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
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
Camelia Elias: Bach meets Ate (acrylic on canvas)
One tough cookie - Fay Weldon, for many years the funniest and most sarcastic English feminist writer….
“We shelter children for a time; we live side by side with men; and that is all. We owe them nothing, and are owed nothing. I think we owe our friends more, especially our female friends.” - Ouch!
Weldon turns 78 today…
No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.
— Artaud
Literature…
The great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy was born Sep. 8, 1828 (d. 1910). Works include War and Peace and Anna Karenina as well as numerous other novels and novellas…
As the following quotes illustrate Tolstoy was a pacifist, a nearly full-blown hippie and a new age prophet well ahead of time:
“Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source.”
“In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful.”
“There is no greatness where there is no simplicity, goodness and truth.”
Photo of Tolstoy in amazing colour by by Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii, a pioneer of color photography - 1908!!
