It is the individual himself who decides, obviously if he has the capacity, his aesthetic, ethical and moral behavior. Are we aware of what we are looking for? Do we want to satisfy our desires on a material level?. Are we more interested in the pleasure of money? That of artistic creation? The good of others? Throughout a lifetime there are always different stages in which the person ephemerally suffers mutable states, although the personality itself almost always remains constant throughout the journey. It is the ultimate values that we aim to achieve that mark this journey. At a certain point in history, human beings began to reflect on the values that delimit their own behavior and those of others and decided to create laws that determine the behavior of the group and the individual: the code of Hammurabi, the tables of Moses, the laws of Justinian, among others.
Kazantzaki defines the novel as a dialogue; the dialogue between the writer and the man of the people, that is, the dialogue between the pen and the great soul of the people. Alexis Zorba is, without a doubt, one of the novels that lingers in my memory. There is the essence of Crete, the synthesis between East and West. The writer has a vision of the present and the future with his eyes always set on the world, the one from here and the one from there, halfway between the two civilizations. Alexis Zorba is not a God, nor a demigod, nor is he a hero, he is a simple human being, a soul wandering in search of pleasure, an individual in constant struggle to maintain freedom in the face of social oppression.
Kazantzaki's work is a cry: Every man must cry before he dies. When the writer hears a scream inside him, he doesn't want to drown him to please the dumb and the stuttering. The cry is freedom from others: I don’t want to be a disciple of anyone, I don’t want to have disciples either. His journey in this world is a simple moment, the right time to shout: My soul is a cry and my work is the interpretation of that cry. I, there, sitting on a corner of his tomb, the sky of Crete at the top, heard his pen resound, it was a deep roar from the bottom of the tomb.
Alexis Zorba is a character taken from real life. Relying on my memory, I recall that in the book Lletre au Greco, which I also read in French just after my stay in Crete, is where Kazantzaki talks about the real character. A character with whom he was able to share six months in Crete. At this time, writing these words I could not free myself from the desire to rediscover the pages of the book where Kazantzaki describes his encounter with the man. I was struck by the spirit of rereading that five characters throughout his life left a strong imprint on his person: Homer, Buddha, Nietzsche, Bergson and, of course, Zorba.
From reading a book, the remains of the sensations generated by the work can survive in the memory in spite of the fact that many of the details that a book must undoubtedly contain can and do often disappear over time. Many of the characters, places and other singular conjunctures that structure its plot have disappeared from my mind, although its memories can be confused with those of the images of the film made from the novel. The memory is always selective, dissipates many of the particularities and other contents and deliver it only to the sensations experienced at the time of reading. There are books that, once the images have been part of the oblivion, there is no feeling left, sometimes not even the pleasure that could have aroused from reading them.
A few days ago, here, at the Rodríguez-Amat Foundation where I am living, I had a conversation with two resident artists, both German, Fred Kobecke and Holle Frank, who had read what is still considered a best seller today: The da winci code by Dan Brown. Fred expressed an absolute sympathy for the book, defending the values of erudition and knowledge about the history of art that, among other things and according to him, the novel possesses. Holle, on the contrary, believed that the book was stripped of all literary value, consequently emotional. Both agreed, however, on the strong attraction of reading it: an attraction that made it very difficult to abandon it. The conversation intrigued me and I immediately went to buy the book online. Today, a couple of weeks later, I dived almost up to the middle of the book. My feelings certify my reflection on the work; it is not one of the readings that will remain in my memory. This is a book that, although it has a superficial appeal, is absolutely devoid of any sensitive value. Literary values are limited to creating intrigue, so that the simple reader cannot abandon reading. The language is clear, direct and easily understood, typical, in any case, of a book that seeks solely and exclusively to satisfy the epidermis of a great social mass. There is also the constant and excessive use of indecipherable symbolic and cryptographic games: a good script for a television series.
A few days later, from Heraklion, another bus took the route to Messara, the region where the ruins of Faistos are located. I remember that it was in Mires the destination of the bus, from where it was necessary to take another bus, to either Matala or Agia Galini. Although the ruins made a strong impression on me, the feeling was not the same as I had experienced in Cnossos a few days earier. There was only one bus back and it should have passed at a quarter past three, but it didn't. Apparently, when the bus has to leave its origin and there are no passengers, the driver behaves lethargically and, if you want, go on foot. There was no choice but to hitchhike. Four or five cars were enough to start the way back to Mires. A man in his forties, well dressed, very polite, speaking English quite well, told us that this was quite common.
