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

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

I cannot paint what then I was. The sounding cataract haunted me like a passion.

Five years have past; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a soft inland murmur.—Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
That on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky.
The day is come when I again repose
Here, under this dark sycamore, and view
These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts,
Which at this season, with their unripe fruits,
Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves
‘Mid groves and copses. Once again I see
These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines
Of sportive wood run wild: these pastoral farms,
Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke
Sent up, in silence, from among the trees!
With some uncertain notice, as might seem
Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods,
Or of some Hermit’s cave, where by his fire
The Hermit sits alone.

                                These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind,
With tranquil restoration:—feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man’s life,
His little, nameless, unremembered, acts
Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust,
To them I may have owed another gift,
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,—
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.


                                If this
Be but a vain belief, yet, oh! how oft—
In darkness and amid the many shapes
Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir
Unprofitable, and the fever of the world,
Have hung upon the beatings of my heart—
How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee,
O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer thro’ the woods,
How often has my spirit turned to thee!
And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought,
With many recognitions dim and faint,
And somewhat of a sad perplexity,
The picture of the mind revives again:
While here I stand, not only with the sense
Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts
That in this moment there is life and food
For future years. And so I dare to hope,
Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first
I came among these hills; when like a roe
I bounded o’er the mountains, by the sides
Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams,
Wherever nature led: more like a man
Flying from something that he dreads, than one
Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then
(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days,
And their glad animal movements all gone by)
To me was all in all.—I cannot paint
What then I was. The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colours and their forms, were then to me
An appetite; a feeling and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm,
By thought supplied, nor any interest
Unborrowed from the eye.—That time is past,
And all its aching joys are now no more,
And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this
Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur, other gifts
Have followed; for such loss, I would believe,
Abundant recompence. For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye, and ear,—both what they half create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognise
In nature and the language of the sense,
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.


                                Nor perchance,
If I were not thus taught, should I the more
Suffer my genial spirits to decay:
For thou art with me here upon the banks
Of this fair river; thou my dearest Friend,
My dear, dear Friend; and in thy voice I catch
The language of my former heart, and read
My former pleasures in the shooting lights
Of thy wild eyes. Oh! yet a little while
May I behold in thee what I was once,
My dear, dear Sister! and this prayer I make,
Knowing that Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her; ‘tis her privilege,
Through all the years of this our life, to lead
From joy to joy: for she can so inform
The mind that is within us, so impress
With quietness and beauty, and so feed
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all
The dreary intercourse of daily life,
Shall e’er prevail against us, or disturb
Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold
Is full of blessings. Therefore let the moon
Shine on thee in thy solitary walk;
And let the misty mountain-winds be free
To blow against thee: and, in after years,
When these wild ecstasies shall be matured
Into a sober pleasure; when thy mind
Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms,
Thy memory be as a dwelling-place
For all sweet sounds and harmonies; oh! then,
If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief,
Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts
Of tender joy wilt thou remember me,
And these my exhortations! Nor, perchance—
If I should be where I no more can hear
Thy voice, nor catch from thy wild eyes these gleams
Of past existence—wilt thou then forget
That on the banks of this delightful stream
We stood together; and that I, so long
A worshipper of Nature, hither came
Unwearied in that service: rather say
With warmer love—oh! with far deeper zeal
Of holier love. Nor wilt thou then forget,
That after many wanderings, many years
Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs,
And this green pastoral landscape, were to me
More dear, both for themselves and for thy sake!


～Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour, July 13, 1798, by William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

Diary fragments from Lady Emily’s lethargic life of yearning (i)

To live a life of truths saturated with ugliness and barren of beauty would be an unjustifiable lie.

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An anonymous billet-doux arrived this morning. Were I not so intimately familiar with the author’s command of composing erotica-in-disguise, I would have assumed this Prince had fallen in lust with his object of affection after hearing my Goncourt comment. But such is not the case, given I am infinitely acquainted with his style:

Yes, the edge of that precipice offers the most pleasing panorama—a valley teeming with verdure, watered by a stream where the hart quenches his thirst with impunity, happily lapping with a tongue glistening in the warm sun of the temptress. Such places are quoted to us by voices that cry in the night, citing the authority of dreams on its riparian seat, of pillowed ivory, the cheek may rest. 
Impunity, impunity only the bank punished with the hart’s burden as it takes its fill. A stream so beneficent one may lift it towards one’s lips rather than bend towards it. A stream whose source one may also devour. A stream whose waters teach lips eloquence. A stream that engenders others by virtue of the thirst it transfigures, whose moan is answerable to the plash of its puddles plied.

