commit

Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation) there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. I have learned a deep respect for one of Goethe's couplets:

Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.

-- William H. Murray The Scottish Himalayan Expedition

Transplanting

Watching hands transplanting,
Turning and tamping,
Lifting the young plants with two fingers,
Sifting in a palm-full of fresh loam, –
One swift movement, –
Then plumping in the bunched roots,
A single twist of the thumbs, a tamping and turning,
All in one,
Quick on the wooden bench,
A shaking down, while the stem stays straight,
Once, twice, and a faint third thump, –
Into the flat-box it goes,
Ready for the long days under the sloped glass:

The sun warming the fine loam,
The young horns winding and unwinding,
Creaking their thin spines,
The underleaves, the smallest buds
Breaking into nakedness,
The blossoms extending
Out into the sweet air,
The whole flower extending outward,
Stretching and reaching.

-- Theodore Roethke (b. 25 May 1908)

transitions

My films are circus shows, and I'm glad of it. I never put on two elephant acts together. After the elephant, the juggler, and after the juggler, the bears. I even allow a sort of intermission toward the sixth reel, because by then people's attention is flagging. At the seventh reel I take them in hand again, and try to end with a flourish ... I swear I'm not joking; I think of the circus while working. I'd like to see people hiss and boo the unsuccessful sequences and clap those they liked. And since in order to see my films people have to shut themselves up in the dark, I never fail, toward the end of the film, to take them out into the countryside, beside the sea, or in the snow, so they'll forgive me ... I think constantly of the public.

-- François Truffaut, quoted in François Truffaut by C.G. Crisp

Tower on Cliff Top

When I took your hand, securing
you at the turn of the stone stair,
for the narrow step deepened by unknown
steps that climbed that dark,
(many generations in that dark
that split the day from day)
the sky broke blue above;
below the stone cube, the flat sea,
then in this place we knew
what we had known before
the years grew in us together,
yet never knew as here and now
in sudden glare and roaring airs,
as time had waited on this time
to know this in our broken day
when I took your hand.

-- George Bruce

unfettered

Dreaming is thus one of our roads into the infinite ... It is only by emphasizing our finiteness that we ever become conscious of the infinite. The infinite can only be that which stretches far beyond the boundaries of our own personality. It is the charm of dreams that they introduce us into a new infinity. Time and space are annihilated, gravity is suspended, and we are joyfully borne up in the air, as it were in the arms of angels; we are brought into a deeper communion with Nature.

-- Havelock Ellis The World of Dreams

signal

We followed him a little way along a rocky ledge to a platform from which we could see the head of the valley. It was formed like a circus in an irregular closed oval, broken only by the gorge where we stood and surrounded by steep slopes rising towards the summit, from which the huge tongue of a glacier hung down here and there. Bernard lit a fire, threw some moist grass on it, and looked towards the head of the valley. After a few minutes we saw in the distance an answering signal go up, a thin thread of white smoke hard to distinguish from the slow mist of the waterfalls.

In the mountains a man becomes very attentive to any sign indicating the presence of one of his fellow men. That distant smoke was particularly moving for us, a greeting sent us by strangers climbing ahead of us on the same trail. For from now on the trail linked our fate to theirs, even if we were never to meet.

-- René Daumal Mount Analogue
Translated by Roger Shattuck

field

Almost any turn of the kaleidoscope of nature may set up in the artist a detached and esthetic vision, and, as he contemplates the particular field of vision, the (esthetically) chaotic and accidental contemplation of forms and colours begins to crystallize into a harmony; and as this harmony becomes clear to the artist, his actual vision becomes distorted by the emphasis of the rhythm that is set up within him. Certain relations of line become for him full of meaning; he apprehends them no longer curiously but passionately, and these lines begin to be so stressed and stand out so clearly from the rest that he sees them more distinctly than he did at first. Similarly, colours which in nature have almost always a certain vagueness and elusiveness, become so definite and clear to him, owing to their now so necessary relation to other colours, that, if he chooses to paint his vision, he can state it positively and definitely. In such a creative vision, the objects as such tend to disappear, to lose their separate unities and to take their place as so many bits in the whole mosaic of vision.

-- Roger Fry, quoted by John Dewey in Art as Experience

The Last Invocation

At the last, tenderly,
From the walls of the powerful fortress'd house,
From the clasp of the knitted locks, from the keep of the well-closed doors,
Let me be wafted.

Let me glide noiselessly forth;
With the key of softness unlock the locks -- with a whisper,
Set ope the doors O soul.

Tenderly -- be not impatient,
(Strong is your hold O mortal flesh.
Strong is your hold O love.)

-- Walt Whitman Leaves of Grass

in the forest

By another impulse, she took off the formal cap that confined her hair; and down it fell upon her shoulders, dark and rich, with at once a shadow and a light in its abundance, and imparting the charm and softness to her features. There played around her mouth, and beamed out of her eyes, a radiant and tender smile, that seemed gushing from the very heart of womanhood. A crimson flush was glowing on her cheek, that had been long so pale. Her sex, her youth, and the whole richness of her beauty, came back from what men call the irrevocable past, and clustered themselves, with her maiden hope, and a happiness before unknown, within the magic circle of this hour. And, as if the gloom of the earth and sky had been but the effluence of these two mortal hearts, it vanished with their sorrow. All at once, as with a sudden smile of heaven, forth burst the sunshine, pouring a very flood into the obscure forest, gladdening each green leaf, transmuting the yellow fallen ones to gold, and gleaming adown the gray trunks of the solemn trees. The objects that had made a shadow hitherto, embodied the brightness now. The course of the little brook might be traced by its merry gleam afar into the wood's heart of mystery, which had become a mystery of joy.

-- Nathaniel Hawthorne The Scarlet Letter

the tea-drinkers

The tea-parties were held in a long gallery, glazed and narrow, shaped like a funnel, which led from the entrance hall to the dining-room and was bounded on one side by the garden, from which it was separated (save for a few stone pillars) only by its wall of glass which opened here and there. The result of which, apart from ubiquitous draughts, was sudden and intermittent bursts of sunshine, a dazzling and changeable light that made it almost impossible to see the tea-drinkers, so that when they were installed there, at tables crowded pair after pair the whole way along the narrow gully, shimmering and sparkling with every movement they made in drinking their tea or in greeting one another, it resembled a giant fish-tank or bow-net in which a fisherman has collected all his glittering catch, which, half out of water and bathed in sunlight, coruscate before one's eyes in an ever-changing iridescence.

-- Marcel Proust A l'ombre des jeunnes filles en fleurs (Within a Budding Grove)
Translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin

Duality V

You look at me, you give
a light, which I bear and return,
and we are held, and all
our time is held, in this
touching look -- this touch
that, pressed against the touch
returning in the dark,
is almost sight. We burn
and see by our own light.

-- Wendell Berry

spirit

Cathedral by Auguste Rodin

"I obey Nature in everything, and I never pretend to command her. My only ambition is to be servilely faithful to her."

"Nevertheless," [Rodin's interviewer] answered with some malice, "it is not nature exactly as it is that you evoke in your work."

He stopped short, the damp cloth in his hands. "Yes, exactly as it is!" he replied frowning.

"You are obliged to alter-- "

"Not a jot!"

"But after all, the proof that you do change it is this, that the cast would give not at all the same impression as your work."

He reflected an instant and said: "That is so! Because the cast is less true than my sculpture! It would be impossible for any model to keep an animated pose during all the time that it would take to make a cast from it. But I keep in my mind the ensemble of the pose and I insist that the model shall conform to my memory of it. More than that, -- the cast only reproduces the exterior; I reproduce, besides that, the spirit which is certainly also a part of nature. I see all the truth, and not only that of the outside. I accentuate the lines which best express the spiritual state that I interpret."

-- Auguste Rodin Rodin on Art and Artists
Translated by Mrs. Romilly Fedden

Loons Mating

Their necks and their dark heads lifted into a dawn
Blurred smooth by mist, the loons
Beside each other are swimming slowly
In charmed circles, their bodies stretched under water
Through ripples quivering and sweeping apart
The gray sky now held close by the lake's mercurial threshold
Whose face and underface they share
In wheeling and diving tandem, rising together
To swell their breasts like swans, to go breasting forward
With beaks turned down and in, near shore,
Out of sight behind a windbreak of birch and alder,
And now the haunted uprisen wailing call,
And again, and now the beautiful sane laughter.

-- David Wagoner

for what they are

Sunlight pours into my study from four windows. Year after year the turquoise silk has faded to a gentle watery blue, the brilliant embroidery has softened, and it is lovelier than ever. "We love the things we love for what they are," Robert Frost reminds us. And he means, I think, that we love them as they change -- he is speaking in the poem of a brook gone dry -- as well as for what they once were.

