1001 Ways to die (9) – Sylvia Plath, American, Poet, Novelist

…

Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I’ve a call.

It’s easy enough to do it in a cell.
It’s easy enough to do it and stay put.
It’s the theatrical

…

Lady Lazarus, Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath, photographed in a hallway of Smith College, 1952

Sylvia Plath was born in the Boston neighborhood of Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts on October 27, 1932 the oldest child of Otto and Aurelia Schoeber Plath. The daughter of a Boston Univesity German and entomology professor and a high school English teacher, Plath was raised in a household that valued learning highly.  While in college, in August of 1953, Plath attempted to overdose on sleeping pills. This suicide attempt would be recalled years later in her poem, Lady Lazarus. Plath was able to return to college and only graduated a couple of months behind her class.

Ted Hughes

After receiving a Fulbright scholarship, she began two years at Cambridge University. There she met and married, in 1956, the British poet Ted Hughes.

Hughes was born on 17 August 1930 in Mytholmroyd, West Yorkshire, and raised on local farms. According to him, “My first six years shaped everything”. He studied at Cambridge University and first published poetry in a journal launched with fellow students called St Botolph’s Review. It was at the launch party for the magazine that he met Plath, and they married in 1956.

Sylvia Plath in 1957

They separated in 1962.

On February 11, 1963, after carefully sealing the kitchen so her children would not be harmed, Sylvia Plath took a bottle of sleeping pills and stuck her head in a gas oven.

As Plath’s widower, Hughes became the executor of her personal and literary estates. He oversaw the publication of her manuscripts, including Ariel in 1966. He also claimed to have destroyed the final volume of Plath’s journal, detailing their last few months together. In his foreword to The Journals of Sylvia Plath, he defended his actions as motivated by consideration for the couple’s young children. He wrote about his relationship with Plath, and his response to her suicide, in Birthday Letters. It was his final collection and one of his most successful works.

In 1969 Hughes suffered another loss when his mistress, Assia Wevill, also gassed herself and their daughter in an apparent copycat suicide.

In 1982, Plath became the first poet to win a Pulitzer Prize posthumously, for The Collected Poems. She also wrote The Bell Jar, a semi-autobiographical novel published shortly before her death.

Ted Hughes died from cancer in 1998.

On 23 March 2009, CNN reported:

Nicholas Hughes (right) in 1999

“The family history of poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath took another tragic turn Monday when it was revealed that their son had committed suicide after battling depression.

Nicholas Hughes, whose mother asphyxiated herself in 1963 by putting her head in a gas oven at her London home while her two children slept in the next room, hanged himself at his home in Alaska, his sister Frieda told The Times newspaper.

Hughes, 47, was unmarried with no children of his own and had until recently been a marine biologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.”

O love, how did you get here?
O embryo

Remembering, even in sleep,
Your crossed position.
The blood blooms clean

In you, ruby.
The pain
You wake to is not yours.

Love, love,
I have hung our cave with roses.
With soft rugs----
Sylvia Plath, Nick and the Candlestick

Sylvia Plath: Boat in Rock Harbor, Cape Cod

A selection of 44 ink and pen drawings by Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) was exhibited for the first time between 2 Nov and 16 Dec 2011 at the Mayor Gallery in London, displaying Plath’s love for her “deepest source of inspiration”, art. Sam Leigh wrote in “The Guardian”:

“Nearly half a century after her suicide, the great poet is capable of surprising us. A selection of her drawings that have just gone on display at London’s Mayor Gallery shows us a new side of her. I found these drawings moving: not because they feed into the legend, but because they sidestep it. They bring us a fresh look at a woman now so barnacled with myth it’s hard to see her clearly. And – wow – they’re really good….

To see these drawings as in some way complementary to the poems, as some will doubtless try to, seems to me off-beam. Plath did once tell the BBC: “I have a visual imagination.” But what’s so striking about these drawings is exactly their difference from the visual world of the poems. These are pictures that revel in the thinginess of things: in wine bottles, an old kettle, a pair of shoes, the uneven timbering of beached boats, the architectural curlicues of a Parisian roof.”

1001 Ways to die (8) – Watchman of decommissioned vessel “”Claudia M” died of heart attack

The news item in today’s (19 January 2012) wires was very brief.

The watchman of the decommissioned (moored in the area  of Elefsis) vessel “Claudia M” (Italian flag)  died of a heart attack, at the age of 56.

"Claudia M"moored in the Sicilian port of Trapani, sometime in 2010

There is no mentioning of a name.

The dead man remains anonymous.

We do not know his nationality.

All the details that are ususally reported wehne someone dies, are missing.

Seaman's Book

Except of his age and his employment.

Do the details matter after all?

A seaman’s life is exposed to the huge risks created by the Sea and force of the Elements.

Most of the time seamen’s deaths are reported, they have been caused by naval accidents while the ship was en route to somewhere.

In Claudia M’s case, the ship was already decommissioned. Moored outside the port of Piraeus, near Elefsis.

The man most likely died surrounded by boredom, by the relentless pressure that Time puts upon us when we have all the time in the world and absolutely nothing to do.

Apparently, the watchman was  alone on board.

It is likely that he called for help, prior to departing from this futile world.

Officers of the Greek Coast Guard boarded the vessel, and transferred the man to the nearest hospital, where he was confirmed dead.

Claudia M in Livorno, in 2009

I write about someone’w death and I do not even know his name.

I do not even know the “good” things that he did, or even some of the “bad” things.

