Recently the fictional world got trampled a bit underfoot and now haltingly resurfaces. Still it feels as if it should not. There is so much in the real world that screams in my face daily, claiming my attention, and virtually nothing I can do about it. But there is still fictional progress which I might just be slow to follow. Just now I am listening to Richard Armitage’s corona project “Geneva”, which just got released on Audible, and don’t really know if I like it. At first, listening to Nicola Walker impersonating the main character seemed the best bit. She gets directly under my skin. The rest I wasn’t so sure about, though the writing is mostly good. There is a gripping, dizzying realism in the descriptions of the environment and circumstances, and there is psychological depth to the characters underneath the inevitable cliché. A stunning Nobel prize winning female scientist with Alzheimer’s and her attractive but weak husband who is going through a dangerous midlife-crisis - seriously!? Made me question if I like conventional thrillers at all or consider them a waste of my time … but being MORE thrilled listening the second time isn’t a bad sign. (I am this weird kind of reader who reads or watches everything worthwhile at least twice – even thrillers and crime novels!)
I SHOULD be happy, more so because “Cinema” finally recovered and climbed even above what it was before with a new look, nice overpriced cocktails and fresh theatre from London. I already saw Ralph Fiennes in “Straight Line Crazy” – which wasn’t really interesting except for Ralph Fiennes, but there will be more! Two days ago they showed the Coldplay concert from Buenos Aires which was such a heart-warming message to all the good people in the world (who eat clean food and make their own clean energy by treading on bikes …) that it felt as if everybody who couldn’t afford to pay 200 Euros minimum for a regular ticket should have been there. I saw it with my sister and niece, and a handful of others … Seems that “the world” – like me! – still needs a bit of patience to get back on track?
And suddenly there is a lot of NEW THEATRE I desperately want to see. My first botched attempt of getting to London to see Simon Russell Beale in “John Gabriel Borkmann” lies only a few days in the past. Somehow I even reckoned that it would be only theoretically possible to cross Europe and the channel in one day by train to get to the theatre the same evening, but as I missed my first train just because of my own unbelievable stupidity I will probably never know. As the wound is still bleeding, it feels as if I would never be able even to THINK of something like this again. I already know that I will miss David Tennant in “Good” and Juliet Stevenson in “The Doctor” because I cannot make another trip like this in a month or so after having just flushed 600 Euros down the toilet. But I must not despair! My next chance will come in the new year with Sophie Okenedo and Ben Daniels in “Medea”. (Hopefully, 2022 is just a shit year – after most of 2021 having been a shit year – not the beginning of the long decline …)
The really important things that happened in the fictional world, though, were much less spectacular. There are three personal holidays I have been celebrating in the last years, usually together with my reading-partner Claudia. Shakespeare’s Birthday (23red of April), “Bosworth Fields” (22nd of August) and Apple-Pie Day – which takes place when the apples from my mother’s garden are plucked and ready to go into the one and only pie I am baking all year. “Bosworth Fields” kind of fell through – though I had finally managed to get “My Zoe” on DVD – but Apple-Pie Day took place on the 22nd of October. We agreed that the pie was a success and that the play we had read: “Timon of Athens” was a downer. Later on, sitting on my balcony in the sun, we got back to it nonetheless. And, as is often the case, talking about it made me first realize that I had questions. After this we came to the heart of the matter really fast. The play, which might lack aesthetic ingenuity and a genuine “human interest” story, might have had a contemporary impact nonetheless. For Elizabethans it might actually have reflected the madness of capitalism which – if I believe Hilary Mantle, and I do! – had somehow come to a new level during the reign of Henry VIII, and, in the view of many, might have been kind of spiralling out of all proportion, scrambling human relationships in its wake …
Nothing spectacular, but I was thrilled with our EFFICIENCY of getting a foot into this text. As something similar happened just a few days ago, I came to the conclusion that I had still underestimated what I have achieved writing this blog and thus getting myself to focus on my reading the way I did. So, the same questions about the nature of fictional text cropped up repeatedly, and, in the long run, tended to get answered in a way that increased the PRODUCTIVITY of my reading. I think that “Shakespeare 2.0” was in fact a big step forward, though I don’t think I have really understood it yet. At least I feel that I haven’t nailed it, but I seem to finally have taken the notion seriously that fictional text is not necessarily “constructed” or “controlled” by the objective of making sense or achieving one single goal, but is usually the product of MANY intentions, current ideas, economic considerations, literary traditions and personal preferences rooted in a singular mind and experience that is inaccessible to others. It is its nature that it can never be COMPLETE, nonetheless there is this notion that it is a text only when it is complete. So, perversely, what we are inevitably doing as soon and as long as we engage actively with a text is putting things together that have nothing to do with one another IN THE FIRST PLACE. This is kind of frustrating, and I had a mind not to go there – being at a loss how to do it – but my recent mind-boggling museum experience taught me something different. Really having understood something might lead directly to DOING IT right.
It was in the “Alte Pinakothek” - where the old masters like Rembrandt, Rubens or Caspar David Friedrich are displayed. I went there with my sister and niece before the Coldplay concert because of some school project, and I would have expected to leave this museum with a lasting impression of the stunning lemon tarte I had in the café without looking at the “old masters” at all because I hold the prejudice that I am not really good with paintings – especially old ones. But this time I was, because, somehow, “Shakespeare 2.0” seemed to have dislodged all the prejudices and second-hand knowledge which I always thought I needed to look at them. They were not GONE – but somehow DISLOGED, so that it was not possible to take them as absolutes and thus focus on THEM instead of the paintings. It is important that the paintings are HISTORICAL, but this is just the thrill of it! And history is never absolute in the way that a certain painting necessarily “belongs” into the 15th or 20th century because it was painted there. History of art is not carbon dating, it’s about something quite different. This time I realized this already BEFORE we came to El Greco! So, I didn’t have to go out of my way a long way – as I thought I had to in the past – to get to these paintings, they were already speaking to me. In fact, some of them were screaming at me! And even though I had this experience once, a long time ago, at the National Portrait Gallery, briefly, and not really understanding what it was about, now I knew: All these PEOPLE looking at me directly through the centuries. As this is the stunning thing about a good portrait: a person looking right at you, or gazing at something in a distance, both times somehow expressing an entire person in that look.
In fact, it was like the Coldplay concert – just less emotional – a moment of feeling CONNECTED – before the lights went out and there was again segregation, inhumanity, war, brutality, stupidity, and the kind of unproductive routine that will grind us down in the end …
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