Articoli correlati a Dreaming With His Eyes Open: A Life of Diego Rivera
The first definitive biography of the great Mexican artist and revolutionary in more than forty years explores the the life and work of the controversial Diego Rivera, his education, the influence of his native Mexico, his relationship with Frida Kahlo, and his creative artistry. 20,000 first printing.
Le informazioni nella sezione "Riassunto" possono far riferimento a edizioni diverse di questo titolo.
L'autore:
Patrick Marnham is the author of several books, including Fantastic Invasion: Dispatches from Africa; The Man Who Wasn't Maigret: A Portrait of Georges Simenon, which won the Marsh Biography Award and was nominated for a 1994 Edgar Allan Poe Award by the Mystery Writers of America; and So Far from God: A Journey to Central America, which was awarded the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award. He lives in Paris.
Estratto. © Riproduzione autorizzata. Diritti riservati.:
In Guanajuato, a small town in Mexico, in a house on the Calle de Pocitos, over a hundred years ago, a little boy sat on the stone flags of the courtyard watching a magic fountain.
He had been born in a town where the streets run underground, where pigeons roost in tunnels and trees sprout through air shafts, and where the dead were dug up and carried to the surface and set out in glass cases for public inspection. Among them was a baby girl, dressed in her best lawn gown and clutching her favourite doll. When children died in Guanajuato a hundred years ago, they were dressed up as though for a party and taken to the portrait photographer's studio to be photographed with their mother. When photography reached Mexico, this was one of the first uses people found for it. Then, after the photograph, the family were invited home and all the living children were dressed up and there was a party, with the dead child seated in a place of honour. As she was now, so would they be.
In a city where such wonders were current, where the living disappeared daily into the ground and the dead reposed in daylight, it was little wonder that the family fountain was enchanted. The fountain was placed above a large, semi-circular stone basin, built into the courtyard wall. Water fell into the basin through three lead spouts, each concealed within the open mouth of a stone-carved fish. The three stone fish-heads formed the base of another, smaller basin, set higher up against the wall, which was in its turn supplied with water through the open mouth of a carved hunting dog. The water trickled gently out through this hound's teeth, piped from a spring which rose somewhere on the steep hillside behind the house. The intricacy of the fountain was a celebration of the fact that in a town which suffered from recurrent drought, this house had a private supply of running water. Yet the magic of the fountain lay not in its water but in that water's reflections.
Sitting on the cool flags beside the basin, the small boy could see the flight of steps leading to the upper levels of the house. On each of the two upper floors, enclosed by iron balustrades, an open gallery ran round the well of the court. Above the second gallery the walls continued to rise towards a central opening which pierced the wooden beams of the roof. And beyond that was the sky. So the small boy, Diego María, could tilt his head back and from his seat on the floor could scrutinise the spiral levels that led to heaven, where his twin brother Carlos lived. "Volo al cielo Carlos María" was a refrain in the family. "Carlos María has flown up to heaven." Then Diego María, still in pursuit of his missing twin, could mount the step of the great stone basin and, leaning over the edge, peer down into the clear pool and find himself once more gazing up to the gallery of the first floor and beyond to the second gallery and so deeper down and higher up until he once again reached the sky. And if, with his child's eye, by looking down into the fountain he could see up, so, when he returned to his seat on the floor, he might as well, by looking up, see down. In each case at the final level, the heights of the house led him back to the depths of the sky and to the path down which at any moment, one day, Carlos María might fly back. The small boy had all the time in the world to ponder these matters anxiously once Carlos María had departed and he, for some three years, assumed the privileges of an only child.
"The house of my parents . . . that small marble palace," as Diego described it many years later, was surrounded by a town which was built along a narrow valley on opposing hillsides above a ravine, the houses being crammed together in an astonishing jumble as though riding the waves of a perpetual earthquake. Inside these houses the rooms are assembled on equally obscure principles. The right angle is generally absent. The walls and floors are fitted together like some fantastic, three-dimensional jigsaw. The door lintels are crooked, the ground levels change from room to room, and the volumes, even within a room, are inconstant. The line of a wall sets out from the doorway assuming that it will follow a conventional rectangular path, only for convention to give up the struggle as the wall gives way to the angle of the ceiling beams or is forced off-course by the sharp tilt of a window-sill. One has the impression that each cubic foot of interior space has been fought for; that the houses have been squeezed by some unseen giant hand; and that what is left is the shape they sprang back to when the hand relaxed.