It is common when we escort someone to the outskirts of life as we know it, to refer to the “significant” bits of his life, his personality, and so on.

Obviously I cannot do that, as I know nothing about the man.

But I do not feel that I have to.

To mourn the loss of a human life it is not necessary to evaluate this life , assess it, criticize it, and make the whole thing worth it.

There is no “worth” in Death. There is not “ethical side” in Death.

Nikos Kavadias

Death cannot be counterbalanced by the things that the deceased did, or by the traits of his character and personality.

Death is not concerned about great losses or lesser losses.

Death does not count or weigh the good and the bad.

Death ignores and detests discrimination.

Death is the Great Equalizer nd the Master Annihilator.

And it is because of the equivalent powers of the Sea, that every Seaman has a special relationship with Death. They build this relationship during the long hours, the long days, the long months in the vast territories of the blue and grey waters. And they carry it with them everywhere they go. Until they make the last trip.

Dedication: This post is dedicated to the memory of Seaman Nikos Kavadias, who sailed for the Beyond on the 10th February 1975. 

1001 Ways to Die – (7) Cy Twombly, American, Painter and Sculptor

Cy Twombly, one of my favourite modern artists, has died on Tuesday, 5th July 2011 in Rome, Italy, losing a long battle to cancer.

His work “The Rose” was the object of a previous article. In another article on this blog I presented his sculpture “Thermopylae” in relation to C. Cavafy’s poem. Today I want to travel with Twombly in the Sea.

I have somehow visualized Death, more precisely the departure from this life, to embarking, to getting on a boat and sailing in the sea. This is no crossing of Acheron, the river of Hades. This is becoming one with the Sea, taking his boat out to the sea, and then sinking with it.

In order to do this, I will use his “Poems to the Sea”, a series of 24 works done in 1959, a photograph of the Sea that the artist took, and his monumental work “Lepanto”.

Twombly in 1958, the year after he moved to Italy from the US. Photograph: David Lees/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

Poems to the Sea

‘As Twombly told the critic David Sylvester, “the Mediterranean is always just white, white, white”: in the 24 drawings called Poems to the Sea the colour blue barely appears, and yet the cursory lines and spots create a sea of the mind’s eye – hours of contemplation transformed into a few cryptic marks. With their textured, creamy backgrounds, the paintings inspired by Procida are also extremely evocative: parched cliff-tops in the Bay of Naples; crumbling plaster; the heat – it’s all there if you look for it, though without that act of the imagination the charm quickly fades.’ (source: Christopher Masters, the Guardian).

Poems to the Sea, 1959, Collection Dia Art foundation, New York

‘What order of poems, punctuated with numerals and question marks, are these? The sea is reduced to horizon line and word, scribblings and veils of paint against the stark white of paper. A persistent compulsion is invoked in the viewer, the desire to read what is there, but not fully manifest in the artist’s scrawled script. Two words in these drawings emerge into legibility, “time”and “Sappho”, as if washed up on the beach alongside sudden, subtle gem-flashes of colour – blue, orange-yellow, pink – gleaming all the more because of their discretion. In these pages, meaning is endlessly frustrated and pursued. It settles only in the distance, figured perhaps by the horizon lines that move across the top of each of the drawings – in fact, simply grey or blue lines made with a straight edge, but suggesting seascapes at the vanishing point. The flat planes of sea and page have been collapsed. Writing comes in waves, rolling funnels of cursive script, crossed out, erased, enfoamed in satiny greyish-white paint. The signs are given as nascent forms, as gestural indications of “the hand’s becoming”, as Roland Barthes so aptly phrased it.’ (source: Claire Daigle on Cy Twombly, Tate Gallery, London).

Cy Twombly: Miramare 2005

Miramare

‘Cy Twombly photographs the subjects that he encounters in his studio in Gaeta, in Bassano, Rome or in Lexington, on the beach at Miramare or in botanical gardens, using an instant camera. By means of a special pigmenting process that involves dryprint, these one-offs are enlarged and printed in limited editions. Not only the special saturation of color, but also the fact that the shots are strikingly out of focus account for their unmistakable nature and extraordinary appeal. The consistent lack of focus is reminiscent of the photographs of the late 19th-century Pictorialists. Hubertus Von Amelunxen, however, discerns photo-historical references to the early days of photography, namely to early calotypes, first paper photographs permeated in “light and emulsion”. Indeed, with their aesthetic effect, Twombly’s photographic images exhibit a sense of both astonishment and entrancement with the (new) technology. The unusual and the new is of a quite singular beauty.

Using his particular technique, Cy Twombly manages to concentrate on the textures of surfaces which, removed from the flow of time, generate visual orders of an over-arching world of perception. Hubertus Von Amelunxen calls them “musical, rhythmical positions in an ineffable syntax” – as the focus is not on representation but on the unmistakable nature of things or the clarity of motifs. Finding the invisible in the visible, retaining the purportedly excluded in the image and at the same time sensing the intangible dimensions of time and space, that is what constitutes the great appeal of Twombly’s photographs. The eye is always very close to things, the direct view suggests an almost intimate proximity – of tender tulip blooms, of everyday objects such as glasses and bottles, of the artist’s slippers, his brushes and painting utensils, and not least his paintings themselves.’

(Source: La Lettre de la Photographie)

Cy Twombly: Lepanto

Lepanto

The work consists of 12 large canvases that looks back to one of the most important naval battles of early modern history. Lepanto was shown in September 2008 in the Museo del Prado prior to its permanent installation in the Brandhorst Museum in Munich in October of the same year. I saw the work in Brandhorst in 2010 and was deeply moved by it.

