Dear Zazie,  Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag dedicated to his muse.  Follow us on twitter @cowboycoleridge.  Are you without the one you want?  Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

© copyright 2021 mac tag/cowboycoleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

another train rollin’ by
plains blanketed in snow
and memories that sustain

of course want remains
in the sleepless hours

in many ways
paint such a phrase

perhaps you feel it
an exquisite
bit of reality

remains quite stark
an essential
clarion call

cannot make this up
no pretendin’ here
breakin’ down
followin’ the words

this mornin’ finds
no less depressed
but no more
the height and depth,
wonderin’ now
at realization

all thoughts
goin’ on like this
and comin’ back
determined,
in every way,
for this alone

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

the open plains
blanketed in snow
and thoughts of one
always near

composin’ this verse
to you in the sleepless
hours of the night

seems kinda lame
yet so essential
to say i miss you

do you feel it
if only i could
adorn this space
with somethin’
more becomin’ of you

remains quite stark
more than i imagined
prepared or not
so now, this plea
how essential
memories have become

givin’ myself away
you have no idea
bein’ a pretender,
brought to a fine art,
but i cannot with you
please forgive
this desperateness

just followin’ the words

this mornin’ found me
as they each do,
with a certain sort
of acceptance
of what lies ahead

i do want you
but wantin’
is nothin’
up against
not meant to be

and that is no excuse
for lackin’ a zest for life
there will be none of that
just might have to be done solo

supposin’ you are gittin’ bored
my goin’ on like this

only here is the thing
you keep comin’ back
in my dreams
and the words
are determined
to come as well

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

Today is the birthday of Harriet Backer (Holmestrand, Norway 21 January 1845 – 25 March 1932 Oslo); painter who achieved recognition in her own time and was a pioneer among female artists both in the Nordic countries and in Europe generally. She is best known for her detailed interior scenes, communicated with rich colors and moody lighting.

Backer produced just around 180 works of art mostly based upon local themes. Her work was both slow and thorough. In 1880, she debuted in Paris with the painting Solitude, and in 1883 exhibited Blått interiør at the Autumn Exhibition in Oslo. She was influenced by impressionism. She never belonged to any school but her work is often compared with that of her contemporary Eilif Peterssen (1852–1928). Backer worked in the tradition of realism in painting, where she is regarded as both a naturalist and an early Impressionist.

Gallery

Evening interior

Solitude

Now a love story…

Vita Sackville-West

On this day in 1926, 33-year-old novelist Vita Sackville-West wrote an impassioned love letter to 43-year-old novelist Virginia Woolf.  Vita was a distinguished English writer, had been married for more than a decade, loved her husband, and was attracted to other women.  All things she had in common with Woolf.

The two women had met through the Bloomsbury Group of London, which gathered to discuss things like philosophy, literature, and art.  Their romance started cautiously, but by the time Vita composed this letter four years after they had met, she was deeply smitten, languishin’ and lovesick.  She was on a bumpy train ride from Milan to Trieste when she wrote:

“I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone: I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way. You, with all your un-dumb letters, would never write so elementary a phrase as that; perhaps you wouldn’t even feel it. And yet I believe you’ll be sensible of a little gap. But you’d clothe it in so exquisite a phrase that it would lose a little of its reality. Whereas with me it is quite stark: I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal. So this letter is just really a squeal of pain. It is incredible how essential to me you have become. I suppose you are accustomed to people saying these things. Damn you, spoilt creature; I shan’t make you love me any the more by giving myself away like this — But oh my dear, I can’t be clever and stand-offish with you: I love you too much for that. Too truly. You have no idea how stand-offish I can be with people I don’t love. I have brought it to a fine art. But you have broken down my defences. And I don’t really resent it. However I won’t bore you with any more.

We have re-started, and the train is shaky again. I shall have to write at the stations — which are fortunately many across the Lombard plain. …The waterfalls in Switzerland were frozen into solid iridescent curtains of ice, hanging over the rock; so lovely. And Italy all blanketed in snow.

We’re going to start again. I shall have to wait till Trieste tomorrow morning. Please forgive me for writing such a miserable letter.”

Virginia Woolf 1927

The following January, a year later, Vita wrote to Virginia:

“My darling, I hoped I should wake up less depressed this morning, but I didn’t. I went to bed last night as black as a sweep. The awful dreariness of Westphalia makes it worse: factory towns, mounds of slag, flat country, and some patches of dirty snow. … Why aren’t you with me? Oh, why? I do want you so frightfully.  I want more than ever to travel with you; it seems to me now the height of my desire, and I get into despair wondering how it can ever be realised. Can it, do you think? Oh my lovely Virginia, it is dreadful how I miss you, and everything that everybody says seems flat and stupid.

I do hope more and more that you won’t go to America, I am sure it would be too tiring for you, and anyway I am sure you wouldn’t like it. …   So we bundle along over Germany, and very dull it is — Surely I haven’t lost my zest for travel? No, it is not that; it is simply that I want to be with you and not with anybody else — But you will get bored if I go on saying this, only it comes back and back till it drips off my pen — Do you realise that I shall have to wait for over a fortnight before I can hear from you? poor me. I hadn’t thought of that before leaving, but now it bulks very large and horrible. What may not happen to you in the course of a fortnight? you may get ill, fall in love, Heaven knows what.

I shall work so hard, partly to please you, partly to please myself, partly to make the time go and have something to show for it. I treasure your sudden discourse on literature yesterday morning, — a send-off to me, rather like Polonius to Laertes. It is quite true that you have had infinitely more influence on me intellectually than anyone, and for this alone I love you.”

Shortly after she received this letter, Woolf came up with the idea for a new novel, inspired by Vita, who often liked to dress up in men’s clothes.  That novel was Orlando: A Biography (1928), about a transgender writer who lives for hundreds of years.  Vita’s son Nigel wrote, “The effect of Vita on Virginia is all contained in “Orlando” … in which she explores Vita, weaves her in and out of the centuries, tosses her from one sex to the other, plays with her, dresses her in furs, lace and emeralds, teases her, flirts with her, drops a veil of mist around her.”  He calls Orlando “the longest and most charming love letter in literature.”

The two ended their affair in the late 1920s but stayed friends until Woolf’s death by suicide in 1941.  There is a book out from Oxford University Press that chronicles their relationship: Vita and Virginia: The Work and Friendship of V. Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf (1993), written by Suzanne Raitt.

Missin’ You (Still)

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cowboy coleridge, harriet backer, henri duparc, love letter, love lyrics, love song, love story, muse, poem of the day, Rhett, song of the day, the lovers almanac, twt, without you, Zazie