For days I had been able to see the strong religiosity of the people on this Mediterranean island, a feeling that had not become apparent to me in Athens. Whether on foot, by car or by bus, many people find themselves passing right in front of a temple, a cemetery or any other religious place. I remember how the man who had hitchhiked us, in addition to revealing a good culture, manifested his strong religiosity in this way, because in the few kilometers that the journey lasted he did the sign of the cross five or six times. He did so just passing in front of a cemetery, a church, or a monastery, of which there are many all over the island. In Arcadia I saw something that also reached my heart. Arcadia is a very mountainous region with dangerous winding roads. When a few days later I drove from Argos to Olympia, after visiting Epidaurus, with a rented car in Athens, on the sides of the road were hundreds of small chapels in which small oil lamps were constantly burning. There is the custom of keeping the oil lamp alive in the chapel. I do not know the system that allows them to perpetuate the light alive, although I must assume that it must be the inhabitants of the area who feed them. In Catalonia, my country, we can find, although not too profuse, flower buds next to a road.
Iraklion moves under a purely Mediterranean sun, corners and streets full of history, squares and squares, suddenly a plinth with a bust at the top, a small monument, a bust, wants to represent Domenico Theotocopuli, El Greco. Born in Crete and educated in Venice, the exact place of his birth is not known, but it seems that it was in 1541, as he himself declared in 1606 to be sixty-five years old. Condemned to live in Toledo by imperatives of his time and not in Madrid as he seems to have wished at first. I remember hearing an art history teacher of mine say that El Greco arrives in Spain from Rome, where he is unsuccessful in his attempt to position himself as a painter, attracted by El Escorial. The same professor told us that after painting the dream of Philip II around 1578, the painting was presented to the monarch and he showed no interest for the artist. It is also present in my memory that there were those who placed the creation of this painting around one thousand six hundred and ten. I don’t know the basics that can armor one version or another. Are they, in any case, some of them conforming to reality? It is true that the strength of the mystique of Toledo required some painter to please it, and, like a meteorite falling from the sky, Titian's disciple found the place that allowed him to display his personal mannerisms.
His painting darkened over more than two centuries, with no disciples, no followers, and even fewer lovers. The great century and the following one obscured the work of what would be considered again from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This is how the appreciation of a creator's work suffers from the shocks of time and individuality. The work of art does not depend solely and exclusively on itself, but, above all, on the receiver, in this case the spectator. In front of me, the work of El Greco is not immutable, it is as fickle as my state of mind. In February of this year, 2006, I was able to see again the set of works in the Prado Museum in Madrid and I was ashamed to see nothing but a set of dirty and screaming dolls. Was it my inability to immerse myself in the work of the painter, or was it my ability not to submit to the recognition established by history?
A personal experience, a few years ago, made me think deeply about the dialogue that can be established between the work and the spectator and, consequently, about the appreciation of the work of art. It must first be said that when in the early sixties I discovered the Impressionists and my painting was subjected to the effects of light; the great French masters of the late nineteenth century reached in me the highest values of consideration. In light of this statement, allow me to share with you my experience. Many years later, in February 1997, I was in the National Gallery in London, right in the room of the great Spanish painters of the seventeenth century. There were the Velázquez, the Grecos, the Riberes, the Murillos and so many others. Unaware of the temporality of the experiences of my state of mind, the personal vibration in the face of those works absorbed me from head to toe; the aesthetics of those painters had risen to my head. What sensations! What emotional resonances of mine! I was immersed in the aesthetics of these great Spanish painters. After an indefinite period of experience, I went to the French Impressionist painter's rooms. What a worry! What a dirt! It was very easy for me to understand those bourgeois of the last third of the 19th century who begged pregnant women not to go to see those exhibitions if they didn't want to lose their children. I had to mentalize myself in order to be able to change in myself the parameters that allow us to value a specific aesthetic in order, at least, to be able to re-access dialogue with the painters of the light.
One place that had been dancing in my head for years was Súnion; the most far eastern territory of the Mediterranean where the Catalans anchored the flag. The name Súnion will remain in my memory linked to that of a Catalan school where, from 1977 and for five or six years, I carried out a small pedagogical task. Pep Costa-Pau was the creator and promoter. The creator of a modern school with strong pedagogical ideologies: a rigid man, of a strong character, domineering, master and lord of himself. The school, created at the end of the Franco regime, still had to endure the hardships of the dictatorship, but with obstinacy and a desire to serve the country, Pep led a selective and modern school. A couple of years after I had left the school, Pep, coming down from Vilopriu, in the Empordà, where he planned to create the school in the countryside, suffered a fatal accident on the motorway at the height of Sant Celoni. He was a great character and friend. His widow, Magda Planellas, agreed a few years later, in 1994, to join the board of trustees of the foundation I created. |
The Acropolis
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