Wandering

“What is the world doing? Have new gods been discovered, new laws, new freedoms? Who cares! But up here a primrose is blossoming and bearing silver fuzz on its leaves, and the light sweet wind is singing below me in the poplars, and between my eyes and heaven a dark golden bee is hovering and humming—I care about that. It is humming the song of happiness, humming the song of eternity. Its song is my history of the world.”
― Hermann Hesse, Wandering

For more about this work by Hermann Hesse, see this full post at my other blog:

The Wandering and Watercolours of Hermann Hesse

 

 

A Soul out of tune

Alas! all music jars when the soul’s out of tune.

– MIGUEL DE CERVANTES

FEMALE FIGURE (Lyda Borelli) 

Giuseppe Amisani (1879-1941)

Kiss the joy as it flies

He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sun rise.

– William Blake

image: Sydney Long (1871-1955)

Every being cries out silently to be read differently

C. D. Friedrich –  Two Men by the Sea

Justice. To be ever ready to admit that another person is something quite different from what we read when he is there (or when we think about him). Or rather, to read in him that he is certainly something different, perhaps something completely different from what we read in him.
Every being cries out silently to be read differently.

—  Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

Save

Save

Gentle Influence

“The moon does not fight. It attacks no one. It does not worry. It does not try to crush others. It keeps to its course, but by its very nature, it gently influences. What other body could pull an entire ocean from shore to shore? The moon is faithful to its nature and its power is never diminished.” 
― Ming-Dao Deng

Image: Frederick Childe Hassam, ‘Moonlight, Isle of Shoals’, 1892

Inside me there was everything I had believed was outside

Image: René Magritte

“Inside me there was everything I had believed was outside. There was, in particular, the sun, light, and all colours. There were even the shapes of objects and the distance between objects. Everything was there and movement as well… Light is an element that we carry inside us and which can grow there with as much abundance, variety, and intensity as it can outside of us…I could light myself…that is, I could create a light inside of me so alive, so large, and so near that my eyes, my physical eyes, or what remained of them, vibrated, almost to the point of hurting…” – Jacques Lusseyran

The Night Knows Nothing

The night knows nothing of the chants of night.
It is what it is as I am what I am:
And in perceiving this I best perceive myself

And you. Only we two may interchange
Each in the other what each has to give.
Only we two are one, not you and night,

Nor night and I, but you and I, alone,
So much alone, so deeply by ourselves,
So far beyond the casual solitudes,

That night is only the background of our selves,
Supremely true each to its separate self,
In the pale light that each upon the other throws.

Wallace Stevens, Re-Statement of Romance, 1935

image: Giacomo Balla – Poste

 

Interior Portrait – Rainer Maria Rilke

You don’t survive in me
because of memories;
nor are you mine because
of a lovely longing’s strength.

What does make you present
is the ardent detour
that a slow tenderness
traces in my blood.

I do not need
to see you appear;
being born sufficed for me
to lose you a little less.

Rainer Maria Rilke

image: Moon Kissed — Endymion by Arthur Wardle RBI RBA, 1864-1949.

Throw a Bridge..

Poetic analogy has in common with mystical analogy that it transgresses the deductive laws in order to make the mind apprehend the interdependence of two objects of thought situated on different planes, between which the logical functioning of the mind is unlikely to throw a bridge – André Breton

Image – Johfra (Leo)

The Dance of Life, Metamorphosis..

The art of living is based on rhythm – on give and take, ebb and flow, light and dark, life and death. By acceptance of all aspects of life, good and bad, right and wrong, yours and mine, the static, defensive life, which is what most people are cursed with, is converted into a dance, ‘the dance of life,’ metamorphosis. One can dance to sorrow or to joy; one can even dance abstractly … But the point is that, by the mere act of dancing, the elements which compose it are transformed; the dance is an end in itself, just like life. The acceptance of the situation, any situation, brings about a flow, a rhythmic impulse towards self-expression.

– Henry Miller: The Wisdom of the Heart