Heat & Heart, A Valentine for Lovers

Tags

e. e. cummings, fiction, Isaac Marion, Jeanette Winterson, Love, Lovers, Pablo Neruda, poetry, quotations, Valentines Day

Marc Chagall

1.

I crush her against me. I want to be part of her. Not just inside her but all around her. I want our rib cages to crack open and our hearts to migrate and merge. I want our cells to braid together like living thread.

— Isaac Marion, Warm Bodies. 

2.

Sonnet XII

Full woman, fleshly apple, hot moon,
thick smell of seaweed, crushed mud and light,
what obscure brilliance opens between your columns?
What ancient night does a man touch with his senses?

Loving is a journey with water and with stars,
with smothered air and abrupt storms of flour:
loving is a clash of lightning-bolts
and two bodies defeated by a single drop of honey.

Kiss by kiss I move across your small infinity,
your borders, your rivers, your tiny villages,
and the genital fire transformed into delight

runs through the narrow pathways of the blood
until it plunges down, like a dark carnation,
until it is and is no more than a flash in the night.

— Pablo Neruda, Selected Poems.

Erhard Loblain

3.

Where did love begin? What human being looked at another and saw in their face the forests and the sea? Was there a day, exhausted and weary, dragging home food, arms cut and scarred, that you saw yellow flowers and, not knowing what you did, picked them because I love you?

— Jeanette Winterson, Lighthousekeeping.

4.

love is the voice under all silences,
the hope which has no opposite in fear;
the strength so strong mere force is feebleness:
the truth more first than sun more last than star

— e. e. cummings

Gustav Klimt

 

Satie’s Gnossienne, Forking Paths, and Time’s Ever Presence

Tags

art, Erwin Schrodinger, Gnnossienne, Jorge Luis Borges, literature, music, past, Philosophy, quotations, Rilke, Satie, The Garden of Forking Paths, time

Japanese Style Landscape Paul Ranson

Time-travelling—that’s what it feels like when listening to Erik Satie’s Gnossienne. When I close my eyes and let the music move me, I’m transported to faraway places and distant times. I can see the mist rising from the river, the arched bridges, the damp gray stones of gothic towers tilting toward sullen skies. I can feel the cool breath of the river, smell the sweet-dank dampness of rain-drenched streets, hear the clatter of distant hoofs on cobblestones. It’s almost as if I’ve entered some strangely familiar dreamscape, or the distant landscape of an idealized past.

These dark, insistent, melancholy notes play us and ply us across space and time in rapturous eloquence. It reminds us that we share so much of our common past, our common humanity, to the art and music and literature that inspires us.

I’m reminded of the short story “The Garden of Forking Paths” by Jorge Luis Borges, and this particular quote:

“This web of time – the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect or ignore each other through the centuries –embraces every possibility. We do not exist in most of them. In some you exist and not I, while in others I do, and you do not, and yet in others both of us exist. In this one, in which chance has favored me, you have come to my gate. In another, you, crossing the garden, have found me dead. In yet another, I say these very same words but am in error, a phantom Time is forever dividing itself toward innumerable futures. — Jorge Luis Borges, from “The Garden of Forking Paths,” Collected Fictions. (Penguin Books September 1, 1999) Originally published 1941.

And also, this from Rilke:

Even the past is still a being in the fullness of its occurrence, if only it is understood not according to its content but by means of its intensity, and we–members of a world that generates movement upon movement, force upon force, and seems to cascade inexorably into less and less visible things–we are forced to rely upon the past’s superior visibility if we want to gain an image of the now muted magnificence that still surrounds us today. — Rainer Maria Rilke, from “On Life and Living,” The Poet’s Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke, ed. and trans. Ulrich Baer (Modern Library, 2005)

And finally, from a Nobel Prize winning physicist, this:

“This life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is in a certain sense the whole; only this whole is not so constituted that it can be surveyed in one single glance. This, as we know, is what the Brahmins express in that sacred, mystic formula which is yet really so simple and so clear: Tat tvam asi, this is you. Or, again, in such words as ‘I am in the east and in the west, I am below and above, I am this whole world’.

