PICTURES, PICTURES, and more PICTURE

I am a voracious listener to music and encounter favorites within almost any genre. However, I am also a forlorn amateur. Not a musician and far from being an expert. I am even bad at discerning the difference between minor and major. However, when it comes to that disability, I find solace in Schubert's statement: ”There is no such thing as happy music.” He also wrote: ”My compositions spring from my sorrows. Those that give the world the greatest delight were born of my deepest griefs.”

 

 

It is the same with pictures. I am obsessed by them, though they make me more happy than sad. Ever since I was a child I have collected art cards (I don’t know how many thousands I have) and I am forgetting myself while looking at art. Nevertheless, I am not a good draftsman and do not paint anymore. My photographs are generally blurry and out of focus and I am far from being a diligent photographer.

Why mention Schubert when I am presenting a random sample of pictures? I am often listening to his music and while doing so I need calm and loneliness around me, just as when I bring forward my boxes with art cards, picking up the safeguarded items one by one and then examining them intensively. There are so many of them and each and everyone evokes memories and emotions, and so does almost every musical piece I like to listen to.

 

The vastness of the musical output Schubert produced during his short lifespan is dizzying. Just in 1815 he composed over 20,000 bars of music, more than half of which were made for orchestra, including nine church works, a symphony, and 140 songs. Music poured out of him. During the mentioned year, Schubert lived at home with his father, a schoolmaster with a well attended school, wanting his son to follow in his footstepsSchubert taught in the school - being a miserable and bad teacher - while earning an extra income through private musical instruction and thus obtaining enough money for his basic needs, including clothing, manuscript paper, pens, and ink, but with little to no money left over for luxuries. Leaving home and coming to Vienna furthered his intensive and genial output.

 

Schubert’s early death at the age of 31 and later public appreciation of his genial music inspired a welter of sentimental myths spinning around the misunderstood genius, often depicted as a happy-go-lucky bohemian whose heavy drinking and short physical stature made him known as Schwammerl, the Little Mushroom. However, his music bear witness about a much darker and deep inner reality.

 

 

Schubert had battled syphilis since 1822. The final illness may have been typhoid fever, though the final symptoms match those of mercury poisoning, at the time the common treatment for syphilis. His last time was harrowing, spent in constant fever and occasional mental disorder.

 

By the way … writing about Schubert I cannot avoid thinking about a long and intensive debate about Schubert’s assumed homsexuality and while doing so I remember an angry and witty comment to this eternally ongoing discourse , written in the New Yorker by the music expert and Schubert admirer Charles Rosen:

 

Whether Schubert was homosexual or not would not tell us anything really important about his personality. So long as we are ignorant of crucial details, like whether Schubert was passive or aggressive, preferred immediate satisfaction or extended foreplay, I do not care if he slept with men, women, or horses.

 

I listen to Schubert. Not as upsetting and agitating as the music of his so much admired Beethoven often can be. More softly spoken, even more personal. Through his dynamic and melodious appearance Schubert covers an entire spectrum of desire, melancholy, happiness and sorrow; a vast field where unexpected emotions grow, constantly surprising you by their fragrance and intricate beautySchubert rapidly switches between terror and soothing consolation. From dark tragedy he raises you up to an other-worldly sphere, constantly revealing an astounding inventiveness, which nevertheless is profoundly personal and unique. A universe of interpreted and revealed complex emotions.

 

As usual I got lost on a sidetrack, but that is what happens when I roam around in the world of pictures I have collected around me. Looking at them is as if entering into Schubert’s musical universe. In order to indulge in the feelings they create I have to look at them in solitude. It is a joy and solace to dwell inside this secluded sphere, which in spite of containing sorrow and tragedy also reflects the joy and immensity of human existence.

 

I cannot find my camera and two years ago my mobile phone suddenly refused to download my pictures into the computer. Now, while I am trying to unload the pictures stored in the phone (I send them one by one to my e-mail address) I have found that there are much more of them than I imagined. Most of them are of various art works. Paintings, photographs and sculptures I have seen in museums, exhibitions, in the street, or even in some picture magazine or book. I took a photo of them since I liked the motif and wanted to remember it.


