Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Sehnsucht: An exhibition


This is the unedited version of an article which was commissioned by, and appeared in, Flanders Today. I offer here the original text, which was cut for reasons of space and so on, but which left out several points I considered important in the writing. Posting it here also gives me the opportunity, not available to all newspaper articles, of showing all of the photos I had access to. 

I heartily recommend the exhibition, needless to say. 



The castle of Gaasbeek in Flemish Brabant was originally a fortress of the dukes of Brabant, but the building as we now know it is essentially the romantic creation of a French marquise, Marie Peyrat, widow of Giammartino Arconati-Visconti, whose family had owned the castle since the end of the 18th century. Following damage caused in the Napoleonic period Marie, explains the castle museum's director Luc Vanackere, employed artists and designers from across Europe to convert the castle into an idealised version of a medieval palace – a sort of theatre of history, as he describes it. Marie donated the castle to the Belgian state in 1921, and in 1980 it became a museum of the Flemish community.

All of which explains the background to the castle's current exhibition Sehnsucht: een onstilbaar verlangen (Sehnsucht: An Insatiable Longing). The exhibition, curated by the Dutch writer Oscar van den Boogaard, who now lives in East Flanders, could not have wished for a better home: a theme of yearning for what is lost, in a setting which represents the very same sentiment. Gaasbeek Castle is, in fact, the embodiment in stone and brick of the indistinct notion of Sehnsucht.

Sehnsucht is a German word meaning something like “the sickness of painful longing,” and it's probably most associated with the German Romantic poet and author Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, whose second novel, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (1795-96), contains two poems on the theme, one titled simply Sehnsucht and the other Mignons Sehnsucht.

The word is said to have no exact translation in English, though “longing” and “yearning” seem to fit the bill perfectly well, in context. For Sehnsucht is not a longing for ice-cream or a yearning for the latest iPad. Sehnsucht need have no object at all, or a non-existent or impossible one – such as the universal longing, much exploited by conservative politicians, for a Golden Age that never was. Translation or no, the feeling is universal, and aside from the visual representations shown here, it is the core of much poetry, literature and music. For William Blake, the longing was for a New Jerusalem; for William Wordsworth, the memory of a field of daffodils. Elgar's Enigma Variations are an expression of Sehnsucht, as are the Four Last Songs of Richard Strauss, to name but a few examples.

For Mignon, a character in Goethe's novel, the longing was for Italy – “that land where lemon orchards bloom” – where Goethe spent two years from 1786 to 1788. In the poem titled Sehnsucht, however, the longing is for something more diffuse:

Alone and separated
From all joy,
I look to the vast horizon
On every side.

Not surprisingly, the poem inspired musical settings by Schubert and Tchaikovsky, as well as a composition by Robert Schumann. 



Mignon features in the Gaasbeek exhibition, in a small portrait (photo) from 1850 by the Dutch artist Ary Scheffer in which the (fictional) girl stares into the half-distance somewhere over the viewer's right shoulder – a typical attitude of Sehnsucht. The same distant, melancholy glance is seen in the first portrait in the exhibition (photo), Xteriors VI, by the Dutch photographer Desirée Dolron (whose name could itself be an expression of Sehnsucht) in which an impossibly beautiful young woman with a Victorian hairstyle and dress contemplates something beyond us, both physically and imaginatively. 



That sense of mystery – we are rarely allowed to know what the object is of the yearning expressed in any artwork – allows us to construct our own narrative: is the woman in the painting by the Italian Risorgimento artist Andrea Appiani (photo), in which the young Ginevra gazes out of a window on a ship on the water: her secret lover Ettore is aboard, but is he arriving or departing? Only her servant Zoriade knows. 



The act of gazing out over the water is another common trope in depictions of Sehnsucht, representing Mignon's exile from some imaginary promised land. That's a characteristic it shares with other melancholy genres like Celtic folk music and Portuguese fado, with its underlying sentiment of saudade – a very close relation to Sehnsucht. It appears in a painting by Osbert showing a figure who appears to be Orpheus staring over a wine-dark sea, presumably mourning his separation from Eurydice. 

