Sunday, December 30, 2012

This happened

Maybe my pale jeans and pictures with their snow filters and the snowflake necklace were heard. 

Sunday, December 23, 2012

The Nutcracker

The small girl on stage, back arching in exquisite paths through the air. It is impossible to tell the sweat beads on her skin from beads glistening like perspiration on her gown. Blurring the line between breathless and animate, hands build a place where fabric dances in time with the dancer wearing it; where the stage is a dreamworld set before conscious eyes. This is magic.

Saturday, December 22, 2012

Check


Mood

My feet are numb but this is what I asked for. The gradient of warmth stretches from my right pinky to my left knuckle; beyond my left knuckle is ice. Visualizing my hopes for winter break through images and remembering how much I love blending color and blurring texture in two dimensions. In the center I will wind words like you told me.

Tuesday, December 18, 2012

I think my problem is wanting to be both the writer and the muse.

Saturday, December 15, 2012

"Here, for a moment, we are joined." 
-Ron Silliman, "Albany"
I wish I pronounced it like po-em.

I saw the best minds


"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed"

Because young minds are the best minds, and if everyone thought with one they would have no doubt that magic and monsters exist.

Thursday, December 6, 2012

it is my hope

Chance poem, amalgam of this blog--elegy for ENGL88.

penned? Conditions 

children
doubt what I think 
that even if alive are never perceived. I want to
feel

most

but still i know this is happiness; 

but still i know this is happiness
and tell me i'm not right; there is pain in everything

even childhood bliss is not
I write corpses without skeletons.  

mind
a beautiful face


weekend
wind chimes.

Tuesday, November 27, 2012

Rain

How desperately it touches every part of me it can reach--my skin, my hair, the little bones on the back of my neck. How desperately it touches you and everybody, sacrificing its body of infinite tears to hold the earth together.

Saturday, November 24, 2012

Fragments

I felt a pull towards the gothic, so I wore it. Lived it through each of the seasons and it became part of me. Now it is winter and I can lather its absent color over my lashes and cupid's bow, conceal the crisp holes in my ears with sparkle that man freed from the earth. I can wear white and not shy because black is a part of me, nightly hues fill my soul but it is exquisite. I yearn to live in New York but more lands so foreign and infinitely more lovely. The desire makes me restless. Blind-sighted, I want to be everywhere for the seasons until they too glint in my skin. All I wonder about I want to make mine until the internalization sets me free. Likewise, I want to pluck beauty from the lips of foes and lovers and add them to my collection where by mending me for the worse I can grow bent but breathtaking. Alone my shards are glass but trust me to weld debris into mosaics you cry musical.

Sunday, November 18, 2012

Yesterday was good but today is only natural.

Mind

I don't. I have poetry spinning but I am scared to put it down. Can people tell me it isn't really? How is the form of that which forms not worthy of being penned? Conditions worsen.They are the words that self select in my broken mind, a product of everything that has ever happened to me. Everything hurts. But how can it, when it is I that hurt. But you, do you hurt too? They say they do. How awful. We laugh. Let's be love. Let us go someplace where nobody thinks they know us. I only loved two boys. But the first was a dog and the second was a man. I'm sorry. I am cold. I love you. I am a not worthy child. You love me unconditionally. You move your finger through the air to show me the way you imagine a year. When I was a child I told people spring was my favorite season. Because that's what it was for you. I love winter. Winter was nectar when I met you. It is not dead. When children's cheeks bloom, noses shine red. Who killed winter? You live in an enchanted land. Your love was conditional. I wind up in winter.  It is misunderstood.The place I go back to. Winter passing. So why is it I that am always enchanted? Is this home? Except on days like today when I am unstable. I hate the word emotional. Somebody maimed it and got away with murder. We still blame the victim, ostracize it for being hideous. We are grotesque when the sickly letters sound from our mouths. Neither was a boy. So really neither would suffice. The word for dead is harsh. But is death not harsh? Why do we say passing? Passing is beautiful. Seasons pass. I wind up in winter. The place I go back to. Is placing something beautiful where something harsh should be not a road to romanticize? I have been told that romantic is a condition. I was born ill.

Thursday, November 15, 2012

It's true, you know--what they say about holes in the language.

Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Under fluffy covers beside a lava lamp whose warm pink and orange glow dances over my body and the wall I look at and still everything is so cold. And I like cold, but this kind is not kind to my bones or my insides.

Saturday, October 27, 2012


“Poetry, beauty, romance, love. These are what we stay alive for.”
—Dead Poets Society (1989)

If I were Tom Riddle

I'd hide the pieces of my soul in songs, not objects
"I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape - the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn’t show."
-Andrew Wyeth 

Tuesday, October 23, 2012

I wish I loved things that were not fragile.

I wish I didn't love things that could break.
“The happiest people are those who think the most interesting thoughts. Those who decide to use leisure as a means of mental development, who love good music, good books, good pictures, good company, good conversation, are the happiest people in the world. And they are not only happy in themselves, they are the cause of happiness in others.”
William Phelps (via larmoyante)

Stars Crossing

A deep red, velvet dress is on its way to find me.

Saturday, October 6, 2012

Headlock

image source: thefashionspot
Black Locks

Wednesday, October 3, 2012

when i was sad then, i would say i'm happy. i'm sad, but still i know this is happiness. now i know i am sad but forget how to form the other words

Saturday, September 29, 2012

Pirouettes and Contortions

Loneliness, sadness, et al are so strange. I am alone and yearn for people. I am with people and seek to be alone. 

But then other times I know I am a loner and revel in it.

"Danse Russe"
If I when my wife is sleeping
and the baby and Kathleen
are sleeping
and the sun is a flame-white disc
in silken mists
above shining trees,--
if I in my north room
dance naked, grotesquely
before my mirror
waving my shirt round my head
and singing softly to myself:
"I am lonely, lonely.
I was born to be lonely,
I am best so!"
If I admire my arms, my face,
my shoulders, flanks, buttocks
again the yellow drawn shades,--
Who shall say I am not
the happy genius of my household?
-William Carlos Williams

The most grotesque, most naked dance of all is inside.

tired tired fingers won't type full sentences so fragments they shall be

i astound, myself: thinking i fall in love with everything; have the capacity to constantly fall fall fall fall in love but now i think, everything i love is something i loved as a little girl. everything i love i used to love. everything that i love i fell for as a child. love is not new; it is not discovered. love is remembering. uncovering what it was you captured with tenderness as a child

nobody dare tell me chasing beauty is frivolous and not worthwhile. what is frivolous about pain? beauty=pain; if you don't believe, look at mcqueen, etc. any great work and tell me i'm not right; there is pain in everything lovely; even childhood bliss is not without pain-time passes so fast, and afterall its just a manmade conception, like chair, or apple-it may as well not exist; instead there is flatness, and what once was will always be; so the child grows and there it is again; pain

inspiration=energy; excitement; that is all
two kinds: 1. that ^ feeling; 2. pretty and worthwhile great things to show others to simulate 1.

Saturday, September 15, 2012

Winter, I Love You


I really miss true winter. When waking up is like stumbling into a frost that is just delicious. Wriggling the cold from your toes as your fingers wrap around a steaming mug.  Trying in vain to warm your insides with hearty breakfast while your nose, pink and numb, has other ideas, like staying frozen. 

Please, please, please let me get a real winter this year. 





Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Lyrics

They know where it hurts.

On Pandora, one after the other:

"How did we get to be so far apart"
"I am timeless like a broken watch"
"Is it any wonder I can't sleep?"
"Beauty queen of only eighteen, she had some trouble with herself"

Thursday, July 26, 2012

I wish I didn't write in riddles


I read writing that is clear and bright and open, like water. It overwhelms me. I feel so connected to the person writing, wanting nothing more than to get to know them. It's like my soul reading their soul free from language. And then I remember how words come to me—the tangled way they leave my lips is the same way they crawl onto the page. I write vines. I write dead things. Things that even if alive are never perceived to be. I write seaweed. I want to write the sea. I want to write spiderwebs because they are patterned and ornate and beautiful without losing their clarity. They are translucent and the threads are light. I write cobwebs aged in attics. Bent by dust and fallen bodies, they have no structure. I write corpses without skeletons.  

