The silent woman – the strange love of Oskar and Alma

Alma Mahler was a widow for a year when she met the painter Oskar Kokoschka. Having annulled (temporarily) her relationship with Walter Gropius to repair her marriage to Gustav Mahler and to enjoy a semblance of connubial happiness prior to the composer’s death in May 1911, in widowhood Alma was drifting into another intense episode of her life. Kokoschka presented as a fiery and turbulent protagonist compared to the serious, intense Mahler and the elegant Gropius; Alma was entranced.

Shortly after their meeting, Kokoschka wrote her a passionate letter, devoting himself to her and begging to marry her and it wasn’t long before Alma and Oskar became embedded in an intense erotic saga, a folie à deux, that was to last three years. Throughout this time Oskar’s indiscreet and explosive obsession with Alma evolved through his art, in his famous seven painted fans depicting his love for her and the notorious painting ‘Die Windsbraut’ – The Bride of the Wind. This celebrated painting features the sepulchral looking artist gripping the curvaceous and glowing body of Alma – as if he would die the moment she let him go.

Alma found the relationship exhausting – the physical and emotional demands of her jealous lover were stifling and eventually terrifying. Even Oskar’s mother realised that her son was in the grip of erotomania and begged Alma to let him go. The trouble was that Alma tried and he just wouldn’t. When she became pregnant by him she had the child aborted, fearing the relationship would not sustain itself, but this made things worse for poor Oskar. However, the approaching war provided a distraction for the painter and he enlisted, probably at Alma’s behest. He got a commission with the assistance of a friend and left for the front in his K und K uniform finery. Unfortunately, he received a serious bayonet injury to the head in Galicia and was sent to convalesce, seeing out of the war in a struggle to regain his physical and mental strength, pining for Alma and his dead child.

In this time, Alma had resumed her affair with the more refined and aristocratic Walter Gropius and they announced their marriage in 1915, further crushing Kokoschka. In 1918 in an attempt to finally exorcise his subjugation to his passion, and accepting that he had lost her to Gropius, he commissioned the Munich based doll- maker Hermine Moos to make a life-sized doll of Alma, replete in all detail. It was even said to have included Alma’s pubic hair. On completion of the project, Oskar proudly introduced  his ‘escort’ into Viennese society, walking her around the Ringstrasse and taking her to the opera, inciting a mix of outrage, concern and hilarity among his peers. It was soon clear however, that the doll which he called ‘the silent woman’, was unable to resolve any of his unending erotic desire for his lost love and it was destroyed.

As the painter later remarked :

Finally, after I had drawn it and painted it over and over again, I decided to do away with it. It had managed to cure me completely of my passion. So I gave a big champagne party with chamber music, during which my maid Hulda exhibited the doll in all its beautiful clothes for the last time. When dawn broke – I was quite drunk, as was everyone else – I beheaded it out in the garden and broke a bottle-of red wine over its head.

The composition of hygge

We’re in the infancy of the year and the unpredictable and often drear skies of January and February provide the mis-en-scene of our days. A few weeks ago we brushed out the remnants of fir and burbling colour from our houses and now, we realise, we want it back – that house on Christmas Eve in Ingmar Bergman’s ‘Fanny and Alexander’ – a fantasy of red, green and gold to the soundtrack of folk carols sung around a tree, perilously angled and weeping candle-wax. We need some hygge and Christmas is the hygge theme-park.

The noun and verb forms of this untranslatable Danish word are indistinguishable. It is a feeling, a synergy, it won’t stoop to grammar. If pushed, hyggeligt is used as an adjective to describe something that is, well, very hygge. A hug is hygge (surely the word is an Anglo-saxon cousin?), a hog-roast is hygge – warm, candied, old-fashioned, reassuring, the essence of all it is to feel nourished and good to be alive. Hygge’s reassuring onomatopoeic syllables are hygge themselves. The ultimate hygge experience might be a meal shared in candlelight with close friends but whatever it is, it is a Danish sine qua non, the worldly muscle of the Danish soul. They are supposed to be the happiest people in the world, by whose definition I cannot fathom, but the Danes do have something – I’ve personal experience.

Look at any Danish interior and hygge is written on the walls, imbued in rugs and cushions, all underwritten by effective and warm low-lighting. Karen Blixen was the most hygge writer ever – ‘Babette’s Feast’ is a hygge tract. If you haven’t read the story, watch the film – it is a lesson in how to find hygge. Hygge must be a good and necessary thing and the Danes make no apology for extending hygge with all their might into the winter air, lighting dark paths and Hammershøi spaces with candlelight – the ultimate salve of hygge, its very foundation. Hygge is cheap and hygge doesn’t make you feel guilty. Hygge is not privation, it is a gift to oneself. Who will apologise for joy? The Danes don’t. Hygge is omnipresent in Denmark so you will find it: “The whole world is a series of miracles, but we’re so used to them we call them ordinary things” said Hans Christian Andersen.