As I sat with the Prince many a blue moon ago, ruminating over the ridiculousness of life, I mused upon his poetic prowess in erotica, “You, dear sir, would make a handsome living writing these words.” To which he mischievously replied with a sparkle in his eye, “My tongue is best employed, when hearts rather than coins are cloyed.”

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Antoon van Welie (Dutch, 1866–1956), Douleur, pastel, 1895

Goncourt tugged on a string in the womb of my heart tonight, and I say, “I have always derived inexplicable pleasure from singing to a virtuous nobleman, leading him in my hand to the edge of sin and leaving him there to live between the temptation and the fear of that sin.”

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This afternoon, as languid and as annoyed as any other, Baron Gustave spoke to me about a petty—though entertaining—spectacle amongst the court eunuchs, whose comical adventures of trivialities delighted and somewhat intrigued me. On this person’s extraordinary literary competencies, Baron Gustave concluded, “He would have been an effective priest if he knew how to read anything but music.”

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Archduchess Maria Isabella

If death has a way of revealing the essence of things, as the poet Stéphane Mallarmé wrote of Edgar Allan Poe, then some of the essence that has been revealed these days is self-righteousness, bigotry, and above all, hypocrisy. The easy way out, the easy way out—always the easy way out. There is no intrinsic value to anything in this world—nor any intrinsic reality. The double-standard (of humanity) and pretentiousness are overwhelming. And then follows the avalanche of apathy.
Why are we such sheep that only blindly follow?

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Have no fear of happiness—it exists as an illusion only. (This is not to say that happiness does not exist—it exists, like everything else in this apparent world, but as an illusion only.)

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Thence began the odyssey of a little fool as he decided to write poems for the rest of his life in that faraway city named after a woman.

John William Waterhouse

as if hope and heart could meet, as if they might dance themselves out of the dark

The paper blushes, beads of sweat from that aftermath of love.

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La poésie a inventé le monde, le monde, elle l'a oublié.
(Poetry invented the world; the world it then forgot.)

～Yiannis Ritsos

leg image via Mikio Watanabe

The Meaning of Simplicity (translated by Rae Dalven), via Poetry Foundation

艾未未，白瓷花。(via @aiww Instagram)

Ai Weiwei, “Blossom” (via @for_site & @george_fikry Instagram)

image via @nicamille Instagram

Between the mirage hue of Tiepolo Pink linings hides the tempting phantom of Proust’s invisible Venice

Jean François de Troy (French 1679 – 1752), The Abduction of Europa (detail of Europa's hand and cape), 1716, oil on canvas. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

“It was the very evening on which Albertine had put on for the first time the indoor gown in gold and blue by Fortuny which, by reminding me of Venice, made me feel all the more strongly what I was sacrificing for her, who showed no corresponding gratitude towards me. If I had never seen Venice, I had dreamed of it incessantly since those Easter holidays which, when still a boy, I had been going to spend there, and earlier still, since the Titian prints and Giotto photographs which Swann had given me long ago at Combray. The Fortuny gown which Albertine was wearing that evening seemed to me the tempting phantom of that invisible Venice. It was overrun by Arab ornamentation, like Venice, like the Venetian palaces hidden like sultan’s wives behind a screen of perforated stone, like the bindings in the Ambrosian Library, like the columns from which the oriental birds that symbolised alternately life and death were repeated in the shimmering fabric, of an intense blue which, as my eyes drew nearer, turned into a malleable gold by those same mutations which, before an advancing gondola, change into gleaming metal the azure of the Grand Canal. And the sleeves were lined with a cherry pink which is so peculiarly Venetian that it is called Tiepolo pink.”

～Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu // In Search of Lost Time, Volume 5: The Captive, The Fugitive, translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff & Terence Kilmartin, revised by D. J. Enright, p. 531.

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (Italian, 1696 – 1770), details of An Allegory with Venus and Time, about 1754-8, oil on canvas. The National Gallery, London. 

