Visual Fragments

i12bent: Dec. 10 is the birthday of one of the most important...

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 13:00:46 +0100

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.

More Emily on OF

lumpy-pudding: Rainer Maria Rilke: Evening Slowly the evening...

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 23:27:40 +0100

lumpy-pudding:

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

i12bent: And while I am away, this one goes out to the one I...

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 23:07:31 +0100

i12bent:

And while I am away, this one goes out to the one I love… (found at Sparkling Pants’ Tumblr.)

(A tradition)

Camelia Elias: The Cursing Competition, 2009 (oil on canvas)

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 22:10:58 +0100

Camelia Elias: The Cursing Competition, 2009 (oil on canvas)

i12bent: The great French wave continues with Roland Barthes:...

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:06:48 +0100

i12bent:

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

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 12:58:00 +0100

Camelia Elias: School Lesson, oil and acrylic on canvas, 2009

Camelia Elias: Frigg’s Distaff (oil on canvas) Read a poem...

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 00:43:00 +0200

Camelia Elias: Frigg’s Distaff (oil on canvas)

Read a poem that goes with it here

i12bent: Last year we had a major Rimbaud tribute on this day,...

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 11:13:31 +0200

i12bent:

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...

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 13:43:00 +0200

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...

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 13:40:00 +0200

Camelia Elias: Isolde’s Philosophy (oil on canvas) - a fragment that goes with it here

Camelia Elias: Bach meets Ate (acrylic on canvas)

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 01:24:00 +0200

Camelia Elias: Bach meets Ate (acrylic on canvas)

i12bent: One tough cookie - Fay Weldon, for many years the...

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 23:51:46 +0200

i12bent:

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…

i12bent: No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled,...

Sun, 20 Sep 2009 23:15:53 +0200

i12bent:

No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.

— Artaud

i12bent: Literature… The great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy was...

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 23:45:47 +0200

i12bent:

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!!

i12bent: Young Artaud in character… “If I commit suicide, it...

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 23:13:37 +0200

i12bent:

Young Artaud in character…

“If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself but to put myself back together again. Suicide will be for me only one means of violently reconquering myself, of brutally invading my being, of anticipating the unpredictable approaches of God. By suicide, I reintroduce my design in nature, I shall for the first time give things the shape of my will.” - “On Suicide,” no. 1, Le Disque Vert (1925)

i12bent: Antonin Artaud: «Poète noir» Poète noir, un sein de...

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 23:12:14 +0200

i12bent:

Antonin Artaud: «Poète noir»

Poète noir, un sein de pucelle
te hante,
poète aigri, la vie bout
et la ville brûle,
et le ciel se résorbe en pluie,
ta plume gratte au cœur de la vie.

Forêt, forêt, des yeux fourmillent
sur les pignons multipliés ;
cheveux d’orage, les poètes
enfourchent des chevaux, des chiens.

Les yeux ragent, les langues tournent,
le ciel afflue dans les narines
comme un lait nourricier et bleu ;
je suis suspendu à vos bouches
femmes, cœurs de vinaigre durs.

- from L’Ombilic des limbes

lumpy-pudding: Richard Wright: Five Haikus 1. I am nobody:A red...

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 23:11:01 +0200

lumpy-pudding:

Richard Wright: Five Haikus

1.

I am nobody:
A red sinking autumn sun
Took my name away.

2.

I give permission
For this slow spring rain to soak
The violet beds.

3.

With a twitching nose
A dog reads a telegram
On a wet tree trunk.

4.

Burning autumn leaves,
I yearn to make the bonfire
Bigger and bigger.

5.

A sleepless spring night:
Yearning for what I never had
And for what never was.

**********

Photo: Richard Wright in his studio, 1943

i12bent: Warped sonneteer par excellence: Gerard Manley Hopkins...

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 01:21:39 +0200

i12bent:

Warped sonneteer par excellence: Gerard Manley Hopkins (July 28, 1844 - 1889)

AS kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came.

Í say móre: the just man justices;
Kéeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—
Chríst—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

Last year’s tribute on OF: 1

i12bent: Paul Taylor (b. July 29, 1930) is one of the foremost...

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 01:07:21 +0200

i12bent:

Paul Taylor (b. July 29, 1930) is one of the foremost American choreographers of the 20th century.

He performed in the companies of Merce Cunningham, Martha Graham, and George Balanchine, and founded the Paul Taylor Dance Company in 1954. Dancers who emerged from his company include Twyla Tharp, Laura Dean, Dan Wagoner, Carolyn Adams, Christopher Gillis, Senta Driver and David Parsons.

The use of everyday gestures rather than dance moves is characteristic of his choreography. He has collaborated with painters Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and Alex Katz, as well as the legendary Tiffany & Co. designer Gene Moore. A signature work is Esplanade (1975), to music by Johann Sebastian Bach, which he choreographed with a contribution from the National Endowment for the Arts. (Wiki)

Above: The Paul Taylor Dance Company - Promethean Fire (pt. 1) (pt. 2 is here)

Music: Johann Sebastian Bach - Toccata and Fugue in D minor for organ, as orchestrated by Leopold Stokowski.

i12bent: Amedeo Modigliani in his studio… A credo: “Hold sacred...

Sun, 12 Jul 2009 22:17:23 +0200

i12bent:

Amedeo Modigliani in his studio…

A credo: “Hold sacred all which can exalt and excite your intelligence and seek to provoke … and to perpetuate … these fertile stimuli, because they can push the intelligence to its maximum creative power.”

Modigliani lies in Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris. Next to him lies his passionate beloved Jeanne Hébuterne who two days after Modigliani’s death from tubercular meningitis (exacerbated by alcoholism) through herself out a window, killing herself and her unborn baby (she was nine months pregnant with their second child). His epitaph reads: “Struck down by Death at the moment of glory.” Hers reads: “Devoted companion to the extreme sacrifice.”