paintings to ponder | Richibi's Weblog

July 30, 2016

up my idiosyncrasies – Plato‏

“The School Of Athens“ (1510-1511)

Raphael

_____

he sounds just like you, my friend said,

who’d bought me the works of Plato,

for C***mas maybe, or my birthday, or

maybe just because he knew I’d very

much appreciate them

we were reading him together, as is

always my inclination, his Meno

according to my calculations,

Socrates was doing most of the

talking, with Meno, a Sophist

acolyte, a school of philosophy then,

the Sophists, which claimed it could

prove anything by using the right

arguments

lawyers, of course, ensued, politicians

and rhetoric, the art of proving anything

by using the right arguments

philosophy had reached a structural,

indeed an existential, impasse, why,

they therefore wondered, philosophy

wherein it entered a phase of moral

speculation, Stoicism, Epicureanism,

Scepticism, Cynicism, and can you

blame them, theories about the

stars, the moon, the world, even

matter itself, had become so

questionable, was it fire, air, water,

atoms, at its source, who knew

I thought so too, I said, and told

him that Plato’s were the first

texts I studied in philosophy when

I entered university, that’s where I

learned to talk like that, philosophy

from the scratch, as my German

teacher would’ve said, which is to

say, from its very beginnings,

whence I could view, I figured, the

evolution of received wisdom in

Western culture

I was young then, the young have

such dreams

my father had been agnostic, ever

asking questions, though we were

being raised Catholic, my sister

and I, on account of our mother

tongue, our entire community,

having been historically linked

with that religion, and cause my

parents wanted us to be educated

in French

an existentialist crisis would

eventually follow, I intuited, as

indeed it did, so I majored in

philosophy

Socrates taught me to ask

questions, that no one had

all the answers

Plato, usurping his master’s voice,

created the paradigm for our present

version of a Divinity, and Its Paradise

there is an ideal version of any

item we might consider, he spouted,

an ideal table, for instance, exists

of which every material table is an

imperfect example

to virtue, love, beauty, truth, he

applied the same principle, which

early erudite Catholics, Augustine,

Thomas Aquinas, for instance, and

others, despite rejecting all of the

other Greek cultural achievements,

appropriated in order to bolster their

impression of God, the ideal of the

Ideal

this lasted uncontested for just

over a thousand years

for a thousand years our salvation

had been extraterrestrial,

supranatural, this, our very,

perhaps only, existence, an

imperfect reflection of somewhere

else an ideal, a mere simulacrum,

we were, a metaphor

Socrates had only asked questions,

what is virtue, what is justice, what

is beauty, truth

Plato presumed to have known the

answers

Aristotle is making a comeback,

whose method, in opposition to

his contemporaneous forebear,

was much more like Charles

Darwin‘s, working from the facts,

which proved then, and are

proving still now, to be multifarious,

diverse, astonishing, and nearly

enough to make you believe in

God/dess again, this time, however,

through the back door

or in a multiplicity, a panoply, a

very pavilion, even, of natural

deities, otherwise known as

angels, for better or for worse

God/dess bless, or angels

Richard

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July 22, 2016

up my idiosyncrasies – Albertine‏

“Wing Seller“ (2006)

