Dear Zazie,  Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag dedicated to his muse.  Whatever comes your way, keep breathin’, keep dreamin’.  Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

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© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

to look
was but to court deception

a wanderer, all abroad
unable to see from where
inspiration comes

only through years
spent there
could lead to this

the realism,
always and everywhere,
is that of the poets
to find beauty and sorrow
and give them a voice

for to miss that
is to miss all

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

alternate reality stream…
trust your cape
enter the rhapsody

remember when,
from mornin’ break,
beyond the light,
never a day too long
to take time
to make it right

ardent thoughts
often cross the mind,
a time not to forget,
what was once found

© copyright 2017 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

Cowboy poet from mornin’ break
Wrote ’til the close of light,
Never a day too long to make
One word or sentence right

Robert Louis Stevenson

Today is the birthday of Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson (Edinburgh 13 November 1850 – 3 December 1894 Vailima, Samoan Islands); novelist, poet, essayist, and travel writer.  Perhaps best know for his novels; Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

A literary celebrity during his lifetime, Stevenson now ranks among the most translated authors in the world.

Stevenson was a sickly, moderately successful poet, essayist and travel writer, livin’ in France, when he fell in love with a woman after one look at her.  (Sounds like a friend of Jett!)  He was passin’ by the window of a house one night when he looked inside and fell instantly in love with a woman he saw eatin’ dinner with a group of her friends.  Stevenson stood there starin’ at her, and then opened the window and leapt inside.  The guests were shocked, but Stevenson just bowed and introduced himself.  The woman was an American named Fanny Osbourne, and she was unhappily married (another friend of Jett!).  After a few months in Europe, she returned to California, and Stevenson decided to drop everything and go persuade her to divorce her husband and marry him.  He collapsed on her doorstep.  She divorced her husband, and they were married and moved back to Scotland.  Stevenson wrote a poem that served as inspiration for the Lyrics of the Day and that inspired the Song of the Day.

For marriage is like life in this — that it is a field of battle, and not a bed of roses.

Falling in love is the one illogical adventure, the one thing of which we are tempted to think as supernatural, in our trite and reasonable world. The effect is out of all proportion with the cause. Two persons, neither of them, it may be, very amiable or very beautiful, meet, speak a little, and look a little into each other’s eyes. That has been done a dozen or so of times in the experience of either with no great result. But on this occasion all is different. They fall at once into that state in which another person becomes to us the very gist and centrepoint of God’s creation, and demolishes our laborious theories with a smile; in which our ideas are so bound up with the one master-thought that even the trivial cares of our own person become so many acts of devotion, and the love of life itself is translated into a wish to remain in the same world with so precious and desirable a fellow-creature.

• Virginibus Puerisque, Ch. 3.

The cruelest lies are often told in silence. A man may have sat in a room for hours and not opened his teeth, and yet come out of that room a disloyal friend or a vile calumniator. And how many loves have perished because, from pride, or spite, or diffidence, or that unmanly shame which withholds a man from daring to betray emotion, a lover, at the critical point of the relation, has but hung his head and held his tongue?

• Truth of Intercourse.

And now Stevenson’s poem then the lyrics, then the song.  To Stevenson, love at first sight and you.

To the Muse

Keep Breathin’

Alternate reality stream:
Trust your cape, take a breath
Enter the rhapsody, the dream
Breathin’ beyond love’s death

Remember when, from mornin’ break,
Lovin’ beyond the light,
Never a day too long to take
Time to make lovin’ right

Ardent thoughts often cross the mind,
A time not to forget,
What was once found then left behind
Now time full of regret

So, within the vision to hear
Breathin’, faster, urgent
To be to that passion so near
Is to know contentment

Leave, leave it then, muse of my heart
Keep breathin’, keep dreamin’,
Leave, take your totem and depart
Enter my dream streamin’

© copyright 2012 mac tag/Cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

The Song of the Day is “Keep Breathing” by Ingrid Michaelson

 

23.1.1959
West-Berlin
Mary Wigman-Studio

Today is the birthday of Mary Wigman (born Karoline Sophie Marie Wiegmann; Hanover, Germany; 13 November 1886 – 18 September 1973, Berlin); dancer, choreographer, notable as the pioneer of expressionist dance, dance therapy, and movement training without pointe shoes. In my opinion, she is one of the most important figures in the history of modern dance. She became one of the most iconic figures of Weimar German culture and her work was hailed for bringing the deepest of existential experiences to the stage.

Gallery

Portrait of Wigman dancing by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Wigman, dance studio, West Berlin 1959

Postage stamp marks 100th year of Wigman’s birth

Wigman studio, West Berlin

West Berlin 1959

Wigman (1922)

And today is the birthday of Robert Whitaker (13 November 1939 – 20 September 2011) was a British photographer, best known internationally for his many photographs of The Beatles, taken between 1964 and 1966, with his best known work, the “Butcher Cover“, which featured on the band’s 1966’s US-only album Yesterday and Today. He also worked with the rock group Cream, photos from which were used in the Martin Sharp-designed collage on the cover of their 1967 LP Disraeli Gears.

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cowboy coleridge, ingrid michaelson, Jett, keep breathing, love letter, love poem, love song, lyrics of the day, mary wigman, muse, poem of the day, Rhett, robert louis stevenson, song of the day, the lovers almanac, to the muse, twt, Zazie

Dear Zazie,  Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag dedicated to his muse.  Who do you embrace and who returns to embrace you?  Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboycoleridge all rights reserved

choose and chop off
whatever is not needed

the only thing
is to be moved
to tremble, to live
to be an artist

create a spark,
make a fire,
be willin’
to be consumed

the gift is nothin’
without the will
to make it worthwhile

you revealed me to myself
revealed to me, in your embrace

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

trapped in the amber
of any moment with you,
suits me just fine

“How much do you know
about fear?”
all there is

“Room service.”
i did not order anything
not even you

“Think on your sins.”
every dang day

“Do you think
you’ll be able to sleep now?”
i do not think the dead care

“I wish I could set you free.”
me too

quantum of solace
i suppose
in the verse
in you

And now, a vignette, a poem and a song.  All for you.

Embrace
She tried to turn away from him, but he would not let her.  He took her arm and turned her to face him.  She started to speak but he put his finger to her lips. They stood there lookin’ into each other’s eyes for a moment.  A moment that lengthened and lingered.  A moment that became somethin’.  Somethin’ they both needed.  He knew it.  She knew it.  Then he took her in his arms and he held her.  He held her firmly and she allowed herself to flow into the strength of his embrace, their embrace, an embrace that from then on would always be there.  He slowly released her and took her hand and led her down the sidewalk to a bench.  They sat on the bench as one.  As they leaned back they leaned into each other and his arms once again went around her and they gave themselves to the embrace.  All there was, all that mattered was the embrace and their thoughts.  His were there with her and hers took her where she had to go.  They stayed there as if askin’ the world to wait.  They were sustained by each other, by two hearts findin’ unison, by the embrace.

Bein’ Embraced

The Song of the Day is “Embrace” by Dazzled Kid.

Today is the birthday of Auguste René Rodin (François Auguste René RodinParis 12 November 1840 – 17 November 1917 Meudon, France); sculptor.

From the unexpected realism of his first major figure – inspired by an 1875 trip to Italy – to the unconventional memorials whose commissions he later sought, Rodin’s reputation grew, and he became the preeminent French sculptor of his time. By 1900, he was a world-renowned artist. Private clients sought Rodin’s work after his World’s Fair exhibit, and he kept company with a variety of high-profile intellectuals and artists. His students included Antoine Bourdelle, Camille Claudel, Constantin Brâncuși, and Charles Despiau. He married his lifelong companion, Rose Beuret, in the last year of both their lives. Rodin remains one of the few sculptors widely known outside the visual arts community.

In 1883, Rodin agreed to supervise a course for sculptor Alfred Boucher in his absence, where he met the 18-year-old Camille Claudel. The two formed a passionate but stormy relationship and influenced each other artistically. Claudel inspired Rodin as a model for many of his figures, and she was a talented sculptor, assisting him on commissions.

Claudel and Rodin parted in 1898. Claudel suffered an alleged nervous breakdown several years later and was confined to an institution for 30 years by her family, until her death in 1943, despite numerous attempts by doctors to explain to her mother and brother that she was sane.

Fifty-three years into their relationship, Rodin married Rose Beuret. The wedding was 29 January 1917, and Beuret died two weeks later, on 16 February. Rodin was ill that year; in January, he suffered weakness from influenza, and on 16 November his physician announced that “congestion of the lungs has caused great weakness. The patient’s condition is grave.” Rodin died the next day, age 77, at his villa in Meudon, Île-de-France, on the outskirts of Paris.

A cast of The Thinker was placed next to his tomb in Meudon; it was Rodin’s wish that the figure served as his headstone and epitaph.

Gallery

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Auguste Rodin, being embraced, cowboy coleridge, dazzled kid, embrace, love letter, love poem, love song, muse, poem of the day, Rhett, 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

“The pages are worn
but the story is strong.”

the music may be faint
but the melody is true
and it will save us…

so, solo pinot nights
suit just as well
as does cookin’ for one
tonight, foglie d’oliva pasta
with trapanese pesto sauce,
baked spicy dark meat chicken,
and dessert, dark chocolate cake
washed down with a little Sambuca

never miss a chance
to make the most
of a meal or a moment
alone or not

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

can there be
anything better
than cookin’ a fine meal
with a fine woman…

imagine me and you
in a kitchen
fixin’ this menu…
steak carpaccio
with fresh spinach
and arugula
red wine risotto
with fresh basil
and garlic
and for dessert
raspberry cream cupcakes
with a dark chocolate drizzle
and of course a bottle,
well maybe two,
of pinot noir

after that meal
and drinkin’
sex in a glass
and the way
we look at each other
yeah, the dishes
can wait till mornin’…

© copyright 2017 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

Today is the birthday of Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (Moscow 11 November 1821 – 9 February 1881 Saint Petersburg); novelist, short story writer, essayist, journalist and philosopher. Dostoevsky’s literary works explore human psychology in the troubled political, social, and spiritual atmospheres of 19th-century Russia, and engage with a variety of philosophical and religious themes. Perhaps best know for his works Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1869), Demons (1872) and The Brothers Karamazov (1880). Dostoevsky’s oeuvre consists of 11 novels, three novellas, 17 short stories and numerous other works. In my opinion, he is one of the greatest psychologists in world literature. His 1864 novella Notes from Underground is considered to be one of the first works of existentialist literature.