The problem of the interior dimensions of the rooms is carried through the outside walls and repeated on the streets. Warring bands of builders and city planners have clashed all over the city, and you can trace the history of their engagements in the grid plan viewed from Guanajuato's enclosing heights. Here and there patches of order become visible. The nave of a church or the walls of a fortress will shelter a pool of harmony, but it never lasts for long. The pattern dissolves as it spreads out from its source and is overpowered by some conflicting inspiration. Since the floor of the central ravine is wide enough for a road--but not wide enough for a street--someone had the inspired idea of building a road and then roofing it over, so connecting much of the original seventeenth-century town by this subterranean highway. The roof of this tunnel is the floor of the town. It is through the tunnel's air shafts that trees force their way to the earth's surface, their highest branches just reaching the level of the public benches on the plazas above. Around the plazas, the fretwork of buckled alleyways is first, with a rare ingenuity, knitted together, and then, by the walls of its asymmetrical buildings, forced apart. And so the fretwork continues to the town's edge, where the buildings are liberated at last and can rise up in terraces along the sides of the valley, stone construction giving way to more recent brick, and brick to adobe, until, at a certain contour, even the mud walls give out and the crumbling brown earth of the hillside continues up to the crags above.
Down one such stony hillside, several folds back from the edge of Guanajuato City, on the evening of the Day of the Dead, 1994, an old man wearing a conspicuous white shirt was slowly picking his path, leading two donkeys, one grey, one black, and followed at some distance by a black dog. He was on his way to the Panteón Nuevo, the municipal graveyard and social centre, which he could see glimmering in the twilight below. He reached a precipitous stretch of tall grass, through which he descended even more slowly. As he drew nearer to the graveyard, faint sounds drifted up: the engine of a bus, radio music, and laughter from a group of policemen huddled together near the car park. Otherwise there was only the wind in the grass; no other noise disturbed the great amphitheatre of hills and fields around. Occasionally on his way down the old man passed solid-looking stone ruins or piles of grey-green shale, all that is now left of some failed silver mine. When he reached the Panteón Nuevo he tethered the donkeys and disappeared into the crowd. The dog he left free to fend for itself, and it soon wandered off in the direction of the squatters' huts which had started to appear around the graveyard as soon as the first burials took place and an hourly bus service opened up.
The Panteón Nuevo is the graveyard of the future: Guanajuato's development zone, the place where most of the current population of the city will be buried. They have run out of space in the Panteón Municipal, the one where Carlos María was laid in some long-lost grave, so this new arrangement has been set up. At the Panteón Nuevo there is no work for gravediggers. The tombs are located inside three concrete blockhouses, laid out back-to-back like barrack huts. The blocks are pierced by five hundred giant pigeon holes, ranged on six levels, each destined to contain one coffin. After some years of tranquil residence, depending on demand, the coffins are removed, unless the catacomb has been purchased "en perpetuidad." Most have not. The parallel lines of concrete blocks make a bleak sight on their hilltop, even on the Day of the Dead. Without enclosing walls or living trees, there is nothing to protect the mourners from the emptiness and darkness of the abandoned hillsides. On that evening in 1994 there was the sound of the Rosary being recited in the dusk, but most families stood silent, some hunched and miserable, one group staring at a recently occupied grave as though still hoping that it might yet open and permit death to be reversed. Before another unmarked tomb a father played football with his sons on the flint surface of the ground while the boys' mother stood alone in front of the grave and prayed. These people were not resigned to death. They did not easily let go.
In Guanajuato in 1994 the fiesta of the dead started on October 31, which is sometimes called the day of the angelitos, or little angels, the day when families welcome the return of children who have died. I was seated at a café table in the Jardín Unión before a cold Corona Genuina Cerveza de Barril at midday when the doors of the town's infant schools opened and the children poured out, disguised not as angels but as devils, to celebrate this opening of the festival of death. The children's faces were painted death's-head white, they wore long black plastic fingernails, skeleton suits and devils' masks and red devils' horns that flashed, and they carried flashing red devils' tridents or Grim Reaper scythes. Seated before a cold Corona Genuina Cerveza de Barril in the Jardín Unión, I was an easy target. The first little devil to reach me got all the change in my pocket. Then she drove the others off with the point of her trident. For the rest of the day she and her compa...
He had been born in a town where the streets run underground, where pigeons roost in tunnels and trees sprout through air shafts, and where the dead were dug up and carried to the surface and set out in glass cases for public inspection. Among them was a baby girl, dressed in her best lawn gown and clutching her favourite doll. When children died in Guanajuato a hundred years ago, they were dressed up as though for a party and taken to the portrait photographer's studio to be photographed with their mother. When photography reached Mexico, this was one of the first uses people found for it. Then, after the photograph, the family were invited home and all the living children were dressed up and there was a party, with the dead child seated in a place of honour. As she was now, so would they be.
