Hamlet’s Bombay Dream

“... to die, to sleep
No more; and by a sleep, to say we end
The Heart-ache, and the thousand Natural shocks
That Flesh is heir to? ‘Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep,
To sleep, perchance to Dream; aye, there’s the rub,
For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There's the respect
That makes Calamity of so long life.”

A Louis XV parcel-gilt and cream painted lit à la polonaise, mid 18th century (from La vie de château, collection Jean-Louis Remilleux), part of Christie’s Objects of Desire.

Featuring elaborately carved wood with gilded details, this 18th century French four-poster bed offers its inhabitant the possibility of total seclusion at the flick of a pink silk curtain. At just over three metres in height, the bed comes complete with a floral headboard, the entire structure topped with a gold ‘blossom-form’ roof. Pink sashes and tassles add to the sense of occasion.

Photography by Tim Walker for Casa Vogue October 2010, Clementine Keith-Roach and Her Oyster Shell Bed, Northamptonshire, UK.

via bombayelectric on instagram

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a comedy for all the laughables, the laughably craven

A wee writing exercise inspired by darling John, whom I hold in the highest esteem, as ever, as always. ❤

The original (from Keats’ letter to Benjamin Bailey, dated November 22nd, 1817):

...O I wish I was as certain of the end of all your troubles as that of your momentary start about the authenticity of the Imagination. I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination — What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth — whether it existed before or not — for I have the same idea of all our passions as of love: they are all, in their sublime, creative of essential beauty. In a word, you may know my favorite speculation by my first book, and the little song I send in my last, which is a representation from the fancy of the probable mode of operating in these matters. The imagination may be compared to Adam’s dream, — he awoke and found it truth. I am more zealous in this affair because I have never yet been able to perceive how anything can be known for truth by consecutive reasoning — and yet it must be. Can it be that even the greatest philosopher ever arrived at his goal without putting aside numerous objections? However it may be, O for a life of sensation rather than of thoughts! It is a ‘Vision in the form of Youth,’ a shadow of reality to come. And this consideration has further convinced me, — for it has come as auxiliary to another favorite speculation of mine, — that we shall enjoy ourselves hereafter by having what we called happiness on earth repeated in a finer tone and so repeated. And yet such a fate can only befall those who delight in sensation, rather than hunger as you do after truth. Adam’s dream will do here, and seems to be a conviction that imagination and its empyreal reflection is the same as human life and its spiritual repetition. But, as I was saying, the simple imaginative mind may have its rewards in the repetition of its own silent working coming continually on the spirit with a fine suddenness — to compare great things with small — have you never by being Surprised with an old Melody — in a delicious place — by a delicious voice, felt over again your very Speculations and Surmises at the time it first operated on your Soul — do you not remember forming to yourself the singer’s face more beautiful than it was possible and yet with the elevation of the Moment you did not think so — even then you were mounted on the Wings of Imagination so high — that the Prototype must be here after — that delicious face you will see. What a time! 

I am continually running away from the subject — sure this cannot be exactly the case with a complex Mind — one that is imaginative and at the same time careful of its fruits — who would exist partly on Sensation partly on thought — to whom it is necessary that years should bring the philosophic Mind — such an one I consider yours and therefore it is necessary to your eternal Happiness that you not only drink this old Wine of Heaven, which I shall call the redigestion of our most ethereal Musings on Earth; but also increase in knowledge and know all things. I am glad to hear you are in a fair way for Easter — you will soon get through your unpleasent reading and then! — but the world is full of troubles and I have not much reason to think myself pesterd with many — I think Jane or Marianne has a better opinion of me than I deserve — for really and truly I do not think my Brothers illness connected with mine — you know more of the real Cause than they do nor have I any chance of being rack’d as you have been — You perhaps at one time thought there was such a thing as worldly happiness to be arrived at, at certain periods of time marked out, — you have of necessity from your disposition been thus led away — I scarcely remember counting upon any happiness — I look for it if it be not in the present hour, — nothing startles me beyond the moment. The setting sun will always set me to rights, or if a sparrow come before my window, I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel. The first thing that strikes me on hearing a misfortune having befallen another is this — ‘Well, it cannot be helped: he will have the pleasure of trying the resources of his spirit’ — and I beg now, my dear Bailey, that hereafter should you observe anything cold in me not to put it to the account of heartlessness, but abstraction — for I assure you I sometimes feel not the influence of a passion or affection during a whole week — and so long this sometimes continues, I begin to suspect myself, and the genuineness of my feelings at other times — thinking them a few barren tragedy tears.

