Romance Is Love's Way Of Making Eternity Present

Fig. 1. Still from the closing shot of Wuthering Heights (1939) - d. William Wyler


'Any relic of the dead is precious, if they were valued living.'

Nelly Dean (Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë)

It Is Said That Above Oblivion’s Tide There Is A Pier*

Fig. 1. James Ensor - Masks Confronting Death, 1888


'This is the valley of ashes - a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens: where ashes take the form of houses and chimneys and rising smoke, and finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.'

F. Scott Fitzgerald (from The Great Gatsby)

* Above Oblivion's Tide there is a Pier by Emily Dickinson

Your Ears Will Orgasm #45: Luciano Berio - Ekphrasis (MixPod Player)

Untitled (Ecstatic Singers Of Contaminating Songs)*

Fig. 1. Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes - Grotesque Dance (from Los Disparates), c. 1820-24


'Look for the ridiculous in everything and you will find it.'

Jules Renard

* 'And I join my slime, my excrement, my ecstasy to the great circuit which flows through the subterranean vaults of the flesh. All this unbidden, unwanted, drunken vomit will flow on endlessly through the minds of those to come in the inexhaustible vessel that contains the history of the race. Side by side with the human race there runs another race of beings, the inhuman ones, the race of artists who, goaded by unknown impulses, take the lifeless mass of humanity and by the fever and ferment with which they imbue it turn this soggy dough into bread and the bread into wine and the wine into song. Out of the dead compost and inert slag they breed a song that contaminates.' Henry Miller (from Tropic of Cancer)

Your Ears Will Orgasm #36: El Camaron De La Isla - Soy Caminante (MixPod Player)

New Frames And Names For The Vomit Of Chaos

Fig. 1. Cyprien Gaillard - Pruitt-Igoe Falls, 2008

'Before the seas and lands had been created,
before the sky that covers everything,
Nature displayed a single aspect only
throughout the cosmos; Chaos was its name,
a shapeless, unwrought mass of inert bulk
and nothing more, with the discordant seeds
of disconnected elements all heaped
together in anarchic disarray.

The sun as yet did not shine upon the earth,
nor did the crescent moon renew her horns,
nor was the earth suspended in midair,
balanced by her own weight, nor did the ocean
extend her arms to the margins of the land.

Although the air and sea were present,
land was unstable, the sea unfit for swimming,
the air lacked light; shapes shifted constantly,
and all things were at odds with one another,
for in a single mass cold strove with warm,
wet was opposed to dry and soft to hard,
and weightlessness to matter having weight.

Some god (or kinder nature) settled this
dispute by separating earth from heaven,
and then by separating sea from earth
and fluid aether from the denser air;
and after these were separated out
and liberated from the primal heap,
he bound the disentangled elements
each in its place and all in harmony.'

Ovid (from Metamorphoses, translated by Charles Martin)

Why I Still Forage For You - Even When You Are Here

Fig. 1. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec - L'abandon (Les deux amies), n.d.

'And I realised the impossibility which love comes up against. We imagine that it has as its object a being that can be laid down in front of us, enclosed in a body. Alas, it is the extension of that being to all the points in space and time that it has occupied and will occupy. If we do not possess its contact with this or that place, this or that hour, we do not possess that being. But we cannot touch all those points. If only they were indicated to us, we might contrive perhaps to reach out to them. But we grope for them without finding them. Hence mistrust, jealousy, persecutions. We waste precious time on absurd clues and pass by the truth without suspecting it.'

Marcel Proust (from A la recherche du temps perdu: La prisonnière)

Addendum:

Katie and ESVM (aka PFAO) have come to visit us again, and this - with heartfelt thanks - is their contribution:

Poor old Proust - such amazing insight, but he was sick in bed most of the time. I do think I've found him an ESVM companion though.

Departure

It's little I care what path I take,
And where it leads it's little I care;
But out of this house, lest my heart break,
I must go, and off somewhere.

It's little I know what's in my heart,
What's in my mind it's little I know,
But there's that in me must up and start,
And it's little I care where my feet go.

I wish I could walk for a day and a night,
And find me at dawn in a desolate place
With never the rut of a road in sight,
Nor the roof of a house, nor the eyes of a face.