‘When Cy Twombly was offered a gallery dedicated to his work at the 2001 Venice Biennale, he chose to create a new work especially for the space, a work that he describes as one painting in twelve parts. For his concept of the project, Twombly turned to the genre of history painting. Before the advent of Modernism in the late 19th century, history painting, which encompassed images from mythology, the bible, and the lives of the saints, as well as scenes from ancient to contemporary history, was considered the highest achievement of the painter´s art. Responding to the exhibition´s locale adjoining the Arsenale shipyard, Twombly chose of his subject the famous 1571 naval battle of Lepanto.

Cy Twombly in front one of the "Lepanto" panels in the Venice Biennale of 2001

Venice, then an immensely powerful city-state, instigated the formation of an alliance against the Ottoman Empire, which had been attacking its colonies in the eastern Mediterranean and defiling their churches. Brokered by Pope Pius V, the western European alliance consisted of Venice, the Papal States, and Spain, three major Catholic powers of the post-Reformation period. The battle of Lepanto has always been viewed as a turning point in the history of Europe. The Ottoman Empire had heretofore seemed invincible and its fleet was far larger than the alliance´s armada. With more manageable Venetian-designed ships and superior deployment of artillery, the alliance vanquished and burned the Ottoman fleet. Lepanto was the last major sea battle that involved ramming and hand-to-hand fighting on deck. It was the first triumph of Christian Europe over the seemingly all-powerful Islamic Ottoman Empire. It also marked the end of the Mediterranean as the locus of shipping and trade; henceforth, the Atlantic routes to the riches of the American colonies dominated naval activity.

Twombly arranged Lepanto in a way that is at once symphonic and cinematic with four images of flames and falling leaves presaging, interrupting, and concluding his highly abstract narrative of the battle. The maritime scenes, with their stick-figure images of fighting galleys, become increasingly dense with the final triad drenched in the colors of his rich, limited palette. The lushness of the reds and yellows counterpoints their depiction of flames and blood.’

(Source: The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, USA)

As the ship disappears in the horizon, where sky and sea merge, I quote from Roland Barthes (The Wisdom of Art by Roland Barthes 3):

‘If we wished to locate this ethic, we would have to seek very far, outside painting, outside the West, outside history, at the very limit of meaning, and say, with the Tao Te King:

He produces without appropriating anything,
He acts without expecting anything,
His work accomplished, he does not get attached to it,
And since he is not attached to it,
His work will remain.’

Farewell Cy Twombly

 

1001 Ways to Die – (6) Peter Falk, American Actor

Peter Falk, one of my favorite actors, died at the age of 83 on 23rd June 2011. He  died peacefully at his home in Beverly Hills. In the last years of his life he was suffering from Alzheimer’s and dementia.

I got to know Peter Falk from the “Columbo” detective movies in the early 1980′s when I was in the US. I liked the movies very much, as Lieutenant Columbo would always catch the bad guys, the murderers who were trying to flee their inescapable fate.

Columbo in his car

Usually the murderer(s) was a very rich and/or powerful guy. Columbo would enter their impressive houses and mansions, and initially he would create more a wave of sympathy rather than fear, as he was a scruffy looking guy with a crumpled raincoat that he would wear all year long.

Columbo was always underestimated almost until the moment the murderer was caught.

In addition to his scruffy looks, he would carefully lead the suspect to believe that he (Columbo) was naive, almost thick in the mind. Add to this his absent – mindedness, and you have the recipe for a disaster in the investigation. How would Columbo ever catch anyone?

His most famous one liner was “Just one more thing”. He would say this when he was by the door, ready to leave the suspect’s home. He would turn his head, bend slightly, and say it. As I recall, the suspects were invariably irritated by the “thick, slow, absent-minded” lieutenant, but were enduring his questioning, almost sure that it would lead nowhere.

As famous as Columbo himself was his car, a Peugeot 403 convertible, released to the market in 1958. If Columbo was scruffy, his car was a moving wreck.

Peugeot 403 Cabriolet, 1958

However, he never gave it up, even though in some episodes he had a chance. In the photo above you see a well maintained model.

I would now  like to give a short example of his investigative method, or rather of his method of leading the murderer to entrapment and the inevitable confession. In the Episode “Any old port in a storm”, Columbo investigates the murder of a young Californian. The suspect is his half-brother, a wine producer and connoisseur. However, he has alibi: at the time of the death, he was attending a conference in the East Coast. Columbo knows that something is wrong and there are many contradictions in the suspect’s statements and stories, but he has no proof.  The suspect has an extensive and rare wine collection that requires the continuous operation of a temperature and humidity system all around the year. Finally, the whole question focuses on the operation of the wine maintenance system. When the victim was murdered, the temperatures where on the high side. The murderer had to keep the body of the victim in the wine cellar while he was attending the conference, but should the system be operational, this would keep the body in a condition that would change the estimated time of death. Therefore, the killer switched the system off for the critical 24 hours he was away. Columbo needed to prrof that the system was off, but he had no record of it. He therefore invites the murderer to dinner at his favourite restaurant, and at the end he offers a bottle of rare port. The killer tastes the port and immediately says that this bottle has gone bad. This was the needed proof, as the bottle was taken from the killer’s wine cellar. Vintage Columbo all the way!

Peter Falk was not just columbo. In his long career he has played in many movies. As this post is personal, I do not want to list all the movies, only the ones I have seen.

Wings of Desire Movie Poster

“Wings of Desire”, the wonderful movie of German Director Wim Wenders made in 1987, I have presented in another post. In this movie, Peter Falk played himself.