*“Giovanni Battista Tiepolo: a thematic essay”on The Metropolitan Museum of Art's website

*“Proust & Fortuny”on A Hymn to Intellectual Beauty: Creative Minds and Fashion blog

Water Nymphs’ Preludes

III
You tossed a blanket from the bed,
You lay upon your back, and waited;
You dozed, and watched the night revealing
The thousand sordid images
Of which your soul was constituted;
They flickered against the ceiling.
And when all the world came back
And the light crept up between the shutters
And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,
You had such a vision of the street
As the street hardly understands;
Sitting along the bed’s edge, where
You curled the papers from your hair,
Or clasped the yellow soles of feet
In the palms of both soiled hands.

IV
His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o’clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.

I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.

Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.

～from “Preludes,” by T. S. Eliot

“When she got out of the water, what a change was seen in her!”
(I am in love with this water nymph-esque beauty.)
*From Folk-Tales of Bengal, by the Rev. Lal Behari Day, with 32 illustrations in colour by Warwick Goble, Macmillan & Co., Ltd, 1912, London.

“She rushed out of the palace... and came to the upper world.”
*From Folk-Tales of Bengal, by the Rev. Lal Behari Day, with 32 illustrations in colour by Warwick Goble, Macmillan & Co., Ltd, 1912, London.

“A woman drew her long black hair out tight
And fiddled whisper music on those strings
And bats with baby faces in the violet light
Whistled, and beat their wings.”

— T.S.Eliot, The Wasteland.

“Coming up to the surface they climbed into the boat.”
*From Folk-Tales of Bengal, by the Rev. Lal Behari Day, with 32 illustrations in colour by Warwick Goble, Macmillan & Co., Ltd, 1912, London.

To the Muses

Whether on Ida’s shady brow,
         Or in the chambers of the East,
The chambers of the sun, that now
         From ancient melody have ceas’d;

Whether in Heav’n ye wander fair,
         Or the green corners of the earth,
Or the blue regions of the air,
         Where the melodious winds have birth;

Whether on crystal rocks ye rove,
         Beneath the bosom of the sea
Wand’ring in many a coral grove,
         Fair Nine, forsaking Poetry!

How have you left the ancient love
         That bards of old enjoy’d in you!
The languid strings do scarcely move!
         The sound is forc’d, the notes are few!

～“To the Muses,” by William Blake

Women rest at the Parthenon whose damaged structure is under repair, December 1930. Photograph by Maynard Owen Williams, National Geographic.

藍曬情人：Cyanotype of a Lover

“I can’t really remember the days. The light of the sun blurred and annihilated all color. But the nights, I remember them. The blue was more distant than the sky, beyond all depths, covering the bounds of the world. The sky, for me, was the stretch of pure brilliance crossing the blue, that cold coalescence beyond all color. Sometimes, it was in Vinh Long, when my mother was sad she’d order the gig and we’d drive out into the country to see the night as it was in the dry season. I had that good fortune―those nights, that mother. The light fell from the sky in cataracts of pure transparency, in torrents of silence and immobility. The air was blue, you could hold it in your hand. Blue. The sky was the continual throbbing of the brilliance of the light. The night lit up everything, all the country on either bank of the river as far as the eye could reach. Every night was different, each one had a name as long as it lasted. Their sound was that of the dogs, the country dogs baying at mystery. They answered one another from village to village, until the time and space of the night were utterly consumed.”

― Marguerite Duras, L’Amant (translated by Barbara Bray)

Les Noces de Pierrette (The Marriage of Pierrette), by Pablo Picasso, 1905.

Painted in 1905, ‘Les Noces de Pierrette’ is considered as a Blue Period masterpiece―it is by no means Pablo Picasso’s most famous painting, although it does have a notorious history. The painting depicts a group of well-to-do families socialising at a wedding, however the figures are rendered with blank, emotionless faces and hollow eye-sockets. It was created during a critical period in Picasso’s life (his friend and fellow artist Carlos Casagemas had just committed suicide, and the famous painter was facing destitution). Deeply depressed, Picasso spent several months in isolation, developing the piece from sketches―using deep hues of blue to create an oppressively gloomy mood. When he finally emerged from his study, Picasso was said to be bitter and violent―aggressively refusing to let any family or friends see his work. After some weeks, his mistress Fernande Olivier was able to sneak into his study and finally observe the painting. What she saw was so traumatic that the couple separated shortly afterwards. Reportedly, a hysterical Olivier spent the remainder of her life in the care of her mother and sister.

