Sometimes, Kisses Are A Better Fate Than Wisdom*

Fig. 1. Marlene Dumas - The Kiss, 2003


'A kiss, when all is said, what is it? / ... 'Tis a secret told to the mouth instead of to the ear.'

Edmond Rostand

* since feeling is first (e.e. cummings)

since feeling is first

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a far better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
- the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

Addendum: Larissa (thank you!) writes:

I adore e. e. cummings. Here's another great poem by him:

[somewhere i have never travelled]

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

Eldritch Traces, Left By Future Dust In Ancient Dust

Fig. 1. Footprint left during NASA's Apollo 11 mission (July 1969), when astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked the lunar surface.


'If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.'

Emile M. Cioran

Addendum: Old Friends, New Words

Katie and Edna St. Vincent Millay are back, this time with a poem they refuse to dust off - and with good reason:

I vaguely remember the Apollo 11 mission. I was way too young to understand what was really happening though, so I missed my opportunity to want to be an astronaut.

ESVM wrote a little something about dust:

Autumn Chant

Now the autumn shudders
In the rose's root.
Fat and wide the ladders
Lean among the fruit.

Now the autumn clambers
Up the trellised frame,
And the rose remembers
The dust from which it came.

Brighter than the blossom
On the rose's bough
Sits the wizened, orange,
Bitter berry now;

Beauty never slumbers;
All is in her name;
But the rose remembers
The dust from which it came.

I Have Come To Debase The Coinage!, He Trumpeted*

Fig. 1. Vivek Vilasini - Between One Shore and Several Others (After Richard Hamilton's 'Just What Is It that Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing?', 1956), 2008

'The truth, whatever it is, be damned. What we need is laughter.'

Paul Karl Feyerabend

* 'I have come to debase the coinage.' (Diogenes)

Everything Can Not Be Seen From One Point Of View

Fig. 1. William Eggleston - Memphis, c. 1969-70


'If subjectivity constitutes "homes" as places of attachment, temporary addresses for people, agency constitutes strategic installments; these are the specific places and spaces that define specific forms of agency and empower specific populations. In this sense, we can inquire into the conditions of possibility of agency, for agency - the ability to make history, as it were - is not intrinsic to either subjects or to selves. Agency is the product of diagrams of mobility which define or map the possibilities of where or how specific vectors of influence can stop and be placed.'

Lawrence Grossberg

Being's Fragility Is Second To That Of "Nothingness"

Fig. 1. Book of the Dead of Amen-em-hat, 320 BC (Ptolemaic Period): Amen-em-het, on the left, greets the deities Horus, Isis, Nepthys and Anubis


'God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through.'

Paul Valéry

The Silk, The Scribe, The Scientist And Their Doubles

Fig. 1. Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein - Goethe in the Campagna, 1787


'Talent develops in quiet places, character in the full current of human life.'

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Addendum: The Future Of Our Lives Is Short, While That Of Our Deaths Is Eternal

Fig. 2. Monument to Goethe in the Pincio Gardens, Rome


'On Friday, March 16th, 1832, Goethe awoke with a chill, from which he gradually recovered, and was so much better by Monday that he designed to begin his regular work on the following day. But in the middle of the night he woke up with a deathly coldness, which extended from his hands over his body, and which it took many hours to overcome. It then appeared that the lungs were attacked and that there was no possible hope of recovery. Goethe did not anticipate death. He sat fully clothed in his arm-chair, made attempts to reach his study, spoke confidently of his recovery, and of the walks he would take in the fine April days. His daughter-in-law, Ottilie, tended him faithfully. On the morning of the 22nd his strength gradually left him, and he sat slumbering in his arm-chair, holding Ottilie's hand. Her name was constantly on his lips, though his mind occasionally wandered, at one time to his beloved Schiller, at another to a fair female head, with black curls, some passion of his youth. His last words were an order to a servant to open another shutter to let in more light. After this he traced with his forefinger letters in the air. At half-past eleven in the forenoon he drew himself, without any sign of pain, into the left corner of his arm-chair, and went so peacefully to sleep that it was long before the watchers knew that his spirit was fled. He was buried in the grand-ducal vault, where the bones of Schiller were laid, and where Duke Karl August had directed his body be placed, though the request was disregarded as contrary to the etiquette of German courts.'


This document was originally published in The Drama: Its History, Literature and Influence on Civilization, vol. 11. ed. Alfred Bates. London: Historical Publishing Company, 1906. pp. 89-90.

Under The Right Hands, Black And White Are Colours

Fig. 1. Josef Danhauser - Liszt at the Piano, 1840

'I sat near [Liszt] so that I could see both his hands and face. For the first time in my life I beheld real inspiration - for the first time I heard the true tones of the piano. He played one of his own compositions - one of a series of religious fantasies. There was nothing strange or excessive about his manner. His manipulation of the instrument was quiet and easy, and his face was simply grand - the lips compressed and the head thrown a little backward. When the music expressed quiet rapture or devotion a sweet smile flitted over his features; when it was triumphant the nostrils dilated. There was nothing petty or egoistic to mar the picture.'

George Eliot

Your Ears Will Orgasm #48a: Franz Liszt - Hungarian Rhapsodies 1-6, played by Michele Campanella (MixPod Player)

1. No. 1 in C sharp minor
2. No. 2 in C sharp minor
3. No. 3 in B flat
4. No. 4 in E flat
5. No. 5 in E minor (Héroide Elégiaque)
6. No. 6 in D flat

Addendum #1: My friend Jana - bless her heart - has corrected my embarrassing slackness-cum-ignorance with respect to the personages depicted in Josef Danhauser's painting of Liszt at the piano: and, since the information is so relevant to the quote from George Eliot, here it is, with a basketful of thanks:

Funny you should not know. This painting is featured more prominently in the history of music than the history of art, since it's a curious document: more an aesthetic manifesto than visual art.

The painting features Romanticism itself: a trio of musicians represented by Liszt on the piano, and Paganini and Rossini in the back. Then a trio of writers, from George Sand (drawing a line of attention from Liszt to the left, prominently stretching in the armchair), to Alexandre Dumas Sr on her left, and Victor Hugo leaning over the chair. But note the importance given to two major romantic artists: the bust of Beethoven on the piano, and the painting of Byron at the back wall.

The feminine-lookin' lady on the floor is the mother of Liszt's daughter, who married Richard Wagner. Wife? I wouldn't know. She is obviously not one of the compadres here.

PS: Folks, if you want to see a truly great mind at work, check out Jana's blog, guerrilla semiotics. (This is not a paid advertisement).

Addendum #2: Some More (And This May Bore) On Metaphor*

Fig. 2. Giuseppe Arcimboldo - Portrait with Vegetables (The Greengrocer), c. 1590

* Extract from Siri Hustvedt's Charles Dickens and the Morbid Fragment as a downloadable PDF.