The Death of Culture














Midnight and the Minotaur's lost in the city,
circling the same neon walls passed
in the endless orbit hours
following dinner with Pablo.
He approaches random passersby,
dispassionate cocktail crowds
who offer shrugs of apathy.
Kong had it right--
once they force
you off the island-grab
a likely virgin-hightail it
up the Empire State--
film at eleven--
a face no one forgets.

Days were different in the labyrinth,
before he entered the mental maze
that led him to trade
fame for freedom.
The Minotaur in his prime
welcoming the flower of youth--
a fan club willing to pay any price
for nothing more than
the merest glimpse of glory.

(Image: Pablo Picasso, The Minotaur and His Wife, 1937)

Two poems by Paul Éluard










Max Ernst


Dans un coin l'inceste agile
tourne autour de la virginité d'une petite robe
Dans un coin le ciel délivré
Aux épines de l'orage laisse des boules blanches.

Dans un coin plus clair de tous les yeux
On attend des poissons d'angoisse,
Dans un coin la voiture de verdure de l'été
Immobile glorieuse et pour toujours.

A la louer de la jeunesse
Des lampes allumées très tard.
La première montre ses seins que tuent des insectes rouges.
--------------------------------------------------------------

Max Ernst

In one corner agile incest
pivots around the virginity of a little white dress
In one corner heaven sends forth
flashes of white in the thorns of a storm

In a corner bright with eyes
the anguish of fish,
the car of summer and greenery
now and always gloriously immobile

Her youth is rent,
lamps lit too late.
the first illuminates
the death of the red insect buried
beneath her breast.

(trans. Hoffman)

------------------------------------------

Paul Éluard, Capitale de la Doleure (Capital of Pain) 1926.

Max Ernst and Paul Éluard were great friends, sharing living quarters in Paris and apparently a great deal more. Sometime in 1924, Max began an affair with Paul's wife Gala, perhaps inclusive of two, perhaps expanded to three...In any case, Paul became fed up with the whole mess and left the pair to their own devices. Eventually Paul and Gala reconciled, although the reconciliation was short-lived. Gala met and fell in love with Salvador Dali, eventually divorcing Paul to marry Salvador. For his part, Salvador considered Gala his muse and the love of his life.

Eluard was part of the surrealist movement in Paris in the early 1920's. The influence is seen in his Max Ernst...a dream like quality, strongly visual. The image of the fish is interesting. Is he expressing an affinity to a fish out of water, struggling for life and breath?

-----------------------------------------

La courbe de tes yeux

La courbe de tes yeux fait le tour de mon coeur,
Un rond de danse et de douceur,
Auréole du temps, berceau nocturne et sûr,
Et si je ne sais plus tout ce que j'ai vécu
C'est que tes yeux ne m'ont pas toujours vu.
Feuilles de jour et mousse de rosée,
Roseaux du vent, sourires parfumés,
Ailes couvrant le monde de lumière,
Bateaux chargés du ciel et de la mer,
Chasseurs des bruits et sources de couleurs,
Parfums éclos d'une couvée d'aurores
Qui gît toujours sur la paille des astres,
Comme le jour dépend de l'innocence
Le monde entier dépend de tes yeux purs
Et tout mon sang coule dans leurs regards.

------------------------------------------------

The Curve of Your Eyes

The curve of your eyes has encircled my heart
in a round of dance and tenderness.
Halo time, the comfort of the cradle song,
and if I know nothing about this life that I have lived,
I will know that your eyes did not always see me.
Leaves of day, foam of dew,
reeds of the wind, scented smiles,
wings covering the light of the world,
boats carrying sky and sea,
hunters of noise and the source of all colors,
Your perfume hatches a brood of dawns
lying stillborn on a straw of stars,
as the day depends on innocence
so my being depends on your eyes
and all my life flows under their sight.

(Trans. Hoffman)

----------------------------------------------

Beautiful and so very sad. The world continues on while the lover exists only in the vision of his beloved. Again, a surrealist influence, imbued over all with a synethesic confusion of the senses. I love Éluard's imagery of "halo time", referring to the moment of the head crowning at birth.

--------------------------------

(Image: Salvador Dali, "Geodesic" Portrait of Gala, 1936)

Ulysses


In the end he answered the song of the ice blue sea
Brought low over endless nights spent
dreaming in the arms of the Sirens
dazzled by their songs and azure lies.
Hard fall each morning
to wake in his cold grey bed
a stone of hopelessness
lodged in his heart.
He took to the highway
searched for answers in billboards
and the faces of strangers
wise men with broken compasses
He came at last to the Atlantic shore
where once he had seen an eagle
descend on a dove
a strangely peaceful ending
nothing left but a pile of feathers
eventually washed to sea
And so he opted for
the clean and bloodless coup
On a starry night
he sang goodbye to the sirens
stripped off his clothes
laid them on the beach
along with the rest of his life’s baggage
and all the songs he had ever answered
save for the song of the ice blue sea.