Stefan Caltia

_______

what are you doing, a friend of mine

asked when he called

I’m reading my Proust, I answered,

comfy enough with my text, after

years waking up side by side, to

use the possessive adjective

what’s going on, he inquired

Albertine is lying on his bed, I

recounted, asleep, she’s been there

for the past ten pages, and she’s

just now turned onto her stomach

there is not so much story as

paintings, in Proust, detailed

descriptions applied like strokes of

colour to a canvas, that of recovered

time, colours that are specific to a

place and a period, like photographs

showing in their very fabric their

ancestry, their lineage

but in the elucidation of what he

sees, or, more accurately, of what

he remembers, Proust delivers

a work of the very highest art, a

mixture of poetry and philosophy,

Beethoven did as much, see his

“Hammerklavier“

Proust’s French is essentially

immaculate, his tone, however

intimate, always erudite, aristocratic,

perspicacious, wise, penetrating,

embracing, which is to say, French,

though German can be also,

incidentally, pretty cerebral, English

is narrative, just the facts, please,

though often, I think, hilarious

Albertine had been one of the “young

girls in bloom” he’d met at Balbec, a

seaside resort, with whom he’d

undertaken an illicit affair, but

whose faithfulness he doubted

as she lay on his bed at his Paris

apartment, he replays all the

speculations his imagination could

provide, an endless set of variations

on his anguish, which is to say, his

jealousy, worthy of a very Othello

for ten pages he paints a picture of

infidelities completely of his making,

which, of course, becomes the world

he will respond to

it is all in our little heads, I surmise,

however informed, intelligent, that

we create our little realities, they

have never been nearly enough,

though, indeed, our lives depend

on them, however dutifully

considered, however unconsciously,

and ever convincingly, contrived

make them, I submit, good ones

I imagine myself a poet, for instance,

how’s that for a shot in the improbable

dark

Richard

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July 17, 2016

up my idiosyncrasies – Marcel Proust‏

“Holy Man“ (1989)

Eric Fischl

______

Marcel Proust is not an easy read,

of literature it is surely its Everest,

not an easy climb, but from its peak

the world takes on an entirely other

order

an English-speaking friend has

suggested he might try to read it

again, but not in French this time,

I countered that that way he’d miss

the many crevices and crags, the

slippery slopes and lethal ledges,

that give shape to the mountain,

which the French grammar would

apply in all its intricate

manifestations

part of the pleasure in reading

Proust is the poetry, where style

and substance coexist to create

magic, and inspiration

the sentences are long, they wind

on for often pages, you need to be

able to tell the subject from the verb

despite sometimes extended

intervening distances

but the grammar is sound throughout,

except for in a couple of isolated

instances, grammar that would test

even a Frenchman

indeed Proust is where, I profess, I

truly learned to speak French

there’s another mountain

the conceit is that someone rings

the bell at their Combray cottage,

and after 3300 pages someone

rings at the same door again

in between the years have passed,

they are the fruit of Proust’s

“recherche”, search, investigation,

quest, a term that can’t be fully

expressed as such in English,

which doesn’t express the

confluence of cold science and

candle-lit spirituality expressed

in the French word

in dissecting the very entrails of a

flower, a tea cup, a crumpet, an eye,

a brow, a lip, a gesture, a frown, a

smile, a gait, Proust describes his

own world, concocts it, minutely,

meticulously, until you realize this

can be only his perception, that

therefore all of our interpretations

are but our individual perceptions,

our myriad unique worlds

from which one can begin to

shape one’s own

later with Wittgenstein, the

philosopher, this became known

as phenomenology, the idea that

we are confined for knowledge to

our private views of the world,

wherein language plays, manifestly,

a crucial part

in the beginning, if you’ll remember,

was the word

curiously, in French, it is the verb, in

the beginning, implicitly suggesting

a word of action

Proust had been prescient as Freud,

uncovering an inner world we’d always

believed was outside us

at the top of his priorities Proust

chose art, personal expression,

it’s all that we can return to the

world

and what else could be our purpose

Richard

psst: bonne lecture, Kurt

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July 15, 2016

“Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini” – Rachmaninov‏

“Portrait Of The Composer Sergei Rachmaninov” (1925)

Konstantin Somov

_________

no one plays Rachmaninov better than
Rachmaninov, of which we’ve got aural
representations though no visual live
performances

but here’s a “Rhapsody on a Theme of

Paganini“ to knock your socks off, in

all its kinetic, electrifying energy

you might remember Daniil Trifonov

from my coverage of the XVth

Tchaikovsky Competition last year,

who has gone on to achieve a

stunning international reputation,

entirely, I submit, deservedly

watch him set the piece on fire, at

a pace I find faster than most, with

nevertheless all the requisite

dexterity, indeed prestidigitation,

necessary to weave the intricacies

of Rachmaninovian sound into

apposite magic, that magic

Rachmaninov would surely ‘ve

looked for

check them both out

Richard

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July 10, 2016

up my idiosyncrasies – a bio

“Marcel Proust”