Dostoevsky was introduced to literature at an early age through fairy tales and legends, and through books by Russian and foreign authors. His mother died in 1837 when he was 15, and around the same time, he left school to enter the Nikolayev Military Engineering Institute. After graduating, he worked as an engineer and briefly enjoyed a lavish lifestyle, translating books to earn extra money. In the mid-1840s he wrote his first novel, Poor Folk, which gained him entry into St. Petersburg’s literary circles. Arrested in 1849 for belonging to a literary group that discussed banned books critical of “Tsarist Russia”, he was sentenced to death but the sentence was commuted at the last moment. He spent four years in a Siberian prison camp, followed by six years of compulsory military service in exile. In the following years, Dostoevsky worked as a journalist, publishing and editing several magazines of his own and later A Writer’s Diary, a collection of his writings.

Dostoevsky was influenced by a wide variety of philosophers and authors including Pushkin, Gogol, Augustine, Shakespeare, Dickens, Balzac, Lermontov, Hugo, Poe, Plato, Cervantes, Herzen, Kant, Belinsky, Hegel, Schiller, Solovyov, Bakunin, Sand, Hoffmann, and Mickiewicz. His writings were widely read both within and beyond his native Russia and influenced an equally great number of later writers including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Anton Chekhov as well as philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Jean-Paul Sartre. His books have been translated into more than 170 languages. My favorite book of his is The Dream of a Ridiculous Man (1877).

During a visit to Belikhov, Dostoevsky met Maria Dmitrievna Isaeva and fell in love. In 1856 Dostoevsky sent a letter through apologising for his activity in several utopian circles. As a result, he obtained the right to publish books and to marry, although he remained under police surveillance for the rest of his life. Maria married Dostoevsky in Semipalatinsk on 7 February 1857, even though she had initially refused his marriage proposal, stating that they were not meant for each other and that his poor financial situation precluded marriage. Their family life was unhappy and she found it difficult to cope with his seizures. Describing their relationship, he wrote: “Because of her strange, suspicious and fantastic character, we were definitely not happy together, but we could not stop loving each other; and the more unhappy we were, the more attached to each other we became”. They mostly lived apart. 

in Paris, 1863

In 1864 Maria and his brother Mikhail died.

On 4 October 1866, Anna Snitkina started working as a stenographer on his novel The Gambler. A month later they became engaged.

In the Memoirs, Anna describes how Dostoevsky began his marriage proposal by outlining the plot of an imaginary new novel, as if he needed her advice on female psychology. In the story an old painter makes a proposal to a young girl whose name is Anya. Dostoevsky asked if it was possible for a girl so young and different in personality to fall in love with the painter. Anna answered that it was quite possible. Then he told Anna: “Put yourself in her place for a moment. Imagine I am the painter, I confessed to you and asked you to be my wife. What would you answer?” Anna said: “I would answer that I love you and I will love you forever”.

On 15 February 1867, the couple were married. Two months later they went abroad, where they remained for over four years (until July 1871).

 The Dream of a Ridiculous Man (1877)

• I am a ridiculous person. Now they call me a madman. That would be a promotion if it were not that I remain as ridiculous in their eyes as before. But now I do not resent it, they are all dear to me now, even when they laugh at me — and, indeed, it is just then that they are particularly dear to me. I could join in their laughter — not exactly at myself, but through affection for them, if I did not feel so sad as I look at them. Sad because they do not know the truth and I do know it. Oh, how hard it is to be the only one who knows the truth! But they won’t understand that. No, they won’t understand it.
  • I

• I gave up caring about anything, and all the problems disappeared.
  And it was after that that I found out the truth. I learnt the truth last November — on the third of November, to be precise — and I remember every instant since.
  • I

• The sky was horribly dark, but one could distinctly see tattered clouds, and between them fathomless black patches. Suddenly I noticed in one of these patches a star, and began watching it intently. That was because that star had given me an idea: I decided to kill myself that night.
  • I

• It seemed clear to me that life and the world somehow depended upon me now. I may almost say that the world now seemed created for me alone: if I shot myself the world would cease to be at least for me. I say nothing of its being likely that nothing will exist for anyone when I am gone, and that as soon as my consciousness is extinguished the whole world will vanish too and become void like a phantom, as a mere appurtenance of my consciousness, for possibly all this world and all these people are only me myself.
  • II

• Dreams, as we all know, are very queer things: some parts are presented with appalling vividness, with details worked up with the elaborate finish of jewellery, while others one gallops through, as it were, without noticing them at all, as, for instance, through space and time. Dreams seem to be spurred on not by reason but by desire, not by the head but by the heart, and yet what complicated tricks my reason has played sometimes in dreams, what utterly incomprehensible things happen to it!
  • II

• Yes, I dreamed a dream, my dream of the third of November. They tease me now, telling me it was only a dream. But does it matter whether it was a dream or reality, if the dream made known to me the truth? If once one has recognized the truth and seen it, you know that it is the truth and that there is no other and there cannot be, whether you are asleep or awake. Let it be a dream, so be it, but that real life of which you make so much I had meant to extinguish by suicide, and my dream, my dream — oh, it revealed to me a different life, renewed, grand and full of power!
  • II

• I suddenly dreamt that I picked up the revolver and aimed it straight at my heart — my heart, and not my head; and I had determined beforehand to fire at my head, at my right temple. After aiming at my chest I waited a second or two, and suddenly my candle, my table, and the wall in front of me began moving and heaving. I made haste to pull the trigger.
  • III

• In dreams you sometimes fall from a height, or are stabbed, or beaten, but you never feel pain unless, perhaps, you really bruise yourself against the bedstead, then you feel pain and almost always wake up from it. It was the same in my dream. I did not feel any pain, but it seemed as though with my shot everything within me was shaken and everything was suddenly dimmed, and it grew horribly black around me. I seemed to be blinded, and it benumbed, and I was lying on something hard, stretched on my back; I saw nothing, and could not make the slightest movement.
  • III

• On our earth we can only love with suffering and through suffering. We cannot love otherwise, and we know of no other sort of love. I want suffering in order to love. I long, I thirst, this very instant, to kiss with tears the earth that I have left, and I don’t want, I won’t accept life on any other!”
  • III

• The children of the sun, the children of their sun — oh, how beautiful they were! Never had I seen on our own earth such beauty in mankind. Only perhaps in our children, in their earliest years, one might find, some remote faint reflection of this beauty. The eyes of these happy people shone with a clear brightness. Their faces were radiant with the light of reason and fullness of a serenity that comes of perfect understanding, but those faces were gay; in their words and voices there was a note of childlike joy. Oh, from the first moment, from the first glance at them, I understood it all! It was the earth untarnished by the Fall; on it lived people who had not sinned. They lived just in such a paradise as that in which, according to all the legends of mankind, our first parents lived before they sinned; the only difference was that all this earth was the same paradise. These people, laughing joyfully, thronged round me and caressed me; they took me home with them, and each of them tried to reassure me. Oh, they asked me no questions, but they seemed, I fancied, to know everything without asking, and they wanted to make haste to smoothe away the signs of suffering from my face.
  • III

• Well, granted that it was only a dream, yet the sensation of the love of those innocent and beautiful people has remained with me for ever, and I feel as though their love is still flowing out to me from over there. I have seen them myself, have known them and been convinced; I loved them, I suffered for them afterwards. Oh, I understood at once even at the time that in many things I could not understand them at all … But I soon realised that their knowledge was gained and fostered by intuitions different from those of us on earth, and that their aspirations, too, were quite different. They desired nothing and were at peace; they did not aspire to knowledge of life as we aspire to understand it, because their lives were full. But their knowledge was higher and deeper than ours; for our science seeks to explain what life is, aspires to understand it in order to teach others how to love, while they without science knew how to live; and that I understood, but I could not understand their knowledge.
  • IV

• They showed me their trees, and I could not understand the intense love with which they looked at them; it was as though they were talking with creatures like themselves. And perhaps I shall not be mistaken if I say that they conversed with them. Yes, they had found their language, and I am convinced that the trees understood them. They looked at all Nature like that — at the animals who lived in peace with them and did not attack them, but loved them, conquered by their love. They pointed to the stars and told me something about them which I could not understand, but I am convinced that they were somehow in touch with the stars, not only in thought, but by some living channel.
  • IV

• They had no temples, but they had a real living and uninterrupted sense of oneness with the whole of the universe; they had no creed, but they had a certain knowledge that when their earthly joy had reached the limits of earthly nature, then there would come for them, for the living and for the dead, a still greater fullness of contact with the whole of the universe. They looked forward to that moment with joy, but without haste, not pining for it, but seeming to have a foretaste of it in their hearts, of which they talked to one another.
  • IV

• They sang the praises of nature, of the sea, of the woods. They liked making songs about one another, and praised each other like children; they were the simplest songs, but they sprang from their hearts and went to one’s heart. And not only in their songs but in all their lives they seemed to do nothing but admire one another. It was like being in love with each other, but an all-embracing, universal feeling.
  • IV

• Oh, everyone laughs in my face now, and assures me that one cannot dream of such details as I am telling now, that I only dreamed or felt one sensation that arose in my heart in delirium and made up the details myself when I woke up. And when I told them that perhaps it really was so, my God, how they shouted with laughter in my face, and what mirth I caused! Oh, yes, of course I was overcome by the mere sensation of my dream, and that was all that was preserved in my cruelly wounded heart; but the actual forms and images of my dream, that is, the very ones I really saw at the very time of my dream, were filled with such harmony, were so lovely and enchanting and were so actual, that on awakening I was, of course, incapable of clothing them in our poor language, so that they were bound to become blurred in my mind; and so perhaps I really was forced afterwards to make up the details, and so of course to distort them in my passionate desire to convey some at least of them as quickly as I could. But on the other hand, how can I help believing that it was all true? It was perhaps a thousand times brighter, happier and more joyful than I describe it. Granted that I dreamed it, yet it must have been real. You know, I will tell you a secret: perhaps it was not a dream at all!
  • IV

• How it could come to pass I do not know, but I remember it clearly. The dream embraced thousands of years and left in me only a sense of the whole. I only know that I was the cause of their sin and downfall. Like a vile trichina, like a germ of the plague infecting whole kingdoms, so I contaminated all this earth, so happy and sinless before my coming. They learnt to lie, grew fond of lying, and discovered the charm of falsehood.
  • V

• All became so jealous of the rights of their own personality that they did their very utmost to curtail and destroy them in others, and made that the chief thing in their lives. Slavery followed, even voluntary slavery; the weak eagerly submitted to the strong, on condition that the latter aided them to subdue the still weaker. Then there were saints who came to these people, weeping, and talked to them of their pride, of their loss of harmony and due proportion, of their loss of shame. They were laughed at or pelted with stones.
  • V