In a city where such wonders were current, where the living disappeared daily into the ground and the dead reposed in daylight, it was little wonder that the family fountain was enchanted. The fountain was placed above a large, semi-circular stone basin, built into the courtyard wall. Water fell into the basin through three lead spouts, each concealed within the open mouth of a stone-carved fish. The three stone fish-heads formed the base of another, smaller basin, set higher up against the wall, which was in its turn supplied with water through the open mouth of a carved hunting dog. The water trickled gently out through this hound's teeth, piped from a spring which rose somewhere on the steep hillside behind the house. The intricacy of the fountain was a celebration of the fact that in a town which suffered from recurrent drought, this house had a private supply of running water. Yet the magic of the fountain lay not in its water but in that water's reflections.
Sitting on the cool flags beside the basin, the small boy could see the flight of steps leading to the upper levels of the house. On each of the two upper floors, enclosed by iron balustrades, an open gallery ran round the well of the court. Above the second gallery the walls continued to rise towards a central opening which pierced the wooden beams of the roof. And beyond that was the sky. So the small boy, Diego María, could tilt his head back and from his seat on the floor could scrutinise the spiral levels that led to heaven, where his twin brother Carlos lived. "Volo al cielo Carlos María" was a refrain in the family. "Carlos María has flown up to heaven." Then Diego María, still in pursuit of his missing twin, could mount the step of the great stone basin and, leaning over the edge, peer down into the clear pool and find himself once more gazing up to the gallery of the first floor and beyond to the second gallery and so deeper down and higher up until he once again reached the sky. And if, with his child's eye, by looking down into the fountain he could see up, so, when he returned to his seat on the floor, he might as well, by looking up, see down. In each case at the final level, the heights of the house led him back to the depths of the sky and to the path down which at any moment, one day, Carlos María might fly back. The small boy had all the time in the world to ponder these matters anxiously once Carlos María had departed and he, for some three years, assumed the privileges of an only child.
"The house of my parents . . . that small marble palace," as Diego described it many years later, was surrounded by a town which was built along a narrow valley on opposing hillsides above a ravine, the houses being crammed together in an astonishing jumble as though riding the waves of a perpetual earthquake. Inside these houses the rooms are assembled on equally obscure principles. The right angle is generally absent. The walls and floors are fitted together like some fantastic, three-dimensional jigsaw. The door lintels are crooked, the ground levels change from room to room, and the volumes, even within a room, are inconstant. The line of a wall sets out from the doorway assuming that it will follow a conventional rectangular path, only for convention to give up the struggle as the wall gives way to the angle of the ceiling beams or is forced off-course by the sharp tilt of a window-sill. One has the impression that each cubic foot of interior space has been fought for; that the houses have been squeezed by some unseen giant hand; and that what is left is the shape they sprang back to when the hand relaxed.
The problem of the interior dimensions of the rooms is carried through the outside walls and repeated on the streets. Warring bands of builders and city planners have clashed all over the city, and you can trace the history of their engagements in the grid plan viewed from Guanajuato's enclosing heights. Here and there patches of order become visible. The nave of a church or the walls of a fortress will shelter a pool of harmony, but it never lasts for long. The pattern dissolves as it spreads out from its source and is overpowered by some conflicting inspiration. Since the floor of the central ravine is wide enough for a road--but not wide enough for a street--someone had the inspired idea of building a road and then roofing it over, so connecting much of the original seventeenth-century town by this subterranean highway. The roof of this tunnel is the floor of the town. It is through the tunnel's air shafts that trees force their way to the earth's surface, their highest branches just reaching the level of the public benches on the plazas above. Around the plazas, the fretwork of buckled alleyways is first, with a rare ingenuity, knitted together, and then, by the walls of its asymmetrical buildings, forced apart. And so the fretwork continues to the town's edge, where the buildings are liberated at last and can rise up in terraces along the sides of the valley, stone construction giving way to more recent brick, and brick to adobe, until, at a certain contour, even the mud walls give out and the crumbling brown earth of the hillside continues up to the crags above.
Down one such stony hillside, several folds back from the edge of Guanajuato City, on the evening of the Day of the Dead, 1994, an old man wearing a conspicuous white shirt was slowly picking his path, leading two donkeys, one grey, one black, and followed at some distance by a black dog. He was on his way to the Panteón Nuevo, the municipal graveyard and social centre, which he could see glimmering in the twilight below. He reached a precipitous stretch of tall grass, through which he descended even more slowly. As he drew nearer to the graveyard, faint sounds drifted up: the engine of a bus, radio music, and laughter from a group of policemen huddled together near the car park. Otherwise there was only the wind in the grass; no other noise disturbed the great amphitheatre of hills and fields around. Occasionally on his way down the old man passed solid-looking stone ruins or piles of grey-green shale, all that is now left of some failed silver mine. When he reached the Panteón Nuevo he tethered the donkeys and disappeared into the crowd. The dog he left free to fend for itself, and it soon wandered off in the direction of the squatters' huts which had started to appear around the graveyard as soon as the first burials took place and an hourly bus service opened up.
