The Lovers’ Chronicle 15 May – helluva consequence – art by Viktor Vasnetsov – birth of Katherine Anne Porter – photography by Richard Avedon

15 May 2023 By Rhett 0 In Love, Quotes, Random

Dear Zazie, Today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag to his muse. Visit us on twitter @cowboycoleridge. Hope all is well with you. Take care of yourself. Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

conscious and recollected years have been lived to now in the shadow of past romantic miscues, and most of the energies of mind and spirit have been spent in the effort to grasp the meanin’ of those wrong turns, to trace them to their sources and to understand the logic of these failures, only to discover from this vantage that it was a necessary process to get to us

not talkin’ ’bout promises,

nor false hopes, and not

gonna get all romantic

about it

plenty enough drama

in the world now

just writin’ what i feel,

pourin’ out my stories

and lettin’ ’em go

where they may

all to say that i care

at least i can know

the truth about that

regrets
sure, got ’em stacked
up like cord wood
the trick is to not let ’em
eat you up, or to minimize
how much of you it eats up

and there are two kinds;
those you can do
somethin’ about
and those you cannot
never been one to worry
about what cannot
be controlled

so to those i cannot
do anything about
i say, adieu

the ones i could do
somethin’ about,
those are tough

i like to think
i have ’em
under control

but there is one
that haunts
and takes
a little piece
day by day

some choices come
with helluva consequence

no false hopes
no more foolin’
could not live
that way anymore

listenin’ to voices
from the past
tellin’ their stories
lettin’ ’em explain
how things happened

at least i know now
whatever happens
assurances made
in the silence
a promise made
in hopefulness

A vignette:

A man, fiftyish, dressed very specifically; starched black jeans pressed tight and stacked over black cowboy boots, long sleeve grey pearl snap shirt worn over a long sleeve white Henley shirt, black leather vest, black denim sport coat with a white linen monogrammed pocket square, full-length black oilskin duster, 6-X silver belly cowboy hat, sits at a table in the outdoor section of a small hotel bar somewhere in the New Mexico Rockies. He is drinkin’ Dow’s 30 Year Old Tawny Port and smokin’ an Arturo Fuente Opus X Perfexion No. 2 pyramid. He is writin’ a letter:

You ask if I have regrets
I God, of course I do
got ’em stacked up like cord wood
The trick with regret is to not let it
eat you up, or to minimize
how much of you it eats up
And there are two kinds of regret;
those you can do somethin’ about
and those you cannot
Never been one to worry
about what I cannot control
So to the regrets I cannot do anything about
I say, adios, adieu, ciao, see ya’ later
Now the ones I could do somethin’ about,
those are the tough ones
I like to think I have ’em under control
so one of ’em does not come rollin’
off the stack and knock me down
But there is one regret
that haunts me night and day
Each day she takes a little piece of me
I made a choice, and that choice
came with a consequence
Helluva consequence

Viktor Vasnetsov
Self-portrait, 1868

Today is the birthday of Viktor Mikhaylovich Vasnetsov (May 15, 1848, Lopyal, Vyatka Governorate – July 23, 1926, Moscow); artist who specialized in mythological and historical subjects. He is considered the co-founder of Russian folklorist and romantic nationalistic painting and a key figure in the Russian revivalist movement.

Gallery

Alenushka

Moving House, 1876

The Flying Carpet, 1880

Baptism of Prince Vladimir, a Vasnetsov’s fresco from Kiev Cathedral

Bogatyrs (1898), one of Vasnetsov’s most famous paintings, depicts mythical Russian knights Dobrynya Nikitich, Ilya Muromets and Alyosha Popovich

Vasnetsov’s painting of Ivan the Terrible

Katherine Anne Porter
Porter in 1930

Today is the birthday of Katherine Anne Porter (Indian Creek, Texas, May 15, 1890 – September 18, 1980 Silver Spring, Maryland); Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, essayist, short story writer, novelist, and political activist. Her 1962 novel Ship of Fools was the best-selling novel in America that year, but her short stories received more critical acclaim. She is known for her penetrating insight. Her work deals with dark themes such as betrayal, death and the origin of human evil. In 1990, Recorded Texas Historic Landmark number 2905 was placed in Brown County, Texas, to honor the life and career of Porter.