-- May Sarton Plant Dreaming Deep

suggestiveness

I was looking around one of these temples a few days ago, where I noticed that you couldn't figure out how big it was, or it didn't seem to have any limits. I said to the priest, "I don't know whether I'm going exploring or not, or just leave it alone and think that, well, here I left Kyoto and never did find out what was through that little gate, and so what!" Forever there will be magic behind there which I didn't define and didn't draw in. So this whole temple was done that way. All sorts of suggestions of little avenues disappearing, like a mountain path winding up among the trees... because always, every wall of a room seemed to be a screen which led to something else beyond, and at the back of every garden there seemed to be a little gate that led to some other courtyard and everything led into something else.

Where does it go? True, if you follow it you will eventually go up out of Kyoto and get down to Otsu and find yourself back down in the suburbs. But there is a sense that the disappearing mountain path goes to the place that everybody has in the back of their minds as the image of the place that you want to go to (not really an image, as it's always slightly indefinite). There is a certain feeling that there ought to be somewhere that thing I've always wanted.

-- Alan Watts Uncarved Block, Unbleached Silk: The Mystery of Life

the music in words

Is there another language, just as exacting for the author, as a language of words? Is there a language of actions, a language of sounds -- a language of word-as-part-of movement, of word-as-lie, word-as-parody, of word-as-rubbish, of word-as-contradiction, of word-shock or word-cry? If we talk of the more-than-literal, if poetry means that which crams more and penetrates deeper -- is this where it lies?

-- Peter Brook The Empty Space

horizons

When you are away, you are nevertheless present for me. This presence is multiform: it consists of countless images, passages, meanings, things known, landmarks, yet the whole remains marked by your absence, in that it is diffuse. It is as if your person becomes a place, your contours horizons. I live in you then like living in a country. You are everywhere. Yet in that country I can never meet you face to face.

-- John Berger And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos

Sonnet XLIII

When most I wink, then do mine eyes best see,
For all the day they view things unrespected;
But when I sleep, in dreams they look on thee,
And, darkly bright, are bright in dark directed.
Then thou, whose shadow shadows doth make bright,
How would thy shadow's form form happy show
To the clear day with thy much clearer light,
When to unseeing eyes thy shade shines so!
How would, I say, mine eyes be blessed made
By looking on thee in the living day,
When in dead night thy fair imperfect shade
Through heavy sleep on sightless eyes doth stay!
All days are nights to see till I see thee,
And night bright days when dreams do show thee me.

-- William Shakespeare

spring

Such were Arkady's reflections;... but even as he reflected, the spring regained its sway. All around was golden green, all -- trees, bushes, grass -- shone and stirred gently in wide waves under the soft breath of the warm wind; from all sides flooded the endless trilling music of the larks; the peewits were calling as they hovered over the low-lying meadows, or noiselessly ran over the tussocks of grass; the rooks strutted among the half-grown short spring-corn standing out black against its tender green; they disappeared in the already whitening rye, only from time to time their heads peeped out amid its grey waves. Arkady gazed and gazed, and his reflections grew slowly fainter and passed away .... He flung off his coat and turned to his father, with a face so bright and boyish, that the latter gave him another hug.

-- Ivan Turgenev Fathers and Sons
Translated by Constance Garnett

Day-Blind

One clap of day and the dream
rushes back
where it came from. For a moment
the ground is still moist with it.
Then day settles. You step onto dry land.

Morning picks out the four
corners, coffeepot, shawl of dust
on a cupboard. Stunned
by brightness, that dream --
where did it go?

All day you grope in a web
of invisible stars. The day sky soaks them up
like dreams. If you could see
in the light, you'd see what fires
keep spinning, spinning their mesh of threads

around you. They're closer
than you think, pulsing
into the blue. You press your forehead
to the cool glass.

They must be out there in all that dazzle.

-- Chana Bloch

blue room

Was Marcel Proust, sequestered in his cork-lined bedchamber with its twelve-foot ceiling, sealed windows (two), and felt-lined shutters, asking by way of color for solitude? An exact recreation of that room at the Musée Carnavalet at 32 rue de Sévigné in Paris shows not only that his bedspread was a policeman-blue, a dark satiny hue, with ruffles at the bottom, but that the color informed the scheme of the entire chamber. "The most striking thing in the room, apart from the cork, was the color blue," wrote his housekeeper Céleste Albaret in her memoir of 1973, "the blue of the curtains, to be precise, which reflected the big chandelier that hung from the ceiling -- a sort of bowl ending in a point, with lot of lights and several switches, which was never lighted except for visitors or when I tidied the room in M. Proust's absence. There was a thick white marble mantelpiece with two blue-globe candelabra and a matching bronze clock in between. The candelabra were never used either. The only light came from the small long-stemmed bedside lamp -- like a desk lamp -- which lighted up his papers while leaving his face in shadow."

-- Alexander Theroux The Primary Colors

Gorky

Water of the Flowery Mill by Arshile Gorky

I like the heat the tenderness the edible the lusciousness the song of a single person the bathtub full of water to bathe myself beneath the water... I like the wheatfields the plough the apricots those flirts of the sun. But bread above all...

When something is finished, that means it's dead, doesn't it? I believe in everlastingness. I never finish a painting -- I just stop working on it for a while. I like painting because it's something I never come to the end of. Sometimes I paint a picture, then I paint it all out. Sometimes I'm working on fifteen or twenty pictures at the same time. I do that because I want to -- because I like to change my mind so often. The thing to do is always to keep starting to paint, never finishing painting.

-- Arshile Gorky Arshile Gorky: Paintings, Drawings, Studies

the possibility of bears

A summer storm reveals the dreaming place of bears. But you cannot see their shaggy dreams of fish and berries, any land signs supporting evidence of bears, or any bears at all. What is revealed in the soaked rich earth, forked waters, and fence line shared with patient stones is the possibility of everything you can't see.

-- Joy Harjo Secrets from the Center of the World

clouds

Apollonius: Tell me, Damis, is there such a thing as painting?

Damis: Of course.

Apollonius: And what does this art consist of?

Damis: Well, in the mixing of colors.

Apollonius: And why do they do that?

Damis: For the sake of imitation, to get a likeness of a dog or a horse or a man, a ship, or anything else under the sun.

Apollonius: Then, painting is imitation, memesis?

Damis: Well, what else? If it did not do that it would just be a ridiculous playing about with colors.

Apollonius: Yes, but what about the things we see in the sky when the clouds are drifting, the centaurs and stag antelopes and wolves and horses? Are they also works of imitation? Is God a painter who uses his leisure hours to amuse himself that way?

Damis: No...

Apollonius: But does this not mean that the art of imitation is twofold? One aspect of it is the use of hands and mind in producing imitations, another aspect the producing of likenesses with the mind alone?

Damis: Yes...

Apollonius: And for this reason I should say that those who look at works of painting and drawing must have the imitative faculty and that no one could understand the painted horse or bull unless he knew what such creatures are like.

-- Philostratus Life of Apollonius of Tyana
Translated by F.C. Conybeare

mirrors

To get back to mirrors; some make a large, close thing seem tiny and distant, even if it were that mountain between France and Cerdagna. When you hold a mirror up to it, it suddenly becomes very small, so that even if you gaze at it intensely you can barely see it. Other mirrors show the true dimensions of objects. If you look into a normal mirror you see things as they are, real. I know of others again in which objects burn, but only when you place them right where the sun's rays are all reflected and trained on that point. Then all seems ablaze. Some form many quite different figures: single or doubled and sometimes quadrupled, prone, supine, shortened, lengthened. They make one figure a hundred.


-- Jean de Meung and Guillaume de Lorris Le Roman de la Rose
Translated by Alastair McEwen

The Well Dressed Man With a Beard

After the final no there comes a yes
And on that yes the future world depends.
No was the night. Yes is this present sun.
If the rejected things, the things denied,
Slid over the western cataract, yet one,
One only, one thing that was firm, even
No greater than a cricket's horn, no more
Than a thought to be rehearsed all day, a speech
Of the self that must sustain itself on speech,
One thing remaining, infallible, would be
Enough. Ah! douce campagna, honey in the heart,
Green in the body, out of a petty phrase,
Out of a thing believed, a thing affirmed:
The form on the pillow humming while one sleeps,
The aureole above the humming house...
It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.

-- Wallace Stevens

house of breath

That people could come into the world in a place they could not at first even name and had never known before; and that out of a nameless and unknown place they could grow and move around in it until its name they knew and called with love, and call it HOME, and put roots there and love others there; so that whenever they left this place they would sing homesick songs about it and write poems of yearning for it, like a lover...

So this is why when often as you came home to it, down the road in a mist of rain, it seemed as if the house were founded on the most fragile web of breath and you had blown it. Then you thought it might not exist at all as built by carpenter's hands, nor had ever; and that it was only an idea of breath breathed out by you who, with that same breath that had blown it, could blow it all away.

