References
Stanley Kunitz, “The Layers” The Collected Poems of Stanley Kunitz. Copyright © 1978
Photo: Braga getting into Noites Brancas, September 2017
To help us seek duende there is neither map nor discipline. All one knows is that it burns the blood like powdered glass, that it exhausts, that it rejects all the sweet geometry one has learned, that it breaks with all styles.
Federico Garcia Lorca
From Theory and Play ( Function ) of the Duende
Para buscar al duende no hay mapa ni ejercicio. Solo se sabe que quema la sangre como un tópico de vidrios, que agota, que rechaza toda la dulce geometría aprendida, que rompe los estilos…
Federico Garcia Lorca
It makes me realize that I will most probably not find it. I just pretend.
Photo by C.
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unus’d to flow,
For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night,
And weep afresh love’s long since cancell’d woe,
And moan th‘ expense of many a vanish’d sight;
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restor’d, and sorrows end.
Sonnet 30, William Shakespeare
My weekend was perfect because of Tiago Rodrigues’s play “By Heart”
My world is, after all, a place of beauty.
And they all seem beautiful to me.
Siena, May 25 2017
in foolish dreams. A big, decadent, grand house somewhere in the tropics might anchor me…
Photo Aspinwall Pier, Fort Kochi, 2016
Self Reflecting as a fortuneteller (according to my husband) on the tram in Sarajevo
For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me. With every acquaintance I make, the population of phantoms resembling me increases. Somewhere they live, somewhere they multiply. I alone do not exist. Vladimir Nabokov, The Eye
It cannot countervail the exchange of joy
I still have no words of my own.
Sarajevo, Blagaj and Mostar (April, 2017)
To sit on rocks, to muse o’er flood and fell,
To slowly trace the forest’s shady scene,
Where things that own not man’s dominion dwell,
And mortal foot hath ne’er or rarely been;
To climb the trackless mountain all unseen,
With the wild flock that never needs a fold;
Alone o’er steeps and foaming falls to lean;
This is not solitude, ‘tis but to hold
Converse with Nature’s charms, and view her stores unrolled.
But midst the crowd, the hurry, the shock of men,
To hear, to see, to feel and to possess,
And roam alone, the world’s tired denizen,
With none who bless us, none whom we can bless;
Minions of splendour shrinking from distress!
None that, with kindred consciousness endued,
If we were not, would seem to smile the less
Of all the flattered, followed, sought and sued;
This is to be alone; this, this is solitude!
George Gordon Byron
Photo: Flying to Poznan, June 2016
Casati was born Luisa Adele Rosa Maria Amman on January 23, 1881
Determined to become a “living work of art”, she lived her life as a reaction to her horror of the mundane, crafting herself into an otherworldly creature whose image was her voice.
An outsized personality, hers was a life lived in performance.
She was in herself and in her creations an unforgettable spectacle, and although by the time of her demise she had ceased to live a gilded existence, her legacy was not about to fade away
But life as performance seems to bear the ingredients of tragedy. As described by Jean Cocteau,
As soon as she came out of her dressing room, the Marquise Casati received the applause usually given to a famous tragedian at her entry to the stage. It remained to act the play. There was none. This was her tragedy.
Is it the common choice of those who don’t feel that they belong or are seen (or feel themselves to be) as inadequate to choose being the performance of self over being oneself?
Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety
William Shakespeare
Anthony and Cleopatra
References
An Ode to the Singular Marchesa Luisa Casati
Anarchists of Style: Marchesa Luisa Casati
Marchesa Casati Goth, Glamorous and Wild
http://www.vogue.com/fashion-shows/spring-1998-couture/christian-dior
A woman who cuts her hair is about to change her life. So said Mademoiselle Chanel. I had my hair cut short last Friday, after two years of trying to be a long haired person. I am not. Half my hair was gone and looking at myself in the hairdresser’s mirror, I just saw happiness looking back at me. I was back to being myself.
I had my hair cut on the last Friday of the year as a way of celebrating an ending and just start moving forward. Again. I came back home to reread Joan Juliet Buck’s essay on short hair.
Women with short hair always look as if they have somewhere else to go. Women with long hair tend to look as if they belong where they are(…)
My life most probably will not change radically after a radical haircut, my perception of myself always does. I am no longer standing still, fitting others’ perceptions, I am taking back my story. This what a bare neck feels to me.
References
I’m writing a new book about beauty. I decided to do it after reading an interview with Botho Strauss. When asked what he misses, Botho Strauss answered: “beauty”. He didn’t say anything else – I miss beauty, and I got it. So then I thought, I’ll write a book about beauty.
“But the beauty is in the walking — we are betrayed by destinations.” — Gwyn Thomas
The only thing I like about the month of December is the circus at Coliseu.
Not the clowns. But the confirmation that we are meant to fly.
References
António Lobo Antunes
References
Jim Morrison – Poems from.”Wilderness”
Stories from A Closet of Errors 