I went to the Salvador Dali exhibit in Istanbul with Kate and her friend Umit today. It was supposed to have ended a week ago, but they extended it, which was lucky for us. I love museums. There were only a few at home, and they were really small and just about local history. And then there were a few art galleries. The Louvre in Paris, the Prado in Madrid, they are so amazing! I love the quiet. People even seem to breathe more quietly in museums, and their footsteps echo in the gallery, even when they try to walk silently. It’s not an oppressive, heavy silence though. It’s the silence of art, of contemplation, of thinking. It reminds me of reading a book. And the smell. Not all museums smell the same of course, but they all have similarities. There is the smell of wood, glass, old things, the remnants of many perfumes, and a slight whiff of glass cleaner. If the building is old (and that’s my favorite kind of museum) the museum will have more of an old smell. I don’t like the museums that are too new and sterile.
So anyways, we went to this museum, the Sabanci museum, which was right on the Bosporus. Dali was a really interesting guy. I learned a little bit about him in school. And I’m one of those people that visit a museum and read all the plaques. So I read the timeline of his life, which also included major world events, and I read about Spanish history. Dali is amazing!! Not only did he do the crazy surrealist paintings he is so famous for (clocks melting like they are soft cheese, humans with drawers coming out of them, like a real live chest of drawers, fragments of hands, feet, bones, decaying objects, etc) he also worked on films, on sets for plays, designed jewelry, clothes, and shoes. And he wrote. I found myself wishing he were still alive. I bet he could do amazing things with computer based art. He wrote and illustrated his autobiography. Except it wasn’t really an autobiography as I think of it. Some things were real. Some things were half real. And some events and people he completely made up. I was a bit shocked. An autobiography with made up people? Was that even allowed? Were you allowed to call it an autobiography? Was it fiction? Or non-fiction? Where should it go in a library? Would I be able to tell who the made up characters were when I read it? Or did that even matter? Was I supposed to read it as the truth? Or Dali’s truth?
Moving on. He also did illustrations for Don Quixote and for a publication of Dante’s inferno. He said he had never read Dante’s poem – he just dreamed about it and made his paintings from the dream. And then, at the very end of the exhibit were photos of Dali – with a thin, very long mustache that was curled at the ends. He was wearing a black and gold velvet patterned jacket – and looked both very crazy, and also insanely brilliant. Seeing the exhibit brought to life all the things I learned in school, but it sort of made me realize that they also left some things out.
As we were walking along the Bosporus afterward, Umit asked us if we had ever read Don Quixote.
“I started to” Kate replied. “I started to read it in Spanish one summer, but didn’t get very far.”
“I never read it,” I said “but I watched the movie version of the musical, so I sort of know the story.” “And then, this summer, we ended up in a tiny town in the Czech Republic called Loket. It’s in the western part of the country, not so far from Germany. It’s in a bend in the river that is so bendy that the town is almost on an island, but not quite. At the top of the hill the town is built on is a castle. It’s a fairytale town. The first time I saw it I pinched myself. This can’t possibly be real I thought. It’s too perfect. But it was real. It was the sort of town where everyone knows everyone, and they all visit the local pub every night. Except in this town there were three local pubs. And it rains less. There’s more sunshine. And everyone is speaking Czech.
We heard there was going to be a play up at the castle, and since Kate is so into theater and all, and I love visiting castles, we decided to go. They had set up a small stage and some folding chairs for the show in the courtyard of the castle. I think there were maybe nine of us watching. The show was Don Quixote. The opening was in Spanish, which thankfully Kate understood and translated for me. But then it went into Czech, and I tried to remember the musical version I had seen so that I could at least sort of follow what was going on. Sancho, Don Quixote’s friend and companion was played by a woman wearing oversized shoes and an oversized belly. Don Quixote was on stilts. And then, we discovered that this was not just a Czech interpretation of a Spanish story. This was a Czech interpretation of a Spanish story with audience participation. And since there were only nine of us, it was a definite that we were going to be participating, Not minding at all that I was a mouse, they tried to get me to play Dulcinea, the woman Don Quixote devotes himself to. It soon became apparent though that there was a language problem and that I had no clue what I was saying, so they picked someone else. But at the end both Kate and I found ourselves standing on stage with our shoes off around the dying Don Quixote. We received a paper model of a pirate ship to thank us for our participation.”