Dear Zazie, Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag dedicated to his muse. Follow us on twitter @cowboycoleridge. Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

© copyright 2023 mac tag/cowboycoleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2021 mac tag/cowboycoleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

i will, till we meet…

over the mountain
to the ocean
and the stars in the sky
your hands in water
stare in wonder
at what we have missed

the wind blows in the eves,
the desert sighs in the bed,
and the crack in the emptiness
opens a lane to the light ahead

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

lay your sleepin’ head
sorrow fades away
in my arms till first light
let the livin’ vision be
complete, to us
the entirety

how should we have it
with a passion
unlike anything
let it be

the more
rare bliss
but, surely it can be

about a time
a lover’s kiss
all that matters

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

if not a fever, then for sure
an obsession with creation
in an attempt to recapture
lost years
to create a dream,
embrace an existence
where beauty and sorrow
come in preparation
for solitude
the opium den
of remembrance

you believe you are,
but you are not
you are merely
hibernatin’
the symptoms are plain…
monotony, the absence
of marvelous

many live like this,
many die like this
without knowin’

for the lucky,
a shock happens
a place, a person,
a book, a song,
awakens them
and they discover
they think,
in the order and disorder
in which they feel
they follow sensations
and correlations,
however absurd,
of events and images,
they trust the new realms
they are lead into
the marvelous, the mysterious,
the cult of the unconscious
as proclaimed by Rimbaud
it is not madness
it is transcendin’
the rigidities and the patterns
made by the insensate mind

ordinary, does not interest
seekin’ only the high moments

for you, for me
the highest moment,
losin’ ourselves in each other

© copyright 2017 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

Today is the birthday of Pyotr Petrovich Konchalovsky (Izyumsky Uyezd, Russian Empire 21 February 1876 – 2 February 1956 Moscow); painter, a member of the Knave of Diamonds group.

His public debut was at the Salon des Indépendants exhibition in Paris, 1908, but Konchalovsky soon returned to Moscow, bringing with him new ideas (elements of his work from this period have been identified as “Fauvist”), as well as his more respectable Salon training.

By 1909, he was exhibiting frequently, participating in the Golden Fleece, Fraternity, Mir Iskusstva, and New Society of Artists. He was a founding member of the society Knave of Diamonds in 1909, a rebellious, avant-guard group seeking to synthesize the modern art breakthroughs of French and German styles with Russian primitivism. Where Western European looked to primitive African sculptures for artistic refreshment and inspiration, these Russian painters imagined they could turn to “indigenous” Russian works. Konchalovsky was elected as the group’s chairman in 1911.

Pyotr married a daughter of painter Vasily Surikov, who always praised the art of his son-in-law.

Gallery

Scheherazade 1917

The model in a chair

Model squatting

Anaïs Nin
Portrait of Nin, c. 1920

Today is the birthday of Anaïs Nin (born Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell; Neuilly-sur-Seine; February 21, 1903 – January 14, 1977 Los Angeles); essayist and memoirist born to Cuban parents in France, where she was also raised.  She spent some time in Spain and Cuba, but lived most of her life in the United States, where she became an established author.  She wrote journals (which span more than 60 years, beginning when she was 11 years old and ending shortly before her death), novels, critical studies, essays, short stories, and erotica.  A great deal of her work, including Delta of Venus and Little Birds, was published posthumously.

On March 3, 1923, in Havana, Cuba, Nin married her first husband, Hugh Parker Guiler (1898–1985), a banker and artist, later known as “Ian Hugo” when he became a maker of experimental films in the late 1940s.  The couple moved to Paris the following year, where Guiler pursued his banking career and Nin began to pursue her interest in writing.  In her diaries she also mentions having trained as a flamenco dancer in Paris in the mid-to-late 1920s.

Nin met her second husband, Rupert Pole met in an elevator as both were en route to a party given by an heir to the Guggenheim fortune.  He was 28 and she was 44 at the time.  In her diary entry that evening, Nin noted his emotional sensitivity and knowledge of Eastern philosophies and concluded the entry with “Danger! He is probably homosexual.”

Pole, who was under the impression that Nin had divorced Guiler, asked Nin to accompany him to the West Coast.  Nin agreed to do so, but told Guiler she was accompanying a friend on a drive to Las Vegas.  He and Nin lived a rustic life in a cabin in the Sierra Madre, where Nin introduced herself as Mrs. Anaïs Pole even though she was still married to Guiler.  Nin referred to her simultaneous marriages as her “bicoastal trapeze”.  Nin said, “I tell so many lies I have to write them down and keep them in the lie box so I can keep them straight.”

Nin and Pole were married by a justice of the peace in Quartzsite, Arizona, on March 17, 1955.  She kept her marriage to Guiler secret from Pole for 11 years, but concern about the legal consequences of having two men claim her as a dependent on their tax returns led her to arranging the annulment in 1966 of the marriage with Pole.

Nin remained married to Guiler, citing his decades of financial support, but spent her final years with Pole.  She and Pole lived in a small house in Los Angeles’ Silver Lake neighborhood that Pole had built with money saved from his job as forest ranger and later as a science teacher at Thomas Starr King Junior High School in Los Angeles.

According to her diaries, Vol.1, 1931–1934, Nin shared a bohemian lifestyle with Henry Miller during her time in Paris.  Her husband Guiler is not mentioned anywhere in the published edition of the 1930s parts of her diary (Vol. 1–2) although the opening of Vol. 1 makes it clear that she is married, and the introduction suggests her husband refused to be included in the published diaries.  The diaries edited by Pole, after her death, tell that her union with Henry Miller was very passionate and physical, and that she believed that it was a pregnancy by him that she aborted in 1934.

Her passionate love affair and friendship with Miller strongly influenced her both sexually and as an author.  Nin wrote about her infatuation with the Surrealist artist Bridget Bate Tichenor in her diaries.  Claims that Nin was bisexual were given added circulation by her apparent attraction to Miller’s second wife June.  The first unexpurgated portion of Nin’s journal to be published, Henry and June, makes it clear that Nin was stirred by June to the point of saying (paraphrasing), “I have become June,” though it is unclear whether she consummated her feelings for her sexually.  To both Anaïs and Henry, June was a femme fatale—irresistible, cunning, erotic.  Nin gave June money, jewelry, clothes, often leaving herself broke.

Nin often cited authors Djuna Barnes and D. H. Lawrence as inspirations. She states in Volume One of her diaries that she drew inspiration from Marcel Proust, André Gide, Jean Cocteau, Paul Valéry, and Arthur Rimbaud.

Prose

 Only in the fever of creation could she recreate her own lost life.

• Winter of Artifice (1939)

• In the world of the dreamer there was solitude: all the exaltations and joys came in the moment of preparation for living. They took place in solitude. But with action came anxiety, and the sense of insuperable effort made to match the dream, and with it came weariness, discouragement, and the flight into solitude again. And then in solitude, in the opium den of remembrance, the possibility of pleasure again.
  • Children of the Albatross (1947)
• This image of herself as a not ordinary women, an image which was trembling now in his eyes, might suddenly disappear. Nothing more difficult to live up to than men’s dreams.
  • Children of the Albatross (1947)

• You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book (Lady Chatterley, for instance), or you take a trip, or you talk with Richard, and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death.
  • The Diary of Anaïs Nin , Volume One 1931-1934
• I had always believed in Andre Breton’s freedom, to write as one thinks, in the order and disorder in which one feels in thinks, to follow sensations and absurd correlations of events and images, to trust to the new realms they lead one into. “The cult of the marvelous.” Also the cult of the unconscious leadership, the cult of mystery, the evasion of false logic. The cult of the unconscious as proclaimed by Rimbaud. It is not madness. It is an effort to transcend the rigidities and the patterns made by the rational mind.
  • Winter, 1931-1932 The Diary of Anaïs Nin , Volume One 1931-1934

• Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous.
  • Winter, 1931-1932

• The truly faithless one is the one who makes love to only a fraction of you. And denies the rest.
  • February, 1932

• For you and for me the highest moment, the keenest joy, is not when our minds dominate but when we lose our minds…
  • February, 1932

• My life is slowed up by thought and the need to understand what I am living.
  • February, 1932

• Passion gives me moments of wholeness.
  • February, 1932

• We don’t have a language for the senses. Feelings are images, sensations are like musical sounds.
  • February, 1932

• Man can never know the kind of loneliness a woman knows. Man lies in a woman’s womb only to gather strength, he nourishes himself from this fusion, and then he rises and goes into the world, into his work, into battle, into art. He is not lonely. He is busy. The memory of the swim in amniotic fluid gives him energy, completion. The woman may be busy too, but she feels empty. Sensuality for her is not only a wave of pleasure in which he has bathed, and a charge of electric joy at contact with another. When man lies in her womb, she is fulfilled, each act of love is a taking of man within her, and act of birth and rebirth, of child bearing and man bearing. Man lies in her womb and is reborn each time anew with a desire to act, to BE. But for a woman, the climax is not in the birth, but in the moment when man rests inside of her.
  • May 25, 1932

• Women always think that when they have my shoes, my dress, my hairdresser, my makeup, it will all work the same way. They do not conceive of the witchcraft that is needed. They do not know that I am not beautiful but that I only appear to be at certain moments.
  • June 1932 Henry and June

• Nothing too long imagined can be perfect in a worldly way.
  • June 1932 Henry and June

• Love reduces the complexity of living.
  • June 1932 Henry and June

• The basis of insincerity is the idealized image we hold of ourselves and wish to impose on others.
  • July 1932, The Diary Of Anaïs Nin, Volume One (1931-1934)

• To lie, of course, is to engender insanity.
  • August 1932 Henry and June

• I see myself wrapped in lies, which do not seem to penetrate my soul, as if they are not really a part of me. They are like costumes.
  • August 1932 Henry and June

• There will never be darkness because in both of us there’s always movement, renewal, surprises. I have never known stagnation. Not even introspection has been a still experience…
  • August 1932 Henry and June

• You are so terribly nimble, so clever. I distrust your cleverness. You make a wonderful pattern, everything is in its place, it looks convincingly clear, too clear. And meanwhile, where are you? Not on the clear surface of your ideas, but you have already sunk deeper, into darker regions, so that one only thinks one has been given all your thoughts, one only imagines you have emptied yourself in that clarity. But there are layers and layers — you’re bottomless, unfathomable. Your clearness is deceptive. You are the thinker who arouses most confusion in me, most doubt, most disturbance.
  • August 1932 Henry and June

• This abdication of life demanded of the artist is to be achieved only relatively. Most artists have retired too absolutely; they grow rusty, inflexible to the flow of currents.
  • November 26, 1932

• I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.
  • March, 1933

• I disregard the proportions, the measures, the tempo of the ordinary world. I refuse to live in the ordinary world as ordinary women. To enter ordinary relationships. I want ecstasy. I am a neurotic — in the sense that I live in my world. I will not adjust myself to the world. I am adjusted to myself.
  • March 25, 1933

• I need a place where I can shout and weep. I have to be a Spanish savage at some time of the day. I record here the hysteria life causes in me. The overflow of an undisciplined extravagance. To hell with taste and art, with all contractions and polishings. Here I shout, I dance, I weep, I gnash my teeth, I go mad — all by myself, in bad English, in chaos. It will keep me sane for the world and for art .
  • Oct. 27, 1933 (writing about her diary)

• When others asked the truth of me, I was convinced it was not the truth they wanted, but an illusion they could bear to live with.
  • November, 1933

• For me, the adventures of the mind, each inflection of thought, each movement, nuance, growth, discovery, is a source of exhilaration.
  • November, 1933

• People living deeply have no fear of death.
  • The Diary Of Anais Nin, Volume Two (1934-1939)

• He was insane with anger. Or is all insanity anger?
  • The Diary Of Anais Nin, Volume Two (1934-1939)

• You cannot save people, you can only love them.
  • The Diary Of Anais Nin, Volume Two (1934-1939)

• I have so strong a sense of creation, of tomorrow, that I cannot get drunk, knowing I will be less alive, less well, less creative the next day.
  • The Diary Of Anais Nin, Volume Two (1934-1939)

• Someday I’ll be locked up for love insanity. “She loved too much.”
  • The Diary Of Anais Nin, Volume Two (1934-1939)

• The times in his studio when he washed his hands and they smoked, for his hands were so warm and the water so cold.
  • The Diary Of Anais Nin, Volume Two (1934-1939)

• The body is an instrument which only gives off music when it is used as a body. Always an orchestra, and just as music traverses walls, so sensuality traverses the body and reaches up to ecstasy.
  • The Diary Of Anais Nin, Volume Two (1934-1939)

• He left me at my hotel at 3:00 AM murmuring: “You’re marvelous.”
  • The Diary Of Anais Nin, Volume Two (1934-1939)

• I seek the real stuff of life. Profound drama.
  • February 5, 1934

• Oh, God, I know no joy as great as a moment of rushing into a new love, no ecstasy like that of a new love. I swim in the sky; I float; my body is full of flowers, flowers with fingers giving me acute, acute caresses, sparks, jewels, quivers of joy, dizziness, such dizziness. Music inside of one, drunkenness. Only closing the eyes and remembering, and the hunger, the hunger for more, more, the great hunger, the voracious hunger, and thirst.
  • May 30, 1934

• No one but a woman in love ever sees the maximum of men’s greatness .
  • June 18, 1934

• I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn’t impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.
  • July 7, 1934

• Love is the axis and breath of my life. The art I produce is a byproduct, an excrescence of love, the song I sing, the joy which must explode, the overabundance — that is all!
  • Oct. 21, 1934

