In praise of dragonflies

Exactly a year ago I started this blog with a piece in praise of crows, which mentioned that greatest of crow-poets, Ted Hughes. So today, in celebration of the Invective anniversary, I give you dragonflies, and Hughes again. On a walk over Blaxhall Common this morning, I encountered (along with my fellow poets Anne Berkeley and Sue Rose, who took the picture) this fine male Emperor, Anax imperator. Sometimes a thing is so perfect, so beautiful in itself that you don’t need to write about it; it’s just there, making a simple walk significant. And you couldn’t do better than this poem, which is all about the issues of trying to capture nature in art (but Hughes manages to nail it, of course):

 

How To Paint A Water Lily

A green level of lily leaves
Roofs the pond’s chamber and paves

The flies’ furious arena: study
These, the two minds of this lady.

First observe the air’s dragonfly
That eats meat, that bullets by

Or stands in space to take aim;
Others as dangerous comb the hum

Under the trees. There are battle-shouts
And death-cries everywhere hereabouts

But inaudible, so the eyes praise
To see the colours of these flies

Rainbow their arcs, spark, or settle
Cooling like beads of molten metal

Through the spectrum. Think what worse
is the pond-bed’s matter of course;

Prehistoric bedragoned times
Crawl that darkness with Latin names,

Have evolved no improvements there,
Jaws for heads, the set stare,

Ignorant of age as of hour—
Now paint the long-necked lily-flower

Which, deep in both worlds, can be still
As a painting, trembling hardly at all

Though the dragonfly alight,
Whatever horror nudge her root.

 

Rag and Bone Shop (The Cabinet of Curiosities)

As someone who is fascinated by objects and their provenance (and has great difficulty getting rid of things I can no longer justify the need to keep) I feel a great affinity with collectors. There is something obsessive about a collection that focuses on one specific item or theme, for example, collections of Elvis memorabilia or Susie Cooper polka dot china (but only in blue). I like that kind of single-mindedness. For those collectors, the joy of collecting is in the search, the striving for completion (mixed with a secret desire never to complete, for to complete would mean there would be nothing more to search for).

I am a great admirer of Francis Alÿs’s Fabiola installation, which I saw at the National Portrait Gallery in 2009, and which has toured the world – this strange collection of over 300 images of Saint Fabiola, a 4th century Roman matron. Two aspects of the installation impressed me: 1. All the images of the saint are identically posed, based on a nineteenth-century French Salon painting, ironically now lost; 2. The artist spent fifteen years trawling flea markets and junk shops all over the world seeking out these images, rendered in a variety of genres, and all by amateur painters and craftspeople. It is Alÿs’s singular and obsessive act of collecting that most moves me; his search for this (not so) obscure saint, this one image of her copied and copied again, and then presented by him in one place. A world conference of Fabiolas. So I was thrilled on my recent trip to the Saturday market in Bruges to find my first Fabiola, in the form of an oval brooch. I resisted buying it, just in case Alÿs has an itch to add to his collection. It was enough just for me to see one out of the context of his installation. Presumably, once you start looking, you see them everywhere …

And you start to wonder how they got to where you found them. Flea markets are a great place to ponder this question. Things travel from one corner of the world to another, in suitcases or pockets. Some things never lose their power, even out of context. At the Saturday market in Bruges, I was momentarily halted in my tracks by the sight of a selection of Nazi memorabilia spread out innocently on a rug on the grass, part of a more general and random selection of goods offered by a jovial middle-aged Belgian dealer. Objects tainted by association. I had recently finished reading the excellent book The Hare with Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal, so as I wandered the stalls, his summary of the life of objects came to mind:

How objects are handled is all about story-telling. I am giving you this because I love you. Or because it was given to me. Because I bought it somewhere special. Because you will care for it. Because it will complicate your life. Because it will make someone else envious. There is no easy story in legacy. What is remembered and what is forgotten? There can be a chain of forgetting, the rubbing away of previous ownership as much as the slow accretion of stories.