Monday, July 23, 2012

i love everyone and noone, everything and nothing

Monday, July 2, 2012

pressure

a beautiful body
a beautiful mind
a beautiful face
beautiful hair
beautiful skin
beautiful art
beautiful ideas
beautiful execution
beautiful words
beautiful stories
beautiful relationships
beautiful soul
beautiful memories
beautiful form
beautiful rallys
beautiful winners
beautiful walk
beautiful style
beautiful taste
beautiful touch
beautiful photos
beautiful carriage
beautiful mannerisms
beautiful movement
beautiful smile
beautiful laugh
beautiful hurt
beautiful tribute
beautiful kindness
beautiful goals
beautiful thoughts
beautiful thoughts

Friday, June 1, 2012

You know that moment when you’re reading a book and you just have to stop and bite your lip and squeal or sigh or close your eyes and wrinkle your nose and forehead and press the book against your heart and just like sit there and try to soak up the gorgeous literature via osmosis? That’s my favorite part of reading. 
-tommyshawsboots, via scatteredtealeaves 

Friday, May 25, 2012

When I was ten years old, my father and I took a trip to Paris, leaving my younger brother and mother in London where she was filming a movie. My dad believed in one-on-one time with us, and sometimes that extended to a weekend away. We stayed at a great hotel and he said I could order whatever I wanted for breakfast (French fries). We went to the Pompidou museum, the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre - the usual spots. It was pretty great. On the plane back to London he asked me if I knew why we had gone, just he and I, to Paris for the weekend. I said no, but I felt so lucky for the trip. He said, “I wanted you to see Paris for the first time with a man who would always love you, no matter what.” From that time on, Paris was and continues to be very special to me. I lived there for five months in 1994 and I have made many trips back. These are the places in Paris I stay and eat and toast my dad.

- Gwyneth Paltrow

Monday, May 21, 2012

We Are Carved Like Marble

Snarl of crackling Earth: a sound like shovel scraping stone. An utterly sly, serpentine uttering unpleasing to the ear, but brought about by the rolling of four wheels onto the street perpendicular to the driveway, my father's rendition of "Honey, I'm Home", it could be wind chimes.

Thursday, May 17, 2012

"All the strands are interwoven, often in grotesque patterns, but everything echoes everything else..."
-Isaiah Berlin, The Soviet Mind: Russian Culture Under Communism

Wednesday, May 16, 2012

"The poet’s mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together."
-T.S. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent"

I am the son and the heir

Thunder outside and butterflies in my stomach put there by nothing in particular. Just as thunder seems to indicate an explosion when really no such event transpired, the butterflies too make noise, shift in their confining chamber like marionettes guided by a tangible force, but no. No such force exists, merely the absence of one and the corresponding longing.


Saturday, April 28, 2012

I am ruined

Sometimes looking at enough inspiration photos for a project alters your perception beyond repair, images so achingly pretty they snag on your eyelids and reverberate off everything you look at, seep  into words on a page so every A is a majestic igloo rooftop that perpetuates the spell and all letters that follow form a horizon of frosty treetops, backdrop to a faraway land, languid wonder of childhood folktales and fairy tales.


Thursday, April 5, 2012

Poetry of Criticism

"Baudelaire: Art Critic" by Alfred Werner




This, a million times over.
What I'm struggling with, remember? Because why should the inspiration behind something end with it? Designers can be inspired by words, writers can be inspired by image--there is no reason for walls to be driven between the various art forms, and definitely no reason for a review to be devoid of imagination. Criticism as an art in which the writer looks at the subject to be reviewed and then traces what it stirs in him, without placing borders on where the response to the work takes him, this would be worthwhile and interesting.

Wednesday, March 28, 2012

The more I grow, the more I feel like a child.

Sunday, March 25, 2012

Running On Ceilings

Longing long locks for a while now. The way the waves concealed my torso while two pieces I cut to make weightless framed my face...I want to recreate the image even if the moment has crystallized but when I look into the mirror the body of waves takes up less space on my back while the pieces around my face that I tuck cruelly behind my ears are too long and frazzled at the edges. Time has flipped everything but who gave it the right while people are deemed foolish for wanting to perform the reverse?

