TeaWithTater.com

Dear Zazie,  Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag dedicated to his muse.  Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

some can
some can when shown
and some never do

the greatest secrets
are there, waitin’
believe

survive
your own solitude
create, speak to me
you have something to say

we can bring ourselves
to feel, to see
all that we will need

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

Mary Brewster Hazelton

Today is the birthday of Mary Brewster Hazelton (Milton, Massachusetts; November 23, 1868 – September 13, 1953 Wellesley, Massachusetts); portrait painter.  She attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where she was later an instructor.  Among her other achievements, Hazelton was the first woman to win an award open to both men and women in the United States when she won the Hallgarten Prize from the National Academy of Design in 1896.  Her portrait paintings are in the collections of the Massachusetts State House, Harvard University, Peabody Essex Museum, and Wellesley Historical Society.  She lived her adult life with her sisters in the Hazelton family home in Wellesley, Massachusetts.

Gallery

Two Sisters at a Piano, 1894 

Venice Grand Canal, 1900 

Wellesley Hills Congregational Church murals, 1912 

Dr. John Warren, copy after Rembrandt Peale, Harvard University Portrait Collection, Cambridge, Massachusetts

• 

  Woman in White, 1906

• 

  Summer Sunlight, 1912

• 

  Paul Jean Louis Azan, 1918

Mac Tag

Continue reading

mary brewster hazelton, the lovers almanac, the lovers chronicle

Dear Zazie,  Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag dedicated to his muse.

Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

perhaps my best, shortest poem…

thankful
for you
……

who that cares so much…

smile at the thoughts
walkin’ forth one evenin’
hand in hand, an ideal life
fed from within, soar
with illimitable satisfaction

anyone observin’
sees the change,
the vivid glances,
the subtlety
of touches,
the freshness
of sunlit mornin’

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

Today, a new feature on TLC; on occasion, I will feature original photography or artwork that I have created for you.  This is Lake Francis Case in South Dakota.  I took this picture in October just after first light.  I camped in this spot overnight.  As you know, this is right where I like to be; in the middle of nowhere with not another soul for miles.  Hope you enjoy the view as much as I did.

George Eliot
Aged 30 by the Swiss artist Alexandre Louis François d’Albert Durade (1804–86)

Today is the birthday of Mary Ann Evans (Nuneaton, Warwickshire 22 November 1819 – 22 December 1880 Chelsea, Middlesex; alternatively “Mary Anne” or “Marian”), known by her pen name George Eliot; novelist, poet, journalist, translator and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era.  She is the author of seven novels, including Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), Middlemarch (1871–72), and Daniel Deronda (1876).  Most of her novels are set in provincial England and known for their realism and psychological insight.  She used a male pen name, she said, to ensure that her works would be taken seriously.  Female authors were published under their own names during Eliot’s life, but she wanted to escape the stereotype of women writing only lighthearted romances.  She also wished to have her fiction judged separately from her already extensive and widely known work as an editor and critic.  An additional factor in her use of a pen name may have been a desire to shield her private life from public scrutiny and to prevent scandals attending her relationship with the married George Henry Lewes, with whom she lived for over 20 years.

The philosopher and critic George Henry Lewes (1817–78) met Evans in 1851, and by 1854 they had decided to live together.  Lewes was already married to Agnes Jervis.  They had an open marriage.  Because Lewes allowed himself to be falsely named as the father on the birth certificates of Jervis’s illegitimate children, he was considered to be complicit in adultery, and therefore he was not legally able to divorce her.  In July 1854, Lewes and Evans travelled to Weimar and Berlin together for the purpose of research.

The trip to Germany also served as a honeymoon for Evans and Lewes, and they now considered themselves married, with Evans calling herself Mary Ann Evans Lewes, and referring to Lewes as her husband.  It was not unusual for men and women in Victorian society to have affairs; it was the lack of discretion and their public admission of the relationship which created accusations of polygamy and earned them the moral disapproval of English society.

On 16 May 1880 Eliot courted controversy once more by marrying John Cross, a man twenty years her junior, and again changing her name, this time to Mary Anne Cross.  While the couple was honeymooning in Venice, Cross, in a fit of depression, jumped from the hotel balcony into the Grand Canal.  He survived, and the newlyweds returned to England.  They moved to a new house in Chelsea, but Eliot fell ill with a throat infection.  This, coupled with the kidney disease she had been afflicted with for several years, led to her death on 22 December 1880 at the age of 61.

Eliot was not buried in Westminster Abbey because of her denial of the Christian faith and her unconventional life with Lewes.  She was buried in Highgate Cemetery (East), Highgate, London, in the area reserved for religious dissenters and agnostics, beside the love of her life, George Lewes.  In 1980, on the centenary of her death, a memorial stone was established for her in the Poets’ Corner.

Verse

  May I Join the Choir Invisible (1867)

• O may I join the choir invisible
  Of those immortal dead who live again
  In minds made better by their presence; live
  In pulses stirred to generosity,
  In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn
  For miserable aims that end with self,
  In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars,
  And with their mild persistence urge men’s search
  To vaster issues.

• So to live is heaven:
  To make undying music in the world,
  Breathing a beauteous order that controls
  With growing sway the growing life of man.

• This is life to come, —
  Which martyred men have made more glorious
  For us who strive to follow. May I reach
  That purest heaven, — be to other souls
  The cup of strength in some great agony,
  Enkindle generous ardor, feed pure love,
  Beget the smiles that have no cruelty,
  Be the sweet presence of a good diffused,
  And in diffusion ever more intense!
  So shall I join the choir invisible
  Whose music is the gladness of the world.

Middlemarch (1871)

• Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time, has not dwelt, at least briefly, on the life of Saint Theresa, has not smiled with some gentleness at the thought of the little girl walking forth one morning hand-in-hand with her still smaller brother, to go and seek martyrdom in the country of the Moors? Out they toddled from rugged Avila, wide-eyed and helpless-looking as two fawns, but with human hearts, already beating to a national idea; until domestic reality met them in the shape of uncles, and turned them back from their great resolve. That child-pilgrimage was a fit beginning. Theresa’s passionate, ideal nature demanded an epic life: what were many-volumed romances of chivalry and the social conquests of a brilliant girl to her? Her flame quickly burned up that light fuel; and, fed from within, soared after some illimitable satisfaction, some object which would never justify weariness, which would reconcile self-despair with the rapturous consciousness of life beyond self. She found her epos in the reform of a religious order.
  • Prelude

• That Spanish woman who lived three hundred years ago, was certainly not the last of her kind. Many Theresas have been born who found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity; perhaps a tragic failure which found no sacred poet and sank unwept into oblivion.
  • Prelude

• Some have felt that these blundering lives are due to the inconvenient indefiniteness with which the Supreme Power has fashioned the natures of women: if there were one level of feminine incompetence as strict as the ability to count three and no more, the social lot of women might be treated with scientific certitude. Meanwhile the indefiniteness remains, and the limits of variation are really much wider than any one would imagine from the sameness of women’s coiffure and the favorite love-stories in prose and verse. Here and there a cygnet is reared uneasily among the ducklings in the brown pond, and never finds the living stream in fellowship with its own oary-footed kind. Here and there is born a Saint Theresa, foundress of nothing, whose loving heart-beats and sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersed among hindrances, instead of centring in some long-recognizable deed.
  • Prelude

• Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.
  • First lines.

