(Com)Passion
Posted: August 30, 2013 Filed under: Prose, Writing | Tags: compassion, life, love, milan kundera, passion, The Unbearable Lightness of Being Leave a commentAn extract from The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera:
Yes, it was unbearable for him to stay in Zurich imagining Tereza living on her own in Prague.
But how long would he have been tortured by compassion? All his life? A year? Or a month? Or only a week?
How could he have known? How could he have gauged it?
Any schoolboy can do experiments in the physics laboratory to test various scientific hypotheses. But man, because he has only one life to live, cannot conduct experiments to test whether to follow his passion (compassion) or not.
Woman Reading
Posted: August 29, 2013 Filed under: Art, Painting/Drawing | Tags: books, henri matisse, read, reading, The inattentive reader, women Leave a commentOde to a Lemon
Posted: August 27, 2013 Filed under: Poetry, Writing | Tags: latin american literature, lemon, limon, Neruda, ode, Pablo Neruda, poem, Poetry Leave a commentBy Pablo Neruda
Out of lemon flowers
loosed
on the moonlight, love’s
lashed and insatiable
essences,
sodden with fragrance,
the lemon tree’s yellow
emerges,
the lemons
move down
from the tree’s planetarium
Delicate merchandise!
The harbors are big with it-
bazaars
for the light and the
barbarous gold.
We open
the halves
of a miracle,
and a clotting of acids
brims
into the starry
divisions:
creation’s
original juices,
irreducible, changeless,
alive:
so the freshness lives on
in a lemon,
in the sweet-smelling house of the rind,
the proportions, arcane and acerb.
Cutting the lemon
the knife
leaves a little cathedral:
alcoves unguessed by the eye
that open acidulous glass
to the light; topazes
riding the droplets,
altars,
aromatic facades.
So, while the hand
holds the cut of the lemon,
half a world
on a trencher,
the gold of the universe
wells
to your touch:
a cup yellow
with miracles,
a breast and a nipple
perfuming the earth;
a flashing made fruitage,
the diminutive fire of a planet
*
Pillar
Posted: August 26, 2013 Filed under: Art, Photography | Tags: Mark Borthwick, pillar, sheets, towels, woman Leave a commentFernweh
Posted: August 24, 2013 Filed under: Art, Photography | Tags: collage, fernweh, lanscape, postcards, Tacita Dean, travel, vintage, wanderlust Leave a commentLonging to Travel
“Fernweh is an improbable landscape made of cliffs, forest and dunes. I created it from four small discoloured nineteenth century photographs that I found in flea markets some time ago. The craggy horizon is a famous outcrop, called Sächsische Schweiz – Saxony’s Switzerland, which is near Dresden. The foreground is unknown sand and scrub.
Finding a path amongst the vegetation and boulders of the photographic distortions, I imagined Goethe’s voyage to Italy, particularly his parcours south of Rome on his way to Naples.
‘Fernweh’ is discontinued parlance for a longing to travel, an aching to get away. Different, I imagine, from ‘Wanderlust’, which is a more spirited desire to be in the landscape.
It is the etymological opposite of the German word, ‘Heimweh’, which means homesickness. We do not have a single word in English for this more considered desire to be gone. This work should be approached through its title.” Tacita Dean