Another movie where Falk starred, was “Anzio, 1968, directed by Edward Dmytryk.

Anzio Movie Poster

Falk plays Corporal Jack Rabinoff, a “killing machine”, who is based on a real First Special Service Force soldier Jake Wallenstein, who ran an illegal brothel of Italian prostitutes in a stolen ambulance Most of the men, including Rabinoff, are killed. (Source: Wikipedia)

I confess I do not remember anything about the movie as I write.

A Woman under the Influence, Movie Poster

Closing this personal note on Peter Falk, I would like to refer his masterpiece, “A Woman under the Influence”, a John Cassavetes film made in 1974 and distributed in 1975.

Falk and Cassavetes were good friends. When Falk read the scenario and Cassavetes told him that nobody was willing to produce the movie, Falk gave him 500,000 dollars.

Peter Falk and Gena Rowlands

The movie was made, and Falk played the Italian blue collar worker who is married to Gena Rowlands, the “woman under the influence”. The movie is Cassavetes’ best.

Peter Falk and Model

Peter Falk was also a figurative artist. He loved to draw and paint.

Farewell Columbo!!!

1001 Ways to Die – (5) Ferdinand Lassalle, German Politician and Publicist

Lassalle's Tomb in Wroclaw, Poland

The German politician and publicist Ferdinand Lassalle (1825-64) died after a duel in Switzerland at the age of 40.

Sturm und Drang marked the life of Ferdinand Lassalle. Born in 1825 in Breslau, Eastern Prussia (today’s Wroclaw in Poland) as Ferdinand Lasal, he changed his name to one that sounded less Jewish and more like a revolutionary French name. As lawyer for Countess Sophie von Hatzfeldt in her divorce, he became famous and received a tidy sum, which he dedicated to the revolution and the workers’ movement.  (Source: IISH)

The General German workers’ Association (Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein, ADAV) was established by Lassalle in 1863. The only stated purpose of this organization was the winning of equal, universal, and direct suffrage through peaceful and legal means. As a result of the “disagreements between MArx and Lassalle, a lot of German Marxists did not join the first labour party in the history of Germany.  

The German Social Democratic Party, SPD, ws established in 1875, absorbing ADAV.  

But Lassalle was not an “ordinary” socialist. He became friends with Bismarck. As Geoffrey Wawro notes in his review of Steiberg’s Bismarck biography on WSJ:

“Mr. Steinberg notes that Bismarck’s tactical use of democracy drew much from his controversial friendship, in the early 1860s, with the dashing socialist Ferdinand Lassalle. None of Bismarck’s conservative contemporaries could make sense of this relationship, but Bismarck learned from Lassalle clever ways to ­discredit liberalism and what the ­Germans called Manchestertum—the mania for British-style capitalism ­wedded to parliamentary government.

Lassalle loathed liberalism on the grounds that it merely replaced the landed aristocracy with a new elite of merchants and professionals; it would lead, he believed, “to a deep immorality and to exploitation” of the poor by the rich. Bismarck would later employ that novel line of attack to justify the paternal Polizeiwirtschaft (police state) that he wielded against German socialists and Catholics after unification. With one hand, he doled out old-age pensions and accident insurance, while removing representative government with the other.”

Ferdinand Lassalle

 

According to Golo Mann (The History of Germany since 1789) when Bismarck had to address the Reichstag years later, he made what was almost a declaration of love for LAssalle as a human being:

“He had something which geatly attracted me as a private person; he was one of the most intelligent and charming people with whom I have come in contact, a man who was ambitious in a big way. Lassalle was an energetic and highly intelligent person and to talk to him was very instructive; our discussions lasted for hours and I was always sorry when htey were over. I regret that our political positions did not allow more extended dialogue. I would have been glad to have a man of such talents and intellect as my neighbour in the country….”

But Lassalle was not just a politician. He was a man of many talents. In 1845, having graduated from University, he started wrting a book on Heraclitus. The author’s efforts were intrrupted by other events and the book was eventually published in 1858 with the title “ The philosophy of Heraclitus the Dark Philosopher of Ephesus”. In this essay Lassalle portrayed Heraclitus as a young Hegelian, or a precursor of Hegel.

The reason that led him to the fateful and fatal duel was is love for a woman, Helene von Donniges, the daughter of a Bavarian diplomat. Herr von Donniges was dead against the marriage between his daughter and the socialist Leader. Helene finally sucumbed to the huge pressures exerted by her family and renounced Lassalle, becoming engaged to the Wallachian Count von Racovitza. Lassalle who did not take this lightly challenged both Helene’s father and fiancee to a duel. The fiancee accepted and on the morning of 28 August 1864  Lassalle was mortally wounded. He died on August 31.

Wilhelm von Donniges

Helene married the Wallachian Count Von Racovitza and, subsequently, the actor Siegwart Friedmann, a leader in German theater. After Friedmann’s death, Helene married again, this time the Russian Baron von Schewitsch. After the Baron died in Munich in 1911, Helene became very distressed and committed suicide taking chloral hydrate in November of the same year.

Helene von Donniges

In a dramatic and romantic posture worthy of Sarah Bernhardt, Helene (Von Racovitza) poses at the Mora studio.