Richard Lindner

___________

for a bio with which I’ve been asked

to provide an online poetry magazine

I’ve been encouraged to apply to, I’m

submitting the following text

I thought you might enjoy it

Richard

______________

my name is Richard Bisson, from

which you’ll intuit my French

Canadian background, though I

write mostly in English, with no

trouble however in French, my

mother tongue is le français

I am thus imbued, undoubtedly,

with that sensibility, my peers

have been Hugo, Flaubert, and

most of all Marcel Proust, whom

I imbibed for 33 years, in French,

page by page, reading each out

loud as though it were my own, I

cannot but be replicating now his

rhythms, his aesthetic, his view

of the world

it didn’t take me as long to read

Homer, in the thunderous Robert

Fitzgerald translation, – a mighty

roar resounding still from the

ninth century before the Christian

Era – from him I learned to speak

from the heart, it’s not one’s style

one has to master, but one’s

humanity

Robert Browning gave me the

dramatic monologue as a poetic

device, a gift he’d received from

Shakespeare

Shakespeare himself, of course,

the unbridled freedom of his own

literary imagination

Carl Sandburg‘s “Chicago“ taught

me to talk about every wo/man,

about things even my own folks

were doing

Frank O’Hara‘s “Lana Turner Has

Collapsed“ showed me that even

apparently inconsequential acts

can be poetry, poetry in the

apparently humdrum

Mary Oliver is a strong present

influence

the cadence is entirely Beethoven,

with some help, I must admit, from

the atonalists, Schoenberg, Berg,

and Webern, commas are my bar

lines

I call what I do prosetry, a word so

new my computer won’t even let

me write it, I’m a prosetrist, this

word either

I want to link everyday experience

with poetry, make poetry in the eye

of the beholder, where truth and

beauty lie

if people can see what I see, they

can see that way themselves, it’s

something one learns, and it’s all

in the way one entrenches words

and ideas

I eliminated the word “if” from my

vocabulary once, for being then

too speculative, it changed my life,

I’ve replaced it since with the word

“miracle”, that has also changed

my life

I am 67 years old

I live in Vancouver, Canada

I consider myself to be, at this

point in my life, bibliosexual, I

sleep with my books, and we’re

all still getting along just fine

may you be so blessed

Richard

psst: also Anaïs Nin, for the

intimacy of her diaries

o, and Woody Allen, for

giving up before his

nihilism and just

laughing

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July 3, 2016

on buying designer honey

“The Discovery Of Honey By Bacchus“ (1505)