• ‘I suppose a woman is never in love with any one she has always known— ever since she can remember; as a man often is. It is always some new fellow who strikes a girl.’

• When Mrs. Casaubon was announced he started up as from an electric shock, and felt a tingling at his fingerends. Any one observing him would have seen a change in his complexion, in the adjustment of his facial muscles, in the vividness of his glance, which might have made them imagine that every molecule in his body had passed the message of a magic touch. And so it had. For effective magic is transcendent nature; and who shall measure the subtlety of those touches which convey the quality of soul as well as body, and make a man’s passion for one woman differ from his passion for another as joy in the morning light over valley and river and white mountain-top differs from joy among Chinese lanterns and glass panels? Will, too, was made of very impressible stuff. The bow of a violin drawn near him cleverly, would at one stroke change the aspect of the world for him, and his point of view shifted— as easily as his mood. Dorothea’s entrance was the freshness of morning.

• But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.

• She nursed him, she read to him, she anticipated his wants, and was solicitous about his feelings; but there had entered into the husband’s mind the certainty that she judged him, and that her wifely devotedness was like a penitential expiation of unbelieving thoughts—was accompanied with a power of comparison by which himself and his doings were seen too luminously as a part of things in general. His discontent passed vaporlike through all her gentle loving manifestations, and clung to that unappreciative world which she had only brought nearer to him.

Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

• Last lines

Rohlfs, self-portrait (1918)

Today is the birthday of Christian Rohlfs (Groß Niendorf, Kreis Segeberg; November 22, 1849 – January 8, 1938 Hagen, Westfalia); painter, one of the important representatives of German expressionism.

In 1901 Rohlfs left Weimar for Hagen, where through the architect Henri van der Velde got to know the art collector Karl Ernst Osthaus who offered him a studio in an estate which would become the Museum Folkwang.  Rohlfs was the first artist to begin to work there.  Meetings with Edvard Munch and Emil Nolde and the experience of seeing the works of Vincent van Gogh inspired him to move towards the expressionist style, in which he would work for the rest of his career.

In 1908, at the age of 60, he made his first prints after seeing an exhibition of works by the expressionist group Die Brücke. He went on to make 185 in total, almost all woodcuts or linocuts.  He lived in Munich and the Tyrol in 1910–12, before returning to Hagen.  The outbreak of World War I worried Rohlfs such, that for some time he felt unable to paint.  In rare instances he experimented with heavily hand-coloring his prints, onto the verge of painting and sometimes well after they were made, as in his 1919 recoloring of the prior year’s Der Gefangene.

In May 1922 he attended the International Congress of Progressive Artists and signed the “Founding Proclamation of the Union of Progressive International Artists”.  In 1937 the Nazis expelled him from the Prussian Academy of Arts, condemned his work as degenerate, and removed his works from public collections.  Seventeen of his paintings were exhibited in the Degenerate Art Exhibition in 1937.

Gallery 

Dancing around the ball of the sun

Abstraction (the Blue Mountain) 

• 

  Hilly landscape in late autumn, 1900

• 

  Collegiate Church of St. Patroclus in Soest, 1912, Germanisches Nationalmuseum

• 

  Landscape vision, 1912, Germanisches Nationalmuseum

• 

  The temptation of Christ, 1914, Germanisches Nationalmuseum

• 

  Sternbrücke in Weimar., (ca. 1917)

  

  Dancer

   

   

   

   

   

c. 1870 poster by Charles Lecocq

On this day in 1862, La forza del destino (The Power of Fate, or The Force of Destiny); an Italian opera by Giuseppe Verdi had its premiere in the Bolshoi Kamenny Theatre of Saint Petersburg, Russia.  The libretto was written by Francesco Maria Piave based on a Spanish drama, Don Álvaro o la fuerza del sino (1835), by Ángel de Saavedra, 3rd Duke of Rivas, with a scene adapted from Friedrich Schiller’s Wallensteins Lager.

La forza del destino is frequently performed, and there have been a number of complete recordings.  In addition, the overture (to the revised version of the opera) is part of the standard repertoire for orchestras, often played as the opening piece at concerts. 

1860s postcard showing Act IV.

Enrico Caruso, Jose Mardones and Rosa Ponselle in a 1918 Metropolitan Opera performance.

Forza is an opera that many old school Italian singers felt was “cursed” and brought bad luck.  The superstitious Luciano Pavarotti avoided the part of Alvaro.

On 4 March 1960 at the Metropolitan Opera, in a performance of La Forza del Destino with Renata Tebaldi and tenor Richard Tucker, the American baritone Leonard Warren was about to launch into the vigorous cabaletta to Don Carlo’s Act 3 aria, which begins “Morir, tremenda cosa” (“to die, a momentous thing”).  Warren either simply went silent and fell face-forward to the floor, or started coughing and gasping, and cried out “Help me, help me!” before falling to the floor, remaining motionless.  A few minutes later he was pronounced dead of a massive cerebral hemorrhage, and the rest of the performance was canceled.  Warren was only 48.

The “Curse” prompted singers and others to do strange things to fend off possible bad luck.  The great Italian tenor Franco Corelli was rumored to have held on to his groin during some of his performances of the opera as “protection.”

Today is the birthday of André Paul Guillaume Gide (Paris 22 November 1869 – 19 February 1951 Paris); author and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature (in 1947). Gide’s career ranged from its beginnings in the symbolist movement, to the advent of anti-colonialism between the two World Wars. The New York Times described him as “France’s greatest contemporary man of letters” and “judged the greatest French writer of this century by the literary cognoscenti.”

Known for his fiction as well as his autobiographical works, Gide exposes to public view the conflict and eventual reconciliation of the two sides of his personality, split apart by a straitlaced traducing of education and a narrow social moralism. Gide’s work can be seen as an investigation of freedom and empowerment in the face of moralistic and puritanical constraints, and centres on his continuous effort to achieve intellectual honesty. His self-exploratory texts reflect his search of how to be oneself, including owning one’s sexual nature, without betraying one’s values. His political activity is shaped by the same ethos, as indicated by his repudiation of communism after his 1936 voyage to the USSR.

• La sagesse n’est pas dans la raison, mais dans l’amour.
  • Wisdom comes not from reason but from love.
    • Les Nourritures Terrestres [Fruits of the Earth] (1897), book I

• …que toute émotion sache te devenir une ivresse. Si ce que tu manges ne te grise pas, c’est que tu n’avais pas assez faim.
  • Let every emotion be capable of becoming an intoxication to you. If what you eat fails to make you drunk, it is because you are not hungry enough.
    • Les Nourritures Terrestres (1897)

• Ce qu’un autre aurait aussi bien fait que toi, ne le fais pas. Ce qu’un autre aurait aussi bien dit que toi, ne le dis pas, — aussi bien écrit que toi, ne l’écris pas. Ne t’attache en toi qu’à ce que tu sens qui n’est nulle part ailleurs qu’en toi-même, et crée de toi, impatiemment ou patiemment, ah! le plus irremplaçable des êtres.
  • What another would have done as well as you, do not do it. What another would have said as well as you, do not say it; what another would have written as well, do not write it. Be faithful to that which exists nowhere but in yourself — and thus make yourself indispensable.
    • Les Nourritures Terrestres (1897), Envoi

• Le péché, c’est ce qui obscurcit l’âme.
  • Sin is whatever obscures the soul.
    • La Symphonie Pastorale (1919)