-- William Goyen The House of Breath

be what you are

Sermon to the birds: "Esteemed friends, birds of noble lineage, I have no message to you except this: be what you are: be birds. Thus you will be your own sermon to yourselves!"

Reply: "Even this is one sermon too many!"

-- Thomas Merton Dancing in the Water of Life

now sleeps the crimson petal

Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white;
Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk;
Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font:
The fire-fly wakens: waken thou with me.

Now droops the milkwhite peacock like a ghost,
And like a ghost she glimmers on to me.

Now lies the Earth all Danaë to the stars,
And all thy heart lies open unto me.

Now slides the silent meteor on, and leaves
A shining furrow, as thy thoughts in me.

Now folds the lily all her sweetness up,
And slips into the bosom of the lake:
So fold thyself, my dearest, thou, and slip
Into my bosom and be lost in me.

-- Alfred Lord Tennyson, from The Princess

myth

It would not be too much to say that myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation. Religions, philosophies, arts, the social forms of primitive and historic man, prime discoveries in science and technology, the very dreams that blister sleep, boil up from the basic, magic ring of myth.

-- Joseph Campbell The Hero with a Thousand Faces

returning

I guess I remembered clearest of all the early mornings, when the lake was cool and motionless, remembered how the bedroom smelled of the lumber it was made of and of the wet woods whose scent entered through the screen. The partitions in the camp were thin and did not extend clear to the top of the rooms, and as I was always the first up I would dress softly so as not to wake the others, and sneak out into the sweet outdoors and start out in the canoe, keeping close along the shore in the long shadows of the pines. I remembered being very careful never to rub my paddle against the gunwale for fear of disturbing the stillness of the cathedral...

[W]hen I got back there, with my boy, and we settled into a camp near a farmhouse and into the kind of summertime I had known, I could tell that it was going to be pretty much the same as it had been before -- I knew it, lying in bed the first morning, smelling the bedroom, and hearing the boy sneak quietly out and go off along the shore in a boat. I began to sustain the illusion that he was I, and therefore, by simple transposition, that I was my father. This sensation persisted, kept cropping up all the time we were there. It was not an entirely new feeling, but in this setting it grew much stronger. I seemed to be living a dual existence. I would be in the middle of some simple act, I would be picking up a bait box or laying down a table fork, or I would be saying something, and suddenly it would be not I but my father who was saying the words or making the gestures.

-- E.B. White, "Once More to the Lake" One Man's Meat

communication between couples

(There are several men and two ladies in the room.)

[The lady speaks in Welsh.]

MORTIMER. I understand thy looks, that pretty Welsh
Which thou pourest down from these swelling heavens
I am too perfect in, and but for shame
In such a parley should I answer thee.

[The lady speaks again in Welsh.]

I understand thy kisses, and thou mine,
And that's a feeling disputation,
But I will never be a truant, love,
Till I have learnt thy language, for thy tongue
Makes Welsh as sweet as ditties highly penn'd.
Sung by a fair queen in a summer's bow'r
With ravishing division to her lute.

GLENDOWER. Nay, if you melt, then will she run mad.

[The lady speaks again in Welsh.]

MORTIMER. O, I am ignorance itself in this!

GLENDOWER. She bids you on the wanton rushes lay you down,
And rest your gentle head upon her lap,
And she will sing the song that pleaseth you,
And on your eyelids crown the god of sleep,
Charming your blood with pleasing heaviness,
Making such difference 'twixt wake and sleep
As is the difference betwixt day and night,
The hour before the heavenly-harness'd team
Begins his golden progress in the east.

MORTIMER. With all my heart I'll sit and hear her sing,
By that time will our book I think be drawn.

GLENDOWER. Do so, and those musicians that shall play to you
Hang in the air a thousand leagues from hence,
And straight they shall be here: sit, and attend.

HOTSPUR. Come, Kate, thou art perfect in lying down.
Come, quick, quick, that I may lay my head in thy lap.

LADY PERCY. Go, ye giddy goose.

[The music plays.]

HOTSPUR. Now I perceive the devil understands Welsh,
And 'tis no marvel he is so humorous,
By'r lady, he is a good musician.

LADY PERCY. Then should you be nothing but musical,
For you are altogether govern'd by humors.
Lie still, ye thief, and hear the lady sing in Welsh.

HOTSPUR. I had rather hear Lady my brach howl in Irish.

LADY PERCY. Wouldst thou have thy head broken?

HOTSPUR. No.

LADY PERCY. Then be still.

-- William Shakespeare The First Part of King Henry the Fourth

vision

It is the first vision that counts. Artists have only to remain true to their dream and it will possess their work in such a manner that it will resemble the work of no other artist -- for no two visions are alike, and those who reach the heights have all toiled up the steep mountains by a different route. To each has been revealed a different panorama.

-- Albert Pinkham Ryder

What Are Years

What is our innocence,
what is our guilt? All are
naked, none is safe. And whence
is courage: the unanswered question,
the resolute doubt,--
dumbly calling, deafly listening -- that
in misfortune, even death,
encourages others
and in its defeat, stirs

the soul to be strong? He
sees deep and is glad, who
accedes to mortality
and in his imprisonment rises
upon himself as
the sea in a chasm, struggling to be
free and unable to be,
in its surrendering
finds its continuing.

So he who feels strongly feels,
behaves. The very bird,
grown taller as he sings, steels
his form straight up. Though he is captive,
his mighty singing
says, satisfaction is a lowly
thing, how pure a thing is joy.
This is mortality,
this is eternity.

-- Marianne Moore

learning the words

We sat down and made a nest in the long red grass ... Ántonia pointed up to the sky and questioned me with her glance. I gave her the word, but she was not satisfied and pointed to my eyes. I told her, and she repeated the word, making it sound like "ice." She pointed up to the sky, then to my eyes, then back to the sky, with movements so quick and impulsive that she distracted me, and I had no idea what she wanted. She got up on her knees and wrung her hands. She pointed to her own eyes and shook her head, then to mine and to the sky, nodding violently.

"Oh," I exclaimed, "blue; blue sky."

She clapped her hands and murmured, "Blue sky, blue eyes," as if it amused her. While we snuggled down there out of the wind, she learned a score of words. She was quick, and very eager. We were so deep in the grass that we could see nothing but the blue sky over us and the gold tree in front of us. It was wonderfully pleasant. After Ántonia had said the new words over and over, she wanted to give me a little chased silver ring she wore on her middle finger. When she coaxed and insisted, I repulsed her quite sternly. I didn't want her ring, and I felt there was something reckless and extravagant about her wishing to give it away to a boy she had never seen before.

-- Willa Cather My Ántonia

gaze

Psyche Revived by Cupid's Kiss by Antonio Canova

She gazed again and again upon the beauty of that divine face and her soul drew joy and strength. She beheld the glorious hair of his golden head streaming with ambrosia, and curling locks that strayed over his snow-white neck and crimson cheeks ... and before the lightnings of their exceeding splendor even the light of the lamp grew weak and faint. From the shoulders of the winged god sprang dewy pinions, shining like white flowers, and the topmost feathers, so soft and delicate were they, quivered tremulously in a restless dance, though all the rest were still.

-- Erich Neumann Amor and Psyche: The Psychic Development of the Feminine

Myth of Psyche

Images of Cupid and Psyche

to play

I am fond of works of art, and I collect them. But I do not want to hang them on the wall simply in order to get an electric shock every time that I pass them. I want to hold them, and turn them round and re-hang them -- in short, to play with the images at leisure. And, putting aside what may be no more than a personal prejudice, I rather doubt if an art which depends solely on the first impact on our emotions is permanently valid. When the shock is exhausted, we have nothing to occupy our minds. And this is particularly troublesome with an art which depends so much on the unconscious, because, as we know from the analysis of dreams, the furniture of our unconscious minds is even more limited, repetitive, and commonplace than that of our conscious minds. The blots and stains of modern painting depend ultimately on the memories of things seen, memories sunk deep in the unconscious, overlaid, transformed, assimilated to a physical condition, but memories none the less. Ex nihilo nihil fit. It is not possible for a painter to lose contact with the visible world.

-- Kenneth Clark, "The Blot and the Diagram" Encounter January 1963

shoes

A Pair of Shoes by Vincent Van Gogh

From the dark opening of the worn insides of the shoes the toilsome tread of the worker stares forth. In the stiffly rugged heaviness of the shoes there is the accumulated tenacity of her slow trudge through the far-spreading and ever-uniform furrows of the field swept by a raw wind. On the leather lie the dampness and richness of the soil. Under the soles slides the loneliness of the field-path as evening falls. In the shoes vibrates the silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of the ripening grain and its unexplained self-refusal in the fallow desolation of the wintry field. This equipment is pervaded by uncomplaining anxiety as to the certainty of bread, the wordless joy of having once more withstood want, the trembling before the impending childbed and shivering at the surrounding menace of death. This equipment belongs to the earth, and it is protected in the world of the peasant woman. From out of this protected belonging the equipment itself rises to its resting-within-itself.