Thus you can throw yourself flat on the ground, stretched out upon Mother Earth, with the certain conviction that you are one with her and she with you. You are as firmly established, as invulnerable as she, indeed a thousand times firmer and more invulnerable. As surely she will engulf you tomorrow, so surely will she bring you forth anew to new striving and suffering.
And not merely ‘some day’: now, today, every day she is bringing you forth, not once but thousands upon thousands of times, just as every day she engulfs you a thousand times over. For eternally and always there is only now, one and the same now; the present is the only thing that has no end.”
― Erwin Schrödinger,

Still Open to the Beauty of the World

Tags

beauty, books, faith, fiction, literature, Paul Harding, quotations, quote, Tinkers, Winter

Winter Landscape by Carol Collette

“Your cold mornings are filled with the heartache about the fact that although we are not at ease in this world, it is all we have, that it is ours but that it is full of strife, so that all we can call our own is strife; but even that is better than nothing at all, isn’t it?

And as you split the frost-laced wood with numb hands, rejoice that your uncertainty is God’s will and His grace toward you that that is beautiful, and a part of a greater certainty, as your own father always said in his sermons and to you at home.

And as the ax bites into the wood, be comforted in the fact that the ache in your heart and the confusion in your soul means that you are still alive, still human, and still open to the beauty of the world, even though you have done nothing to deserve it.

And when you resent the ache in your heart, remember: You will be dead and buried soon enough.” ― Paul Harding, Tinkers. (Bellevue Literary Press January 1, 2009) Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2010

To Live Content With Small Things

Tags

inspiration, meditation, poems, poetry, quotations, spiritual

A few pebbles for the pond . . . . 

To live content with small things;
To seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion;
To be worthy, not respectable;
To listen to stars and birds, and to babes with an open heart;
To bear all cheerfully, do all bravely, await occasion, hurry never –
In a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious grow up through the common.  — William Henry Channing

love is the voice under all silences,
the hope which has no opposite in fear;
the strength so strong mere force is feebleness:
the truth more first than sun more last than star
— e.e.cummings

We sit together,
the mountain & I
. . .  until only the
mountain remains.
— Li Po

The Insatiable Eye – Sontag on Photography

Tags

art, books, essays, On Photography, photography, quotations, Social Media, Susan Sontag

Photograph by Sally Mann, Self portrait

In her book of essays On Photography, Susan Sontag speaks of the “insatiability of the photographing eye” in our image-obsessed society, and how it shapes how we see ourselves and the world around us.

While she wrote these essays in the 1970’s before the arrival of the digital camera, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and the cell phone selfie, most of her observations ring true. Perhaps even truer than when she was writing, nearly forty years ago.

By Sally Mann

Photography as Social Rite, and an Elegiac Art

Perhaps closest to home for those of us who practice photography as amateurs, capturing images to share with family and friends on social media and elsewhere, are these observations. While offered as a critique of this practice, or at least a peeling back of its happier connotations, they provide food for thought.

[P]hotography is not practiced by most people as an art. It is mainly a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and a tool of power.

Through photographs, each family constructs a portrait-chronicle of it self–a portable kit of images that bears witness to its connectedness.

{P]hotographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal.

Those ghostly traces, photographs, supply the token presence of the dispersed relatives.

[P]hotographs actively promote nostalgia. Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched by pathos.

All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.

By Gary Winogrand

Photography as Acquisition, and Voyeuristic

This acquisitive and voyeuristic relationship to the world that incessant photography promotes is one I identify with and struggle against. I believe that these travel-trophies we bring home from our trips have positive as well as the negative consequences, as I wrote about in my last post. But I think we are well-advised to be aware of the addictive dangers of photography to ourselves and others and the world at large.

Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.

To collect photographs is to collect the world.

To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge–and, therefore, like power.

Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire.

Taking photographs has set up a chronic voyeuristic relation to the world which levels the meaning of all events.

The omnipresence of cameras persuasively suggests that time consists of interesting events, events worth photographing.

As way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it–by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir. Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.

[C]ameras are fantasy-machines whose use is addictive.

Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted.

By Vivian Maier

Photography as a Mystery, a Grammar, and an Ethics of Seeing

This last subject is the one that interests me the most about photography, and about any art form, whether in its making or in the response of the viewer. Yet Sontag spends less time developing this topic, at least so far in my reading. Even so, her observations are acute and intriguing, and invite us to delve deeper.

Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern

A photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence. Like a fire in a room, photographs . . . are incitements to reverie. The sense of the unattainable that can be evoked by photographs feeds directly into the erotic feelings of those for whom desirability is enhanced by distance.

The camera’s rendering of reality must always hide more than it discloses.

[It] confers on each moment the character of a mystery. Any photograph has multiple meaning; indeed, to see something in the form of a photograph is to encounter a potential object of fascination. 

Photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy.

In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. . . .

There is a peculiar heroism abroad in the world since the invention of cameras: the heroism of vision.

Photographic seeing meant an aptitude for discovering beauty in what everybody sees but neglects as too ordinary. Photographers were supposed to do more than just see the world as it is . . . ; they were to create interest, by new visual decisions.

[Cameras] changed seeing itself, by fostering the idea of seeing for seeing’s sake.

By Henri Cartier-Bresson

Click here for more photographs by famous photagraphers.

Three to Share: Beauty, Art, Place

Tags

art, Blogging, blogs, inspiration, Nature, photography, quotations

I love discovering new blogs that inspire me and want to share three, among many, that I discovered this past year.

The Beauty We Love

I turn to this one often, for the captivating images as well as the inspiring quotations. Two I enjoyed most recently were by John Muir, the first enticing us to saunter reverently rather than “hike” when we are out among nature. He tells us how the word “saunter” comes from pilgrims who are traveling through France  ‘A la sainte terre’, or  ‘To the Holy Land.’ Another reminds us that we are kin to everything

When we try to pick out anything by itself,

we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.

One fancies a heart like our own must be beating in every crystal and cell,

 and we feel like stopping to speak to the plants and animals

 as friendly fellow mountaineers.

Recently I featured another post I loved in Seeing the Self in What We Love.

Then there was Wild Elegance, which speaks to why I named this blog Living on the Edge of the Wild. John O’Donohue from The Invisible Embrace, Beauty writes:

When we acknowledge the wild beauty of God, we begin to glimpse the potential holiness of our neglected wildness.  As humans, citizens and believers, we have become domesticated beyond belief.  We have fallen out of rhythm with our natural wildness.  What we now call ‘being wild’ is often misshapen, destructive and violent.  The natural wildness as the fluency of the soul at one with beauty is foreign to us.

The call of the wild is a call to the elemental levels of the soul, the places of intuition, kinship, swiftness, fluency and the consolation of the lonesome that is not lonely.  Our fear of our own wildness derives in part from our fear of the formless; but the wild is not the formless – it holds immense refinement and, indeed, clarity.  The wild has a profound simplicity that carries none of the false burdens of brokenness or self-conflict; it flows naturally as one, elegant and seamless.

And moreover:

Beauty invites us towards profound elegance of soul.  It reminds us that we are heirs to elegance and nobility of spirit and encourages us to awaken the divinity within us.  We are no longer trapped in mental frames of self-reduction or self-denunciation.

Instead, we feel the desire to celebrate, to give ourselves over to the dance of joy and delight.   The overwhelming beauty which is God pervades the texture of our soul, transforming all smallness, limitation and self-division.  The mystics speak of the excitement of such unity.  This is how Marguerite Porete describes it:

 ‘Such a Soul, says Love swims in the sea of joy, that is in the sea of delights, flowing and running out of the Divinity.  And so she feels no joy, for she is joy itself.  She swims and flows in Joy… for she dwells in Joy and Joy dwells in her.’

The Eclectic Light Company – Paintings

For a stroll through art history and a survey of some of the major and minor artists through the ages, I love to visit this site, which always inspires and enlightens.

The painting that headlines this post is from his site by a lesser known artist, or at least new to me, Maria Fortuny’s painting of Portici Beach in Spain.

The best of his 2018 paintings and articles can be found at this link. It’s a two-parter, so don’t miss this one as well.

For a preview of what he’ll be covering this your, make sure you check out this link.

The Depth of Now

This blog satisfies my longing for travel, art, photography, soulful writing, and that fearsome urge to trust oneself in exploring the unknown. Here a young woman tells about uprooting herself to move to a new city, Istanbul, which she explores through photography and storytelling.

In her favorite posts of 2018 you can taste some of the many flavors she has to offer: joyful wisdom, finding home, writing about place, Istanbul street art, and more.

I also loved her interview with photographer John Wreford. She’s a wonderful photographer herself, and I think that’s how I met her, at a cemetery in Prague.

But where I fell in love with her blog was when I read Home is Where the Heart Is,  where she converses with a stranger she meets in a medieval courtyard and writes:

We talked about how everything at its core is fluid and he talked to me about the Tao Te Ching.

And suddenly we had left the party and were slowly meandering down the road of a deep conversation. And by deep, I mean that reality started to lose its edges as we both came to an agreement on certain points other than what is conventionally accepted.

