我的美麗與哀愁：some fragments on poetry and soul

“Often the object of a desire, when desire is transformed into hope, becomes more real than reality itself.” 

—Umberto Eco, The Book of Legendary Lands

A poet's soul is written down in words and expressed through the soul of his poetry. A sigh becomes the poetic essence of his soul, a recognition of this delicate and evanescent beauty that is universal, paradoxically transient and eternal at the same time. A breath, the pearlescent powder on a butterfly's wing, an evening breeze, colours of the world at dusk, a mirage on sand, a thought, a melody, a poem lasting for as long as it is sung silently, soundlessly. The efflorescence of fallen petals on a floating piano in slumber of emptiness, nonchalantly awaiting reveille from repose.

*
A poet's soul can always foresee the aching sadness that comes with/after beauty－something that "is," and not "caused"－the featherlight imprint of a butterfly's kiss upon one's heart that weighs heavier than the blood of a velvety scarlet rose...

*
This is the moon's phosphorescence... As exquisite and mysterious as the poetry of the moon, of the stirring illusion of crazing inside jade.


I shall quote from one of the poems dearest to my heart－“Invitation to the Harp” by Rafael Alberti (translated by Mark Strand):

Go even farther away than that.
Where the moon is torn between a poplar leaf and a passionate book,
where there are midnight frosts that candelabra conceal
and where death shivers in the unsteady sleep of the candles,
where a puppet in mourning dies over a tuberose,
where a voice from oblivion stirs the sleeping water of pianos.

Go always farther away, farther away.
Go where floors retain the echoes and shadows of footsteps,
where moths watch over the silence of neckties,
where a hundred years is a harp that has been forgotten.

film x-ray radiograph of roses, by bionerd (via flickr)

“Today in my heart
a vague trembling of stars
and all roses are
as white as my pain.”

―Federico García Lorca, from “Canción Otoñal” (Autumn Song)

Mughal gem set gold mounted jade mirror, Northern India, 18th century.

We hardly ever see the moon any more
                                                          so no wonder
   it’s so beautiful when we look up suddenly
and there it is gliding broken-faced over the bridges
brilliantly coursing, soft, and a cool wind fans
       your hair over your forehead and your memories
              of Red Grooms’ locomotive landscape
I want some bourbon/you want some oranges/I love the leather
                jacket Norman gave me
                                                and the corduroy coat David
     gave you, it is more mysterious than spring, the El Greco
heavens breaking open and then reassembling like lions
                                                 in a vast tragic veldt
     that is far from our small selves and our temporally united
passions in the cathedral of Januaries


     everything is too comprehensible
these are my delicate and caressing poems
I suppose there will be more of those others to come, as in the past
                                                  so many!
but for now the moon is revealing itself like a pearl
                                                  to my equally naked heart

～Avenu A, by Frank O’Hara

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One's heart can be a riddle to oneself. Is it possible, could it be an intimation of not loving one's own soul would there be a soulmate out there with whom one was not in love?

*

“La noche habla suspiros de hojas.

En el silencio,

una sombra camina la huella de mi susurro.”

"Walk my sigh.

I knew there was none reflected in each step."

“It was the night sea

deep breathing silence.

The message of the conch you told in your look from sirens

where dream gorges of fire.

Ancestral Elixir

walking the stone beating.”

～Three poems: Untitled i & ii, and Deep Blue by Nube Alix

from the series Dialog, 1973, by Rudolf Bonvie (via)

Musicality in Poetic Narratives

“It was counterpoint in a narrative form.

I’m just using polyphony as an analogy here. Let’s say there are two musical lines, a treble and a bass line, that you’re hearing simultaneously. You’re experiencing each one, but you’re also experiencing what’s happening between them. Each line has complete integrity, but the space between them, the harmonic relationship, is just as critical an element, and it’s that tension, the way it all works together—that is what is uncannily exciting. How I would love to be able to do something like that! I would love to make some experience for the reader that entails the words and could not be made with other words, but that is much more, and other, than what the words are. And I would love to make some experience that creates all kinds of reverberations between different elements. /.../

But the message that is found cannot be exactly the message you’ve sent. Whatever bunch of words the writer transmits requires a person, a consciousness on the other end, to reassemble it. You know how it feels when you read something that opens up a little sealed envelope in your brain. It’s a letter from yourself, but it’s been delivered by somebody else, a writer.

Nothing is more fortifying than learning that you have a real reader, a reader who truly responds both accurately and actively. It gives you courage, and you feel, I can crawl out on the branch a little further. It’s going to hold.”