But perhaps it is only in the picture that we notice all this about the shoes. The peasant woman, on the other hand, simply wears them.

-- Martin Heidegger Poetry, Language, Thought
Translated by Albert Hofstadter

ceremony

The theatre, when it was still part of religion, was already theatre: it liberated the spiritual energy of the congregation or tribe by incorporating myth and profaning or rather transcending it. The spectator thus had a renewed awareness of his personal truth in the truth of the myth, and through fright and a sense of the sacred he came to catharsis.

-- Jerzy Grotowski Towards a Poor Theatre
Translated by T.K.Wiewlorowski

descent

The sky was blue, but as we flew from the plains in over the stony and bare lower country, all colour seemed to be scorched out of it. The whole landscape below us looked like delicately marked tortoise-shell. Suddenly, in the midst of it was the lake. The white bottom, shining through the water, gives it, when seen from the air, a striking, an unbelievable azure-colour, so clear that for a moment you shut your eyes at it; the expanse of water lies in the bleak tawny land like a big bright aquamarine. We had been flying high, now we went down, and as we sank our own shade, dark-blue, floated under us upon the light-blue lake. Here live thousands of Flamingoes, although I do not know how they exist in the brackish water, -- surely there are no fish here. At our approach they spread out in large circles and fans, like the rays of a setting sun, like an artful Chinese pattern of silk or porcelain, forming itself and changing, as we looked at it.

-- Isak Dinesen Out of Africa

core

The only fertile research is excavatory, immersive, a contraction of the spirit, a descent. The artist is active, but negatively, shrinking from the nullity of extracircumferential phenomena, drawn into the core of the eddy.

- Samuel Beckett Proust

awe

The only valid thing in art is the one thing that cannot be explained, to explain away the mystery of a great painting would do irreplaceable harm, for whenever you explain or define something you substitute the explanation or the definition for the image of the thing.

-- Henri Matisse, quoted in The Meanings of Modern Art by John Russell

The Two of You

Don't run anymore. Quiet. How softly it rains
On the roofs of the city. How perfect
All things are. Now, for the two of you
Waking up in a royal bed by a garret window.
For a man and a woman. For one plant divided
Into masculine and feminine which longed for each other.
Yes, this is my gift to you. Above ashes
On a bitter, bitter earth. Above the subterranean
Echo of clamorings and vows. So that now at dawn
You must be attentive: the tilt of a head,
A hand with a comb, two faces in a mirror
Are only forever once, even if unremembered,
So that you watch what is, though it fades away,
And are grateful every moment for your being.
Let that little park with greenish marble busts
In the pearl-gray light, under a summer drizzle,
Remain as it was when you opened the gate.
And the street of tall peeling porticoes
Which this love of yours suddenly transformed.

-- Czeslaw Milosz
Translated by the author and Robert Hass

Gluck's manifesto

I have tried to restrict music to its true role of serving poetry through expression and by following the situation of the story, without interrupting the action or smothering it with useless, superfluous ornaments; and I believe that it should do this in the same way that telling colours affect a correct and well organized drawing, by a well matched contrast of light and shade, which animates the figures without altering their shapes.

-- Christoph Willibald Gluck, writing in the preface to the published score of Alceste

the world

Thou believest thyself to be nothing,
And yet it is in thee that the world resides.

-- Avicenna

chase

LOW CAMERA SHOT -- A SHARP CURVE IN THE ROAD

The Ford whizzes by us on two wheels, the land yacht does almost the same.

A MOTOR COP -- READING A NEWSPAPER

He is in a little side road at its juncture with the main highway. Some mud and water from the side road has leaked onto the highway. He lowers his newspaper and turns his head in astonishment as the Ford races past and splatters him with mud. He throws his newspaper to the ground and his leg over the saddle. As he throws his weight up to start the motorcycle, the land yacht roars by and really gives him some mud.

CLOSE SHOT -- THE MOTOR COP -- SCOOPING THE MUD OUT OF HIS EYES

CLOSE SHOT BEHIND THE HEADS OF SULLIVAN AND BUD

SULLIVAN: Can a whippet tank make a sharp turn?

BUD: What?

SULLIVAN: (Hollering) Can a whippet tank go up a side road?

BUD: A whippet tank can go anywhere. Hang on!

There is a terrible screeching, the car lurches and the background swings ninety degrees. Now the car bumps down a country lane.

THE DRIVER'S SEAT OF THE LAND YACHT

THE CHAUFFEUR: Hang on!

He takes a mighty grip and spins the wheel. As the four other occupants slide toward him --

INT. OF THE LAND YACHT

Jones, the doctor, and the young man with the earphones flop over to the side of the body then bounce back.

THE COOK -- IN THE GALLEY

He is upside down on the floor. Another pile of dishes fall on him.

THE DRIVER'S SEAT OF THE LAND YACHT

It is listing badly as it completes the turn. The girl screams.

THE MOTOR COP -- ROARING TOWARD US

He is scooping mud out of his eyes.

THE MOTOR COP -- ROARING AWAY FROM US

As he disappears down the road the CAMERA PANS and LOOKS UP THE LANE. The land yacht is moving AWAY FROM US in a series of leaps.

-- Preston Sturges Sullivan's Travels

The Coen Brothers went on to make the movie within this movie as O Brother, Where Art Thou?

the wind

You realize that you had heard the drum from the distance, also the deep, distant roar and boom of the singing, but that you had not heeded, as you don't heed the wind.

-- D.H. Lawrence, "The Dance of the Sprouting Corn" The Later D.H. Lawrence

the dance

The foraging bee, having got rid of her load, begins to perform a kind of "round dance." On the part of the comb where she is sitting she starts whirling around in a narrow circle, constantly changing her direction, turning now right, now left, dancing clockwise and anti-clockwise in quick succession, describing between one and two circles in each direction. This dance is performed among the thickest bustle of the hive. What makes it so particularly striking and attractive is the way it infects the surrounding bees; those sitting next to the dancer start tripping after her, always trying to keep their outstretched feelers in close contact with the tip of her abdomen. They take part in each of her manoeuvrings so that the dancer herself, in her madly wheeling movements, appears to carry behind her a perpetual comet's tail of bees. In this way they keep whirling round and round, sometimes for a few seconds, sometimes for as long as half a minute, or even a full minute, before the dancer suddenly stops, breaking loose from her followers to disgorge a second or even a third droplet of honey while settling on one, or two other parts of the comb, each time concluding with a similar dance. This done, she hurries towards the entrance hole again to take off for her particular feeding-place, from where she is sure to bring back another load; the same performance being enacted at each subsequent return.

-- Karl von Frisch Dancing Bees: An Account of the Life and Senses of the Honeybee

Devotion Is a Heavy Cross

Devotion is a heavy cross,
but you are lovely and direct;
the mystery of your attractions
is powerful as the key to life.

Scuffling of dreams is heard in spring,
rustle of news and truths. And your
family sprang from such beginnings.
Your mind's impartial as the air.

Lightly to waken, see again,
shake from the heart its wordy litter
and live in future days unchoked,
surely all that needs no great cunning.

-- Boris Pasternak
Translated by J.M. Cowen

honey

I keep thinking that we need a new language, a language of the heart, a language, as in the Polish forest, where language wasn't needed -- some kind of language between people that is a new kind of poetry, that is the poetry of the dancing bee, that tells us where the honey is.

-- André Gregory and Wallace Shawn My Dinner With André

standing back

Nailed side by side on to the wall were several unstretched canvases on all of which, to my astonishment, [Pierre] Bonnard was working at the same time. Once he had collected a touch of laque de garance, or cadmium yellow, with his nervous, deft fingers, he would then examine each canvas to find the one and only place to put it. In this way, he could nourish several canvases at once until they all came to life. Economy of gesture? The procedure might have seemed a rational one had his 'palette' not obliged him to make a tiresome trip back and forth for each colour -- for the paints were laid out far behind him on a low table. However, he had obviously set this onerous task for himself deliberately. By moving away from the canvases after each stroke, he was better able to judge the effect he was obtaining and to seize the colour relationships, as well as to keep an eye out for any empty spaces.

-- Brassaï The Artists of my Life
Translated by Richard Miller

suggestion

... truth, life, or reality is an organic thing which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only through transformation, through changing into other forms than those which were merely present in appearance.

-- Tennessee Williams The Glass Menagerie Production Notes

the river

Often they sat together in the evening on the tree trunk by the river. They both listened silently to the water, which to them was not just water, but the voice of life, the voice of Being, of perpetual Becoming. And it sometimes happened that while listening to the river, they both thought the same thoughts, perhaps of a conversation of the previous day, or about one of the travellers whose fate and circumstances occupied their minds, or death, or their childhood; and when the river told them something good at the same moment, they looked at each other, both thinking the same thought, both happy at the same answer to the same question.