• We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another, unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made of layers, cells, constellations.
  • The Diary of Anaïs Nin Vol. 4 (1971); as quoted in Journal of Phenomenological Psychology Vol. 15 (1984)

• In creation alone there is the possibility of perfection.
  • May 11, 1935, published in Fire : From “A Journal of Love” : the Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1934-1937 (1995)

• I miss the animal buoyancy of New York, the animal vitality. I did not mind that it had no meaning and no depth.
  • June, 1935

• Everything but happiness is neurosis.
  • Feb. 15, 1936

• Experience teaches acceptance of the imperfect as life.
  • Feb. 15, 1936

• No desire of the body, but for what lies in there, what lies in the flesh, the world, the thought, the creation, the illumination.
  • March 2, 1936 Fire

• To withhold from living is to die … the more you give of yourself to life the more life nourishes you.
  • March 6, 1936 Fire

• I say quotations are literary. They are good only when dealing with ideas, not with experience. Experience should be pure, unique.
  • June 5, 1936 Fire

• I have an attitude now that is immovable. I shall remain outside of the world, beyond the temporal, beyond all the organizations of the world. I only believe in poetry.
  • August 22, 1936 Fire

• Ecstasy is the moment of exaltation from wholeness!
  • September 10, 1936

• Creation which cannot express itself becomes madness.
  • October 18, 1936 Fire

• Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.
  • March 1937

• There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.
  • Fall 1943

• Anxiety is love’s greatest killer. It creates the failures. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.
  • February 1947 The Diary of Anaïs Nin Vol. 4 (1944-1947), p. 185

• Why one writes is a question I can answer easily, having so often asked it of myself. I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live. I could not live in any of the worlds offered to me — the world of my parents, the world of war, the world of politics. I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and recreate myself when destroyed by living. That, I believe, is the reason for every work of art.
  • February 1954 The Diary of Anaïs Nin Vol. 5 (1947-1955), as quoted in Woman as Writer (1978) by Jeannette L. Webber and Joan Grumman, p. 38

• The artist is the only one who knows that the world is a subjective creation, that there is a choice to be made, a selection of elements. It is a materialization, an incarnation of his inner world. Then he hopes to attract others into it. He hopes to impose his particular vision and share it with others. And when the second stage is not reached, the brave artist continues nevertheless. The few moments of communion with the world are worth the pain, for it is a world for others, an inheritance for others, a gift to others, in the end. When you make a world tolerable for yourself, you make a world tolerable for others.
  We also write to heighten our own awareness of life. We write to lure and enchant and console others. We write to serenade our lovers. We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection. We write, like Proust, to render all of it eternal, and to persuade ourselves that it is eternal. We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it. We write to teach ourselves to speak with others, to record the journey into the labyrinth. We write to expand our world when we feel strangled, or constricted, or lonely. We write as the birds sing, as the primitives dance their rituals. If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don’t write, because our culture has no use for it. When I don’t write, I feel my world shrinking. I feel I am in a prison. I feel I lose my fire and my color. It should be a necessity, as the sea needs to heave, and I call it breathing.
  • February 1954 The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 5 as quoted in Woman as Writer (1978) by Jeannette L. Webber and Joan Grumman, p. 38

• One handles truths like dynamite. Literature is one vast hypocrisy, a giant deception, treachery. All writers have concealed more than they revealed.
  • The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 5

• The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say. Most of the writing today which is called fiction contains such a poverty of language, such triteness, that it is a shrunken, diminished world we enter, poorer and more formless than the poorest cripple deprived of ears and eyes and tongue. The writer’s responsibility is to increase, develop our senses, expand our vision, heighten our awareness and enrich our articulateness.
  • The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 5, as quoted in Moving to Antarctica : An Anthology of Women’s Writing (1975) by Margaret Kaminski

• I would say that compassion for our parents is the true sign of maturity.
  • The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 5

• At a lecture I am asked to pronounce my name three times. I try to be slow and emphatic, “Anaïs — Anaïs — Anaïs. You just say “Anna” and then add “ees,” with the accent on the “ees.”
  • Summer 1966, in The Diary Of Anais Nin, Volume 7 (1966-1974)

W. H. Auden
Auden in 1939 (from the Library of Congress)

Today is the birthday of Wystan Hugh Auden (York 21 February 1907 – 29 September 1973 Vienna); poet, who later became an American citizen.  Perhaps best known for love poems such as “Funeral Blues,” poems on political and social themes such as “September 1, 1939” and “The Shield of Achilles,” poems on cultural and psychological themes such as The Age of Anxiety, and poems on religious themes such as “For the Time Being” and “Horae Canonicae.”  In 1939 he moved to the United States and became an American citizen in 1946.

Auden’s poetry was noted for its stylistic and technical achievement, its engagement with politics, morals, love, and religion, and its variety in tone, form and content.  He won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for his 1947 long poem The Age of Anxiety, the title of which became a popular phrase describing the modern era.

Verse

Lay your sleeping head, my love
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral;
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie:
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.

• Lay your sleeping head, my love (1937) Lines 1-2, Written January 1937; also known as Lullaby.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

• The More Loving One (1957)

• Marriage is rarely bliss
  But, surely it would be worse
  As particles to pelt
  At thousands of miles per sec
  About a universe
  In which a lover’s kiss
  Would either not be felt
  Or break the loved one’s neck.
  • After Reading a Child’s Guide to Modern Physics (1961) Lines 9-16
• Thoughts of his own death,
  like the distant roll
  of thunder at a picnic.
  • Marginalia (1965-68)

Funeral Blues (1936)

First version written 1936, final version 1938; also known as “Stop all the clocks” 

• Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
  Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone.
  Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
  Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

• He was my North, my South, my East and West,
  My working week and my Sunday rest,
  My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
  I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

• The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
  Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
  Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods;
  For nothing now can ever come to any good.

As I Walked Out One Evening (1937)

Written November 1937

• I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you
  Till China and Africa meet,
  And the river jumps over the mountain
  And the salmon sing in the street,I’ll love you till the ocean
  Is folded and hung up to dry
  And the seven stars go squawking
  Like geese about the sky.

• ‘O plunge your hands in water,
  Plunge them in up to the wrist;
  Stare, stare in the basin
  And wonder what you’ve missed.
• ‘The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
  The desert sighs in the bed,
  And the crack in the tea-cup opens
  A lane to the land of the dead.’
• Lines 37-44

Behind the corpse in the reservoir, behind the ghost on the links,
Behind the lady who dances and the man who madly drinks,
Under the look of fatigue, the attack of migraine and the sigh
There is always another story, there is more than meets the eye.

Mac Tag

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anais nin, the lovers almanac, w h auden

Dear Zazie,

Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag.  Follow us on twitter @cowboycoleridge.  Who do you go to the river with?  Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

an overused word
“Sets a high bar”
best used in the context
of us for each other
“I like that”
or how it feels with you
whatever we are doin’
“And a song”
has to be Lou Reed
days spent with her
drinkin’ sangria
goin’ to the movies
how she keeps him
hangin’ on
“And it bet they ended here”
in each other’s arms, perfectly

© copyright 2023 mac tag/cowboycoleridge all rights reserved

©copyright 2022 mac tag/cowboy colridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

i felt it
it was perfect
tell me it was

not about control
about lettin’ go
transcendence
surprise yourself
very few
have it in them

come to ask
if you will
dance
so we can
lose ourselves
in mutual
seduction

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

“Well, I have to go
and you need to write.
Go write something
beautiful.”
ah, but it does not
work that way
beauty writes itself

we came to ask
we just wanted to be

we felt it
perfect
it was perfect
seducin’ each other
when in control
turned to lettin’ go
surprised even us
a transcendence
few ever reach

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

By The River

Saw her again today
I see her everywhere
In the sunrise
In the sunset
In the flowers
In the forest
In the mountains
In the meadow
Ridin’ horses
Takin’ a walk
Smilin’ that smile
By the river

Wherever beauty is
That is where I see her
She’s in my dreams
She’s in the stars
She’s in the moon
She’s in my thoughts
She’s in the mist
She’s in the snow
Ridin’ with me
Takin’ my heart
Smilin’ at me
By the river

© copyright 2013 mac tag/Cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

The Song of the Day is “The River” by Breed 77.  We do not own the rights to this song.  All rights reserved by the rightful owner.  No copyright infringement intended.

 

Il barbiere di Siviglia The Barber of Seville
Opera buffa by Gioachino Rossini
Portrait of the composer

Today is the premiere day of The Barber of Seville, or The Useless Precaution (Il barbiere di Siviglia, ossia L’inutile precauzione; an opera buffa in two acts by Gioachino Rossini with an Italian libretto by Cesare Sterbini. The libretto was based on Pierre Beaumarchais’s French comedy Le Barbier de Séville (1775). The première of Rossini’s opera (under the title Almaviva, o sia L’inutile precauzione) took place on 20 February 1816 at the Teatro Argentina, Rome.

In my opinion, Rossini’s Barber is one of the greatest masterpieces of comedy within music. It is the the opera buffa of all “opere buffe”. It remains a popular work.

Figaro

Synopsis

Place: Seville, Spain

Time: 18th century

Act 1

The square in front of Bartolo’s house

In a public square outside Bartolo’s house a band of musicians and a poor student named Lindoro are serenading, to no avail, the window of Rosina (“Ecco, ridente in cielo”; “There, laughing in the sky”). Lindoro, who is really the young Count Almaviva in disguise, hopes to make the beautiful Rosina love him for himself – not his money. Almaviva pays off the musicians who then depart, leaving him to brood alone. Rosina is the young ward of the grumpy, elderly Bartolo and she is allowed very little freedom because Bartolo plans to marry her once she is of age and thus appropriate her not inconsiderable dowry.

Figaro approaches singing (Aria: “Largo al factotum della città”; “Make way for the factotum of the city”). Since Figaro used to be a servant of the Count, the Count asks him for assistance in helping him meet Rosina, offering him money should he be successful in arranging this. (Duet: “All’idea di quel metallo”; “At the idea of that metal”). Figaro advises the Count to disguise himself as a drunken soldier, ordered to be billeted with Bartolo, so as to gain entrance to the house. For this suggestion, Figaro is richly rewarded.

A room in Bartolo’s house with four doors

The scene begins with Rosina’s cavatina, “Una voce poco fa” (“A voice a little while ago”). (This aria was originally written in the key of E major, but it is sometimes transposed a semitone up into F major for coloratura sopranos to perform, giving them the chance to sing extra, almost traditional, cadenzas, sometimes reaching high Ds or even Fs.)
When the two have gone, Rosina and Figaro enter. Figaro asks Rosina to write a few encouraging words to Lindoro, which she has actually already written. (Duet: “Dunque io son…tu non m’inganni?”; “Then I’m the one…you’re not fooling me?”). Although surprised by Bartolo, Rosina manages to fool him, but he remains suspicious. (Aria: “A un dottor della mia sorte”; “To a doctor of my class”).Knowing the Count only as Lindoro, Rosina writes to him. As she is leaving the room, Bartolo and Basilio enter. Bartolo is suspicious of the Count, and Basilio advises that he be put out of the way by creating false rumours about him (this aria, “La calunnia è un venticello” – “Calumny is a little breeze” – is almost always sung a tone lower than the original D major).

Count Almaviva, disguised as a soldier and pretending to be drunk, enters the house and demands to be quartered there. In fear of the drunken man, Berta the housekeeper rushes to Bartolo for protection. Bartolo tells the “soldier” that he (Bartolo) has an official exemption which excuses him from the requirement to quarter soldiers in his home. Almaviva pretends to be too drunk and belligerent to understand, and dares Bartolo to brawl. While Bartolo searches his cluttered desk for the official document which would prove his exemption, Almaviva whispers to Rosina that he is Lindoro in disguise, and passes a love-letter to her. Bartolo suspiciously demands to know what is in the piece of paper in Rosina’s hands, but she fools him by handing over her laundry list. Bartolo and the Count argue loudly. Basilio enters; then Figaro, who warns that the noise of the argument is rousing the whole neighborhood. Finally, the noise attracts the attention of the Officer of the Watch and his troops, who crowd into the room. Bartolo demands that the Officer arrest the “drunken soldier”. The Officer starts to do so, but Almaviva quietly reveals his true identity to the Officer, and he (the Officer) backs off and stands down. Bartolo and Basilio are astonished and mystified; Figaro laughs quietly at them. (Finale: “Fredda ed immobile, come una statua”; “Cold and still, just like a statue”). The confusion intensifies and causes everyone to suffer headaches and auditory hallucinations (“Mi par d’esser con la testa in un’orrida fucina; dell’incudini sonore l’importuno strepitar.”; “My head seems to be in a fiery forge: the sound of the anvils deafens the ear.”)

Act 2

A room in Bartolo’s house with a piano

Almaviva again appears at the doctor’s house, this time disguised as a priest who is also a singing tutor and pretending to act as substitute for the supposedly ailing Basilio, Rosina’s regular singing teacher. Initially, Bartolo is suspicious, but does allow Almaviva to enter when the Count gives him Rosina’s letter. He describes his plan to discredit Lindoro whom he believes to be one of the Count’s servants, intent on pursuing women for his master. While Almaviva pretends to give Rosina her singing lesson, Figaro arrives to shave Bartolo. Bartolo demurs, but Figaro makes such a scene he agrees, but in order not to leave the supposed music master alone with Rosina, the doctor has Figaro shave him right there in the music room. When Basilio suddenly appears, he is bribed by a full purse from Almaviva and persuaded to leave again, with much discussion of how ill he looks. (Quintet: “Don Basilio! – Cosa veggo!”; “Don Basilio! – What do I see?”). Figaro begins to shave Bartolo, but Bartolo overhears the lovers conspiring, and angrily drives everybody away.

