Ces années... 

ont été d'une beauté qui ne se reproduit pas facilement.

Cézanne and Paris was a v successful exhibit at the Senate museum which ended today. I went yday morning as soon as it opened, to avoid crowds.  No photos allowed.  Just as well.  A Sunday driver can't compete in F1.

The highlights:  learning just how close he was with Zola, such good friends, inspiring each other in their respective arts, and Zola dedicated his "MonSalon" to Cézanne;  Nu féminin (Léda II) was inspired by Zola's Nana.  Somehow a misunderstanding brought an end to their friendship and they never spoke again.

But dialogue in art can take place in many ways.

This became mega apparent toward the end of the exhibit when I looked at the last three paintings in the last room, a touch of elegant organization on the part of the curator which impressed me a great deal.

In this last part, we're treated to a sample of dialogue among artists.  

Cézanne paints a portrait of the painter Alfred Hauge. 

Ambroise Vollard, a famous art dealer at the time, sees the painting and likes it.  Vollard is by then already collecting works by those who would become known throughout the world, like Renoir and Maillol.  

Cézanne appreciates him, they hang out. Cézanne paints him, but the portrait is never finished, even after hundreds of sittings.  Vollard likes it that Cézanne says that even though he didn't finish it, he (Cézanne) is quite happy with how the front of the shirt turned out (it's exquisite; the shades of purple, blue, yellow, green, and gray he saw in white! and we see it too when looking at it.)

Cézanne, Portrait of Alfred Hauge, 1899

Cézanne, Portrait of Ambroise Vollard, 1899

After writing "painting is what is best for me", Cézanne dies of pneumonia in 1906, after being caught in a storm while working. I wonder if he ever had time to reflect on the irony of those words he wrote down, presumably in a letter to a friend.  

In 1924, Monsieur Vollard, however, still lives, and he is still surrounded by art and artists.  

Bonnard paints his portrait.  In fact, many painters do (Renoir, Picasso).  But one of Bonnard's paintings of him (there are a few) wasn't only of Vollard.  Here, he includes the Portrait of Alfred Hauge (bottom left) that Cézanne painted in his own painting; he includes a Maillol sculpture on the mantelpiece; he adds a Renoir next to it, on the wall (and others I am unable to identify).

I don't know if these were in fact in Vollard's room, and I don't care. What is quite touching as well as aesthetically pleasing (and also witty and interesting! egoless and cordial, the camaraderie apparent, the admiration almost tangible) is that the exchange between Cézanne and other painters did not stop when he died.  Art allows the conversation to continue.  It isn't a lecture, it isn't a line drawn under numbers to be added up.  It carries on, and on, forever.  Or it can.

Bonnard, Ambroise Vollard and his cat, 1924

Beads Begone

I decided to be a False Friend today, and be seriously Mardy & Fat, till midnight.

Michelangelo, Prisoner

Bernini, Damned Soul

Rodin, The Gates of Hell, detail

Jardins des Serres d'Auteuil

Yesterday was the second time I went to this park.  The first time was last year, at the height of summer. Not the best idea when it comes to spending an afternoon visiting greenhouses... but yesterday it was the perfect place to be.  It's free, hot, empty of tourists, and gorgeous.  Too bad we didn't bring a flask of tea to drink while admiring these many species of flora, some of which come from Brasil and yet I had to come all the way here to see... 

The first greenhouse we saw was of plants from the deserts in North America; Mexico, Arizona, Texas.  I never saw so many cactii together!

This has been cruelly dubbed "Mother-in-law cushion"

Hibiscus

In this "tropiclimate" greenhouse, there are ponds with rather large, colourful, fish, too. My camera's not good enough to do it justice, however...

Bonus Fauna

Pairs in Paris

Yknow what I love?  When I'm looking intently at a painting and all of a sudden a sound comes to me. A sound I've heard before and which became familiar over a period of time... and which was waiting for its visual pair.   Or, alternatively, when I'm listening to a piece of music, and an image comes to me. Usually it is an image which comes out of my imagination -- of course prompted by the sounds... that exquisite combination of notes, pitches and rhythm, with more intensity here, less there, silences in all the right places, making one wait just enough, the better to understand what comes next.