• On ne découvre pas de terre nouvelle sans consentir à perdre de vue, d’abord et longtemps, tout rivage.
  • One doesn’t discover new lands without consenting to lose sight, for a very long time, of the shore.
    • Les faux-monnayeurs [The Counterfeiters] (1925)

• C’est avec de beaux sentiments qu’on fait de la mauvaise littérature.
  • It is with noble sentiments that bad literature gets written.
    • Letter to François Mauriac (1929)

• Croyez ceux qui cherchent la vérité, doutez de ceux qui la trouvent; doutez de tout, mais ne doutez pas de vous-même.
  • Believe those who seek the truth, doubt those who find it; doubt all, but do not doubt yourself.
  • Gallimard, ed. (1952), Ainsi soit-il; ou, Les Jeux sont faits, p. 174

• Toutes choses sont dites déjà; mais comme personne n’écoute, il faut toujours recommencer.
  • Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and beginning all over again.
  • Le Traité du Narcisse (The Treatise of the Narcissus)
    • Nothing is said that has not been said before. — Terence

The Immoralist (1902)

• Savoir se libérer n’est rien; l’ardu, c’est savoir être libre.
  • Translation: To know how to free oneself is nothing; the arduous thing is to know what to do with one’s freedom.
  • The Immoralist, Chapter 1 (1902)

Boléro

Mac Tag

Continue reading

André Gide, christian rohlfs, george eliot, the lovers almanac, the lovers chronicle

Dear Zazie,  Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag dedicated to his muse.  Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

© copyright 2021 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

Thanks Karen,

“I wish I could tame Time
I would train it to fetch
all those stolen moments;
I would feed it nothing
but the opposite of regret.”

then you had to go and say
i made you smile…
now my mind
is freshly boggled
i need a moment
to form coherent thoughts…

you continue to amaze
i am many things
but not a panderin’ fool
and i detest insipid platitudes
but i do not know
what else to say but that,
you continue to amaze

were you sent to remind me
that faith and hope and grace
still exist, no matter how many
times i have cursed them
and tossed them aside

i understand your wish
and here is mine…

to tame time
to bring back
all the lost moments
and feed it faith
and hope and grace
all just to get to you

© copyright 2017 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

thanks again Karen

Voltaire
Portrait by Nicolas de Largillière, c. 1724

Today is the birthday of François-Marie Arouet (Paris; 21 November 1694 – 30 May 1778 Paris), known by his nom de plume Voltaire; Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher famous for his wit, his attacks on the established Catholic Church, and his advocacy of freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and separation of church and state.

Voltaire was a versatile writer, producing works in almost every literary form, including plays, poems, novels, essays, and historical and scientific works.  He wrote more than 20,000 letters and more than 2,000 books and pamphlets.  He was an outspoken advocate of civil liberties, despite the risk this placed him in under the strict censorship laws of the time.  As a satirical polemicist, he frequently made use of his works to criticize intolerance, religious dogma, and the French institutions of his day.

In 1733, Voltaire met Émilie du Châtelet, a married mother of three who was 12 years his junior and with whom he was to have an affair for 16 years.  To avoid arrest after the publication of Letters, Voltaire took refuge at her husband’s château at Cirey-sur-Blaise, on the borders of Champagne and Lorraine.  Voltaire paid for the building’s renovation, and Émilie’s husband, the Marquis du Châtelet, sometimes stayed at the château with his wife and her lover.  The relationship had a significant intellectual element.  Voltaire and the Marquise collected over 21,000 books.

Quotes 

• La vertu s’avilit à se justifier.
  • Virtue is debased by self-justification.
    • Oedipe, act II, scene IV (1718).
• On doit des égards aux vivants; on ne doit aux morts que la vérité.
  • We should be considerate to the living; to the dead we owe only the truth.
    • Letter to M. de Grenonville (1719).

• C’est un poids bien pesant qu’un nom trop tôt fameux.
  • Quite a heavy weight, a name too quickly famous.
    • La Henriade, chant troisième, l.41 (1722).

• L’homme est libre au moment qu’il veut l’être.
  • Man is free at the instant he wants to be.
    • Source Brutus, act II, scene I (1730).

• Les mortels sont égaux; ce n’est pas la naissance,
  C’est la seule vertu qui fait la différence.
  • All mortals are equal; it is not their birth,
    But virtue itself that makes the difference.
    • Eriphile, act II, scene I (1732); these lines were also used in Mahomet, act I, scene IV (1741).

• On parle toujours mal quand on n’a rien à dire.
  • One always speaks badly when one has nothing to say.
    • “Commentaires sur Corneille,” Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire (1827).

• Les anciens Romains élevaient des prodiges d’architecture pour faire combattre des bêtes.
  • The ancient Romans built their greatest masterpieces of architecture for wild beasts to fight in.
    • Letter addressed to “un premier commis” [name unknown] (20 June 1733), from Oeuvres Complètes de Voltaire: Correspondance [Garnier frères, Paris, 1880], vol. I, letter # 343 (p. 354).

• Où est l’amitié est la patrie.
  • Where there is friendship, there is our natural soil.
    • Letter to Nicolas-Claude Thieriot (1734).
• Tous les genres sont bons, hors le genre ennuyeux.
  • All styles are good except the boring kind.
    • L’Enfant prodigue: comédie en vers dissillabes (1736), Preface.

• Le superflu, chose très nécessaire.
  • The superfluous, a very necessary thing.
  • Variant translation: The superfluous is very necessary.
    • Poem Le Mondain (1736).

• Le paradis terrestre est où je suis.
  • Paradise on earth is where I am.
    • Le Mondain (1736).

• Tout homme sensé, tout homme de bien, doit avoir la secte chrétienne en horreur.
  • Every sensible man, every honorable man, must hold the Christian sect in horror.
    • Examen important de milord Bolingbroke (1736): Conclusion.

• Aime la vérité, mais pardonne à l’erreur.
  • Love truth, but pardon error.
    • “Deuxième discours: de la liberté,” Sept Discours en Vers sur l’Homme (1738).

• Usez, n’abusez point; le sage ainsi l’ordonne.
  Je fuis également Épictète et Pétrone.
  L’abstinence ou l’excès ne fit jamais d’heureux.
  • Use, do not abuse; as the wise man commands. I flee Epictetus and Petronius alike. Neither abstinence nor excess ever renders man happy.
    • “Cinquième discours: sur la nature de plaisir,” Sept Discours en Vers sur l’Homme (1738).

• Le secret d’ennuyer est celui de tout dire.
  • The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.
    • “Sixième discours: sur la nature de l’homme,” Sept Discours en Vers sur l’Homme (1738).

• Une seule partie de la physique occupe la vie de plusieurs hommes, et les laisse souvent mourir dans l’incertitude.
  • A single part of physics occupies the lives of many men, and often leaves them dying in uncertainty.
    • “A Madame la Marquise du Châtelet, Avant-Propos,” Eléments de Philosophie de Newton (1738).

Le premier qui fut roi fut un soldat heureux:
Qui sert bien son pays n’a pas besoin d’aïeux.

• The first who was king was a fortunate soldier:
  Who serves his country well has no need of ancestors.
  • Mérope, act I, scene III (1743). Borrowed from Lefranc de Pompignan’s “Didon”.

• Les habiles tyrans ne sont jamais punis.
  • Clever tyrants are never punished.
    • Mérope, act V, scene V (1743).

