The Narrative Within

Moonstruck

Posted on August 31, 2023 by Art for Housewives

The loud music was keeping us awake. Finally, around 2 a.m., we decided to go out and search for the culprit. That’s why we were out on the streets with a flashlight. But there was no need as the moon was extraordinarily bright. It was also a bit lopsided. As an experienced moon gazer, I could detect a slice of peach colored light coming from behind one side of the moon. It was Saturn. The two celestial bodies, sharing the same longitude in the sky, were in conjunction. The moon, although in front of Saturn, is smaller and unable to completely hide Saturn’s presence. And that’s what created the distortion.

The moon’s gravitational force is modified by Saturn’s presence. And, as Hurricane Idalia is on its way, there’s the fear that this conjunction can dramatically rise the tides.

This past week I have been feeling a bit strange and waking up earlier than usual without understanding why. But seeing how Saturn was cheating the moon out of its perfect roundness, I began remembering what’s said about Saturn and its modifying capacities.

In astrology, Saturn has a reputation of being a bit domineering. In space it helps steer dangerous asteroids from Earth. But for those of us still on the ground, Saturn can cause much turbulence. In medical astronomy, Saturn rules the bones so that explains why my knees have been hurting all week especially considering that, as a Capricorn, I am governed by Saturn.

Since Saturn makes you weird, it is the planet most associated with creative people. So much so that art historians, Margot and Rudolf Wittkower, wanted to see if it were true. In Born Under Saturn, they explored the idea that artistic inspiration is a form of madness directly expressed in the artists’ unhappy and eccentric lives. The couple concluded that if an artist was wacko, it wasn’t Saturn’s fault.

Many of the stereotypes related to artists and creativity were instigated by men. Plato differentiated between clinical insanity and creative insanity. Renaissance philosopher Marsilio Ficino believed that the artist, thanks to his senses, was enraptured by divine frenzy. Whereas Proust believed that everything great in the world came from neurotics.

Lunar markings on prehistoric bone fragments indicate that women were tracking their menstrual cycles in correlation with the phases of the moon (both moon and menstrual cycles are c. 29.5 days.). The most famous such calendar is the Ishango Bone. The etchings on the bone indicate a knowledge of simple mathematics leading Claudia Zaslavsky, mathematician and civil rights activist, to believe that women were the first mathematicians.

The Moon and the Earth exert a gravitational pull one on the other. This pull affects ocean tides so when the moon is full, the tides are higher. Just as the moon affects ocean tides, it also affects the tide of our menstrual cycle. Maybe that’s why, once upon a time, women better understood that there exists a relationship between ourselves and the universe. It was this symbiosis with mother nature that elevated women to the role of goddesses. Unfortunately, that changed with patriarchal dominance.

Considering the negative effect this patriarchal dominance has had on nature, Ladies, don’t you think it’s time we go back to being goddesses once again?

Bibliography:

Wittkower, Margot and Wittkower, Rudolf. Born Under Saturn. Random House. New York. 1963. (You can find it on archive.org HERE)

Related: See Saturn snuggle up to the Super Blue Moon in the night sky tonight + Michelangelo’s uncelebrated birthday and uncertain death + Leonardo and Michelangelo: the astrological significance + Metaformic Theory + Ishango bone + Claudia Zaslavsky + Were Women The First Mathematicians In Ancient Africa? Video + Lebombo bone, calendar stick with 29 notches +

Supermoon could team up with Hurricane Idalia to raise tides higher just as the storm makes landfall + How the Lunar Cycle Affects Women +

Posted in Ecofeminism, Paros, storytelling | Tagged artists, astrology, Blue Moon, bone calendar, Born Under Saturn, Claudia Zaslavsky, gravitational pull, Hurricane Idalia, Ishango Bone, mathematics, menstrual cycle, moon, Rudolph Wittakower, Saturn, tides | 4 Comments

Hotel du Lac

Posted on August 29, 2023 by Art for Housewives

I’m halfway finished reading Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner. Yesterday I watched the film based on the book. The story is somewhat sad and unresolved. Now I’m not sure that I want to finish the book.

Hotel du Lac is the story of Edith Hope (that last name tells it all) who is having an affair with a married man, David. One day Edith shows up at a party and finds David there with his wife. Edith watches the couple who seem to be very affectionate. They’re talking about their vacation plans. Crushed, Edith decides to accept the marriage proposal of a decent but boring man. However, on the way to her wedding, she freaks out. As she’s about to pass in front of the church where everyone is waiting for her, she realizes she can’t marry the decent but boring guy so she tells the cab driver not to stop and to keep on driving. Her wanna be husband sees her drive by and is humiliated. Her friends, scandalized by Edith’s behavior, insist that she leave town for a while. Edith, not feeling that she has much of a choice, leaves for Switzerland to stay at a fading hotel on Lake Geneva. It is off-season and the few guests there seem to be just as displaced as Edith is.