Picasso then spent a further six months trying to salvage his canvas―painting over certain ‘offending’ elements, and removing one figure entirely. In a 1949 interview, the artist briefly mentioned the painting, commenting that “I don’t talk about it.  It’s not mine”.

The painting currently resides in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, where historians are using technology to view Les Noces’ lower layers.

(*text via Where Sleep is Irrelevant) 

“It has been my face. It’s got older still, of course, but less, comparatively, than it would otherwise have done. It’s scored with deep, dry wrinkles, the skin is cracked. But my face hasn’t collapsed, as some with fine features have done. It’s kept the same contours, but its substance has been laid waste. I have a face laid waste.”

“I’ve known you for years. Everyone says you were beautiful when you were young, but I want to tell you I think you’re more beautiful now than then. Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged.”

“Very early in my life it was too late.”

― Marguerite Duras, The Lover (translated by Barbara Bray)

Beauty, Pleasure, and Shelley's Poetry of Mimosa (a poem I adore)

It has been nine years since I finished my graduate studies in philosophy, and yet these areas still enthrall me as much as day one: (freely beautiful) objects versus (us the) subjects, aesthetic disinterestedness and perception —or consciousness— (how it is distinct from our ordinary consciousness), the metaphysical aspects of beauty etc.... And, here, how can I not love these words? “To a poet nothing can be useless. Whatever is beautiful and whatever is dreadful must be familiar to his imagination; he must be conversant with all that is awfully vast or elegantly little.”

Indeed, all that is awfully vast and elegantly little. I think I will write a poem on that.

*

Now, where the question is whether something is beautiful, we do not want to know, whether we, or anyone else, are, or even could be, concerned in the real existence of the thing, but rather what estimate we form of it on mere contemplation (intuition of reflection). … All one wants to know is whether the mere representation of the object is to my liking, no matter how indifferent I may be to the real existence of the object of this representation. It is quite plain that in order to say that the object is beautiful, and to show that I have taste, everything turns on the meaning which I can give to this representation, and not on any factor which makes me dependent on the real existence of the object.

～Immanuel Kant: Critique of Judgement, Book I, §2, 42-43.

… it is Kant’s identification of pleasure in the beautiful as pleasure in free beauty that leads him to claim that pleasure in the beautiful of itself does not generate an interest. For pleasure in free beauty is pleasure that is independent of any concepts under which the object is experienced, but an interest is pleasure in the instantiation of a concept, pleasure that the concept is instantiated in the object of one’s judgement.[...]

… the vital point concerning beauty is that the possession of the capacity to make pure judgements of taste and familiarity with its exercise does not imply as a matter of necessity the existence of an interest in experiencing freely beautiful objects … the capacity to experience pleasure of a certain kind does not necessarily go hand in hand with an interest in experiencing such pleasures… and pleasure in the beautiful is no exception to this general truth, being compatible with a negative interest in its object, i.e. displeasure at its existence. … a pure judgement of taste does not, of itself, generate an interest. 

～Malcolm Budd, ‘Delight in the Natural World: Kant on the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature. Part II: Natural Beauty and Morality’ in British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 38, No. 2, April 1998.

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... the early writers are in possession of nature, and their followers of art; that the first excel in strength and invention, and the latter in elegance and refinement. (...) To a poet nothing can be useless. Whatever is beautiful and whatever is dreadful must be familiar to his imagination; he must be conversant with all that is awfully vast or elegantly little. (...) His character requires that he estimate the happiness and misery of every condition, observe the power of all the passions in all their combinations, and trace the changes of the human mind, (...) and rise to general and transcendental truths, which will always be the same. (...) that his style may be worthy of his thoughts, must by incessant practice familiarise to himself every delicacy of speech and grace of harmony.

～Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas, Prince Of Abyssinia, Chapter X: “A Dissertation Upon Poetry”


A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream. /.../ 
I am a dreamer of words, of written words. I think I am reading; a word stops me. I leave the page. The syllables of the word begin to move around. Stressed accents begin to invert. The word abandons its meaning like an overload which is too heavy and prevents dreaming. Then words take on other meanings as if they had the right to be young. And the words wander away, looking in the nooks and crannies of vocabulary for new company, bad company.

～Gaston Bachelard, La poétique de la rêverie (The Poetics of Reverie), 1960.


