Skip to main content

The play of memory


When I was in the Pushkin gallery in Moscow recently, a gallery I know intimately, I was surprised to discover this fabulous painting of an old woman by Rembrandt was not there. If you had asked me at the time to swear on my mother's life (and she was with me) that this painting belonged in the Pushkin, I would have been tempted to such a wager!

But it is not! In fact, it is in Stockholm's National Gallery where I have seen it, not multiple times (as I might in the Pushkin) but, only once, on a brief visit between meetings a year or so ago!

This can be read as a testimony to the arresting nature of Rembrandt's art. The ability to create familiarity instantly. Love at first sight! It can be read as the fickleness of memory, that it plays tricks is a cliche, but cliches are only truths grown over familiar!

But interestingly I think there was another dimension at play. The major exhibition at the Stockholm gallery at the time was only too familiar namely nineteenth century Russian art. It remains a surprise to see it travelling (though it ought for being uniquely itself and of high quality and still unfamiliar).  So I was amongst friends, especially my beloved Nesterov: what could be more natural than to insert a newly loved painting (the Rembrandt) into this familiar matrix of memory and carry it over into its most likely contiguous space - the Pushkin in Moscow - down the road and over the river but close to the nineteenth century Russian arts most likely resting place at the Tretyakov!

This illustrates rather beautifully the creativity of memory: what we are beholding is not 'what happened' but a creative elaboration of our pasts, made to fit within spaces at once familiar, safe and conforming with prejudice (seen as a neutral term). The questioning of memory thus becomes not only 'what happened' but what do I need to have happened in order that it make sense and in that questioning I need a much deeper sense of my own assumptions than I would normally assume!

A painting to be loved must require familiarity (I assume) and that familiarity must come from repeated seeing (I assume) thus it must be in a place regularly visited (I assume).

All of which proved to be wholly questionable!


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age...
13 comments
Read more

Luminous Spaces - the poetry of Olav H. Hauge

Don't give me the whole truth, don't give me the sea for my thirst, don't give me the sky when I ask for light, but give me a glint, a dewy wisp, a mote as the birds bear water-drops from their bathing and the wind a grain of salt. It began with a poem, this poem, in Mark Oakley's 'The Splash of Words: Believing in Poetry' - a wonderful series of meditations on particular poems, one each chapter. The poet is the Norwegian, Olav H. Hague (1908-1994). I immediately ordered, 'Luminous Spaces: Selected Poems & Journals' and was enjoying dipping until, at the weekend, recovering from a stomach bug, I decided to read them through and fell wholeheartedly for a new friend. Hague was born on a farm. His formal education was brought short by a combination of restricted means, an inability to conquer mathematics: and, a voracious diet of reading ranging beyond the confines of any confining curriculum. He went to a horticultural college instead an...
1 comment
Read more

Richard Hauser and the evils of Marx

Richard was a distinguished Austrian sociologist who had contributed to the Wolfenden report that led to the decriminalisation of homosexuality in England, Wales and Scotland in the late 1960's. I was remembering him on the plane today because I saw a reference to his wife, Hephzibah Menuhin, pianist sister of the violinist Yehudi and human rights activist. I met him after responding to an advertisement in the New Society. He lived in a house in Pimlico, a widower, with a clutch of young people, running an ill-defined (for me) social research/action institute, that I visited several times and to which Richard wanted to recruit me. I was never clear as to what my responsibilities might be and resisted co-option. He was, however, extraordinarily charismatic and as a Jew had fled Austria in 1938 not without receiving permanent damage to his hearing, courtesy of Gestapo interrogation. I vividly remember one story he told me that gives you an idea of his character. He was invit...
17 comments
Read more