Boude en boesems

Liewe vriende

Die herrie in die hoenderhok het gaan lê. Tom het die Oscar en ons kan weer sing. Êrens het ek 'n dadaïstiese gedig gelees wat só begin: Asindeton for the Duke's prize / and you and I don't exist. Maar nou is dit weg. Miskien was dit in sand geskryf, of miskien was dit 'n droom. Dit laat 'n hartseer naklank.

Verlede week se brief het my gedreineer. Vandag vat ek 'n blaaskans en plaas 'n aanhaling uit een van daardie boeke wat 'n mens soos 'n Lindt-balletjie op jou tong rol tot dit smelt – The Wren, the Wren deur Anne Enright. Die verteller was in Florence in die Uffizi-galery, waar ek ook al was:

"

The pictures in the Uffizi are too famous to see properly. You will hear yourself gasp with recognition when you wander into one of these rooms and find Botticelli's The Birth of Venus on the wall. It is there, and you are in front of it. The physical object brings you into the presence, not just of the painting, but of the painter's intentions. You can see the brushstrokes. You think, this is genius. You do not touch. No one touches, though lots of people want to touch. They smooth and caress the air an inch or two away form the canvas and the alarm goes off. The attendants don't startle. The place is rammed.

No one in the crowd looks at anyone else, they only look at the walls. Or maybe the lovers glance at each other. Yes, here we are. We have seen this together. Mostly, the onlookers behave as though they are alone, communing with greatness in the midst of rabble. Get out of my way!

On the day I was in the Botticelli room, I saw a girl with tears running down her face. I saw a young man with a copy of The Birth of Venus printed on his T-shirt. I saw people accept that they have seen it with a nod, and move to the next thing. A woman sat on the floor breastfeeding while looking up at the painting and, at first, I thought there was something very wrong with her breast. There was a big squishy brown mark on it about half the size of the baby's face. But of course, it was her nipple. Which was insanely large.

On the wall, Venus's nipple is pale, and neat as those annoying buttons that are too little to keep your shirt closed. All the painted women in the Uffizi are whiter than any human flesh. Many of them look like Cate Blanchett, if Cate Blanchett could not act. This is especially the case in the early rooms. Here, groups of pale, serene people gaze off in different directions doing very bad acting indeed. Oh, I am being born from the waves. Oh, I am getting pregnant talking to an angel. Oh, I am dying in agony. Oh, I am sexually attractive. Further in, and historically later, the acting improves, then it goes madly over the top, Slaughter! Mayhem! What a nice party, let us all laugh!

How many naked bodies are in the Uffizi gallery? This is a real question. There are probably more bottoms than breasts. Especially fine, I found, are the slightly squished bottoms of figures who are sitting on a rock while draped in fabric that doesn't cover their bottom. There are nursing Virgins – it is a place of breastfeeding – and lots of little Jesus babies, each one looking solemn and tinily endowed.

In one room I found five penises, four adult and one infant. Many of the hundreds of penises in the Uffizi are very small and also anatomically incorrect. Hard to describe, but the ballsack is somehow hung around the whole base of the shaft and not from underneath it. They have a wrong ... the word that comes to mind is 'integument'. This error was the reason I began to see them in the first place. If they had been accurately portrayed, I might have filed these many hundreds of genitals under 'Art' and gone about the place experiencing the sublime.

You never see a penis in public. In real life. If you did, you would shriek, run, call the cops. You would not find it 'sublime'. You would be 'shocked' you would be 'frightened' you might feel 'disgusted' or 'soiled'. Someone, please tell me why.

Anyway, after all the historical, beautiful and oddly imprecise junk on the walls, you start noticing the decapitations. Judith chopping off Holofernes' head, outraged Medusa, severed at the neck, at least two Salomes, drooling over the head of John the Baptist on a platter. It is always the head (just saying) no one loses a foot or an arm.

Among the thousands of painted figures, I spotted only one person of colour, though it was some time before I thought to count. In the pictures I have on my phone, one hundred percent of the tourists are white. Many of them are women, although, on the walls, I saw the work of just one female artist. The Uffizi is fully weird and very niche. Near the end is a beautiful image of a woman with her chest bared to an old man. She is breastfeeding him. He is her father.

After that, a self-portrait by Rembrandt, that made me cry watery tears of salty joy.
Fully dressed, unbeautiful, a little self-defeated.
Hallo, Mr Harmenszoon van Rijn.

I did not leave the gallery slowly, I ran out of it at speed. I raced down the stairs and into a wall of heat. Across the road is a colonnade, where the younger tourist can sit and chew a huge sandwich wheel from a local stall. This is what I did. Recovering from Art, watching a crumb-scavenging pigeon, with a red stub where its left foot had once been.
Thinking about nothing, my brain wiped clean.

Unmissable. See this before you die. And then die.

Five stars.

"

En dit, liewe vriende, was min of meer presies my gewaarwordings in die galery.

Hou die blink kant bo.

Liefde
Deborah

At the Uffizi

Can’t analyze art.
Applied math but it refused to quantify.
Put physics to the test,
but art refused to bend to
its all-inclusive, unbendable rules.
Behind me, a voice asks,
“What about biology?”
Art is bulging with something,
but it’s not carbon-based.
It doesn’t respond to chemistry.

The numbers can’t explain
Botticelli’s “Venus.”
Even the poet struggles,
so what hope has the scientist?
Reaction is as variegated as faith,
as a diamond.
It’s like the roadmap
of some unfamiliar territory.
It suggests 1,000 routes,
none of which take you to
where you want to be.

Here I am in Florence
at the Uffizi gallery,
a tourist, half of an equation—
myself on one side,
a masterpiece on the other,
and the whole thing is tilting
but not towards me.

My glasses fog.
Formulas are worthless.
Neither can cope with genius.
Why not just say,
“The hell with it.
The woman is a goddess.
She’s a glorious high-stakes creature
looking down from a wall
at a low-stakes kind of guy.”

Best just be love-drunk.
The more alcoholic the feeling,
the less it tells me lies.

John Gray