I’ve been to Port-Vendres in France twice, and each time I found the early mornings to be a great introduction to the day.
Once, I was awake before sunrise, admiring the blue cargo ship moored in the port overnight beneath the lightening sky of deep pre-dawn blue. By a happy coincidence, the dome of the church at the centre of my view is also blue, and the lighting on the obelisk at the right is mauve-blue. But that day wasn’t a blue blue day. The sun rose and shone on the old village houses, highlighting the pink and orange tones of their walls, promising a good day.
Pre-sunrise, Port-Vendres, FranceEarly morning, Port-Vendres, France
Today in Valldemossa, Mallorca, I heard two Chopin piano concerts, each lasting ten minutes. They were included with the ticket to the Real Cartuja Municipal Museum which exhibits Frédéric Chopin and George Sand memorabilia in a few cells of the old monastery. Though one of Chopin’s pianos is present in another cell, the Celda de Chopin (a different, privately owned museum), it was not played today; the pianist played on a grand piano in the adjoining Palace of King Sancho, who owned the monastery before it was a monastery.
The Chopin pieces give visitors an impression of the sounds that drifted from the monks’ cells where he was staying in the winter of 1838/39. Though he began his sojourn by composing on a borrowed instrument, in the last few weeks of his stay his new Pleyel piano arrived from Paris. In the cold bare cells he composed a few Preludes, a Polonaise, a Ballade, a Scherzo – pieces now famous. Today’s tourists come to see this very piano in the private museum, they photograph it and even hear it played by concert pianists, but only in summer. I missed out, being here in spring.
Chopin’s piano in the Celda de Chopin, Valldemossa
They photograph his handwritten musical scores, his death mask, his hand mask. There’s little information attached to the exhibits, and if visitors can’t speak to the guide in Spanish, they can only look but not learn. Yet if Chopin’s name is famous here, it is a modern phenomenon; when he and his lover, George Sand, were staying in Valldemossa, they were anything but popular, he having a disease which in the Mallorcan mind was contagious and deadly, and she wearing men’s clothes and not attending mass on Sunday. Even two years later when she wrote her account of their stay, Un Hiver à Majorque, Sand did not reveal the name of her companion but discreetly referred to him as the sick one, the invalid, our friend, someone in my family.
Time passed, and the world learnt that Chopin had been here, had composed here. They wanted to come and feel his presence, hear the echoes of his music in the cloisters, see his music scores with all their corrections exhibited on the walls.
George’s photos and images also adorn both of the museums, samples of writings by her and about her are exhibited under glass, with no indication of who wrote what. Copies of paintings of Sand, Chopin and their contemporaries hang on the walls.
Display for George Sand in the Celda de Chopin Museum, Valldemossa
The view from each cell is stunning, a distant perspective with a foreground of Mediterranean plantings in a monk’s garden. While Chopin composed, Sand finished Spiridion, the novel she’d begun a year earlier, coincidentally about monks in a monastery. What providence for a writer to land in her imaginary setting, to live for a short time the life of her protagonists!
View from monk’s garden, Valldemossa
Copies of Sand’s travel account, Un Hiver à Majorque, are on sale in both museums in many languages. An English translation by Shirley Kerby James, A Winter in Mallorca, sells well. Clearly tourists like to buy it and relive Sand’s experience here with Chopin, its ups and downs, mostly downs. His health deteriorated with the winter rains, the cells were miserably furnished and bitterly cold and the local food was unpalatable to them. If you listen to Chopin’s Prelude in D-flat major, Op. 28 no. 15, sometimes called the Raindrop prelude because of the repeating A flat which seems to imitate insistent raindrops – it’s believed he wrote it during a rainstorm – remember him at this low point in his physical health, remember that this music came from his suffering.
As for Valldemossa, I can recommend it if you like well cared-for stone houses and cobbled streets, green-shuttered windows, and if you like to be surrounded by your fellow human beings, for masses of them flock to this village to see the place that unceremoniously inspired Chopin to write beautiful music, the place where Sand observed so astutely the Mallorcans and a few monks left over from the days when the Real Cartuja was a functioning Spanish monastery.
Morning, Valldemossa. Defeated by the insomnia of jet lag, I rise and open the curtains to a full moon shining on me. It’s four o’clock. Sheep down below the valley wall shuffle through grass, chewing and bleating. No other sound; no other presence; it’s the other extreme of Valldemossa. Twelve hours ago the streets crawled with tourists, Europeans on spring holiday spending their money in the restaurants and terrace cafés, in the souvenir and art shops. Their numbers surprised me. I’d expected this small village to be of minor touristic interest, but I was wrong. It’s all because of George Sand. Well, more precisely, because of Frédéric Chopin.