Paris - Musée d'Orsay: Jean Baptiste Carpeaux's La Danse (model)

Note: This allegorical vision of a genie of the dance, surrounded by Dionysiac creatures, was designed in 1865for the Paris Opera House. Puritans, who exist even in France, thought that the sculpture was obscene and erotic. Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux had given the genie a female face (that of Princess Helene de Racowitza) and a male nude body (the model was a carpenter, Sebastien Visat). (Source: flickr)

Lassalle's Death Mask

1001 ways to die – (4) Ayrton Senna, Racing Driver (1st May 1994, Imola Circuit, Italy)

Senna in the Barcelona Grand Prix, 1993 (my photo)

On the 1st of May 1994, in the Imola Circuit in Italy, Ayrton Senna crashed in the wall of the Tamburello turn (See Circuit Map, turns 2, 3, and 4 – in 994 there was no chicane in the turn) with a speed of approximately 200km/h. A bolt from the front wheels penetrated his helmet, crushing his forehead and causing excessive brain damage, and ultimately, his death.

Senna was rushed to nearby Bologna by helicopter and was hospitalised. A race begun to save his life. It was a short and failed one. Senna died a few hours later. Some claim that Senna’s brain stopped functioning on the track but his heart was kept working in order not to stop the race. It has been confirmed that the drivers who were in their cars, waiting for the restart of the race knew only that Senna had an accident and was moved to a hospital.

I was there in Tosa (Point 7 in the circuit map). It was my second visit to Imola for the Formula 1 race. The first was in 1993. Tragically, another driver, the Austrian Roland Ratzenberger, had crashed heavily in the Vileneauve curve (points 5 and 6 in the circuit map) and died on the spot the day before, during the official qualifying session.

Roland Ratzenberger

Senna was shocked after the death of Ratzenberger, even though people were saying that it was a racing accident. The day before, in Friday’s free practice the 21 year old Rubens Baricchelo flew off the track and ended up on the tire wall unconscious. Senna almost got to the point of asking for Sunday’s race to be cancelled.

Senna in his MacLaren Ford in Barcelona, 1993 (my photo)

I arrived in Bologna on Friday evening, and stayed at a hotel in the old town. On Saturday morning I drove to Imola, some 40 km east of Bologna. The weather was great, the atmosphere in the circuit wonderful. My Saturday seat  was on the main  straight (21, 22 on the circuit map), just opposite the pits.

Senna in the pits during qualifying for the 1993 Imola Grand Prix (My Photo)

When the Ratzenberger accident happended, I could see Senna jump the pit wall and run to get in a circuit car so that he could go immediately to the scene.

1994 was Senna’s first year in the Williams team. From 1988 to 1993 he was racing with MacLaren. His teammate was Damon Hill, the son of Graham Hill, the only son of  a world champion to win the title (he won it in 1996). The irony of the matter was that in June 1994, one month after Senna’s death, I met Damon at the Montreal Airport and got his autograph(although faded, you can see it below the “Boss”mark on the lower side of the helmet).

MotorSport's cover in June 1994, with Damon Hill's autograph (June 1994, Montreal)

In 1993, Senna’s last year with the Maclaren team, I went to many races in Europe and was fortunate to see the great man racing in a totally inferior car, compared to the all powerful Renault Williams. In 1993 Maclaren had the V8 Ford engine and the chassis was not exactly perfect. On the other hand, Williams had the V10 Renault engine that had delivered them the title in 1992 (Nigel Mansell).

Senna in Magny Cours, 1993 (My Photo)

 

Senna in Hockenheim, 1993 (My Photo)

By far the best race I have been to was in England, in Donnington Park. Donnington Park is a racing circuit some 150 miles north of London, near the town of Milton Keynes.

Senna’s drive was sensational. His underpowered car was flying, while the Williams Renault cars of Prost and Hill were struggling. If I remeber correctly, Prost had to stop for more than 4 times to change tires, as the rain would flood the circuit, then stop, then start again.

Ayrton Senna in Donnington Park on Saturday qualifying, 1993 (My photo)

The race was thoroughly wet, and Senna turned everything upside down. He comprehensively beat the chief Williams driver, Alain Prost, and went to drive a stunning race in horrible conditions. It was one of the greatest races ever.

Senna overtakes Prost in Donington's race

If Donnington Park was the most spectacular race I Saw where Senna unfolded his immense talent, Monaco in 1993 was another splendid opportunity for Senna to exhibit his determination to win the “difficult” races of the calendar, the races where Renault Williams’ superiority was not enough, but had to be coupled with the driver’s talents.

L'Equipe: Senna in Monaco's 1993 race (with Dereck Warrick's autograph)

I was fortunate to see the Monaco race. Spellbinding!

I now return to the horrific incident that killed Senna. After the deadly incident, the race continued. And ended with a chill. Everyone was wondering what happenned to Senna and what was his condition. We were to find out very soon that he was fighting against death, and had almost lost the battle.

Why Senna died?

The Italian judicial system closed the case in 2007, having confirmed that Senna’s car never turned in Tamburello but went straight to the wall, due to failure of the steering column.

Back to Imola, on the 1st May 1994.

After the race ended, the crowd entered the circuit and walked to Tamburello. It is common to walk the track after the race is over, but usually this is a fun thing to do. It was not so in 1994. There was an eerie silence hanging over us. As if we all knew that Senna was no longer with us.

On the way back to Bologna I took the road that passes through small towns, rather than the Autostrada.  There were people out this Sunday afternoon, but they were silent. So uncharacteristic of the tifosi to be quiet on a Sunday afternoon after a Formula 1 race. But they weere.  Same in Bologna.

Next morning, on the flight from Bologna to Heathrow, I saw Flavio Briatore, who was at the time running the Benetton team. He was like a ghost.

