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.

+

“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

+

“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

une piscine caché

《影；氤氳與流光》

To whom,
is a writer that does not write―
a bard that utters no poems
a dreamer of dreamless dreams?

When does
a piano of soundlessness
sigh, and

How does an underwater flower
pass into decay

without blossoming?

Felice Casorati, Ragazza di Pavarolo (1938)

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

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)

“The Tobacco Shop,” by Fernando Pessoa

I'm nothing.
I'll always be nothing.
I can't want to be something.
But I have in me all the dreams of the world.

Windows of my room,
The room of one of the world's millions nobody knows
(And if they knew me, what would they know?),
You open onto the mystery of a street continually crossed by people,
A street inaccessible to any and every thought,
Real, impossibly real, certain, unknowingly certain,
With the mystery of things beneath the stones and beings,
With death making the walls damp and the hair of men white,
With Destiny driving the wagon of everything down the road of nothing.

Today I'm defeated, as if I'd learned the truth.
Today I'm lucid, as if I were about to die
And had no greater kinship with things
Than to say farewell, this building and this side of the street becoming
A row of train cars, with the whistle for departure
Blowing in my head
And my nerves jolting and bones creaking as we pull out.

Today I'm bewildered, like a man who wondered and discovered and forgot.
Today I'm torn between the loyalty I owe
To the outward reality of the Tobacco Shop across the street
And to the inward reality of my feeling that everything's a dream.

I failed in everything.
Since I had no ambition, perhaps I failed in nothing.
I left the education I was given,
Climbing down from the window at the back of the house.
I went to the country with big plans.
But all I found was grass and trees,
And when there were people they were just like the others.
I step back from the window and sit in a chair. What should I think about?

How should I know what I'll be, I who don't know what I am?
Be what I think? But I think of being so many things!
And there are so many who think of being the same thing that we can't all be it!
Genius? At this moment
A hundred thousand brains are dreaming they're geniuses like me,
And it may be that history won't remember even one,
All of their imagined conquests amounting to so much dung.
No, I don't believe in me.
Insane asylums are full of lunatics with certainties!
Am I, who have no certainties, more right or less right?
No, not even me . . .
In how many garrets and non-garrets of the world
Are self-convinced geniuses at this moment dreaming?
How many lofty and noble and lucid aspirations
–Yes, truly lofty and noble and lucid
And perhaps even attainable–
Will never see the light of day or find a sympathetic ear?
The world is for those born to conquer it,
Not for those who dream they can conquer it, even if they're right.
I've done more in dreams than Napoleon.

I've held more humanities against my hypothetical breast than Christ.
I've secretly invented philosophies such as Kant never wrote.
But I am, and perhaps will always be, the man in the garret,
Even though I don't live in one.
I'll always be the one who wasn't born for that;
I'll always be merely the one who had qualities;
I'll always be the one who waited for a door to open in a wall without doors
And sang the song of the Infinite in a chicken coop
And heard the voice of God in a covered well.
Believe in me? No, not in anything.
Let Nature pour over my seething head
Its sun, its rain, and the wind that finds my hair,
And let the rest come if it will or must, or let it not come.
Cardiac slaves of the stars,
We conquered the whole world before getting out of bed,
But we woke up and it's hazy,
We got up and it's alien,
We went outside and it's the entire earth
Plus the solar system and the Milky Way and the Indefinite.

(Eat your chocolates, little girl,
Eat your chocolates!
Believe me, there's no metaphysics on earth like chocolates,
And all religions put together teach no more than the candy shop.
Eat, dirty little girl, eat!
If only I could eat chocolates with the same truth as you!
But I think and, removing the silver paper that's tinfoil,
I throw it on the ground, as I've thrown out life.)

But at least, from my bitterness over what I'll never be,
There remains the hasty writing of these verses,
A broken gateway to the Impossible.
But at least I confer on myself a contempt without tears,
Noble at least in the sweeping gesture by which I fling
The dirty laundry that's me–with no list–into the stream of things,
And I stay at home, shirtless.