Saturday, March 17, 2012

why do we call them stories if what we feel is real

"I looked up at him. I noticed for the first time the lines around his eyes, how his left one seemed to droop into a crevice. Above my father, the branches of the live oak played against each other and then were stilled. I looked at my father for a long time like that, his face framed by those branches and the blue sky beyond."
-Ana Menendez, In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd

It's amazing how someone can write something based on their father, and if there is love there, the reader will always be filling the space where words end with an image of his own father, so what you get in that moment is the sketch of a figure that is simultaneously parent to both. Reader and author become related, connected, by the strange alchemy of words. 

What did I say about worlds being intertwined

     "He led her around the dance floor lined with chaperones, and when they turned he whispered that he wanted to follow her laughter to the moon. 
      She laughed again, the notes round and heavy as summer raindrops, and Máximo felt his fingers go cold where they touched hers. The danzón played, and they turned and turned, and the faces of the chaperones and the moist warm air--and Máximo with his cold fingers worried that she had laughed at him. He was twenty-four and could not imagine a more sorrowful thing in all the world. 
      Sometimes, years later, he would catch a premonition of Rosa in the face of his eldest daughter. She would turn toward a window or do something with her eyes. And then she would smile and tilt her head back, and her laughter connected him again to that night, made him believe for a moment that life was a string you could gather up in your hands all at once."
-Ana Menendez, In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd

Spring or Something Like It

While I was running, my eyes landed on gold letters embossed on a black mailbox. The picture plane jutting in time with my stride made them read like Gatsby. I ran to the end of the block and did a three sixty, slowing to run in place when leveling with the mailbox. Gazety, it read. Russian for newspapers. It's so funny how our worlds are intertwined.

Tuesday, March 13, 2012

Library

Refuge among the stacks. The cadence of cars travels
Inside, in tune with the displacement of air around my
knees. Books near and far, cascading; Conspiring,
Angles inclining, surrounding
me.

If my index finger were a silkworm, I'd make a glistening trail across the spines.

lan·guor

lan·guor/ˈlaNG(g)É™r/
Noun:
  1. The state or feeling, often pleasant, of tiredness or inertia.
  2. An oppressive stillness of the air.

Friday, March 9, 2012

Matryoshka World

Staring between frames, into that invisible gutter separating the panels of paintings, I stumbled on the feature of museums that I find so wonderful. Consider this: even if you don't like or can't connect with every painting you see, just the fact of walking into the box that is a museum and alternating your attention between its sides is like time travel. At any one point in time, the wall in front of you is a more or less two dimensional surface but contained within that surface are whole worlds of indiscriminate time periods piled into neat little frames, worlds you can access merely by fixing your gaze.

Reading a book is another activity often likened to entering a different world, and with this in mind bookshops are magical by default. That said, the experience of exploring a bookstore is unique still. While with a museum, the interaction between the viewer and the work, the emotional passage through time and space, transpires within the same moment, a bookshop functions on the teasing aspect. You don't experience the books while you are browsing; everything hangs on the anticipation--studying all those spines, seeing the dust leap from them and gather in little clouds you must dismantle to get to the next shelf... Indeed, the electricity in the air, does it emanate from the books or is it a projection of your own excitement? No matter the cause, the atmosphere crackles.

So while the paintings and the literature fizzle with the secrets from within their distinct worlds, the universes which contain them--museums, libraries--are not without their own charms. 

Tuesday, March 6, 2012

What is it about

the striking sensational difference in the experiences of pressing a heart with a lead point into paper versus trapping a bracket and a number 3 in a text box that is in turn trapped within the dimensions of an LCD screen?

Deemed part of the tech-saavy generation, I fill my head with nostalgia and surround my body with the likewise physical--books--fingers running across the variable surfaces in attempt to appreciate their minute differences. Cherishing the fine grain and cool planes, wondering how all that can be pushed into oblivion by a single screen, I am like those "nineteenth-century travelers" who could not adapt their perceptual modes from the accustomed travel by carriage to travel by train (Schivelbusch).

