The Goldfinch, Carel Fabritius

'And in this staunch little portrait, it's hard not to see the human in the finch. Dignified, vulnerable... But who knows what Fabritius intended? There's not enough of his work left to even make a guess. The bird looks out at us. It's not idealised or humanised. It's very much a bird. Watchful, resigned. There's no moral or story. There's no resolution. There's only a double abyss: between painter and imprisoned bird; between the record he left of the bird and our experience of it, centuries later'. Donna Tart, The Goldfinch

 

The Goldfinch, by Carel Fabritiius, 1654, at the Maurithuis
                                     

A goldfinch is sitting on its feeder, chained by its foot. A simple, but totally compelling painting. One of the few works we know by Fabritius. He was killed in a massive gunpowder explosion that wrecked 17th century Delft. When the painter perished, so did most of his art, but from the few of his remaining works we know that he promised to match Vermeer and Rembrandt.

If you look closely The Goldfinch,  it's just a collection of brushstrokes - you can almost count each one. If you step back however, the paint becomes a living thing. It's a master class in technique, an expert manipulation of paint to suggest form and texture.  Fabritius depicted the wing in thick yellow paint, which he scratched with the handle of his brush.                                                               

The painting is tiny. The bird in the painting is actual size. Seeing the painting hung high on the wall, the size of the bird and the angle of its two perches could easily persuade your eye that you are seeing a real goldfinch. It's an elaborate trompe l'oeil trick, part of the painting's spell.

 

 

Theo, the main character in Donna Tart's novel, comes to this conclusion at the end of the novel: 

 

'I've come to believe that there's no truth beyond illusion. Because, between 'reality' on the one hand, and the point where the mind strikes reality, there's a middle zone, a rainbow edge where beauty comes into being, where two very different surfaces mingle and blur to provide what life does not: and this is the space where all art exists, and all magic'.

 

It's that middle zone that the Goldfinch occupies.

 

Liked!
view quote

Book launch

 

Road Trip, by Tatiana Tzinioli.

My niece Tatiana Tzinioli has just published her second book - a contemporary love story which deals with a lot of issues that are pertinent today, written with compassion and humour.

We attended the publisher's launch event in Athens. The venue: Polyhoros Aition.

The event was extremely well attended

 

in a café/bar

 

 

 



 

 

that combined arty elements

 

 

 

 



 

with kitsch - a combination that, surprisingly,  worked really well.

 

 

 

 

 

We were able to buy copies of the novel before the presentation

Tatiana Tzinioli spoke first, giving us a background to the novel and then three other writers made  thoughtful contributions

and then we had our copies signed

 

 

 

here, her partner, Michalis, is begging Tatiana to sign a copy.

Pondering time

I feel that I am experiencing temporal chaos in my blogging at the moment. Here I am in Greece, but I am still posting about our break in Amsterdam which was over a month ago. I still have to write some posts on our day in London which was after Amsterdam, but before Greece. So the three places and their times are all mixed up in my head. It's nice to be reliving what were very good times but somehow it feels that I am not living completely in the present.

And this is what (amongst other things) A Tale for the Time Being, by Ruth Ozeki, the novel I am currently reading, is all about: the nature of time. Nao (pronounced Now) the protagonist, introduces herself like this: 'I'm a time being. Do you know what a time being is? It's someone who lives in time'.
She pens her thoughts in a diary written in a hacked copy of Proust's A la Recherche du Temps Perdu.  'And what does it mean to waste time anyway? If you waste time is it lost forever?' she ponders. Jiko, her great grandmother is 'very careful with her time. She does everything really really slowly, even when she's just sitting on the veranda, looking out at the dragonflies spinning lazily around the garden pond. She says that she does everything really really slowly in order to spread time out so that she'll have more of it and live longer, and then she laughs so you know she is telling you a joke'.

Appendix A in the novel is about Zen Moments: 'you can't understand what it means to be alive on this earth until you understand the time being, and in order to understand the time being, you have to understand what a moment is... A moment is a very small particle of time. It is so small that one day is made of 6,400,099,980 moments'. Snapping your fingers equals sixty-five moments so that even the snap of a finger provides us with sixty five opportunities to wake up and to choose actions that will produce beneficial karma and will turn our lives around. 'In the time it takes to say now, now is already over. It's already then'. The only way to enter time completely, is to do zazen - meditation.

And because nothing is permanent, and all things are just kind of flowing through for the time being, form is emptiness and emptiness is form.