(O my consoler, who doesn't exist and therefore consoles,
Be you a Greek goddess, conceived as a living statue,
Or a patrician woman of Rome, impossibly noble and dire,
Or a princess of the troubadours, all charm and grace,
Or an eighteenth-century marchioness, decollete and aloof,
Or a famous courtesan from our parent's generation,
Or something modern, I can't quite imagine what–
Whatever all of this is, whatever you are, if you can inspire, then inspire me!
My heart is a poured-out bucket.
In the same way invokers of spirits invoke spirits, I invoke
My own self and find nothing.
I go to the window and see the street with absolute clarity.
I see the shops, I see the sidewalks, I see the passing cars,
I see the clothed living beings who pass each other.
I see the dogs that also exist,
And all of this weighs on me like a sentence of exile,
And all of this is foreign, like everything else.)

I've lived, studied, loved, and even believed,
And today there's not a beggar I don't envy just because he isn't me.
I look at the tatters and sores and falsehood of each one,
And I think: perhaps you never lived or studied or loved or believed
(For it's possible to do all of this without having done any of it);
Perhaps you've merely existed, as when a lizard has its tail cut off
And the tail keeps on twitching, without the lizard.
I made of myself what I was no good at making,
And what I could have made of myself I didn't.
I put on the wrong costume
And was immediately taken for someone I wasn't, and I said nothing and was lost.
When I went to take off the mask,
It was stuck to my face.
When I got it off and saw myself in the mirror,
I had already grown old.
I was drunk and no longer knew how to wear the costume hat I hadn't taken off.
I threw out the mask and slept in the closet
Like a dog tolerated by the management
Because it's harmless,
And I'll write down this story to prove I'm sublime.

Musical essence of my useless verses,
If only I could look at you as something I had made
Instead of always looking at the Tobacco Shop across the street,
Trampling on my consciousness of existing,
Like a rug a drunkard stumbles on
Or a doormat stolen by gypsies and it's not worth a thing.

But the Tobacco Shop Owner has come to the door and is standing there.
I look at him with the discomfort of a half-twisted neck
Compounded by the discomfort of a half-grasping soul.
He will die and I will die.
He'll leave his signboard, I'll leave my poems.
His sign will also eventually die, and so will my poems.
Eventually the street where the sign was will die,
And so will the language in which my poems were written.
Then the whirling planet where all of this happened will die.

On other planets of other solar systems something like people
Will continue to make things like poems and to live under things like signs,
Always one thing facing the other,
Always one thing as useless as the other,
Always the impossible as stupid as reality,
Always the inner mystery as true as the mystery sleeping on the surface.
Always this thing or always that, or neither one thing nor the other.

But a man has entered the Tobacco Shop (to buy tobacco?),
And plausible reality suddenly hits me.
I half rise from my chair–energetic, convinced, human–
And will try to write these verses in which I say the opposite.

I light up a cigarette as I think about writing them,
And in that cigarette I savor a freedom from all thought.
My eyes follow the smoke as if it were my own trail
And I enjoy, for a sensitive and fitting moment,
A liberation from all speculation
And an awareness that metaphysics is a consequence of not feeling very well.
Then I lean back in the chair
And keep smoking.
As long as Destiny permits, I'll keep smoking.

(If I married my washwoman's daughter
Perhaps I would be happy.)
I get up from the chair. I go to the window.

The man has come out of the Tobacco Shop (putting change into his pocket?).
Ah, I know him: it's unmetaphysical Esteves.
(The Tobacco Shop Owner has come to the door.)
As if by divine instinct, Esteves turns around and sees me.
He waves hello, I shout back "Hello, Esteves!" and the universe
Falls back into place without ideals or hopes, and the Owner of the Tobacco Shop
     smiles.

－Translated from the Portuguese by Richard Zenith

Medardo Rosso, “Enfant malade (Sick child),” c.1909, aristotype, 7.9 x 6.3cm. Private Collection.

Detail from Van Gogh’s “Roses”

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.

"Ars Poetica" & "You, Andrew Marvell"

～two poems by Archibald MacLeish

A poem should be palpable and mute  
As a globed fruit,

Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb,

Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown—

A poem should be wordless  
As the flight of birds.

                         *              

A poem should be motionless in time  
As the moon climbs,

Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,

Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,  
Memory by memory the mind—

A poem should be motionless in time  
As the moon climbs.

                         *              

A poem should be equal to:
Not true.

For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf.

For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea—

A poem should not mean  
But be.