• Il vaut mieux hasarder de sauver un coupable que de condamner un innocent.
  • It is better to risk sparing a guilty person than to condemn an innocent one.
    • Zadig (1747).

• Qui plume a, guerre a.
  • To hold a pen is to be at war.
    • Letter to Jeanne-Grâce Bosc du Bouchet, comtesse d’Argental (4 October 1748)
    • This remark also appears in a letter to Marie-Louise Denis (22 May 1752): To hold a pen is to be at war. This world is one vast temple consecrated to discord [Qui plume a, guerre a. Ce monde est un vaste temple dédié à la discorde].

• C’est une des superstitions de l’esprit humain d’avoir imaginé que la virginité pouvait être une vertu.
  • It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue.
    • Notebooks (c.1735-c.1750)
    • Note: This quotation and the three that follow directly below are from the so-called Leningrad Notebook, also known as Le Sottisier; it is one of several posthumously published notebooks of Voltaire.

• Prier Dieu c’est se flatter qu’avec des paroles on changera toute la nature.
  • To pray to God is to flatter oneself that with words one can alter nature.
    • Notebooks (c.1735-c.1750).

• Nous cherchons tous le bonheur, mais sans savoir où, comme les ivrognes qui cherchent leur maison, sachant confusément qu’ils en ont une.
  • We all look for happiness, but without knowing where to find it: like drunkards who look for their house, knowing dimly that they have one.
    • Notebooks (c.1735-c.1750)

• Les opinions ont plus causé de maux sur ce petit globe que la peste et les tremblements de terre.
  • Opinions have caused more ills than the plague or earthquakes on this little globe of ours.
    • Letter to Élie Bertrand (5 January 1759).
• Mari qui veut surprendre est souvent fort surprise.
  • Translation: The husband who decides to surprise his wife is often very much surprised himself.
  • La Femme Qui a Raison, Act 1, scene 2 (1759)

• Quand il s’agit d’argent, tout le monde est de la même religion.
  • When it is a question of money, everybody is of the same religion.
    • Letter to Mme. d’Épinal, Ferney (26 December 1760) from Oeuvres Complètes de Voltaire: Correspondance (Garnier frères, Paris, 1881), vol. IX, letter # 4390 (p. 124).

• Il y a des vérités qui ne sont pas pour tous les hommes et pour tous les temps.
  • There are truths which are not for all men, nor for all times.
    • Letter to François-Joachim de Pierre, cardinal de Bernis (23 April 1764).

• Les hommes seront toujours fous; et ceux qui croient les guérir sont les plus fous de la bande.
  • Men will always be mad, and those who think they can cure them are the maddest of all.
    • Letter to Louise Dorothea of Meiningen, duchess of Saxe-Gotha Madame (30 January 1762).

• Quoi que vous fassiez, écrasez l’infâme, et aimez qui vous aime.
  • Whatever you do, crush the infamous thing, and love those who love you.
    • Letter to Jean le Rond d’Alembert (28 November 1762); This was written in reference to crushing superstition, and the words “écrasez l’infâme” (“Crush the Infamy”) became a motto strongly identified with Voltaire

Today is the birthday of René François Ghislain Magritte (Lessines, Belgium; 21 November 1898 – 15 August 1967 Brussels); surrealist artist. He became well known for creating a number of witty and thought-provoking images. Often depicting ordinary objects in an unusual context, his work is known for challenging observers’ preconditioned perceptions of reality. His imagery has influenced Pop art, minimalist and conceptual art.

Magritte married Georgette Berger in June 1922. Georgette was the daughter of a butcher in Charleroi, and had first met Magritte when she was only 13 and he was 15. They met again in Brussels in 1920 and Georgette subsequently became Magritte’s model and muse. In 1936 Magritte met a young artist, Sheila Legge, and began an affair. Magritte arranged for his friend, Paul Colinet, to entertain and distract Georgette, but this led to an affair between his wife and Colinet. Magritte and his wife did not reconcile until 1940.

Magritte died of pancreatic cancer on 15 August 1967, aged 68, and was interred in Schaerbeek Cemetery, Evere, Brussels.

Gallery

The Lovers 1928

Night and Day

The Lovers

Black Magic

The Evening Gown

Mac Tag

Continue reading

René Magritte, the lovers almanac, voltaire

Dear Zazie,  Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag dedicated to his muse.  Are you without the one you do not want to be without?  Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

“Sleep with me?”
absolutely…

meet me
in that old
hotel lobby

i will bring the vodka
and the caviar
and we will savor it

we will talk
of the places we have been
and the places we should go

and we will never say
i love you,
but we will

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

these feelin’s persist…
that which once was

the feelin’s
that stir about you
burn but more clearly

this is how
without feels
this is how
without
makes me feel
this is what
moves me so

these thoughts of you
have never been more
beautiful and necessary
than they are right now
after all i have been through

so i will continue
through these
cold, empty nights
to wait
to write, to dream
to let these thoughts
provide just enough
warmth and maybe,
ever once in awhile,
to hope

© copyright 2017 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

Today original lyrics and a song.  The Dark Muse fought and won again as she usually does these days.  This topic is one of my favorites.  I have visited it before and probably will again, so if you do not like the song of the day just stay tuned.  There are many good songs on this topic and we might get to your favorite.  The Poem of the Day:

Without You

Without you…

These feelins persist,
These persistent feelins

That which was once gained
That which was soon lost
Others sing while I sigh
Others laugh while I weep
I am robbed of rest
Pain lulls me asleep

Without you…

These moods prevail,
These prevailin’ moods

The voice; hear and obey
Sister to despair
Monarch of the lost
Come down; my bluster
Swells no more
The stormy rage blows

Without you…

This gloom pervades,
This pervadin’ gloom

To the depths below
Down I must go
The Dark Muse speaks
Her words; must record
All is forsaken

Without you…

This despair lingers,
This lingerin’ despair

Eternal Darkness
Eternal chains bind
To infinite pain
Let ’em come, Let ’em
Eternal Shadows
This is what awaits

Without you…

This hope fadin’,
This fadin’ hope

There must be some way
Some kinda way
To work this out
Cause I just can’t
Be much longer
Without you, without you

© copyright 2012 mac tag/Cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

The Song of the Day is “Without You” by Van Halen.

Today is the birthday of Paulus Potter (Enkhuizen, Netherlands 20 November 1625 (baptised) – 17 January 1654 (buried) Amsterdam); painter who specialized in animals within landscapes, usually with a low vantage point.

Potter became a member of the Guild of Saint Luke in Delft, but by 1649, he moved to The Hague, next to Jan van Goyen. In July 1650, Potter married Adriana van Balckeneynde (1627-1690). His father-in-law was a leading building contractor in the Hague and introduced him to the Dutch elite.  Amalia of Solms-Braunfels, a member of the stadholder’s family and an art-lover, bought one of Potter’s paintings, The Farmyard, but some court ladies seemed to have advised against it. In May 1652, he returned to Amsterdam on invitation of Nicolaes Tulp, who owned a number of his paintings. Tulp was impressed by his civilized behavior and politeness and had Potter paint his son, Dirck Tulp, as a noble equestrian.  Potter composed a will in January of 1653 and died a year later of tuberculosis, two months after his 28th birthday.