-- Herman Hesse Siddhartha
Translated by Hilda Rosner

meaning of things

What more could be needed to suffuse the world with the deepest meaning and beauty? The attention is fixed upon a well-defined object, and all the effects it produces in the mind are easily regarded as powers or qualities of that object. But these effects are here powerful and profound. The soul is stirred to its depths. Its hidden treasures are brought to the surface of consciousness. The imagination and the heart awake for the first time. All these new values crystallize about the objects then offered to the mind. If the fancy is occupied by the image of a single person, whose qualities have had the power of precipitating this revolution, all the values gather about that one image. The object becomes perfect, and we are said to be in love. If the stimulus does not appear as a definite image, the values evoked are dispersed over the world, and we are said to have become lovers of nature, and to have discovered the beauty and meaning of things.

-- George Santayana The Sense of Beauty

marya

"Sometimes I remember it was a boy, and sometimes it was a girl. And when he was born, I wrapped him up in cambric and lace, and put pink ribbons on him, strewed him with flowers, got him ready, said prayers over him. I took him away unchristened and carried him through the forest, and I was frightened, and what I weep for most is that I had a baby and I never had a husband."

"Perhaps you had one?" Shatov queried cautiously.

"You're absurd, Shatushka, with your reflections. Perhaps I had, but what's the use of my having had one if it is just the same as though I hadn't. There's an easy riddle for you, guess it," she smiled.

"Where did you take your baby?"

"I took it to the pond," she said with a sigh.

Shatov nudged me again: "And what if you never had a baby and all this is only a wild dream?"

"You ask me a hard question, Shatushka," she answered dreamily, without a trace of surprise at such a question. "I can't tell you anything about that. Perhaps I hadn't: I think it's only your curiosity. I shan't leave off crying for him; anyway, I couldn't have dreamt it ...." And big tears glittered in her eyes.

-- Fyodor Dostoevsky The Possessed
Translated by Constance Garnett

Equations of a Villanelle

The breath within us is the wind without,
In interchange unnoticed all our lives.
What if the same be true of world and thought?

Air is the ghost that comes and goes uncaught
Through the great system of lung and leaf that sieves
The breath within us and the wind without;

And utterance, or inspiration going out,
Is borne on air, on empty air it lives
To say the same is true of world and thought.

This is the spirit's seamless fabric wrought
Invisible, whose working magic gives
The breath within us to the wind without.

O great wind, blow through us despite our doubt,
Distilling all life's sweetness in the hives
Where we deny the same to world and thought,

Till death, the candle guttering to naught,
Sequesters every self as it forgives
The breath within us for the wind without;
What if the same be true of world and thought?

-- Howard Nemerov

via Modern Kicks

vortex

When there is too much going on, more than you can bear, you may choose to assume that nothing in particular is happening, that your life is going round and round like a turntable. Then one day you are aware that what you took to be a turntable, smooth, flat, and even, was in fact a whirlpool, a vortex.

-- Saul Bellow Something to Remember Me By: Three Tales

spring

MARY: The cold spring now is the time
For the ache in the moving root
The agony in the dark
The slow flow throbbing the trunk
The pain of the breaking bud.
These are the ones that suffer least:
The aconite under the snow
And the snowdrop crying for a moment in the wood.

HARRY: Spring is an issue of blood
A season of sacrifice
And the wail of the new full tide
Returning the ghosts of the dead
Those whom the winter drowned
Do not the ghosts of the drowned
Return to land in the spring?
Do the dead want to return?

MARY: Pain is the opposite of joy
But joy is a kind of pain
I believe the moment of birth
Is when we have knowledge of death
I believe the season of birth
Is the season of sacrifice
For the tree and the beast, and the fish
Thrashing itself upstream:
And what of the terrified spirit
Compelled to be reborn
To rise toward the violent sun
Wet wings into the rain cloud
Harefoot over the moon?

HARRY: What have we been saying? I think I was saying
That it seemed as if I had been always here
And you were someone who had come from a long distance.
Whether I know what I am saying, or why I say it,
That does not matter. You bring me news
Of a door that opens at the end of a corridor,
Sunlight and singing; when I had felt sure
That every corridor only led to another,
Or to a blank wall; that I kept moving
Only so as not to stay still. Singing and light.

-- T.S. Eliot The Family Reunion

what happened to the new poem

It exploded like the crack of doom, and it kicked (as Peter had well foreseen) like a carthorse. Gun and gunman rolled together upon the hearth, entangled inextricably in the folds of the drape. As Bunter leaped to the rescue, the loosened soot of centuries came plunging in a mad cascade down the chimney; it met the floor with a soft and deadly violence and mushroomed up in a Stygian cloud, while with it rushed, in a clattering shower, masonry and mortar, jackdaws' nests and the bones of bats and owls, sticks, bricks and metalwork, with fragments of tiles and potsherds. The shrill outcry of Mrs. Ruddle and Miss Twitterton was drowned by the eruptive rumble and boom that echoed from bend to bend of the forty-foot flue.

"Oh rapture!" cried Peter, with his lady in his arms. "Oh, bountiful Jehovah! Oh, joy for all its former woes a thousand-fold repaid!"

-- Dorothy L. Sayers Busman's Honeymoon

vision

I am that supreme and fiery force that sends forth all the sparks of life. Death has no part in me, yet do I allot it, wherefore I am girt about with wisdom as with wings. I am that living and fiery essence of the divine substance that flows in the beauty of the fields. I shine in the water, I burn in the sun and the moon and the stars. Mine is that mysterious force of the invisible wind. I sustain the breath of all living. I breathe in the verdure, and in the flowers, and when the waters flow like living things, it is I. I found those columns that support the whole earth ... I am the force that lies hid in the winds, from me they take their source, and as a man may move because he breathes, so doth a fire burn but by my blast. All these live because I am in them and am of their life. I am wisdom. Mine is the blast of the thundered word by which all things were made. I permeate all things that they may not die. I am life.

-- Hildegard of Bingen Hildegard of Bingen: Scivias
Translated by Mother Columba Hart

feeling

RAYMOND: So what is your opinion on modern art?

CATHY: It's hard to put into words really. I just know what I care for and what I don't. Like this -- I'm not sure how you pronounce it -- Mirra?

RAYMOND: Miró.

CATHY: Miró. I don't know why but I just adore it. The feeling it gives. I know that sounds terribly vague.

RAYMOND: No. It actually confirms something I've always wondered about modern art, abstract art.

CATHY: What is that?

RAYMOND: That perhaps it's just picking up where religious art left off. You know. Trying to somehow show you divinity, put it up there on the wall. The modern artist just pares it down to the most basic elements of shape and color. But when you look at that Miró, you feel it just the same.

CATHY: Why, that's lovely, Raymond.

We hear the brief shriek of a woman's laugh. CATHY turns to see MONA LAUDER, MR. FARNSWORTH, and two other women snickering among themselves over CATHY and her friend.

ELEANOR, who is standing listening to an ELDERLY WOMAN, also notices the commotion.

ELDERLY WOMAN: To tell you the truth, I was rather shocked by the prices. But then I've always preferred the work of the masters ... Rembrandt, Michelangelo --

ELEANOR spots CATHY saying good-bye to RAYMOND and starting off down the hall.

ELEANOR: I'm terribly sorry -- Would you excuse me a moment?

ELDERLY WOMAN: Certainly.

ELEANOR starts after CATHY.

ELEANOR: Cathleen!

CATHY: El, honey. It all looks just marvelous --

ELEANOR whisks CATHY to the side.

ELEANOR: Cathy, who on earth was that man? You have the whole place in a clamor!

CATHY: Oh for heaven's sake, why? Because of that ridiculous story?

ELEANOR: (squinting off at RAYMOND) Who is he?

RAYMOND is now introducing SARAH to a smiling, middle-aged woman in a hat.

CATHY: His name's Raymond Deagan. He's Otis Deagan's son.

ELEANOR: Your gardener?

-- Todd Haynes Far From Heaven

the creative act

The creative act takes another aspect when the spectator experiences the phenomenon of transmutation; through the change from inert matter into a work of art, an actual transubstantiation has taken place, and the role of the spectator is to determine the weight of the work on the esthetic scale.

All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.

-- Marcel Duchamp, "The Creative Act" ArtNews 56, no. 4

art

Philosophy is said to begin in wonder and end in understanding. Art departs from what has been understood and ends in wonder. In this end, the human contribution in art is also the quickened work of nature in man ... Art is the extension of the power of rites and ceremonies to unite men, through a shared celebration, to all incidents and scenes of life. This office is the reward and seal of art.