1001 Ways to Die – (3) Heinrich von Kleist, Writer

2011 will mark the 200th anniversary of the death of the great German writer Heinrich von Kleist.

Kleist was born in the market town of Frankfurt on the Oder into an aristocratic Prussian family that had produced a long line of distinguished military men. Following tradition, he joined a regiment of the royal foot guards when he was not yet 15. He saw action against the French, but he was quite unsuited to the discipline and monotony of military life. “So many officers, so many drill masters, so many soldiers, so many slaves,” he wrote.

Unappreciated in his own time, Kleist posthumously received wide critical acclaim for his short prose. His eight short stories, or Novellen, originally puhlished in two volumes in 1810-11, are considered comparable to the work of Giovanni Boccaccio and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. In addition to his Novellen, Kleist wrote eight plays and many political essays. The extreme stylization and frank sexuality of his works shocked his contemporaries, denying him the acclaim he coveted; however, these same qualities have ensured continuing interest in his work today, and he is now particularly praised for his acute psychological insight and honest depictions of sexuality.

In Greece Kleist is mostly known for his play “The Broken Jug”, which he wrote in 1808. The play was staged for the first time in Greece by the National Theater, in 1954, under the direction of Alexis Solomos.

{Goethe, a literary father-figure to Heinrich von Kleist, may have sensed an Oedipal bloodlust in the emerging poet and playwright: “With the best will in the world towards this poet,” he wrote, in a review of The Broken Jug, “I have always been moved to horror and disgust by something in his works, as though there were a body well planned by nature, tainted with an incurable disease.”}

Read more: http://wordswithoutborders.org/dispatches/article/kleist_new_translations/#ixzz1D56qSlse

I got to know Kleist and his work more, when a good friend some years ago, gave me as a present Kleist’s novellas. It was a revellation. I quote from a “New Republic” article:

Patricia O'Donovan's work based on the story by Heinrich von Kleist

{Heinrich von Kleist’s famous story “The Earthquake in Chile” is set in Santiago in 1647. A young Carmelite nun named Josephe, condemned to death for becoming pregnant out of wedlock, is about to be beheaded. Across town, her lover, Jeronimo Rugera, is preparing to hang himself in the prison where he has been incarcerated. Just as the bells announcing Josephe’s imminent execution begin to toll, a gigantic earthquake strikes: We now know that it measured around 8.5 on the Richter scale, just a little less than the recent 8.8 quake. The pillar on which Jeronimo was to hang himself becomes his support, and he escapes as the building collapses around him. His beloved, saved by the same “heavenly miracle,” finds him in the countryside, where the refugees from the city have gathered. (This quotation and the others come from Peter Wortsman’s new translation of Kleist’s Selected Prose, just out in an attractive new edition from Archipelago Books.) The same townspeople who earlier that day had gathered to watch Josephe’s execution now greet the pair with warmth and compassion. Had the past, they wonder, only been a bad dream? The earthquake seems to have acted as a great leveler, erasing the previous divisions of class and piety:

Amidst these awful moments that had brought about the destruction of all of humanity’s worldly possessions, and during which all of nature threatened to be engulfed, it did indeed seem that the human spirit itself blossomed like a lovely flower. In the fields all around, as far as the eye could see, there were people of all social classes lying together, nobles and beggars, matrons of once stately households and peasant women, civil servants and day laborers, monks and nuns: all commiserating with each other, helping each other, cheerfully sharing the little of life’s necessities they’d been able to salvage, as though the common calamity had joined all those who’d managed to survive it into a single harmonious family of man.}

Later when I was living in London, I got introduced to other Kleist plays, like “The Prince of Homburg”  and “Penthesilea”. The appreciation of Kleist’s work grew even more when I discovered Hans Werner Henze, the German composer who wrote an opera based on the play “The Prince of Homburg” in 1958.

von Menzel Adolf: Illustration to Kleist's - The Broken Jug

{As (Thomas) Mann stressed to Anglo-Saxon readers, one cannot account for Kleist’s narrative quirks with historical perspective. “No other contemporary writer resembled him in the least. His method of storytelling is as eccentric as his plots, and with very few exceptions…Kleist’s contemporaries found his fiction intolerably mannered, unpalatable in fact.”}

Read more: http://wordswithoutborders.org/dispatches/article/kleist_new_translations/#ixzz1D57I1fVx

In his essay “On the Theater of Marionettes,” an ironic, fictionalized dialogue, Kleist consider’s Man’s fall from Eden and asks whether human self-consciousness is less a blessing than a curse.

Excerpt from “On the Theater of Marionettes”

{In this context, Mr. C… replied in a right friendly manner, I must tell you another story, of which you will immediately comprehend the connection.

On a trip to Russia I happened to find myself on the country estate of a certain Sir von G…, a Livonian nobleman, whose sons were at the time very much focused on their fencing; especially the older one, who had just returned from his university studies, played the virtuoso, and one morning up in his room handed me a rapier. We fenced, yet I proved superior; passion helped put him off his guard; with almost every thrust I struck home, until, finally, his rapier flew into a corner. Half in jest, half pained, he said, as he picked up his rapier, that he had found his master; but everything in nature finds its match, and he would soon lead me to mine. The brothers laughed out loud and cried: Off with him! Off with him! To the woodshed he must go! Whereupon they took me by the hand and led me to a bear that Sir von G…, their father, was training in the yard.