This pair came naturally, just now.

I like it.  

The music came first, and now, to my mind, it seems to have been waiting for its visual peer; to me, this:

Jean-Marc Nattier, Thalia, Muse of Comedy, 1739

Al's well Or is it?

Chapter One

A SQUAT grey building of only thirty-four stories. Over the main entrance the words, CENTRAL LONDON HATCHERY AND CONDITIONING CENTRE, and, in a shield, the World State's motto, COMMUNITY, IDENTITY, STABILITY.

The enormous room on the ground floor faced towards the north. Cold for all the summer beyond the panes, for all the tropical heat of the room itself, a harsh thin light glared through the windows, hungrily seeking some draped lay figure, some pallid shape of academic goose-flesh, but finding only the glass and nickel and bleakly shining porcelain of a laboratory. Wintriness responded to wintriness. The overalls of the workers were white, their hands gloved with a pale corpse-coloured rubber. The light was frozen, dead, a ghost. Only from the yellow barrels of the microscopes did it borrow a certain rich and living substance, lying along the polished tubes like butter, streak after luscious streak in long recession down the work tables.

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, 1931

Chapter 1

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.

The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it a coloured poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features. Winston made for the stairs. It was no use trying the lift. Even at the best of times it was seldom working, and at present the electric current was cut off during daylight hours. It was part of the economy drive in preparation for Hate Week. The flat was seven flights up, and Winston, who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went slowly, resting several times on the way. On each landing, opposite the lift-shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-four, 1949

My generation is so sad.  My generation has no link, no connection to what went on before it; we're loose bits of rocket released in the vacuum of space, without even knowing we were once part of the rocket.  We've no intellectual home, no emotional link to our predecessors; no idea or ethos binds us together as a group or in opposition to another group.  The generations which come later are even worse.  No will to LIVE, no incentive; no goal has been identified, no philosophy has come out of it, and these are the yrs when vigorous rebellion is easiest, when hormones and unapologetic arrogance not yet earned are at its peak.

Technology has never been more advanced -- (btw, what kind of stupid phrase is this anyway? Of COURSE technology can only become more and more advanced as a linear conception of time follows its course! but I digress) -- and ppl have seldom been this illiterate.  

Not even in a traditional way. 

Ppl know other forms of knowledge and literacy to the ones I knew at, say, age 20. But the problem is the lack of connection with everything else.

How is one to measure progress if the body of work produced by Man so far is no longer acknowledged -- not even known!

Are we about to witness 3, 4 generations studying like mad only to reinvent the wheel? Out of sheer ignorance?

What ARE they studying?  Theyre not reading the classics, theyre not studying political or economic theory; theyre not studying philosophy or fine arts.  They've no clue how language and History connect, no idea about the extent to which language itself influences ALL disciplines and how theyre formulated, posited, and directed.  And if *I* am saying this the problem is grave, friends, because I'm hardly a polymath.

Were I Dictator of the Polyverse, my first decree would be that an introduction to metalinguistics be made compulsory in formal education at age FIFTEEN.  "These are the tools used in order to steer ppl's thoughts THAT way instead of any other way it could have gone."  In all disciplines!  From scientific discourse all the way down to softer disciplines which teach ppl v little (i.e. pedagogy).

Reductionist views of the human person and what s/he can accomplish, why, and how, effectively removes the infinite potential we all have in us to create or rearrange what already exists.  This does come from a sloppy and misguided conception of language and how it shapes thought.  

The idea that something is only real and true once it has been proven by science, using the scientific method as it is today, is so destructive even of science that I am perplexed flabbergasted incandescent, plus which baffled as well as fascinated by the fact ppl don't see it, don't discuss it, and scientists themselves do not address it.

Because if the v nature and foundation of the scientific method is by definition an endless process whereby epistemology is a work in eternal progress (with perhaps the exception of some elements of biology and physics), then why should A Scientific Discovery be considered as a more final, solid, reliable truth than any other got via another epistemological field?  

If science is never done, if the scientific inquiry itself is always being perfected and its accepted truths challenged (necessarily), then surely it is AS reliable as any other type of knowledge.

