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Category: in search of God

February 10, 2011

the sixth and seventh circles of Purgatory

after having managed with Dante first the seven circles of lurid Hell,
then five in the much more tolerable Purgatory, I’ve reached the sixth
and seventh circles there of Lust and Gluttony, sins I have been more
particularly prone to
  
the egregious crimes of murder, fraud, treason, blasphemy, the stuff 
of very Hell, were never a concern for me, while the venial imperfections 
of pride, envy, wrath, sloth, Purgatory’s more tempered lot, would never,
surely, transcendentally confound me, I thought, should there be indeed
a Hell, a Heaven, or a Purgatory, notions incidentally that were first made
explicit by Dante himself in his “Divine Comedy“, no earlier topographical
description of the place had ever been written, later Bosch would paint his
“Garden of Earthly Delights”  
 
we owe our notions of the Christian afterlife even still to Dante 
  
  
but where of course does all this fit in a universe we know to be infinite,
an idea itself, that last, that is no less awesome
 
somewhere above Olympus, the home of the Greek Gods, is where it sits,
I think, but beneath the canopy of the stars, which enclosed the earth then, 
but which dispersed, it would seem, of its own incorporeality when we’d
reached beyond  
 
  
at the terrace of Gluttony, a level that winds around the mountain,
Dante meets among emaciated shades – “shades”, he says, “that
seemed things dead twice over”, who hunger for instead of victuals
eternal life – Forese Donati, an old flame 
  
“how did you come so far so fast?”, he asks his bosom friend who’d died
only a short four years earlier  
  
“It is my Nella”, he replies, his wife
  
        “whose flooding tears so quickly brought me 
         to drink sweet wormwood in the torments. 
  
         With her devoted prayers and with her sighs,
         she plucked me from the slope where one must wait  
         and freed me from the other circles.” * 
   
but I think it was Dante himself who could never have consigned such a
privy buddy to anything short of Purgatory   
 
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    and that was the terrace of Gluttony
 
tomorrow I do Lust   
 
 
upon moving towards that terrace, the last before reaching the
circles of Paradise, an angel blinds Dante with its radiance so that
he must turn away his eyes  
 
        “And as, announcing dawn, the breeze of May
          stirs and exudes a fragrance
          filled with the scent of grass and flowers,
 
          just such a wind I felt stroking my brow  
          and I could feel the moving of his feathers,
          my senses steeped in odor of ambrosia.” **

 

I wish you angels, and Heaven 
 
Richard 
 
 
*    “Purgatorio“, XXIII, 85-90 
**  “Purgatorio“, XXIV, 145-150 
 
                           translations by Robert and Jean Hollander

 

 

 

 

 

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May 28, 2010

true happiness

 
in the movie “Never on Sunday” Homer Thrace, an American moralist and armchair philosopher, objects to the libertine ways of the modern Greeks, Ilya especially, a whore, disconcerts him, she likes her job, so do the dockworkers, and the other women who ply her trade at the port of Piraeus, near Athens 
  
Homer Thrace accuses them all righteously of pursuing the Stoic and Epicurean philosophies that came out of the fall of Greece, instead of the true and noble ideals of the more upstanding Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, who believed that the greatest happiness comes from the joy of understanding  
  
when he tells Taki, who plays the bouzouki, that he can never be a true musician because he can’t read music, Taki, who is too old now to learn, hides in the bathroom forlornly, and says he will never play again 
  
Ilya, Melina Mercouri, in a star turn, tells him composers need his music to be able to write his notes down, what would composers do without him, if birds can’t read music, she asks, should they stop singing  
  
Taki comes out of the bathroom
  
so had I   

  
Richard

 

 

 

                   

                       ______________________________

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May 13, 2010

John Ruskin, on truth in art

that we have dismissed, often indeed forgotten, the great voices of our culture,
the great oracles, the dead, they’ve dared to call them, painters, composers,
poets, doesn’t make their pronouncements less true, less inspiring, proof that
they are still very much alive, and relevant 
  
that they are still relevant ties us to the great notion that we are from very
Homer to the present day one family, one illustrious family, which to disregard, 
or any of its great giants, would be our inestimable loss 
 
where would we be without their wisdom, leaves without a trunk
 
 
John Ruskin was a great influence on Marcel Proust, my own supreme poet and prophet, I needed to plumb his literary pockets for, I did not doubt, nuggets of priceless gold
 
 
Richard 
 
 
                       _____________________

 