The Panteón Nuevo is the graveyard of the future: Guanajuato's development zone, the place where most of the current population of the city will be buried. They have run out of space in the Panteón Municipal, the one where Carlos María was laid in some long-lost grave, so this new arrangement has been set up. At the Panteón Nuevo there is no work for gravediggers. The tombs are located inside three concrete blockhouses, laid out back-to-back like barrack huts. The blocks are pierced by five hundred giant pigeon holes, ranged on six levels, each destined to contain one coffin. After some years of tranquil residence, depending on demand, the coffins are removed, unless the catacomb has been purchased "en perpetuidad." Most have not. The parallel lines of concrete blocks make a bleak sight on their hilltop, even on the Day of the Dead. Without enclosing walls or living trees, there is nothing to protect the mourners from the emptiness and darkness of the abandoned hillsides. On that evening in 1994 there was the sound of the Rosary being recited in the dusk, but most families stood silent, some hunched and miserable, one group staring at a recently occupied grave as though still hoping that it might yet open and permit death to be reversed. Before another unmarked tomb a father played football with his sons on the flint surface of the ground while the boys' mother stood alone in front of the grave and prayed. These people were not resigned to death. They did not easily let go.
In Guanajuato in 1994 the fiesta of the dead started on October 31, which is sometimes called the day of the angelitos, or little angels, the day when families welcome the return of children who have died. I was seated at a café table in the Jardín Unión before a cold Corona Genuina Cerveza de Barril at midday when the doors of the town's infant schools opened and the children poured out, disguised not as angels but as devils, to celebrate this opening of the festival of death. The children's faces were painted death's-head white, they wore long black plastic fingernails, skeleton suits and devils' masks and red devils' horns that flashed, and they carried flashing red devils' tridents or Grim Reaper scythes. Seated before a cold Corona Genuina Cerveza de Barril in the Jardín Unión, I was an easy target. The first little devil to reach me got all the change in my pocket. Then she drove the others off with the point of her trident. For the rest of the day she and her compa...
Le informazioni nella sezione "Su questo libro" possono far riferimento a edizioni diverse di questo titolo.
- EditoreAlfred a Knopf Inc
- Data di pubblicazione1998
- ISBN 10 0679430423
- ISBN 13 9780679430421
- RilegaturaCopertina rigida
- Numero edizione1
- Numero di pagine350
- Valutazione libreria
Compra nuovo
Scopri di più su questo articolo
EUR 29,99
Spese di spedizione:
EUR 3,76
In U.S.A.
I migliori risultati di ricerca su AbeBooks
Foto dell'editore
Dreaming with His Eyes Open: A Life of Diego Rivera
Da:
Valutazione libreria
Descrizione libro Hardcover. Condizione: new. New. Fast Shipping and good customer service. Codice articolo Holz_New_0679430423
Compra nuovo
EUR 29,99
Convertire valuta
Foto dell'editore
Dreaming with His Eyes Open: A Life of Diego Rivera
Da:
Valutazione libreria
Descrizione libro Hardcover. Condizione: new. New. Codice articolo Wizard0679430423
Compra nuovo
EUR 31,77
Convertire valuta
Foto dell'editore
Dreaming with His Eyes Open: A Life of Diego Rivera
Da:
Valutazione libreria
Descrizione libro Condizione: new. Codice articolo FrontCover0679430423
Compra nuovo
EUR 32,32
Convertire valuta
Foto dell'editore
Dreaming with His Eyes Open: A Life of Diego Rivera
Da:
Valutazione libreria
Descrizione libro Hardcover. Condizione: new. New Copy. Customer Service Guaranteed. Codice articolo think0679430423
Compra nuovo
EUR 51,70
Convertire valuta
Foto dell'editore
Dreaming with His Eyes Open: A Life of Diego Rivera
Da:
Valutazione libreria
Descrizione libro Hardcover. Condizione: New. Brand New!. Codice articolo VIB0679430423
Compra nuovo
EUR 61,64
Convertire valuta
Foto dell'editore
DREAMING WITH HIS EYES OPEN: A L
Da:
Valutazione libreria
Descrizione libro Condizione: New. New. In shrink wrap. Looks like an interesting title! 1.8. Codice articolo Q-0679430423
Compra nuovo
EUR 59,60
Convertire valuta