LITMIR.BIZ

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this emptiness that feels like pain?)

      Maria’s earliest childhood memories are sparse. An outside toilet (which she associates with one of her earliest dreams). Curtains billowing slightly, slightly in the wind. Red cement steps. The birth of her sister, Sofie. Her first day at school, the smell of Marmite sandwiches at break. The smell of poster paint (in powder form). The patterns they made with it on large sheets of paper. The way in which the sheets hardened as they dried, cracking where they were folded.

      Was it this early school experience, does that perhaps provide a key? Perhaps one of many keys? School was not for the sensitive or the tender-hearted. Some of the children had an off-putting smell: of fish-paste sandwiches, of rancid butter, of pee. Mrs Roodt, her Grade Two teacher, one day yanked her own child from his desk and gave him an almighty thrashing, in full view of the startled class. Mrs Roodt had white-blonde, curly hair like a merino sheep. (Maria overheard her parents say that Mrs Roodt was much older than her husband.) She wore pearls and a shirtwaister with three-quarter sleeves, of which Maria can still recall the woolly texture. Her best friend, Dalena, once whispered to Maria that Mrs Roodt had big titties.

      Is that where it started, in her first years at school – in the Grade One class of drab, depressive Miss Hendrikse, in the Grade Two class of Mrs Roodt with the merino hair and big titties? Early misery and misfortune, because school was a minefield of smells and unpredictable (often cruel and inconsistent) actions on the part of teachers as well as children.

      She concludes that she feels neither longing nor nostalgia for any single place on the globe, nor for any single person – not even her deceased parents. The house in which she grew up feels to her like a place in which sorrowful, even violent, things happened. A house in which emotional damage was inflicted upon her, without the conscious intent or knowledge of her solicitous parents. The birth of her sister, Sofie, for instance. Impostor. For years she felt nothing for her sister. Only once she left home did she start finding Sofie’s singular take on things interesting.

      Summer arrives, the rainy season commences for the umpteenth time. Everything ruffles its pelt and pinion, shell and carapace, in readiness for the season of brash unbridled burgeoning. Baby monkeys are born. They cling to their mothers who trapeze intrepidly from branch to branch high up in the trees. The monkeys gorge themselves on dates from the palm in front of her window; snap and eat the sweet young buds of the strelitzias. Maria dreams that she tries to garden in sandy soil; she sometimes cries in her sleep. Everywhere in gardens, in parks, there are trees and shrubs, big with gravid blossom clusters, the intensity of colour assails the eye. The flying ants are due any day now. They will launch their mating flights evening after evening in unstoppable swarms. Vulgar, Maria thinks, the profusion of this season, the fungiferous humidity and unquenchable fecundity. Only the loerie’s call remains modest.

      She wonders if she needs an alternative vocabulary: Meek. Taciturn. Attentive. Forgiveness, purity, remorse.

      Sometimes she wonders, in a preoccupied sort of way, whether little strings are indeed what tie the universe together, and if, with our awareness of three dimensions, we are perched as on the spout of a teapot in a universe of nine or more dimensions.

      *

      But Maria Volschenk is plucky and pragmatic. She has an enterprising spirit. She knows that she has to adopt some strategy to hold her own against the onslaught of the beleaguering void.

      She devises a plan of action – quite apart from her regular contact with her two neighbours. (With the one woman she plays cards once a week, with the other chess once a week.)

      The university offers evening classes and she attends a lecture series on the nude in pictorial art. The six instalments cover the Apollo figure, the Venus figure, the nude as embodiment of energy, of pathos, of ecstasy. In the last instalment an alternative convention is examined.

      It is especially the instalments on the nude as embodiment of energy and ecstasy that interest her. These lectures examine the multiple transformations, variations and subtle and not-so-subtle deviations from and interpretations of the classical ideal. In the nude as embodiment of energy the body is directed by the will. The nude as embodiment of ecstasy renounces the will – the body is possessed by some irrational force. Satyrs, dryads and nereides represent, in the Greek imagination, the irrational element of human nature, the vestiges of the animal impulse that Olympian religion tried to sublimate or tame.

      The yearning for levitation and escape is the essence of the ecstatic nude. Like all Dionysiac art, this figure is a celebration of the welling up of exuberant forces erupting as it were from the earth’s crust. From earliest times the ecstatic figure has been associated with resurrection: from its depiction on sarcophagi in ancient religions to the depiction of the saved souls in representations of the Last Judgement. A representation of the most ancient of religious instincts – the rebirth of plant and animal life after a deathlike hibernation.

      In the last instalment of the series, the alternative convention, the body is pale, unprepossessing and defenceless, reminiscent of a tuber or a root. The bodies of the damned in the depictions of the Last Judgement, in Gothic paintings and miniatures, the Adam and Eve of Van Eyck, Van der Goes, Memlinc. Dürer’s women in a bath house, his four witches, Urs Graf’s woman stabbing herself in the chest with a dagger, Cranach’s sly Venuses.

      It comes as no surprise to Maria that these tuber- and root-shaped damned and cunning nudes should interest her. She now feels no rapport with harmony and wholeness – the ecstatic and the deviant, that she can identify with much more closely at the moment.

      *

      The second lecture series that Maria Volschenk attends at the university deals with the art of the Bronze Age during the Shang dynasty in China (from the eighteenth to the eleventh century B.C.). (Maria reasons that the wider she casts her net, the better her chances of outwitting her vigilant self.) The first lecture provides a general introductory background. The origin of Chinese bronze casting remains obscure, but it’s generally accepted that pottery and bronze castings from the Shang dynasty are the oldest forms of Chinese art. The Shang empire was situated on the plains of Huang He – the Yellow River.

      Her father told them – her and Sofie, her sister – about the Huang He and the Yangtze Kiang. He was a geography teacher but he should really have been a world traveller, visiting and discovering places. From as far back as she can remember, the names of places fascinated him, he recited them like mantras: the Yangtze Kiang and the Huang He in China, the Popocatépetl and the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in Mexico, the Sverdrup Islands at the North Pole, Mont Forel in Greenland. He was enchanted by the places as well as by their resonant names. In that respect Sofie was his child – she was also seduced by the melodious names. Maria wanted to know where the places were on the map, their degrees of longitude and latitude, Sofie wanted their father to repeat the names again and again.

      Maria casts the net as wide as possible, and meets up with her father again. Hello Dad. We meet again, on the plains of Huang He, the Yellow River, at the time of the Shang dynasty in China.

      The subsequent lectures examine examples of the bronze artefacts. A gu drinking vessel, a three-legged jue container with dagger-shaped feet, decorated with a motif of stylised songbirds. A three-legged jia with pointed feet, a handle in the shape of a ram’s head. A you container with three-dimensional ram’s heads as support for the handle, decorated with dragon’s heads with serpent bodies. A zun container with rams on all four corners, serpents and inscriptions – technically so complex that it took twenty-one separate steps from the casting stage to completion. Another you container, wonderfully ingenious and highly ornate, in a combination of high as well as low relief, with a tiger-eats-man motif; the lid in the shape of a deer. A three-legged jia container with prominent, upright handles.

      The last lecture surveys the use of ritual, and in particular its use of the so-called oracle bones. Tortoise shells and the scapulae of oxen were heated with branding irons so that the shell or bone cracked, and the resulting patterns used to predict the future. These divinations were the main activity in the household of the king, who had divine status. Before any important enterprise of which the outcome was uncertain – like a hunting expedition or a battle – the ancestral spirits were invoked and the interpreted

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