(Image: Ulysses and the Sirens; Herbert James Draper, 1909)

End of Life Care

When I am an old woman

I will wait for a morning in winter

a morning in winter

when the sun is shining

a morning in winter

when the temperature

falls below zero

and the wind sings

through winter sere branches

When I am an old woman

I will sit among skeletal trees

in sub zero weather

I'll sit until I fall asleep

dreaming perhaps of

a toasty fire

or a turkey feast

skin on cooked to the crackle

biscuits inhumed in butter

pumpkin pie with a ginger snap crust

and sugared pecans shrouded in cream.

(Image: Winter Trees; Guido Frizzoni)

The night is still, the streets lie sleeping,
here is the house where my sweetheart lived;
long ago she left this town
yet here stands her house, on the same place.

And there stands a man, staring into the sky
who wrings his hands in violent grief.
I look into his face and shudder
as the moon reveals a reflection of my own.

You nemesis, my very double!
Why do you mimic the agony of a love
that lived in torment in this very house
so many nights, so long ago?
(Heinrich Heine, trans. Hoffman)


On the first night of the full moon, a man looks out of his window. The interplay between moonlight and moon shadow is so compelling he feels he must somehow become part of it. He steps out onto his porch, looks above him at the view through the leaves of an old maple. The broken light draws him in. He begins to walk, eyes on the moon, mind in contemplation of the exuberance he feels when he steps out of the fractured light peeking through leaves, buildings, alleyways, into the full face of the moon. As he walks he begins to feel invincible, larger than life. The moonlight infuses his veins, rays reach finger-like into his very core. He is become Nature and is filled with an overwhelming sense of luminescence and joy.

Time passes unheeded until some annoyance nags at the corner of his consciousness. He pushes it aside. Still it intrudes, overcomes the luminescence. Drawn out of his moon reverie, the man notices his surroundings. His old neighborhood…and across the rutted street, he sees the house of a former love. His infused light darkens; his feeling of elation dims; he realizes the presence of The Other.

The Other stands in the shadow of the house, baying at the moon. Out of curiosity, the man crosses over. He stands some distance from The Other and realizes that The Other is not baying at the moon, but rather sobbing, shouting, howling at empty windows, relating in his grief a tale of love and deceit.

The light of the moon is broken; its shards stab into the man’s own memories of this house. He turns to The Other. The eyes that greet him are his own; the keening voice, his own. The old brown suit he wore only because she had expressed admiration, the brown suit he had torn and thrown in the refuse bin when he realized her betrayal, here again in pristine newness.

And now the light has turned to anger, to rage, to revisited memories of deception, dreams broken, love betrayed. The man is overcome. He howls at the moon and the desolate house; he howls at the memory of lost love and still it is not enough. The rage bursts forth, renders him, splits him, emerges into an entity all its own…..

News Item: Early this morning another body was found in the Old River District. The police are quite perplexed as the body appears to have been mauled by a large animal. It is unlikely that such an animal is indigenous to this area. Police are advising avoidance of the area and are asking that anyone with information relating to this case step forward.
-------------------------------------------

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Schubert's Der Doppelgänger
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKVnL9JvuO8

(Image: Adam Pieniazek)

The Coming of Winter










Day by day
a denser fog
envelops the core
edges overlap
outlines lack
acuity
meanwhile
the woman in the mirror
hides a shadow in her eyes
a reflection of the darkness
that lives within her mind.
She pricks her finger
I bleed.

(Image: John William Waterhouse; Boreas, 1902)

On Mandelbrot's Fractal Geometry of Nature


Why is geometry always described as “cold” Wind blown clouds and “dry?" One reason lies in its Stretched into wisps inability to describe the shape of a Water filled cloud, a mountain, a coastline, or a tree. Clouds are not spheres, Sinking into mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, Penetration of nor does lightning travel in a straight line. More generally I claim that Mountain peaks many patterns of Nature are so irregular Sacred rite and fragmented, that compared with Euclid--a term Shrouded in a used in this work to denote all of standard Veil of fog geometry--Nature exhibits not simply a higher degree but an altogether different level of complexity. The number of distinct Act of Nature scales and length of natural patterns is for all practical purposes infinite. The existence Climaxing in of these patterns challenges us to study these Lightning bolt patterns that Euclid leaves aside as being “formless,” to investigate Water birth the morphology of the Mountain streams “amorphous.” Mathematicians have disdained this challenge, however, Pines ferns and have increasingly chosen to Condensate waters warmed flee from nature by devising theories unrelated In sunlit glades to anything we can see or feel……at first glance such Evaporate rise misbehavior looks most bizarre and even terrifying….contrary to rumors Reborn in that analysis is a dry subject, these fractals Wind blown clouds tend to be astonishingly beautiful.

(Text: Mandelbrot; The Fractal Geometry of Nature)