Optic Nerve and Diva

Oh hello

Again, it is spring. I’m biking to see Iris with tears and snot from hay fever streaming on my cheeks, like the plumes of coloured smoke that trail ceremonial fighter jets at coronations, except me, tired, on a creaky rusty bike, smelling the sickly warmth of the pollen, and shaking, completely, from the infinite possibility of spring. Everything, right now, is potential. Life billows with choices that lead to more. Like Louise Gluck, “I’m looking for courage, for some evidence my life will change, though it takes forever”. And in spring, those signs are everywhere, ugh, teasing me with their optimism, with their playful cartwheeling towards the future. 

I like the magnolias in spring. The petals always look like they are falling off like fake eyelashes coming loose, like they are disposable, like they never intended to stick for very long. Sometimes I’d like to write about nature in a manner that didn’t seem laden with metaphor. I know this is asking a lot because communication is itself just one metaphor after another, but, I guess, I’d like to give more primacy to my feelings of awe, a feeling that seems shorn from any depth to my observation. Like, sometimes I go to an art opening and I’ll say: “It was pretty but I didn’t really get it.” Often, in my life, I’m sure there’s a sign there, waiting for me, but I also like the prettiness, the aesthetic charm that wanders into my gaze before the weight of the image reveals itself. 

I have in my pocket a card from Cordelia, which arrived this morning in a sealed bag. She says that she’ll be visiting a coal power station in May and would I like to come? She says she is worried that her perfumes are not pungent enough, too dainty, too wearable, too commercial. She would like instead for her perfumes to choke, to startle, to triumph. So she’s studying coal to get inspo. The card itself smells of ammonium, the inside of an old cinema and a hint of metallic that reminds me of licking a street lamp as a child as a dare. I miss Cordelia and I’m excited again to see Iris but really I just want my friends, for them to ground me in the repetition of our overlapping life: the questions that they ask each time they see me; the same things they prod me to do. It’s this repeated looking at me and identifying me that makes me feel more solid, more settled in myself. Sometimes with crushes, like Iris, like Cord, all I feel is my newness, my allure, my charm, and that makes me feel fleeting, dizzy, not the obvious, totally ordinary person that I am. 

This week I’m writing about Optic Nerve by María Gainza and Diva by Jean-Jacques Beineix.  

Optic Nerve (2019) by María Gainza

“[Y]ou write one thing in order to talk about something else”, the narrator in María Gainza’s novel tells us. A woman travels around Buenos Aires looking at and writing about her favourite paintings. There’s art everywhere. There aren’t many lamp posts or breakfast cereals or stop signs or friends or neighbours. All the stuff that normally fills out the space of a novel. But there’s a lot of art, leaning in from all sides. At one point, she visits a doctor and even there, there’s a poster of a Rothko. 

This novel structure, a woman moved by and reflecting on art, builds, I felt, a sense of life in which inspiration and emotion surrounds us at all times. The woman walks and looks and in looking finds meaning, finds joy, finds life. My favourite section is in fact about the Rothkos. She says you must look at a Rothko like a sunrise: “The work has a clear beauty, but that beauty can be either sublime or decorative.” It can both evoke awe and look pretty behind a sofa. And the looking pretty behind the sofa quality sometimes makes it hard for the critics to believe in the sublime part of it, like its everyday-pleasingness can make it hard to consider its transcendence. But like a good sunset, the narrator says, a Rothko is in fact sublime. Also, like a sunset, I guess, and perhaps suggesting its aesthetic higher value, when you see a Rothko you don’t really want to comment too much on the colours and the lines. You just want to say ‘fuck me’. 

Much of Optic Nerve is written like this, flitting in and out of capital A art writing, the history of the painters she’s writing about, and the narrator’s own life. It’s a magically composed novel. At the doctors, the narrator looks at the Rothko poster one last time before leaving. It reminds her:

“I’m alive, I remember, and I can’t help but immediately feel saddened, like any time happiness is promised and you embrace it, but you know it isn’t going to last.”

Diva (1981)  by Jean-Jacques Beineix

A postman is obsessed with a famous opera singer. The singer has never recorded herself before, or let anyone record her, preferring the fleeting delicateness of her music. Her manager tells her she will not be young forever. But she does not listen. She keeps performing to standing ovations. The postman records one of her operas, a performance of La Wally, and steals her dress later. He wraps the dress around his neck as a scarf and listens to the music on his scooter. At home, in his warehouse full of broken cars “a monument to destruction”, he listens to it again. Taiwanese men try to take the recording from him so that they can extort the singer for money. Jules, the postie, is pursued by two mobsters, who do not speak very much, after a cassette is dropped into his postie bag. The postie meets the opera singer to return the dress. The infatuation develops into something deeper. 

Jean-Jacques Beineix’ Diva is a gorgeously styled film about fame, love and our connection to art, but mainly its sensuous and thrilling. You should watch this film for the colour and the sound alone. Because it’s pretty! Jules lies in his sallow blue lit warehouse playing La Wally on repeat. He’s chased around Paris at night on a red scooter wearing a red helmet and a red leather jacket. He makes a friend who steals records for her lover who is building a puzzle and taking a bath. Everything looks better in the cold tones that you associate with 1980s French cinema. Jules doesn’t make the recording for money but for himself to listen to over and over, like a memory of a moment frozen through sound. Jules is in love and he’s not interested in it being ephemeral, in it going away. He wants it forever.

Love

Anne