I wish I could walk till my blood should spout,
And drop me, never to stir again,
On a shore that is wide, for the tide is out,
And the weedy rocks are bare to the rain.

But dump or dock, where the path I take
Brings up, it's little enough I care;
And it's little I'd mind the fuss they'll make,
Huddled dead in a ditch somewhere.

"Is something the matter, dear," she said,
"That you sit at your work so silently?"
"No, mother no, 'twas a knot in my thread.
There goes the kettle, I'll make the tea."

There But For The Twists And Turns Of Fortuity...

Fig. 1. Patricia Piccinini - The Young Family, 2002


'You marvel that this matter, shuffled pell-mell at the whim of Chance, could have made a man, seeing that so much was needed for the construction of his being. But you must realise that a hundred million times this matter, on the way to human shape, has been stopped to form a stone, now lead, now coral, now a flower, now a comet; and all because of more or fewer elements that were or were not necessary for designing a man. Little wonder if, within an infinite quantity of matter that ceaselessly changes and stirs, the few animals, vegetables, and minerals we see should happen to be made; no more wondering than getting a royal pair in a hundred casts of the dice. Indeed it is equally impossible for all this stirring not to lead to something; and yet this something will always be wondered at by some blockhead who will never realise how small a change would have made it into something else.'

Cyrano de Bergerac (from Voyage dans la lune)

Addendum: In Her Own Words

Patricia Piccinini talking about her exhibition at Artium (Spain)

Your Ears Will Orgasm #26: Sineopolis (MixPod Player)

1. Main Title From Forbidden Planet - Louis & Bebe Barron
2. Apocalypse: Part 2 - Tod Dockstader
3. Mutations - Jean-Claude Risset
4. Bye Bye Butterfly - Pauline Oliveros
5. Melange - Klaus Schulze
6. On The Other Ocean - David Behrman

A Memo To Those Who Won't Be Born Until 12009*

Fig. 1. M. C. Escher - Drawing Hands, 1948

'Speed and conciseness of style please us because they present the mind with a rush of ideas that are simultaneous, or that follow each other so quickly that they seem simultaneous, and set the mind afloat on such an abundance of thoughts or images or spiritual feelings that either it cannot embrace them all, each one fully, or it has no time to be idle and empty of feelings. The power of poetic style, which is largely the same thing as rapidity, is pleasing for these effects alone and consists in nothing else. The excitement of simultaneous ideas may arise either from each isolated word, whether literal or metaphorical, from their arrangement, from the turn of a phrase, or even from the suppression of other words and phrases.'

Giacomo Leopardi (from Zabildone di pensieri)

* '[Above] all stupendous inventions, what eminence of mind was his who dreamed of finding means to communicate his deepest thoughts to any other person, no matter how far distant in place and time? Of speaking with those who are India, of speaking with those you are not yet born for a thousand or ten thousand years? And with what facility? All by using the various arrangements of twenty little characters on a page.' Galileo Galilei (from Dialogo dei massimi sistemi)

Addendum:

Fig. 2. The death mask of Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837)

To The Mice Who Insist They Are Men and Women

Fig. 1. Rodney Graham - Allegory of Folly: Study for an Equestrian Monument in the Form of a Wind Vane, 2005

'One reason for my willingness to speak publicly on a subject for which I am sort of underqualified is that it affords me a chance to declaim a short story of Kafka's that I have given up teaching in literature classes and miss getting to read aloud. Its English title is "A Little Fable":

"Alas," said the mouse, "the world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when at last I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into." "You only need to change your direction," said the cat, and at it up.

For me, a signal function in trying to read Kafka with college students is that it is next to impossible to get them to see that Kafka is funny ... [and] to appreciate the way funniness is bound up with the extraordinary power of his stories. Because, of course, great short stories and great jokes have a lot in common. Both depend on what communication theorists sometimes call "exformation," which is a certain quantity of vital information removed from but evoked by a communication in such a way as to cause a kind of explosion of associative connections within the recipient. This is probably why the effect of both short stories and jokes often feels sudden and percussive, like the venting of a long-stuck valve. It's not for nothing that Kafka spoke of literature as "a hatchet with which we chop at frozen seas inside us." Nor is it an accident that the technical achievement of great stories is often called "compression" - for both the pressure and the release are already inside the reader. What Kafka seems able to do better than just about anyone else is to orchestrate the pressure's increase in such a way that it becomes intolerable at the precise instant it is released.'