Gallery

The spotted horse

The piebald horse

And on this day in 1805, Fidelio (originally titled Leonore, oder Der Triumph der ehelichen Liebe; English: Leonore, or The Triumph of Marital Love), Op. 72, Ludwig van Beethoven’s only opera premiered at Vienna’s Theater an der Wien. The German libretto was originally prepared by Joseph Sonnleithner from the French of Jean-Nicolas Bouilly. The following year, Stephan von Breuning (de) helped shorten the work from three acts to two. After further work on the libretto by Georg Friedrich Treitschke, a final version was performed at the Kärntnertortheater on 23 May 1814. By convention, both of the first two versions are referred to as Leonore.

The libretto, with some spoken dialogue, tells how Leonore, disguised as a prison guard named “Fidelio”, rescues her husband Florestan from death in a political prison. Bouilly’s scenario fits Beethoven’s aesthetic and political outlook: a story of personal sacrifice, heroism, and eventual triumph. With its underlying struggle for liberty and justice mirroring contemporary political movements in Europe. Notable moments in the opera include the “Prisoners’ Chorus” (O welche Lust—”O what a joy”), an ode to freedom sung by a chorus of political prisoners, Florestan’s vision of Leonore come as an angel to rescue him, and the scene in which the rescue finally takes place. The finale celebrates Leonore’s bravery with alternating contributions of soloists and chorus.

Mac Tag

Because of that great nobleness of hers

The fire that stirs about her, when she stirs,

Burns but more clearly

– W. B. Yeats

Continue reading

beethoven, cowboy coleridge, fidelio, love letter, love poem, love song, muse, poem of the day, Rhett, song of the day, the lovers almanac, twt, van halen, wb yeats, without you, Zazie

Dear Zazie,  Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag dedicated to his muse.  Are these days halcyon days for you?  Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

you, in ways inspire
this verse, this vision,
this desire, come
that we may create
these days and we will
not want, nothin’s lost
that we cannot have,
we shall find wherever
we are, attendin’ to,
without fail the words
we long to say and hear,
to hold, not thrown away

© Copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

“I would ask you,
if you could remain
emotionally detached.
But I don’t think
that is your problem, is it?”
no

as much as i miss
those halcyon days,
facts have a nasty way
of bein’ facts

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

Original lyrics for you and a song.

Halycon Days

The Song of the Day is “Halcyon Days” by Siobhán Donaghy

Eustache Le Sueur

Today is the birthday of Eustache Le Sueur or Lesueur (Paris; 19 November 1617 – 30 April 1655 Paris); artist and one of the founders of the French Academy of Painting. He is known primarily for his paintings of religious subjects.

Gallery

Les muses Clio Euterpe et Thalia

Rape of Tamar, c. 1640

• 

  Présentation de la Vierge au Temple (vers 1640-1645), Saint-Pétersbourg, musée de l’Ermitage.

• 

  La Naissance de l’Amour (1645-1647), Paris, musée du Louvre.

• 

  L’Enlèvement de Ganymède(vers 1650), Paris, musée du Louvre.

• 

  Les Muses Melpomène, Érato et Polymnie (vers 1652-1655), Paris, musée du Louvre.

• 

  Portrait d’un jeune homme(vers 1640), Hartford, Wadsworth Atheneum.

• 

  Vénus présente l’Amour à Jupiter (vers 1646-1647), Paris, musée du Louvre.

• 

  Le Retour de Tobie (vers 1640), Paris, musée du Louvre.

And today is the birthday of Louise Dahl-Wolfe (Louise Emma Augusta Dahl; San Francisco; November 19, 1895 – December 11, 1989 Allendale, New Jersey); photographer. She is known primarily for her work for Harper’s Bazaar, in association with fashion editor Diana Vreeland.

Her first published photograph, titled Tennessee Mountain Woman, was published in Vanity Fair (U.S. magazine 1913–36).  In 1928 she married the American sculptor Meyer Wolfe, who constructed the backgrounds of many of her photographs.

Among the celebrated fashion photographers of the 20th century, Louise Dahl-Wolfe was an innovator and influencer who significantly contributed to the fashion world. She was most widely known for her work with Harper’s Bazaar. Dahl-Wolfe was considered a pioneer of the ‘female gaze’ in the fashion industry. Dahl-Wolfe created the new image of American women during the world war II.  They were strong and independent. Dahl-Wolfe often shot on location and outdoors, bringing her models out of the studio and to exotic locales such as Tunisia, Cuba and South America. Her models pose candidly, almost as if Dahl-Wolfe had just walked in on them. Dahl-Wolf innovatively used color in photography and mainly concerned with the qualities of natural lighting, composition, and balance.  Her methodology in using natural sunlight and shooting outdoors became the industry standard even now.

Gallery

Three viewing la danse by matisse

Mac Tag

Continue reading

cowboy coleridge, eustache le sueur, halcyon days, love letter, love lyrics, love song, lyrics of the day, muse, Rhett, Siobhán Donaghy, song of the day, the lovers almanac, twt, Zazie

Dear Zazie,  Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag dedicated to his muse.  Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

above all i recall
i saw you smile

you are the one
who made this come true
did you not know

i remember too,
though there were
no bells, nor stars that fell

when all is done
and i recall the thrill
of it all, i shall say,
i remember you

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

by George Charles Beresford, half-plate glass negative, 1913

Today is the birthday of Percy Wyndham Lewis (Amherst, Nova Scotia, Canada; 18 November 1882 – 7 March 1957 London); writer, painter and critic (he dropped the name “Percy”, which he disliked). He was a co-founder of the Vorticist movement in art, and edited the literary magazine of the Vorticists, BLAST. His novels include his pre-World War I-era novel Tarr (set in Paris), and The Human Age, a trilogy comprising The Childermass (1928), Monstre Gai and Malign Fiesta (both 1955), set in the afterworld. A fourth volume of The Human Age, The Trial of Man, was begun by Lewis but left in a fragmentary state at the time of his death. He also wrote two autobiographical volumes, Blasting and Bombardiering (1937) and Rude Assignment: A Narrative of my Career Up-to-Date(1950).

In 1930, Lewis married Gladys Anne Hoskins (1900–79), affectionately known as ‘Froanna’. 

In the 1930s Lewis kept Froanna in the background, and many of his friends were simply unaware of her existence. It seems that Lewis was extraordinarily jealous and protective of his wife, owing to her youth and beauty (she was eighteen years his junior). They lived together for ten years before marrying. Froanna was patient and caring toward her husband through financial troubles and his frequent illnesses. She was the model for some of Lewis’s most tender and intimate portraits, as well as a number of characters in his fiction. In contrast to his earlier, rather impersonal portraits, which are purely concerned with external appearance, the portraits of Froanna show a preoccupation with her inner life.

Gallery

Johnny Mercer
Johnny Mercer, c. 1947

Today is the birthday of John Herndon “Johnny” Mercer (Savannah, Georgia; November 18, 1909 – June 25, 1976 Hollywood); lyricist, songwriter and singer.  He was also the founder of Capitol Records.  Perhaps best known as a lyricist, but he also composed music.  He was also a popular singer who recorded his own songs as well as those written by others.  From the mid-1930s through the mid-1950s, many of the songs Mercer wrote and performed were among the most popular hits of the time.  He wrote the lyrics to more than fifteen hundred songs, including compositions for movies and Broadway shows.  He received nineteen Academy Award nominations, and won four Best Original Song Oscars.

