My life as an amateur. Part 96.

 Ik wist helemaal nergens wat van, behalve dat het vandaag was. 

In English this phrase wouldn’t be half as poetic. I finished a new work this evening. 

I am not so good with people at the moment. I got this ancient Philips hifi tower from my neighbour, for free, so I bought her a bottle of Fat Bastard red wine. It’s an all-in-one machine with a tuner and a cassette player as well. I only wanted a turntable but that’s not possible. I finally can listen to the jazz records I bought this past half year. On the one with Young Lester Young with recordings from the thirties last century there seems to participate an electronic organ. Super modern. Not that I know what modern should be. I am not someone to be concerned about. That’s a good thing.

I just passed a backpacked young person who was reading a book while walking. I think it was a volume of Gerrit Komrij’s choice of Dutch poetry of the twentieth century. This was the last weekend of the Constantin Brancusi exhibition. So there were tons of smelly people blocking my views. Luckily it’s a precious artist, the works are powerful and modest enough to escape the crowds. There are phrases on the wall, once said by Brancusi: ‘We only see real life through reflections’. Brancusi’s patient polishing gave his bronzes a shiny, mirror-like surface. This creates a play of reflections and enables the sculpture to project itself outwards, escaping its firm outline. One sculpture, ‘ Torse de jeune homme’ 1923 blew my mind and set it right in another way. An art collector of that time described it as a female torso, but Brancusi named it Torso of a young man. The confusion about its gender is reinforced by the fragmented and geometrical nature of the piece. It resembles an upside down tree trunk as well. It gave me strongness of will and self. I should get rid of the breasts.