• Alas! I always loved sorrow and tribulation, but only for myself, for myself; but I wept over them, pitying them. I stretched out my hands to them in despair, blaming, cursing and despising myself. I told them that all this was my doing, mine alone; that it was I had brought them corruption, contamination and falsity. I besought them to crucify me, I taught them how to make a cross. I could not kill myself, I had not the strength, but I wanted to suffer at their hands. I yearned for suffering, I longed that my blood should be drained to the last drop in these agonies. But they only laughed at me, and began at last to look upon me as crazy. They justified me, they declared that they had only got what they wanted themselves, and that all that now was could not have been otherwise. At last they declared to me that I was becoming dangerous and that they should lock me up in a madhouse if I did not hold my tongue. Then such grief took possession of my soul that my heart was wrung, and I felt as though I were dying; and then . . . then I awoke.
  • V

• I go to spread the tidings, I want to spread the tidings — of what? Of the truth, for I have seen it, have seen it with my own eyes, have seen it in all its glory.
  • V

• I have seen the truth; I have seen and I know that people can be beautiful and happy without losing the power of living on earth. I will not and cannot believe that evil is the normal condition of mankind. And it is just this faith of mine that they laugh at. But how can I help believing it? I have seen the truth — it is not as though I had invented it with my mind, I have seen it, seen it, and the living image of it has filled my soul for ever. I have seen it in such full perfection that I cannot believe that it is impossible for people to have it.
  • V

• A dream! What is a dream? And is not our life a dream? I will say more. Suppose that this paradise will never come to pass (that I understand), yet I shall go on preaching it. And yet how simple it is: in one day, in one hour everything could be arranged at once! The chief thing is to love others like yourself, that’s the chief thing, and that’s everything; nothing else is wanted — you will find out at once how to arrange it all. And yet it’s an old truth which has been told and retold a billion times — but it has not formed part of our lives! The consciousness of life is higher than life, the knowledge of the laws of happiness is higher than happiness — that is what one must contend against. And I shall. If only everyone wants it, it can be arranged at once.
  • V

Paul Signac
Paul Signac with his palette, ca. 1883

Today is the birthday of Paul Victor Jules Signac (Paris; 11 November 1863 – 15 August 1935 Paris); Neo-Impressionist painter who, working with Georges Seurat, helped develop the Pointillist style.

On 7 November 1892 Signac married Berthe Roblès at the town hall of the 18th arrondissement of Paris.  Witnesses at the wedding were Alexandre Lemonier, Maximilien Luce, Camille Pissarro and Georges Lecomte.  In November 1897, the Signacs moved to a new apartment in the Castel Béranger, built by Hector Guimard.  In December of the same year, they acquired a house in Saint-Tropez called La Hune, where he had a studio constructed.

In September 1913, Signac rented a house at Antibes, where he settled with Jeanne Selmersheim-Desgrange.  Signac had left La Hune as well as the Castel Beranger apartment to Berthe.  They remained friends for the rest of his life.

Signac died from septicemia at the age of 71.  His body was cremated and buried three days later, on 18 August, at the Père Lachaise Cemetery. 

Gallery 

Femmes au puits, 1892.

Portrait of Félix Fénéon, 1890, oil on canvas, 73.5 × 92.5 cm (28.9 × 36.4 in), Museum of Modern Art, New York

Portrait of Paul Signac, 1890, conté crayon, private collection

In the Time of Harmony. The Golden Age is not in the Past, it is in the Future, 1893-95, oil on canvas, 310 x 410 cm (122 × 161.4 in), Mairie de Montreuil 

Capo di Noli, 1898, oil on canvas, 93.5 × 75 cm (36.8 × 29.5 in), Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne 

The Port of Saint-Tropez, 1901, oil on canvas, 131 x 161.5 cm (51.6 x 63.6 in) National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo 

1893, Femme à l’ombrelle (Woman with Umbrella), oil on canvas, 81 x 65 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris; a portrait of Signac’s wife Berthe, painted at Saint-Tropez

 

• 

  Road to Gennevilliers, 1883, Musée d’Orsay, Paris

• 

  Comblat le Chateau. Le Pré. 1886, Dallas Museum of Art

• 

  Cassis, Cap Lombard, Opus 196, 1889, Gemeentemuseum Den Haag

• 

  Golfe-Juan, ca. 1896, Worcester Art Museum

• 

  Grand Canal (Venice), 1905, Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, Ohio

• 

  Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde (La Bonne-Mère) Marseilles, 1905–06, Metropolitan Museum of Art

• 

  The Port of Rotterdam, 1907, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen

• 

  The Pine Tree at Saint Tropez, 1909, Pushkin Museum, Moscow

• 

  Antibes, 1911, Albertina, Vienna

• 

  Antibes le soir, 1914, Strasbourg Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art

• 

  Entrée du port de la Rochelle, 1921, oil on canvas, 130.5 x 162 cm (51.4 × 63.8 in), Musée d’Orsay

• 

  Le phare, Groix, 1925, oil on canvas, 74 × 92.4 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art

   

Édouard Vuillard
Self-portrait, 1889, oil on canvas

Today is the birthday of Jean-Édouard Vuillard (Cuiseaux, Saône-et-Loire; 11 November 1868 – 21 June 1940 La Baule, Loire-Atlantique); painter and printmaker associated with the Nabis.

Gallery 

Jane Renouardt

Ker-Xavier Roussel, Vuillard, Romain Coolus, Félix Vallotton, 1899

Le corsage rayé, 1895, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon (1983.1.38).

Two Seamstresses in the Workroom

Le Grand Teddy, 1918, glue distemper on canvas, 150 x 290 cm, the largest of the three paintings commissioned from Vuillard in 1918 for the Paris café “Le Grand Teddy”

The Table by Vuillard, 1902 

Breakfast, 1894, oil on cardboard, 26.9 x 22.9 cm. (Zoom)

Mac Tag

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Édouard Vuillard, Fyodor Dostoevsky, paul signac, 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

follow from afar
where are, only dreamers

lead me ‘cross this dreamland
lone and wild and i will sing
this song unsung
past doubts,
past what was long denied

we will live rare at dawnin’ there
singin’ this song, to our own tune

this is somethin’ to believe in

a force, even, say it
la forza del destino

we are there
swear to me
this is us

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

or how ’bout this dream…
over shared bottles
of superb pinot noir,
also called the most
romantic of wines,
or sex in a glass,
we laugh and talk
and…

and on this night,
time does not exist

© copyright 2017 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

William Hogarth
Painter and his Pug, 1745

Today is the birthday of William Hogarth FRSA (London; 10 November 1697 – 26 October 1764 London); painter, printmaker, pictorial satirist, social critic, and editorial cartoonist who has been credited with pioneering western sequential art.  His work ranged from realistic portraiture to comic strip-like series of pictures called “modern moral subjects”.  Knowledge of his work is so pervasive that satirical political illustrations in this style are often referred to as “Hogarthian”.

On 23 March 1729 Hogarth married Jane Thornhill, daughter of artist Sir James Thornhill.

Hogarth died in London on 26 October 1764 and was buried at St. Nicholas Church, Chiswick, London.  His friend, actor David Garrick, composed the following inscription for his tombstone:

Farewell great Painter of Mankind

Who reach’d the noblest point of Art

Whose pictur’d Morals charm the Mind

And through the Eye correct the Heart.

If Genius fire thee, Reader, stay,

If Nature touch thee, drop a Tear:

If neither move thee, turn away,

For Hogarth’s honour’d dust lies here.

Gallery 

William Hogarth by Roubiliac, 1741, National Portrait Gallery, London 

The Assembly at Wanstead House.

Self-Portrait by Hogarth, ca. 1735, Yale Center for British Art. 

A Rake’s Progress, Plate 8, 1735, and retouched by Hogarth in 1763 by adding the Britannia emblem 

Marriage à-la-mode, Shortly After the Marriage (scene two of six).

Marriage à-la-mode, After the old Earl’s funeral (scene four of six) 

Industry and Idleness Plate 1, The Fellow ‘Prentices at their Looms 

Gin Lane 

David Garrick as Richard III, 1746

Portrait of a Man, 1741 

Eva Marie Veigel and husband David Garrick, c. 1757–1764, Royal Collection at Windsor Castle. 

The Analysis of Beauty plate 1 (1753) 

• 

  Before

• 

  After

• 

  Portrait of Inigo Jones, English Architect

• 

  The Beggar’s Opera VI, 1731, Tate Britain’s version (22.5 x 30 ins.)

• 

  William Jones, the Mathematician, 1740

• 

  Hogarth’s Portrait of Captain Thomas Coram, 1740

• 

  Miss Mary Edwards 1742
• 

  The Gate of Calais (also known as, O the Roast Beef of Old England), 1749

• 

  March of the Guards to Finchley (1750), a satirical depiction of troops mustered to defend London from the 1745 Jacobite rebellion.

• 

  Hogarth Painting the Comic Muse. A self-portrait depicting Hogarth painting Thalia, the muse of comedy and pastoral poetry, 1757–1758

• 

  The Bench, 1758

• 

  Hogarth’s Servants, mid-1750s.

• 

  An Election Entertainment featuring the anti-Gregorian calendar banner “Give us our Eleven Days”, 1755.

• 

  Hogarth’s Election series, Humours of an Election, plate 2

Today is the birthday of Nicholas Vachel Lindsay (November 10, 1879 – December 5, 1931); poet. He is considered a founder of modern singing poetry, as he referred to it, in which verses are meant to be sung or chanted.

Lindsay’s private life was rife with disappointments, such as his unsuccessful courtship in 1914 of fellow poet Sara Teasdale before she married rich businessman Ernst Filsinger.

In 1924 he moved to Spokane, Washington, where he lived in room 1129 of the Davenport Hotel until 1929. On May 19, 1925, at age 45, he married 23-year-old Elizabeth Connor.

Lindsay had a serious love affair with Lucy Bates, a professional modern dancer who lived in New York City. His poem “How a Little Girl Danced” was dedicated to her.

Crushed by financial worry and in failing health, Lindsay sank into depression. He committed suicide by drinking a bottle of Lysol. His last words were: “They tried to get me; I got them first!”

I will not be a slave to my yesterday. I am creator, not a parrot.

I think that my first poetic impulse is for music; second a definite conception with the ring of the universe…

Poetry is for the inner ear

And today is the birthday of Louis le Brocquy HRHA (Dublin 10 November 1916 – 25 April 2012 Dublin); painter.  His work received many accolades in a career that spanned some seventy years of creative practice. In 1956, he represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale, winning the Premio Acquisito Internationale (a once-off award when the event was acquired by the Nestle Corporation) with A Family (National Gallery of Ireland), subsequently included in the historic exhibition Fifty Years of Modern Art Brussels, World Fair 1958.  The same year he married the Irish painter Anne Madden and left London to work in the French Midi.