In 1931, Mercer married chorus girl Ginger Meehan.  In 1941 Mercer began an intense affair with 19-year-old Judy Garland while she was engaged to composer David Rose.  Garland married Rose to stop the affair, but the effect on Mercer lingered, adding to the emotional depth of his lyrics.  Their affair revived later.  Mercer stated that his song “I Remember You” was the most direct expression of his feelings for Garland.

He died from a brain tumor.  Mercer was buried in Savannah’s historic Bonaventure Cemetery.  The simple line drawing caricature adorning his memorial bench is in fact a reproduction of a self-portrait.

Lyrics 

• You got to ac-cent-tchu-ate the positive
  E-lim-i-nate the negative
  And latch on to the affirmative.
  Don’t mess with mister inbetween.
  • Song Ac-cent-tchu-ate the Positive
• From Natchez to Mobile, from Memphis to St. Joe, wherever the four winds blow
  I been in some big towns an’ heard me some big talk, but there is one thing I know
  A woman’s a two-face, a worrisome thing who’ll leave ya to sing the blues in the night.
  • Song Blues in the Night

• The days of wine and roses laugh and run away like a child at play
  Through the meadow land toward a closing door
  A door marked “nevermore” that wasn’t there before
  • Song The Days of Wine and Roses

• Shine little glow-worm, glimmer, glimmer.
  Shine little glow-worm, glimmer, glimmer.
  Lead us lest too far we wander.
  Love’s sweet voice is calling yonder.
  • Song The Glow-Worm

• So you met someone who set you back on your heels – goody, goody
  You met someone and now you know how it feels – goody, goody
  • Song Goody, Goody

• Skylark,
  Have you seen a valley green with Spring
  Where my heart can go a-journeying,
  Over the shadows in the rain
  To a blossom covered lane?
  And in your lonely flight,
  Haven’t you heard the music in the night,
  Wonderful music,
  Faint as a will-o-the-wisp,
  Crazy as a loon,
  Sad as a gypsy serenading the moon.
  • Song “Skylark” (1942)

• I remember too, a distant bell…
  and stars that fell…
  like the rain
  out of the blue.
  • Song “I Remember You” (1941)

• When my life is through
  And the angels ask me to recall
  The thrill of them all
  Then I shall tell them
  I remember you
  • Song I Remember You

• Cigarette holder,
  which wigs me,
  over her shoulder
  she digs me:
  Out cattin’
  that Satin Doll.
  • Song “Satin Doll” (1953)

• There’s a long goodbye,
  and it happens every day,
  when a passerby
  invites your eye
  to come away.
  Even as you smile a quick hello
  you let her go,
  you let the moment fly…
  Too late you turn your head,
  you know you’ve said
  the Long Goodbye.
  • Song “The Long Goodbye” (1973)

• I know all the songs that the cowboys know
  ’bout the big corral where the doggies go,
  ‘Cause I learned them all on the radio.
  Yippie yi yo kayah
  • Song I’m an old Cowhand

The song of the day is Jo Stafford’s version of “I Remember You“. we do not own the rights to this song. no copyright infringement intended.

Mac Tag

follow us on twitter @cowboycoleridge

Continue reading

johnny mercer, the lovers almanac, wyndham lewis

Dear Zazie,  Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag dedicated to his muse.  Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

the sense that after all

© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

there was a time
when that woulda played
i mean, i still feel it
i am not dead
just numb
incredibly numb

so much time spent chasin’
what was supposed to be
without ever knowin’
it could never be

© copyright 2017 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

Today is the birthday of Charles Lock Eastlake (Plymouth, Devon, England 17 November 1793 – 24 December 1865 Pisa, Italy); painter, gallery director, collector and writer of the 19th century. After a period as keeper, he was the first director of the National Gallery.

In 1849 he married Elizabeth Rigby, an art historian and translator of German art histories, forming a formidable art history writing partnership.

In 1845, he was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Honorary Academician. From 1850 to 1865, he was the second president of the Birmingham Society of Artists.  Elected President of the Royal Academy and knighted in 1850, he became a notable figure in the British art establishment, being appointed the first President of the Photographic Society in 1853 and, in 1855, the first Director of the National Gallery.

Gallery

Haidée, a Greek Girl

The lily

And on this day in 1839 – Oberto, Giuseppe Verdi’s first opera, opens at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, Italy.

The town and citadel of Bassano where the opera is set

Oberto, Conte di San Bonifacio is an opera in two acts by Verdi to an Italian libretto by Temistocle Solera, based on an existing libretto by Antonio Piazza probably called Rocester.  It was written over a period of four years and was first performed at the Teatro alla Scala, Milan.  The La Scala production enjoyed success and the theatre’s impresario commissioned more operas from Verdi.

Portrait of Verdi, 1839-40 by Molentini

Continue reading

giuseppe verdi, oberto, the lovers almanac

Dear Zazie,  Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag dedicated to his muse.  Have you wondered if those days would ever come back?  Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

© copyight 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

the details of this daily life
which need only be
turned like pages,
constitute the whole
of what is left
of what matters

from the broken,
scattered past
still, alone,
persistent,
vital

it reminds,
this persists

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

used to be, all about
searchin’ for what
i thought was lost
for lost coulda, shoulda
a dreadful crime
for certain,
wastin’ so much time

now content to write
and ride the wave
of memories
the voluntary,
the involuntary
the beauty
and the sorrow

after takin’ several readin’s
this is startin’ to feel
more and more
like the denouement
the days fraught with angst
are givin’ way to a sense of peace
that comes with a growin’
acceptance of the inevitable
the meant to be,
the, there never ever
coulda been a shoulda been

© copyright 2017 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

This one started out with me thinkin’ of the perfect day and you.  Then voilà, the Poem of the Day.

Those Days

The Song of the Day is “These Days” by Chantal Kreviazuk.

Today is the birthday of Francis Danby (County Wexford, Ireland 16 November 1793 – 9 February 1861 Exmouth, England); painter of the Romantic era.  His imaginative, dramatic landscapes were comparable to those of John Martin. Danby initially developed his imaginative style while he was the central figure in a group of artists who have come to be known as the Bristol School. His period of greatest success was in London in the 1820s.

Disappointed love

Houses of Parliament from the river

Mac Tag

Continue reading

À la recherche du temps perdu, Chantal Kreviazuk, cowboy coleridge, in search of lost time, love letter, love poem, love song, marcel proust, muse, poem of the day, remembrance of things past, Rhett, song of the day, the lovers almanac, these days, twt, Zazie

Dear Zazie,  Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag dedicated to his muse.  Jett misses his friend.  Who are you missin’?  Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

one may be pardoned,
i suppose,
for the hyperbole
for feelin’s,
undyin’

blessed are those whose faith
is not framed by ordinary things

here, existence is flawed
transcendence unconditional
the journey to redemption
perpetual

“Is there refuge
here for me?”

yes, take my hand

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

beauty and sorrow
sorrow and beauty
i grapple with thee,
the one, then the other,
with a vigor
unlike anything
you can imagine

two words
that can mean
so much
yet sometimes
feel so empty
two words
overused
ad nauseam
yet not said enough
two words fraught
with beauty and sorrow
perhaps
that is the attraction
though the effort
to go there feels futile
far better poets
have written
better odes

if written again
would it matter
would it convey
this utter, complete
feelin’ of loss
that threatens
to subdue
the last vestige
of hope

yes, that word
can still be written
but is it real
or is it just
layin’ there
for your sake

remember this my friend,
ain’t nothin’
but a candle in the wind,
and it is a far, far better fate
to swathe oneself
in shrouds of sorrow,
than to feel nothin’ at all

that answers
the question
does it not,
for once joy
cannot be felt
then sorrow must
be probed often
to prove
that feelin’s
still exist

