I pause Le Grand Concert de la Nuit at a sequence that always moves me: Agamédé and the twin maidservants, the deaf girls. It appears that she has instructed these children in a private language of gestures. She converses with them by means of flurrying fingers, complex arabesques of the hand, quick caresses of her own face and arms. Agamédé sweeps a finger around the palm of each of the girls, as though playing notes on a glass harmonica, and the girls smile at whatever favour it is that their mistress has promised. From this intimate choreography, we know that the unfathomable Agamédé, the cold and subtle Agamédé, loves these children as she loves no one else.
The Count, walking past the belvedere with Agamédé, makes an observation. We do not hear his words, but the expression is sardonic; we assume that the subject of the remark is the pensive young Guignon, who has just crossed the path on which the Count and Agamédé are strolling. Agamédé laughs. At this moment, in the background, in the belvedere, the nervous-looking theorbo player, who is evidently a real musician and not an actor, directs a brief but longing look at the poised and pretty flautist, who seems to be aware of his attention, though her gaze does not stray from the score on the stand in front of her. This moment is accidental, I’m sure; but it has been allowed to remain because it could be seen to serve the purposes of the film. I find it touching, this glimpse of the truly real amid all the high artifice.
I freeze the scene at the instant in which the flautist, at the end of a long phrase, lifts her lips from the flute for a fraction of a second; a small smile appears, in response to the admiring gaze, I believe. In that frame, Agamédé’s laugh is reaching fruition, but if one looks at that frame alone, her face is not laughing: if one were to see this image in isolation, the expression might be read as one of pain. Freeze the action a moment later, and one now sees weariness in Agamédé’s face. But twenty-four frames flash onto the retina in each second of the film, and in watching this tiny episode one sees not a succession of photographic images but a single event – an outburst of gaiety. By means of the phi phenomenon and beta movement, our brain converts the sequence of unmoving images into a perfect illusion of motion. We see the movement of life. Agamédé glances to her left; touching the tip of her tongue to her teeth, she laughs, and in the same instant the theorbo player glances at the attractive young flautist. That sentence might be said to consist of thirty frames. In description, the scene becomes a bodiless tableau; there is no illusion of movement; no illusion of anything.
But does he who loves some one on account of beauty really love that person? No; for the smallpox, which will kill beauty without killing the person, will cause him to love her no more.
And if one loves me for my judgement or my memory, he does not love me, for I can lose these qualities without losing myself. Where then is this ‘I’, if it be neither in the body nor in the soul? And how love the body or the soul, except for these qualities which do not constitute me, since they are perishable? For it is impossible and would be unjust to love the soul of a person in the abstract, and whatever qualities might be therein. We never then love a person, but only qualities.
Let us then jeer no more at those who are honoured on account of rank and office; for we love a person only on account of borrowed qualities.
An announcement: the Sanderson-Perceval Museum will close to the public on March 31st next year. A hotel group has expressed an interest in acquiring the building. There are no immediate plans to auction any more items from the collection. I am authorised to put in place as many loan arrangements as possible; unloaned items are to be stored, for an indefinite period.
In the last hour of full sunlight we came upon a tiny bay. The tide had turned an hour ago: a thin curve of sea-smoothed sand, dark with water, was now exposed; small pools shone in the low-lying rocks. A narrow path descended steeply through the grass, bringing us to the back of the inlet. There we sat. The sun was in our faces, a disc of gorgeous tangerine, within a shallow bank of cloud that ran across the whole visible horizon, a wall of violet and mauve. The higher sky, above the mauve, was palest lemon. A windless evening. We heard only the rushing of the little waves; the sighing of the sea. ‘My God,’ Imogen whispered, staring across the water. The pleasure was inexpressible, but it compelled acknowledgement, an exclamation. And in the moment of that exclamation it waned a little, necessarily, having been acknowledged; by no act of will could the pleasure now be recovered completely. I recall her face before she spoke: the widened eyes, momentarily ingenuous; the slight parting of the lips; she combed her hair with her fingers. In one of the rock pools, a blenny swam among the beadlet anemones. She watched it, fascinated.
The plausible atmospherics of the little bay. Some of those words may have led me astray. Was the sky ‘violet and mauve’? Perhaps it was; it should have been. The colours seem right; the colour-names, rather. The scene cannot be seen; the mind’s eye is not an eye. In bringing the past closer, into words, a distance is created. In writing, one steps outside of life.
We watched a pair of jays foraging in the oak trees. It would have been one of the last times we walked to within sight of the copse. The birds delighted her – their agility, the gorgeous colouring. Everything delighted her that afternoon. Her thoughts were like the birds, she remarked. Perhaps, she said, what was happening in her mind could not be characterised as thought. Impressions and notions alighted weightlessly and quickly departed. Everything that she saw was of interest, but her interest was disinterested, she told me.
Interview not a success. By the time I arrived, I knew that I could not live in London again. At the Tube station, I found myself acting the part of the bewildered provincial; I actually flinched at the noise of the approaching train. My self-presentation lacked conviction.
Having a couple of hours to spare, I retreated to the National Gallery, and went directly to Tiepolo’s melancholy Venus, as if expected there. Whenever Imogen was in the vicinity, she would pay her a visit, to see that lovely face and the otherworldly pink of the fabric that spills from her cloud-throne. She brought me to look at her, the first time I stayed at Imogen’s flat. This Venus directs her gaze at Time. Other Venuses regard their own reflection, or Mars, or Adonis, or merely avert their eyes from their beholders. The multitudinous Virgins, however, live among us. Even here, in exile, among people for whom she is merely an image, the Virgin looks at us, or down on us, returning our gaze. Whereas Venus looks away, at the object of her passion, or at nobody at all.
An altercation in the Velázquez room: a guard steps in front of a dozen teenagers who have run into the room as if the place were a playground. ‘God, what’s her problem?’ shouts the queen bee, departing at the head of the gang. Later, I meet them again. The queen bee has paused to take a picture of herself, in front of a painting which she has been told is really famous. She grins as though the painted face were the face of a celebrity. Nearby, a teacher is talking to a school group. Half of her audience are looking at their phones.