Your affectionate friend, 
John Keats

偽，muteness of a Chinese jar。

哥窯自縊後結晶了胭脂蜜：

Being broken by an inferior essence, a failed poem of pretense is made even more poetic than the knees of an antiquarian butterfly.

—“a violent slap of the exquisite” (a melody from the New Aristocrats manifesto)

Very drawn to artist Lukas Wegwerth's series of ceramic works “Crystallisation” displayed at Maison & Objet, Paris—
“The sure, sweet cement, lime and glue of love”* oozing out of celadon crazing of yore... (*Robert Herrick, The Kiss)

All I may, if small,
Do it not display
Larger for the Totalness —
’Tis Economy

To bestow a World
And withhold a Star —
Utmost, is Munificence —
Less, tho’ larger, poor.

～Emily Dickinson, from The Single Hound: Poems of a Lifetime (CXIII.)

“Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts. I was better after I had cried, than before—more sorry, more aware of my own ingratitude, more gentle.”

—Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

“From my rotting body,
flowers shall grow
and I am in them
and that is eternity.”

—Edvard Munch

The Moments of Dominion

That happen on the Soul

And leave it with a Discontent

Too exquisite—to tell—

～Emily Dickinson

Troisième Symphonie de Gustav Mahler
Ballet de l'Opéra de Paris (Nolwenn Daniel & Christophe Duquenne, Mélanie Hurel & Alessio Carbone)
Deuxième Mouvement: Printemps
Choréographie de John Neumeier

Revelation

III: Emily

                              your long legs

                              built

                              to carry high

                              the small head

                              your

                              grandfather

                              knows

                              if he knows

                              anything

                              gives

                              the dance as

                              your genius

                              the cleft in

                              your

                              chin’s curl

                              permitting 

                              may it

                              carry you far

～final part of the poem “3 Stances” by William Carlos Williams, from his book Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems

my Muse, my legend of love: Svetlana Zakharova (linked to Macbeth performance with Andrei Uvarov), Prima Ballerina of the Bolshoi Ballet
Светлана Захарова

Poetic Essence: Keatsian fine excess and remembrance

“These violent delights have violent ends
And in their triumph die, like fire and powder,
Which, as they kiss, consume.”

～Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet: Act II, Scene 6

Emma Bennett, Death & Co, 2008; Oil and French enamel on Canvas, 170 x 130 cm.

The music and beauty of memento mori: 
I am entirely in love with artist Emma Bennett’s mystical and poetic paintings, quietly glistening in the darkened melodies of vanitas and mono no aware—a silently powerful Floating World that is swooningly gorgeous. Her work takes my breath away.

Anne Vallayer-Coster, “Panaches de mer, lithophytes et coquilles (Still-Life with Tuft of Marine Plants, Shells and Corals),” Oil on Canvas, 1769, Musée du Louvre, Paris.

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“In poetry I have a few axioms, and you will see how far I am from their center.

1st. I think poetry should surprise by a fine excess, and not by singularity; it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.

2nd. Its touches of beauty should never be half-way, thereby making the reader breathless, instead of content. The rise, the progress, the setting of imagery should, like the sun, come natural to him, shine over him, and set soberly, although in magnificence, leaving him in the luxury of twilight.

But it is easier to think what poetry should be, than to write it. And this leads me to another axiom—That if poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all.”

～John Keats, from a letter to John Taylor, February 27, 1818

Willem van Aelst, Vase of Flowers with Pocket Watch

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“The more I see her, the more I am convinced she is a very isolated figure. A man should never be that, not even a young one, for since reflection is essential to his development he must have come into contact with others. But for that reason a girl should rather not be interesting, for the interesting always contains a reflection upon itself, just as the interesting in art always gives you the artist too. A young girl who wants to please by being interesting really only succeeds in pleasing herself.”