I mean it's like I said before, no romance is lost on me because I see the beauty in it, the preservation and the possibility, the magic of holding worlds within a single screen but even though the novelty of riding in a horse-drawn carriage on a snow-strewn winter eve was made possible by their obsolescence in the realm of practical transportation, I don't want the same thing to happen to books and paper. I don't want them to become a thing of legend, though perhaps as artifacts they would draw the awestruck expressions that they deserve from a public that only recognizes a good thing once it is gone.

What I want is a happy harmony, like where we are now but without the feeling of foreboding. For people to hold on to one while embracing the other, but for the fearful grip that now characterizes the former to be replaced with a doting one.

Saturday, March 3, 2012

Spring Wishlist

new cute workout clothes
more glittery, velvety things
things with mesh
things with lurex running through them
more black clothes but this time dresses in crisp fabrics that would feel cooler against the skin in summer
bikinis
black bookshelf
light box
velvet pillows
vintage earrings
pretty lace bras and bralettes
crystal barrettes for when my locks again reach mermaid lengths, even if it won't be for a while but let's just call it an investment

Spring Break

Torn between the prospects of finally sleeping in tomorrow versus the routine waking up at an indecent hour and extracting myself from the comfort of the sheets, only to have the satisfaction of looking down at my warm bed, bathed in the blue tint of morning, and for once having the choice to crawl back into it. I wish I was better at weighing pros and cons.

The sound of rain has a beautifying effect on both alternatives. Waking up organically to the pitter patter on the window, eyes adjusting smoothly to a muted atmosphere is lovely, but then tricking yourself into believing you still need to wake up and go out into the rain makes the realization that you can stay in that much more powerful...the realization that you are free to submerge yourself under the covers and eventually savor breakfast and read a book or watch a film in bed, or write, or write about writing, and all the while around you the sound of rain belting out its unique melody against the glass.

Sunday, February 19, 2012

Pablo

You didn't leave an email but I want to thank you for your sweet words. Just as someone who is constantly taken with the mystique of people around them wishes to be a source of the same sort of intrigue for someone else, I always reach out to people who have written or created something that moves me or if I just love it a lot, always with a faint hope in the back of my mind that if I have had a similar effect on someone they would do the same for me.

I always feel the more strange for doing this, though, like people aren't often that direct, so it really meant a lot for you to leave me your note.

Friday, February 17, 2012

I tugged absently at my mind and out came this sentence(s).

Look at me with a look that says, here. Take me as I am. Take me as I appear in the reflection in the rain soaked train window, and on paper, the faceless heroine tangled up in her own locks that mimic the path of tree branches, seeping across the backs of my lids when I close my eyes but then what you see is nothing at all.

Wednesday, February 8, 2012

musings aggregated in a ten minute's walk in the pouring snow

1. so much happening in the external world, while so much is happening internally, in this secret, hidden dimension inhabited by people's thoughts--personal universes braided limply together

 2. why writing about your own experience is not selfish: just like writing in the first person perspective (I) is often better accepted by an audience versus writing in the second (you) which elicits a negative response from the reader--the reader rebels against the presumptuousness of the writer, how dare you think you know me, this isn't me, etc. Same goes for writing on behalf of people, instead of connecting the reader, this creates a distance. people can much more easily connect to an "I" perspective because this allows them to find parallels between the "I" created by the author and their own "I". It doesn't necessitate an absolute parallelism or mirroring between the two. there is no pretension in writing from your own thoughts or experiences without concealing or blurring their relation to you, only honesty.

3. discussions: everyone is coming from a different place. everyone measures thoughts or ideas against the backdrop of their own intellectual or theoretical foundation in order to derive a sense of meaning or understanding from them. this subjectivity explains why nobody will ever be truly on the same plane in a discussion. everyone has their own history of experience from which they pull ideas that intrigued them, ideas that they spent time turning over. these ideas will almost always take initial precedence over fully formed ideas contributed by external persons (idea of personal wisdom derived from personal experience trumping wisdom derived from other people's advice)--what this perhaps suggests is that we attribute greater value to the knowledge that we have had to go through certain lengths to attain--some work, some translation or formulation had to take place in our minds to get us from point a to point b, there had to have transpired some germination of an idea. this contrasted with knowledge or a fully formed idea that was simply handed to us. this is what makes discussion so fascinating though, the coming together of all of these separate universes that we inhabit in the seclusion of our minds, the clashing of conflicting or perhaps interconnected ideas, each external idea interacting with our internal ones and creating something perhaps altogether new, or at the very least activating other streams of thought.