His is the famous name. Even the non-musical could tell you he composed music in some past century. Without him, Valldemossa’s cafés wouldn’t be nearly as profitable. It began when he fell in love with one of nineteenth-century-France’s gifted writers, George Sand, a woman six years older with two children in tow. In need of a warmer, healing clime for his bad chest, they ventured to Mallorca in the Mediterranean. After a few weeks of hurdles and blocks (inevitable when travelling abroad) they found themselves on the west coast of the island, temporary residents of three monk cells in a recently secularised monastery, the Real Cartuja de Valldemossa. Real for Royal. Cartuja for Carthusian. Once a king’s residence, then a Carthusian monastery. Now a museum and tourist attraction.
Real Cartuja, Valldemossa
I’m quietly, very quietly, celebrating the publishing of my translation of Spiridion, George Sand’s novel that she finished in the cells of the Real Cartuja while Chopin, in his poor health, composed several pieces – Preludes, a Polonaise, a Ballade, a Scherzo.
When you wake at three, the morning is long. I wait for the new day by writing, and eating scraps of leftover food, my First Breakfast, like the hobbit. Now it’s ten to seven and the ragged Mallorcan mountains are silhouetted in the east. It’s seven o’clock and church bells in the monastery are ringing. It’s twenty past seven and there’s light, soft and shaded by mountains. The warm yellow street lamps are still on. It’s a quarter to eight and the lamps are now off. It’s half past eight and the hotel owners have set the tables. Time for Second Breakfast.
If I ask ‘Aren’t you glad it’s photo challenge time?’ it doesn’t sound like ‘Orange you glad it’s photo challenge time?’ But for Americans at WordPress who pronounce all the r’s it does, and I don’t mind because they give us brilliant photo prompts, like this weekend’s orange idea. Yes, I am glad it’s photo challenge time because I saw something amazing in orange just a few months ago at a Christmas celebration where some women performed an Indian dance, and I took this photo as they spun like whirling dervishes. The ‘something amazing in orange’ is my daughter-in-law, who loves India, has lived in India and would make a great Bollywood dancer. She’s actually amazing in any colour!
I found this photo of the Grand Hotel in my father’s war album, from his time in Egypt in 1941/42 with the AIF. The hotel in central Cairo is part of the Gamalian complex built in 1939, designed by Kamal Ismail. At street level are the hotel foyer and shops, above them is a mezzanine level of offices, and then eight floors of apartments. The complex is an excellent example of stark modernist architecture with its streamlined, symmetrical arrangement of facade details, repetition of balconies, rounded corners, simple balustrades and lack of ornamentation.
On the right and left of the photo where it is out of focus there are small corner balconies on separate buildings, between which there are three pedestrian walkways leading to a central rotunda. The walkways these days are blocked with shops and stalls, but they were designed to allow natural ventilation and illumination between the three parts of the complex, as you can see in the layout plan below the photo.
Grand Hotel, Cairo, c1941
I found the plan at archnet.org in a very interesting article, “Gamalian: a rediscovery”, about the design and innovations in the complex. The author laments the deterioration of the buildings since their construction in 1939.
Derna Harbour, Libya. Also Darna, Darnah. A very small harbour, anchorage depth 15.5 – 16m.
In 1941, when Libya was controlled by the Italians, and the Italians were allied with Germany, the British bombarded the harbour. My father brought home this photo.
Today there’s a prompt to show and tell: show the last photo I’ve taken, and tell the story behind that moment in time.
Yesterday I was passing the Civic library where I’ve worked casually as a tutor for a couple of years. There’s something in there that I’ve often wanted to photograph, but when I’m working I’m too busy for such an indulgence, though I sit gazing up at it while my student is busy with his writing exercises. Yesterday it wasn’t a work day, I had my camera, and I had time.
Here it is, my last photo. It’s of an artwork suspended from the library ceiling, a stripped down Vietnamese boat. The oars are long golden arms and hands pushing through the air, while a pair of eyes on the prow watches where the boat is going. The artist, Nerine Martini of Sydney, created the work during an artist residency in Vietnam in 2006 and has exhibited it in Vietnam on a lake (on a stand in the water) and at outdoor sculpture exhibitions in Sydney and Melbourne. The design of the Civic library is ideal for hanging a long object in the high-ceilinged space above the ground floor, up there at the mezzanine level where we can lean over the railing and look into the boat. The golden hands, each with a different gesture, reach out to the viewer; it was tempting to reach my own hand out to touch one. I didn’t.
