Dec. 10 is the birthday of one of the most important American poets, the inimitable Emily Dickinson (1830 - 1886):
LOVE is anterior to life,
Posterior to death,
Initial of creation, and
The exponent of breath.
Rainer Maria Rilke: Evening
Slowly the evening changes into the clothes
held for it by a row of ancient trees;
you look: and two worlds grow separate from you,
one ascending to heaven, another, that falls;
and leave you, belonging not wholly to either one,
not quite as dark as the house that remains silent,
not quite as certainly sworn to eternity
as that which becomes star each night and rises—
and leave you (unsayably to disentangle) your life
with all its immensity and fear and great ripening,
so that, all but bounded, all but understood,
it is by turns stone in you and star.(transl. by Cliff Crego)
Photo © Bildarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz
And while I am away, this one goes out to the one I love… (found at Sparkling Pants’ Tumblr.)
Camelia Elias: The Cursing Competition, 2009 (oil on canvas)
The great French wave continues with Roland Barthes: semiotician, theorist of photography, and elegant fragmentier…
“Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.”
“”Am I in love? — Yes, since I’m waiting.” The other never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of the one who doesn’t wait; I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game: whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time. The lover’s fatal identity is precisely: I am the one who waits.”
— Roland Barthes - A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments
Camelia Elias: School Lesson, oil and acrylic on canvas, 2009
Camelia Elias: Frigg’s Distaff (oil on canvas)
Read a poem that goes with it here
Last year we had a major Rimbaud tribute on this day, Oct. 20, the 155th birthday of the young Poète Maudit…
This year, just the best known of all the - scarce - photos of Arthur (by Étienne Carjat, c. 1871), and a little poem:
Rimbaud: Sensation
Through blue summer nights I will pass along paths,
Pricked by wheat, trampling short grass:
Dreaming, I will feel coolness underfoot,
Will let breezes bathe my bare head.Not a word, not a thought:
Boundless love will surge through my soul,
And I will wander far away, a vagabond
In Nature - as happily as with a woman.- From Rimbaud Complete, translated and edited by Wyatt Mason
Camelia Elias: Federman Dies (oil on canvas) - read also a fragment written as a eulogy for Raymond Federman here
Camelia Elias: Isolde’s Philosophy (oil on canvas) - a fragment that goes with it here