Of course, his inheritance, the collection of netsuke which is at the centre of the book, was hidden (under a mattress) from the Nazis who invaded his great-grandfather’s mansion in Vienna; so they are linked by history to these grim Nazi souvenirs (one of the less attractive aspects of our collecting culture – the need to grab trophies from those we’ve defeated).

As a collector whose habits are both specific (Chinese ginger jars and mid-century Scandinavian pots) and random (anything that catches my eye, from a rat’s skull to a Victorian grave marker), I appreciate the need to surround oneself with curiosities; objects which represent the variety of the world. I have always liked the idea of a wunderkammer, a cabinet (or in Renaissance times, a whole room) which would gather objects both man-made and natural, ancient and rare, works of art or geological samples.

Or even things common and ordinary. The best (and most obsessive) book on this type of ephemeral collecting is Collections of Nothing by William Davies King, in which he lists (over two pages) all the varieties of tuna fish for which he has collected labels from their cans. It is crazy, but also fascinating, as a way of recording how we branded and packaged items for sale at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Of no value now, but in years to come …

Eavan Boland describes one of her poems as ‘a small inventory of my views’. Perhaps poems are also a way of gathering these disparate objects together, another kind of ‘cabinet’. I will leave you with a quote from William Davies King’s book:

Collecting is a way of linking past, present, and future. Objects from the past get collected in the present to preserve them for the future. Collecting processes presence, meanwhile articulating the mysteries of desire. What people wanted and did not want drives what collectors want and do not want in anticipation of what future collectors will want or will not want. The mathematical formula connecting these equations of desire is mysterious and difficult …

The painter and his wife (a study in metaphor)

One thing I learned as an undergraduate art history student sitting in a darkened lecture theatre as Dr Forte projected endless slides of Renaissance Italian altarpieces onto the screen is that a rose is never just a rose. I was reminded of this yesterday while listening to a radio discussion on flower symbolism in Victorian times, and how even a slight modulation of hue could send a subtle message; for example, everyone knows a red rose symbolises love, but a deep red rose is the symbol of shame. At one time everyone understood a common symbolic language, in the days before absolutely everything could be stated, and whatever could be said (or overheard, considering the current phone hacking scandals) could also be broadcast in all forms of media.

For many years I’ve been fascinated by the painting of the Arnolfini Wedding by Jan van Eyck. From the time I first saw it, projected onto the lecture theatre screen, I was intrigued by what I’ve always understood as the subtext, in other words, the stuff going on around the couple. There is so much to take in: the dog (fidelity), the clogs (faith), the oranges on the window sill (wealth), the single candle in the chandelier (the marriage ceremony). There is also the burning question as to whether the bride is pregnant (which I even covered once in a poem); although I suspect she isn’t, her pose suggests that of the Madonna, and the possibility that in the not-too-distant future she will be with (Giovanni Arnolfini’s) child. They are, after all, posed next to a bed draped in bright red (no mistaking the meaning there). But the most striking feature is the convex mirror, which sits dead centre in the picture, actually coming between the happy couple. In it we see the reflection of their backs and of two other figures, one of whom was no doubt the priest, the other the painter himself, and above it, his signature and the date, like graffiti on the wall. A simple way of demonstrating that the artist was witness to the ceremony. But an odd intervention nonetheless, and one which shows the dexterity of the painter, to show all four figures present in such a small space. I think of that other convex mirror of Parmigianino and Ashbery’s famous lines: the soul is not a soul, / Has no secret, is small, and it fits / Its hollow perfectly: its room, our moment of attention.