Le Brocquy is widely acclaimed for his evocative “Portrait Heads” of literary figures and fellow artists, which include William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, and his friends Samuel Beckett, Francis Bacon and Seamus Heaney. Towards the end of his life, le Brocquy’s early “Tinker” subjects and Grey period “Family” paintings attracted attention on the international marketplace, placing le Brocquy within a very select group of British and Irish artists whose works commanded prices in excess of £1 million during their lifetimes, a group that includes Lucian Freud, David Hockney, Frank Auerbach, and Francis Bacon.

The artist’s work is represented in numerous public collections from the Guggenheim, New York to the Tate Modern, London. In Ireland, he is honoured as the first and only painter to be included during his lifetime in the Permanent Irish Collection of the National Gallery of Ireland.  Le Brocquy died on 25 April 2012 and was survived by his daughter Seyre from his first marriage (1938–1948) to Jean Stoney, and his two grandsons John-Paul and David; his second wife Anne Madden whom he married in 1958, and their two sons, Pierre and Alexis.

Le Brocquy designed the covers for the albums Lark in the Morning and The Rising of the Moon.

Le Brocquy was educated at St Gerard’s School, studied chemistry at Kevin Street Technical School in 1934, and then Trinity College Dublin.

Gallery

The Girl in grey

The picnic

Anne

Mac Tag

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giuseppe verdi, la forza del destino, the lovers almanac, the lovers chronicle, william hogarth

Dear Zazie,  Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag dedicated to his muse.  Has your someday come?  What leaves you breathless?  Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

must i be reminded
yes, i need it
it is the only way
to feel anything

it comes down like this
contentment
or somethin’
damn near like it

what else could issue thus

bring on the night,
ring out the hour
the days wear on
but this endures

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

have you ever wished
that  someone
would take you away

someday
someone will come and stay
someday……
then you will feel,
À bout de souffle,
at breath’s end

miss feelin’ breathless
when you were near

© copyright 2017 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

someday came and left
miss feelin’ breathless
when you were near

© copyright 2016 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

Two more poems.  The first inspired by somethin’ you once said to me and the second inspired by a movie I recently watched; the 1960 French film À bout de souffle (Breathless) featurin’ the lovely and talented Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo.  Consider this the official notification that this film belongs on the must-see film list.

Do you remember when you said you wished someone would take you away?

Someday

Someday
Love will find a way
Someday
Love will come your way
Someday
Love will take you away
Someday
Love will save the day
Someday
Love will come and stay
Someday……

Then you will feel,

À bout de souffle, at breath’s end,

Breathless

Breathless
All over tremblin’
Breathless

Holdin’ on believin’

Breathless
Carried away gettin’
Breathless
Givin’ in to the feelin’
Breathless
Not fearin’ bein’
Breathless……

© copyright 2012 mac tag/Cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

The two songs of the day are “Someday” by Tegan and Sara and “Breathless” by The Corrs.

My someday came and left.  I miss feelin’ breathless when you were near.

Giorgi “Gigo” Ivanes dze Gabashvili (Tbilisi, Georgia; November 9, 1862 – October 28, 1936 Tsikhisdziri, Georgia); painter, educator and photgrapher. One of the earliest Georgian representatives of the Realist School of Georgian painting, his work is known for covering a wide range of subjects, landscapes and scenes of everyday life through orientalist lens. Although not widely known in the West, Gabashvili’s paintings are highly valued.

His photographic archive was unknown until 2012.  The photographs were taken in late nineteenth and early twentieth century. It was a time when photography and even art as a whole had to comply with Soviet ideology. Gabashivili’s works mainly included nude photographs of women, which was completely unacceptable. Perhaps that is the reason for late display of his works as a photographer.

Gallery

Today is the birthday of Robert Frank (Zürich; November 9, 1924 – September 9, 2019 Inverness, Nova Scotia.); photographer and documentary filmmaker, who became an American binational. His most notable work, the 1958 book titled The Americans, earned Frank comparisons to a modern-day de Tocqueville for his fresh and nuanced outsider’s view of American society. Critic Sean O’Hagan, writing in The Guardian in 2014, said The Americans “changed the nature of photography, what it could say and how it could say it. [ … ] it remains perhaps the most influential photography book of the 20th century.”  Frank later expanded into film and video and exerimented with manipulating photographs and photomontage.

By the time The Americans was published in the United States in 1959, Frank had moved away from photography to concentrate on filmmaking. Among his films was the 1959 Pull My Daisy, which was written and narrated by Kerouac and starred Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and others from the Beat circle. The Beats emphasized spontaneity, and the film conveyed the quality of having been thrown together or even improvised.  Pull My Daisy was accordingly praised for years as an improvisational masterpiece, until Frank’s co-director, Alfred Leslie, revealed in a November 28, 1968 article in the Village Voice that the film was actually carefully planned, rehearsed, and directed by him and Frank, who shot the film with professional lighting.

In 1960, Frank was staying in Pop artist George Segal’s basement while filming The Sin of Jesus with a grant from Walter K. Gutman. Isaac Babel’s story was transformed to center on a woman working on a chicken farm in New Jersey. It was originally supposed to be filmed in six weeks in and around New Brunswick, but Frank ended up shooting for six months.

Frank’s 1972 documentary of the Rolling Stones, Cocksucker Blues, is arguably his best known film. The film shows the Stones on tour, engaging in heavy drug use and group sex. Frank said of the Stones, “It was great to watch them — the excitement. But my job was after the show. What I was photographing was a kind of boredom. It’s so difficult being famous. It’s a horrendous life. Everyone wants to get something from you.”  Mick Jagger reportedly told Frank, “It’s a fucking good film, Robert, but if it shows in America we’ll never be allowed in the country again.” The Stones sued to prevent the film’s release, and it was disputed whether Frank as the artist or the Stones as those who hired the artist owned the copyright. A court order restricted the film to being shown no more than five times per year, and only in the presence of Frank.  Frank’s photography also appeared on the cover of the Rolling Stones’ album Exile on Main St.

Gallery

Anne Sexton
photographed by Elsa Dorfman

And today is the birthday of Anne Sexton (Newton, Massachusetts; November 9, 1928 – October 4, 1974 Weston); poet, known for her highly personal, confessional verse.  She won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967 for her book Live or Die.  Themes of her poetry include her long battle against depression and mania, suicidal tendencies, and various intimate details from her private life, including her relationships with her husband and children.

On October 4, 1974, Sexton had lunch with Maxine Kumin to revise galleys for Sexton’s manuscript of The Awful Rowing Toward God, scheduled for publication in March 1975 (Middlebrook 396).  On returning home she put on her mother’s old fur coat, removed all her rings, poured herself a glass of vodka, locked herself in her garage, and started the engine of her car, committing suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning.

In an interview over a year before her death, she explained she had written the first drafts of The Awful Rowing Toward God in twenty days with “two days out for despair and three days out in a mental hospital.”  She is buried at Forest Hills Cemetery & Crematory in Jamaica Plain, Boston, Massachusetts.

Verse

• We are all writing God’s poem.
  • As quoted by Erica Jong, in “Into the lion’s den” in The Guardian (26 October 2000)

To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960)

• Even so, I must admire your skill.
  You are so gracefully insane.
  • “Elegy in the Classroom”
  • Referring to Robert Lowell

• Love your self’s self where it lives.
  There is no special God to refer to; or if there is,
  why did I let you grow
  in another place. You did not know my voice
  when I came back to call. All the superlatives
  of tomorrow’s white tree and mistletoe
  will not help you know the holidays you had to miss.
  • “The Double Image”

• I rot on the wall, my own
  Dorian Gray.
  • “The Double Image”

• I imitate
  a memory of belief
  that I do not own.
  • “The Division of Parts”

• I have ridden in your cart, driver,
  waved my nude arms at villages going by,
  learning the last bright routes, survivor
  where your flames still bite my thigh
  and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
  A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
  I have been her kind.
  • “Her Kind”

All My Pretty Ones (1962)

• All who love have lied.
  • “The Operation”

• Fact: death too is in the egg.
  Fact: the body is dumb, the body is meat.
  And tomorrow the O.R. Only the summer was sweet.
  • “The Operation”

• Need is not quite belief.
  • “With Mercy for the Greedy”

• Dearest,
  although everything has happened,
  nothing has happened.
  • “Letter Written on a Ferry While Crossing Long Island Sound”

• A woman who writes feels too much,
  those trances and portents!
  As if cycles and children and islands
  weren’t enough; as if mourners and gossips
  and vegetables were never enough.
  She thinks she can warm the stars.
  A writer is essentially a spy.
  Dear love, I am that girl.
  • “The Black Art”

• It would be pleasant to be drunk:
  faithless to my tongue and hands,
  giving up the boundaries
  for the heroic gin.
  Dead drunk is the term I think of,
  insensible,
  neither cool nor warm,
  without a head or foot.
  To be drunk is to be intimate with a fool.
  I will try it shortly.
  • “Letter Written During a January Northeaster”

• And what of the dead? They lie without shoes
  in their stone boats. They are more like stone
  than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse
  to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.
  • “The Truth the Dead Know”

• In a dream you are never eighty.
  • “Old”

Live or Die (1966)

• I was spread out daily
  and examined for flaws.
  • “Those Times…”

• I grow old on my bitterness.
  • “Two Sons”

• Love! That red disease —
  • “Menstruation at Forty”

• Why have your eyes gone into their own room?
  • “Your Face on the Dog’s Neck”

• But suicides have a special language.
  Like carpenters they want to know which tools.
  They never ask why build.
  • “Wanting to Die”

Love Poems (1969)

• My mouth blooms like a cut.
  I’ve been wronged all year, tedious
  nights, nothing but rough elbows in them
  and delicate boxes of Kleenex calling crybaby
  crybaby, you fool!
  • “The Kiss”

• I am alive when your fingers are.
  • “The Breast”

• As for me, I am a watercolor.
  I wash off.
  • “For My Lover, Returning to His Wife”

• You said the anger would come back
  just as the love did.
  • Again and Again and Again”

• He puts his bones back on,
  Turning the clock back an hour.
  She knows flesh, that skin balloon,
  the unbound limbs, the boards,
  the roof, the removable roof.
  She is his selection, part time.
  You know the story too! Look,
  when it is over he places her,
  like a phone, back on the hook.
  • “You All Know the Story of the Other Woman”

