Dali House

Dali’s “Portrait of Juan de Pareja Fixing a String of his Mandolin” from 1960 is sometimes referred to as “Maelstrom”, although, suspiciously, only the online poster shops seem to use the alternative title. It’s also typical of the whirlpool that Dali’s output has become that you’ll come across reproductions of this painting in three or four different hues, with the get-cheap-prints-here websites favouring Hallowe’en orange. The website of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, where the original hangs, has it in greyish brown, as seen in the detail below. The version above comes from Olga’s ABC Gallery.

Here Dali is honouring Diego Velázquez, borrowing the palace-official-in-a-doorway from his feverishly adored 1656 “The Maids of Honour” (”Las Meninas”). Dali has him watching a commotion of a different order, and also utilises the subject of Velázquez’s “Portrait of Juan Pareja” from 1650. Pareja’s hand is at the lower centre, with a tack in the thumb. His head is in profile, with Velázquez’s quartered easel forming the bridge of the nose and the princess and her attendants his goatee.

I’m going to have a proper look at Velásquez soon, but this post is about maelstroms. Shown below is “Maelstrom” by Scottish-born Canadian Ruth Palmer.

I’m still puzzled about this notion of getting to the centre of the earth (here’s an early Dorseyland post about one hilarious plan). Is it a womb thing? Nothing to be ashamed of if so, seeing as how visionaries like Edgar Allan Poe and Jules Verne wanted to get back inside too.

The latter took his cues from the former, and even pushed his characters into the unknown abyss pit from a Scandinavian locale, as Poe had done, although Verne reckoned on an Icelandic volcano rather than a Norwegian whirlpool.

No one outside of Norway had heard of a maelstrom before Poe (read about his curious demise at Dorseyland) published “A Descent into the Maelstrom” in 1841. The Nordic word came from the old Dutch maalstroom, a grinding stream. It was Poe who parlayed little-known accounts into a convincing, culture-spanning argument that a maelstrom was a whirlpool, not a cranky creek.

By 2007 Disney buccaneer ships were fighting it out in the maw of a monstrous maelstrom in “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End”. The picture below comes from the 1997 TV miniseries “The Odyssey”

Ten years after Poe’s short story, Herman Melville had Captain Ahab vowing to chase Moby-Dick around the world, right “round the Norway Maelström” if he had to. Jules Verne’s “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea”, published in 1870, characterised it as a “whirlpool from which no vessel ever escapes”.

It’s not that bad, really. The Moskstraumen, as it’s properly known, is fairly powerful, but it’s just a tidal current. It’s probably never sucked down a ship in its life. Don’t blame Poe — he’d been up all night reading other people’s “journalism” on the Lofoten Islands Moskstraumen. We’ll have a look ourselves in a moment.

As viewed on Google Earth, This is the scene of “the Sicilian Charybdis”, the two-mile-wide mouth of the Strait of Messina, with a prominence called Scylla shown in the foreground. They catch a lot of fish here, even swordfish, but the daily double high and low tides are barely noticeable today. They may well have been more powerful in Homer’s era. An earthquake shifted the sea floor in 1783 and calmed things down, though right up to the 19th century they could still turn around a heavy ship. See the rest.