David Foster Wallace (from Laughing With Kafka, a speech)

In This Painted Paradise Of Sea, Stone And Sky*

The Sunday Six #6: On Someone Else's Distant Horizon

Fig. 1. Claude Monet - Low Tide at Pourville (near Dieppe), 1882

Fig. 2. Claude Monet - The Cliff Walk (Pourville), 1882

Fig. 3. Claude Monet - The Church at Varengeville, 1882

Fig. 4. Claude Monet - The Cliff at Sunset (Étretat), 1882-83

Fig. 5. Claude Monet - Rock Arch West of Étretat (the Manneport), 1883

Fig. 6. Claude Monet - The Needle Rock and the Porte d'Aval (Étretat), 1885


'To paint the sea really well, you need to look at it every hour of every day in the same place so that you can understand its ways in that particular spot.'

Claude Monet

* 'The sea. The sea enchants, the sea kills, it moves, it frightens, it also makes you laugh sometimes, it disappears every now and then, it disguises itself as a lake, or it constructs tempests, devours ships, gives away riches, it gives no answers, it is wise, it is gentle, it is powerful, it is unpredictable. But, above all, the sea calls. You will discover this, Elisewin. All it does, basically, is this: it calls. It never stops, it gets under your skin, it is upon you, it is you it wants. You can even pretend to ignore it, but it's no use. It will still call you. The sea you are looking at and all the others that you will not see, but will always be there, lying patiently in wait for you, one step beyond your life. You will hear them calling, tirelessly. It happens in this purgatory of sand. It will happen in any paradise, and in any inferno. Without explaining anything, without telling you where, there will always be a sea, which will call you.' Alessandro Baricco (Ocean Sea)

Your Ears Will Orgasm #20: Debussy - La Mer (MixPod Player)

Addendum #1: The Katie And Edna Show


Katie (aka Katiefornia) has again graced us with her virtual presence, her wistful reflections and one of her favourite poems. I'll let her explain the connection between the Monet and Maine in a moment; but first I would like to thank her for being such a consistent and considerate reader, not to mention such a generous and genial contributor. At the risking of sounding like an ebullient "teacher's comment" on her elementary school report card, I think it's true to say that Katie is always cheerful, convivial and courteous: she knows how to give and how to take, how to share and how to thank. Indeed, she is exactly the kind of optimistic, good-humoured, intelligent and polite visitor I have been trying to attract to this blog. In short, she is always a pleasure to have in my class. And now, over to you, Katie:

Oh how I love these Monet paintings. I'm especially captivated by the Étretat ones, as I was lucky enough to spend an afternoon there in 2002. It looked just like these paintings. Amazing to think that Monet could have been sitting exactly where I sat taking in the beautiful views of the rocks.

I'm sure that it will come as no surprise that ESVM [Edna St. Vincent Millay] wrote about the sea, since she grew up on the coast of Maine. Even though I live in California and have the Pacific Ocean not that far away, I still miss the Maine coast, and spending time with my grandparents out rowing or sailing with them. I'll leave it to Edna to elaborate:

Exiled

Searching my heart for its true sorrow,
This is the thing I find to be:
That I am weary of words and people,
Sick of the city, wanting the sea;

Wanting the sticky, salty sweetness
Of the strong wind and shattered spray;
Wanting the loud sound and the soft sound
Of the big surf that breaks all day.

Always before about my dooryard,
Marking the reach of the winter sea,
Rooted in sand and dragging drift-wood,
Straggled the purple wild sweet-pea;

Always I climbed the wave at morning,
Shook the sand from my shoes at night,
That now am caught beneath great buildings,
Stricken with noise, confused with light.

If I could hear the green piles moaning
Under the windy wooden piers,
See once again the bobbing barrels,
And the black sticks that fence the weirs,

If I could see the weedy mussels
Crusting the wrecked and rotting hulls,
Hear once again the hungry crying
Overhead, of the wheeling gulls,

Feel once again the shanty straining
Under the turning of the tide,
Fear once again the rising freshet,
Dread the bell in the fog outside,

I should be happy! - that was happy
All day long on the coast of Maine;
I have a need to hold and handle
Shells and anchors and ships again!