～Deborah Eisenberg, The Art of Fiction No. 218, interviewed by Catherine Steindler; from Paris Review Spring 2013 issue, No. 204

The Intelligence of Flowers, 1907, by Alvin Langdon Coburn

I would like to give you the silver
branch, the small white flower, the one
word that will protect you
from the grief at the center
of your dream, from the grief
at the center I would like to follow
you up the long stairway
again & become
the boat that would row you back
carefully, a flame
in two cupped hands
to where your body lies
beside me, and as you enter
it as easily as breathing in

I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for a moment
only. I would like to be that unnoticed

& that necessary.

～from “Variation on the Word Sleep,” by Margaret Atwood

Pierre-Ambroise Richebourg, Paysage russe (Russian Landscape), c.1859

Antoine’s Women; Rosalba’s Muse

“Watteau’s women do not care to represent Womanhood or Love or Beauty, certainly not with a capital W or L or B. They are not the sort of women who want to be regarded as forces of nature. They are not interested in being idealized or idolized. They are too much at ease to be caught up in such fantasies.

They stand apart from their own beauty and their amorous adventures, as if they felt free to consider the value of love or beauty, but only the value it might have for them, for now—a private matter. They are in some sense natural aristocrats, with a freedom from social constraints that gives them the aura of supernatural beings, even of goddesses.

But Watteau’s women are not goddesses in any classical sense. They have none of the traditional responsibilities of goddesses. They do not personify some value or virtue. They do not have supernatural powers. And that is precisely their charm, the key to their comic exuberance. They are goddesses who are freed from all responsibility. They are goddesses who have resigned from their roles.

They are goddesses on the lam.”

～Jed Perl, Antoine’s Alphabet: Watteau and His World

A Muse, by Rosalba Carriera, Italian, about 1725,
pastel on laid blue paper, 12 3/16 x 10 1/4 in., via The Getty Museum.

Portrait of Archduchess Maria Isabella, from The History of Florence: From 59 B.C. to 1966: the two-thousand-year story of a unique city, whose way of life has influenced the world, by Marcello Vannucci.

Lady Beatrice, by George Clausen

Combing Hair, by Torii Kotondo (Japanese, 1900-1976). Japan, Oct 1929.
Prints; woodcuts. Color woodblock print; embossed.
Image: 16 1/8 x 10 5/16 in. (41 x 26.2cm);
Sheet: 18 9/16 x 11 3/4in. (47.2 x 29.8cm)

Mirror (Kagemi), by 恩地孝四郎 Onchi Koshiro (Japanese, 1891-1955), ca. 1930, 
woodblock print with gofun and mica, 33 x 23.1cm

“Forget this world and all its troubles and if possible
its multitudinous Charlatans—everything in short but
the Enchantress of Numbers.” 
～Charles Babbage to Ada Lovelace  

*Portrait (detail) of Ada by British painter Margaret Sarah Carpenter (1836).

Con la rosa tra le labbra, 1895, by Ettore Tito (Italian 1859-1941).

Portrait of Countess Elisa Dadiani, by Savelij Abramovich Sorin, 1919 (via)

Nayika Shringara: the romantic herione adorns herself, preparing her hair. 

Jodhpur, circa 1830 (artist unknown). Gouache & gold on paper. 15 x 10.3cm. 

*via Indian Miniature Paintings

Ideal Female Heads, French, 1769-1770,

by Jacques Augustin Pajou (1730-1809),

Terracotta on white marble socle, via The Getty Museum.

Detail of Bacchante tenant un tambour de basque, avec deux enfants 
(Bacchante holding a tambourine, with two children),
by Jacques Augustin Pajou (1730-1809); Marble, Musée du Louvre.

Three Studies of a Woman and a Study of Her Hand Holding a Fan, 
by Antoine Watteau c.1717

Detail of a Female Nude Study, by George Lawrence Bulleid (British 1858-1933).

Vioets, Sweet Violets (detail), 1906, by John William Godward

When the Heart is Young (detail), 1902, by John William Godward. 

Oil on canvas, private collection

Jacques-Louis David, Psyché Abandonnée (detail), 1795, Musée du Louvre

Empress Elisabeth of Austria, 1864, by Franz Xaver Winterhalter

Helene Caroline Therese, Duchess in Bavaria (4 April 1834 – 16 May 1890) 
of the House of Wittelsbach, nicknamed Néné, was a Bavarian princess and, 
through marriage, temporarily the head of the Thurn and Taxis family.