Looking Through Matilda's Eyes - Part I

I

Last night I watched Angels and Insects, a drama based on the novella Morpho Eugenia by A. S. Byatt.

My Apple TV had been suggesting this movie for a very long time but I had managed to ignore it. The predicament of a Victorian naturalist that falls in love with an angelically beautiful flax haired maiden named after an Amazonian butterfly seemed to me not worth paying the $3.99 Apple wanted in return for an hour and a half of (potentially yawning) entertainment.

But I have been recently thinking on butterflies - or moths, to be precise - and I needed something to distract me while doing the dishes, so I finally succumbed to Apple's insistence and rented the movie. I swear I could hear a maleficent little laughter coming from the Apple TV box.

The plot was not as predictable as I though it would be. It was also nicely rendered. So the $3.99 were actually a fare investment. There was one character, though, and its subplot, that particularly caught my attention and made watching the movie worthwhile: Matty the nanny, or to be correct, Matilda, which is the way the character prefers to be addressed.

The character Matilda is designed to look freakish, mysterious and stern during first half of the movie. But on the second half the plot starts to unveil her as a sophisticated, wise and wonderfully gifted woman, a virginal heroine with a vast humanistic knowledge in the tradition of the great free-thinker women such as of Hildegard of Bingen or Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz.

We discover Matilda's amazing draughtsmanship skills and her ability to make keen and precise observations of the natural world surrounding her, in particular of the world of the ants. Encouraged by her, the naturalist decides to create a natural history volume, for which she beautifully renders a series of plates illustrating the life of an ant colony.

In Matilda's times they had no Google, or Corbis or Getty Images. If you wanted to know how an ant looked, you had to lace up your boots, get yourself to the fields, capture a real one, and armed with lots of patience and a magnifying glass, take a good look at the little animal managing not to be bitten. Photography had just been invented, so it was outrageously expensive, inaccurate and very inconvenient to use. If you wanted to keep an image of the ant for yourself, you had to resource to your draughtsman abilities and make your own sketch. There was no Illustrator or Photoshop or Corel, so you had to get your fingers stained with ink and watercolour washes if you were serious about immortalizing your ants in delightfully rendered plates.

There is a beautiful scene in the movie in which Matilda helps the naturalist arrange the hand written pages of the book in a very thick folder, daintily labelled by hand. They wrap the folder in brown paper, tie it up with a string and mail it for approval to a publishing house. They touched the package as one touches a beloved object, one that is valuable but also fragile, almost alive.

This scene reminded me of my grandfather papers. He was a poet - an unknown and private one - and he kept his poems, like the rest of his possessions, neatly arranged. They were covered by a plastic bag and tucked away on his wardrobe, under his package of pipe tobacco, behind a wall of soap bars. Our apartment was quite small, so even the wardrobe private compartments had to be shared with more practical possessions.

After his death I went very often through his poems. Some were handwritten some were typed. He was a very fast typist - he was trained as a teletype operator - so his typed pages were as neat as if they would have come out of a press. I always preferred to read the handwritten poems though, because somehow by looking at his calligraphy I felt I could understand better his soap scent and tobacco infused rhymes.



It is not my intention to write a Ludditian apology glorifying a previous time just because there were not enough gadgets at hand. I am myself a sworn geek. I do own an Underwood vintage typewriter, because it reminds me of my grandfather and my childhood, but I also own a Google t-shirt, one of my favourite blogs is just about gizmos and I read the Wired magazine every month religiously. But watching Matilda manually draw her ants made me think on how different the creation process was before the advent of the era of the CTRL and the ALT.

Maybe I am just being a foolish romantic idealizing a very uncomfortable era with a big dose of steam-punk daydreams. But maybe there is a truth behind all this nostalgia. So, just to scare away the sparrows* from my back, today I decided to try to look at the world through the eyes of Matilda, to create something using my own fingers, guided only by my eyes, refraining from pressing any of the convenient buttons that populate our lives.

* In Cuban colloquial language, the sparrow symbolizes melancholy and nostalgia.