• Catch me. I’m your disease.
  • “Eighteen Days Without You”: December 18th

Transformations (1971)

• Beauty is a simple passion,
  but, oh my friends, in the end
  you will dance the fire dance in iron shoes.
  • “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”

The Book of Folly (1972)

• With a tongue like a razor he will kiss
  the mother, the child,
  and we three will color the stars black
  in memory of his mother
  who kept him chained to the food tree
  or turned him on and off like a water faucet
  and made women through all these hazy years
  the enemy with a heart of lies.
  • “The Wifebeater”

• In my sights I carve him
  like a sculptor. I mold out
  his last look at everyone.
  I carry his eyes and his
  brain bone at every position.
  I know his male sex and I do
  march over him with my index finger.
  His mouth and his anus are one.
  I am at the center of feeling.
  • “The Assassin”

• My eyes, those sluts, those whores, would play no more.
  • “Killing the Spring”

A Small Journal (1974)

• It doesn’t matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was.
  • “The Poet’s Story,” January 1, 1972 entry

The Awful Rowing Toward God (1975)

• The tongue, the Chinese say,
  is like a sharp knife:
  it kills
  without drawing blood.
  • “The Dead Heart”

• I am, each day,
  typing out the God
  my typewriter believes in.
  Very quick. Very intense,
  like a wolf at a live heart.
  • “Frenzy”

45 Mercy Street (1976)

• What can I do with this memory?
  Shake the bones out of it?
  Defoliate the smile?
  Stub out the chin with cigarettes?
  Take the face of the man I love
  and squeeze my foot into it,
  when all the while my heart is making a museum?
  I love you the way the oboe plays.
  I love you the way skinny dipping makes my body feel.
  I love you the way a ripe artichoke tastes.
  Yet I fear you,
  as one in the desert fears the sun.
  • “Waking Alone” from The Divorce Papers

• I am murdering me, where I kneeled at your kiss.
  I am pushing knives through the hands
  that created two into one.
  Our hands do not bleed at this,
  they lie still in their dishonor.
  • “Killing the Love” from The Divorce Papers

• I am stuffing your mouth with your
  promises and watching
  you vomit them out upon my face.
  • “Killing the Love”

• There is rust in my mouth,
  the stain of an old kiss.
  • “The Lost Lie” from The Divorce Papers

Words for Dr. Y (1978)

• Death,
  I need my little addiction to you.
  need that tiny voice who,
  even as I rise from the sea,
  all woman, all there,
  says kill me, kill me.
  • “Letters to Dr. Y.”

• I begin again, Dr.Y,
  this neverland journal,
  full of my own sense of filth.
  Why else keep a journal, if not
  to examine your own filth?
  • “Letters to Dr. Y.”

• God is only mocked by believers.
  • “Letters to Dr. Y.”

• Blue eyes wash off sometimes.
  • “Letters to Dr. Y.”

Poems 1971-1973 (1981)

• We all walk softly away.
  We would stay and be the nurse but
  there are too many of us and we are too worried to help.
  It is love that walks away
  and yet we have terrible mouths
  and soft milk hands.
  We worry with like.
  We walk away like love.
  • “To Like, To Love”

• To love another is something
  like prayer and it can’t be planned, you just fall
  into its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief.
  • “Admonitions to a Special Person” (1974) from Last Poems

Mac Tag

I bade my heart build these poor rhymes:

It worked at them, day out, day in,

Building a sorrowful loveliness

Out of the battles of old times

– WB Yeats

Poetry is my love, my postmark, my hands, my kitchen, my face. – Anne Sexton

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anne sexton, breathless, cowboy coleridge, jean seberg, love letter, love poem, love song, muse, poem of the day, Rhett, someday, someday breathless, song of the day, tegan and sara, the corrs, the lovers almanac, wb yeats, Zazie

Dear Zazie,  Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag dedicated to his muse.  Who is your light?  Do you dream of your light?  Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboycoleridge all rights reserved

the old ones
are not worth a damn
i try to rewrite ’em
mostly be cuttin’
most of the words
some of ’em
can be rewritten
usin’ three words,

i miss you
……

finally had enough
of forgettin’
the best part of myself
……

oh the light, for sure
and the dream shall tell

your voice i revisit often
escape reality in this place
we created where we get lost
this alone stirs
this sustains

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

i dream i may
i dream i might
have this dream
i dream tonight…

love how dreams
can take you
from one place
in your life
to the next

my current favorite dream
the one that will take me
to the next stage of my life…

we meet in an airport,
matters not where
we are walkin’ towards
each other, through
the crowd of people
when our eyes lock,
and then we are alone
standin’ there, smilin’
we hurry into
each other’s arms
i lift you in a hug
and time waits
for us

© copyright 2017 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

by Unknown artist, oil on canvas, feigned oval, circa 1629

Today is the anniversary of the death of poet John Milton, born in London (1608).  His first two wives died from childbirth complications.  His third wife, 31 years his junior, outlived him.  In 1643, he published a pamphlet called Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce.  He wrote: “Marriage is a cov’nant the very beeing wherof consists, not in a forc’t cohabitation, and counterfet performance of duties, but in unfained love and peace.”   Milton wrote a poem, “Light” which served as inspiration for this poem.  To Milton, unfained love and you.

Dreamin’ Light

The Song of the Day is “Dreaming Light” by Anathema

Bram Stoker
Photograph of Bram Stoker circa 1906

Today is the birthday of Bram Stoker (Abraham Stoker; Clontarf, Dublin 8 November 1847 – 20 April 1912 London); author, perhaps best known today for his 1897 Gothic novel Dracula.  During his lifetime, he was better known as the personal assistant of actor Henry Irving and business manager of the Lyceum Theatre in London, which Irving owned.

In 1878, Stoker married Florence Balcombe, daughter of Lieutenant-Colonel James Balcombe of 1 Marino Crescent. She was a celebrated beauty whose former suitor had been Oscar Wilde. Stoker had known Wilde from his student days, having proposed him for membership of the university’s Philosophical Society while he was president. Wilde was upset at Florence’s decision, but Stoker later resumed the acquaintanceship, and, after Wilde’s fall, visited him on the Continent.

 The first edition cover of Dracula

The Stokers moved to London, where Stoker became acting manager and then business manager of Irving’s Lyceum Theatre, London, a post he held for 27 years. On 31 December 1879, Bram and Florence’s only child was born, a son whom they christened Irving Noel Thornley Stoker. The collaboration with Henry Irving was important for Stoker and through him he became involved in London’s high society, where he met James Abbott McNeill Whistler and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (to whom he was distantly related). Working for Irving, the most famous actor of his time, and managing one of the most successful theatres in London made Stoker a notable if busy man. He was dedicated to Irving and his memoirs show he idolised him. In London, Stoker also met Hall Caine, who became one of his closest friends – he dedicated Dracula to him.  Stoker’s inspirations for the story, in addition to Whitby, England, may have included a visit to Slains Castle in Aberdeenshire, a visit to the crypts of St. Michan’s Church in Dublin, and the novella Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu.  Stoker was a deeply private man and not much is known about his personal life.

After suffering a number of strokes, Stoker died at No. 26 St George’s Square, London on 20 April 1912. Some biographers attribute the cause of death to overwork, others to tertiary syphilis. His death certificate named the cause of death as “Locomotor ataxia 6 months”, presumed to be a reference to syphilis. He was cremated, and his ashes were placed in a display urn at Golders Green Crematorium in north London. The ashes of Irving Noel Stoker, the author’s son, were added to his father’s urn following his death in 1961. The original plan had been to keep his parents’ ashes together, but after Florence Stoker’s death, her ashes were scattered at the Gardens of Rest.

Dracula is an epistolary novel, written as a collection of realistic but fictional diary entries, telegrams, letters, ship’s logs, and newspaper clippings, all of which added a level of detailed realism to the story, a skill which Stoker had developed as a newspaper writer. At the time of its publication, Dracula was considered a “straightforward horror novel” based on imaginary creations of supernatural life.   It gave form to a universal fantasy and became a part of popular culture.

Prose

Dracula (1897)

• I heard a heavy step approaching behind the great door, and saw through the chinks the gleam of a coming light. Then there was the sound of rattling chains and the clanking of massive bolts drawn back. A key was turned with the loud grating noise of long disuse, and the great door swung back.
  Within, stood a tall old man, clean shaven save for a long white moustache, and clad in black from head to foot, without a single speck of colour about him anywhere. He held in his hand an antique silver lamp, in which the flame burned without a chimney or globe of any kind, throwing long quivering shadows as it flickered in the draught of the open door. The old man motioned me in with his right hand with a courtly gesture, saying in excellent English, but with a strange intonation.
  “Welcome to my house! Enter freely and of your own free will!”
  • Jonathan Harker’s journal

• I am Dracula, and I bid you welcome, Mr. Harker, to my house. Come in, the night air is chill, and you must need to eat and rest.
  • Count Dracula to Jonathan Harker

• We are in Transylvania, and Transylvania is not England. Our ways are not your ways, and there shall be to you many strange things.
  • Dracula to Jonathan Harker

• Listen to them — children of the night. What music they make.
  • Dracula referring to the howling of the wolves to Jonathan Harker.