I should be happy . . . that am happy
Never at all since I came here.
I am too long away from water.
I have a need of water near.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Which proves the point that there are really only three gifts any of us can expect to last a lifetime: a happy childhood, good genes and the right name (one of the Irish meanings of Katie is "pure").

Love and best wishes to you and your loved ones, Katie - now, and always.

Addendum #2: And Then, A Little Later...

Your “teacher’s comments” had a somewhat familiar ring, so I dug out the “School” folder from my archives and found two report cards from when I was eleven.

My first Teacher Evaluation showed I wasn’t quite living up to Mrs. MacLaren’s expectations:

“Katie’s written work is very good when she really tries to think an idea through. Sometimes she stops before she gets really into it. I want her to achieve at a higher level in academic areas because she has more ability than she sometimes demonstrates.”

By the end of the year I had improved a bit:

“Katie’s creativeness is so evident in her written work, as well as the delightful illustrations which accompany it. Katie does all of her work, and more, enthusiastically yet has time to be friendly and happy with others.”

I have to laugh at how little has changed in 33 years. Now that I'm back in class with ISFK, I know that having a dedicated teacher will make me want to work hard so I can achieve at a higher level.

Addendum #3: And, In Between, "Old Dive" (who, via Small Glass Planet, has been to me from Norwich, England what Katie has been to me from San Francisco, California)


If you could take a different road, just for one day, where would you go? What would you explore? Robyn would go to Chicago, for reasons which make it sound as genuinely tempting as the Emerald City in Oz.

This "take a different route just this once" thing; it's a feeling I get really intensely at airports. Just to get on a random plane and see where I end up. There are so many wonderful places to explore, if only I just got on that plane … But as I cannot choose a favourite, I'll choose something simple instead … something I've done once before and, if I could find that fork in the road again, would be off down there like a shot.

In winter, I love walking our desolate local beaches in really huge storms. Like that one in Ryan's Daughter. Any chance I get, if the weather forecast sends us a big one, I'm off to see Mother Nature throw a wobbly. To stand there and let her get all shouty at me. I love it …

One of the best I ever found was at Walberswick, some years back. It was February. There was a thunderstorm … and I mean a fucking huge storm! All howling and swirling black sky and searing lightning. It tore over the marshes and up the valley like the wrath of God.

There's a wrecked concrete breakwater at the harbour mouth (it's the one under Peahen's bottom on that picture I posted of her). I clambered over the barrier and walked right out to the end. It's all twisted, rotting concrete with rusted reinforcing bars sticking out, and this HUGE sea towered over it. Every massive wave pounded and smashed into it with an enormous BOOM. The whole structure shuddered and shook. It was brilliant! (and very, very cold and wet) … It was a totally stupid thing to do but I just clamped my legs round a concrete beam and sat there for ages watching the storm, letting the waves try and knock me off while the sky tore itself to bits all around me. And it was one of the most fantastic feelings I've ever had …

Eventually I came to my senses and struggled, soaked and battered, back up the beach into the dunes, where nestles one of the very best pubs in the universe. Stone flags and high Victorian pews. Big inglenook with a massive log blaze. Wonderful local ale and fresh caught fish. The Bell at Walberswick. It's swamped by tourists in the summer, but go there in winter when there's a big old storm … I keep going back, but there's not been a storm to touch that one …

So, young Robyn. If I could choose, then let me take that road again. The cold, wet and stupid one …

Thanks for all the cynical humanity and curmudgeonly humour, Dive.

Love and best wishes to you and your loved ones - now, and always.

It Is A Double Pleasure To Deceive The Deceiver*

Fig. 1. Friedrich Eduard Bilz - Das Neue Naturheilverfahren, vol. 3, c. 1910


'It is unnecessary for a prince to have all the good qualities I have enumerated, but it is very necessary to appear to have them. . . . Every one sees what you appear to be, few really know what you are, and those few dare not oppose themselves to the opinion of the many.'