{more ars poetica poems here}

Detail from Boy Blowing Soap Bubbles: Allegory on the Transitoriness and the Brevity of Life, Karel Dujardin, 1668.

+++

And here face down beneath the sun   
And here upon earth’s noonward height   
To feel the always coming on
The always rising of the night:

To feel creep up the curving east   
The earthy chill of dusk and slow   
Upon those under lands the vast   
And ever climbing shadow grow

And strange at Ecbatan the trees   
Take leaf by leaf the evening strange   
The flooding dark about their knees   
The mountains over Persia change

And now at Kermanshah the gate   
Dark empty and the withered grass   
And through the twilight now the late   
Few travelers in the westward pass

And Baghdad darken and the bridge   
Across the silent river gone
And through Arabia the edge
Of evening widen and steal on

And deepen on Palmyra’s street
The wheel rut in the ruined stone   
And Lebanon fade out and Crete
High through the clouds and overblown

And over Sicily the air
Still flashing with the landward gulls   
And loom and slowly disappear   
The sails above the shadowy hulls

And Spain go under and the shore   
Of Africa the gilded sand
And evening vanish and no more   
The low pale light across that land

Nor now the long light on the sea:

And here face downward in the sun   
To feel how swift how secretly
The shadow of the night comes on ...

Hermine

    She spoke so seriously from a deep impulse of her very soul that I scarcely liked to encourage her. I tried to calm her down. She shook her head with a frown and with a compelling look went on: "I tell you, you must keep your word, my boy. If you don't you'll regret it. You will have many commands from me and you will carry them out. Nice ones and agreeable ones that it will be a pleasure for you to obey. And at the last you will fulfill my last command as well, Harry." 

    "I will," I said, half giving in. "What will your last command be?" 

    I guessed it already—God knows why. 

    She shivered as though a passing chill went through her and seemed to be waking slowly from her trance. Her eyes did not release me. Suddenly she became still more sinister. 

    "If I were wise, I shouldn't tell you. But I won't be wise, Harry, not for this time. I'll be just the opposite. So now mind what I say! You will hear it and forget it again. You will laugh over it, and you will weep over it. So look out! I am going to play with you for life and death, little brother, and before we begin the game I'm going to lay my cards on the table." 

    How beautiful she looked, how unearthly, when she said that! Cool and clear, there swam in her eyes a conscious sadness. These eyes of hers seemed to have suffered all imaginable suffering and to have acquiesced in it. Her lips spoke with difficulty and as though something hindered them, as though a keen frost had numbed her face; but between her lips at the corners of her mouth where the tip of her tongue showed at rare intervals, there was but sweet sensuality and inward delight that contradicted the expression of her face and the tone of her voice. A short lock hung down over the smooth expanse of her forehead, and from this corner of her forehead whence fell the lock of hair, her boyishness welled up from time to time like a breath of life and cast the spell of a hermaphrodite. I listened with an eager anxiety and yet as though dazed and only half aware.

(...)

Hermine was pale but smiling. Slowly she raised her arm and pushed back her hair. As she did so one arm caught the light and a faint and indescribably tender shadow ran from her armpit to her hidden breast, and this little trembling line of shadow seemed to me to sum up all the charm and fascination of her body like a smile.

～Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

Pia de' Tolomei, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
oil on canvas, c.1868,
Spencer Museum of Art, Lawrence, Kansas

徽宗之天青潤澤: Huizong's Celadon Tone Poems singing in Whistler's Visions

雨過天青雲破處，者般颜色做將來。 

Clouds part after the morning rain, colour of the sky,

Such is the colour of the days beyond.

白如玉、薄如纸、明如镜、聲如磐。

Fair as jade, fine as paper, brilliant as mirror, and sounds of grandeur.

+++

“You could say that when I slowly descended those rarely used steps to the small, always deserted beach, I was making use of a magical process in order to bring myself closer to the possible monad that is my self.”

～Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“...having shed its bright load, the relieved leaf unbent. Tip, leaf, dip, relief - the instant it all took to happen seemed to me not so much a fraction of time as a fissure in it, a missed heartbeat, which was refunded at once by a patter of rhymes: I say 'patter' intentionally, for when a gust of wind did come, the trees would briskly start to drip all together in as crude an imitation of the recent downpour as the stanza I was already muttering resembled the shock of wonder I had experienced when for a moment heart and leaf had been one.”

～Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

+++

*Two paintings by Whistler: “Nocturne Blue and Silver － Cremorne Lights” (1872) & “Nocturne, Blue and Silver: Battersea Reach”

Whistler’s emphasis on sensation and atmosphere over detailed description has been compared by some to the philosophy underpinning Gardner’s whole museum. “I see the entire museum as a correlative to these shadowy tone poems,’’ wrote the poet and critic Wayne Koestenbaum of Whistler’s nocturnes. (The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum)

Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851), On Lake Lucerne, looking towards Fluelen, around 1841. Watercolour, with scraping out and marks made with the thumb, over graphite on wove paper, 223 x 283mm. The Courtauld Gallery, London.

‘The aim of the great inventive landscape painter must be to give the far higher and deeper truth of mental vision, rather than that of the physical facts.’ ～John Ruskin

An Ode to Entanglement & Modigliani Suite

Ode to Hands
(written by Halina Poświatowska, translated by Anna Gąsienica-Byrcyn)


Greetings to you my palms, my grasping fingers, and my finger smashed by the car door. My X-rayed palm looks like a sprained wing, like a tiny piece of bone drawn by its own contour. My left hand's ring finger once decorated by a band is widowed now, deprived of its adornment. The one who gave me the ring long since has no fingers. His arms are woven with the tree's roots into one.

My hands have so often touched the frozen palms of the dead, and the warm, strong palms of the living. They know how to caress unusually by touch losing the space that separates existence from existence, and heaven from earth. My hands knowing the pain of helplessness cling to each other like two frightened birds, homeless, blindly seeking everywhere the trace of your hands.

the body of my garden
woven from the living and painful branches
cries at night
recalling the down of birds' wings
the moon's face wet among the leaves
it peers into a nest full of absence
the green fingers quiver
clenched in the throat of the wind
dawn

the seeing fingers dance
on black and white keys
I greet them with my breath
with my hand I touch the lips
with my smile I bring to life
the colors and I use the most beautiful of them
to write in red blood: myself

in our eternal departures
on outstretched wings
we are ever closer
to each other and earth

you are my hand
I am your hair
and that shadow behind us
is neither this nor that

the shadow—our united lips enclosing
all-
embracing
both love and death

I broke off the bough of love
I buried it in the earth
and look
my garden has blossomed

one cannot kill love
if you bury it in the earth
it grows back
if you toss it into the air
it grows leaf-like wings
dropped into the water

it flashes with gills
immersed in the night
it shines

so I wanted to bury it in my heart
but my heart was home to my love
my heart opened its heart's door
and it rang out with song from wall to wall
my heart danced on my fingertips

so I buried my love in my head
and people asked
why my head has blossomed
why my eyes shine star-like
and why my lips are brighter than the dawn

I wanted to tear this love to pieces
but it was supple it entangled my hands
and my hands are bound with love
people ask whose prisoner I am 

*To read more of Poświatowska's poetry, visit here.

Georgia O'Keeffe — Hands, 1919
Alfred Stieglitz (American, Hobokan, New Jersey, 1864-1946 New York)
via The Metropolitan Museum of Art

 

untitled musing

“Des Esseintes also derived a specious pleasure from handling this minuscule booklet, with its covers of Japanese felt as white as milk curds, fastened by two silk cords, one Chinese pink, the other black. Concealed behind the binding, the black braid met the pink braid which, like some licentious handmaid, added a whisper of powder, a suggestion of modern Japanese rouge, to the antique whiteness, the artless flesh-tints of the book; it would itself round the pink, intertwining its sombre colour with the light one in a dainty bow, and introducing a discreet hint of that regret, a vague threat of that sadness which follow in the wake of burnt-out passion and satiated sensual frenzy.” 