-- John Dewey Art as Experience

captivity

The huge endless bivouac that had previously resounded with the crackling of camp-fires and the voices of many men had grown quiet, the red camp-fires were growing paler and dying down. High up in the lit sky hung the full moon. Forests and fields beyond the camp, unseen before, were now visible in the distance. And farther still, beyond those forests and fields, the bright oscillating, limitless distance lured one to itself. Pierre glanced up at the sky and the twinkling stars in its far-away depths. "And this is me, and all that is within me, and it is all I!" thought Pierre. "And they caught all that and put it into a shed boarded up with planks!" He smiled, and went and lay down to sleep...

-- Leo Tolstoy War and Peace
Translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude

ineffable

What is the phrase for the moon? And the phrase for love? By what name are we to call death? I do not know. I need a little language such as lovers use, words of one syllable ...

-- Virginia Woolf The Waves

novel writing

1st Announcer: Novel writing which comes today from the west country from Dorset ....

2nd Announcer: (we hear the sound of a crowd in the background) Hello and welcome to Dorchester, where a very good crowd has turned out to watch local boy Thomas Hardy write his new novel The Return of the Native on this very pleasant July morning. This will be his eleventh novel and the fifth of the very popular Wessex novels…. and here he comes! Here comes Hardy walking out to his desk, he looks confident, he looks relaxed, very much the man in form as he acknowledges this very good natured Bank Holiday crowd. And the crowd goes quiet now as Hardy settles himself down at the desk, body straight, shoulders relaxed, pen held lightly but firmly in the right hand, he dips the pen in the ink (the announcer becomes excited) and he's off, it's the first word, but it is not a word….. oh no, it's a doodle way up on top of the left hand margin. It is a piece of meaningless scribble, and he's signed his name underneath it.... oh dear what a disappointing start, but he is off again and he goes, the first word of Thomas Hardy’s new novel, at 10:35 on this very lovely morning, it's three letters, it's the definite article and it's THE, Dennis.

Dennis: Well this is true to form, no surprises there. He started five of his eleven novels with the definite article, we've had two of them with the IT, there has been one BUT, two ATs, one ON, and a Delorios. Oh that, of course, was never published.

2nd Announcer: I am sorry to interrupt you there Dennis, but he’s crossed it out. Thomas Hardy on the first day of his new novel has crossed out the only word he has written so far and he is gazing off into space…. Ohh! Oh dear, he’s signed his name again.

-- Monty Python's Flying Circus Matching Tie and Handkerchief

Side B of Matching Tie and Handkerchief had two grooves, unbeknownst to people who bought the record. Depending on where they dropped the needle, they could hear side two or side three with different tracks.

simple enough

But I don't think you express clearly enough what it is you want us to feel: the certainty which one seems to have, and which one can, in any case, prove, of the nothingness, the emptiness, the treachery of the good or beautiful things one desires; and how, despite this knowledge, we allow ourselves to be eternally deceived by the charm cast over our 6 senses by the external world, by things outside ourselves, as though we understood nothing, and especially not the difference between objectivity and subjectivity. Luckily for us, we remain in this way both stupid and full of hope ...

There are so many people, especially among our pals, who imagine that words are nothing: but, on the contrary, it's as interesting and as difficult to say a thing well as to paint it, isn't it? There is the art of lines and colours, but the art of words exists too, and will never be less important.

Here's a fresh orchard, simple enough as a composition: a white tree, a small green tree, a square patch of green, lilac soil, an orange roof, a big blue sky.

-- Vincent Van Gogh Letter to Emile Bernard 20 April 1888
Translated by Douglas Lord

perfection

Orchids by Robert Mapplethorpe

Perfection means you don't question anything about the photograph. There are certain pictures I've taken in which you really can't move that leaf or that hand. It's where it should be, and you can't say it could have been there. There's nothing to question as in a great painting. I often have trouble with contemporary art because I find it's not perfect. It doesn't have to be anatomically correct to be perfect either. A Picasso portrait is perfect. It's just not questionable. In the best of my pictures, there's nothing to question -- it's just there. And that's what I try to do....

-- Robert Mapplethorpe Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment

burning

Without feeling or with feeling,
without light and in darkness living,
all of me is slowly burning

-- St. John of the Cross
Translated by Antonio T. de Nicolas

In the spiritual practice of San Juan de la Cruz there is a laborious and dedicated effort to strip the writer away from any background that is not the ultimate, or in his words, the Will of God. The images of the mystic and the poet coincide in this ultimate region, where we find the Trinity, the images of origin, the ultimate marriage of union, the ultimate eroticism of the soul (which happens to be also the original one). These are all images not borrowed from the senses, but built through interior sensitizations that flow from the senses to the image and back, transforming them and yielding the inspired poetry we know.

-- Antonio T. de Nicolas St. John of the Cross: Alchemist of the Soul

Magie

Aus unbeschreiblicher Verwandlung stammen
solche Gebilde --: Fühl! und glaub!
Wir leidens oft: zu Asche werden Flammen;
doch, in der Kunst: zur Flamme wird der Staub.

Hier ist Magie. In das Bereich des Zaubers
scheint das gemeine Wort hinaufgestuft...
und ist doch wirklich wie der Ruf des Taubers,
der nach der unsichtbaren Taube ruft.

Magic

From indescribable transformation flash
such creations --: Feel! and trust!
We suffer it often: flames become ash;
yet, in art: flames come from dust.

Here is magic. In the realm of a spell
the common word seems lifted up above...
and yet is really like the call of the male
who calls for the invisible female dove.

-- R.M. Rilke
Translated by John J.L. Mood

taste

Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty. One person may even perceive deformity, where another is sensible of beauty; and every individual ought to acquiesce in his own sentiment, without pretending to regulate those of others. To seek in the real beauty, or real deformity, is as fruitless an enquiry, as to pretend to ascertain the real sweet or real bitter. According to the disposition of the organs, the same object may be both sweet and bitter; and the proverb has justly determined it to be fruitless to dispute concerning tastes. It is very natural, and even quite necessary to extend this axiom to mental, as well as bodily taste; and thus common sense, which is so often at variance with philosophy, especially with the skeptical kind, is found, in one instance at least, to agree in pronouncing the same decision.

-- David Hume Of the Standard of Taste

evening walk

On the evening I am thinking about -- it was breezy there on Ilingnorak Ridge, and cold; but the late-night sun, small as a kite in the northern sky, poured forth an energy that burned against my cheekbones -- it was on that evening that I went on a walk for the first time among the tundra birds. They all build their nests on the ground, so their vulnerability is extreme. I gazed down at a single horned lark no bigger than my fist. She stared back resolute as iron. As I approached, golden plovers abandoned their nests in hysterical ploys, artfully feigning a broken wing to distract me from the woven grass cups that couched their pale, darkly speckled eggs. Their eggs glowed with a soft, pure light, like the window light in a Vermeer painting. I marveled at this intense and concentrated beauty on the vast table of the plain. I walked on to find Lapland longspurs as still on their nests as stones, their dark eyes gleaming. At the nest of two snowy owls I stopped. These are more formidable animals than plovers. I stood motionless. The wild glare in their eyes receded. One owl settled back slowly over its three eggs, with an aura of primitive alertness. The other watched me, and immediately sought a bond with my eyes if I started to move.

I took to bowing on these evening walks. I would bow slightly with my hands in my pockets, toward the birds and the evidence of life in their nests -- because of their fecundity, unexpected in this remote region, and because of the serene arctic light that came down over the land like breath, like breathing.

-- Barry Lopez Arctic Dreams

The Servant-Girl at Emmaus

(A Painting by Velázquez)

She listens, listens, holding
her breath. Surely that voice
is his -- the one
who had looked at her, once, across the crowd,
as no one ever had looked?
Had seen her? Had spoken as if to her?

Surely those hands were his,
taking the platter of bread from hers just now?
Hands he'd laid on the dying and made them well?

Surely that face --?

The man they'd crucified for sedition and blasphemy.
The man whose body disappeared from its tomb.
The man it was rumored now some women had seen this
morning, alive?

Those who had brought this stranger home to their table
don't recognize yet with whom they sit.
But she in the kitchen, absently touching
the winejug she's to take in,
a young Black servant intently listening,

swings round and sees
the light around him
and is sure.

-- Denise Levertov

read about Diego Velázquez

love

Love unannounced goes in to God,
Hath instant audience:
Long in the antechamber wait
Wit and intelligence.

--Angelus Silesius
Translated by J.E. Crawford Flitch


art

The virtues of art, like the virtues of faith, are such that they reach beyond the limitations of the intellect, beyond any mere theory that a writer may entertain.

