This is not a blog

In 1926, Magritte painted a large pipe for smoking and wrote underneath in clear, neat school boy writing "This is not a pipe".

At the time when Magritte was painting his picture, my mother, with her sisters, attended Floriana girls school in Malta, where she was encouraged to improve her deportment by walking around with a book on her head. At home, she changed this task into a game with her sisters and her mother, my grandmother. Together they defied the  sanctity of my gradfather's study, extracted suitable books for size, and devised a model route around their townhouse in Hamrun. My Scottish, schoolteacher grandfather discovered them as they negotiated the stairs and he was so outraged at this abuse of books that the next day, he marched up to the Floriana Girls school and withdrew all his children. My mother's deportment remained excellent for the rest of her life and when she bore her children she read as many books as she could afford becuase she wanted do a good job of child rearing.

Eighty years later, in Much Ado bookshop in Sussex, England, I stumbled upon a book entitled 'This is not a book'. It contained quirky ideas about alternate uses for a book. I bought it for my niece who was in her early teens at the time. She loved it almost as much as I did even though she is not a reader.

So what is it about Brussels that has brought these two unrelated stories into my head and placed them next to each other in this blog that is not a blog?

Brussels is a city that juxtaposes contradictions every time the flaneuse turns a corner. On wide avenues lined with designer shops people sit with their begging cups. Two blocks away from
museums, galleries and palaces where tourists wander in search of a pissing boy, you are into residential quarters with Arab, African or Chinese grocery shops and every language spoken on the streets. Yesterday when I was walking to work at the Parliamentarium along the direct route I have now discovered that includes a free lift next to the palace of Justice, I was looking down at my feet to avoid stumbling on the cobble stones and I noticed three gold stones glinting like teeth. They were memorial plaques to three members of a Jewish family who were taken from that particular house to be killed in WW2 death camps. Later that day, I explored that district further and found more gold teeth as well as an old wine making factory now re-used as a hub for ethical start-ups including a minimal packaging market, an up-cycling shop that offers sewing classes and some kind of beer brewing shop. I've made a mental note to return there and write another blog about it.

Magritte played with the juxtapositioning of disparate objects and with the alternate realities that we can create with images and words. He also famously said that he thought poetry was a higher form than painting, whatever that means. Yet I love his playing with words and have bought a coffee mug from the museum shop with his word plays. Now when I take tea in my coffee cup (see what I just did there) I look at a bright image of the sun followed by the words ' est cache par les nuages' (is covered by clouds). In a way, Magritte was the forerunner of the Gif.

I'll finish this unblog by juxtaposing two more images from my wanders around the exhibitions of Brussels. One is Magritte's image of a coffin stiffly folded at right angles to enable the reality of death to recline on a couch like the images that we all have in our heads of more famous nude women. He does not use a skeleton to represent death as do the Knights of Malta in St John's Cathedral in Valletta. He chooses a coffin, the form in which the Western world dresses up, hides death and he bends the coffin in to imitate life.

Which brings me to my final image which is not created by Magritte but by Rik Wouters. It is his sculptured image of a wildly dancing naked woman, arms flung wide, grinning mouth, knee high. You can walk all round her and she is alive. You perhaps know her from a gif that shows a painting on a gallery wall and in front a small girl imitating the wild dancing pose.

This is not a blog because I still haven't worked out how to include images and sometimes my words are not enough