When I appeared before him in stunned amazement, the bear stood upright on its hind legs, with his back to a post to which he was attached, his right paw raised and ready to strike, looking me straight in the eye: this was his fencing position. And finding myself face to face with such an opponent, I did not know if I was dreaming; but Sir von G…, egged me on: Thrust man! Thrust! he said. See if you can teach him a thing or two! And having gotten over my initial amazement, I lunged with my rapier; the bear made a very slight movement with his paw and parried my thrust. I tried with feints to trick him; the bear did not budge. And once again I lunged with a nimble stroke that would have pierced without fail any human breast; but the bear made a very slight motion with its paw and parried the thrust. Now I was almost as befuddled as had been the young Sir von G… The bear’s perfect calm helped rob me of my own composure, I varied thrusts and feints, sweat dripped from my brow: for naught! Not only did the bear, like the foremost fencer in the world, parry all my thrusts; but, unlike any human counterpart would have done, not a single time did he go for my feints: Looking at me eye to eye, as if he could read my soul, he stood stock still, paw raised and ready, and if my thrusts were ruses, he did not even budge.

Do you believe this story?

Absolutely! I replied with cheerful applause; I’d believe it from the lips of any stranger; all the more so from you!

Well then, my fine friend, said Mr. C…, you now have all the knowledge you need to grasp my meaning. We see that in the organic world, to the same degree that reflection gets darker and weaker, grace grows ever more radiant and dominant.—But just as two lines intersect on one side of a point and, after passing through infinity, suddenly come together again on the other side; or the image in a concave mirror suddenly reappears before us after drawing away into the infinite distance: so, too, does grace return once perception, as it were, has traversed the infinite—such that it simultaneously appears the purest in human bodily structures that are either devoid of consciousness or which possess an infinite consciousness, i.e. in the jointed manikin or the god.

In which case, I observed, a bit befuddled, would we then have to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge again to fall back into the state of innocence?

Undoubtedly, he replied; which will be the last chapter of the history of the world.}

Kleist shot himself on the 21 November 1811, on a small hill by the shore of the Wannsee lake just outside Berlin, having first shot dead a woman called Henrietta Vogel, who was the wife of an acquaintance and who in the subsequent autopsy would be found to have been suffering from incurable cancer. There was no love affair between the two of them, although when I first read the events, I trully wished this were the case.

As an ending to the post, I would like to present his masterpiece, the play “The Prince of Homburg”, with the help of two articles from the British newspaper, “The Guardian”.

The Prince of Homburg

“Encountering Kleist, one’s first impression is of a compelling strangeness. Nowhere is this more potent than in his masterpiece The Prince of Homburg, with its moonstruck opening tableau, its sleepwalking hero, its plot developing ominously and unstoppably from a single and essentially mysterious incident. The strangeness is compounded for a modern audience by the setting of the play. We are somewhere called Prussia, with the semi-legendary historical incident that inspired the play – the Prince’s cavalry charge at the 17th-century battle of Fehrbellin – transposed into a recognisable early 19th-century world of bureaucracy, organised warfare and journalism. But this is not the Prussia of history, for all the concrete details of its steely military orthodoxy. It is an interior landscape of the imagination, one very different from that of the English 19th century.

Kleist’s characters are confined, trapped, caught; but their imaginations and their narratives are opened up by the same vistas of exaltation and devastation that are to be found in the music of Beethoven, the visionary architecture of Schinkel, the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich. They live on a stage where the stoniest of certainties can be suddenly evacuated by doubt, or hope, or catastrophe; where the sternest of hierarchies can unexpectedly warp, dissolve and then cruelly reassert themselves. Even time can be dangerously swift one moment, rapturously suspended the next. Darkness is suddenly challenged by light; brightness suddenly overwhelmed by the night.

No wonder that Kleist’s stories and plays are so haunted by sudden disaster and inexplicable reversals of fortune. Contemporaries still devoted to a more optimistic reading of the ideals of the Enlightenment found the violent emotions, the radical ambiguities and black ironies of his work hard to stomach. On publication The Prince of Hom burg was widely deemed unperformable. In addition, its portrayal of a high-ranking Prussian officer who collapses centre-stage in grovelling terror at the prospect of his own imminent death carried swift condemnation from the state censor.”

(Source: Neil Bartlett in the Guardian)

“Set during the time of Brandenburg’s war with the Swedes, the play starts mesmerisingly. In a moonlit garden, the eponymous prince has vivid dreams of military glory and royal betrothal. But, on waking, he becomes a distracted figure who fails to attend to the battle-plans of the ruling Elector.

As a result, in ordering the cavalry to charge too early, the prince suffers a bad case of premature exhortation. Although the Swedes are routed, the prince is court-martialled for disobeying orders and sentenced to death. What follows is an intricate cat-and-mouse game in which the Elector, bombarded with pleas for mercy by his generals and his niece, offers to quash the sentence if the prince himself can prove it was unjust.

…

But Kleist’s play is infinitely more subtle and morally ambiguous than that. In part, it is about the age-old conflict between freedom and order. But it is also a startlingly prophetic play about the equivocal nature of reality. In his dreams, the prince seems on solid ground. Only when he wakes is he plunged into a world of utter confusion. In this sense, it is only a short step, as George Steiner once pointed out, from Kleist to Pirandello.”

(Source: The Guardian)

1001 Ways to Die – (2) Jacqueline Du Pre, Cellist

Today I continue with the second part of the series, dedicated to the British cellist Jacqueline du Pre.

She was born in 1945 and considered one of the best cellists ever.

Her life was cust short by multiple sclerosis.