• No man knows till he has suffered from the night how sweet and dear to his heart and eye the morning can be.
  • Jonathan Harker

• Despair has its own calms.
  • Jonathan Harker

• Nothing is too small. I counsel you, put down in record even your doubts and surmises. Hereafter it may be of interest to you to see how true you guess. We learn from failure, not from success!
  • Professor Abraham Van Helsing to Dr. John Seward

• He seemed so confident that I, remembering my own confidence two nights before and with the baneful result, felt awe and vague terror. It must have been my weakness that made me hesitate to tell it to my friend, but I felt it all the more, like unshed tears.
  • Dr. John Seward

• Van Helsing and I came on here. The moment we were alone in the carriage he gave way to a regular fit of hysterics. He has denied to me since that it was hysterics, and insisted that it was only his sense of humour asserting itself under very terrible conditions. He laughed till he cried, and I had to draw down the blinds lest any one should see us and misjudge; and then he cried, till he laughed again; and laughed and cried together, just as a woman does. I tried to be stern with him, as one is to a woman under the circumstances; but it had no effect. Men and women are so different in manifestations of nervous strength or weakness! Then when his face grew grave and stern again I asked him why his mirth, and why at such a time. His reply was in a way characteristic of him, for it was logical and forceful and mysterious. He said:—
  “Ah, you don’t comprehend, friend John. Do not think that I am not sad, though I laugh. See, I have cried even when the laugh did choke me. But no more think that I am all sorry when I cry, for the laugh he come just the same. Keep it always with you that laughter who knock at your door and say, ‘May I come in?’ is not the true laughter. No! he is a king, and he come when and how he like. He ask no person; he choose no time of suitability. He say, ‘I am here.’ Behold, in example I grieve my heart out for that so sweet young girl; I give my blood for her, though I am old and worn; I give my time, my skill, my sleep; I let my other sufferers want that so she may have all. And yet I can laugh at her very grave — laugh when the clay from the spade of the sexton drop upon her coffin and say ‘Thud, thud!’ to my heart, till it send back the blood from my cheek. My heart bleed for that poor boy — that dear boy, so of the age of mine own boy had I been so blessed that he live, and with his hair and eyes the same. There, you know now why I love him so. And yet when he say things that touch my husband-heart to the quick, and make my father-heart yearn to him as to no other man — not even you, friend John, for we are more level in experiences than father and son — yet even at such a moment King Laugh he come to me and shout and bellow in my ear, ‘Here I am! here I am!’ till the blood come dance back and bring some of the sunshine that he carry with him to my cheek. Oh, friend John, it is a strange world, a sad world, a world full of miseries, and woes, and troubles; and yet when King Laugh come, he make them all dance to the tune he play. Bleeding hearts, and dry bones of the churchyard, and tears that burn as they fall — all dance together to the music that he make with that smileless mouth of him. And believe me, friend John, that he is good to come, and kind. Ah, we men and women are like ropes drawn tight with strain that pull us different ways. Then tears come; and, like the rain on the ropes, they brace us up, until perhaps the strain become too great, and we break. But King Laugh he come like the sunshine, and he ease off the strain again; and we bear to go on with our labour, what it may be.”
  • Chapter XIV, Dr. Seward’s Diary entry for 22 September

• “Friend John, forgive me if I pain. I showed not my feeling to others when it would wound, but only to you, my old friend, whom I can trust. If you could have looked into my very heart then when I want to laugh; if you could have done so when the laugh arrived; if you could do so now, when King Laugh have pack up his crown, and all that is to him — for he go far, far away from me, and for a long, long time — maybe you would perhaps pity me the most of all.”
  I was touched by the tenderness of his tone, and asked why.
  “Because I know!”
  • Professor Van Helsing to Dr. John Seward, in Dr. Seward’s Diary entry for 22 September

• You reason well, and your wit is bold, but you are too prejudiced. You do not let your eyes see nor your ears hear, and that which is outside your daily life is not of account to you. Do you not think that there are things which you cannot understand, and yet which are, that some people see things that others cannot? But there are things old and new which must not be contemplated by men’s eyes, because they know, or think they know, some things which other men have told them. Ah, it is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all, and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to explain. But yet we see around us every day the growth of new beliefs, which think themselves new, and which are yet but the old, which pretend to be young, like the fine ladies at the opera.
  • Professor Van Helsing to Dr. Seward

• One and all we felt that the holy calm that lay like sunshine over the wasted face and form was only an earthly token and symbol of the calm that was to reign for ever.
  • Dr. Seward of Lucy Westenra

• I have always thought that a wild animal never looks so well as when some obstacle of pronounced durability is between us. A personal experience has intensified rather than diminished that idea.
  • The Keeper in the Zoological Gardens

• You think to baffle me, you with your pale faces all in a row, like sheep in a butcher’s. You shall be sorry yet, each one of you! You think you have left me without a place to rest, but I have more. My revenge is just begun! I spread it over centuries, and time is on my side. Your girls that you all love are mine already. And through them you and others shall yet be mine, my creatures, to do my bidding and to be my jackals when I want to feed. Bah!
  • Dracula, having found Jonathan Harker, Quincey Morris and Arthur Holmwood in his house

• The sun was almost down on the mountain tops, and the shadows of the whole group fell upon the snow. I saw the Count lying within the box upon the earth, some of which the rude falling from the cart had scattered over him. He was deathly pale, just like a waxen image, and the red eyes glared with the horrible vindictive look which I knew so well. As I looked, the eyes saw the sinking sun, and the look of hate in them turned to triumph. But, on the instant, came the sweep and flash of Jonathan’s great knife. I shrieked as I saw it shear through the throat. Whilst at the same moment Mr. Morris’s bowie knife plunged into the heart. It was like a miracle, but before our very eyes, and almost in the drawing of a breath, the whole body crumbled into dust and passed from our sight. I shall be glad as long as I live that even in that moment of final dissolution, there was in the face a look of peace, such as I never could have imagined might have rested there.
  • Mina Harker

• Seven years ago we all went through the flames. And the happiness of some of us since then is, we think, well worth the pain we endured.
  • Jonathan Harker

 

Charles Demuth
Self-Portrait, 1907

Today is the birthday of Charles Henry Buckius Demuth (Lancaster, Pennsylvania; November 8, 1883 – October 23, 1935 Lancaster); watercolorist who turned to oils late in his career, developing a style of painting known as Precisionism.

Gallery

“Nana, Seated Left, and Satin at Laure’s Restaurant”
(1916)
Museum of Modern Art

I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold 1928, collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

In Vaudeville (Dancer with Chorus), 1918, in the Philadelphia Museum of Art 

• 

  The Jazz Singer (1916)

• 

  Trees and Barns Bermuda (1917)

• 

  Turkish Bath with Self Portrait (1918)

• 

  The Boat Ride from Sorrento (1919)

• 

  Wild Orchids (1920)

• 

  Spring (1921)

• 

  Incense of a New Church (1921)

• 

  Roofs and Steeple (1921)

• 

  Aucassin and Nicolette (1921)

• 

  Study for Poster Portrait, Marsden Hartley (1921) (c. 1923–1924)

• 

  Sail: In Two Movements, 1919

• 

  Charles Demuth – Love Love Love, 1928, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

   

Margaret Mitchell

And today is the birthday of Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell (Atlanta, Georgia; November 8, 1900 – August 16, 1949 Atlanta); author and journalist.  One novel by Mitchell was published during her lifetime; the epic American Civil War-era novel, Gone with the Wind, for which she won the National Book Award for Most Distinguished Novel of 1936 and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1937.  In more recent years, a collection of Mitchell’s girlhood writings and a novella she wrote as a teenager, Lost Laysen, have been published.

Margaret began using the name “Peggy” at Washington Seminary, and the abbreviated form “Peg” at Smith College when she found an icon for herself in the mythological winged horse, “Pegasus”, that inspires poets.

Although her family disapproved, Peggy and Berrien (“Red”) Kinnard Upshaw married on September 2, 1922; the best man at their wedding was John Marsh, who would become her second husband. The couple resided at the Mitchell home with her father. By December the marriage to Upshaw had dissolved and he left. Mitchell suffered physical and emotional abuse, the result of Upshaw’s alcoholism and violent temper. Upshaw agreed to an uncontested divorce after John Marsh gave him a loan and Mitchell agreed not to press assault charges against him. Upshaw and Mitchell were divorced on October 16, 1924.

On July 4, 1925, 24-year-old Margaret Mitchell and 29-year-old John Marsh were married in the Unitarian-Universalist Church.^[18]: 125 The Marshes made their home at the Crescent Apartments in Atlanta, taking occupancy of Apt. 1, which they affectionately named “The Dump” (now the Margaret Mitchell House and Museum).  While still legally married to Upshaw and needing income for herself, Mitchell got a job writing feature articles for The Atlanta Journal Sunday Magazine. She received almost no encouragement from her family or “society” to pursue a career in journalism, and had no prior newspaper experience.  During the time Mitchell worked for the Atlanta Journal, she wrote 129 feature articles, 85 news stories, and several book reviews.

In May 1926, after Mitchell had left her job at the Atlanta Journal and was recovering at home from her ankle injury, she wrote a society column for the Sunday Magazine, “Elizabeth Bennet’s Gossip”, which she continued to write until August. Meanwhile, her husband was growing weary of lugging armloads of books home from the library to keep his wife’s mind occupied while she hobbled around the house; he emphatically suggested that she write her own book instead:

For God’s sake, Peggy, can’t you write a book instead of reading thousands of them?

To aid her in her literary endeavors, John Marsh brought home a Remington Portable No. 3 typewriter (c. 1928). For the next three years Mitchell worked exclusively on writing a Civil War-era novel whose heroine was named Pansy O’Hara (prior to Gone with the Wind‘s publication Pansy was changed to Scarlett). She used parts of the manuscript to prop up a wobbly couch.

Gone with the Wind was popular with American readers from the outset and was the top American fiction bestseller in 1936 and 1937. As of 2014, a Harris poll found it to be the second favorite book of American readers, just behind the Bible. More than 30 million copies have been printed worldwide.

Gone with the Wind is a controversial reference point for subsequent writers of the South, both black and white. Scholars at American universities refer to, interpret, and study it in their writings. The novel has been absorbed into American popular culture.

Mitchell received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for the book in 1937. It was adapted into the 1939 film of the same name, which has been considered to be one of the greatest movies ever made and also received the Academy Award for Best Picture during the 12th annual Academy Awards ceremony. Gone with the Wind is the only novel by Mitchell published during her lifetime.

Margaret Mitchell was struck by a speeding automobile as she crossed Peachtree Street at 13th Street in Atlanta with her husband, John Marsh, while on her way to see the movie A Canterbury Tale on the evening of August 11, 1949. She died at age 48 at Grady Hospital five days later on August 16 without fully regaining consciousness.

The driver, Hugh Gravitt, was an off-duty taxi driver who was driving his personal vehicle when he struck Mitchell. After the collision, Gravitt was arrested for drunken driving and released on a $5,450 bond until Mitchell’s death.

Gravitt was originally charged with drunken driving, speeding, and driving on the wrong side of the road. He was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in November 1949 and sentenced to 18 months in jail. He served almost 11 months. Gravitt died in 1994 at the age of 73.

Margaret Mitchell was buried at Oakland Cemetery, Georgia. When her husband John died in 1952, he was buried next to his wife.