Piero di Cosimo

___________

it’s not every day that someone changes

your outlook on, well, everything

I was at the supermarket, needed honey

for my recipe for carrot soup, with Brie

also, and nuts, an intriguing combination,

I’d thought

but I couldn’t place the honey in the

umpteenth reorganization of the food

store

where’s the honey, I asked the clerk,

who serendipitously was standing

in front of me, this aisle or the one

over, I added, not expecting anything

more than cursory directions, and

giving him thereby a feel for my

attendant capabilities

but he took me, impressively, I

thought, the one aisle over to the

honey spot, ahem

there was a modest selection there,

plastic honey bears, the white honey

you need to crank out of the jar, other

honeys in less appealing packages,

several of the wild berry and grain

varieties

but I wanted the honey that melts in

your mouth, instinctively, the one

infused with clove, cardamom and

cinnamon, the one that clings to

your tongue lasciviously, leaving,

with every lick of your lips, very bliss,

though not, notably, at an especially

conducive price

why not, you only live once, I’d

devised already, despite the cost,

to validate my more cavalier

expenses

someone else was ogling, however,

my honey, reaching for the larger of

the two options, there was some

space, I reached up, into a kind of

shopper’s no man’s land, how do

you impinge on someone’s pending

decision when you already know

what you want, and not create

confusion, if not distress

and he was bigger than me

looks good enough not to resist,

I said, you only live once, why not,

I rejoindered, falling back on my

default position, my broken record,

which sent nevertheless a strong

existential message, I think

how can we know, he congenially

replied, catching me up on my

unexamined assertion, how do

we know for sure we don’t have

another, others

imagine that, I marvelled, I’ve never

heard anyone else ever say that,

everyone ‘s always ceded, it’s

something to profoundly, and

inevitably have to, ponder

but not enough right now to not

buy the honey, I added, however

unphilosophically, though I’d think

about it further for consequences,

it could change everything, I

declared, my life, this life

and we waved each other goodbye

from our present incarnations

Richard

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June 23, 2016

“Ebben? Ne andrò lontana” – Alfredo Catalani‏

“Diva II“

Erte

a fellow blogger, who’s been inspiring

me with an array of diverse composers,

some obscure to me, others personally

transformational, unearthed a piece of

music recently, on that composer’s

very birthday, that resounds in my

spirit still, through, for me, its signal

interpretation, as though it were very

yesterday

it was 1981, a French film, “Diva“, had

taken the world by storm, a precursor

to “Bladerunner“, the cultural

phenomenon, made the following year

like in “Bladerunner“, the music was

haunting

the antihero had stolen not only

the dress of the sublime soprano

he worshipped, but had also taped

surreptitiously one of her concerts,

something absolutely forbidden

corporations were avid to get a copy

of the tape, and the chase ensues

throughout the streets of Paris,

“The French Connection“, but on

Gallic drugs

the air is from Catalani‘s “La Wally“,

a fraught opera, with the heroine

eventually, and her beloved, dying,

separately however, in the same

avalanche, which he’d set off by

calling out, unaware of the sonic

consequences, her name

don’t ask

but at a moment of great despair, in

those very treacherous mountains,

after her father has thrown her out

of the house for wanting one of his

very enemies, the wrong man, she

sings an air that will break your

heart, “Ebben? Ne andrò lontana“,

“Well then? I’ll go far away“

Wilhelmina Higgins Fernandez

sings it in the movie, you’ll

quiver, thrill, at her clarity, her

purity, she’s a goddess, you’ll

see why Jules wanted her dress

but listen to Angela Gheorghiu,

as well, bring it up again a few

years later, live in Prague, from

her very “Là fra la neve bianca“,

“There somewhere in the white

snow“, I melted, after which I

became burnt toast, if you’ll

pardon those clashing, however

forcefully compelling, metaphors

nor would I ‘ve minded either her

dress

Richard

psst: thanks, Kurt

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June 21, 2016

me in the key of B major – my birthday‏

“Bad Boy”

Eric Fischl

______

le coeur a ses raisons que

la raison ne connaît point

( the heart has its own,

inscrutable to reason,

reasons)

– Pascal

my birthday is coming up

long I held that I’d been premature,

my birthday was not after the

requisite number of months for a

legitimate pregnancy, but I held to

the private drama of my story rather

than ask my parents any questions,

only later during adolescence did I

find out from my sister that I had

not been premature

that I could have so misconstrued

astonished me at the time, how

narrow could be one’s apparently

infinite perspective, how confined

and misdirected, a lesson never

easily, however recurrent, learned,

see love

my father would never have forsaken

my mother, nor ever has, he was a

principled man, a responsible man,

a man who prized his honour, his

friends’, his family’s

the men in his family were such, all

devoted husbands, though one, late

in life when the children were grown,

left his wife for greener pastures,

became a nudist, his wife used to

change her clothes in the closet,

he later on complained

as a corollary, he cultivated in his

new environment many girlfriends,

it appears, despite, by then, his

advanced age

about my aunts, however, my other

uncle used to say that though he

had five sisters, he had 17

brothers-in-law, which isn’t counting

the ones who hadn’t been husbands,

I’d add

put some clothes on, Cid, my aunt

Doris, his sister, said, one morning

when he was visiting, he was coming

down the stairs to breakfast – they all

then, three sons, Aurèle, or Aurelius,

Cid, Alcide, and my dad, Conrad Hector,

had the heroic names of Greek and

Roman warriors, of even, some more

distant uncles, Hebraic characters,

Ephraïm, for instance, owing to our

French, therefore Latin, background

my aunts’ names were, however,

more prosaic, common

my aunt Doris, of the sisters, was,

perhaps the most uncharacteristically,

prim, though I suspect she didn’t

change in a closet, but I would’ve

never used even the word “penis” in

front of her for fear of causing her

alarm, though clearly she’d grown

up among them

she is also the first aunt I confided

in about my controversial then

situation, after, of course, having

told my parents, they would know,

I knew, I had therefore to be the

first to tell them, but only once I’d

found my own closet, my own

home of my own

I’m in love, I’m in love, I’m in love,

I said to her over the phone

what’s her name, she asked

his name is John, I retorted

how wonderful, she replied, but,

let me hand you over to your

Aunt Anne, her sister, she said,

while I pick myself up off the

floor

my Aunt Anne was, as usual, only

love and compassion, though she

never had any children she raised

at least six, none her own, all of

whom remained ever profoundly

devoted

to my other relatives, that information

was later on only implicit, and I was

grateful to have found from them only

ever love and acceptance, my own

particularities were understood to be

anyone’s, everyone’s, we all had our

inclinations, what mattered was the

bond

Richard

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June 19, 2016

me in the key of B major – 60 Jubilee East (the master bedroom)‏

“Krefeld Project Bedroom Scene 1“ (2002)

