Listening notes: search out Manannán by Hildegard von Gynku. This was released this year (25 July 2025). It is only a minute long. I do not know if mum knew this piece of music. She disappeared less than a month after the track was released.
Manannan was renowned as a warrior, king and god of people living around the Irish Sea. He leant his name to the Isle of Man.
My mum put bookmarks in favourite volumes. These are little green tea labels on thread, pulled from the used tea bag, or a whole green tea envelope, unfolded. She placed a couple in a book about Remedios Varo. I have catalogued each of these fragments of writing, however apparently trivial. During my archiving I spotted the mention of another Hildegard: the rather more famous one from Bingen, Germany (1098-1179). She was a remarkable woman, composing, and writing extensively on a range of religious and scientific topics. A large amount of her published material and papers survive.
My mum appears to have seen echoes of Hildegard of Bingen in the work of Remedios Varo (Catalan artist, exiled to Mexico 1908-1963). I can see similarities between an illumination in Hildegard’s book Scivias (1151) and some of Varo’s paintings. I see from a Google search that others, including Francisco Rabasso Rodrigues commented on parallels between the two women, noting Varo’s “esoteric practices, and her relation to time as circular or simultaneous”. I learned about this when reading about a manuscript Varo prepared on a sculpture called Homo Rodans. She penned that essay under the pseudonym Hälikcio von Fuhrängschmidt, fictional anthropologist. Going by the sketches I have found as bookmarks, my mum appears to have found the same Wikipedia articles as me.
We will perhaps never know what my mum planned with her Little Grapefruit At Sea sequence. Her opening sentence in the excerpt I am sharing today frames this as a beginning, but written in the past tense. It refers, however, to events we have already read about in previous posts, some of which were written in the present tense. The ordering of these pieces is therefore challenging and up for interpretation. A loop of time perhaps, like Varo.
The Catalan artist also features in the forthcoming book GANTOB’s 25 Paintings, contributor copies of which are currently in the possession of The Benefaktor, who has also gone missing, last heard of on the Isle of Man in October 2025.
FIONA FINKS, 13 December 2025
GANTOB blog 