Prose from Gone with the Wind

• “The trouble with most of us Southerners,” continued Rhett Butler, “is that we either don’t travel enough or we don’t profit enough by our travels…. I have seen many things that you all have not seen. The thousands of immigrants who’d be glad to fight for the Yankees for food and a few dollars, the factories, the foundries, the shipyards, the iron and coal mines &mdash all the things we haven’t got. Why, all we have is cotton and slaves and arrogance. They’d lick us in a month.”
  • Chapter 6

• Before the war there had been few cotton factories, woolen mills, arsenals and machine shops south of Maryland, a fact of which all Southerners were proud. The South produced statesmen and soldiers, planters and doctors, lawyers and poets, but certainly not engineers or mechanics. Let the Yankees adopt such low callings.
  • Chapter 8

• “In the end what will happen will be what has happened whenever a civilization breaks up. The people who have brains and courage come through and the ones who haven’t are winnowed out. At least, it has been interesting, if not comfortable, to witness a Gotterdammerung.”
• “A what?”
• “A dusk of the gods. Unfortunately, we Southerners did think we were gods.”
  • Chapter 31

• “It isn’t that I mind splitting logs here in the mud, but I do mind what it stands for. I do mind, very much, the loss of the beauty of the old life I loved. Scarlett, before the war, life was beautiful. There was a glamor to it, a perfection and a completeness and a symmetry to it like Grecian art. Maybe it wasn’t so to everyone. I know that now. But to me, living at Twelve Oaks, there was a real beauty to living. I belonged in that life. I was a part of it. And now it is gone and I am out of place in this new life, and I am afraid. Now, I know that in the old days it was a shadow show I watched. I avoided everything which was not shadowy, people and situations which were too real, too vital. I resented their intrusion. I tried to avoid you too, Scarlett. You were too full of living and too real and I was cowardly enough to prefer shadows and dreams.”
  • Chapter 31

• I cannot understand why I did not desert. It was all the purest insanity. But it’s in one’s blood. Southerners can never resist a losing cause.
  • Chapter 34

• There ain’t nothin’ that walks can lick us, any more than it could lick him, not Yankees nor Carpetbaggers nor hard times nor high taxes nor even downright starvation. But that weakness that’s in our hearts can lick us in the time it takes to bat your eye.
  • Chapter 38
• Hardships make or break people.
  • Chapter 40

• These women, so swift to kindness, so tender to the sorrowing, so untiring in times of stress, could be as implacable as furies to any renegade who broke one small law of their unwritten code. This code was simple. Reverence for the Confederacy, honor to the veterans, loyalty to old forms, pride in poverty, open hands to friends and undying hatred to Yankees.
  • Chapter 47

• Drink and dissipation had done their work on the coin-clean profile and now it was no longer the head of a young pagan prince on new-minted gold but a decadent, tired Caesar on copper debased by long usage.
  • Chapter 63

• She was seeing through Rhett’s eyes the passing, not of a woman but of a legend — the gentle, self-effacing but steel-spined women on whom the South had builded its house in war and to whose proud and loving arms it had returned in defeat.
  • Chapter 63

Mac Tag

Yet is not ecstasy some fulfillment of the soul in itself, some slow or sudden expansion of it like an overflowing well? – WB Yeats

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anathema, bram stoker, charles demuth, cowboy coleridge, dracula, dreaming light, gone with the wind, john milton, light, love letter, love poem, love song, margaret mithcell, muse, poem of the day, Rhett, song of the day, the lovers almanac, twt, Zazie

Dear Zazie,  Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag dedicated to his muse.  Tell us about your night dreams.  Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

if by that you mean conviction,
i have some, but i admit it depends
on which way the wind is blowin’
……

everything in this vision
the feelin’s, accepted
and conceived in the only
sensuality, have become
more vitally important
than anything else

silent night
comin’ down
your voice
still
in my head

i know
what i want

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

thanks Karen…

i may not be
the smartest guy
but i figured this out
my days without you
ain’t worth a damn…

i listen to the sound
of your name, whisked
by the wind across
a South Dakota canyon
on a night, cold
with the only light
comin’ from a full moon
that shines with a halo
in the dark cloud-curtained sky

i turn my face to the snow
beginnin’ to fall
silently, and reflect
on my own, alone,
lookin’ at the moon,
with my thoughts of you
and i imagine…
and i smile

© copyright 2017 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

He came from a distinguished, though not wealthy, aristocratic family.  His father became obsessed with the idea he could restore the family fortune by findin’ the lost treasure of the Knights of Malta (Philippe Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, 16th century Grand Master of the Knights Hospitaller, was his ancestor), which had reputedly been buried near Quintin durin’ the French Revolution.  Consequently, he spent large sums of money buyin’ land, excavatin’ it and then sellin’ it at a loss when he failed to find anything of value.  The most important occurrence in his early years was probably the death of a young girl with whom Villiers was in love, an event which would deeply influence his literary imagination.

Villiers had made several trips to Paris in the late 1850s, where he became enthralled by artistic and theatrical life.  He acquired a reputation in literary circles for his inspired, alcohol-fuelled monologues.  Villiers began livin’ a Bohemian life, frequentin’ the Brasserie des Martyrs, where he met his idol Baudelaire, who encouraged him to read the works of Edgar Allan Poe.  Poe and Baudelaire would become the biggest influences on Villiers’ mature style.  Around this time, Villiers began livin’ with Louise Dyonnet, a woman whose reputation scandalised his family so much they made Villiers undergo a retreat at Solesmes Abbey.  Villiers would remain a devout, if highly unorthodox, Catholic for the rest of his life.

Villiers finally broke with Dyonnet in 1864.  His attempts at securin’ a suitable bride for himself would all end in failure.  In 1867, he asked Théophile Gautier for the hand of his daughter Estelle, but Gautier—who had turned his back on the Bohemian world of his youth and would not let his child marry a writer with few prospects, turned him down.  Villiers’ own family also disapproved of the match.  His plans for marriage to an English heiress, Anna Eyre Powell, were equally unsuccessful.  Villiers finally took to livin’ with Marie Dantine, the illiterate widow of a Belgian coachman.  He wrote a poem, “Nocturne”, that served as inspiration for this poem, dedicated to Villiers and to you.

Night Dream

The great mystery
Approaches, opens Herself
As much upon us
As the stars in the sky

The lengthenin’ shadows
Gradually advance
Upon our embrace
Under the stars in the sky

This night envelopes
We have all we need
Just us and the stars
My love and your beauty

This dream enshrouds
The token keeps spinnin’
This we fiercely cling to
This our sweet refrain:

Just the night and the dream

My love and your beauty

© copyright 2012 mac tag/Cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

The Song of the Day is “Nocturne Op. 43-2” words by Villiers, music by Gabriel Fauré, Baritone: Gérard Souzay, Piano: Dalton Baldwin

And today is the birthday of Paul Peel (London, Ontario 7 November 1860 – 3 October 1892 Paris ); academic painter.  Having won a medal at the 1890 Paris Salon, he became one of the first Canadian artists to receive international recognition in his lifetime.

In 1882 he married Isaure Verdier.  He contracted a lung infection and died in his sleep, in Paris, France, at the age of 31.

Gallery

Self-portrait from the National Gallery of Canada

 

The Little Shepherdess (1892) Oil on canvas. Art Gallery of Ontario

 

Adoration (1885) by Peel

Mac Tag

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Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, charles baudelaire, cowboy coleridge, edgar allan poe, gabriel faure, Gérard Souzay, muse, night dream, nocturne, paul peel, Rhett, the lovers almanac, theophile gautier, twt, Zazie

Dear Zazie,  Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag dedicated to his muse.  Have you known sadness?  Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

of course i felt like
burnin’ everything down
gave the finger to Faith,
told Hope to go to hell,
and gave Grace away

there was nothin’ left
nowhere to hide
the rope was played out

cannot say
what kept me holdin’ on
pure stubbornness i s’pose

anyhow,
grateful for what i have
and for you

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

thanks Karen…

i love the way
your name sounds
in a candlelit room…

did you know
that lionesses
and cowboys always
land on their feet…

our minds are strong,
our hearts are resilient
how else can you explain
givin’ everything you have
to someone only to find
it is not enough

and then sure enough,
much to our surprise,
after the fall, there it is
beatin’ stronger than before
recoverin’ from the rendin’

it gets through the hurt
and learns to beat for itself

anyhow, that is our story

we keep remindin’ ourselves,
and hopin’ we succeed
with the convincin’
however the disappointment comes

whether it be
from one sided love
or when the one you love
loves you and talks about
a rare connection then
of a sudden, insists it is over

either way, s’pose those
are moments in life
when one must accept
that sometimes
there is no understandin’
someone else’s feelin’s

and sometimes
it is better to let go…
let go… let go…
for one’s own well bein’
and we are learnin’
to spread our arms
and hold our breaths

© copyright 2017 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge/Dead Lioness all rights reserved

Today is the birthday of Louis Racine (Paris 6 November 1692 – 29 January 1763, Paris);  poet of the Age of the Enlightenment.

The second son and the seventh and last child of the celebrated tragic dramatist Jean Racine, he was interested in poetry from childhood but was dissuaded from trying to make it his career by the poet Boileau on the grounds that the gift never existed in two successive generations. However, in 1719 Racine became a member of the Académie des Inscriptions and published his first major poem, La Grâce, in 1722. But, because of the poem’s Jansenist inspiration, Cardinal de Fleury, chief minister of Louis XV, blocked the poet’s admission to the Académie Française, and instead Racine was induced to accept the post of inspector-general of taxes at Marseille in Provence.

For the next 24 years, although he continued to write poetry, Racine worked as a tax inspector in various provincial towns and cities, marrying in 1728. His most important poem, La Religion, in which he was careful to avoid further accusations of Jansenism, was published in 1742. He eventually retired from government service in 1746, aged 54, and returned to Paris where he devoted himself to his writing.

In November 1755, he lost his only son and his daughter-in-law when they were swept away by the tsunami from the Lisbon earthquake while on honeymoon at Cadiz in Spain. This tragedy, commemorated by the French poet Écouchard-Lebrun, is said to have broken Racine’s spirit. He sold his large library, gave up writing, and devoted himself now to the practice of religion. It was around this time that Racine wrote his last published work, an essay on the famous feral child of 18th-century France Marie-Angélique Memmie Le Blanc whom he had interviewed and written of in his philosophical poem L’Épître II sur l’homme (1747) (Second Epistle on Man).

Racine was characterised by Voltaire, the leading French intellectual of his day, as le bon versificateur Racine, fils du grand Racine (“the good versifier Racine, son of the great Racine”). His Oeuvres complètes (complete works) were collected in six volumes and published in Paris in 1808.

His father’s poem (and my no doubt inept translation) “Choer D’Esther” served as inspiration for this poem:

The Song of the Day is “Sadness” by Enigma.

Dennis Miller Bunker
Jessica, 1890. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Today is the birthday of Dennis Miller Bunker (New York City; November 6, 1861 – December 28, 1890 Boston); painter and innovator of American Impressionism.  His mature works include both brightly colored landscape paintings and dark, finely drawn portraits and figures.  One of the major American painters of the late 19th century, and a friend of many prominent artists of the era, Bunker died from meningitis at the age of 29.

