Some of these last magical days are all about direction, where to look to match ones current thinking, which path to choose from going nowhere in particular but an itch made you want to dream about horizons opening up, or to simplify, entertaining a desire that has not yet gotten any language or substance but it might happen any minute now, if you just keep paying serious attention. If like that, these days become exciting adventures of invaluable preciousness, uncovering some kind of mastery or insight no-one could have predicted would shape ones present.
I did not wake up with a passionate pining for staring at The Ambassadors, a painting from 1533 by Hans Holbein the Younger, a court painter during the reign of Henry VIII, yet it happened after coincidentally reading about the sfumato technique that artists use to blur the outlines in a painting and let them flow, making their subjects not stand still and completely fixed in front of their background, but lifelike and moving, fascinating in itself but no rocket science really, nothing but an optical illusion.
What truly triggered my attentiveness was the blot at the bottom of this depicted canvas, its representation instantly recognizable even if not gazed at from the side at an angle, but when you do, this skull for sure is looking back at you, like a Mona Lisa 2.0
Apparently, and this might only be a private fascination so forgive the digression, the most controversial psychoanalyst since Freud, Jacques Lacan, named this painting his favorite example of the difference between ones look and a gaze, proclaiming the symbols of wealth, art, science and ambition in Holbein’s painting to be undercut by the floating object, for him reflecting ‘our own nothingness, in the figure of the death’s head’.
He pointed at a lack at the heart of desire, basically allowing desire to persist and at the same time threaten to run us aground upon the underlying rock of the real.
On these days without proper direction, leading to delicious aberrance into art and other diversions, of course Mec will pose himself in the windowsill, looking in. He’s either further feeding my sense of esthetics or…signaling he needs to pee.