Jacqueline du Pre's Grave in the Golder's Green Jewish Cemetery, London

Jacqueline du Prι learned to play the cello from her mother Iris Greep, a piano teacher at the Royal Academy. Jacqueline was performing in BBC concerts when she was only twelve years old. Her recording with the London Symphony Orchestra of the Elgar Concerto in 1961 made her internationally famous. She played a Stradivarius from 1712 called “The Davidoff” that was given to her by an admirer. On 14 May 1965 she debuted in the United States by playing the Elgar Concerto at the Carnegie Hall in New York.

‘She was immediately acclaimed for her instinctive feeling for style and breadth of understanding as well as technical proficiency,” Noel Goodwin wrote in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. When Mr. Rostropovich first heard her play, he remarked that he had found somebody to carry on his work.

Arthur Rubinstein, Itzak Perlman, Daniel Barenboim and Jacqueline du Pre.

During Christmas 1966 she met Daniel Barenboim and she converted to judaism and married him the next year. They worked together very succesfully, Barenboim accompanying her on piano or conducting the orchestra. Often compared with Robert and Clara Schumann, they were admired for their energy, musicality and youthful glamour.

Daniel Barenboim and Jacqueline du Pre.

Mr. Barenboim was once asked what it was like to accompany his wife. ”Difficult,” he replied. ”It doesn’t dawn on her sometimes that we mortals have difficulties in following her.” In the next few years, they performed throughout the world, both separately and as a duo.

The first signs of Miss du Pre’s illness appeared when she was 26 years old and at the height of her fame. ”My hands no longer worked,” she recalled in 1978. ”I simply couldn’t feel the strings.” She withdrew from concertizing for one year, then returned, to mixed reviews. The diagnosis of multiple sclerosis followed shortly, and Miss du Pre retired.

Throughout her illness, Miss du Pre remained sanguine about the future. ”Nobody knows if I’ll ever regain mobility,” she said in 1978. ”It could be that next week I’ll find myself walking down the road. I believe in realistic optimism but not wishful thinking.”

Jacqueline’s brother Piers and sisters Hilary wrote a book “A genious in the Family” which chronicles the life and career of their sister. The film “Hilary and Jackie” was based on the book. Both are considered controversial. Hilary claims that she consented to her husband Christopher Finzi having an affair with JAcqueline in the late stage of her illness in order to combfort her anxiety.

Daniel Barenboim and artists who knew them both bitterly and publicly confronted this version of events.  Hilary’s daughter with Christopher  also contradicts her mother saying her father was a violent sadist who had multiple affairs and abused Jacqueline while she was in a vulnerable, emotional state.

Jacqueline du Pre died in 1987.

1001 Ways to Die – (1) Fritz Wunderlich, Tenor

Today I embark on a sequence of posts, under the title “1001 ways to die”. The inspiration for this came to me back in 1980 when I was a graduate student in the USA. The vastness of the country, the incredible gap between the avarage person and the ultra high net worth individuals, among other things, led me one night to declare among my fellow students that at some stage of my life I will compile this as a study of human affairs during a life long journey.

On January 2011, 31 years laters, I am embarking on it, starting with Fritz Wunderlich, a German Tenor who died accidentally in 1966 before arriving at t the peak of his career.

He fell from a stairway onto the stone floor below in a friend’s country house in Oberderdingen near Maulbronn. He died in the University Clinic of Heidelberg just days before his 36th birthday. In the documentary that I have appended at the end of the post, his wife mentioned that Wunderlich was on the phone prior to descending the stairs, and while talking on the phone, he untied his boots. As he started the descend, he got tangled up, and fell on the stone ground.

Herman Prey, a contemporary German baritone, who had become a friend with Wunderlich and sang together since 1959, wrote in his diary after the tenor’s death in 1966:

“My friend Fritz is dead. This simple sentence becomes more incomprehensible to me with every day. Our friendly and artistic collaboration developed into something very rare in the last few years. We shared many amusing adventures and spent many contemplative hours together. He could discuss life’s problems and musical issues for nights on end. The most beautiful hours of my career were those spent together with him on the stage or in front of a microphone. We never discussed phrasing in advance or how we would colour certain passages – the sympathy was simply there. We used to play piano duets for hours, or roamed the forests making plans for the future.

When we first mounted the stage together during the “Schweigsame Frau” rehearsals at Salzburg in 1959, we knew that our paths would converge then on. In those brief years we learned how to complement one another. He knew a tremendous amount about singing. I learned a lot from him. With his immense natural musical talent, this son of the gods was still at the beginning of a meteoric career. What might he not have achieved, given the time? At Schubert’s graveside Grillparzer said: “Here Death buried a rich treasure, and even richer promise.” How this statement applies to Fritz too! When we were last together he told me: “The best years are yet to come; a singer only gains command over tears at forty.” He did not know that he already had it.

Wunderlich sings Schubert, Strauss and Wolf (1965)

Our dreams were truly boundless. We wanted to become the heavenly twins of song. Fate decided otherwise, decreeing that I be left alone, a deserted twin. We virtually improvised this record, our last one, together with Fritz Neumeyer and his musicians. Listening to it today, there are points at which I cannot really tell who is singing what. Our voices melted together to form one. The world is mourning for a gifted singer of his generation. I mourn for a friend and brother in song the likes of whom I will never find again.”

FRITZ WUNDERLICH – ARTE DOCUMENTARY

In addition to listening to his divine voice, in what ever he has recorded, I strongly recommend to those of you who can understand German, to view the wonderful documentary of “arte”. It comes in 7 pieces. Every minute is worth it!

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Part 7