But everything is not about science and how some of its tenets have been misapplied and misinterpreted.

The problem is a lot more serious.  I see these 20somethings walking around as if they've already died, not unlike the zombies they spend so much time attempting to kill in videogames.  There is no joy on their faces, no understanding of the beauty lying there, created by countless generations before them.  They know technology intimately, and think that because their grandparents couldn't operate a computer or a videogame, they were less intelligent, less capable, more naive.  In reality it is the v opposite.  

When one opens a BOOK, a dictionary, one doesn't only learn what one was looking for. When one looks for one word in the dictionary, one ends up seeing many others, and learning what those other words mean, too.  

Analog absorption of knowledge is more complete, more thorough, more vast, if yes slower.

But learning by analogy, identifying analogous elements in the world is far more important than knowing WHERE to click on a computer screen.

In my own circle, I have noticed how more and more ppl have difficulty identifying rather unimpressive, common, symbols, which anyone who grew up in a certain culture ought to be able to discern; ppl can't speak metaphorically anymore.  

The paradoxical element of metaphorical language is that because of its seeming vagueness and potential for misunderstanding, ppl apply their intellectual ability a lot more!  When an idea is conveyed in non-metaphorical language, the words used to convey it had better be pretty well-chosen, pretty accurate, for the interlocutor will not think twice. And this is tragic when linguistic knowledge has either not been ingested or has been poorly digested.

Metaphors HELP us think.  They help us think more, and better, and in different ways.

Symbols do, too.

But these elements are scarcer & scarcer in daily speech and, worse, in literature & in art!! The v womb of metaphors&symbols. This womb is now an inhospitable one, to match the general sterility of the average 20-something, plucked and clean, straight and falsely serious.  No! They're not even serious! I'm wrong!  They're DULL.

Instead of metaphors and symbols we get avatars and txt msg lingo.  At the HEIGHT of freedom, we choose to put ourselves in a prison of ignorance.  At a time when we could have the most knowledge about any and everything that's already been created, we choose instead to make our "knowledge" narrower and narrower, about things which are finite, and whose application is limited, and in the service and for the benefit of those whose interest is to keep us ignorant and disconnected, atomized, lost, depressed, drugged, surrounded by machines and meaningless objects, buying, buying, more&more, to dull the senses, distract the mind, lose focus; anything but see that we're running around in squares.  Yes squares!  My God 20somethings these days are square in the worst possible way!  Get married quickquick, have kids, get mortgage oweowe bucketsful of money to banks, to schools, quickquick, indebted youth has no time to think, they have to workwork get job makepayment every month!

This entry's organization is a reflection of the topic treated here.

I trust Mankind's potential.  I believe curiosity will prevail, even if at times it looks unlikely.

Today's young... the younger they look the older and more hopeless they are inside.  I wish that they,  like me, may become younger, the older they look.

The Municipal Gallery Revisited

William Butler Yeats

I

Around me the images of thirty years:

An ambush; pilgrims at the water-side;

Casement upon trial, half hidden by the bars,

Guarded; Griffith staring in hysterical pride;

Kevin O'Higgins' countenance that wears

A gentle questioning look that cannot hide

A soul incapable of remorse or rest;

A revolutionary soldier kneeling to be blessed;

II

An Abbot or Archbishop with an upraised hand

Blessing the Tricolour. 'This is not,' I say,

'The dead Ireland of my youth, but an Ireland

The poets have imagined, terrible and gay.'

Before a woman's portrait suddenly I stand,

Beautiful and gentle in her Venetian way.

I met her all but fifty years ago

For twenty minutes in some studio.

III

Heart-smitten with emotion I Sink down,

My heart recovering with covered eyes;

Wherever I had looked I had looked upon

My permanent or impermanent images:

Augusta Gregory's son; her sister's son,

Hugh Lane, 'onlie begetter' of all these;

Hazel Lavery living and dying, that tale

As though some ballad-singer had sung it all;

IV

Mancini's portrait of Augusta Gregory,

'Greatest since Rembrandt,' according to John Synge;

A great ebullient portrait certainly;

But where is the brush that could show anything

Of all that pride and that humility?