I admitted to him that I had lived in so many places that I no longer could relate to home being somewhere outside myself. That secretly I was building my home within – letting go of the stuff of this world and instead focusing on the things that I can take with me when I die – the wisdom and knowledge of the world that may (or may not) serve me in the next life.

You see, I don’t believe that we die because what is there to die into? Everything is alive and remains alive in one form or another.

And something tells me that I have lived many lives because from time to time I remember something unusual. I will have a dream that will take me to another place so real that I must have been there before.

I hope you will fall in love with these blogs I discovered this past year as I have. And, please, share some of the favorites sites you’ve discovered with me too in the comments below.

When the Sea Rises and the Light Fails

Tags

Advice, humanity, inspiration, James Baldwin, life, personal, quotations, troubled times

J.M.W. Turner

“For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.” ~ James Baldwin

My world has shifted in the last few weeks in a way that has left me reeling, looking for something to hold onto, to keep from sinking into darkness.

The remarkable thing is I’ve managed to pull myself back from that edge, to realize that no matter what seems to be happening “out there,” what really matters is what’s happening “in here,” in our own consciousness. Will we let an overwhelming sense of loss, grief, and rage pull us under? Or hold on tight to the ones we love, and the things that give us joy, a sense of buoyancy, and the ability to ride out this storm.

I am not alone. Those in the Carolinas experiencing the ravages of Florence have been been facing those rising seas, that failing light. We all experience these calamities, whether of our own or another’s making, or something completely out of our control. Nothing is fixed “out there.” But our minds are our own. We get to decide how we weather our storms, whether we hold on to each other and the things we love, or let the sea engulf us and our light go out.

The Poetics of Place: Redwood Speech,Watershed Prayers

Tags

deep ecology, Francis Weller, humanity, inspiration, Language, music, Nature, quotations, The poetics of place, writing

“I want to see our words jump off the ground, erupt from a sensual earth, musty, humid, gritty. I want to taste words like honey, sweet and dripping with eternity. I want to hear words coming from my mouth and your mouth that are so beautiful that we wince with joy at their departure and arrival. I want to touch words that carry weight and substance, words that have shape and body, curve and tissue. I want to feel what we say as though the words were holy utterances surfacing from a pool where the gods drink. . . . .

My language must be redwood speech, watershed prayers, oak savannah, coupled in an erotic way with fog, heat, wind, rain and hills, sweetgrass and jackrabbits, wild iris and ocean current. My land is my language and only then can my longing for eloquence by granted. Until then I will fumble and fume and ache for a style of speaking that tells you who I am.”   – Francis Weller

One of my first blog posts in 2012 featured a speech by Francis Weller that captures so eloquently how the earth, our natural habitat, speaks to us and inspires us to speak. How it shapes our language and the way we express ourselves, not only in literature but in art and music and dance.

You can read his whole speech at his website Wisdom Bridge – Modern Pathways to our Indigenous Soul. The excerpt above, my quote of the week, hopefully will whet your appetite to do so.

As you read his speech, you might want to listen again to how nature inspires and shapes music, here in Max Richter’s reimagining of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, one of my favorite pieces.

Art Enhances a Sense of Wonder & Mystery

Tags

Abel's Island, art, books, children, inspiration, quotations, William Steig

Illustration from Abel’s Island by William Steig, 1975

Quote of the Week

“Art has the power to make any spot on earth the living center of the universe; and unlike science, which often gives us the illusion of understanding things we really don’t understand, it helps us to know life in a way that keeps before us the mystery of things.

It enhances the sense of wonder. And wonder is respect for life.”

—William Steig. author and illustrator of award winning children’s book, including The Magic Pebble, for which he won a Caldecott Medal in 1970. This quote is from his acceptance speech.

More on Art and the Mystery in the Midst of Things

“Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist.” -Rene Magritte.

“The artist’s function is to love the enigma. All art is this: love which has been poured out over enigmas – and all works of art are enigmas surrounded and adorned by love.” – Rainer Maria Rilke

“The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.” -Francis Bacon

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious; It is the source of all true art and science.” – Albert Einstein

“The Raw Nerve of the Universe”

Tags

art, inspiration, quotations, Ursula Le Guin, Wassily Kandinsky, writing

Wassily Kandinsky

Quote of the Week 

“We writers are the raw nerve of the universe. Our job is to go out and feel things for people, then to come back and tell them how it feels to be alive. Because they are numb. Because we have forgotten.”

Ursula Le Guin, from class notes by Luis Alberto Urrea