Niccolò Machiavelli (The Prince)

* Niccolò Machiavelli

Addendum: My impressively erudite friend Julian has just brought Claudia Roth Pierpont's article about Machiavelli, recently published in The New Yorker, to my attention, adding; "The Prince itself is almost an act of deception - at odds with Machiavelli's general personal decency and quiet commitment to the Florentine republic." I thank him for his thoughtful contribution.

The Girl With The Jadeite Teeth

Fig. 1. Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette in a publicity still for Rêve d'Égypte, 1907 (Moulin Rouge)


‘One aspect of Colette’s life is how modern it sounds to today’s reader. She ate sushi at the turn of the century, had a facelift in the 1920s, hired an acupuncturist, kept her wild hair permed all her life, rejected religion, flouted most of society’s rules – and ate with such relish and so little guilt that she ended up weighing 180 pounds. (Once, recovering from food poisoning, Colette soothed her stomach by downing a stuffed cabbage and a currant tart.) She announced that slimness was dangerously “masculinizing” women. She loved perfumes and sprayed each room with a different scent, attuned to its décor. She was one of the first serious writers to turn to the silent movies and devise scenarios that were neither novelistic nor theatrical but purely cinematic. She was obviously open to anything and everything; once when she had some painful dental work she asked, “Why can’t one simply have one’s teeth pulled and replace them with green jade?”’

Edmund White (The Flâneur)

Addendum: Dogs Are Human, Cats Are Gods*

Fig. 2. Full-length studio portrait of Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, c. 1885

'On this narrow planet, we have only the choice between two unknown worlds. One of them tempts us - ah! what a dream, to live in that! - the other stifles us at the first breath.' (S-GC)

Fig. 3. Réunion de famille au chalet des Sapins (Colette au premier plan à gauche)

'I love my past. I love my present. I'm not ashamed of what I've had, and I'm not sad because I have it no longer.' (S-GC)

Fig. 4. Walter Limot - The Hand of Colette, 1934

'The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen.' (S-GC)

Fig. 5. Ammi Phillips - Girl in Red Dress with Cat and Dog, 1830-1835

'Our perfect companions never have fewer than four feet.' (S-GC)

Fig. 6. Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

'You must not pity me because my sixtieth year finds me still astonished. To be astonished is one of the surest ways of not growing old too quickly.' (S-GC)

Fig. 7. Colette receives the Gold Medal of Paris from René Moatti, 1953

'What a wonderful life I've had! I only wish I'd realized it sooner.' (S-GC)

* 'Dogs believe they are human. Cats believe they are God.' (S-GC)

A Passion For Everything - And Nothing

Fig. 1. Jean-Antoine Watteau - The French Comedians, 1720-21

'The variety of Paris is matched by the energy, the voraciousness and the passion of its population. Balzac observed that the appetites for gold and pleasure were so strong in Paris that its citizens quickly burned themselves out. 'In Paris there are only two ages,' he wrote, 'youth and decay; a bloodless, pallid youth and a decay painted to seem youthful.' He also took note of the Parisians' love of novelty - and their devotion to nothing. Or, as he put it:

The Parisian is interested in everything and, in the end, interested in nothing . . . Intoxicated as he is with something new from one day to the next, the Parisian, regardless of age, lives like a child. He complains of everything, tolerates everything, mocks everything, forgets everything, desires everything, feels everything passionately, drops everything casually - his kings, his conquests, his glory, his idol, whether made of bronze or glass . . .

Since Balzac's day, of course, Paris has changed. No one is too ambitious, since its populace is now cosseted in the meagre but constant comforts of the socialist state, and the city's glory days are long in the past. But the passion for novelty still reigns. Perhaps Paris is the one city left where the tyranny of Paris fashions still holds women in its thrall. A great theatre director, a perfume, a new fad - all will be embraced one season and forgotten the next. There is nothing more final or frightening than the way a Parisian hisses out the words ‘C’est fini! ça? c’est dépassé, d’est démodé.’ Even children say it with ruthless confidence.'

Edmund White (The Flâneur)

Nowhere To Go But Everywhere

Fig. 1. Jack Kerouac

'[Then] they danced down the street like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!"'

Jack Kerouac (On The Road)