Lifeboat: Thuyen Cuu Roi by Nerine Martini
It was an odd moment finally seeing the boat up close, as pleasurable as I expected it to be. But up on the mezzanine level where I took an earlier photo (see my header), as I leaned over the rail I was aware of a tutor at a table behind me teaching four students. I knew her. She was enjoying the interaction with her group, so I studied the boat for some moments and then I turned to her and quietly said “Hi, Jenny”. Although I have known her for five years, she looked at me blankly. I most uncomfortably interrupted her class to explain our connection as tutors. “Your face looks vaguely familiar,” she said.
I left the library feeling fulfilled but forgettable. Not so the rugged beauty of the Lifeboat.
We escaped to the beach on New Year’s Day (yesterday). I’ve spent every New Year of my life in Australia, and take the summer holiday mood for granted. But since I’ve been blogging I’ve seen countless photos of New Years from the other side of the world where it’s snowing and the trees are bare and people are indoors in front of a warming device.
As I sat on the beach watching holidaymakers do what relaxes them, I was struck by the difference in the world’s seasons.
Beach cricket
On most New Year’s Days, good-weather days in the fullness of an Australian summer, there’ll be families and friends playing beach cricket (or football or volleyball…). Rubbish bins are the wickets, the bat and ball are bright plastic, easy to see against a sandy background.
Hot dog
Dogs on this beach are allowed off-leash. There were three running free, in and out of the water and in and out of the cricket game. The one standing in the shallow surf here, a hyperactive apricot poodle, tore up and down the beach and even ran right across the back of my legs as I lay peacefully reading Chekhov on the sand.
Kayak carriers
A few people messed about in kayaks, rowing out to the deeper water and back again, then putting them away beneath the trees.
Love letter in the sand
But not everyone was having a good holiday. Someone on this beach had a disappointing Christmas-New Year and wrote about it in a five-page letter, stabbed it onto a sharp broken branch from where it worked its way loose and drifted down to the urine-soaked sand beneath this rocky overhang at the far end of the beach. I read the five pages, recognised the pain of unrequited love, and scattered them again beneath the tree. Together, he said, they had come this far, but she had kept moving and left him behind.
Would she one day (before the next high tide) stroll past this overhang, see his writing, and change her mind?
View from Blank Canvas, Batemans Bay
When we were weary of the beach, when we’d walked far across the rocks, far from cricketers and mad dogs, examined every rock pool and cooled our ankles in the clear water of several two-metre wide beaches formed between rocky outcrops, we went hunting for food. Long lines emerged from the popular fish and chip shops. But there was another choice; a longer walk brought us to a small restaurant, Blank Canvas, where for a couple of hours we sat at a table, enjoying fish and chips and this view between two gnarly trees.
I recently read a quotation by August Endell (1871 – 1925), a German self-taught architect who designed in the era of Jugendstil, or, in English and French, Art Nouveau. Here’s what he said in Berliner Architekturwelt, volume 4, 1902:
“I believe it is not generally known that, in the bark of our own native trees, we possess the most rapturous symphonies of colour that a painter could ever dream of. After rain, for example, when the colours are luminous and fresh, the richest and most wonderful motifs are to be found there. You need to go right up to the trunk and look hard at small areas the size of your palm. Strong colours alternate one with another. Velvety violet,
fiery yellowy-red,
grey with a blue shimmer,bright green,
– the widest possible range of colour nuances are found in a rich spectrum in the boldest contrasts. Only when you have studied the colours of bark close up can you appreciate why tree trunks have such luminous colours from afar.
The individual colours are garish and unbroken, but because they lie so close together in such small blotches, they tone each other down without losing their effect.”
August Endell’s first commission was for the Hof-Atelier Elvira, a photography studio in Munich, built and decorated in 1896-97. The interior decor was highly individual, even bizarre, but partly reflected Endell’s belief that ‘the most wonderful motifs’ are to be found on tree bark. Look, for example, at the studio staircase, to see how the organic pattern resembles the cracks in bark:
You can guess from the age of the staircase photo that the building no longer exists. It was destroyed by Allied bombing in 1944. Hooray for photos!
In 1896, in an article about his theory of art, Endell said:
“Someone who has never been sent into raptures by the exquisite swaying of a blade of grass, the wondrous implacability of a thistle leaf, the austere youthfulness of burgeoning leaf buds, who has never been seized and touched to the core of his being by the massive shape of a tree root, the imperturbable strength of split bark, the slender suppleness of the trunk of a birch, the profound peacefulness of an expanse of leaves, knows nothing of the beauty of forms.”