A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language. /.../ Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.

～Ibid, “A Retrospective Glance at the Lifework of a Master of Books” in Fragments of a Poetics of Fire, 1988.

Shelley, fair copy of A Defence of Poetry, 1821.

“The Sensitive Plant,” by Percy Bysshe Shelley

PART 1.

A Sensitive Plant in a garden grew,
And the young winds fed it with silver dew,
And it opened its fan-like leaves to the light.
And closed them beneath the kisses of Night.

And the Spring arose on the garden fair,
Like the Spirit of Love felt everywhere;
And each flower and herb on Earth’s dark breast
Rose from the dreams of its wintry rest.

But none ever trembled and panted with bliss
In the garden, the field, or the wilderness,
Like a doe in the noontide with love’s sweet want,
As the companionless Sensitive Plant.

The snowdrop, and then the violet,
Arose from the ground with warm rain wet,
And their breath was mixed with fresh odour, sent
From the turf, like the voice and the instrument.

Then the pied wind-flowers and the tulip tall,
And narcissi, the fairest among them all,
Who gaze on their eyes in the stream’s recess,
Till they die of their own dear loveliness;

And the Naiad-like lily of the vale,
Whom youth makes so fair and passion so pale
That the light of its tremulous bells is seen
Through their pavilions of tender green;

And the hyacinth purple, and white, and blue,
Which flung from its bells a sweet peal anew
Of music so delicate, soft, and intense,
It was felt like an odour within the sense;

And the rose like a nymph to the bath addressed,
Which unveiled the depth of her glowing breast,
Till, fold after fold, to the fainting air
The soul of her beauty and love lay bare:

And the wand-like lily, which lifted up,
As a Maenad, its moonlight-coloured cup,
Till the fiery star, which is its eye,
Gazed through clear dew on the tender sky;

And the jessamine faint, and the sweet tuberose,
The sweetest flower for scent that blows;
And all rare blossoms from every clime
Grew in that garden in perfect prime.

And on the stream whose inconstant bosom
Was pranked, under boughs of embowering blossom,
With golden and green light, slanting through
Their heaven of many a tangled hue,

Broad water-lilies lay tremulously,
And starry river-buds glimmered by,
And around them the soft stream did glide and dance
With a motion of sweet sound and radiance.

And the sinuous paths of lawn and of moss,
Which led through the garden along and across,
Some open at once to the sun and the breeze,
Some lost among bowers of blossoming trees,

Were all paved with daisies and delicate bells
As fair as the fabulous asphodels,
And flow’rets which, drooping as day drooped too,
Fell into pavilions, white, purple, and blue,
To roof the glow-worm from the evening dew.

And from this undefiled Paradise
The flowers (as an infant’s awakening eyes
Smile on its mother, whose singing sweet
Can first lull, and at last must awaken it),

When Heaven’s blithe winds had unfolded them,
As mine-lamps enkindle a hidden gem,
Shone smiling to Heaven, and every one
Shared joy in the light of the gentle sun;

For each one was interpenetrated
With the light and the odour its neighbour shed,
Like young lovers whom youth and love make dear
Wrapped and filled by their mutual atmosphere.

But the Sensitive Plant which could give small fruit
Of the love which it felt from the leaf to the root,
Received more than all, it loved more than ever,
Where none wanted but it, could belong to the giver,—

For the Sensitive Plant has no bright flower;
Radiance and odour are not its dower;
It loves, even like Love, its deep heart is full,
It desires what it has not, the Beautiful!

The light winds which from unsustaining wings
Shed the music of many murmurings;
The beams which dart from many a star
Of the flowers whose hues they bear afar;

The plumed insects swift and free,
Like golden boats on a sunny sea,
Laden with light and odour, which pass
Over the gleam of the living grass;

The unseen clouds of the dew, which lie
Like fire in the flowers till the sun rides high,
Then wander like spirits among the spheres,
Each cloud faint with the fragrance it bears;

The quivering vapours of dim noontide,
Which like a sea o’er the warm earth glide,
In which every sound, and odour, and beam,
Move, as reeds in a single stream;

Each and all like ministering angels were
For the Sensitive Plant sweet joy to bear,
Whilst the lagging hours of the day went by
Like windless clouds o’er a tender sky.