The scene returns to the location of act 1 with a grill looking out onto the square. Bartolo orders Basilio to have the notary ready to marry him to Rosina that evening. He also explains his plot to come between the lovers. Basilio leaves and Rosina arrives. Bartolo shows Rosina the letter she wrote to “Lindoro”, and persuades her that this is evidence that Lindoro is merely a flunky of Almaviva and is toying with her at Almaviva’s behest. Rosina believes him and agrees to marry him.

During an instrumental interlude, the music creates a thunder storm to indicate the passage of time. The Count and Figaro climb up a ladder to the balcony and enter the room through a window. Rosina shows Almaviva the letter and accuses him of betraying her. Almaviva reveals his identity and the two reconcile. While Almaviva and Rosina are enraptured by one another, Figaro keeps urging them to leave. Two people are heard approaching the front door, who later turn out to be Basilio and the notary. However, when the Count, Rosina, and Figaro attempt to leave by way of the ladder, they discover it has been removed. The marriage contract requires two witnesses; Figaro is one, but another is needed. The Count makes Basilio an offer he can’t refuse: the choice of accepting a bribe and being a witness to his marriage or receiving two bullets in the head (an easy choice, Basilio says). He and Figaro witness the signatures to a marriage contract between the Count and Rosina. Bartolo barges in, accompanied by the Officer and the men of the watch, but too late; the marriage is already complete. The befuddled Bartolo (who was the one who had removed the ladder) is pacified by being allowed to retain Rosina’s dowry. The opera concludes with an anthem to love (“Amor e fede eterna, si vegga in noi regnar!”).

 

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Today is the premiere day of Swan Lake (Russian: Лебединое озеро Lebedinoye ozero), Op. 20; a ballet composed by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky in 1875–76. It is now one of the most popular of all ballets.

The scenario, initially in two acts, was fashioned from Russian folk tales and tells the story of Odette, a princess turned into a swan by an evil sorcerer’s curse. The choreographer of the original production was Julius Reisinger (Václav Reisinger). The ballet was premiered by the Bolshoi Ballet on 4 March [O.S. 20 February] 1877 at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow. Although it is presented in many different versions, most ballet companies base their stagings both choreographically and musically on the 1895 revival of Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov, first staged for the Imperial Ballet on 15 January 1895, at the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg. For this revival, Tchaikovsky’s score was revised by the St. Petersburg Imperial Theatre’s chief conductor and composer Riccardo Drigo.

 The libretto is based on a story by the German author Johann Karl August Musäus, “Der geraubte Schleier” (The Stolen Veil), though this story provides only the general outline of the plot of Swan Lake. However, there are many similarities: The hero Friedbert is, though no prince,a careless youth, whose father is dead. He befriends with Benno (who’s here an old monk). He tells him about the swan lake. Friedbert steals a veil, so the swan maiden and princess Kalliste can’t fly away. But Friedbert tells her that it was a wizard threatening her. When Kalliste finds the veil, she leaves Friedbert. But his mother and the wedding guests assume that Kalliste was a female demon and Friedbert a wizard. In the end, Friedbert manages to get her forgiveness and they live happily ever after. A fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm, the white and the black bride, and a Russian folktale “The White Duck” also bear some resemblance to the story of the ballet, and may have been another possible source. The contemporaries of Tchaikovsky recalled the composer taking great interest in the life story of Bavarian King Ludwig II, whose tragic life had supposedly been marked by the sign of Swan and who—either consciously or not—was chosen as the prototype of the dreamer Prince Siegfried. However, the tragic death happened in 1886, 10 years after the first performance in 1877. A better explanation is that Siegfried represents the romantic composer Tchaikovsky himself, struggling between duties and longing for true love. The Russian ballet patriarch Fyodor Lopukhov has called Swan Lake a “national ballet” because of its swans, which he argues originate from Russian lyrically romantic sources, while many of the movements of the corps de ballet originated from Slavonic ring-dances. According to Lopukhov, “both the plot of Swan Lake, the image of the Swan and the very idea of a faithful love are essentially Russian.” The idea of a princess enchanted by an evil wizard is essentially Russian. However, the swan occurs in several Norse myths: Lohengrin, Wieland the blacksmith or The children of Lir. The names in Swan Lake are taken from several romantic icons: Siegfried the dragonslayer,Odette de Champdivers, Odile of Alsace, Emperor Friedrich Barbarossa (=Rotbart=Redbeard). The French Melusine, the English Tattercoats, and the greek myths like Cygnus or Cephalus and Procris might be other possible sources. It could be the hint that the cooperation of the Tzchech choreographer and the Russian composer intended an all-European fairy tale, in the times of upcoming nationalism. While the Biedermeier choreographer might have intended a parody of romanticism, Tschaikovsky contributed to the overwhelming romantic atmosphere. So Swan Lake is essential romantic.

Design by F. Gaanen for the décor of Act II of Swan Lake, Moscow, 1877

Adelaide Giuri as Odette and Mikhail Mordkin as Prince Siegfried in Aleksandr Gorsky’s staging of the Petipa/Ivanov Swan Lake for the Bolshoi Theatre, Moscow, 1901. A young Vera Karalli is seen kneeling.

Anna Sobeshchanskaya as Odette in Julius Reisinger’s original production of Swan Lake, Moscow, 1877

Pierina Legnani as Odette (1895)

 Pavel Gerdt as Prince Siegfried (Mariinsky Theatre, 1895)

A 2008 production at the Royal Swedish Opera

Roles

• Princess Odette (the Swan Queen and the White Swan or also the Swan Princess), a beautiful Princess, who has been transformed into a white swan
• Prince Siegfried, a handsome Prince who falls in love with Odette
• Baron Von Rothbart, an evil sorcerer, who has enchanted Odette
• Odile (the Black Swan), Rothbart’s daughter
• Benno von Sommerstern, the Prince’s friend
• The Queen, Prince Siegfried’s mother
• Wolfgang, his tutor
• Baron von Stein
• The Baroness, his wife
• Freiherr von Schwarzfels
• His wife
• A herald
• A footman
• Court gentlemen and ladies, friends of the prince, heralds, guests, pages, villagers, servants, swans, cygnets

By 1895, Benno von Sommerstern had become just “Benno,” and Odette “Queen of the Swans.” Also Baron von Stein, his wife, and Freiherr von Schwarzfels and his wife were no longer identified on the program. The sovereign or ruling Princess is often rendered “Queen Mother.” Rothbart (“Redbeard”) may also be spelled Rotbart.

Princess Odette, the White Swan is the lead ballerina role. Rothbart’s daughter Odile is danced by the same ballerina; this facilitates the scene in which Odile, disguised as Odette, tricks Prince Siegfried into being unfaithful. Odette also appears in many adaptations of the ballet.

Odette is often referred to as a “tragic heroine” and is always portrayed as vulnerable, gentle, caring, modest and warm-hearted. She appears in the second and fourth acts, though she also makes a minor appearance in the third act when she appears as a vision during the Ball. As the heroine of the story, she has been transformed into a swan by Rothbart and can only regain her human form at night. She has many companions under the same spell, who have made her their princess, hence her title “The Swan Princess.” She is forced to live by a lake that was magically formed from the tears of her grieving mother after Rothbart kidnapped her. The only way for the spell to be broken is by the power of eternal love between Odette and a young man who will remain faithful to her, for if the vow of eternal love is broken, she will remain a swan forever. When Odette falls in love with Prince Siegfried, hope for her freedom has come at last, until Siegfried is tricked into breaking his vow by Rothbart, trapping Odette as a swan forever. To escape the spell, Odette chooses to die and Siegfried chooses to die with her; the lovers drown themselves in the lake and are reunited forever in death.

Prince Siegfried is the lead male ballet dancer role. Like Odette and Rothbart, he appears in many adaptations of the ballet, although he has a different name in almost every one, despite retaining some or all of his characteristics.

Out of all the characters in the ballet, Siegfried is the only one to appear in all four acts. He is a young Prince, full of bright spirit and enthusiasm, and seems to have little interest in his royal role. He clearly cares more for socialising, merry events and sporting activities, as shown when he is celebrating his 21st birthday with his best friend, Benno and his tutor, Wolfgang. When his mother, the Queen tells him he must soon marry, he refuses because he has not yet found a woman of his preference. His favourite hobby is hunting, so to end his birthday celebrations, he and Benno head into the forest on a hunting expedition with their companions. However, everything takes an ironic twist on this expedition, for deep in the forest, Siegfried and his friends arrive at a lake, where Siegfried spots a beautiful swan wearing a crown. But before he can shoot it, the swan transforms into the most beautiful woman he has ever seen: Princess Odette, the Princess of the Swans. Struck by her beauty, Siegfried falls in love with her at once. She tells him her story, explaining that she is under a spell of the evil sorcerer Rothbart. It is at this point in the ballet that Siegfried’s carefree spirit is overcome by a sudden growth to manhood out of his love for Odette and from that point, it becomes his goal to save and marry her. He invites her to attend a Ball at his castle and promises to choose her as his bride, but everything takes a turn for the worse.

On the night of the Ball, Siegfried is thinking of nothing but Odette, and after rejecting various potential brides in her favour, he is overjoyed when she finally arrives. But it is actually Rothbart’s daughter Odile in disguise, for Rothbart has magically disguised her as Odette. Suspecting nothing, Siegfried falls for the trickery and pledges eternal love to Odile, thinking she is Odette and now all seems lost. Siegfried follows Odette back to the lake and begs her to forgive him, swearing that he loves her only. She forgives him, but explains that she has chosen to die so she can escape Rothbart’s spell. Unwilling to live without her, Siegfried chooses to die with Odette and the lovers throw themselves into the lake, reuniting in death for all eternity.

Rothbart is a powerful and evil sorcerer who casts a spell on Odette that turns her into a swan every day and returns her to human form at night. The reason for Rothbart’s curse upon Odette is unknown; several versions, including two feature films, have suggested reasons, but none is typically explained by the ballet.

Rothbart is rarely seen in human form, as he appears as a giant owl in the second and fourth acts. His human form is seen only in the third act with his daughter Odile, when she dances with the Prince Siegfried.

When Rothbart realises that Odette has fallen in love with Prince Siegfried, he tries to intervene by tricking Siegfried into declaring his love for his daughter Odile. The plan succeeds, yet in the end, Rothbart is not triumphant. When Siegfried and Odette make the ultimate sacrifice in the name of their love by throwing themselves into the lake, Rothbart’s powers are overcome and he is destroyed.

However, his fate is different in some versions, as there are productions where Rothbart is triumphant and survives. One example is the Bolshoi Ballet’s version, where he is portrayed as a sadistic schemer and plays a wicked game of fate with Siegfried, which he wins at the end, causing Siegfried to lose everything. In the second American Ballet Theatre production of Swan Lake, he is portrayed by two dancers. One of them depicts him as young and handsome; it is this Rothbart that is able to lure Odette and transform her into a swan (this is shown during the introduction to the ballet in a danced prologue especially created by choreographer Kevin McKenzie). He is also able to entice the Prince to dance with Odile, and thus seal Odette’s doom. The other Rothbart, a repulsive, reptilian-like creature, reveals himself only after he has performed an evil deed, such as transforming Odette into a swan. In this version, the lovers’ joint suicide inspires the rest of Rothbart’s imprisoned swans to turn on him and overcome his spell, which ultimately defeats him.

Odile, the Black Swan is the daughter of Rothbart, who is also an evil witch and who is willing to follow in her father’s footsteps. She only appears in the third act, usually dressed in black (though in the 1895 production, she did not wear black) and magically disguised as Odette in order to help her father trick Siegfried into breaking his vow of love to Odette. In some productions, Odile is known as the Black Swan and, rather than being magically disguised as her, is actually Odette’s evil twin or double; an example of this type of portrayal is seen in the production by the Bolshoi Ballet. There are also some productions where Odette and Odile are danced by two different ballerinas.

Synopsis

Below is a synopsis based on the 1895 libretto. Swan Lake is generally presented in either four Acts, four Scenes (primarily outside Russia and Eastern Europe) or three Acts, four Scenes (primarily in Russia and Eastern Europe). Some productions in the West include a prologue that shows the actual transformation by which Princess Odette is first turned into a swan by Rothbart. The biggest difference of productions all over the world is that the ending varies from romantic to tragic.

Prologue

This scene can take place anywhere. It shows Rothbart turning Odette into a swan.

Act 1

A magnificent park before a palace.

[Scène: Allegro giusto] Prince Siegfried is celebrating his birthday with his tutor, friends and peasants [Waltz]. The revelries are interrupted by Siegfried’s mother, the Queen [Scène: Allegro moderato], who is concerned about her son’s carefree lifestyle. She tells him that he must choose a bride at the royal ball the following evening. Siegfried is upset that he cannot marry for love. His friend Benno and the tutor try to lift his troubled mood. As evening falls [Sujet], Benno sees a flock of swans flying overhead and suggests they go on a hunt [Finale I]. Siegfried and his friends take their crossbows and set off in pursuit of the swans.

Act 2

A lakeside clearing in a forest by the ruins of a chapel. A moonlit night.

 The Valse des cygnes from Act II of the Ivanov/Petipa edition of Swan Lake

Siegfried has become separated from his friends. He arrives at the lakeside clearing, just as a flock of swans land nearby [Scène. Moderato]. He aims his crossbow at the swans [Scène. Allegro moderato-], but freezes when one of them transforms into a beautiful maiden, Odette [Scène. -Moderato]. At first, she is terrified of Siegfried. When he promises not to harm her, she tells him that she is the Swan Queen Odette. She and her companions are victims of a terrible spell cast by the evil owl-like sorcerer Rothbart. By day they are turned into swans and only at night, by the side of the enchanted lake – created from the tears of Odette’s mother – do they return to human form. The spell can only be broken if one who has never loved before swears to love Odette forever. Rothbart suddenly appears [Scène. -Allegro vivo]. Siegfried threatens to kill him but Odette intercedes – if Rothbart dies before the spell is broken, it can never be undone.