～The Seducer's Diary (part of his larger book Either/Or), by Søren Kierkegaard

Francesca Woodman

Oneiric Sketches of a Broken Poem

Miss Horatia Feilding, half-sister of William Henry Fox Talbot, playing the harp, c. 1842

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Scents, with their eyelids heavy, 
from the oneiric sketches of our broken poems:

a muser and a paresseuse 
dreaming 
of ephemeral truths, dreaming
in the absence of dreams. 

an evanescent truth 
less sorrowful; that truthful ephemerality
even less perceivable...

the memory of a door lies in its unrecoverable closedness 
to a space imagined,
—traversed and touched only by a fingertip—
to what is left open

and songs sung 
to eyes half asleep

～my sketch composed on 19th September ’15

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“Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.”

― T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets: Burnt Norton, 1936

William Henry Fox Talbot, photogenic drawing negative using botanical specimens from his garden, taken in 1839, the year he announced his discoveries in photography.

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天空持續燃放著

無聲的煙火

我們停步

牽著手

於彼大澤

和一隻鹿對望

良久

有鹿

有鹿哀愁

食野之百合 

The silent fireworks continued 

to burn across the sky

We stopped

and held our hands

We laid our gaze upon the deer

opposite the enormous swamp

gazing back at us

for a long time

There was a deer

There was a deer of sorrow

that grazed upon wild lilies 

～《有鹿》許悔之, a poem by Taiwanese poet Hsu Huei-Ji; translated from the Chinese into English by me.

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“Everything is blooming most recklessly; 

if it were voices instead of colors, 

there would be an unbelievable shrieking 

into the heart of the night.”

～Rainer Maria Rilke

Peak of Dawn, photograph by Katsuyoshi Nakahara, for National Geographic Your Shot.
Shirley poppies bloom in a field near Japan’s Mount Tsukuba, here silhouetted against an early morning sky. The mountain—which can be ascended via a hiking trail or cable car—has two peaks, each rising more than 2,800 feet.

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to sleep 

bed’d among flowers  

for scent

to wake lovers

children become

mothers and fathers

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“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

detail from an Edgar Degas painting

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“At first he told them that everything was just the same, that the pink snails were still in the house where he had been born, that the dry herring still had the same taste on a piece of toast, that the waterfalls in the village still took on a perfumed smell at dusk. They were the notebook pages again, woven with the purple scribbling, in which he dedicated a special paragraph to each one. Nevertheless, and although he himself did not seem to notice it, those letters of recuperation and stimulation were slowly changing into pastoral letters of disenchantment. One winter night while the soup was boiling in the fireplace, he missed the heat of the back of his store, the buzzing of the sun on the dusty almond trees, the whistle of the train during the lethargy of siesta time, just as in Macondo he had missed the winter soup in the fireplace, the cries of the coffee vendor, and the fleeting larks of springtime. 

Upset by two nostalgias facing each other like two mirrors, he lost his marvelous sense of unreality and he ended up recommending to all of them that they leave Macondo, that they forget everything he had taught them about the world and the human heart, that they shit on Horace, and that wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end. ”

― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877), Lace, photogenic drawing negative,
before December 1845, 17.1 x 22.1cm, The J . Paul Getty Museum

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Aimai-je un rêve?
Mon doute, amas de nuit ancienne, s’achève
En maint rameau subtil, qui, demeuré les vrais
Bois même, prouve, hélas! que bien seul je m’offrais
Pour triomphe la faute idéale de roses.

“Did I love a dream?
My doubt, night’s ancient hoard, pursues its theme
In branching labyrinths, which being still
The veritable woods themselves, alas, reveal
My triumph as the ideal fault of roses.”


～from Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem L’après-midi d’un faune, translated by Henry Weinfeld (read also A.S. Kline's translations of Mallarmé’s poetry)

William Henry Fox Talbot, Adiantum Capillus-Veneris (Maidenhair Fern),
photogenic drawing negative, probably early 1839, 22.5 x 18.3cm.

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“It is the job of poetry to clean up our word-clogged reality by creating silences around things.”
“Everything that is sacred and that wishes to remain so must envelop itself in mystery.”
“For me, Poetry takes the place of love, because it is enamored of itself, and because its sensual delight falls back deliciously in my soul.”

～Stéphane Mallarmé