Posted on: February 10, 2009
The Buddah, by Odilon Redon. 1905
Odilon Redon was an amazing artist. Few have captured the Symbolist moment as well. Few artists portray mystery, the ambiguous, or the debris of nightmare and daydream with as fine a touch as Redon. You can get a good sense of his oeuvre from this online exhibit from MoMa.
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I was digging through some of my old writings from the 80s and found this poem. In a sense, it fits Redon, and it doesn’t:
Integration at Two
Horses in gallop-frenzy with poets in translation
Breach the walls of the money-men
Sink without a push from anyone extraordinary
… Climb back if you let them
You who cease for centuries and
Reappear like someone’s Prodigal
Like someone’s Nietzsche covered with dust
And choral-sounds
…
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Posted on: February 5, 2009
Alison Sudol. Photo by Brian Tibbets
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet,
Are of imagination all compact.
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman; the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to
heaven;
And, as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
– William Shakespeare. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Act 5, Scene 1.
Alison Sudol, singer/songwriter (b. December 23, 1984), takes her stage name from within Shakespeare’s play. A Fine Frenzy captures something of the nuance in her voice and music. And the magic and mystery inherent in the myths and sources for that play ring inside her music, her voice.…
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Posted on: February 4, 2009
Van Gogh. Self Portrait as an Artist. 1888
Look. Really look. And listen. So few of us do. Which is a bit of a contradiction, and perhaps even a paradox, given the fact that we so often are very much self-involved and self-centered. But we don’t see the Self. We don’t hear it. Or its multiplicity.
I think the aggressive ones, the financial winners, the political and social élite, rush headlong toward their goals, most without knowing who is behind that rush, behind the desires. They do so selfishly, crushing many in their way. But they don’t see themselves doing it. Strangely enough. If they bother to justify it, they do so without thought, quickly, angrily, self-righteously.
Humans are most likely the only beings that are selfishly unaware. Because we live outside and against nature now, we don’t run on instinct alone. Instinct alone prevents true selfishness.…
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Posted on: February 2, 2009
Lev Tolstoy, by Repin. 1887
What has it? What brings it? What gives meaning to our existence in the here and now? The afterlife? Paradoxes aside, the search for meaning has meaning itself, above and beyond any cleverness in the equation. To express that meaning, however, has become problematic in our late date — our cynical, jaded, post-post-guileless world. Post-guileless in the sense that we no longer can stop self-referencing or self-consciousness enough to just be. Enough to let be be the finale of seem, to borrow a brilliant phrase from Wallace Stevens.
It’s hip to search for meaning without letting others really know. It’s hep to mock the attempt. It’s cool to stand above the silly masses striving to do the right thing … Believe, believe in what they do, accept that life really does have a purpose in the here and now, beyond the here and now!…
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