On October 2 Bunker married Eleanor Hardy in Boston.  The couple then moved to New York.  Returning to Boston to celebrate Christmas with the Hardy family, Bunker fell ill.  On December 28 he died of heart failure, probably caused by cerebro-spinal meningitis.  He was Buried at Milton Cemetery, Milton, MA and his tombstone was designed by his friends Stanford White and Augustus Saint-Gaudens.

Gallery

The Mirror

The Pool, Medfield, 1889. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Portrait Sketch of Eleanor Hardy Bunker, 1890. Private collection.

Everett Shinn
Self-portrait done in 1901 in his charcoal style.

Today is the birthday of Everett Shinn (Woodstown, New Jersey; November 6, 1876 – May 1, 1953 New York City); realist painter and member of the Ashcan School.  He also exhibited with the short-lived group known as “The Eight,” who protested the restrictive exhibition policies of the powerful, conservative National Academy of Design.  He is best known for his robust paintings of urban life in New York and London, a hallmark of Ashcan art, and for his theater and residential murals and interior-design projects.  His style varied considerably over the years, from gritty and realistic to decorative and rococo.

The 1940s saw his work included in more museum exhibitions and just prior to his death he was taken on by the prestigious James Graham Gallery in New York.  In his best years, Shinn was well-paid and owned large houses in Connecticut and Upstate New York, but he went through a vast amount of money (along with four wives and numerous mistresses) and was financially straitened in his final days. 

Gallery

 Shinn 

The White Ballet 

Ashcan School Artists, circa 1896. L-R: Shinn, Robert Henri, John French Sloan 

Keith’s Union Square, ca. 1902-06. Brooklyn Museum

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  Revue, 1903

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  Rehearsal of the Ballet, 1903

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  Girl in a Bathtub, 1903

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  A girl on stage, 1906

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  Strong Man, Clown and Dancer, 1909

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  Mrs A Stewart Walker in a Fur, 1910

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  Fifth Avenue, 1910 – – Brooklyn Museum

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  The Canfield Gambling House, 1912

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  Girl with Japanese Lanterns, 1912

  

  Couple Sitting Among Lanterns, Vanity Fair, June 1916

And today is the birthday of Anne Porter (Anne Elizabeth Channing; Sherborn, Massachusetts; 6 November 1911 – 10 October 2011 Hampton Bays, Long Island); poet.  She was educated at Bryn Mawr College and Radcliffe College. When she was 16 she met artist Fairfield Porter and they were married by the time she was 20. She had been writing poetry since she was seven but now, as a busy mother of five, she didn’t have much time for her own pursuits. The choir and women’s group at the Methodist church were her only social outlets, apart from playing hostess to her husband’s artist friends. Sometimes she modeled for her husband’s paintings, but they weren’t portraits of her; she compared the experience to being an apple in a still life.

When her husband died in 1975, she began to write poetry much more seriously. As she told the Wall Street Journal: “I remember realizing that I was alone, and I’d have to be more organized. I had these poems, and I thought that it would be worthwhile working on them. I started to write.” Her first collection, An Altogether Different Language (1994), published when she was 83, was named a finalist for the National Book Award. Her other volume of poetry is Living Things: Collected Poems (2006). Her work has been anthologized in the Oxford Book of American Poetry (2006), and featured on Garrison Keillor’s radio program, The Writer’s Almanac.

A November Sunrise
by Anne Porter

Wild geese are flocking and calling in pure golden air,
Glory like that which painters long ago
Spread as a background for some little hermit
Beside his cave, giving his cloak away,
Or for some martyr stretching out
On her expected rack.
A few black cedars grow nearby
And there’s a donkey grazing.

Small craftsmen, steeped in anonymity like bees,
Gilded their wooden panels, leaving fame to chance,
Like the maker of this wing-flooded golden sky,
Who forgives all our ignorance
Both of his nature and of his very name,
Freely accepting our one heedless glance.

from An Altogether Different Language. ©1994 Anne Porter, published by Zoland Books.

Mac Tag

O how could I be so calm

When she rose up to depart?

Now words that called up the lightning

Are hurtling through my heart.

– WB Yeats

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Dear Zazie,  Here is today’s Lovers’ Chroncile from Mac Tag dedicated to his muse.  Have you ever thought someone was walkin’ towards you only to find they were walkin’ away from you?  Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

move as you do,
and make me feel
first and last thoughts,
and if I may,
desire come this way
here and now
and would it not be fun

wonderin’ how it could be done,
to espy the parts denied unto the eye
undoin’ all that had come before

more plainly seen,
the walkin’ away,
leavin’ anguish

a tremulous dream,
a random ripple
in the reality stream

if i cannot, and upon
that discovery awhile
if fancy sadly stops so near,
best find my way
back to I-90

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

am i bein’ punished
i think i am
by god or fate
or cupid or somethin’

whenever i feel blue
there is one thing
i always do,
and it works every time
i just think about you

so i feel good
about the choices
i have made
but i still wrestle
with these feelin’s
of bein’ without

“I know that people get confused
in this life about what they want,
and what they’ve done,
and what they think
they should’ve because of it.
Everything they think they are
or did, takes hold so hard
that it won’t let them see
what they can be.”

well, it has for sure,
taken a hold on me
and that is my struggle
not lettin’ myself
let go of that

© copyright 2017 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

Today is the birthday of Anna Maria van Schurman (Cologne, Germany; November 5, 1607 – May 4, 1678 Wieuwerd, The Netherlands); painter, engraver, poet, and scholar, who is best known for her exceptional learning and her defence of female education. She was a highly educated woman, who excelled in art, music, and literature, and became proficient in fourteen languages, including Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, Aramaic, and Ethiopic, as well as various contemporary European languages.  She was the first woman to unofficially study at a Dutch university.

Judy Chicago’s feminist artwork The Dinner Party (1979) features a place setting for van Schurman.

Between 2000 and 2018, a marble bust of van Schurman was situated in the atrium of the House of Representatives of the Dutch Parliament in The Hague.

Gallery

Schurman, by Jan Lievens,  setting for van Schurman.

On this day in 1660, the English courtier, known for her beauty and wit, Lucy Hay died.  Her charms were celebrated in verse by contemporary poets, including a risqué poem by Sir John Suckling; “Upon My Lady Carlisle’s Walking in Hampton Court Garden”.  That of course is the Poem of the Day and followin’ that the Lyrics of the Day, inspired by the poem.

The Song of the Day is “Walkin’ Away Blues” by Ry Cooder.

Today is the birthday of Pietro Longhi (Venice 1702 or November 5, 1701 – May 8, 1785 Venice); painter of contemporary genre scenes of life.

In numerous paintings, Longhi depicts masked figures engaging in various acts from gambling to flirting. For example, in the foreground of Longhi’s painting The Meeting of the Procuratore and His Wife is a woman being greeted by a man that is presumed to be her husband. The setting is of a type of gathering place usually for masked people to engage in private matters such as romantic encounters.

Gallery

Self-portrait of Longhi

Clara the rhinoceros by Pietro Longhi,1751 (Ca’ Rezzonico)

La lezione di danza (The Dancing Lesson), ca 1741, Venezia, Gallerie dell’Accademia

The Charlatan, 1757

The Ridotto in Venice, ca. 1750s

Today is the birthday of Ella Wheeler Wilcox (Johnstown, Wisconsin; November 5, 1850 – October 30, 1919 Short Beach, Connecticut); author and poet. Her works include Poems of Passion and Solitude, which contains the lines “Laugh, and the world laughs with you; weep, and you weep alone.” Her autobiography, The Worlds and I, was published in 1918, a year before her death.

“The Way of the World” was first published in the February 25, 1883 issue of The New York Sun. The inspiration for the poem came as she was travelling to attend the Governor’s inaugural ball in Madison, Wisconsin. On her way to the celebration, there was a young woman dressed in black sitting across the aisle from her. The woman was crying. Miss Wheeler sat next to her and sought to comfort her for the rest of the journey. When they arrived, the poet was so depressed that she could barely attend the scheduled festivities. As she looked at her own radiant face in the mirror, she suddenly recalled the sorrowful widow. It was at that moment that she wrote the opening lines of “Solitude”:

Laugh, and the world laughs with you;

Weep, and you weep alone.

For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth

But has trouble enough of its own

In 1884, she married Robert Wilcox of Meriden, Connecticut, where the couple lived before moving to New York City and then to Granite Bay in the Short Beach section of Branford, Connecticut. The two homes they built on Long Island Sound, along with several cottages, became known as Bungalow Court, and they would hold gatherings there of literary and artistic friends. They had one child, a son, who died shortly after birth. Not long after their marriage, they both became interested in Theosophy, New Thought, and Spiritualism.

Early in their married life, Robert and Ella Wheeler Wilcox promised each other that whoever died first would return and communicate with the other. Robert Wilcox died in 1916, after over thirty years of marriage. She was overcome with grief, which became ever more intense as week after week went without any message from him. It was at this time that she went to California to see the Rosicrucian astrologer, Max Heindel, still seeking help in her sorrow, still unable to understand why she had no word from her Robert.

Several months later she composed a little mantra or affirmative prayer which she said over and over “I am the living witness: The dead live: And they speak through us and to us: And I am the voice that gives this glorious truth to the suffering world: I am ready, God: I am ready, Christ: I am ready, Robert.”

Wilcox made efforts to teach occult things to the world. Her works, filled with positive thinking, were popular in the New Thought Movement and by 1915 her booklet, What I Know About New Thought had a distribution of 50,000 copies, according to its publisher, Elizabeth Towne.

The following statement expresses Wilcox’s unique blending of New Thought, Spiritualism, and a Theosophical belief in reincarnation: “As we think, act, and live here today, we build the structures of our homes in spirit realms after we leave earth, and we build karma for future lives, thousands of years to come, on this earth or other planets. Life will assume new dignity, and labor new interest for us, when we come to the knowledge that death is but a continuation of life and labor, in higher planes.”

Her final words in her autobiography The Worlds and I: “From this mighty storehouse (of God, and the hierarchies of Spiritual Beings) we may gather wisdom and knowledge, and receive light and power, as we pass through this preparatory room of earth, which is only one of the innumerable mansions in our Father’s house. Think on these things.”  Evidently, Robert never returned.

 

Thanks for stoppin’ by y’all

Mac Tag

Love is the irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired. –  Mark Twain

O, thou art a perpetual triumph, an everlasting bonfire-light! – Shakespeare

Love is all

Unsatisfied

That cannot take the whole

Body and soul; – WB Yeats

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