Denizens II

Art for the heart’s sake

Arabic calligraphy I find very attractive. It fits into a wholly pleasing aesthetic slot in my sensitivity. I don’t know what the words mean and I don’t feel the need to find out. This is restful, like sitting at a street café in a German-speaking country, enjoying guttural, familiar-sounding, but totally unintelligible speech. On Capri, visiting the blue grotto, our Scottish accents got us a seat on the boat with the German tourist guide.

Arabic music makes me feel that I am not at home. Maybe I only really encountered it for the first time when I spent the winter in Morocco as a teenager. My first trip outside my home country. The labyrinth of the Medina at night.

So I’m thinking about the idea of being foreign, which, strangely enough, for an Anglophone living in France, is sparked off by Arabic music. I should add that I once lived in Paris with a Moroccan lover who committed suicide. Could be that the feeling of foreignness is more a reluctance to acknowledge or return to that period of emotional devastation, the aftermath of the suicide, than anything to do with a geographic country.

One thing that saved me was Dubuffet’s Jardin d’Hiver in the Modern Art Museum at the Pompidou Centre. I would crawl into it of a Sunday afternoon, and I felt safe there. There are many pictures of it online, but I haven’t found one that captures the magic of the pale winter light that comes in the “skylight” in the ceiling of the grotto – I always assumed it to be the natural light of a pale winter sky, but, come to think of it, there must be a light bulb, since the source is concealed, and that wouldn’t work here, the way the sunshine manages to shine upwards from under the water in the blue grotto of Capri.

I loved the Pompidou Centre, which we always called Beaubourg; a free place to keep warm, especially on a wet Sunday afternoon, when entrance to the museum was free, too. It is probably what I miss most about Paris.

From today’s Guardian:
“The Pompidou Centre's marvellous L'Atelier d'Alberto Giacometti is a retrospective featuring not only Giacometti's sculptures, paintings and drawings, but also the studio itself - what went on there, and what was removed after the artist's death, including sections of the walls on which he drew and painted. These were not so much murals as a palimpsest of stains, scribbles and scratches, among which loom faces, walking men and standing women: Giacometti's perennial subjects.”

I added the bold. I felt that was really creepy. Visions of vultures and the word cannibalistic come to mind.