As Rothbart disappears, the swan maidens fill the clearing [Scène: Allegro, Moderato assai quasi andante]. Siegfried breaks his crossbow, and sets about winning Odette’s trust as the two fall in love. But as dawn arrives, the evil spell draws Odette and her companions back to the lake and they are turned into swans again.

Act 3

An opulent hall in the palace.

Guests arrive at the palace for a costume ball. Six princesses are presented to the prince [Entrance of the Guests and Waltz], one of whom his mother hopes he will choose as his bride. Then Rothbart arrives in disguise [Scène: Allegro, Allegro giusto] with his enchantress daughter, Odile, who has transformed her figure to appear as Odette. Though the princesses try to attract the prince with their dances [Pas de six], Siegfried, confusing Odile for Odette, has eyes only for her and dances with Odile. [Scène: Allegro, Tempo di valse, Allegro vivo] Odette appears as a vision and vainly tries to warn Siegfried that he is being deceived. But Siegfried remains oblivious and proclaims to the court that he intends to make Odile his wife. Rothbart shows Siegfried a magical vision of Odette and he realises his mistake. Grief-stricken, Siegfried hurries back to the lake.

Act 4

By the lakeside.

 Scene from Act 4 of Swan Lake. Vienna State Opera, 2004

Odette is distraught at Siegfried’s betrayal. The swan-maidens try to comfort her, but she is resigned to death. Siegfried returns to the lake and finds Odette. He makes a passionate apology. She forgives him and the pair reaffirm their love. Rothbart appears and insists that Siegfried fulfill his pledge to marry Odile, after which Odette will be transformed into a swan forever. Siegfried chooses to die alongside Odette and they leap into the lake. This breaks Rothbart’s spell over the swan maidens, causing him to lose his power over them and he dies. In an apotheosis, the swan maidens watch as Siegfried and Odette ascend into the Heavens together, forever united in love.

Adaptations and references

Live action film

• The opening credits for the first sound version of Dracula (1931) starring Béla Lugosi includes a modified version of the Swan Theme from Act II. The same piece was later used for the credits of The Mummy (1932) and is often used as a backing track for the silent film, Phantom of the Opera (1925).
• The film I Was an Adventuress (1940) contained a long sequence from the ballet.
• In 1968–69, the Kirov Ballet along with Lenfilm studios produced a filmed version of the ballet starring Yelena Yevteyeva as Odette.
• In the film Funny Girl (1968), Barbra Streisand, playing Fanny Brice, dances in a comedic spoof of Swan Lake.
• The ballet is central to the plot of “Étoile” (1989).
• In Brain Donors (1992), the three main characters try and succeed in sabotaging a fictional production of the ballet.
• 

  Natalie Portman in Black Swan

  Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan (2010) focuses on two characters from Swan Lake—the Princess Odette, sometimes called the White Swan, and her evil duplicate, the witch Odile (the Black Swan) portrayed by , and takes its inspiration from the ballet’s story, although it does not literally follow it. Clint Mansell’s score contains music from the ballet, with more elaborate restructuring to fit the horror tone of the film. One of my all time favorite movies!

The Silent Violinist, a professional mime busker act, that references the “swan princess” concept.

Dancers from Little Princess Ballet Academy (LPBA) in Second Life have lined up, waiting to go on stage for Swan Lake in May 2014.

Ansel Adams

Today is the birthday of Ansel Easton Adams (San Francisco; February 20, 1902 – April 22, 1984 Monterey, California); photographer and environmentalist.  His black-and-white landscape photographs of the American West, especially Yosemite National Park, have been widely reproduced on calendars, posters, books, and the internet.

He married Virginia Best in 1928 after a cooling-off period during 1925–26, during which he had short-lasting relationships with various women.  The newly-weds moved in with his parents to save expenses.  His marriage also marked the end of his serious attempt at a musical career, as well as her ambitions to be a classical singer.

Gallery

Japanese internment camp

Georgia o’keeffe and Orville cox

Ghost ranch

Ghost ranch

Church, Taos Pueblo (1942)

Evening, McDonald Lake, Glacier National Park (1942)

Baton practice at the Manzanar War Relocation Center, 1943

The Tetons and the Snake River (1942)

Mac Tag

Continue reading

ansel adams, breed 77, by the river, cowboy coleridge, Gioachino Rossini, Il barbiere di Siviglia, love letter, love poem, love song, muse, poem of the day, Rhett, song of the day, swan lake, tchaikovsky, tea with tater, the lovers almanac, the river, tla, twt, Zazie

Dear Zazie,  Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag dedicated to his muse.  Follow us on twitter @cowboycoleridge.  Who do you remember?  Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

that was for the one
that never was
“No need to go there now”
did you enjoy the short films
“I did, The Irish Goodbye
was hilarious”
i would have preferred
darker themes
“Or romantic”
yes, but glad we went
“Another moment to our list”
cherished
do you recall the time we…

@ copyright 2023 mac tag/cowboycoleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2021 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

i settle myself in a place as favorable as possible to the concentration of my mind upon you, i write quickly, fast enough so that the first line comes spontaneously, so compellin’ are you that with every passin’ second the verse unknown to my consciousness cries out to be heard

© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

in the rear view…

our sketchbooks,
our photos
convey the details
of impressions
left from together

the long walks,
nights at the opera,
drinks and dancin’
whatever we did
it was never borin’

“I can feel the wind
in your cheek.”

a kiss before
the clock tolls

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

rememberin’ you is good
out here
amid the hills
covered with snow
as another year
passes…

rememberin’ you is good
the softness
of touch
a second chance
given to me…

rememberin’ you is good
and writin’ about you
as i sit by the fire
thinkin’ of yesteryear

of first touches
of words you said
not of the words
so much
but of you within them…

rememberin’ you
is good
and writin’ for you
a story
a poem
weavin’ the words
then ridin’
far into the hills
to tell what i have written
to the big High Plain’s sky

rememberin’ you is good
out here
amid the hills
covered with snow
as another year passes…

at this late hour
on this winter night
filled with your words
time always there
naked
the night
heavy
like the frost
words which
come
and come again

your words came to me
your words delivered
you
woman
lover
muse
your words were sad
they were
bitter
hopeful
heroic
your words were all

rememberin’ you
is good
out here
amid the hills covered with snow

as another year
passes…

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

Rememberin’ You

Rememberin’ you is good
out here
amid the hills
covered with snow
as my fiftieth year
passes…

Rememberin’ you is good

Your lips
and the softness
of their touch
upon my skin
This joy of lovin’ you
is like a second chance
given to me…
The smell of your perfume
on your neck
warm and comfortin’
The invitation of your flesh
a hot
intense
darkness
scored in me always…

Rememberin’ you is good
or
writin’ about you is
as I sit on my porch
out here,
thinkin’ of the day
we first kissed
at my place in the country
Of some words you said
Not of the words
so much
but of you within them…

Rememberin’ you
is good
I must write somethin’ for you again
a story
a poem
I
must weave the words together
then ride
far into the
hills
and tell what I have written
to the innocent blue
of the High Plain’s sky

Rememberin’ you is good
out here
amid the hills
covered with snow
as my fiftieth year passes…

At this late hour
on this winter night
I am filled with your words
Eternal
Time always there
Naked
the night
Heavy
like the frost
Words which
sparkle
Your words came to me
from your heart
your
head
your body
Your words delivered
you
woman
lover
muse
Your words were sad
they were
bitter
hopeful
heroic
Your words were human

Rememberin’ you
is good
out here
amid the hills covered with snow

as my fiftieth year
passes…

© copyright 2010 mac tag/Cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

The Song of the Day is “I Remember You” by Skid Row.

Gabriele Münter in 1900

Today is the birthday of Gabriele Münter (19 February 1877 – 19 May 1962); expressionist painter who was at the forefront of the Munich avant-garde in the early 20th century.

When World War I began, Münter and Kandinsky relocated to Switzerland. In 1914, Kandinsky returned to Russia without her, and his marriage in 1917 to Nina Andreevskaya marked the end of Münter and Kandinsky’s relationship.  Subsequently, there was a period of inactivity in her art career. She returned a number of paintings and drawings to Kandinsky, and stored other pieces in a warehouse for many years. She resumed painting in the late 1920s after she had moved back to Germany with Johannes Eichner after the war.

The Gabrielle Münter and Johannes Eichner foundation was established and has become a valuable research center for Münter’s art, as well as the art that was done by the Blaue Reiter group. Münter lived the rest of her life in Murnau, traveling back and forth to Munich. She died at home in Murnau am Staffelsee on 19 May 1962.

Gallery

Woman in black

Meditation

Bei Paris II (Countryside Near Paris), 1907. Brooklyn Museum

Abend im Park (Nightfall in St. Cloud), 1906. Brooklyn Museum

André Breton
André Breton in 1924

Today is the birthday of André Breton (Tinchebray, Orne; 19 February 1896 – 28 September 1966 Paris); writer, poet, and anti-fascist.  He is known best as the founder of Surrealism.  His writings include the first Surrealist Manifesto (Manifeste du surréalisme) of 1924, in which he defined surrealism as “pure psychic automatism”.

  La beauté sera CONVULSIVE ou ne sera pas.

• Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or not at all.
• Nadja (1928), final sentence

Le Surréalisme et la Peinture (Surrealism and Painting; 1926)

• L’amour est toujours devant vous. Aimez.
  • Love is always before you. Love it.

• L’œil existe à l’état sauvage.
  • Eyes exist in the savage state.

 

Carson McCullers
McCullers, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1959

Today is the birthday of Carson McCullers (Columbus, Georgia; February 19, 1917 – September 29, 1967 Nyack, New York); novelist, short story writer, playwright, essayist, and poet.  Her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, explores the spiritual isolation of misfits and outcasts in a small town of the U.S. South.  Her other novels have similar themes and most are set in the deep South.

McCullers’ oeuvre is often described as Southern Gothic and indicative of her southern roots.  However, McCullers penned all of her work after leaving the South, and critics also describe her writing and eccentric characters as universal in scope.  Her stories have been adapted to stage and film.  A stagework of her novel The Member of the Wedding (1946), which captures a young girl’s feelings at her brother’s wedding, made a successful Broadway run in 1950–51.

“The most outlandish people can be the stimulus for love. A man may be a doddering great-grandfather and still love only a strange girl he saw in the streets of Cheehaw one afternoon two decades past. The preacher may love a fallen woman. The beloved may be treacherous, greasy-headed, and given to evil habits. Yes, and the lover may see this as clearly as anyone else – but that does not affect the evolution of his love one whit. [.] It is for this reason that most of us would rather love than be loved.”

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Dear Zazie,  Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag to his muse.  Follow us on twitter @cowboycoleridge.  What do you know?  Have you told that someone what you know?  Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

oh yes you do
“We do”
no song lyrics leap to mind
“Without don’t, I agree”
how many do and how often
do those, find someone who does
“I hope it is not rare”
for dramatic effect
and for the dark spot i have,
it does not happen often
“All the more reason
we sould feel fortunate”
that we do

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© copyright 2021 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

you know that i am
more near to you
than anyone

spent years,
too many,
afraid to look
into some
of the rooms
in my mind

not fearful anymore
been in all of ’em
finally figured out
i just had to write
to make sense of it all

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

all these years
all these memories
it has been you

you know
that i am

what means it then
to be sundered so
if hopes are true
if expectancy
breaks down
what between stands

for bein’ without
is endurable
because you know

be not, therefore
need not burn
need not cry
come
that we may know
what was meant to be

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboycoleridge

i sure ain’t found
the answer
truth is,
i never understood
the language
b’lieve i will stick
with horses

And another oldie but goodie.  This started out as a vignette that I sent you.  Then I read a poem today written by Michelangelo and it all came together.  Hope you like……

You Know

© copyright 2013 mac tag/Cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

The Song of the Day is “You Know You Know” by the Mahavishnu Orchestra.  Also check out this song which was based on “You Know You Know”, “One Love” by Massive Attack.  We do not own the rights to these songs.  All rights reserved by the rightful owner.  No copyright infringement intended.

Today is the birthday of artist Anders Zorn (Anders Leonard Zorn; Yvraden, Mora, Dalarna, Sweden 18 February 1860 – 22 August 1920 Stockholm). He obtained international success as a painter, sculptor, and etcher. At the end of his life, he established the Swedish literary Bellman Prize in 1920.

From 1875 to 1880 Zorn studied at the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts in Stockholm, where he amazed his teachers with his talent. Members of Stockholm society approached him with commissions. This was how Zorn met his wife, Emma Lamm, early in 1881. Her background was different from Zorn’s. Coming from a wealthy Jewish merchant family, she was interested in art and culture.

 Gallery

Nude bathers

Wallace Stegner
Wallace Stegner, c. 1969

Today is the birthday of Wallce Stegner (Wallace Earle Stegner, Lake Mills, Iowa, February 18, 1909 – April 13, 1993 Santa Fe); novelist, short story writer, environmentalist, and historian, often called “The Dean of Western Writers”. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972 and the U.S. National Book Award in 1977.

Stegner grew up in Great Falls, Montana; Salt Lake City, Utah; and the village of Eastend, Saskatchewan, which he wrote about in his autobiography Wolf Willow. Stegner says he “lived in twenty places in eight states and Canada”. He received a B.A. at the University of Utah in 1930. He also studied at the University of Iowa, where he received a master’s degree in 1932 and a doctorate in 1935.