It's a wonderful novel, riveting. But I am trying to take my time and read it slowly, in the same way that Ruth, the person who finds the diary, decides to read it. She asked herself:  'how do you search for lost time'?  She decided that perhaps a clue lay in the pacing. 'Perhaps if Ruth paced herself by slowing down and not reading faster than the girl had written, she could more closely replicate Nao's experience... This way she wouldn't end up with an overly compressed or accelerated sense of the girl's life and its unfolding, nor would she run the risk of wasting too much time'. Now I obviously cannot pace my reading at the pace that Ozeki wrote the novel, but I feel that this novel requires careful pacing, and this is what I am doing.

Time was also very prominent in a novel/autobiography I started reading two weeks ago: A Death in the Family, by Karl Ove Knausgaard. He too mentions Proust. In the beginning he ponders the way our experience and perception of time changes as we grow older:

'[As you grow older and] as your perspective of the world increases not only is the pain it inflicts on you less but also its meaning. Understanding the world requires you to keep a certain distance from it... At length we bring [the world] within the scope of our senses and we stabilise it with fixer. When it has been fixed we call it knowledge. Throughout our childhood and teenage years we strive to attain the correct distance from objects and phenomena. We read, we learn, we experience, we make adjustments. Then one day we reach the point where all the necessary distances have been set, all the necessary systems have been put in place. That is when time begins to pick up speed. It no longer meets any obstacles, everything is set, time races through our lives, the days pass by in a flash and before we know what is happening we are forty, fifty, sixty... Meaning requires content, content requires time, time requires resistance. Knowledge is distance, knowledge is stasis and the enemy of meaning'.

Such a promising beginning!

But, I stopped reading around page 150. I got bored. I found it extremely self-indulgent and developed quite a strong dislike of the main character. In this I know I am in the minority as this autobiography is a great hit,

but time is too precious

and not to be lost.

A fairy tale in an enchanted setting

 

Vouliagmeni Lake, near Athens.

 

 



 

I have written about the lake in Vouliagmeni before, and you can see the post here where I described the lake and how I feel when I am there, but where I also drew juxtapositions between the lake, which is a lacuna, and Barbara Kingsolver's novel The Lacuna.

Swimming was not the reason for our visit this time, however. We went to see the play Ondine, written by Jean Giraudoux, and performed by the Naan group. When we got there we found out that the play was not going to be performed in the lake itself, but the Small Lake. When I told the official that we did not know the Small Lake existed, he said that no one did, this was the fist time that it had been opened to the public, specifically for this performance.

 

We sat by the lake and had an early supper. At 9:00 we made our way to the small lake

 



 

 

 

 

It's a very small lake, tiny, and this made the whole experience immediate and very intimate

 

 

 



 

 

four rows of seating on two sides and the rock majestically rising on the other two

 

 

 

the stage on the right was partially submerged in the water and most of the action happened either on that stage or in the water

 

 

we were enchanted the whole time - it was a magical experience. I sat on the edge of my seat and did not want the performance to end.

 

 

 

 

 

Very clever lighting

 

 



 

 

that enhanced the rock

 

Ondine is a passionate love story.

 

 

 



Auguste and Eugenie are impoverished folk earning a living on the edge of a lake in the Black Forest.

A baby they found at the water's edge when their own child was lost has grown up to become a strangely enchanted creature they have named Ondine (or Little Wave)






Impulsive, frank and filled with wonder, Ondine is a creature of water and air, riding the storm at night, spontaneously performing little feats of magic and driving her aging adoptive parents crazy with her whims and unpredictability.






The arrival of Hans, a knight in shining armour changes all that. Ondine falls in love with him







and despite warnings from her watery friends from the lake's nether regions, she determines to marry him.






Her parents try to make her see sense






 but to no avail







she's head over heels - her face lights up whenever she sees Hans







and she will listen to no one







This ethereal spirit creature crashes headlong into the petty squabbles and paltry deceptions of human affairs.

One can get hurt that way, and she does.

The two worlds don't mix.







Hans betrays her






and she's heartbroken.






Her mentor from the watery deep, known simply as the Old One, furtively monitors Ondine's travails,







finally offering perfect amnesia as the kindest absolution.

 

 

I felt privileged being in this very small, intimate, natural space which is a wonder.

 

 

 

A few more shots as we were leaving

 



 

 

 

This rock is amazing

 



 

 

 

I wish they would open up the small lake for swimming

 



 

 

 

and hopefully there will be other productions

 



 

 

 

 

You can see here how the stage is partially submerged

 



 

 

 

Finally, on the way out, the main lake.


A wonderful evening.