 4. why my quest for beauty is not a superficial or irrelevant one: things, entities and ideas, shift depending on how you define them...i happen to position beauty in the broad realm of the intricacies and intrigues that emerge in life-moments of insight or unique or telling parallels between things discovered, just solid and compelling thoughts or ideas, however "serious" or painful or grotesque or structured they may be, there is no limit to this conception of beauty. beauty is not confined to only that which possesses a conventional, aesthetic beauty, but is rather an umbrella term which contains beneath its sweeping body anything that is good and true and powerful.

5. thinking about how crazy it is that one thought sets off another like a firework and they just keep at it, multiplying, each one splitting from the other like cell division and it is impossible to cap them with a stopper because you don't want to stop it. remembered jk rowling's conception of a pensieve and thought how funny it is that, again, something formulated in the head of another can impact so many people to the point where it becomes yet another parallel forming organically in your mind

6. my mind feels wrung, wrung dry, wrung wet, wrung until it is left throbbing even though there is nothing left of it to capture except for the stream of forms and colors that with each projection split further the shrieking matter of the conflicted mind
i hate that some words with all their semantic potential are too often reduced to their most basic, literal meanings. every time i use the word "magic" in an academic setting the professor looks at me as if i am intellectually challenged, like "there, there, silly girl. i don't think that there are any elements of the supernatural at work here"


Saturday, February 4, 2012

"Rivers will flow with chocolate and tea"

-Langle and Vanderburch, Louis-Bronze et le Saint-Simonien

valentine's life

i feel beautiful. always after running, in that split second when i catch a glimpse of the mirror before disappearing behind the curtain of water beads.

i feel so much love. and yet when the shampoo gets into my eye still i thrash my head like a dragon.

Saturday, January 28, 2012

Laziness

“Everyone does what they can to avoid thinking. Laziness is the most basic human trait. People don’t want to think-they can’t make the connection between entertainment and thought. They want immediate kicks. People will not be human until they get pleasure from thought-only a thinking person can be a whole person.”

-Vera Chytilova

Yes. That's why I love what the Russian animator (can't recall his name) said, that rather than lowering his craft to the level of the public, he does good work and forces his audience to rise to the level necessary to understand it. He forces the viewer to think. I don't mean everything you watch or read or listen to needs to be of this quality, but I don't see why so many are vehemently opposed to thinking deeply or caring about things beyond a hearty laugh, when opening yourself to the mysteries of art and life through contemplation is the most true and natural way to euphoria and ecstasy (there is a reason for "the frenzy of poetic inspiration" to be an entry in the latter's dictionary definition). There are better applications of passion than fighting that which will expose you to the beauty of the human experience.
Imagined being old, breathing in the bitter trace of days past and unrecoverable. The now is so beautiful, to be young and surrounded by family.
i grow while i shrink and am twisted with wisdom and joy
just two more things to mutate with my metamorphosis

then here i am again beaming at the parallelism of it all

Friday, January 27, 2012

Never Say Neverland

No matter how much Rambo ages, he will always retain those delightful features which mark his eternal childlike condition. Just like it doesn't make a difference how much wisdom, knowledge, or experience our person collects. No matter how many times we call ourselves adults and how many times we believe it.

We are destined to a lifetime of childhood. We are all children, looking with wide eyes at the external world and our internal universes and doing what we can to make sense of the mess that contains us. Look truly into the eyes of any woman and paintbrush eyelashes will frame the eyes of a little girl. Look deeply into the eyes of any man and you will find a boy.

This is Never, Neverland.

Saturday, January 21, 2012

Recursion

I believe in doing what you believe and allowing the force of curiosity, the force of inspiration to drive your motions. I believe in fate.