Chapter 7
 
8 – That then which I would have the reader inquire respecting
       every work of art of undetermined merit submitted to his
       judgment, is not whether it be a work of especial grandeur,
       importance, or power; but whether it have any virtue or
       substance as a link in this chain of truth; whether it have 
       recorded or interpreted anything before unknown; whether
       it have added one single stone to our heaven pointing pyramid,
       cut away one dark bough, or levelled one rugged hillock in our
       path. This, if it be an honest work of art, it must have done, for
       no man ever yet worked honestly without giving some such help
       to his race. God appoints to every one of his creatures a separate
       mission, and if they discharge it honourably, if they acquit themselves
       like men and faithfully follow that light which is in them, withdrawing
       from it all cold and quenching influence, there will assuredly come of
       it such burning as, in its appointed mode and measure, shall shine
       before men, and be of service constant and holy. Degrees infinite
       of lustre there must always be, but the weakest among us has a
       gift, however seemingly trivial, which is peculiar to him, and which
       worthily used will be a gift also to his race for  ever: 
                ‘Fool not’, says George Herbert,
                                                                     ‘For all may have,
                             If they dare choose, a glorious life or grave’ 
      
 
                                            John Ruskin (from “Modern Painters“) 
 
 

                     ______________________________________________

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April 29, 2010

“Trouble” – Matthew Dickman‏

                                                                                                                                                                              after the great hiatus of the Middle Ages Descartes declared “I think, therefore I am“, and set the modern world in motion, the Age of Reason, the Era of Human Rights 
 
but even Shakespeare some seventy years earlier had given voice already to the consequent existential dilemma, by way of Hamlet in his “To be, or not to be“, the moral dilemma of the individual before existence – “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” – and the abyss of eternity, a question up to that point forbidden on dire pain of heresy  
  
                                                                                                                                                                         Emily Dickinson touches on the subject famously, others also of equal authority, but here is something I thought true, touching, beautiful, and ultimately inspiring for anyone who’s delved that deep  
 
                                                                                                                                                                   Richard 
  
  
                       ______________________
  
 
Trouble   
 
                                                                                                                                                                        Marilyn Monroe took all her sleeping pills
to bed when she was thirty-six, and Marlon Brando’s daughter
hung in the Tahitian bedroom
of her mother’s house,
while Stanley Adams shot himself in the head. Sometimes
you can look at the clouds or the trees
and they look nothing like clouds or trees or the sky or the ground.
The performance artist Kathy Change
set herself on fire while Bing Crosby’s sons shot themselves
out of the music industry forever.
I sometimes wonder about the inner lives of polar bears. The French
philosopher Gilles Deleuze jumped
from an apartment window into the world
and then out of it. Peg Entwistle, an actress with no lead
roles, leaped off the “H” in the HOLLYWOOD sign
when everything looked black and white
and David O. Selznick was king, circa 1932. Ernest Hemingway
put a shotgun to his head in Ketchum, Idaho
while his granddaughter, a model and actress, climbed the family tree
and overdosed on phenobarbital. My brother opened
thirteen fentanyl patches and stuck them on his body
until it wasn’t his body anymore. I like
the way geese sound above the river. I like
the little soaps you find in hotel bathrooms because they’re beautiful.
Sarah Kane hanged herself, Harold Pinter
brought her roses when she was still alive,
and Louis Lingg, the German anarchist, lit a cap of dynamite
in his own mouth
though it took six hours for him
to die, 1887. Ludwig II of Bavaria drowned
and so did Hart Crane, John Berryman, and Virginia Woolf. If you are
travelling, you should always bring a book to read, especially
on a train. Andrew Martinez, the nude activist, died
in prison, naked, a bag
around his head, while in 1815 the Polish aristocrat and writer
Jan Potocki shot himself with a silver bullet.
Sara Teasdale swallowed a bottle of blues
after drawing a hot bath,
in which dozens of Roman senators opened their veins beneath the water.
Larry Walters became famous
for flying in a Sears patio chair and forty-five helium-filled
weather balloons. He reached an altitude of 16,000 feet
and then he landed. He was a man who flew.
He shot himself in the heart. In the morning I get out of bed, I brush
my teeth, I wash my face, I get dressed in the clothes I like best.
I want to be good to myself.
 