-- Flannery O'Connor (b. 25 March 1925) Mystery and Manners

selected quotes from Flannery O'Connor's Mystery and Manners

attention

So what is it, this force which makes saints, heroes, geniuses, which makes men pursue their destinies to the end? It seems to me that attention is the state of mind which allows us to perceive what has to be. It is a form of the vision experienced by the great mystics, on days when they were granted a profound concentration. I have the impression that the more I try to think of the essentials of music, the more they seem to depend on general human values. It's all very well to be a musician, it's all very well to be a genius, but the intrinsic value which constitutes your mind, your heart, your sensibility, depends on what you are. You may have to lead a life in which no one understands who you are. Nevertheless I believe that everything depends on attention. I only see you if I pay attention. I only exist, in my own eyes, if I pay attention to myself. One always comes back, willy nilly, to the great words. Have you or have you not received grace? Saint Teresa of Avila, afflicted despite everything with arid prayer, has visions; we say to ourselves, "She is mad, it is hysteria." That's very convenient! Was [Yehudi] Menuhin hysterical while playing sublimely a sublime movement of a Brahms sonata? No, he received the power to penetrate a thought which is neither Brahms's nor his, nor mine; a thought floating in the world, above the world, bearing light.

-- Nadia Boulanger, quoted in Mademoiselle: Conversations with Nadia Boulanger by Bruno Monsaingeon
Translated by Robyn Marsack

Casablanca

The sunlight hit Jean-Rene. The sepia half-moon of a mole by his right cheekbone glistened, steaming coal in a fast car gliding through the hills of Morocco. We stopped to have a very French picnic: kisses. Shadows of lips and teeth against luxurious auburn soil. The sun always slipping in and out of the bends of limbs, wine from Lisbon dancing mouth to mouth, tongues tracing patterns of clouds, scents of goats, sheep, and the last of my Opium, somewhere near Meknes. I wanted to stay in Paris I'd thought, but no. He said he'd have to have me somewhere I'd never been. I'd laughed. I woke in Casablanca to morning prayers and croissants.

-- Ntozake Shange Liliane

leaving

I stayed there on my own, gazing at the sea. I never will forget that morning. It moved me as much as any love-affair. The colours on the sea-bed, because of the shells and the shell-fish, the madrepores and the corals, etc., the colours are more various than an April meadow covered in primroses. And as for the surface of the sea, every possible colour played across it, all shimmering and fading and melting into each other, from chocolate to amethyst, pink to lapis lazuli and the palest shade of green. It was extraordinary, and if I'd been a painter, I'd have been exceedingly peeved at the thought of how false any reproduction of this reality (granted that such a thing were even possible) would seem. We left Kosseir that afternoon at four, feeling very sad. There were tears in my eyes when I shook hands with our host and climbed up onto my camel. It is always sad to leave a place you know you'll never see again. Such are the melancholy pleasures of the traveller's life, perhaps the most valuable thing it has to offer.

-- Gustave Flaubert Letter to Louis Bouilhet 2 June 1850
Translated by Geoffrey Wall

the world

The world is a tree growing from a jewelseed planted in raw nothingness. Its roots are water and wind, its trunk the earth. Its branches the sky, its leaf-tips the stars, none of which resemble the original seed. Oak trees do not look like acorns. Each tree, every growing thing, has two roots, one in the visible, another in the unseen. Many acknowledge only this visible. They do not understand that the juice, the taste, the thickness of the trunk, and other qualities come not from this palpable place but from the mystery, out of the hidden root.

-- Bahauddin, Father of Rumi
Translated by Coleman Barks and John Moyne

happy birthday jb3

Every Day You Play (Poema14)

Every day you play with the light of the universe.
Subtle visitor, you arrive in the flower and the water.
You are more than this white head that I hold tightly
as a cluster of fruit, every day, between my hands.

You are like nobody since I love you.
Let me spread you out among yellow garlands.
Who writes your name in letters of smoke among the stars of the south?
Oh let me remember you as you were before you existed.

Suddenly the wind howls and bangs at my shut window.
The sky is a net crammed with shadowy fish.
Here all the winds let go sooner or later, all of them.
The rain takes off her clothes.

The birds go by fleeing.
The wind. The wind.
I can contend only against the power of men.
The storm whirls dark leaves
and turns loose all the boats that were moored last night to the sky.

You are here. Oh, you do not run away.
You will answer me to the last cry.
Cling to me as though you were frightened.
Even so, at one time a strange shadow ran through your eyes.

Now, now too, little one, you bring me honeysuckle,
and even your breasts smell of it.
While the sad wind goes slaughtering butterflies
I love you, and my happiness bites the plum of your mouth.

How you must have suffered getting accustomed to me,
my savage, solitary soul, my name that sends them all running.
So many times we have seen the morning star burn, kissing our eyes,
and over our heads the gray light unwind in turning fans.

My words rained over you, stroking you.
A long time I have loved the sunned mother-of-pearl of your body.
I go so far as to think that you own the universe.
I will bring you happy flowers from the mountains, bluebells,
dark hazels, and rustic baskets of kisses.

I want to do with you
what spring does with the cherry trees.

-- Pablo Nerudo
Translated by W.S. Merwin

Read this poem in Spanish and French here

shirts

He took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them, one by one, before us, shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel, which lost their folds as they fell and covered the table in many-colored disarray. While we admired he brought more and the soft rich heap mounted higher -- shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, and monograms of Indian blue. Suddenly, with a strained sound, Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily.

"They're such beautiful shirts," she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. "It makes me sad because I've never seen such -- such beautiful shirts before."

-- F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

hunger

I have been much concerned that in this world we have so largely lost the ability to talk with one another. In the great succession of deep discoveries, we have become removed from one another in tradition, and in a certain measure even in language. We have had neither the time nor the skill nor the dedication to tell one another what we have learned, nor to listen nor to hear, nor to welcome its enrichment of the common culture and the common understanding. We hunger for nobility: the rare words and acts that harmonize simplicity and truth.

-- J. Robert Oppenheimer, 1960 address in Berlin, quoted in Oppenheimer by I.I. Rabi et al

Oppenheimer!

Behind his back his friends said
he was crazy when he fled from them
to be a poet,
once the best physicist in the world
and now, when the atomic bomb is almost ready!
Lunatic!

-- Leszek Czuchajowski

Electronic Green Journal

the poet

The excommunication of the arts, when it was found necessary, took the form of pronouncing the artist mentally degenerate, a device which eventually found its theorist in Max Nordau. In the history of the arts this is new. The poet was always known to belong to a touchy tribe -- genus irritabile was a tag anyone would know -- and ever since Plato the process of the inspired imagination, as we have said, was thought to be a special one of some interest, which the similitude of madness made somewhat intelligible. But this is not quite to say that the poet was the victim of actual mental aberration. The eighteenth century did not find the poet to be less than other men, and certainly the Renaissance did not. If he was a professional, there might be condescension to his social status, but in a time which deplored all professionalism whatever, this was simply a way of asserting the high value of poetry, which ought not to be compromised by trade. And a certain good nature marked even the snubbing of the professional. At any rate, no one was likely to identify the poet with the weakling. Indeed, the Renaissance ideal held poetry to be, like arms or music, one of the signs of manly competence.

-- Lionel Trilling "Art and Neurosis" Partisan Review Winter 1945

reflection

Lilacs and Peaches by Melody Phaneuf

Perhaps lilac is the most abundantly feminine of flowers. It came from Eastern Europe and was imported into the West in the sixteenth century. A Slav flower.

Among the mountains here, the lilac trees flower at the time when the first cuckoos sing. Cuckoos and lilac come as a pair. The cuckoo is pure impudence. Later when he falls silent after mating, he eats grubs and caterpillars -- even those which are poisonous for other birds -- with impunity ...

The days are becoming long, and in the evening I sit in the kitchen reading without a light. On the windowsill is a jug with a flowering branch of lilac, which I cut in a friend's garden. It is pale purple, the color of a much-washed ultramarine blue shirt ... When I glanced up a moment ago, the branch of lilac in the fading light looked like a distant hill of blossoming trees merging into the dusk. It was disappearing.

The walls of the house are thick, for the winters are cold. On the window embrasure, close to the windowpanes, hangs a shaving mirror. As I look up now, I see reflected in the mirror a sprig of the lilac branch: each petal of each tiny flower is vivid, distinct, near, so near that the petals look like the pores of a skin. At first I do not understand why what I see in the mirror is so much more intense than the rest of the branch which, in fact, is nearer to me. Then I realize that what I am looking at in the mirror is the far side of the lilac, the side fully lit by the last light of the sun.

Every evening my love for you is placed like that mirror.

-- John Berger And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos

Ballade des Äusseren Lebens

Ballad of the Outer Life

Und Kinder wachsen auf mit tiefen Augen,
Die von nichts wissen, wachsen auf und sterben,
Und alle Menschen gehen ihre Wege.

And children grow with deeply wondering eyes
That know of nothing, grow a while and die,
And every one of us goes his own way.

Und süße Früchte werden aus den herben
Und fallen nachts wie tote Vögel nieder
Und liegen wenig Tage und verderben.

And bitter fruit will sweeten by and by
And like dead birds come hurtling down at night
And for a few days fester where they lie.