And when evening descended from Heaven above,
And the Earth was all rest, and the air was all love,
And delight, though less bright, was far more deep,
And the day’s veil fell from the world of sleep,

And the beasts, and the birds, and the insects were drowned
In an ocean of dreams without a sound;
Whose waves never mark, though they ever impress
The light sand which paves it, consciousness;

(Only overhead the sweet nightingale
Ever sang more sweet as the day might fail,
And snatches of its Elysian chant
Were mixed with the dreams of the Sensitive Plant);--

The Sensitive Plant was the earliest
Upgathered into the bosom of rest;
A sweet child weary of its delight,
The feeblest and yet the favourite,
Cradled within the embrace of Night.

PART 2.

There was a Power in this sweet place,
An Eve in this Eden; a ruling Grace
Which to the flowers, did they waken or dream,
Was as God is to the starry scheme.

A Lady, the wonder of her kind,
Whose form was upborne by a lovely mind
Which, dilating, had moulded her mien and motion
Like a sea-flower unfolded beneath the ocean,

Tended the garden from morn to even:
And the meteors of that sublunar Heaven,
Like the lamps of the air when Night walks forth,
Laughed round her footsteps up from the Earth!

She had no companion of mortal race,
But her tremulous breath and her flushing face
Told, whilst the morn kissed the sleep from her eyes,
That her dreams were less slumber than Paradise:

As if some bright Spirit for her sweet sake
Had deserted Heaven while the stars were awake,
As if yet around her he lingering were,
Though the veil of daylight concealed him from her.

Her step seemed to pity the grass it pressed;
You might hear by the heaving of her breast,
That the coming and going of the wind
Brought pleasure there and left passion behind.

And wherever her aery footstep trod,
Her trailing hair from the grassy sod
Erased its light vestige, with shadowy sweep,
Like a sunny storm o’er the dark green deep.

I doubt not the flowers of that garden sweet
Rejoiced in the sound of her gentle feet;
I doubt not they felt the spirit that came
From her glowing fingers through all their frame.

She sprinkled bright water from the stream
On those that were faint with the sunny beam;
And out of the cups of the heavy flowers
She emptied the rain of the thunder-showers.

She lifted their heads with her tender hands,
And sustained them with rods and osier-bands;
If the flowers had been her own infants, she
Could never have nursed them more tenderly.

And all killing insects and gnawing worms,
And things of obscene and unlovely forms,
She bore, in a basket of Indian woof,
Into the rough woods far aloof,--

In a basket, of grasses and wild-flowers full,
The freshest her gentle hands could pull
For the poor banished insects, whose intent,
Although they did ill, was innocent.

But the bee and the beamlike ephemeris
Whose path is the lightning's, and soft moths that kiss
The sweet lips of the flowers, and harm not, did she
Make her attendant angels be.

And many an antenatal tomb,
Where butterflies dream of the life to come,
She left clinging round the smooth and dark
Edge of the odorous cedar bark.

This fairest creature from earliest Spring
Thus moved through the garden ministering
Mi the sweet season of Summertide,
And ere the first leaf looked brown—she died!

PART 3.

Three days the flowers of the garden fair,
Like stars when the moon is awakened, were,
Or the waves of Baiae, ere luminous
She floats up through the smoke of Vesuvius.

And on the fourth, the Sensitive Plant
Felt the sound of the funeral chant,
And the steps of the bearers, heavy and slow,
And the sobs of the mourners, deep and low;

The weary sound and the heavy breath,
And the silent motions of passing death,
And the smell, cold, oppressive, and dank,
Sent through the pores of the coffin-plank;

The dark grass, and the flowers among the grass,
Were bright with tears as the crowd did pass;
From their sighs the wind caught a mournful tone,
And sate in the pines, and gave groan for groan.

The garden, once fair, became cold and foul,
Like the corpse of her who had been its soul,
Which at first was lovely as if in sleep,
Then slowly changed, till it grew a heap
To make men tremble who never weep.

Swift Summer into the Autumn flowed,
And frost in the mist of the morning rode,
Though the noonday sun looked clear and bright,
Mocking the spoil of the secret night.

The rose-leaves, like flakes of crimson snow,
Paved the turf and the moss below.
The lilies were drooping, and white, and wan,
Like the head and the skin of a dying man.

And Indian plants, of scent and hue
The sweetest that ever were fed on dew,
Leaf by leaf, day after day,
Were massed into the common clay.