(Joris-Karl Huysmans, À rebours, trans. by Margaret Mauldon)

常玉畫作：雙裸女，1929年。
Sanyu, Two Pink Nudes, oil on canvas, 1929 (via Ravenel Art)

“However, by delving into his own mind, he first of all grasped that, to appeal to him, a work must possess that aura of strangeness which Edgar Allan Poe required; but he readily ventured further along that path, demanding over-subtle creations of the intellect and complex deliquescences of language; what he wanted was a disturbing ambivalence he could muse about, until he chose to make it either vaguer or more precise, according to his state of mind at that particular moment. In a word, he wanted a work of art both for what it intrinsically was and for what it potentially allowed him to impart to it; he wanted to go forward with it and because of it, as if aided by an acolyte, as if transported in a vehicle, into a sphere where sublimated feelings would induce in him a state of turmoil which was unexpected, and the causes of which he would, over a long period, try—though quite in vain—to analyse.” (ibid)

常玉畫作：鏡前母與子，1930年代。
Sanyu, Virgin Mary and the Infant Jesus, oil on canvas, 1930s (via Sotheby's HK)

我的生命中一無所有，我只是一個畫家。對於我的作品，我認為毋須賦予任何解釋，當觀賞我的作品時，應該清楚瞭解我所要表達的... 只是一個簡單的概念。～常玉
“I have nothing in my life, I am merely a painter. Regarding my works, I do not think explanations are necessary. When looking at my paintings, one should understand with clarity, what I am trying to express... is but a simple concept.” —Sanyu






Death and ecstasy... “[Art] is about connecting with human beings emotionally, not intellectually.” (Tamara Rojo)

Poetry Pairing (series i): petals & gardens in flames～"Though It Be Thy Will" & "Self-embrace on Silk Prayer"

One communicates and exchanges in poetry, as in music, as in silence...


Though It Be Thy Will

by Abdias DeMarin

(Special thanks to Graceful-Jen for providing the lament
that served as its humourous counterpointe)


Though it be thy will to wrest thy breast from mine,
Though no Roman heart can make Sabian claim,
My pate is parched from excess prate and pine,
Such showes bring shame and diminish my fame.
At first light found a golden garden gave to me,
Lillie nymphs umteen litt'ring shade of tree,
The dewy petals rolled with fond embrace,
their kisses painting the tears on my face.
When bored with the bevy the breeze answered all,
Did a hundred more nymphs from the branches fall,
In beauty's bower, thus burdened with bliss,
I nearly forgave thy deeds gone amiss.
My love for thee is like a sorrowe blinde,
Obscur'ng the garden within my minde,
Though beauty is thine, 'tis a hair of the world's,
Nor canst thou wrest me, 'tis a flame unfurled.

+++

*Where are the songs of spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, — (Keats, To Autumn)*

The Roses of Heliogabalus (1888), by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema,
oil on canvas, 132.1 x 213.7 cm, private collection.
As it was painted during the winter, Tadema arranged to have roses sent weekly from the French Riviera for four months to ensure the accuracy of each petal.

Self-embrace on Silk Prayer

by Ting-Jen Hwang, on 8th January 2012

(With thanks to Hamlet-at-Sea of this incarnation, 

for being the final catalyst of my poem.)

"Is it a blessing for a poet to be a natural poet-magnet?"

The romantic thinker wonders to herself.

'Oh you Little Fool,' she whispered,

A foolish thinker I am.

All these men, coming

in and out of me. All this pleasure and pain,

flickering like dying blue flames.

An instant garden trampled upon for hundreds of years

by those he loves with his Life－ah, such blasphemous

Beauty. An instant paradise turned

into the most exquisite ice ablaze.

A bruised garden amidst the flames.

The love and devotion that it takes to create

－such Beauty－

I can never fully comprehend.

Threads of a thousand hues are weaving themselves 

in and out of each other; breathing esoteric, 

breathing erotic, into

the weakest Bird of the most powerful strength－

A Bird without a name－

Can I be spared－Can I be

abstract like your patterns of this mesmerising nature, again?

I plead with my heart to be

as romantic and as abstract, like

your Little Brother, again.

Tears from the eyes of his heart are still rolling,

shining on my quill 

like dews on those pink Oleander flowers－

falling, falling, fallen. 

(And in case you were wondering, I was not speaking of 

your little brother, I was speaking of

Mine. Like all these quests for Beauty and pleasure－I was

speaking, and thinking, of Mine.)

Breathing erotic. Breathing esoteric.

All these fiery blossoms burning way below sub-zero,

I could faint,

just listening to them.