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.

+

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

“All I ever asked of life was that it should pass me by without my even noticing it.”

—Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet 

 “Sometimes I sensed that the books I read in rapid succession had set up some sort of murmur among themselves, transforming my head into an orchestra pit where different musical instruments sounded out, and I would realize that I could endure this life because of these musicales going on in my head.”

—Orhan Pamuk, The New Life

fleuriste en Asie (via)

“light and evanescent but 
held together 
by bolts of 
iron”

—Virginia Woolf

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)

Musicality in Poetic Narratives

“It was counterpoint in a narrative form.

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

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

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

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

The Intelligence of Flowers, 1907, by Alvin Langdon Coburn

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

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

& that necessary.

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

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

Antoine’s Women; Rosalba’s Muse

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

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

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

They are goddesses on the lam.”

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

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

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

Lady Beatrice, by George Clausen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*via Indian Miniature Paintings

Ideal Female Heads, French, 1769-1770,

by Jacques Augustin Pajou (1730-1809),

Terracotta on white marble socle, via The Getty Museum.

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

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

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

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

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

Oil on canvas, private collection

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

Empress Elisabeth of Austria, 1864, by Franz Xaver Winterhalter

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

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

無常: “we embrace a shadow and love a dream”

Beauty exists because perfection does not. What is beautiful and alluring is not perfect, and what mesmerises and arrests, is illusion.

Transience: a rose in bloom
*image via Lili Price

*Post title in English is taken from Doctor Glas by Hjalmar Söderberg: “We know so little about one another. We embrace a shadow and love a dream.”

+

“[...] I have got new curtains for my study; pure white. When I awoke this morning, I first thought it had been snowing. In my room the light was exactly as it is after the first fall of snow. I even fancied I caught the scent of snow freshly fallen. And soon it will come, the snow. One feels it in the air. 
It will be welcome. Let it come. Let it fall.” 

― Hjalmar Söderberg, Doctor Glas

Piazzolla's Saudades for Oblivion: emotional soundscapes of his poetry...

"I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another… then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."

― James Joyce, closing line of Ulysses

“I loved her enough to forget myself, my self pitying despairs, and be content that something she thought happy was going to happen.”

― Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany's

"His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."

― James Joyce, closing line of 'The Dead' from Dubliners


〝醉生夢死不過是她跟我開的一個玩笑。有些事情你越想忘記，就會記得越牢。當有些事情你無法得到時，你唯一能做的，就是不要忘記。＂ 
"Living a befuddled and intoxicated life is merely a joke she made with me. The harder you try to forget about some things, the harder you remember them. When there’s something you can never get, the only thing you can do is not to forget."

― from the film Ashes of Time directed by Wong Kar-Wai


＂你知不知道有一種鳥沒有腳的？他的一生只能在天上飛來飛去。一輩子只能落地一次，那就是他死的時候。＂
"Do you know there’s a kind of bird without legs? All its life it only flies in the sky. All its life only one time it lands on earth – that is the time it dies."

(...also Wong Kar-Wai, forgot which film it is from...)

La Mélancolie (detail), by Lucas Cranach the Elder, 1532
*image via Wikipedia

One of the beautiful Piazzolla songs used in Wong Kar-Wai's Happy Together, a film about longing, time, memories, love, loss, chance, and "the end of the world"...

Wong, in regards to the interpretation of the film said: "In this film, some audiences will say that the title seems to be very cynical, because it is about two persons living together, and at the end, they are just separate. But to me, happy together can apply to two persons or apply to a person and his past, and I think sometimes when a person is at peace with himself and his past, I think it is the beginning of a relationship which can be happy, and also he can be more open to more possibilities in the future with other people." (via)




Santiago Cimadevilla performing Astor Piazzolla's "Oblivion." With the Liepaja Symphony Orchestra (Latvia), conductor Imants Resnis. Live performance in Liepaja, December 2007.

The Violin of Eugène Ysaÿe

"It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness and of pain: of strength and freedom. The beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature, and everlasting beauty of monotony."
— Benjamin Britten

Ysaÿe's hand

David Oistrakh plays Eugène Ysaÿe's Sonata for Solo Violin in D Minor, Op. 27, #3.




"Music, of all the arts, stands in a special region, unlit by any star but its own, and utterly without meaning ... except its own."
— Leonard Bernstein, The Joy of Music


Selections from Eugène Ysaÿe's Six Sonatas for Solo Violin, Opus 27, performed by Ilya Kaler. (Thank you, GeorgeEnescu, for sharing such beauty.)




"... music, since it passes over the Ideas, is... quite independent of the phenomenal world, positively ignores it, and, to a certain extent, could still exist even if there were no world at all, which cannot be said of the other arts."
— Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation

Collected Quotes: Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau

By Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau

“Goethe always said that life must be like art somehow. It is for him only bearable if it is art. Otherwise it cannot be lived.”

“Art itself nourishes me as an inner vision. It has provided – and continues to provide – a possibility to lift oneself up to another level.”

“An intellectual singer is unthinkable, because a singer, like almost no other creature on earth, represents the proposition that there can be something approaching a unity of body, soul, and mind, at least in a symbolic fashion.”

“It is important to know that we are not the master of our will, that the intellect does not come first. First comes the will to expression – the drive to express oneself, to express artistic things. Only after that comes the critical distance that channels it.”

“In everything you do, you establish a kind of moral framework. You can never start too close to the basic principles.”

“I’m still very bound to the word, you know: committed to making the text more alive, more understood, closer to the audience than it may be on the printed page.”

“Performing music is more a question of serving, but painting is a dialogue from the start. You make only one stroke – and from that moment you are in discussion with your subject.”

On Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau

“You’re not a singer, you’re a bard!” (Paul Hindemith)

“He is a marvellous combination of intellectual power and wonderful vocal technique, and above all, he has a tremendous imagination.” (Gerald Moore)

“Fischer-Dieskau made a greater impression on the history of singing in the 20th century than any other performer.” (Hilary Finch)

“All of Fischer-Dieskau’s artwork is a mere accessory to his music making, only part of his adamant urge for ultimate self-expression. He scales artistic Matterhorns because they are there.”