“How many more
shades darker
will you have it?”

many, many…
© copyright 2017 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

This was so easy to write and so hard to read.  I have been playin’ the SOD over and over today.  Miss you.  The Lyrics of the Day:

Missin’ You

Matters not what I do
Matters not where I go
Matters not what I know
I am ever missin’ you

I can go have my fill
I can do whatever
I can be real clever
I am missin’ you still

Whether I continue
Is not up for debate
Whether early or late
I will be missin’ you

Matters not what I touch
Matters not how I feel
Matters not what is real
I am missin’ you so much

I can do somethin’ new
I can do anything
Or I can do nothin’
I am always missin’ you

Whatever comes my way
I can feign or flatter
It just does not matter
Missin’ you, come what may

Ever missin’ you
Missin’ you still
Missin’ you
Missin’ you so much

Always missin’ you
Missin’ you come what may

© copyright 2012 mac tag/Cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

The Song of the Day is “Missing You” by John Waite and Alison Krauss

Marianne Moore
Photograph by Carl Van Vechten (1948)

Today is the birthday of Marianne Craig Moore (Kirkwood, Missouri; November 15, 1887 – February 5, 1972 New York City); Modernist poet, critic, translator, and editor.  Her poetry is noted for formal innovation, precise diction, irony, and wit.  Moore never married.

Verse

• One may be pardoned, yes I know
  one may, for love for love, undying (Ephesians 6:24)
  • Voracities and Verities Sometimes are Interesting
• There is hate’s crown beneath which all is
  death; there’s love without which none
  is king.
  • In Distrust of Merits
• In Homer, existence
  is flawed; transcendence, conditional;
  ‘ the journey from sin to redemption, perpetual’,
  • To a Giraffe
• Tell me, Tell me where might there be a refuge for me
  from egocentricity
  and its propensity to bisect,
  mis-state, misunderstand
  and obliterate continuity?
  • Tell Me, Tell Me
• You are not male nor female, but a plan
  deep-set within the heart of man.
  • “Sun” from Tell Me, Tell Me (1966)

• Consume hostility;
  employ your weapon in this meeting-place of surging enmity!
  Insurgent feet shall not outrun
  multiplied flames, O Sun.
  • “Sun” from Tell Me, Tell Me (1966)

Collected Poems (1951)

• Poetry I too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond
  all this fiddle,
  Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it
  one discovers in
  it after all, a place for the genuine.
  • Poetry
• If you demand on the other hand,
  the raw material of poetry in
  all its rawness and
  that which is on the other hand
  genuine, you are interested in poetry.
  • Poetry
• ‘Hebrew poetry is,
  prose with a sort of heightened consciousness’ Ecstasy
  affords
  the occasion expediency, determines the form
  • The Past is the Present

Poetry (1919)

Hands that can grasp, eyes

that can dilate, hair that can rise

if it must, these things are important not because a

high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are

useful. When they become so derivative as to become unintelligible,

the same thing may be said for all of us, that we

do not admire what

we cannot understand: the bat

holding on upside down or in quest of something to

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf under

a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse that feels a flea, the base-

ball fan, the statistician —

nor is it valid

to discriminate against “business documents and

school-books; all these phenomena are important. One must make a distinction

however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry,

nor till the poets among us can be

“literalists of

the imagination” — above

insolence and triviality and can present

for inspection, “imaginary gardens with real toads in them,” shall we have

it.

In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,

the raw material of poetry in

all its rawness and

that which is on the other hand

genuine, you are interested in poetry.

The Poems of Marianne Moore (2003)

• that which is impossible to force, it is impossible
  to hinder.
  • “Radical”

• My father used to say “Superior people never make long visits.”
  • “Silence”

• The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence;
  not in silence, but restraint.
  • “Silence”

• He’s not out
  seeing a sight but the rock
  crystal thing to see — the startling El Greco
  brimming with inner light — that
  covets nothing that it has let go. This then you may know
  as the hero.
  • “The Hero”

• What is our innocence,
  what is our guilt? All are
  naked, none is safe.
  • “What Are Years?”

• Beauty is everlasting
  and dust is for a time.
  • “In Distrust of Merits” (1944)

• Some speak of things we know, as new;
  And you, of things unknown as things forgot.
  • “Quoting an Also Private Thought” (this poem is a very slight reworking of an earlier poem “As Has Been Said”)

• We Call Them the Brave
  who likely were reluctant to be brave.
  • “We Call Them the Brave” (the title of this poem is also obviously meant to be read as its first line, though set apart)

• What of it? We call them brave
  perhaps? Yes; what if the time should come
  when no one will fight for anything
  and there’s nothing of worth to save.
  • “We Call Them the Brave”

• A symbol from the first, of mastery,
  experiments such as Hippocrates made
  and substituted for vague
  speculation stayed
  the ravages of plague.
  • “The Staff of Aesculapius”

• Staff and effigy of the animal
  which by shedding its skin
  is a sign of renewal —
  the symbol of medicine.
  • “The Staff of Aesculapius”

• The problems is mastered — insupportably
  tiring when it was impending.
  Deliverance accounts for what sounds like axiom.
• The Gordian knot need not be cut.
  • “Charity Overcoming Envy”

• Love, ah Love, when your slipknot’s drawn,
  One can but say, “Farewell, good sense.”
  • “The Lion in Love”

• We are what we were at birth, and each trait has remained
  in conformity with earth’s and with heaven’s logic:
  Be the devil’s tool, resort to black magic,
  None can diverge from the ends which Heaven foreordained.
  • “The Mouse Metamorphosed into a Maid”

Georgia O’Keeffe
Georgia O’Keeffe, 1918, photograph by Alfred Stieglitz

Today is the birthday of Georgia Totto O’Keeffe (Town of Sun Prairie, Wisconsin; November 15, 1887 – March 6, 1986 Santa Fe, New Mexico); artist.  She was best known for her paintings of enlarged flowers, New York skyscrapers, and New Mexico landscapes.  O’Keeffe has been recognized as the “Mother of American modernism”.

O’Keefe took a job as head of the art department at West Texas State Normal College from late 1916 to February 1918, the fledgling West Texas A&M University in Canyon just south of Amarillo.  While there, she often visited the Palo Duro Canyon, making its forms a subject in her work.

Alfred Stieglitz organized O’Keeffe’s first solo show at his 291 art gallery in April 1917, which included oil paintings and watercolors completed in Texas.

Stieglitz and O’Keeffe corresponded frequently beginning in 1916 and, in June 1918, she accepted his invitation to move to New York to devote all of her time to her work.  The two were in love and, shortly after her arrival, they began living together, even though Stieglitz was married and 23 years her senior.  That year, Stieglitz first took O’Keeffe to his family home at the village of Lake George in New York’s Adirondack Mountains.  They spent part of every year there until 1929, when O’Keeffe spent the first of many summers painting in New Mexico.  In 1924, Stieglitz’s divorce was approved by a judge and, within four months, he and O’Keeffe married.  It was a small, private ceremony at John Marin’s house, and afterward the couple went back home.  There was no reception, festivities, or honeymoon.  After the marriage, they both continued working on their individual projects as they had before.  For the rest of their lives together, their relationship was, as biographer Benita Eisler characterized it,

a collusion … a system of deals and trade-offs, tacitly agreed to and carried out, for the most part, without the exchange of a word. Preferring avoidance to confrontation on most issues, O’Keeffe was the principal agent of collusion in their union.