The Master of Frankfurt painted the double portrait of himself and his young wife some 60 years later. When I saw it a few weeks ago at the MAS in Antwerp, the first thing I noticed was not the faces of the couple, but the beautifully-rendered fly sitting on his wife’s wimple. It is possibly the finest fly in the whole of the history of art, and very large indeed in proportion to the figures. There is another fly and a smaller insect inspecting the plate of cherries in front of them (I’ve already done cherries in a previous post; we know what they mean), but the Master wants us to notice this one, standing proud against the pure white wimple. Of course it was common in Netherlandish art of the period to include insects and reptiles in paintings, especially in still life scenes, partly to show off the talent of the artist; it has been suggested that the artist painted the fly so that it looked as if it was on the surface and at its actual size, so the viewer might be tricked into thinking it was a real fly that had alighted on the canvas. A clever deception, a trompe l'oeil. But I suggest this fly means something more. The artist’s wife bears a sprig of violet; there are violets in the vase at her side, and in the gilt foliage above their heads (which also holds the emblem for the painters’ guild of St Luke). The violet is a symbol of fidelity and modesty, thought to ward off evil spirits. So perhaps the fly is present as a symbol of death, decay, threat, and the violet is an offering to keep the couple safe. Death was never far away in the 1400s (I’ve often wondered about the single candle in the chandelier above the heads of Mr and Mrs Arnolfini) but despite the fly, the Master and his wife seem happy and in love, the violet held forward as their declaration.

Ostend and the World

In 1905 the Austrian author Stefan Zweig wrote an essay describing the summer season in Ostend, which was then the North Sea’s answer to Monte Carlo. He speaks of the elegant women promenading on the front, the delicate art nouveau architecture. Zweig was in Ostend when Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in 1914, heralding the beginning of WWI. The Germans were to capture the port, as well as most of the Belgian coast, the following year. Although Ostend suffered extensive damage, ‘La Reine des Plages’ made a comeback as the premier jazz age resort of Northern Europe. But WWII was to bring greater destruction and an end to the concept of the ‘summer season’. It is a place that represents a way of life which no longer exists.

The Ostend you see today still retains traces of its glory, in blocks of Deco flats skirting the Digue like ocean liners, in sweeping Horta balconies above betting shops and chain stores. It is like so many once-grand British seaside resorts; but where places like Blackpool survive on kitsch, and Folkestone and Margate attempt to reinvent themselves as art destinations, Ostend strikes me as irredeemably depressing. 

I suspect the Flemish day-trippers around me don’t share my view. On a slightly overcast August Saturday, they come pouring off the train, groups of girls tottering in skyscraper heels ready to hit the shops, and men with tattoos and cans. They remind me of the hoards that pack the sandy beach in James Ensor’s drawings (modern-day versions of Breughel’s village scenes).  Ensor is the most famous son of Ostend; an artist who remained faithful to the place that gave him his vision. He would have seen it in its heyday, and watched its decline. He never decamped to Paris or the States; although by the end of his life he was famous (the Belgian government made him a Baron). He stayed in Ostend, in a flat over the souvenir shop his mother ran selling carnival masks and shells. After his death in 1949, the shop and flat were opened as a museum. It is his museum that has brought me here.

I have been a fan of Ensor’s work for nearly 30 years. He is like no other artist, in his mix of the figurative and the surreal, the broadly comic (which comes from his Flemish roots; but also from his English roots, and the tradition of Hogarth and Gilray) and the morbidly serious. Here is a world of colour and carnival, but in the centre of it, death and loneliness. In his greatest work, the monumental ‘The Entry of Christ into Brussels’, the tiny figure of Jesus is isolated, alone, almost lost (like ‘Where’s Wally?’) in the tapestry of humanity cramming the streets. The reason for the celebration becomes sidelined by the desperate need to be part of the crowd. 

To be honest, the house is an enormous disappointment. There is something shabby and sad about the place. Screenprint reproductions of his paintings line the walls, the real thing shipped to grander galleries (his paintings ended up seeing the world the artist never visited). There is his harmonium, the easel where he painted, but in the dark Edwardian gloom, it is impossible to see how anyone could be inspired.  

Unless of course your message is all about isolation, like that tiny figure no longer central to most people’s lives. The masks the artist’s mother sold from the downstairs shop keep appearing, as if you could change your identity, become someone else, by wearing one. Skeletons dance and put on frilly hats, but they are there as a reminder. He lived here all alone for the last third of his life, and watched the world change from one tiny lace curtained window.  

Ostend speaks to me of failure. A place of grandeur struck down by one war, which lifted itself up, only to be practically leveled by another. And now it has given up. While I stand on the Digue, looking out over the sea towards England, riots are brewing in London, which will spread, like the fires the rioters light, to other cities. I wonder what Ensor would have made of the world now.