                                                     Matthew Dickman 

             

                        ____________________________________

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April 5, 2010

5 April, 2010

                                                                                                                                                                               April is dour here, with grim rain and nearly sleet, but for the burgeoning buds and leaves manifesting themselves in a variety of resplendent colours, from the lightest pastels to the most saturated earth tones, for our wonder and delectation, despite the glum gray cover of clouds 
  
under my matching umbrella I am also a flower, I conclude, and take consolation, inspiration, from the fact that I am not among them alone
  
and proceed as though touched by magic   
    
  
Richard   

 

 

 

                               __________________________                                                                     

 

  

 

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March 18, 2010

Still Life with Teapot and Fan – Wang Weidong‏

Still Life with Teapot and Fan by Wang Weidong

                           ” Still Life with Teapot and Fan ” 
 
                                       Wang Weidong  
 
                                   _________________  

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                despite bifurcations in the direction of abstract art – Impressionism Surrealism, Expressionism, Pop – representational art, with its evident demands on the artist – formal excellence, not just heat and heart – still inspires perhaps our foremost admiration 
 
perhaps it’s true however that still lifes, nearly by definition, are bloodless, as is to my mind, here again, this exquisite nevertheless “Teapot“, which reaches out to your intellect rather than to your emotions
 
it speaks of duty rather than love, tradition rather than innovation, a nostalgia for security, conformity, philosophy perhaps, and ultimately by inference faith and trust  
 
if you let your sense of taste do the talking
  
 
Richard

                  

                           __________________________

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January 10, 2009

The Birth of Venus

  Botticelli Venus.jpg

                        “The Birth of Venus“, c.1482-6
 
                                    Sandro Botticelli 
 
                                       (1445 -1510)
 
                                         ________

this is me at New Year’s Eve, instead of a party after a day of some incidental work, not much but enough to hobble my spirit, I thought a hot bath would be good, maybe even an alternative, at midnight itself, I carried on, it sounded irresistible

I’d light a candle of course, play soft music, Lizst was already on, his “Années de Pèlerinage” – a meditation for piano on his Swiss, Italian pilgrimage – would go on tinkling away peripatetically prestidigitating still for hours, I wouldn’t have to even change a thing

I’d be reborn of course, that was the rationale for not going out, never mind the cold, the snow, for me the late hour, who’d pass after all even for a New Year’s party, I mused, on an outright reincarnation   

later I’d make my excuses

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          meanwhile after a long, hot, indeed gestative soak, in the very womb of earth, in allegorical, I imagined, primal waters, wherein I’d redefine my inner being, redirect of course my errant soul, I could only rise transformed resplendent, I instinctively foresaw, as Venus, specifically Botticelli’s

I arose

a mane of golden hair, neck and profile by already Modigliani, fluted fingers a modest flutter above pert breasts, the others in their clutch a strand of protective locks to shield my innocent, inviolate pudenda

Venus, I thought, goddess of love

to be reflected not only for the moment in my mirror but like a resolution in my heart for the entire year, years in fact, to come

took a picture, hope you like it

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             and all the very best                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     Richard

psst: only later did I realize there were zephyrs there, they’re there of course, I should’ve known, always

and one of also the Horae – Nymphe, I think, goddess of the morning hour of washing, ablutions – handing me a vernal cloak, a tribute to my season, of course, of spring

         

                                                                                                       

________________________________________________

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December 7, 2008

Stefan Lochner

    Stefan Lochner 007.jpg

                                   Stefan Lochner

 

                                      (1400-1452)

 

                       “Madonna in the Rose Bower”                            

                                                                     

                                                                    __________

 

                                    for Christmas

 

                           I wish you faith in angels    

 

                                                    

                                          Richard    

                                                                                                                                           

 

                                     ________________________ 

 

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November 18, 2008

falling for Abstraction

  
            Morning star  

                                                         

                                “Morning star”, 1940                   

                                         Joan Miró

                                      _____________

                                                                                                                                      to prize Abstraction you need to feel its value, somehow make it relevant to your well-being, your soul, not an easy task for someone who hasn’t grown up with it, I see the same thing ‘s happened for instance for many with computers, the language is entirely foreign

I remember a sigh of relief, and unexpectedly delight, at the Queen Sofia after slogging through the history of art for a couple of weeks across the street at the Prado, before a roomful of Mirós

the Prado had been dripping in art

the Spaniards of course, Murillo, Goya, Zurbaran, were there, El Greco, the transplanted Doménicos Theotokópoulos, his great elongated figures depicting anguish, torment, ecstasies, edged unforgettably in charcoal black

the cheeky Velazquez – looking you straight in the face, where his subjects, the king and queen, also stand, reflected craftily albeit in a mirror at the back where you’d be too were this a real mirror – is a celebrated self-portrait, majesties no less have acquiesced to be merely backdrop here for the artist’s rendering of himself 

and indeed who remembers these once almighty monarchs beside their now immortal subject, their lasting fame assured ironically by virtue mostly of his grace

