Proust for tea in Tivoli Gardens

 

6 May, 2020

Proust for tea in Tivoli Gardens

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 5 May 2020 oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

This is very curious picture came to me seemingly zoomed up via some unique portal from childhood. It isn’t uncommon to be working on something when I taste my own ‘Madeleine’, of which Proust evoked so personally. I think everyone must have one lurking about in the bird cage of their subconscious mind. Though they could arrive through any one of my senses, this one came visually to me and it relates to some kind of cryptic memory I may have either seen in a museum or book. Possibly even, it might replicate a colorful drawing I might have made as a child. In this picture, in any event, it appears that I have somehow merged the visual with the sense of taste because while working on it two nights ago I had the unatural feeling that I remembered making these sort of flat pictures as a kid. It was so strong that I even had a taste of it in my throat.

Of course I thought of Marcel, who wouldn’t? But even stranger, I had came across an anecdote about Proust’s Madelaine recently. It seem that in Proust’s first draft of the novel, In Search of Lost Time, there wasn’t yet a Madeleine. Hard to believe it, but the iconic metaphor was initially ‘a toast topped with honey’. In the second draft, according to this source, it became a hard biscuit, probably an Italian ‘Biscotto’. But only in the third draft would it become the deliciously famous ‘Madeleine’, the petit four that we are all so used to coughing up when we need a literary metaphor. So you see, all art is inherently made up of both a lie and a truth, what’s in between I think is the creative ingenuity of the artist. Over the last few years I’ve come to place all my faith in this small space.

I was working somewhat normally last night at the beach, nothing out of the ordinary had changed my habit but as this child-like image began to appear I immediately felt that it was a strangely familiar image. And like Alice in Wonderland, I found myself willing to follow it’s fragile thread with my brushes and paint. It was not a picture I would have imagined making, at least the other night. It was one of two, and the one that unearthed these memories and feelings that became so intermingled as I tried to find a way to finish it. In the end I left it in its primary state, stillborn perhaps but it made perfect sense to me alone, and it’s the audience for whom it matters most. 

Looking at it today it still startles me but I’m drawn to it as one is drawn to certain persons to whom one is attracted for only vaguely sensorial reasons. These feeling don’t live on the surface like lust, admiration or intellectusl respect, or even just curiosity for another, they’re buried deeper inside me. Certainly some people are just great-looking and they attract everyone but it isn’t that sort of attraction because after an hour minutes of speaking with them one can quickly find out who they are and more importantl, who they are not.  

These go further backwards into a place where ones’s earliest desires, those made of nebulous filaments have yet to coalesce into sturdy memories that take form through visual, olfactory, and sensual highways in us. These, I think, are the cryptic signposts that point all heroes and heroines back into their own personal time zones. When these ‘Proustian’ feelings arise they can display all the haphazard feelings that seize us in an instant with intense familiarity. I cannot speak for others, but these senses come on like a freight train leaving me in quiet mysterious mood for no apparent reason at all. They don’t happen often enough that I’m even used to them, so when they come it’s always unexpected. They are deep secrets I’ve managed to hide from myself. 

When I was four, I visited Tivoli Gardens with my family when we all went to Europe in the summer of 1956. We crossed on the Andrea Doria which provided me a rich treasure-trove of memories of which I retain several still. But in Copenhagen, I’ve never forgotten a kind of Danish pastry which I ate there and one which I can sporadically access through my taste buds today.. Even just walking into a particular pastry shop anyway in the world can sometimes trigger this olfactury bliss, then, bingo! I’m right back in the sheltered etherworld of Tivoli Gardens.

With the passing years, little by little, these earliest memories have surprisingly taken over a larger portion of my imagination like towards the end of the day when a tree grows a longer shadow across the flat lawn. The taste of my Danish pastry can arrive out of the blue, unexpectedly, but it’s almost always accompanied by a shower of blissful feelings. Without rehearsal, they’re released, again and again, as if one has disturbed a large bush from which hundreds of butterflies scatter into the air for no reason at all. None of this should come as a surprise to me because I’m currently knee deep into Lydia Davis’ translation of The Way by Swann, 1st volume of In Search of Lost Time.

So this small unremarkably strange image that churned up so much emotion for me came as I was struggling with a flat drawing in the fading light. I was feeling lost by what was coming up. It was so wonky and yet so familiar to me that I felt confused. Do I redo everything or pursue this strange path forward? By going forward I was dredging up an image that was conjured just for myself as if it had been custom-ordered. 

I haven’t a clue whether it’s any good or not, but I’m unconcerned, for it’s the electric jolt to my system that counts, irregardless of its success or failure. Isn’t this why anyone indulges in these absurd artistic endevours in the first place? If we’re lucky and we’ve survived our many failures, whatever comes up will often be precious by virtue of its own circuitous provenance. 

Although I wish I did, I don’t have a conscious compass to locate an image like this whenever I feel like it. It came randomly to me of its own volition like a yellow butterfly through an open window in my bedroom. 

What else to say? I know that through any creative endeavor, anyone who ventures into these unexplored places in themselves can find rubies and emeralds for themselves, even for the briefest of moments. For Proust it was his Madeleine, and for me it was this little picture.