(Cited in Art Nouveau, Gabriele Fahr-Becker)
… the austere youthfulness of burgeoning leaf buds
… the massive shape of a tree root
The year 2014 is all but over; I want to finish it on a beautiful note. In an antique shop at Jervis Bay, in a holiday mood, I found Fahr-Becker’s Art Nouveau still sealed in protective plastic yet offered for a small price. I took it back to the beach house, peeled away its covering and flicked through the large glossy pages. At around the middle of the book, 232 pages in, the Endell quotation on bark brought me to a halt. I didn’t turn the page, but closed the book. I didn’t want to forget his urging to ‘go right up to the trunk’ of trees, and look hard. I urge you to do it, too.
It’s early days in December, but I’ve already taken a trip! Jervis Bay was the destination.
A friend who has a beach house there (and who loves the bay for its small population) says it’s a really awful place; she tells everyone not to go there. Of course, no one takes her advice. Jervis Bay has a number of isolated beaches, clean and white, with turquoise waters and plenty of fun water activities. It’s not awful, it’s awesome! See if you agree.
Huskisson, Jervis Bay NSW
Huskisson is at about the centre of the bay shore and is the central shopping area, though there’s not a lot except cafés and restaurants, swimwear and souvenir shops. Across the street from the shops is this green landscaped park that slopes down to the water. I sat in the shade of the trees, staring out to sea, wishing it was my back yard.
Hole in the Wall, Jervis Bay, Booderee National Park
Hole in the Wall is the name of this spot in the National Park at Jervis Bay. The rock is composed of sand grains solidly stuck together. As I sat in the gap rubbing at the sand walls I had a sense of reshaping nature, brushing the grains off the rock as easily as I brush them from my toes. Yet it’s strong enough to climb on, which my son did, declaring himself champion of the wall.
Cudmirrah Beach, Sussex Inlet
The water in the bay is calm with small waves, but down around the southern peninsula, on the ocean side at Sussex Inlet, the waves are surfable. If you look closely you’ll see my son waiting for a wave.
Boom net behind Port Venture boat
He enjoyed a number of water activities, especially lying in the boom net as it was dragged behind the tour boat.
Kayaking, Jervis Bay
…and the more peaceful pleasure of kayaking with his dad.
Dolphins, Jervis Bay
In the tour boat we were on dolphin watch, and we saw plenty, swimming around and under the boat and even riding the wash. The dolphins are free to swim wherever they like and easily cover the whole bay, which I’ve read is 124 square kilometres in size. Huge. Many times larger than Sydney Harbour. The dolphins are never fed by humans or made to entertain us in any way, unlike dolphins in marine theme parks. The captain announced his firm belief that dolphins should not be kept in captivity, and I can see why he’s so passionate about it. He frequently stopped the boat so we could watch them swimming and leaping out of the water for a synchronised breath.
Cliffs, Beecroft Peninsula, Jervis Bay
At the mouth of the bay, cliffs rise from a turquoise sea, their vertical faces and horizontal layers tempting the captain to pull in closer so we can marvel at the geology. At the base of the cliffs are large cavernous tunnels, magnets for divers. Here’s one where you can swim in one doorway and out another.
Keep clear 5NM – live firing, Honeymoon Bay NSW
If you don’t like deep water diving you could try a shore dive at Honeymoon Bay (a bay within the bay), but not when this red sign has been planted in the sand: ‘Range is active. Live firing. Do not land’ … Much of the Beecroft Peninsula is occupied by the Royal Australian Navy and is regularly (but not during school holidays) used for weapons training. Of course, the kangaroos can’t read, so they’re oblivious to the danger as they lie back on the beach. Zoom in and you’ll see one taking it easy on the soft sand.
I was amused by things that women do on Jervis Bay beaches; I saw things I haven’t seen on beaches further south. One, a bikinied Italian, hatted her head and wrapped her shoulders with her shirt, obviously wanting to keep the sun off the top but not the bottom! She laid out her towel in front of me on the sand, bending over from the waist. I didn’t want to see that. There was another, a bikinied Spaniard, who was also exposing a round bump. It’s rare to see an advanced naked pregnancy on our beaches. Probably no coincidence that both women were Mediterranean. And then, just when I was thinking, well at least Australians are predictable if reserved, I stumbled across eight boxing-gloved women punching each other beside the calm waters of the bay.
I often wonder as I’m people-watching, snapping photos, whether anyone ever catches me doing something unusual, a bit crazy, and … click! Pffft. Not likely.
Thanks Marianne for the prompt to take a trip EVERY month. I’ve done it, twelve months in a row. And thanks to all of you who’ve read my trippy posts this year.
bright green,