Orpheus also features in a work by the French academic painter Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret (photo). Towards the end of the exhibition, there's a painting by the English artist Diane Rattray (photo), based on an old holiday snap, in which a young boy, his face turned away from us, stares at an expanse of water; at what, or away from what, we cannot tell.

The most emotionally powerful work in the exhibition, in my view at least, is also a rear view. In Eric Rondepierre's Champs-Elysées (photo) a woman walking away from us in the gardens observes herself, walking in the company of a man. The woman is the artist's mother, who used to visit him on a Sunday when he was in an orphanage, and take him to the cinema. The cinematic photo, in black and white, shows two levels of longing: the boy longs for his mother, while she in turn longs for something else: a lost love, or another life. 



In the photograph by Erwin Olaf, who featured in another recent exhibition at Gaasbeek, the story is more enigmatic. Titled The Mother (photo), it shows a young woman sitting, eyes downcast, in a room done out entirely in white, as indeed is she. In the background, a pram; at the doorway, another boy, with riding-crop and -boots, is on his way out, his face also unseen. We look in vain for some clue: is the doorway the portal between life and death? Is the boy the baby grown and departed? Olaf gives nothing away. 



He's more overt in the other work by him featured here: titled Grief (photo), it shows a young man in an attitude of some despair looking from a window into what appears to be a graveyard. 



While grief might be seen to be the ultimate unquenchable longing, the notion of Sehnsucht also extends to Paradise – the unattainable perfection represented for Mignon by Italy. Two of the greatest epics of literature – John Milton's Paradise Lost and Goethe's Faust – concern themselves with the consequences of seeking to attain the unattainable Paradise: for Faust, the essence of life; for Lucifer, dominion over God.

It's not all doom and gloom, however. The Chinese artist Yang Jiechang takes a satirical look at Heaven in his work Stranger than Paradise, in which the animals and humans of the Ark, arrayed on a series of perspex cubes which could be water or could be air (the artist says they represent human cities) indulge in a riotous orgy of inter-species copulation. The small terra cotta figures seem to have stepped right out of a work by Hieronymous Bosch, whose most famous work, now known as The Garden of Earthly Delights, contains scenes of human-animal congress both in Heaven and in Hell.

There's also humour in the work by Flemish artist Wim Delvoye (photo), a sculpture in wood of a cement mixer, painted to look as if it were made of Wedgewood china, as if harking back to an imaginary time when building-site materials were of a nobler sort. And Physical Cosmology (photo) by the German artist Carola Mücke, an installation of light and sound, has to be seen (and especially heard) to be appreciated. 



Sehnsucht: een onstilbaar verlangen runs at Gaasbeek Castle until 11 November, daily except Mondays, from 10.00 to 18.00. www.kasteelvangaasbeek.be

Saturday, August 25, 2012

Ghost village life




















A plaque on the wall in the village of Lillo-Fort in the area of the port of Antwerp, commemorating the life of Theresia Eyer née Gorsen, who was born in one vanished village, and died in another. Were it not for this plaque, there would likely be no record of her remaining.

Allow me to explain.

The village of Oorderen is first referred to in 1116. 850 years later it no longer exists, havng been evacuated and razed to the ground in 1965 to make way for the expansion of the port of Antwerp. Where Oorderen used to stand is now the former plant of Opel Antwerp, now itself lying disused, and the Antwerp-North railway training station. Of Oorderen nothing remains; of the neighbouring village of Wilmarsdonk, also razed in 1965, a lonely church steeple standing alone surrounded by stacked shipping containers.


Lillo, meanwhile, also largely disappeared as a result of expansion of port facilities. The town was first known, by the name of Lindelo, in the ninth century, and in succeeding centuries became a thriving community. Until 1966, when the demands of trade took over. All that remains of Lillo now is the tiny centre known as Lillo-Fort, built in 1579 to strengthen the defences of the Scheldt river from an expected Spanish attack. Antwerp itself fell in 1585, but the fort remained in the hands of the Netherlandish resistants. You can still see the church, the former barracks and the gunpowder magazine, as well as this house, where Theresia Eyer-Gorsen's plaque is displayed.