And the leaves, brown, yellow, and gray, and red,
And white with the whiteness of what is dead,
Like troops of ghosts on the dry wind passed;
Their whistling noise made the birds aghast.

And the gusty winds waked the winged seeds,
Out of their birthplace of ugly weeds,
Till they clung round many a sweet flower’s stem,
Which rotted into the earth with them.

The water-blooms under the rivulet
Fell from the stalks on which they were set;
And the eddies drove them here and there,
As the winds did those of the upper air.

Then the rain came down, and the broken stalks
Were bent and tangled across the walks;
And the leafless network of parasite bowers
Massed into ruin; and all sweet flowers.

Between the time of the wind and the snow
All loathliest weeds began to grow,
Whose coarse leaves were splashed with many a speck,
Like the water-snake’s belly and the toad’s back.

And thistles, and nettles, and darnels rank,
And the dock, and henbane, and hemlock dank,
Stretched out its long and hollow shank,
And stifled the air till the dead wind stank.

And plants, at whose names the verse feels loath,
Filled the place with a monstrous undergrowth,
Prickly, and pulpous, and blistering, and blue,
Livid, and starred with a lurid dew.

And agarics, and fungi, with mildew and mould
Started like mist from the wet ground cold;
Pale, fleshy, as if the decaying dead
With a spirit of growth had been animated!

Spawn, weeds, and filth, a leprous scum,
Made the running rivulet thick and dumb,
And at its outlet flags huge as stakes
Dammed it up with roots knotted like water-snakes.

And hour by hour, when the air was still,
The vapours arose which have strength to kill;
At morn they were seen, at noon they were felt,
At night they were darkness no star could melt.

And unctuous meteors from spray to spray
Crept and flitted in broad noonday
Unseen; every branch on which they alit
By a venomous blight was burned and bit.

The Sensitive Plant, like one forbid,
Wept, and the tears within each lid
Of its folded leaves, which together grew,
Were changed to a blight of frozen glue.

For the leaves soon fell, and the branches soon
By the heavy axe of the blast were hewn;
The sap shrank to the root through every pore
As blood to a heart that will beat no more.

For Winter came: the wind was his whip:
One choppy finger was on his lip:
He had torn the cataracts from the hills
And they clanked at his girdle like manacles;

His breath was a chain which without a sound
The earth, and the air, and the water bound;
He came, fiercely driven, in his chariot-throne
By the tenfold blasts of the Arctic zone.

Then the weeds which were forms of living death
Fled from the frost to the earth beneath.
Their decay and sudden flight from frost
Was but like the vanishing of a ghost!

And under the roots of the Sensitive Plant
The moles and the dormice died for want:
The birds dropped stiff from the frozen air
And were caught in the branches naked and bare.

First there came down a thawing rain
And its dull drops froze on the boughs again;
Then there steamed up a freezing dew
Which to the drops of the thaw-rain grew;

And a northern whirlwind, wandering about
Like a wolf that had smelt a dead child out,
Shook the boughs thus laden, and heavy, and stiff,
And snapped them off with his rigid griff.

When Winter had gone and Spring came back
The Sensitive Plant was a leafless wreck;
But the mandrakes, and toadstools, and docks, and darnels,
Rose like the dead from their ruined charnels.

CONCLUSION.

Whether the Sensitive Plant, or that
Which within its boughs like a Spirit sat,
Ere its outward form had known decay,
Now felt this change, I cannot say.

Whether that Lady’s gentle mind,
No longer with the form combined
Which scattered love, as stars do light,
Found sadness, where it left delight,

I dare not guess; but in this life
Of error, ignorance, and strife,
Where nothing is, but all things seem,
And we the shadows of the dream,

It is a modest creed, and yet
Pleasant if one considers it,
To own that death itself must be,
Like all the rest, a mockery.

That garden sweet, that lady fair,
And all sweet shapes and odours there,
In truth have never passed away:
’Tis we, ’tis ours, are changed; not they.

For love, and beauty, and delight,
There is no death nor change: their might
Exceeds our organs, which endure

No light, being themselves obscure.

Mimosa acustistipula by Klei Sousa, Brazil (winner of 2012 Margaret Flockton Award for Excellence in Scientific Botanical Illustration). 
*via Margaret Flockton Award