Some months have passed since, looking at a model's photo instead of doing my homework, my eyes interacted with a beautiful quote someone left on her picture. If I had not done this I never would have discovered Baudelaire, or probably I would have, but like Keira Knightley's character says in Last Night, "it's about the when of time", and each time my eyes ran over his words since was strengthened by that first time. It's like Milan Kundera's concept of the motif that he explores in The Unbearable Lightness of Being: Baudelaire has become a motif in my life, and motifs must be evidence of the existence of fate, even if that fate is a construct of our need to find connections and parallels in attempt to make sense of the world.

Just now, looking up a quote from the Baudelaire text I am reading

("The child sees everything in a state of newness; he is always drunk. Nothing more resembles what we call inspiration than the delight with which a child absorbs form and colour.")

 and I stumble upon more beauty to add to my collection:

"And the external world is reborn upon his paper, natural and more than natural, beautiful and more than beautiful, strange and endowed with an impulsive life like the soul of its creator. The phantasmagoria has been distilled from nature."

Fell in love with the words before realizing they too belonged to Baudelaire. This man knew my soul before it was born with my body.

The Ephemeral Quality


The motion which marks inspiration is like that of a firework. The explosion and the initial frenzy, followed by the scattering of sparks into dark corners of the night, literal in the case of the firework and figurative in the other, where dark corners signify the crevices of consciousness and thoughts are the sparks. The tragic feature of this metaphor is the identical manner in which the lights of both then dissipate into nothingness, never lingering.

Ghostly Attraction

"One day perhaps someone will put on a play in which we shall see a resurrection of those costumes in which our fathers found themselves every bit as fascinating as we do ourselves in our poor garments (which also have a grace of their own, it must be admitted, but rather of a moral and spiritual type). And then, if they are worn and given life by intelligent actors and actresses, we shall be astonished at ever having been able to mock them so stupidly. Without losing anything of its ghostly attraction, the past will recover the light and movement of life and will become present."

Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life


I love his ideas so much. Everything I read by him is touched by something timeless and magical and stirs something I have been thinking or wish to be thinking. His writings answer questions I hadn't realized I asked, with the added effect of setting off a million little thoughts to glitter like fireworks in my head and in my eyes, but unlike fireworks, these linger.

image source: jake weird















Saturday, January 14, 2012

On Nature and Imagination

"Painters who are obedient to the imagination seek in their dictionary for which the whole visible universe is but a storehouse of images and signs to which the imagination will give a relative place and value; it is a sort of pasture which the imagination must digest and transform..."

-Charles Baudelaire

How I feel about writing. And how Hemingway felt about writing (proof).
"After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn't it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked--as I am surprisingly often--why I bother to get up in the mornings."

-Richard Dawkins

Monday, January 9, 2012

Substance Over Matter

"The Paris art scene is tame!" he tells me, looking up and down the candlelit tables at Comptoir de la Gastronomie. "Parisians are too busy dining and drinking and trying to seduce each other to pay serious attention to it."
A cliché, but a cliché with a scrap of truth to it. The French I see around me are not home funneling their vital energy into some artistic pursuit. Much as they may hope that their nation excels at such endeavors, what they reserve their real attention, ingenuity, and passion for is not the art of writing or composing, painting or philosophizing, but— quite simply —the art of living.
You need only pick up a French newspaper to discover that, while other papers in the West offer book reviews, the French offer book raves. Parisian reviewers have mistaken promotion for reflection, commerce for analysis, Serge Halimi, editor of the political journal Le Monde diplomatique, tells me as we wander down a bustling boulevard near his home. The art of criticism is defunct. So, too, is the art of philosophy. 
 Source: Conde Nast Traveler, http://www.cntraveler.com/features/2009/04/Paris-Isn-t-It-Romantic


This. (In the bold.) A touch of this is what's needed in the States and I'd be happy to oblige. 

Friday, January 6, 2012

Ode to Winter

Why should there be an end to velvet and lace and mesh and sparkles? To fairy lights and glitter lamps and tinsel garlands? The holidays may have expired on the calendar but there is no end to tiny tea bags swimming in tall mugs, and the promise of white frosting, in the form of snow outside and marshmallows on the surface of the hot chocolate nestled between your frosted palms, is fresh as the flush on your cheeks. Put there by the wind that, following three seasons of hibernation, has gotten its bite back, the rosy glow tells the tale of a beginning.

Let this be the season of tea party dresses, for winter's just begun.