The inhabitants of what remains of Lillo now number 30 -- and a lot of tourists.

So much for the passage of Theresia Eyer-Gorsen, from one vanished village to another, and thence herself to eternity. What do we know of her?

Maria Theresia Gorsen was born, as we read, in 1819, and married André Eyer, a customs official, with whom she had seven children. She earned the nickname Moederke Eyer (Ma Eyer) because of her advanced age. On her centenary in 1919 she received a parade and a visit from King Albert I. Five years later Prince Leopold, later to become King Leopold III, showed up, as mentioned on the plaque. Moederke Eyer died in October that same year. She was buried in Lillo cemetery, and a statue raised outside the church. The statue has moved to Lillo-Fort, and her grave was moved in 1960 to the Schoonselhof cemetery in Antwerp city, in the company of poet Herman De Coninck, writer Willem Elsschot, cartoonish Jef Nys and singer La Esterella.


And still the disappearances go on. Across the river from Lillo is the village of Doel, whose fate has also been declared to be to vanish to make way for further port developments, this time on the left bank of the river, where the potential for expansion is still enormous. Doel is in the news right now because of problems at the nuclear power station (seen in the photo from the Lillo side). Just south of the station is the village proper, where the residents and their supporters refuse to give in to the bulldozers. Their protests have been both physical and judicial, and the issue drags on. Unfortunately, the ultimate result is certain to be what the villagers fear, as their neighbours in Oorderen, Wilmarsdonk, Oosterweel and Lillo feared before them. In 20 years, Doel will be no more than some picture postcards, forgotten websites and blog posts like this one, and somewhere, perhaps, a plaque or a gravestone commemorating someone whose home it once was, but who is now, like Theresia Gorsen, exiled in death.

(Photo of Wilmarsdonk church by LimoWreck/Wikimedia Commons)

Saturday, January 28, 2012

Let Me Enjoy

Let Me Enjoy by Thomas Hardy
Minor Key

I

Let me enjoy the earth no less
Because the all-enacting Might
That fashioned forth its loveliness
Had other aims than my delight.

II

About my path there flits a Fair,
Who throws me not a word or sign;
I'll charm me with her ignoring air,
And laud the lips not meant for mine.

III

From manuscripts of moving song
Inspired by scenes and dreams unknown
I'll pour out raptures that belong
To others, as they were my own.

IV

And some day hence, towards Paradise
And all its blest -- if such should be --
I will lift glad, afar-off eyes
Though it contain no place for me.

Sunday, September 18, 2011

Hamlet, Act I, Scene 2, search and replace

 87  'Tis sweet and commendable in your nature, Hamlet,
 88   To give these mourning duties to your mother:
 89   But, you must know, your father lost a mother;
 90   That mother lost, lost hers, and the survivor bound
 91   In filial obligation for some term
 92   To do obsequious sorrow: but to persever
 93   In obstinate condolement is a course
 94   Of impious stubbornness; 'tis unmanly grief;
 95   It shows a will most incorrect to heaven,
 96   A heart unfortified, a mind impatient,
 97   An understanding simple and unschool'd:
 98   For what we know must be and is as common
 99   As any the most vulgar thing to sense,
100   Why should we in our peevish opposition
101   Take it to heart? Fie! 'tis a fault to heaven,
102   A fault against the dead, a fault to nature,
103   To reason most absurd: whose common theme
104   Is death of mothers, and who still hath cried,
105   From the first corse till she that died to-day,
106   "This must be so."[...]

Who knows where the time goes?

In the small Flemish town of Poperinge yesterday they were having a Hops Festival. I was in town visiting Talbot House as part of a battlefields tour including Tyne Cot Cemetery, just one of many memorials in that area to a generation of boys and men slaughtered for ... what?