The format that Brookner generally uses in her novels is that of having the protagonist, a lonely spinster, look for a place to safely anchor. But is marriage a solution? Many of the hotel guests at Hotel du Lac are married or have been married. But the kind of relationships they’ve had with their mates makes me think of an Italian expression “meglio soli che mal accompagnati”—better alone than badly accompanied. Mrs. Pursley, now widowed, is suffocating her daughter’s independence just to keep from being alone. Mme de Bonneuil, also widowed, has been evicted from her home by her son and daughter-in-law because they can’t be bothered with an elderly woman. Monica is very beautiful but hasn’t produced an heir. Her husband tells her to become fertile or prepare to be dumped. Mr. Neville is charming and rich but that didn’t keep his wife from running off with a much younger man.

A basic insecurity shared by Anita’s protagonists is that a woman can’t be happy on her own. But marriage doesn’t necessarily protect you from solitude. A relationship is no promise of a happy life.

It wasn’t until she was 53 that she began writing novels. Anita’s prose is clean-cut and crisp. She also has the capacity to observe people with forensic accuracy. Afterall, she was an art historian and wrote about art. And to write about art, you must be good at describing.

In her novels, Anita often makes references to art. In Hotel du Lac, David is seen in his auction room selling a painting attributed to Francesco Furini, “Time Revealing Truth.” When I saw Furini’s name, I flashed back to the first time I saw one of his paintings. It was “Santa Lucia” at the Galleria Spada in Rome. The painting shows a woman with her back turned from the viewer. She is holding up a pair of eyes.

Lucia of Syracuse died during the Diocletianic persecution. And it was basically the fault of her beauty and of her family’s wealth. After the death of her father, Lucia’s mom, Eutychia, wanted to make sure that her daughter would be taken care of in the future so she arranged a marriage between Lucia and a young man from a wealthy pagan family. But unknown to her, Lucia had already consecrated her virginity to God and had no intentions of marrying.

When Eutychia suffered from a bleeding disorder, Lucia took her to Catania to pray at the shrine of St. Agatha. Once her mom was cured, Licia convinced her to convert and distribute their wealth among the poor. But Lucia’s suitor was afraid that all his fiancée’s patrimony would be given away with nothing left for him. So he squealed to the governor that Lucia was a Christian. The governor ordered Lucia to make an offering to the governor and, when she refused, he sentenced her to be defiled at a brothel. The guards came to take Lucia away but they were unable to move her. They even tried to set her on fire but she wouldn’t burn. Finally, they thrusted a sword into her throat and Lucia died.

Lucia is known as the saint without the eyes. It’s not known if she poked them out herself so her suitor wouldn’t want her anymore or because, before her death, she was tortured by eye gouging. But when Lucia’s body was taken to the family tomb, it was discovered that her eyes had been miraculously restored. And for this she is now considered the patron saint of the blind.

Lucia’s relics were scattered around—Venice, Sicily, Rome, etc. In 1981, thieves stole her bones from San Geremia in Venice but the relics were recovered in time for her feast day, December 13.

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Hotel du Lac, the book on Archive.org

Hotel du Lac, the film on YouTube

Posted in Books | Tagged Anita Brookner, Francesco Furini, Galleria Spads, Hotel du Lac, loneliness, Santa Lucia, women writers | Leave a comment

A Life of Lacunae

Posted on August 28, 2023 by Art for Housewives

It’s 9 a.m. and the cicadas are having a loud and lively jam session. It is understandable. They spend the first 17 years of their life underground then come out to mate. It’s the males that make all the noise hoping to attract a female. The hotter the day, the louder the sound. If the female likes the noise being made, she will make clicking sounds with her wings indicating that she’s available. Once an attraction is established, the cicadas mate, lay their eggs, then die.

I’m sitting on the terrace where I’ve just finished reading Anita Brookner’s A Start in Life. I wanted to reflect on the book but the sound of the cicadas distracted me. So my thoughts about the book and about the cicadas got jumbled together.

Anita Brookner (1928-2016) was born in London but her father was a Polish-Jew immigrant whose family name “Bruckner” was changed to “Brookner” because of Britain’s anti-German sentiments. Her mother was a concert singer who gave up her career to marry and was never happy again. Her parents were always busy orbiting around themselves having no time for their daughter. So Anita grew up feeling that her parents were always in another room.

As fiction gives you the chance to inhabit a life not your own, Anita read books to keep her company. Nevertheless, Anita would later say that she was one of the loneliest women in London.