Eric Fischl

______

at the bottom of the stairs on the left,

there was my parents’ bedroom, the

master bedroom, an inner sanctum

where things of only great import

took place, where behind its closed

doors, my mom and dad would

propose, concoct, discuss, ponder,

deliberate, envision, enact, create

the structure that would be the

elements of our lives

interestingly, no children were

conceived there, we, my sister and

I, had shown up earlier, and by then

my parents had settled on only two

children, were already blessed with

the order they had preferred, an

older boy, and a slightly younger

girl, where more would’ve been

financially impracticable

the Catholic Church disapproved

of such practicality then, and my

folks would’ve been refused

communion had they ever been

to church, but by then such

observance had become irrelevant

to them, despite their Christian still

trappings

and their plans were to transcend

rather the humble beginnings the

Church would’ve confined them to,

if not also the very mores of the day,

it was still only the mid Fifties, God

would die in the early Sixties only,

after which women would get the

pill

and the world changed

there also had I been taken to heal,

in the darkened room, when I had

the measles, I remember waking

up weary in someone’s arms, my

mother’s, my father’s, to be paraded

into the kitchen for a moment, then

returned to the inner, recuperatory,

chamber

also, for the talk, when my dad

figured it was time to speak to

me about guy things, girl things,

birds, bees

I told him they were called penis,

and vagina, but he already knew

nomenclature had nothing to do

with it, that a rose by any other

name would smell as sweet

otherwise our chambers were

private, each our place of private

recuperation, regeneration,

contemplation, creativity, sleep,

dreams, all of us respectful of

each others’ inviolable space

ever, each with a room of our

own

Richard

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June 12, 2016

me in the key of B major – im/patience‏

“Patience“ (1542)

Giorgio Vasari

_______

if I would’ve, my mother said

if you what, I interrupted

if I would’ve, my mother said

if you what, I again interrupted

whereupon she became rattled,

disoriented, unable to even see

the sentence, never mind the

words therein swimming, in

very genetic accord with my

sister, see my sister

she took a deep breath, as I much

earlier, on another matter, had urged,

propped herself up, and corrected

herself, if I had, she said, and

continued her sentence with the

proper grammar, if I had, I would’ve

I was relieved, I sighed, surely, that

it hadn’t been the more obstreperous

if I wouldn’t’ve, another related error,

which would’ve required several more

deep breaths to unravel, I’m sure, a

chaos of conditionals confronting an

innocent enough negation can be a

not especially edifying sight

I am, as my father was, exacting, as

has always also been my mom, and

I have a hard time with incorrect

grammar, I cringe at it, much as they

did when I didn’t properly vacuum

their floor

now, of course, but before my new

housekeeper, I would go under the

rug and into all the even most

impracticable corners, a great

lesson having been learned

you’re too impatient, she had

complained, in a wretched voice

that expressed her distress

what do you mean, impatient, I

said, it had been about the

computer that time, how to

learn to use it, for people of a

certain age, it is a new, and

next to inscrutable, language

I was patient

I said take a deep breath, I said,

I said I have all in the time in the

world to wait, which I did, I said

just do it, she did it, and is now

comfortable at her computer

but I touch up her grammar now

and then, when it falters

my sister can also now, of course,

tell the time

I have prayed for patience, it is

the work of a lifetime, and it often

looks like impatience, even to

yourself

also the reverse

Richard

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Richibi’s Weblog

Category: paintings to ponder

July 30, 2016

up my idiosyncrasies – Plato‏

July 22, 2016

up my idiosyncrasies – Albertine‏

“Wing Seller“ (2006)

Stefan Caltia

July 17, 2016

up my idiosyncrasies – Marcel Proust‏

July 15, 2016

“Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini” – Rachmaninov‏

July 10, 2016

up my idiosyncrasies – a bio

July 3, 2016

on buying designer honey

June 23, 2016

“Ebben? Ne andrò lontana” – Alfredo Catalani‏

June 21, 2016

me in the key of B major – my birthday‏

June 19, 2016

me in the key of B major – 60 Jubilee East (the master bedroom)‏

June 12, 2016

me in the key of B major – im/patience‏