royal children meanwhile cavort up front, while on the far left taking up most of that side there’s the canvas he’s working on, a brush in one hand, in the other a palette of assorted colours, considering their applicability

a triumph

                                                                                                                                         the Dutch were there, the ubiquitous Rubens of course, the Rembrandts, the van Dycks, the Bruegels, but supreme for me among them was the unearthly rather “Garden of Earthly Delights“, I didn’t expect it there, it was awesome, Bosch representing pictorially the panoply of Christian mythological thought, from Eden to black and ignominious hell through, in the middle triptych, our earth, controversially carnal and cavorting, in pink and azure blue, for our sober edification and delight

and still there were the innumerable, the masterful, Italians

                                                                                                                                       we left the Prado saturated, my mom and I, the Queen Sofia was an afterthought with time left on our hands, we expected nothing other there than baubles, trinkets

but Miró greeted us at the door with a roomful of light, air, fantasy, planets, comets, asterisks swirled in orbits of infinite phantasmagorical invention, fish flew where stars fell, and eyes looked out of spiderwebs, perspective gave way to dimensions

my mom breathed a sigh of relief, simultaneously enchantment, we’d entered another world

just as had in its own time, for that matter, the history itself of art

from there it was just a hop, skip and jump of course to the more abstruse maybe even abstractions of for instance even a Jackson Pollock

imagine

                                                                                                                                      yours in the discovery of art                                                                                                                                         richibi

psst: in thinking of Miró I was reminded of Chagall, he could be he for whimsy, I recalled an ekphrastic poem about a painting of his I thought I might’ve lost, all I could remember was the poem’s own mimetic whimsy, and a blue, I’d thought, violin

here it is

by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Don’t let that horse

Don’t let that horse
eat that violin
cried Chagall’s mother

But he kept right on painting

And became famous

And kept on painting
The Horse with Vilolin in Mouth
And when he finally finished it
he jumped up upon the horse
and rode away
waving the violin

And then with a low bow gave it
to the first naked nude he ran across

And there were no strings attached

 

 

____________________________________

 

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November 9, 2008

Diane Arbus – 1923-1971

     Diane Arbus, Identical Twins, Roselle, N.J.

                                    “Identical Twins, Roselle, N.J.“, 1967
 
                                                        Diane Arbus  
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   1923 -1971
                               
                                                          _______
 
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      with the camera the shutter becomes the brush, the art only a click away, the artistry, the creativity, debatable
 
where is the skill, the ingenuity, indeed the art
 
the snapshot is a picture of an imagination taken on the spot, the art must be in the very brain, not in, as one would expect, the dextrous fingers, the articulation, the prestidigitation, must be already sorted out, already calibrated, technical prowess not required, just able, artful observation
 
the shutter will do the rest
 
can a point of view then, a take, one will reasonably inquire, be art

 
Diane Arbus had been a fashion photographer, gave it up for something, it would appear, more meaningful, became thereby, in my estimation, unforgettable, broke down for me reservations about photography as art 
 
witness
 
“Identical Twins, Roselle, N.J.“, 1967, is not about these twins, these unexceptional twins – otherwise merely a portrait, an indifferent even portrait – but about something much more relevant
 
two little girls in black and white – though this may be itself the kind of photography – look straight into the camera, you look to tell them apart
 
their little dress adorned by each the same white ruffle at the collar, recalling incidentally the Reformation Dutch, a witty touch, give no clue, they could be matching dolls, flat cut-outs, for that matter, given the minimal use of perspective
 
a matching hair band, the same hair, the same nose, the same mouth, don’t either, the eyes do but only just 

they tell though the entire story, their different light, their different incandescence, though even ever so slight, though ever even so elusive, is what finally tells them apart 

but the focus has switched, you’re observing something now immaterial, incorporeal, insubstantial, become simultaneously something mystical, metaphysical, transcendental, some might call God  
 
Michelangelo’s did the same thing for Adam, another much wittier art history touch

 
two other girls, “Untitled“, 1970-71, speak even more clearly perhaps about this 
 
note the angel come through in the girl on the left, in all its magnificent splendour

   

                                           “Untitled“, 1970-71
 
                                                   Diane Arbus 

                                                   1923 -1971
                                                 
                                                      _______

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  Diane Arbus committed suicide on July 26, 1971, undoubtedly undone by what she’d sought to witness, perhaps the too bright light
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     psst: why is it that those who are “Untitled” would never think of taking their own life, perhaps they’ve been blessed with an extra measure of courage

                                                                           

                                                                  

_________________________________________________

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