In 1934, Stegner married Mary Stuart Page. For 59 years they shared a “personal literary partnership of singular facility”, in the words of Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Stegner died in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on April 13, 1993, as the result of a car accident on March 28, 1993.

Prose

• It is a better world with some buffalo left in it, a richer world with some gorgeous canyons unmarred by signboards, hot-dog stands, super highways, or high-tension lines, undrowned by power or irrigation reservoirs. If we preserved as parks only those places that have no economic possibilities, we would have no parks. And in the decades to come, it will not be only the buffalo and the trumpeter swan who need sanctuaries. Our own species is going to need them too.It needs them now.
  • This is Dinosaur: Echo Park Country and its Magic Rivers is a collection of essays and photographs edited by Wallace Stegner and published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1955. This passage is from the collection’s first essay, “The Marks of Human Passage”, which is by Stegner (page 17).

• It has never been man’s gift to make wildernesses. But he can make deserts, and has.
  • “The War Between the Rough Riders and the Bird Watchers” (1959 address; reprinted in Wildlands and Our Civilization, David Brower, editor, 1964, and in Voices for the Wilderness, William Schwarz, editor, 1970, page 76)

• There is a sense in which we are all each other’s consequences.
  • All the Little Live Things (1967)

• If the national park idea is, as Lord Bryce suggested, the best idea America ever had, wilderness preservation is the highest refinement of that idea.
  • “It All Began with Conservation” Smithsonian magazine, April 1990, pages 35-43

• The national park idea, the best idea we ever had, was inevitable as soon as Americans learned to confront the wild continent not with fear and cupidity but with delight, wonder, and awe.
  • “The Best Idea We Ever Had” Marking the Sparrow’s Fall: The Making of the American West, page 137

Wilderness Letter (1960)[edit]

A 3 December 1960 letter to David Pesonen, concerning the wilderness portion of the Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission’s report. Reprinted many times, for example, in The Sound of Mountain Water(1969) and Marking the Sparrow’s Fall (1998).

• Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste. And so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, brother to the other animals, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it. … We need wilderness preserved — as much of it as is still left, and as many kinds — because it was the challenge against which our character as a people was formed. The reminder and the reassurance that it is still there is good for our spiritual health even if we never once in ten years set foot in it.

• 

  Photo by mac tag

  It is a lovely and terrible wilderness, such as wilderness as Christ and the prophets went out into; harshly and beautifully colored, broken and worn until its bones are exposed, its great sky without a smudge of taint from Technocracy, and in hidden corners and pockets under its cliffs the sudden poetry of springs.

• These are some of the things wilderness can do for us. That is the reason we need to put into effect, for its preservation, some other principle that the principles of exploitation or “usefulness” or even recreation. We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.
• She had rooms in her mind that she would not look into.
• We write to make sense of it all.
• Be proud of every scar on your heart, each one holds a lifetime’s worth of lessons.

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Dear Zazie, Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag dedicated to his muse. Follow us on twitter @cowboycoleridge. Rhett

The Lovers’ Almanac

Dear Muse,

the more to hold cherished
“Those we have created”
the answer to, what is it
“Creation”
whether in words or visuals
“Shaped and molded”
not to be tossed aside
“From the time the sun rises”
the first words, the first touch
“Till twilight and dreams”
the last whisper’s, the last kiss
come we will create another

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© copyright 2021 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

indeed, brief

© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

just as dawn comes
one still winter’s morn
dreamt a fair dream

at my bedside,
weepin’ aloud,
one who had loved
and knew all my care
murmured, “Troubles at rest,
what has vexed, vexes no more.”

tenderly cross hands on breast
kiss then, the kindest words
more smiled than said

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

a wish, but one
si usted por favor…
meet me in Seville
at Glorieta de Bécquer…

i left flowers there
because i still believe

un bel dì vedremo
indeed, one fine day…
after a long time
see in the distance
comin’ up the hill
callin’ your name
hearin’ you
call my name
a promise
that this will happen

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

Un bel dì vedremo
(“One fine day we’ll see”)

“look there she is”
what
“look, there she is
there”
where
“she comes, it means
we are close to home”

music plays
exquisite
lyrical
under the high plains stars
now reachin’ for your hand
to lead you
in a dance
around the fire,
a slow waltz

moon reflects
on ripplin’ water

“What is it you wanted?”
i wanted
more than just
the bright, brief moments
maybe i just had bad luck,
but the true and deep
was just not meant to be

“Does it happen only
to the lucky few?”
yes
“But not to most?”
no
that is why
there are so many
fearful folk out there

a shiver, and feelin’
you close, another

you roll on top
and look down,
your hair touches
my cheek
i cannot see your face
but the stars in the night sky
behind you, form a crown
’round your head

© copyright 2017 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer
Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, by his brother, Valeriano Bécquer

Today is the birthday of Gustavo Adolfo Claudio Domínguez Bastida, better known as Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer (Seville; February 17, 1836, Seville – December 22, 1870 Madrid); post-romanticist poet and writer, playwright, literary columnist, and artist.  In my opinon, one of the most important figures in Spanish literature.  He adopted the alias of Bécquer as his brother Valeriano Bécquer, a painter, had done earlier.  He was associated with the post-romanticism movement.  He was moderately well known during his life, but it was after his death that most of his works were published.  Perhaps his best known works are the Rhymes and the Legends, usually published together as Rimas y leyendas.  These poems and tales are essential to the study of Spanish literature and common reading for high-school students in Spanish-speaking countries.

His work approached the traditional poetry and themes in a modern way, and he is considered the founder of modern Spanish lyricism.

Verse 

Glorieta de Bécquer in Seville, Spain

Bécquer at 19

The poet died from tuberculosis, an illness known as “the romantic illness” because of how common it was during the romantic period in Spain. Before this tragic sickness took his life away, Bécquer asked his good friend, Augusto Ferrán, also a poet, to burn all his letters and publish his poems instead, since he thought once he was dead, his work would be more valuable.  His body was buried in Madrid, and afterwards was moved to Seville along with his brother’s.

Somewhere around 1858, he met by chance a girl by the name of Julia Espín, with whom he fell deeply in love, and who also served as an inspiration for much of his romantic poetry.  This love, however, was unrequited.

In 1861, Bécquer met Casta Esteban Navarro, and married her in May 1861.  Bécquer was believed to have had a romance with another girl named Elisa Guillén shortly before the marriage, which is also thought to have been arranged, by the parents of the girl.  The poet was not happy in the marriage, and took any chance he got to follow his brother Valeriano on his constant trips.  Casta began to take up with a man with whom she had had a relationship shortly before marrying Bécquer, something that was later blamed on Bécquer’s trips and lack of attention by Casta’s acquaintances.  The poet wrote very little about Casta, as most of his inspiration at this time, (as it is the case with the famous rima LIII), came from his feelings towards Elisa Guillén.

Verse

Volverán las oscuras golondrinas En tu balcón sus nidos a colgar Y otra vez con el ala a sus cristales, Jugando llamarán. Pero aquellas que el vuelo refrenaban Tu hermosura y mi dicha a contemplar, Aquellas que aprendieron nuestros nombres, ¡Esas… no volverán!		The dark swallows will return their nests upon your balcony, to hang. And again with their wings upon its windows, Playing, they will call. But those who used to slow their flight your beauty and my happiness to watch, Those, that learned our names, Those… will not come back!

In Rhymes (Rhyme 21) Becquer wrote one of the most famous poems in the Spanish language.  The poem can be read as a response to a lover who asked what was poetry:

¿Qué es poesía?, dices mientras clavas en mi pupila tu pupila azul. ¡Qué es poesía! ¿Y tú me lo preguntas? Poesía… eres tú.

What is poetry? you ask, while fixing your blue pupil on mine. What is poetry! And you are asking me? Poetry… is you.

 Serpiente del amor, risa traidora,
verdugo del ensueño y de la luz,
perfumado puñal, beso enconado… ¡eso eres tú!

Today is the birthday of Pierre Auguste Cot (17 February 1837 – 2 August 1883); painter of the Academic Classicism school.

Gallery

Femme avec fleurs

La Tempête

Louisa Lawson

Today is the birthday of Louisa Lawson (née Albury) (Gulgong, New South Wales 17 February 1848 – 12 August 1920 Gladesville, New South Wales); poet, writer, publisher, suffragist, and feminist.

Verse

A Dream

Just as the grey dawning ‘gan faintly to beam
One still summer’s morning I dreamt a fair dream.
I thought that my body was tenantless clay,
And friends were preparing to lay it away,
They stood at my bedside, one weeping aloud,
While two with deft fingers placed on me a shroud.
And one who had loved me and knew all my care
Placed flowers about me and braided my hair,
And murmured, “Poor creature, her troubles are o’er,
And they who have vexed her can vex her no more.”
Then tenderly crossing my hands on my breast
She kissed me and blessed me and left me to rest.
The kindest words only about me were said
And restfully thought I, “’Tis well to be dead.”
I sighed with contentment, so safe did I seem —
Alas, for the sigh! for it banished my dream.

The Hour is Come

How did she fight? She fought well.
How did she light? Ah, she fell.
Why did she fall? God, who knows all,
Only can tell.

Those she was fighting for — they
Surely would go to her? Nay!
What of her pain! Their’s is the gain.
Ever the way.

Will they not help her to rise
If there is death in her eyes?
Can you not see? She made them free.
What if she dies ?

Can we not help her? Oh, no!
In her good fight it is so
That all who work never must shirk
Suff’ring and woe.

But she’ll not ever lie down –
On her head, in the dust, is a crown
Jewelled and bright, under whose light
She’ll rise alone.

Andrew Barton “Banjo” Paterson
Banjo Paterson

Today is the birthday of Andrew Barton “Banjo” Paterson (New South Wales 17 February 1864 – 5 February 1941 Sidney); poet, journalist and author.  He wrote many ballads and poems about Australian life, focusing particularly on the rural and outback areas, including the district around Binalong, New South Wales, where he spent much of his childhood.  Paterson’s more notable poems include “Waltzing Matilda”, “The Man from Snowy River” and “Clancy of the Overflow”.

Verse

 He hails from Snowy River, up by Kosciusko’s side,
Where the hills are twice as steep, and twice as rough;
Where the horse’s hoofs strike firelight from the flintstones every stride,
The man that holds his own is good enough.
And the Snowy River riders on the mountains make their home,
Where the river runs those giant hills between;
I have seen full many horsemen since I first commenced to roam,
But nowhere yet such horsemen have I seen.

• “The Man From Snowy River“, the poem which inspired the movies by the same name.

 

On this day in 1904 – Madama Butterfly receives its première at La Scala in Milan.

Madama Butterfly
Opera by Giacomo Puccini
Original 1904 poster by Adolfo Hohenstein

Madama Butterfly is an opera in three acts (originally two) by Giacomo Puccini, with an Italian libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa.

It is based on the short story “Madame Butterfly” (1898) by John Luther Long, which in turn was based on stories told to Long by his sister Jennie Correll and on the semi-autobiographical 1887 French novel Madame Chrysanthème by Pierre Loti.  Long’s version was dramatized by David Belasco as the one-act play Madame Butterfly: A Tragedy of Japan, which, after premiering in New York in 1900, moved to London, where Puccini saw it in the summer of that year.

The original version of the opera was poorly received, despite such notable singers as soprano Rosina Storchio, tenor Giovanni Zenatello and baritone Giuseppe De Luca in lead roles; this was due in part to a late completion by Puccini, and thus inadequate time for rehearsals.  Puccini revised the opera, splitting Act II into two (with the Humming Chorus as a bridge to what became Act III) and making other changes.  Success ensued, starting with the first performance on 28 May 1904 in Brescia.

Madama Butterfly is a staple of the operatic repertoire around the world, ranked 6th by Operabase; Puccini’s La bohème and Tosca rank 3rd and 5th.

Geraldine Farrar as Madama Butterfly, 1907

Synopsis

Time: 1904.

Place: Nagasaki, Japan.

Act 1

In 1904, a U.S. Naval officer named Pinkerton rents a house on a hill in Nagasaki, Japan, for himself and his soon-to-be wife, “Butterfly”. Her real name is Ciocio-san (cio-cio, pronounced “chocho” [t͡ʃoːt͡ʃoː], the Japanese word for “butterfly” (蝶々, chōchō^?); san is a plain honorific). She is a 15-year-old Japanese girl whom he is marrying for convenience, since he intends to leave her once he finds a proper American wife, and since Japanese divorce laws are very lax. The wedding is to take place at the house. Butterfly had been so excited to marry an American that she had earlier secretly converted to Christianity. After the wedding ceremony, her uninvited uncle, a bonze, who has found out about her conversion, comes to the house, curses her and orders all the guests to leave, which they do while renouncing her. Pinkerton and Butterfly sing a love duet and prepare to spend their first night together.

Act 2

Three years later, Butterfly is still waiting for Pinkerton to return, as he had left shortly after their wedding. Her maid Suzuki keeps trying to convince her that he is not coming back, but Butterfly will not listen to her. Goro, the marriage broker who arranged her marriage, keeps trying to marry her off again, but she won’t listen to him either. The American Consul, Sharpless, comes to the house with a letter which he has received from Pinkerton which asks him to break some news to Butterfly: that Pinkerton is coming back to Japan, but Sharpless cannot bring himself to finish it because Butterfly becomes very excited to hear that Pinkerton is coming back. Sharpless asks Butterfly what she would do if Pinkerton were not to return. She then reveals that she gave birth to Pinkerton’s son after he had left and asks Sharpless to tell him.