In some of these ordinary things are my miracles. You can find your own and hygge is yours.

Candlelight. Everywhere – I’m with the Danes on this. A dark corner is an invitation to light
A good old 1940s classic like ‘The Philadelphia Story’ or ‘Brief Encounter’
Marzipan
A walk in the park at dusk – the interplay between shadow and light
A cat purring on my lap
A foot-bath
Lying in bed in the dark listening to the wind in the chimney
Lighting a fire and enjoying every cackle of flame against kindling

 

The fallacy of wish fulfilment

As we head into a new year we are unavoidably pulled into the idea of resolutions – what will I endeavour to do to make things better? For that is essentially what a resolution is supposed to achieve. A small privation to be healthier, a resolve to fulfil a desire at last. I’ve been thinking a great deal about this lately and have realised that the privations of such resolutions along with the reaffirming of our dreams at this time of year is heavily hued by the Nietzschean idea that struggle prevails so that satisfaction might be complete; but that this may not be quite the full story. What if the very happiness, satisfaction we seek above all in our lives is not in having but not having; might the not having be the most satisfactory, if not essential, quotient of actually being more complete? For Nietzsche the struggle was a necessary lay-by on the road to victory, but maybe it is not the struggle which is so necessary but the pause when we imagine our solace, the life we’ll lead when we have won what we seek poised, inevitably, on the possibility of failure?

We form all our needs from within, even the basic ones. We were engineered like that. When we are babies are needs are met without question or hesitation but as soon as we learn to speak, the grey area opens up – ‘Mummy, hungry!” is met with: “In a minute, darling, I’m busy just now.” We are appalled, our omnipotence has gone and it can never be reclaimed unless we fall into psychotic delusion. Suddenly dissatisfaction, one unmet need, and our whole life looms ahead adorned inevitably with considerable disappointments; hence the difficult negotiations of the terrible twos of our infancy. Reason develops and we learn and we are taught that with work comes favour and, if we are lucky, we learn about the advantages of delayed gratification. Being good at delayed gratification is being, if not exemplary, better at life.

Then, one day, a crisis of some form or another will seethe into a bottomless pit of failure – failure to be in the right place at the right time, failure to find a fulfilling career, failure to find that special relationship. It’s all too much. But is it? Might the failures and the nearlys be the best bits of ourselves? Might the hunger that ensues be the bellows that keeps firing up our life force? All that ‘perfect’ that other people seem to have might not be at all perfect, but another form of un-living, an avoidance of the very mettle of being. I know when I have, in moments, felt that I might be intrinsically happy, that I was just passing through it, the transient delusion of happiness. If I had rather a lot of this ‘happiness’ it ceases to mean anything at all. It sounds counter-intuitive but to feel it slipping way, as if it was never there at all is the real rush.  I am most living in the pass of it.

So the real joy, and therefore the real satisfaction, is in the almost – the abstract lives half-lived, the thing we should have done, the road less-travelled we overlooked as we elected to take a short-cut, the pondering on what is elusively ‘out there’…the tease of the FOMO (fear of missing out).  Jung states, that ‘the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.’ To me these possibilities teasing us from the periphery of our field of observation, these unmet needs, this almost happiness, these perpetual frustrations and half-realised dreams might be the way we kindle the light. Having recently met a heavy frustration I can say wholeheartedly, that in facing it I feel more alive than ever. It won’t go away, but its very presence is a kind of comfort and has turned the light on a dark corner of a life yet un-lived. I can’t ‘fix’ the situation, only time can do that, but I can live the life I would have had had the wish been fulfilled. Nothing can stop me from doing that.

Look up here, I’m in heaven

In memoriam David Bowie

He started life as a boy angel, turned himself into a psychedelic, pan-sexual rainbow, an alien, an aristocrat and, in a memorable cult film, a Schubert-playing vampire. Really he was a truly uniquely gifted creator of fantasy, enjoying the masks, the pliability of personae and the musical  imagination.

In ‘The Hunger’ in which he co-starred with Catherine Deneuve, he played a vampiric cellist, in one scene ‘performing’ the Andante from the Schubert Trio in E flat, below performed by Pierre Fournier, Arthur Grumiaux and Nikita Magaloff .