Spinozablue: An Eclectic Journal of the Arts

Posted on: March 31, 2009

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mod­ern moments (main-​​​​à-​​​​dieu, nova scotia)

 

sun & cloud (reproduction)

 

bright

band, slow mov–

ing, copy–

ing

the

 

sea

 

nest (goodyear)

rock–

weed, dulse &

sor­rel, moss a–

round the

 

tire

 

night jour­ney (disconnect)

shoot–

ing star,

far

cry, jet st–

reams in

the

 

bay

…

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Posted on: March 31, 2009

Comments (11)

Reincarnation

Look for me after I die
I’m com­ing back as a cello
All the emo­tions intact
With cool low saw­ing notes
Heart ris­ing in the throat
Brought to near ecstasy
By the sweet caress of Yo-​​​​Yo Ma
Gently draw­ing the seduc­tive tones
From my spruce and poplar heart
With his per­nam­buco slow bow

Notes of long­ing con­tent­ment
Disappointment
Haunting dark­ness and spic­cato joy
My next life of pure pas­sion
The giv­ing and receiv­ing of it
Back and forth artistry
Cruel agony hot caus­tic erotic
The dark­ness and joy
Rich roman­tic vibrato
Of me
The cello

Altea

I recall the sound of
dried bougainvil­lea petals
scut­tling down
nar­row ancient stone steps
whis­per­ing
pink petals bunched
at each crooked turn

Altea held in time
along the Costa Blanca
haunted by ghostly Moors
and feral cats
who roam the har­bour
in search of a
tossed off cuttlefish

Altea, ris­ing
in stark white­ness
up up to its
blue and gold heav­enly dome
where bal­conies of pri­mor­dial tears
flow down on
Mediterranean blue

– by Doreen LeBlanc

_​​_​​_​​_​​_​​_​​_​​_​​_​​_​​_​​

Doreen LeBlanc lives in Massachusetts and spends vaca­tion time at her cabin in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, where she was born.  Inspiration bub­bles up out of the river and sea, streams down the moun­tain, and comes through fam­ily sto­ries and the beauty of Cape Breton and her Acadian and Scottish heritage.…

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Posted on: March 29, 2009

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Rachel Getting Married

Are we the cen­ter of every­thing? Can we be the cen­ter with­out dis­rupt­ing other cen­ters? Smashing into each other, again and again. Ego against ego. Id against id. Timing is every­thing. Crashing into some­one else’s time. Knocking that time off kil­ter like a shot blocker, like some­one who moves the tar­get, the goal posts, the field of drama, over and over again .…

March was an espe­cially good month for DVD releases. Watched Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married, and was knocked out by the real­ism, depth and hon­esty on dis­play. It, too, dealt with the impact of pity (among many other things) on our lives and ties in well with Zweig’s book. There are also some faint echoes with another movie I reviewed here, I’ve Loved you for so Long

Two sis­ters. One with a tragic past. The impact on fam­ily, friends. Pity. Self-​​​​pity.…

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Posted on: March 25, 2009

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Beware of Pity, by Stefan Zweig

 

A bit of syn­chronic­ity and chance today. About half way through Zweig’s excel­lent Beware of Pity, I decided to take a break and watch The Cake Eaters, pri­mar­ily because Kristen Stewart is in it. Almost right from the start, I could see her role echoed Zweig’s story in some impor­tant ways. Stefan Zweig’s novel cen­ters on a young woman who is par­a­lyzed, and befriended by a young lieu­tenant in the Austro-​​​​Hungarian army. Befriended, at first, because of his sense of pity, duty, honor, guilt. Because he had asked her to dance at a lav­ish party, not know­ing she was too crip­pled to. She goes into hys­ter­ics and he flees from the house in shame. But comes back out of guilt. The book trav­els through the Hungarian coun­try­side as well as the coun­try of the mind, our phở­bias, our fears, our strange sense of debt and the psy­chol­ogy of pity.…

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