From the hill house, Butterfly sees Pinkerton’s ship arriving in the harbour. She and Suzuki prepare for his arrival, and then they wait. Suzuki and the child fall asleep, but Butterfly stays up all night waiting for him to arrive.

Act 3

Suzuki wakes up in the morning and Butterfly finally falls asleep. Sharpless and Pinkerton arrive at the house, along with Pinkerton’s new American wife, Kate. They have come because Kate has agreed to raise the child. But, as Pinkerton sees how Butterfly has decorated the house for his return, he realizes he has made a huge mistake. He admits that he is a coward and cannot face her, leaving Suzuki, Sharpless and Kate to break the news to Butterfly. Agreeing to give up her child if Pinkerton comes himself to see her, she then prays to statues of her ancestral gods, says goodbye to her son, and blindfolds him. She places a small American flag in his hands and goes behind a screen, cutting her throat with her father’s hara-kiri knife. Pinkerton rushes in, but he is too late, and Butterfly dies.

Synopsis (musical numbers)

This is a synopsis of the standard version of the opera, with its arias, duets, trios, choruses, etc. The synopsis is organized into the 34 tracks that constitute most recordings.

Act 1

1. A short orchestral prelude with a busy, fugal opening theme, followed by a second theme of more overtly Japanese character, leads straight into the opening scene.

2. E soffitto e pareti (“And ceiling and walls”). Pinkerton, a U.S. Naval Officer on USS Abraham Lincoln, and Goro, a Japanese marriage broker, are inspecting a small house which sits on a hill and overlooks the bay. Goro has found the house for Pinkerton and his bride, and is showing him the house, with its sliding doors and small garden. The butler, the cook and the bride’s maid, Suzuki, enter the garden and are introduced to Pinkerton. After they leave, Goro tells Pinkerton that everything is now ready and that his intended bride, a girl of 15 called Cio-Cio San (nicknamed Butterfly), will arrive soon, as will the American Consul, the marriage Registrar and all the bride’s relatives, except her uncle. Her uncle is a priest and refuses to attend the wedding ceremony. Sharpless, the American Consul, has climbed up the hill from the city. He enters the garden, greets Pinkerton and Goro, and admires the view that overlooks Nagasaki’s harbor and the sea. Pinkerton tells Sharpless that he has just purchased the little house for 999 years, with the right every month to cancel the agreement. Pinkerton explains that, in Japan, the law is very loose.

3. Dovunque al mondo (“Throughout the world”). As the orchestra plays the opening flourish to “The Star-Spangled Banner” (a musical theme which will characterize Pinkerton throughout the opera), Pinkerton tells Sharpless that, throughout the world, the Yankee wanderer is not satisfied until he captures the flowers of every shore and the love of every beautiful woman. “So I am marrying in the Japanese style: for 999 years, but with the right to cancel the marriage each month”. Sharpless is critical of Pinkerton’s beliefs, but they stand and agree, “America forever”. Pinkerton tells Goro to bring Butterfly to him. When Goro leaves, Sharpless asks Pinkerton if he is really in love.

4. Amore o grillo (“Love or fancy”). Pinkerton admits to Sharpless that he does not know whether he is really in love or just infatuated, but he is bewitched with Butterfly’s innocence, charm and beauty; she is like a butterfly fluttering around and then landing with silent grace, so beautiful “that I must have her, even though I injure her butterfly wings”. Sharpless tells Pinkerton that he heard Butterfly speak, when she visited the Consulate, and he asks Pinkerton not to pluck off her delicate wings. However, Pinkerton tells Sharpless that he will do “no great harm, even if Butterfly falls in love.” Sharpless takes his glass of whisky and offers a toast to Pinkerton’s family at home, to which Pinkerton adds, “and to the day when I will have a real wedding and marry a real American bride.” Goro re-enters to tell Pinkerton and Sharpless that Butterfly’s friends are coming.

5. Ancora un passo (“One step more”). Butterfly can be heard guiding her friends to the top of the hill, jubilantly telling them that “Over land and sea, there floats the joyful breath of spring. I am the happiest girl in Japan, or rather in the world.” Butterfly and her friends enter the garden. She recognizes Pinkerton and points him out to her friends, and all bow down before him.

6. Gran ventura (“May good fortune attend you”). Butterfly greets Pinkerton, who asks about her difficult climb up the hill. Butterfly says that, for a happy bride, the wait is even more difficult. Pinkerton thanks her for the compliment but cuts her off as she continues to compliment him further. Butterfly tells Pinkerton and Sharpless that her family is from Nagasaki and was once very wealthy.

7. L’Imperial Commissario (“The Imperial Commissioner”). Goro announces the arrival of both the Grand Commissioner and the Registrar of marriages. Butterfly greets her relatives, who have arrived for the wedding. Pinkerton laughs at the sight and whispers to Sharpless, “This is a farce: all these will be my new relatives for only a month.” Sharpless tells him that, even though he considers the marriage contract a farce, she considers it very real. Meanwhile, Butterfly tells her relatives how much she loves Pinkerton. One of her cousins says that Goro first offered Pinkerton to her, but she refused. Butterfly’s relatives say that he is like a king, so rich and so handsome, and then, at a sign from Butterfly, all her friends and relatives bow to Pinkerton and walk out to the garden. Pinkerton takes Butterfly’s hand and leads her into the house.

8. Vieni, amor mio! (“Come, my love!”). From her sleeve, Butterfly brings out to show Pinkerton all of her treasures, which include only a few handkerchiefs, a mirror, a sash, and other trinkets. Then she shows him a long, narrow case, which she tells him holds her only sacred treasure, but she cannot open it, because there are too many people around. Goro whispers to Pinkerton that the case contains a “gift” from the Mikado to Butterfly’s father, inviting him to commit seppuku. Butterfly continues to show Pinkerton her other little treasures, including several little statues: “They are the spirits of my ancestors.”

9. Ieri son salita tutta sola (“Yesterday, I went all alone”). Butterfly tells Pinkerton that yesterday, in secret and without telling her uncle, who is a Buddhist priest, the Bonze, she went to the Consulate, where she abandoned her ancestral religion and converted to Pinkerton’s religion. “I am following my destiny and, full of humility, bow to Mr. Pinkerton’s God.”

10. Tutti zitti (“Quiet everyone”). Everything is ready, and Goro tells everyone to be quiet. The Commissioner conducts the brief ceremony and witnesses Pinkerton and Butterfly sign the official papers.

11. Madama Butterfly (“Madam Butterfly”). The wedding celebration begins, and everyone wishes happiness to the new couple. After a short while, Sharpless pleads with Pinkerton not to be cruel, and he leaves with the Commissioner and the Registrar. Pinkerton, Butterfly and their guests continue the celebration with many toasts.

12. Cio-Cio San! (“Cio-Cio San”). The toasts are interrupted by an angry voice offstage, saying “Cio-Cio San! Cio-Cio San! You are damned.” Butterfly’s uncle, the Bonze, has discovered that Butterfly has renounced her ancestral religion, and he has arrived to deliver his curse. He stands over Butterfly, shouting his curses at her, when Pinkerton intervenes to stop him. The Bonze is shocked at the American, and he orders all the guests to leave with him, saying to Butterfly, “You have renounced us, and we renounce you.” All the guests shout their renunciation as they rush away. The night is falling. Butterfly is weeping. Pinkerton consoles her.

13. Bimba, Bimba, non piangere (“Sweetheart, sweetheart, do not weep”). (This begins the famous long love duet, which ends act 1.) Pinkerton tells Butterfly that “All your relatives and all the priests in Japan are not worth the tears from your loving, beautiful eyes.” Butterfly smiles through her tears, “You mean that? I won’t cry any more. And I do not worry about their curses, because your words sound so sweet.” They hear Suzuki offstage, saying her evening prayers.

13A. Viene la sera (“Night is falling”). (The long duet continues.) Pinkerton tells Butterfly that the “Night is falling”, and Butterfly answers that “with it comes darkness and peace.” Pinkerton claps his hands, and the three servants enter and close up the house. Then Suzuki helps Butterfly dress for her wedding night. Pinkerton watches Butterfly, as she watches him, but her happiness is tempered, as “still the angry voice curses me. Butterfly is renounced – renounced but happy”.

14. Bimba dagli occhi (“Sweetheart, with eyes…”). (The long duet continues.) Pinkerton admires the beautiful Butterfly and tells her, “you have not yet told me that you love me.” Butterfly replies that she does not want to say the words, “for fear of dying at hearing them!” She tells him that now she is happy.

15. Vogliatemi bene (“Love me, please.”). (The long duet concludes.) Butterfly pleads with Pinkerton to “Love me, please.” She asks whether it is true that, in foreign lands, a man will catch a butterfly and pin its wings to a table. Pinkerton admits that it is true but explains, “Do you know why? So that she’ll not fly away.” He embraces her and says, “I have caught you. You are mine.” She replies, “Yes, for life.”

Act 2

16. E Izaghi ed Izanami (“And Izanagi and Izanami”). As the curtain opens, three years have passed. Suzuki kneels in front of a Buddha, praying that Butterfly will stop crying. Butterfly hears and tells her that the Japanese gods are fat and lazy, and that the American God will answer quickly, if only He knows where they are living. Suzuki tells Butterfly that their money has almost run out and, if Pinkerton does not return quickly, they will suffer in a bad way. Butterfly assures Suzuki that Pinkerton will return, because he took care to arrange for the Consul to pay the rent and to fit the house with locks to keep out the mosquitoes, relatives and troubles. Suzuki tells Butterfly that foreign husbands never return to their Japanese wives, but Butterfly replies furiously that Pinkerton had assured her, on the very last morning they were together, “Oh, Butterfly, my little wife, I shall return with the roses, when the earth is full of joy, when the robin makes his nest.” Suzuki begins quietly to weep.

17. Un bel dì vedremo (“One fine day we’ll see”). In this, the opera’s most famous aria (and one of the most popular works in the soprano repertoire), Butterfly says that, “one fine day”, they will see a puff of smoke on the far horizon. Then a ship will appear and enter the harbor. She will not go down to meet him but will wait on the hill for him to come. After a long time, she will see in the far distance a man beginning the walk out of the city and up the hill. When he arrives, he will call “Butterfly” from a distance, but she will not answer, partly for fun and partly not to die from the excitement of the first meeting. Then he will speak the names he used to call her: “Little one. Dear wife. Orange blossom.” Butterfly promises Suzuki that this will happen. Suzuki departs, as Sharpless and Goro arrive in the garden.

18. C’e. Entrate. (“She is there. Go in.”). Sharpless greets her, “Excuse me, Madam Butterfly.” Without looking to see who is speaking, Butterfly corrects him, “Madam Pinkerton, please.” As she turns and sees that it is Sharpless who has spoken, she exclaims in happiness, “My very dear Consul. Welcome to this American home.” Sharpless draws a letter from his pocket and tells her, “Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton has written to me.” Sharpless tells her that Pinkerton is perfectly well, and she says, “I am the happiest woman in Japan.” Butterfly asks him, “When do the robins make their nests in America?” The question confuses Sharpless, so Butterfly explains that Pinkerton promised to return to her “when the robin builds his nest again.” She says that, in Japan, the robin has already built his nest three times, and she asks if “over there he nests less frequently.” Sharpless, mortified, tells her that he does not know because he has not studied ornithology. At this, Butterfly hears Goro laugh, and she whispers to Sharpless that Goro is a bad man. She tells him that, after Pinkerton left, Goro came to her many times “with presents to palm off this or that husband on me.” She says that Goro now wants her to agree to marry the wealthy man Yamadori, who then is arriving with his entourage to a musical accompaniment that quotes the same Japanese folk tune (Miyasan) that Gilbert and Sullivan set as “Mi-ya sama” in The Mikado.

19. Yamadori, ancor le pene (“Yamadori, are you not yet…”). Butterfly sees Yamadori and asks him if he is not going to give up pursuing her, because “You have already had many different wives.” Yamadori admits that he married all of them, but says that he divorced them too. In the meantime, Sharpless gives up trying to read Pinkerton’s letter to Butterfly, and he puts the letter back in his pocket. Goro tells Sharpless that Butterfly thinks that she is still married. Butterfly hears this and says, “I don’t think I am; I am.” When Goro tries to tell her about the Japanese law of marriage, Butterfly interrupts and tells him that the Japanese law is not the law of her country, the United States. She tells Goro that she understands how easy divorce is under Japanese law, “but in America, you cannot do that.” She turns sharply and asks Sharpless, “Am I correct?” Sharpless is embarrassed and must admit that she is correct. Butterfly turns triumphantly to Suzuki and asks that she serve tea. Yamadori, Sharpless and Goro quietly discuss Butterfly’s blindness. Goro whispers that Pinkerton’s ship is expected to arrive soon, and Sharpless explains that Pinkerton is too embarrassed to meet Butterfly and has asked Sharpless to handle it. Yamadori, offended, departs with his grand entourage and Goro. Sharpless remains, sits next to Butterfly, and takes the letter out of his pocket once more.

20. Ora a noi. (“Now for us.”). Sharpless begins to read Pinkerton’s letter to Butterfly: “My friend, will you find that lovely flower of a girl…” Butterfly cannot control her happiness, as he continues, “since that happy times, three years have passed, and Butterfly perhaps does not remember me anymore.” Butterfly looks at Suzuki and says, “I don’t remember him? Suzuki, you tell him!” Sharpless continues, “If she still loves me, if she awaits me, I place myself in your hands so that you may carefully and considerately prepare her …” Butterfly exclaims, “He is coming! When? Soon! Soon!” Sharpless cannot bear to continue. He puts the letter away, muttering to himself, “that devil Pinkerton!” Sharpless asks her gently, “Butterfly, what would you do if he never returned?” Butterfly is shocked.