Und immer weht der Wind, und immer wieder
Vernehmen wir und reden viele Worte
Und spüren Lust und Müdigkeit der Gleider.

And always the wind blows, and we recite
And hear again the phrases thin with wear
And in our limbs feel languour or delight.

Und Straßen laufen durch das Gras, und Orte
Sind da und dort, voll Fackeln, Bäumen, Teichen,
Und drohende, und totenhafte verdorrte...

And roads run through the grass, and here and there
Are places full of lights and pools and trees,
And some are threatening, some are cold and bare ...

Wozu sind diese aufgebaut? und gleichen
Einander nie? und sind unzählig viele?
Was wechselt Lachen, Weinen und Erbleichen?

To what end were they built? With differences
No less innumerable than their names?
Why laughter now, now weeping or disease?

Was frommt das alles uns und diese Spiele,
Die wir doch groß und ewig einsam sind
Und wandernd nimmer suchen irgend Ziele?

What does it profit us, and all these games,
Who, great and lonely ever shall be so
And though we always wander seek no aims?

Was frommts, dergleichen viel gesehen haben?
Und dennoch sagt der viel, der "Abend" sagt,
Ein Wort, daraus Tiefsinn und Trauer rinnt

To see such things do travelers leave their homes?
Yet he says much who utters "evening,"
A word from which grave thought and sadness flow

Wie schwerer Honig aus dem hohlen Waben.

Like rich dark honey from the hollow combs.

-- Hugo von Hofmannsthal
Translated by Michael Hamburger

Hugo von Hofmannsthal

Michael Hamburger

radio on

Initially it was relatively easy for artists to simply walk in the back door and onto the airwaves of public radio unobstructed. For a brief time they traversed unmonitored airwaves like guerillas in the night, beaming into automobiles across the urban sprawl. And they developed an audience, an odd cross-section of the populace scanning the broadcast band for a signal amongst the babble in Babel.

-- Jacki Apple "New American Radio and Radio Art"

Will we someday look back on blogs this way?

New American Radio

UBUWEB: RADIO RADIO

picnics

We reserve a whole type of eating experience for "out of doors," where for once we eat seated on the ground. We are very self-conscious about picnics, and the freedom we grant ourselves to lounge about on a blanket eating cold food with our hands. We travel long distances and put up with a thousand risks and inconveniences to reach this state ... People often think that "there is nothing like the out of doors" for lending one an appetite. Fresh air and natural beauty, adventure, no cooking, and no tables and chairs -- a good picnic is a thrilling reversal of normal rules ... The general feeling of relief from normal constraints might even lead to the kind of liberty depicted in Manet's painting Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, a faint and distant echo of the shocking behaviour of ancient Greek Bacchanals, who escaped the constraints of city living by going wild in the woods.

-- Margaret Visser The Rituals of Dinner

XX

In the dark pine-wood

I would we lay,

In deep cool shadow

At noon of day.

How sweet to lie there,

Sweet to kiss,

Where the great pine-forest

Enaisled is!

Thy kiss descending

Sweeter were

With a soft tumult

Of thy hair.

O unto the pine-wood

At noon of day

Come with me now,

Sweet love, away.

--James Joyce Chamber Music

ever changing

I discovered the potential of sour milk by accident. It was at a special period in my life, when I was married in Iceland, -- that I sneaked out at night to draw what you might call "dirty pictures." I was very ashamed of this bent and to destroy these pictures I once poured sour milk over them. Then I noticed that they became very beautiful. Subsequently I always pour sour milk over picture that weren't beautiful or didn't work out. Sour milk is like landscape, ever changing. Works of art should be like that -- they should change like man himself, grow old and die.

-- Dieter Roth Dieter Roth

Roth Time at Moma

Sounds of Lamination

Lamination Rituals - Recordings

a kiss

Roxane:
Ah, hush!

Cyrano:
A kiss, when all is said, is -- what?
A compact sealed, a promise carried out.
An oath accomplished and a vow confirmed.
The rosy dot upon the "i" in "loving."
A secret for no ear, but for the lips.
The velvet humming of an amorous bee:
The endless moment of infinity.
The heart's communion cup that tastes of flowers.
The breathing in a little of the soul
When the pure spirit rises to the lips.

Roxane:
Ah, hush.

-- Edward Rostand Cyrano de Bergerac
Translated by Louis Untermeyer

holiness

Having misunderstood soul in this fashion (just as we often misunderstand God) we become disappointed when we cannot find it and dismiss it an illusion, another fraud perpetrated by religion. But soul is not a thing; it is a dimension of depth in a thing. Like justness in a judge's decision, or beauty in a painting, soul is a quality of absoluteness in something relative ...understood profoundly, people are connected to the holiness of the world in such a way that they reveal a dimension of holiness in themselves, a dimension of depth that is absolute.

-- Barbara Sproul Primal Myths

Moving Water

When you do things from your soul, you feel a river
moving in you, a joy.

When actions come from another section, the feeling
disappears. Don't let

others lead you. They may be blind or, worse, vultures.
Reach for the rope

of God. And what is that? Putting aside self-will.
Because of willfulness

people sit in jail, the trapped bird's wings are tied,
fish sizzle in the the skillet.

The anger of police is willfulness. You've seen a magistrate
inflict visible punishment. Now

see the invisible. If you could leave your selfishness, you
would see how you've

been torturing your soul. We are born and live inside
black water in a well.

How could we know what an open field of sunlight is? Don't
insist on going where

you think you want to go. Ask the way to the spring. Your
living pieces will form

a harmony. There is a moving palace that floats in the air
with balconies and clear

water flowing through, infinity everywhere, yet contained
under a single tent.

-- Rumi
Translated by Coleman Barks

one big soul

"No," she said. "No. When I was a little girl I use' ta sing. Folks roun' about use' ta say I sung as nice as Jenny Lind. Folks use' ta come an' listen when I sung. An'-- when they stood--an' me a-singin', why, me an' them was together more'n you could ever know. I was thankful. There ain't so many folks can feel so full up, so close, an' them folks standin' there an' me a-singin'. Thought maybe I'd sing in theaters, but I never done it. An' I'm glad. They wasn't nothin' got in between me an' them. An'--that's why I wanted you to pray. I wanted to feel that clostness, oncet more. It's the same thing, singin' an' prayin', jus' the same thing. I wisht you would a-heerd me sing."

And perhaps a man brought out his guitar to the front of his tent. And he sat on a box to play, and everyone in the camp moved slowly in toward him, drawn in toward him. Many men can chord a guitar, but perhaps this man was a picker. There you have something -- the deep chords beating, beating, while the melody runs on the strings like little footsteps. Heavy hard fingers marching on the frets. The man played and the people moved slowly in on him until the circle was closed and tight, and then he sang "Ten-Cent Cotton and Forty-Cent Meat." And the circle sang softly with him. And he sang "Why Do You Cut Your Hair, Girls?" And the circle sang. He wailed the song, "I'm Leaving Old Texas," that eerie song that was sung before the Spaniards came, only the words were Indian then.

And now the group was welded to one thing, one unit so that in the dark the eyes of the people were inward, and their minds played in other times, and their sadness was like rest, like sleep. He sang the "McAlester Bues" and then, to make up for it to the older people, he sang "Jesus Calls Me to His Side." The children drowsed with the music and went into the tents to sleep, and the singing came into their dreams.

And after a while the man with the guitar stood up and yawned. Good night, folks, he said.

And they murmured, Good night to you.

-- John Steinbeck The Grapes of Wrath

Orphic rites

We are all aware that most of life escapes our senses: a most powerful explanation of the various arts is that they talk of patterns which we can only begin to recognize when they manifest themselves as rhythms or shapes ... during the war the romantic theatre, the theatre of colours and sounds, of music and movement, came like water to the thirst of dry lives. At that time, it was called escape and yet the word was only partially accurate. It was an escape, but also a reminder: a sparrow in a prison cell. When the war was over, the theatre again strove even more vigorously to find the same values ... it was the theatre of a battered Europe that seemed to share one aim -- a reaching back towards a memory of lost grace.

Walking along the Reeperbahn in Hamburg on an afternoon in 1946, whilst a damp dispiriting grey mist whirled round the desperate mutilated tarts, some on crutches, noses mauve, cheeks hollow, I saw a crowd of children pushing excitedly into a night club door. I followed them. On the stage was a bright blue sky. Two seedy, spangled clowns sat on a painted cloud on their way to visit the Queen of Heaven. 'What shall we ask her for?' said one. 'Dinner,' said the other and the children screamed approval. 'What shall we have for dinner?' 'Schinken, leberwurst ...' the clown began to list all the unobtainable foods and the squeals of excitement were gradually replaced by a hush -- a hush that settled into a deep and true theatrical silence. An image was being made real, in answer to the need for something that was not there.

-- Peter Brook The Empty Space