Now it occurs to me that I could post some of these pictures in my blog. For my own pleasure and maybe for yours as well. So here is a limited selection of what I have amassed during the last two years. When my professor in History of Art – Aron Borelius, who I came to consider as a friend of mine – had given his introductory lectures he generally finished them by declaring: ”Now we are going to revel in pictures.” So let us do that. There’s lots of them, even if it is just a selection of everything I had in my phone. Maybe you can do what I use to do – linger by a picture that attracted you – look at it, listen to it, while trying to find out what it was that appealed to you.

 

Just now I am listening to Billie Holiday singing In My Solitude:

 

In my solitude, you haunt me
with reveries of days gone by.
In my solitude, you taunt me
with memories that never die.

 

I sit in my chair,
I'm filled with despair.
There's no one could be so sad
with gloom everywhere.
I sit and I stare
I know that I'll soon go mad.

In my solitude
I'm praying,
Dear Lord above
send back my love.

It is a great song, though I cannot share it’s depressive sentiment. Alone with my pictures I’m a happy guy.

 

'

 

Vita somnium breve - Life is a short dream, is the title of  this unusually kitschy painting by the otherwise quite impressive Arnold Böcklin:

Rosen, Charles (1994) ”In response to ’Music à La Mode’ ”, in The New Yorker, September 22.

 

BLOG LIST

  It is a hot summer in Hässleholm. We are at my mother´s place and life is somewhat strange, as always. Our summer house is rented out to a Dutch couple and their kids, we can thus not enjoy a swim in the lake or walks through the forest, instead we are cleaning up the second floor of...
  Det är en varm sommar i Hässleholm. Vi är hos min mor och livet är märkligt, som alltid. Vi har hyrt ut vårt hus till holländska sommargäster och tillbringar därför inte tiden på bryggan i sjön eller med cykelturer genom skogen, utan städar istället hos min mor. Genom åren har...
Somewhat over a month ago, I was sitting with my friend Örjan in the garden outside the house  in Bjärnum. We had just eaten an extensive dinner and enjoyed the presence of the nature all around us. In the mild twilight breeze after a day with clear blue skies we were talking amongst lush...
  För lite mer än en månad sedan satt jag tillsammans med min gode vän Örjan i trädgården utanför huset  i Bjärnum. Vi hade avslutat en omfattande middag och njöt i fulla drag av naturen omkring oss. Mätta och belåtna samtalade vi bland prunkande rhododendronbuskar, i ett milt...
  I'm on my way, sitting on the train to Copenhagen´s International Airport, from where I will fly to my family in Rome. Looking out of the window thinking that an external trip is also an internal one. I am mentally preparing myself for the arrival. My thoughts have already reached...
  Jag är åter på resa och sitter på tåget mot Kastrup, därifrån skall jag ta flyget till min familj i Rom. En yttre resa är samtidigt en inre färd. Mentalt förbereder jag mig inför ankomsten. Mina tankar har redan nått målet och kretsar kring de kommande veckorna. Mer eller mindre...
  Several Roman harbor an exaggerated fear of drafts, few of them dare to sleep with an open window open and as soon as the air is saturated with moisture and cold  they cover  themselves up with layers of clothing and scarves and only reluctantly leave their overly heated...
  Flera romare hyser en överdriven fruktan för drag, få av dem riskerar att somna med öppet fönster och så fort luften mättas med fukt och kyla byltar de på sig ordentligt och lämnar motvilligt sina överdrivet uppvärmda hem, bilar och kontor. I Rom lever fortfarande fruktan...
  At night, even when the moon is not there, or maybe because of that, the sky sparkles with the twinkling light from a myriad of stars, high above the dry savannah north of the Niger River. Since the villages lack electricity and lighting, the sky becomes more evident than it is in...
  På natten, även när månen inte är framme eller kanske ännu mer då, gnistrar himlavalvets myriader med stjärnor över den torra savannen norr om Nigerfloden. De små byarnas brist på elektricitet och belysning gör himlen mer närvarande än den är i stora städer. Den välver sin enorma...
Items: 301 - 310 of 330
<< 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 >>

Contact

In Spite Of It All, Trots Allt janelundius@gmail.com