21. Due cose potrei far (“Two things I could do”). Butterfly cries that, if Pinkerton never returned, she would go back to entertaining people with her songs, or, better, die. Sharpless pleads with her to accept the rich offer from Yamadori. Butterfly is upset with Sharpless and instructs Suzuki to show him out. As he begins to leave, Butterfly stops him, apologizes for her anger, and explains that his questions have hurt her “so very, very much!” Then she goes into another room and returns, bringing with her the blonde-haired two-year-old boy who is her constant reminder of her American husband.

22. Ah! M’ha scordata? (“Ah! He has forgotten me?”). Butterfly shows Sharpless her child, and Sharpless asks if Pinkerton knows. Butterfly replies, “No. The child was born when he was away in his big country.” She asks Sharpless to write and tell him that his son waits for him. “And then we shall see if he does not hurry over land and sea!” Butterfly kneels in front of her son and asks him, “Do you know that that gentleman had dared to think that your mother would take you in her arms and walk to town, through the wind and rain, to earn your bread and clothes. And she would stretch out her arms to the pitying crowd, crying ‘Listen! Listen to my sad song, For an unhappy mother, your charity. Take pity! And Butterfly – oh, horrible destiny – will dance for you! And as she used to do, the Geisha will sing for you. And her joyful, happy song will end in a sob!” She kneels in front of Sharpless and says that she will never do that, “that trade which leads to dishonor. Death! Death! Never more to dance! Rather would I cut short my life! Ah! Death!”

23. Io scendo al piano. (“I will go now.”) Sharpless finally says, “I will go now.” Butterfly gives him her hand and this her child’s. Sharpless asks the child his name, and Butterfly answers for him, “Today my name is Sorrow. But write and tell Daddy that, the day he returns, my name will be Joy.” Sharpless promises to tell Pinkerton. Offstage, Suzuki can be heard shouting, “Snake. Damned toad!” Suzuki enters, pulling Goro with her, and she tells Butterfly, “He buzzes around, the snake. Every day he tells the four winds that no one knows who is the child’s father!” Goro explains that, in America, when a child is born with a curse, he will always be rejected by everyone. In a rage, Butterfly runs to the shrine, seizes the dagger and threatens to stab him, “You are lying! You are lying! Say that again, and I will kill you!” Goro flees. Suzuki takes the child to the other room. Butterfly replaces the dagger, goes to her son and says, “You will see, my darling, my Sorrow. You will see, your savior will take us far, far away to his land.”

24. Il cannone del porto! (“The cannon at the harbor!”, often known as The Flower Duet). Just then a cannon shot is heard. Suzuki and Butterfly watch from the hill as the ship enters the harbor and drops anchor. Then Butterfly sees that the ship is the Abraham Lincoln, and she tells Suzuki, “They were all lying! All of them! I alone knew. Only I, who love him.” She continues, “My love, my faith, triumphs completely! He has returned, and he loves me!” She tells Suzuki to prepare a fragrant bath and asks how long she will have to wait for him. “An hour? Two hours, perhaps? The house must be filled with flowers. Everywhere. As the night is full of stars!” Butterfly tells Suzuki to gather all the flowers.

25. Tutti i fior? (“All the flowers?”). Suzuki asks, “All the flowers?” Butterfly says yes, all the flowers from all the bushes and plants and trees. “I want the whole fragrance of Spring in here.” They continue to gather flowers and place them everywhere.

26. Or vienmi ad adornar (“Now come to adorn me”). Finally, Butterfly sits at her dressing table and tells Suzuki, “Now, come and adorn me. No, first bring me the child.” She puts a touch of rouge on her own and on her child’s cheeks and then, as Suzuki does her hair, asks her, “What will they say? My uncle, the priest? All so happy at my misery! And Yamadori, with his pursuit? Ridiculed, disgraced, made foolish, the hateful things!” Butterfly dons the same dress that she wore as a bride, while Suzuki dresses her child. Butterfly tells Suzuki that she wants Pinkerton to see her dressed as she was on the first day “and a red poppy in my hair.”

27. Coro a bocca chiusa (“Humming Chorus”). As the off-stage chorus hums a wordless, melancholy tune, Butterfly, her child and Suzuki begin the long wait for Pinkerton to come. Night falls. Suzuki and the baby are soon asleep, but Butterfly keeps her vigil.

There is no intermission between acts 2 and 3. The action continues without interruption as the “Humming Chorus” ends and morning light appears.

Act 3

28. Oh eh! Oh eh! (“Heave-ho! Heave-ho!”). Suzuki and the baby are asleep, but Butterfly remains standing and waiting. Distant voices are heard from the bay. Sailors are singing, “Heave-ho! Heave-ho!” The sun rises and fills Butterfly’s house with light.

29. Già il sole! (“The Sun’s come up!”). Suzuki awakes and is very sad. Butterfly tells her that “He will come.” Then she carries her sleeping child into the other room and tells him to sleep, while she too falls asleep. Suzuki waits in the front room and hears a knock at the door. Pinkerton and Sharpless have arrived, but Pinkerton tells Suzuki not to wake Butterfly and asks how Butterfly knew that he had arrived. Suzuki tells him that, for the last three years, Butterfly has studied every ship that entered the port. Sharpless tells Pinkerton, “Did I not tell you so?” Suzuki sees a strange woman in the garden, learns from Sharpless that she is Pinkerton’s American wife and collapses to her knees in shock.

30. Io so che sue dolore (“I know that her pain”). While Pinkerton looks at the flowers, the picture of himself and the room that has remained unchanged for three years, Sharpless tells Suzuki that they can do nothing for Butterfly but that they must help her child. Sharpless tells her that Pinkerton’s new wife, Kate, wants to care for the child. Suzuki goes into the garden to meet Pinkerton’s new wife, while Sharpless reminds Pinkerton, “I told you, didn’t I? Do you remember? When she gave you her hand: ‘Take care’, I said, ‘she believes in you’. She has been waiting for you.” Pinkerton admits his wrong and leaves Sharpless to tell Butterfly the shameful news.

31. Addio, fiorito asil (“Farewell, flowery refuge”). Pinkerton says “Farewell, flowery refuge of happiness and of love, her gentle face will always haunt me, torturing me endlessly.” He admits that he is a coward and cannot face her, and quickly leaves as Suzuki and Kate enter from the garden. Kate is telling Suzuki to assure Butterfly that Kate will look after her child like her own son.

32. Suzuki! Suzuki! (“Suzuki! Suzuki!”). From offstage, Butterfly calls for Suzuki and then enters the room. As she enters, Kate retreats to the garden, so that she will not be seen. She asks Suzuki why she is crying, and then she sees Sharpless and the woman in the garden. She tells Suzuki, “Suzuki, you are so kind. Do not cry. You love me so much. Tell me softly, just ‘yes’ or ‘no’ … Is he alive?” When Suzuki answers, “yes”, Butterfly understands that Pinkerton is not coming for her and that Kate is his new wife. Butterfly realizes that she must give up her son, and Kate asks her forgiveness. Finally, Butterfly tells Kate, “I will give my child to her only if he comes himself. In half an hour, come up the hill again.” Suzuki escorts Kate and Sharpless out, and Butterfly falls weeping.

33. Come una mosca (“Like a little fly”). Butterfly stands, sees Suzuki and tells her to close up the house, because it is too light and spring-like. Then she orders her to go to the other room where the child is playing. Butterfly then kneels before the statue of Buddha and prays to her ancestral gods. She rises, takes down her father’s knife, kisses the blade, and reads the inscription.

34. Con onor muore (“To die with honor”). Butterfly reads the inscription on her father’s knife: “Who cannot live with honor must die with honor.” Butterfly’s child enters, but Suzuki does not. Butterfly tells her child not to feel sorrow for his mother’s desertion but to keep a faint memory of his mother’s face. She bids him farewell, seats him on the floor and blindfolds him gently. She gives him a miniature American flag to wave in greeting to his father, which he does, blindfolded, throughout the following action. Butterfly takes the knife and walks behind the screen. The knife clatters to the floor as Butterfly staggers from behind the screen with a scarf around her neck. She kisses her child and collapses. From outside, Pinkerton cries, “Butterfly!” and rushes in – but it is too late: Butterfly is dead.

If i were you, I would find a recordin’ and listen to it raht now!  I am.

Mac Tag

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banjo paterson, giacomo puccini, gustavo adolfo becquer, louisa lawson, madama butterfly, the lovers almanac, the lovers chronicle

Dear Zazie, Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag dedicated to his muse. Follow us on twitter @cowboycoleridge. Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

straight to joe jackson
got it tick, tick, tickin’ in my head
“Do the days pass faster now”
what about this debate:
is it a friend passin’
along with us,
or a stalkin’ enemy
“I’ll take friend for $2000 Alex”
you should to balance us
cuz Carson said it best,
the endless idiot
“As long as now is the…”

© copyright 2023 mac tag/cowboycoleridge all rights reserved

a tree covered hilltop
against the Carolina sky
where the scene is painted
by two who have waited
a very long time

© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboycoleridge all rights reserved

jouir en bien
literally,
enjoy in good
idiomatically…
well, come with me
and together
we will find out

after all,
time gits away

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboycoleridge all rights reserved

time, too much perhaps,
spent turnin’ an eye
towards the past
the broken trail behind
the chances taken
and not taken
not so much
a review of regret
have those stacked
up like cord wood,
dealt and done with

© copyright 2017 mac tag/cowboycoleridge all rights reserved

I was going to say you should go get a cup of coffee. Shut your door turn your volume down and pull up the ” you should leave your hat on” video.   In the movie nothing seemed to matter but the two of them.  She couldn’t even do her job.  Sometime I wish I could get lost in that.

© copyright 2011 mac tag/cowboycoleridge all rights reserved

Today is the birth and death day of Octave Mirbeau (Trévières, Normandy 16 February 1848 – 16 February 1917 Paris); novelist, art critic, travel writer, pamphleteer, journalist and playwright, who achieved celebrity in Europe and great success among the public, whilst still appealing to the literary and artistic avant-garde with highly transgressive novels that explored violence, abuse and psychological detachment. His work has been translated into 30 languages.

Mirbeau ghostwrote ten novels, including three for the Swiss writer Dora Melegari.  He made his own literary debut with Le Calvaire (Calvary, 1886), in which writing allowed him to overcome the traumatic effects of his devastating liaison with the ill-reputed Judith Vinmer (1858-1951), renamed Juliette Roux in the novel.

In 1888, Mirbeau published L’Abbé Jules (Abbé Jules), the first pre-Freudian novel written under the influence of Dostoyevsky to appear in French literature; the text featured two main characters: l’abbé Jules and Father Pamphile. In Sébastien Roch (1890) (English translation: Sébastien Roch, 2000), Mirbeau purged the traumatic effects of his experience as a student at a Jesuits school in Vannes. In the novel, the 13-year-old Sébastien is sexually abused by a priest at the school and the abuse destroys his life.

Mirbeau then underwent an existential and literary crisis, yet during this time, he still published in serial form a pre-existentialist novel about the artist’s fate, Dans le ciel (In the Sky), introducing the figure of a painter (Lucien), directly modeled on Van Gogh. In the aftermath of the Dreyfus Affair — which exacerbated Mirbeau’s pessimism — he published two novels judged to be scandalous by self-styled paragons of virtue: Le Jardin des supplices (Torture Garden (1899) and Le Journal d’une femme de chambre (Diary of a Chambermaid) (1900), then Les Vingt et un Jours d’un neurasthénique (The twenty one days of a neurasthenic person) (1901). In the process of writing these works, Mirbeau unsettled traditional novelistic conventions, exercising collage techniques, transgressing codes of verisimilitude and fictional credibility, and defying the hypocritical rules of propriety.

Mirbeau lies buried in the Passy Cemetery, in the 16th arrondissement of Paris.  See The Final Footprint for more.

Quotes

”Ceux qui se taisent disent plus de choses que ceux qui parlent tout le temps.”

And today is the birthday of Edward Sherriff Curtis (Whitewater, Wisconsin; February 19, 1868 – October 19, 1952 Los Angeles); photographer and ethnologist whose work focused on the American West and on Native American people.  Sometimes referred to as the “Shadow Catcher”, Curtis traveled the United States to document and record the dwindling ways of life of various native tribes through photographs and audio recordings.