Anita studied art history. And while working on her doctorate at Courtauld Institute of Art, she studied under the guidance of art historian and spy, Anthony Blunt. Her career progressed and she wrote several books on art. Thanks to Blunt, she eventually began teaching at the Courtauld. Anita was very grateful to Blunt and often had cocktails with him at his apartment at the Institute. But this was obviously not enough to make her feel complete.

In 1979, Blunt was publicly exposed as a Soviet spy by Margaret Thatcher. So Queen Elizabeth stripped him of his knighthood. Who knows how this affected Anita but shortly afterwards, she stopped writing about art history and began writing fiction. Her first novel, A Start in Life (1981), autobiographical, was written when she was 53.

In an autobiographical novel, you can write about yourself as if you’re someone else. Anita says she started writing because of a terrible feeling of helplessness. Writing about her life made her feel as if she had more control over it.

A Start in Life gets its title from an obscure novel by Balzac, Un Début dans la vie (1842), a study on vanity and its consequences. Anita wrote her book in a moment of sadness and desperation. She felt she was losing control and thought maybe by writing her story, by giving her life the proper narrative, she could get a feeling of control. Anita said writing the novel was an exercise in self-analysis. Although writing is a very lonely activity, it can make you more observant.

The protagonist, Ruth Weiss, “at 40 knew that her life had been ruined by literature.” She lived much of her life in books and not in the outside world.

Ruth’s life is basically a description of Anita’s—parents who had no business having children as they themselves refused to grow up. Her DIY childhood led to much insecurity. Ruth studies, gets a scholarship to study in France but cannot complete her studies there as her parents have crumbled and want her home to care for them. Ruth is thus forced to leave Paris and go back to the life that she wanted to escape. Back in London, she molds her life around the needs of her parents trying to patch up the holes in her beige and boring life by writing and teaching.

After the publication of A Start in Life, Anita continued to write novels publishing one every year. She’s been criticized as being too repetitive, that all her novels seem to focus on unhappy spinsters who are lonely and have the knack of falling for unsuitable men. Because what had started out as an autobiographical novel became a universal theme—how we displace ourselves just hoping to fit in somewhere.

Why is it that some people feel more comfortable with their lives than others? Why is it that some people are better at conforming than others? Why is it that some people have difficulty being the protagonist of their own life? Because in A Start in Life, we are given the impression that some people’s lives are determined for them as opposed to by them.

Like Ruth, Anita cared for her parents until their death. She never married to create a family of her own. Anita died at the age of 87. Childless, she didn’t ha someone to help her as she had helped her parents.

Related: Anita Brookner Interview with Maggie Gee 1984 + Why and How to Read: Anita Brookner + Anita Brookner obituary + Julian Barnes remembers his friend Anita Brookner: ‘There was no one remotely like her’ + Anita Brookner, The Art of Fiction No. 98 + In Praise of Anita Brookner + Anita Brookner’s Undue Influence + The Brooknerian Blog about Anita Brookner +

Anthony Blunt, Spy who came in from the Courtauld + A KGB Spy Worked in Buckingham Palace For Decades. The Crown Only Tells Part of the Story +

Robert Adam and N. 20 Portman House (original home of the Courtauld)

A START IN LIFE on Archive HERE

Billions and Billions of Periodical Cicadas +

Bibliography:

Malcolm, Cheryl Alexander. Understanding Anita Brookner. University of South Carolina Press. Columbia, South Carolina. 2002.

Sadler, Lynn Veach. Anita Brookner. Twayne Publisher. Boston. 1990.

Posted in Books, People | Tagged A Start in Life, Anita Brookner, Anthony Blunt, Art History, Balzac, Courtauld Institute, loneliness | 2 Comments

Takis Varvitsiotis, poet

Posted on August 26, 2023 by Art for Housewives

Today I am a wanderer. I am wandering around my books, my plants, my unfinished projects. While wandering I came across a book of Greek poetry (with translation of course) that I bought in Athens 30 years ago. Only a few poems had been read maybe because, although I love the idea of poetry, I often find its meaning too hermetically sealed for me.

It’s 9 o’clock and my morning is slipping away. Before it’s gone, I’ve decided to look at the poems of Takis Varvitsiotis (1916-2011). Varvitsiotis was born in Thessaloniki where he studied law. But he preferred poetry. A Greek poet of the post-war generation, his first poetry collection “Sleeping Leaves” (“φύλλα ύπνου“) was published in 1949. Although I found little information on him, apparently he was highly translated into other languages and considered “a connoisseur of lyric art”.

I will not try to understand his poetry. But I will copy lines from three different poems that created nice images in my head.