never tire of representing her.”

I cannot represent my mother but I can remember how much she enjoys the old songs from her young days so here she is my little mother, whose face I can never tire of seeing and here is a song, per te mama...

O sole mio sta 'nfronte a te! The sun, my own sun. It's in your face!

See how nervously Darren Hayes glances at the great one - pure sentimental joy - and where did all those little Chinese children come from?

The indistinct line between art and life

Now I wasn’t going to write about these pictures because research into the artist’s life brought on an attack of anathema. But notwithstanding the debate about separation between artist and work, I’d already started an unstoppable train of thought when another stimulus came - the link was a gift so here goes and let’s see where it gets us.

I thought Malliol must have loved women in order to portray them the way he did but maybe Schiele understood them in a different way. Possibly relationships based on power rather than love.

First a portrait of Wally (do hope it is Wally because that’s what I imagine she’s like). Poor Wally, a victim of her love, was passed over for Schiele’s respectable marriage. Better she had been passed over, Schiele attempted to append her to it – promising her an annual holiday for the two of them. How enticing. Brings me to The Unbearable Lightness of Being where Franz only makes love to his mistress in another country – he consequently goes on a lot of academic conferences. But that’s another story for another day.

So, Wally, what are you telling us? Lovely Wally looks boxed in rather like Naomi Wolf’s book cover for The Beauty Myth. So confined, so silent, so introspective. What would Wally say, if she could, about life with Schiele?

What inner self is she protecting, what secrets are hers alone?

Would she wonder why he filled his life with a melange of bruised and damaged, vulnerable young girls?

How can we imagine all this from just looking at that image? She may have been happy as Schiele's mistress. That she told him what he could do with his part-time proposition, however, tells us otherwise so maybe this current interpretation of her supposed image is not so fanciful.

Jeanette Winterson, in her 2002 lecture ‘What is Art For’ claims that art can awaken us to truths about ourselves and our lives.’ The separation then between the work and the artist can be seen as being affected by how the work ‘brings us back to consciousness, sometimes quietly, sometimes dramatically, but the responsibility to act on what we find is ours’. Therefore art is made out of ‘a passionate, reckless love of the work in its own right, as though nothing else exists and an imaginative force that creates something new out of disparate material. She goes on to say that in art there is a terror ‘that there might be a different way to live’, a celebration of the human spirit but, I would argue there is also the possiblity that we are forced to see something that we have preferred to ignore.

But before this post declines into despair, this never fails to revive my belief in humankind:

Mutability

If you take a large quantity of corn flour, mix it with water then you’ll come close to an idea of woman. Try it. It looks soft and smooth, it’s even warm, you can scoop it up and it’ll sit in your hand, soft and rippling as you move your fingers, almost solid. But open your fingers and it’ll become fluid, run through them in globby, glutinous blobs and be reabsorbed into its origins where you won’t find the same handful again.

Push a finger into the mass and take it out, it’ll heal itself. It can be coloured and manipulated but it’ll always go back to where it began; a whole. It does not resist easily. It is seamless, it is solid, it is fluid, it is enigmatic but it’ll go off as quickly as any other organic material. As, of course, we all will. So this is a tribute to the lovely women I am privileged to know.

Consider the beautiful nymph of Aristide Maillol (1930) splendidly curated at the Musee L’Annonciade silhouetted as she is against the Gulf of St Tropez. Long may she stand there, proudly framing her magnificent body on those stout legs.

Maillol must have loved women to make them the subject of nearly all his sculptures - a short tour of the Musee Maillol website brings up the delightful sounding ‘Le Corps Subilme’ or The Exalted Body. (Especially pleasing is the discovery that three of his bronzes can be found on the grand staircase of the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, a place I am having a delightful relationship with at the moment.)

Back to Maillol. The museum’s website says: ‘he imagined infinite variations around a smooth body … combining a rigorous conception of volumes within the body’s sensuality, mingling the attitudes’ gracefulness to the gesture’s naturalness.’ Sounds a lot like the corn flour exercise to me. Whoever would have thought that corn flour was sensual?

Here’s another rendition of woman, this time a photograph by surrealist artist Man Ray from his 1923 experimental film ‘La Retour a la Raison'.

Another lovely female body standing by a window, inside, looking out, waiting.

This post is going nowhere fast at the moment but it’s given me an opportunity to show the view from my room, what I see looking out; a wild wood…

Women

I need to talk about women now...