Gallery

Self portrait

Hopi girl, 1922

Hopi girls At the trysting place

Canyon de Chelly – Navajo

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Dear Zazie, Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag dedicated to his muse. Follow us on twitter @cowboycoleridge. Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

another that could be
described as searchin’
“Yes you were”
year upon year
will do that to ya
“You know I can relate”
i do and that matters
“Now that our searching
has ended”
in the only place it could have
“Here”
raht here, me entwined,
close to, enraptured,
wrapped up in you

© copyright 2023 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2021 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

see, ha! told ya so
i really do dislike
bein’ right all the time
you have no idea
the burden it creates

there is no redemption
there is no forgiveness
you pay and you pay
and say, thank you
may i pay some more
as it damn well should be

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

never knew what was true
absence indicated as much
apart from myself
where doth lie

ranged far and wide
like a traveler, return again
back to the time, back to the places

you will be

believe, in my nature reigns
this wanderin’ that haunts
that forsakes wherever
carry memories
you, all
this verse
turn again
how able
to tell you of your effect
you, such as never expected

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

fluctuat nec mergitur
(tossed but not sunk)

which is the greater shame
tryin’ and failin’,
or failin’ to try

ever dance with madness
in the pale moon light
strike up the band y’all

ever ride with madness
in the pale moon light
hold on to the reins y’all

ever done it
and survived
walked away
with your mind
still fairly sound

pull up a chair
and i will tell you
a survivor’s tale

so do not
find it

buried, denied,
ignored, refused,
shunned, covered up,
and neglected
wants, needs and
desires for so long
not sure if they still exist

© copyright 2017 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

random inception inspired verse…

non regrette rien
non, je ne regrette rien
git ready for the kick y’all

do you want to take
a leap of faith
or become an old man
filled with regret
waitin’ to die alone

you know how to find me
you know what you have to do

you remember when…
you said you had a dream
we would grow old together

what are you doin’ here
“Just trying to understand!”
how could you understand

do you know
what it is
to be a lover
to be half
of a whole

you will be lost
you will become old
and filled with regret
waitin’ to die alone

you are waitin’ for a train
a train that will take you
far away
you know where you hope
the train will go,
but you cannot be sure
you git on the train
because it does not matter
where it is goin’
why does it not matter
because we will be together

non regrette rien
non, je ne regrette rien

Today is the birthday of Carle or Charles-André van Loo (Nice; 15 February 1705 – 15 July 1765 Paris); subject painter, son of the painter Louis-Abraham van Loo, a younger brother of Jean-Baptiste van Loo and grandson of Jacob van Loo. He was the most famous member of a successful dynasty of painters of Dutch origin. His oeuvre includes every category: religion, history painting, mythology, portraiture, allegory, and genrescenes.

Van Loo followed his brother Jean-Baptiste to Turin, and then to Rome in 1712, where he studied under Benedetto Luti and the sculptor Pierre Le Gros. After leaving Italy in 1723, he worked in Paris, studied at the Académie Royale, where he gained first prize for drawing in 1723, and received the first prize for historical painting in 1727—as did his future rival François Boucher. In 1724 he won the Prix de Rome.

After again visiting Turin in 1727, he was employed by king Victor Amadeus II of Sardinia, for whom he painted a series of subjects illustrative of Torquato Tasso. In 1734 he settled in Paris, and in 1735 became a member of the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture and rose rapidly in the hierarchy of the academy. Madame de Pompadour and the French court were taking the artist under their patronage.[citation needed] He was decorated with the Order of Saint Michael and named First Painter to king Louis XV of France in 1762.  He was a most successful court painter but his portraits as well as history paintings also enjoyed an enormous success throughout all Europe.

Gallery

Portrait de femme, dit “La marquise de Pompadour”, en buste dans un ovale feint

Les Trois Grâces (vers 1763), Los Angeles, musée d’art du comté de Los Angeles.

Mac Tag

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Charles-André van Loo, the lovers chronicle

Dear Zazie,  Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag to his muse.  Follow us on twitter @cowboycoleridge.  Hope you have a good Valentine’s Day.  Rhett

 The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

“This day more than any other”
yes i have carried on,
perhaps too on, on this day
“Said with many words or a few”
the bein’ and feelin’ is what matters
“Still mine”
on this day and any other
each a gift we should hold close
“Oh yes my favorite part”
that which does not alter or bend

© copyright 2023 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2021 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

never say, well not sure
about that, or the truth
does absence of either
indicate as much

could no more part from this,
which in you doth lie, the only
home, ever should have known

a traveler, returnin’,
to the places, of you,
for you, with you, to you

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

be mine
if only
for a little while
take my hand
stay
just long enough
so i can recall
what it was like

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

In honour of Valentine’s Day; three poems, and day in history notes.

Sonnet 109: O! never say that I was false of heart

O never say that I was false of heart,
Though absence seemed my flame to qualify.
As easy might I from myself depart,
As from my soul, which in thy breast doth lie.
That is my home of love; if I have ranged
Like him that travels I return again,
Just to the time, not with the time exchanged,
So that myself bring water for my stain.
Never believe, though in my nature reigned
All frailties that besiege all kinds of blood,
That it could so preposterously be stained
To leave for nothing all thy sum of good—
For nothing this wide universe I call,
Save thou, my rose; in it thou art my all.
– “Sonnet 109” by William Shakespeare. Public domain.

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right.
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints — I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! — and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

All of the above inspired the following:

All My Love

Never say my heart was not true,
Though absence may indicate as much
I could no more part from myself
As from my soul, which in you doth lie
You will always be the home of my love
I have rode and ranged far and wide
But like a traveler, I return again,
Back to the time, back to the places,
Of you, for you, with you, to you

Never believe, though in my nature reigns

This wanderin’ soul that haunts my blood,
That I forsake you, wherever I roam,
For I carry your memory with me always
For no one in this world do I call,
Save you, my one; in it you are my all
These verses I write with all my heart
I have been turnin’ and turnin’ again
In my mind how I should be able
To tell you of your effect upon me…
Thank you, from the bottom of my heart
Such a woman, such as I never expected
Words can never tell you; however
Form them, transform them anyway,
How dear you are to my heart and soul
I look back, and in every point in time,
Every word and gesture, every letter,
Every silence, you have been perfect to me
I would not change one word, one look
I am all gratitude, and all pride to say
That my life has been crowned by you
What could be better; you lifted me up
From the depths and carried me into life
All that I am, all my words, I owe you
If I enjoy anything again, it is through you
I love you in every way possible
From every depth and breadth and height
Clear out of sight and as far as I can reach
From the beginnin’ of Grace to the end of bein’
I love you from everyday’s most quiet need,
Everyday before the sun and beyond candlelight
I walk the line because of my love for you
I give praise for you and the purity of my love

My love is so full of passion that it puts to rest
My old griefs, and restores all of my lost faith
I love you with a love I thought I had lost
With my lost soul, I love you through it all,
Smiles, tears, all my life and, with these words,
I shall but love you beyond my last breath

The Song of the Day is “All My Love” by Led Zeppelin.  We do not own the rights to this song.  All rights reserved by the rightful owner.  No copyright infringement intended.

Nina Hamnett
1917 portrait of Nina Hamnett painted by Roger Fry (Courtauld Gallery, London)

Today is the birthday of Nina Hamnett (Tenby, Pembrokeshire, Wales 14 February 1890 – 16 December 1956 London); artist and writer, and an expert on sailors’ chanteys, who became known as the Queen of Bohemia.

While studying in London she met and posed for Henri Gaudier-Brzeska who sculpted a series of nude bronzes. During this period she became friendly with Olivia Shakespear and Ezra Pound. She went on to have a love affair with Brzeska, and later with Amadeo Modigliani and Roger Fry, (allegedly).

On her first night in the Bohemian community she went to the café La Rotonde where the man at the next table introduced himself as “Modigliani, painter and Jew”. In addition to making close friends with Modigliani, Pablo Picasso, Serge Diaghilev, and Jean Cocteau, she stayed for a while at La Ruche, where many of the leading members of the avant-garde lived at the time. In Montparnasse she also met her future husband, the Norwegian artist Roald Kristian.

Flamboyantly unconventional, and openly bisexual, Hamnett once danced nude on a Montparnasse café table because she could. She drank heavily, was sexually promiscuous, and kept numerous lovers and close associations within the artistic community. Very quickly, she became a well-known bohemian personality throughout Paris and modeled for many artists. After divorcing Kristian, she took up with another free spirit, composer E. J. Moeran.

From the mid-1920s until the end of World War II, the area known as Fitzrovia was London’s main Bohemian artistic centre. The place took its name from the popular Fitzroy Tavern on the corner of Charlotte and Windmill Streets that formed the area’s centre. Home of the café life in Fitzrovia, it was Hamnett’s favourite hangout as well as that of her friend from her home town, Augustus John, and later another Welshman, the poet Dylan Thomas.

In 1932 Hamnett published Laughing Torso, a tale of her bohemian life, which became a bestseller in the UK and US.

Alcoholism would soon overtake her many talents and the tragic “Queen of the Fitzroy” spent a good part of the last few decades of her life at the bar, (usually that of the Fitzroy Tavern), trading anecdotes for drinks.

Twenty-three years after her first book Laughing Torso was published, Hamnett, in poor health, released a follow up book aptly titled: Is She a Lady?

Hamnett died in 1956 from complications after falling out of her apartment window and being impaled on the fence forty feet below. The great debate has always been whether or not it was a suicide attempt or merely a drunken accident. Her last words were “Why don’t they let me die?”

A biography, Nina Hamnett: Queen of Bohemia, by Denise Hooker was published in 1986. In 2011, Hamnett was the subject of a short film by writer/director Chris Ward ‘What Shall We Do With The Drunken Sailor’ starring Siobhan Fahey.

Gallery

La Bella Chica Pelirroja (Retrato de Nina Hamnett) by Amedeo Modigliani 
1917

Portrait de femme

The student

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Dear Zazie,  Here is today’s Lovers’ Almanac from Mac Tag dedicated to his muse.  Follow us on twitter @cowboycoleridge.  Comes the hour, comes your love?  If the hour came, what would you do?  Rhett

The Lovers’ Almanc

Dear Muse,

“Sounds literary”
from that letter Joyce wrote
“Guess that answers that”
what
“Are there anymore
real romantics”
touché my dear
“And so”
happy to oblige
what we thought
was denied has come
“Good thing one of us
is patient”
we arrived when
we were supposed to
“Yes, and now the hour”
come here

© copyright 2023 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2021 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

one finds another

a wide capacity
for writin’ and paintin’
overflowin’ with all the day
and each moment brings
life, a cape, now doubled
stretchin’ out before them

this only, completely,
comes from listenin’
to the melody, now
that the hour has come

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

Here is the Poem of the Day inspired by the these letters.  Hope you like……

The Hour Should Come

The Song of the Day is “If Came the Hour” by Secret Garden set to Mozart‘s Sinfonia Concertante in E-flat, K364– II..Andante.  We do not own the rights to this song.  All rights reserved by the rightful owner.  No copyright infringement intended.

 

Eleanor Farjeon
Farjeon in 1899

Today is the birthday of Eleanor Farjeon (London 13 February 1881 – 5 June 1965 Hampstead, London); English author of children’s stories and plays, poetry, biography, history and satire.  Several of her works had illustrations by Edward Ardizzone.  Some of her correspondence has also been published.

Verse

 It’s no use crying over spilt evils. It’s better to mop them up laughing.

• Gypsy and Ginger (1920)

Of troubles know I none,
Of pleasures know I many —
I rove beneath the sun
Without a single penny.

• Vagrant Songs, II

• Old sundial, you stand here for Time:
  For Love, the vine that round your base
  Its tendrils twines, and dares to climb
  And lay one flower-capped spray in grace
  Without the asking on your cold
  Unsmiling and unfrowning face.
  • Time And Love
• Upon your shattered ruins where
  This vine will flourish still, as rare,
  As fresh, as fragrant as of old.
  Love will not crumble.
  • Time And Love

• Dropt tears have hastened your decay
  And brought you one step nigher death;
  And you have heard, unthrilled, unmoved,
  The music of Love’s golden breath
  And seen the light in eyes that loved.
  You think you hold the core and kernel
  Of all the world beneath your crust,
  Old dial? But when you lie in dust,
  This vine will bloom, strong, green, and proved.
  Love is eternal.
  • Time And Love

Morning Has Broken (1931)

This poem was set to music and became a widely used hymn and became further popularized by the performance of Cat Stevens on his album Teaser and the Firecat (1971) · Performance by Cat Stevens (1976)

• Morning has broken,
  Like the first morning,
  Blackbird has spoken
  Like the first bird.
  Praise for the singing!
  Praise for the morning!
  Praise for them springing
  Fresh from the Word!

• Praise with elation,
  Praise every morning,
  God’s re-creation
  Of the new day!

The New Book of Days (1961)

• From the blood of Medusa
  Pegasus sprang.
  His hoof of heaven
  Like melody rang.
  • Pegasus, St. 1, p. 181

• His tail was a fountain.
  His nostrils were caves.
  His mane and his forelock
  Were musical waves.
  He neighed like a trumpet.
  He cooed like a dove.
  He was stronger than terror
  And swifter than love.
  • Pegasus, St. 2, p. 181

• He could not be captured,
  He could not be bought,
  His running was rhythm,
  His standing was thought;
  With one eye on sorrow
  And one eye on mirth,
  He galloped in heaven
  And gambolled on earth.
• And only the poet
  With wings to his brain
  Can mount him and ride him
  Without any rein,
  The stallion of heaven,
  The steed of the skies,
  The horse of the singer
  Who sings as he flies.
  • Pegasus, St. 3 & 4, p. 181

 

Today is the birthday of Grant Wood (Grant DeVolson Wood; Anamosa, Iowa; February 13, 1891 – February 12, 1942 Iowa City, Iowa); painter best known for his paintings depicting the rural American Midwest, particularly American Gothic (1930), which has become an iconic painting of the 20th century.

From 1935 to 1938, Wood was married to Sara Sherman Maxon. Friends considered the marriage a mistake for Wood.

It is thought that Wood was a closeted homosexual.

On the eve of his 51st birthday, Wood died at Iowa City university hospital of pancreatic cancer.  He is buried at Riverside Cemetery, Anamosa, Iowa.

Gallery

Coin du Café de Paris

 American Gothic (1930), Art Institute of Chicago

Appraisal

January

• 

  Fall Plowing

• 

  Death on Ridge Road

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cowboy coleridge, eleanor farjeon, grant wood, henry david thoreau, if came the hour, james joyce, K364-- II..Andante, love letter, love poem, love song, mozart, muse, nathaniel hawthorne, nora barnacle, poem of the day, Rhett, secret garden, Sinfonia Concertante in E-flat, song of the day, sophia peabody, the hour should come, the lovers almanac, tla, twt, Zazie