Stieglitz started photographing O’Keeffe when she visited him in New York City to see her 1917 exhibition.  By 1937, when he retired from photography, he had made more than 350 portraits of her.  Most of the more erotic photographs were made in the 1910s and early 1920s.  In February 1921, forty-five of Stieglitz’s photographs were exhibited in a retrospective exhibition at the Anderson Galleries, including many of O’Keeffe, some of which depicted her in the nude.  It created a public sensation.  She once made a remark to Pollitzer about the nude photographs which may be the best indication of O’Keeffe’s ultimate reaction to being their subject: “I felt somehow that the photographs had nothing to do with me personally.” In 1978, she wrote about how distant from them she had become: “When I look over the photographs Stieglitz took of me-some of them more than sixty years ago—I wonder who that person is. It is as if in my one life I have lived many lives. If the person in the photographs were living in this world today, she would be quite a different person—but it doesn’t matter—Stieglitz photographed her then.”

By 1929, O’Keeffe acted on her increasing need to find a new source of inspiration for her work and to escape summers at Lake George, where she was surrounded by the Stieglitz family and their friends.  O’Keeffe had considered finding a studio separate from Lake George in upstate New York and had also thought about spending the summer in Europe, but opted instead to travel to Santa Fe, with her friend Rebecca Strand.  The two set out by train in May 1929 and soon after their arrival, Mabel Dodge Luhan moved them to her house in Taos and provided them with studios.  O’Keeffe went on many pack trips exploring the rugged mountains and deserts of the region that summer and later visited the nearby D. H. Lawrence Ranch, where she completed her now famous oil painting, The Lawrence Tree, currently owned by the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford, Connecticut.

Between 1929 and 1949, O’Keeffe spent part of nearly every year working in New Mexico.  She collected rocks and bones from the desert floor and made them and the distinctive architectural and landscape forms of the area subjects in her work.  She also went on several camping trips with friends, visiting important sites in the Southwest, and in 1961, she and others, including photographers Eliot Porter and Todd Webb, went on a rafting trip down the Colorado River about Glen Canyon, Utah.

In August of 1934, she visited Ghost Ranch, north of Abiquiú, for the first time and decided to live there.  In 1940, she moved into a house on the ranch property.  The varicolored cliffs of Ghost Ranch inspired some of her most famous landscapes.  In 1977, O’Keeffe wrote: “[the] cliffs over there are almost painted for you—you think—until you try to paint them.”  Among guests to visit her at the ranch over the years were Charles and Anne Lindbergh, singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell, poet Allen Ginsberg, and photographer Ansel Adams.

Known as a loner, O’Keeffe explored the land she loved often in her Ford Model A, which she purchased and learned to drive in 1929.  She often talked about her fondness for Ghost Ranch and Northern New Mexico, as in 1943, when she explained: “Such a beautiful, untouched lonely feeling place, such a fine part of what I call the ‘Faraway’. It is a place I have painted before … even now I must do it again.”

As early as 1936, O’Keeffe developed an intense interest in what is called the “Black Place”, which was about 150 miles west of her Ghost Ranch house.  She made an extensive series of paintings of this site in the 1940s.  O’Keeffe said that the Black Place resembled “a mile of elephants with gray hills and white sand at their feet.”  At times the wind was so strong when she was painting there that she had trouble keeping her canvas on the easel. When the heat from the sun became intense, she crawled under her car for shade. The Black Place still remains remote and uninhabited.

She also made paintings of the “White Place”, a white rock formation located near her Abiquiú house.  In 1945, O’Keeffe bought a second house, an abandoned hacienda in Abiquiú, some 18 miles (26 km) south of Ghost Ranch.

Shortly after O’Keeffe arrived for the summer in New Mexico in 1946, Stieglitz suffered a cerebral thrombosis.  She flew to New York to be with him.  He died on July 13, 1946.  She buried his ashes at Lake George.  She spent the next three years mostly in New York settling his estate, and moved permanently to New Mexico in 1949.

O’Keeffe met photographer Todd Webb in the 1940s.  After his move to New Mexico in 1961, he often made photographs of her, as did numerous other important American photographers, who consistently presented O’Keeffe as a “loner, a severe figure and self-made person.”  While O’Keeffe was known to have a “prickly personality”, Webb’s photographs portray her with a kind of “quietness and calm” suggesting a relaxed friendship, and revealing new contours of O’Keeffe’s character.

In 1972, O’Keeffe’s eyesight was compromised by macular degeneration, leading to the loss of central vision and leaving her with only peripheral vision.  She stopped oil painting without assistance in 1972, but continued working in pencil and charcoal until 1984.

O’Keeffe became increasingly frail in her late 90s.  She moved to Santa Fe in 1984, where she died at the age of 98.  In accordance with her wishes, her body was cremated and her ashes were scattered to the wind at the top of Pedernal Mountain, over her beloved “faraway”.

Gallery

Blue and Green Music, 1921, oil on canvas

Stieglitz photograph of O’Keeffe with sketchpad and watercolors, 1918

Pineapple Bud, 1939, oil on canvas

 

Ram’s Head White Hollyhock and Little Hills, 1935, The Brooklyn Museum

 

O’Keeffe’s “White Place,” the Plaza Blanca cliffs and badlands near Abiquiú

Cerro Pedernal, viewed from Ghost Ranch. This was a favorite subject for O’Keeffe, who once said, “It’s my private mountain. It belongs to me. God told me if I painted it enough, I could have it”

Georgia O’Keeffe, platinum print, 1920

 

 My Shanty, Lake George, 1922, oil on canvas, 20 × 27 1/8 in., The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.

• 

  Untitled – vase of flowers, 1903–1905, watercolor on paper, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum

• 

  Red Canna, 1915, watercolor on paper, 19.4 by 13.0 inches (49.2 cm × 33.0 cm), Yale University Art Gallery

• 

  Drawing No. 2 – Special, 1915, charcoal on laid paper, 23.6 by 18.2 inches (60 cm × 46.3 cm), National Gallery of Art

• 

  Blue #1, 1916, watercolor and graphite on paper, Brooklyn Museum

• 

  Sunrise, 1916, watercolor on paper

• 

  No. 8 – Special, 1916, Whitney Museum of Art

• 

  Light Coming on the Plains No. II, 1917, watercolor on newsprint paper, 11+7⁄8 by 8+7⁄8 inches (30 cm × 23 cm), Amon Carter Museum of American Art

• 

  Series 1, No. 8, 1918, oil-painting on canvas, 20.0 by 16.0 inches (50.8 cm × 40.6 cm), Lenbachhaus, Munich

• 

  Red Canna, 1919, oil on board, High Museum of Art, Atlanta

• 

  A Storm, 1922, pastel on paper, mounted on illustration board, 18.3 by 24.4 inches (46.4 cm × 61.9 cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art

Torso by Stieglitz

Mac Tag

And he called loudly to the stars to bend

From their pale thrones and comfort him, but they

Among themselves laugh on and sing alway:

– WB Yeats

Continue reading

alison krauss, cowboy coleridge, georgia o'keefe, john waite, love letter, love song, lyrics of the day, marianne moore, missing you, muse, Rhett, song of the day, the lovers almanac, Zazie