Musing for the day…

For the last several years, at about this time in the year, I was forcing my poor harried high school students to study the masters of Spanish art… I made them learn the names of the paintings, the dates, the media, I even made them write comparative essays in Spanish about them, as if they were in a good history of art course. We would sit in the darkness and I would prance about in front of the projected image, circling objects, gesticulating, getting excited, telling them stories. They would scribble furiously and wonder how much they would have to remember for the exams.

In essence they missed the point, or at least most of them did. I wanted to transmit the feeling of wonderment that I had experienced in front of these paintings, or to sense something outside of their own little cocoon. I told them stories about how the paintings looked hung in the Museo del Prado, or the Museo de la Reina Sofía and what it felt like to be their age wandering through the streets of Madrid, temporarily off my leash, stopping traffic, as the lecherous Guardia Civil practically fell off his horse to watch me pass. I wanted to transmit the smells of difference but the sensation of ultimate human sameness, of feeling tiny and encircled in marvels. I think our communicational chasm was too wide to bridge, but, oh, how I tried.

There was a painting by Velázquez that I loved. “Las Hilanderas” one of his last works, and in it was the coded message meant to elevate him to the status of demi-God or at least of nobility. It depicts the story of Arachne and Minerva in the moment of competition, before Arachne is smote for her challenge of the goddess. It is a weaving of stories like the golden threads of silk that fall between her hands. But within this story there is yet another, a citation of Titian’s “Rape of Europa”, a second level of meaning, or of petition to the crown for its favor. Truly fascinating, the intertextuality that springs forth from the luminescent flesh of a woman, born of the brush of a man’s imagination.

I truly miss the study of arts beyond the merely written. While my skills of discernment may be somewhat lacking, I miss the visual and sonorous worlds, and I am feeling bound by the restraints of my academic program to not spin off on a tangent. But aren’t the tangents what make life worthwhile? I will put my nose to the grindstone and accomplish what I must, but I need to find a way to spread my arms wider, to incorporate more, always more into my world. Why am I never satisfied with what I have before me?