And I am in despair that time may bring

Approved patterns of women or of men

But not that selfsame excellence again.

V

My mediaeval knees lack health until they bend,

But in that woman, in that household where

Honour had lived so long, all lacking found.

Childless I thought, 'My children may find here

Deep-rooted things,' but never foresaw its end,

And now that end has come I have not wept;

No fox can foul the lair the badger swept --

VI

(An image out of Spenser and the common tongue).

John Synge, I and Augusta Gregory, thought

All that we did, all that we said or sang

Must come from contact with the soil, from that

Contact everything Antaeus-like grew strong.

We three alone in modern times had brought

Everything down to that sole test again,

Dream of the noble and the beggar-man.

VII

And here's John Synge himself, that rooted man,

'Forgetting human words,' a grave deep face.

You that would judge me, do not judge alone

This book or that, come to this hallowed place

Where my friends' portraits hang and look thereon;

Ireland's history in their lineaments trace;

Think where man's glory most begins and ends,

And say my glory was I had such friends.

TO SIR HENRY WOTTON

John Donne

SIR, more than kisses, letters mingle souls,

For thus, friends absent speak. This ease controls

The tediousness of my life ; but for these

I could ideate nothing which could please ;

But I should wither in one day, and pass

To a bottle of hay, that am a lock of grass.

Life is a voyage, and in our lives' ways

Countries, courts, towns are rocks, or remoras ;

They break or stop all ships, yet our state's such,

That though than pitch they stain worse, we must touch.

If in the furnace of the raging line,

Or under th' adverse icy pole thou pine,

Thou know'st two temperate regions, girded in,

Dwell there ; but O, what refuge canst thou win

Parch'd in the court, and in the country frozen ?

Shall cities built of both extremes be chosen ?

Can dung or garlic be perfume ?   Or can

A scorpion or torpedo cure a man ?

Cities are worst of all three ; of all three ?

O knotty riddle !  ; each is worst equally.

Cities are sepulchres ; they who dwell there

Are carcases, as if no such there were.

And courts are theatres, where some men play

Princes, some slaves, all to one end, of one clay.

The country is a desert, where the good,

Gain'd, inhabits not, born, is not understood.

There men become beasts, and prone to more evils ;

In cities blocks, and in a lewd court devils.

As in the first chaos, confusedly,

Each element's qualities were in th' other three,

So pride, lust, covetise, being several

To these three places, yet all are in all,

And mingled thus, their issue is incestuous.

Falsehood is denizen'd ; virtue is barbarous.

Let no man say there, “ Virtue's flinty wall

Shall lock vice in me, I'll do none, but know all.”

Men are sponges, which, to pour out, receive ;

Who know false play, rather than lose, deceive.

For in best understandings sin began,

Angels sinn'd first, then devils, and then man.

Only perchance beasts sin not ; wretched we

Are beasts in all but white integrity.

I think if men, which in these place live,

Durst look in themselves, and themselves retrieve,

They would like strangers greet themselves, seeing then

Utopian youth grown old Italian.

    Be then thine own home, and in thyself dwell ;

Inn anywhere ; continuance maketh hell.

And seeing the snail, which everywhere doth roam,

Carrying his own house still, still is at home ;

Follow—for he is easy paced—this snail,

Be thine own palace, or the world's thy gaol.

And in the world's sea do not like cork sleep

Upon the water's face ; nor in the deep

Sink like a lead without a line ; but as

Fishes glide, leaving no print where they pass,

Nor making sound ; so closely thy course go,

Let men dispute, whether thou breathe or no.

Only in this be no Galenist—to make

Courts' hot ambitions wholesome, do not take

A dram of country's dullness ; do not add

Correctives, but, as chemics, purge the bad.

But, sir, I advise not you, I rather do

Say o'er those lessons, which I learn'd of you ;

Whom, free from Germany's schisms, and lightness

Of France, and fair Italy's faithlessness,

Having from these suck'd all they had of worth,

And brought home that faith which you carried forth,

I thoroughly love ; but if myself I've won

To know my rules, I have, and you have DONNE.