I'm standing there drinking a very hoppy beer when a man approaches and asks if he may take my picture. Surprised, I agree. He asks for my email address and moves on. Later I see him again, he snaps me again and explains he's studying photography at the academy in Bruges, and this is for a project called "Strangers Passing".

The same evening the two photos landed in my mailbox. God, I'm an old guy. I can no longer look at pictures of myself, because the naked reality they contain is just too much in conflict with my whole view of the world. I'm not the person you see when you look at me, and it horrifies me that you could make such a terrible mistake.

I have a friend who's 62, and I consider him an old man, but the difference between us is less than half the years that separate me -- in the other direction -- from Zoltan, my Hungarian friend I visited last week. He's more like my contemporary, except in actual fact.

Last Sunday, as I flew home from Budapest, would have been Daniel's birthday, September 11. He would have been 35, a fact that's simply too unlikely to contemplate. As it turns out, he never made it to 35, and never will. As the ceremony reminded us later at Ieper, and as it does every evening: 
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years contemn.

Above the square in Poperinge, the birds swooped and wheeled. Autumn is arrived, the season for old men. But a life is not a cycle; it is a wheel that turns in only one direction.

The birds are evoked in the first line of this song by Sandy Denny, who dies aged only 23. There are many versions her singing her own song on YouTube, but as I said in a post on Both Sides Now, the words better suit an older voice.



Update: my brother called this evening. My mother died this afternoon, no immediate COD. Autumn turns to winter in the space of a few hours. I put off going home when I should have. Then one day, the last opportunity is lost.



Tuesday, April 19, 2011

No jokes about faggots

Science is full of jokes: the chameleon; the eyes on a butterfly's wings or a peacock's tail; the light which burns on our retina from a star which has not existed for millions of years; the fact that the testicles, upon which all human life depends, have to be stored outside the body's protection, or they get too hot.

Christianity only has one joke:

Matthew 16:13-20

13When Jesus came into the coasts of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, saying, Whom do men say that I the Son of man am?

14And they said, Some say that thou art John the Baptist: some, Elias; and others, Jeremias, or one of the prophets.

15He saith unto them, But whom say ye that I am?

16And Simon Peter answered and said, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.

17And Jesus answered and said unto him, Blessed art thou, Simon Barjona: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven.

18And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.

19And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.

20Then charged he his disciples that they should tell no man that he was Jesus the Christ.

A stupid pun on the word Petrus, in Latin, or if you like Kephas, in Greek, which it's unlikely Jesus, had he existed, would have appreciated.

The Jews, not surprisingly, have more, but only two: the sacrifice demanded of Abraham, when God popped out and went, "Only kidding!" And the Book of Job, which most fans of comedy would admit goes a bit too far -- farther even than Frankie Boyle.

Humanists can laugh at themselves. Scientists even make it a tenet of their activity: if you can prove my thesis wrong, I'll laugh at myself and move on. That's the scientific method.

The faithful don't have that facility. It will be remarked that aside from Jesus' stupid pun, the only jokes in the Judeo-Christian tradition we all hear about are of an extreme cruelty, and while that's not a bar to comedy -- see Fawlty Towers -- it doesn't exactly signal a group of people at ease with their philosophy.

Perhaps that's why the Vatican likes to burn heretics: it doesn't get the joke.

Sunday, March 27, 2011

Loneliness

The last year's leaves are on the beech:
The twigs are black; the cold is dry;
To deeps byond the deepest reach
The Easter bells enlarge the sky.
O ordered metal clatter-clang!
Is yours the song the angels sang?
You fill my heart with joy and grief -
Belief! Belief! And unbelief...
And, though you tell me I shall die,
You say not how or when or why.

Indifferent the finches sing,
Unheeding roll the lorries past:
What misery will this year bring
Now spring is in the air at last?
For, sure as blackthorn bursts to snow,
Cancer in some of us will grow,
The tasteful crematorium door
Shuts out for some the furnace roar;
But church-bells open on the blast
Our loneliness, so long and vast.




















John Betjeman