Select Writings

I don’t want any promises, I won’t have false hopes, I won’t be romantic about myself. I can’t live in their world any longer, she told herself, listening to the voices back of her. Let them tell their stories to each other. Let them go on explaining how things happened. I don’t care. At least I can know the truth about what happens to me, she assured herself silently, making a promise to herself, in her hopefulness, her ignorance.
- “Old Mortality” in Pale Horse (1939)

The road to death is a long march beset with all evils, and the heart fails little by little at each new terror, the bones rebel at each step, the mind sets up its own bitter resistance and to what end? The barriers sink one by one, and no covering of the eyes shuts out the landscape of disaster, nor the sight of crimes committed there.
- “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” (1939)

For myself, and I was not alone, all the conscious and recollected years of my life have been lived to this day under the heavy threat of world catastrophe, and most of the energies of my mind and spirit have been spent in the effort to grasp the meaning of those threats, to trace them to their sources and to understand the logic of this majestic and terrible failure of the life of man in the Western world.
In the face of such shape and weight of present misfortune, the voice of the individual artist may seem perhaps of no more consequence than the whirring of a cricket in the grass, but the arts do live continuously, and they live literally by faith; their names and their shapes and their uses and their basic meanings survive unchanged in all that matters through times of interruption, diminishment, neglect; they outlive governments and creeds and the societies, even the very civilization that produced them. They cannot be destroyed altogether because they represent the substance of faith and the only reality. They are what we find again when the ruins are cleared away.
- Flowering Judas, Introduction to Modern Library edition (1940)

They had both noticed that a life of dissipation sometimes gave to a face the look of gaunt suffering spirituality that a life of asceticism was supposed to give and quite often did not.
- Ship of Fools (1962) Pt. 3

Miracles are instantaneous, they cannot be summoned, but come of themselves, usually at unlikely moments and to those who least expect them.
- Ship of Fools (1962) Pt. 3

The real sin against life is to abuse and destroy beauty, even one’s own — even more, one’s own, for that has been put in our care and we are responsible for its well-being.
- “Herr Freytag” in Ship of Fools (1962) Pt. 3

And today is the birthday of Ricard Avedon (New York City; May 1923 – 1 October 2004 San Antonio, Texas); fashion and portrait photographer. He worked for Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue and Elle specializing in capturing movement in still pictures of fashion, theater and dance. An obituary published in The New York Times said that “his fashion and portrait photographs helped define America’s image of style, beauty and culture for the last half-century”.

Hollywood presented a fictional account of Avedon’s early career in the 1957 musical Funny Face, starring Fred Astaire as the fashion photographer “Dick Avery.” Avedon supplied some of the still photographs used in the production, including its most noted single image: an intentionally overexposed close-up of Audrey Hepburn’s face in which only her noted features – her eyes, her eyebrows, and her mouth – are visible.

Hepburn was Avedon’s muse in the 1950s and 1960s, and he went so far as to say: “I am, and forever will be, devastated by the gift of Audrey Hepburn before my camera. I cannot lift her to greater heights. She is already there. I can only record. I cannot interpret her. There is no going further than who she is. She has achieved in herself her ultimate portrait.”

In 1944, Avedon married 19-year-old bank teller Dorcas Marie Nowell, who later became the model and actress Doe Avedon; they did not have children and divorced in 1949. The couple summered at the gay village of Cherry Grove, Fire Island, and Avedon’s bisexuality has been attested to by colleagues and family. He was reportedly devastated when Nowell left him.

In 1951, he married Evelyn Franklin; she died on March 13, 2004.

Gallery