Sea

erase by Evgeniy Shaman

Sea

To have lost even the why or the what for –
to dream and to wake with the weight
of even the mechanical why even the mechanical wherefore –

the primitive one-string cello,
bent low playing a threnody, thread, theme I know,
into the night as I wake heaving it, hearing it –

like a chorus dissolving
not only sadness, sea,
but past sadness
past past sadness

now that I live so close to your sound, sea,
even at night wake to listen for you –
close to your smell
close and often to your salvage
your changing sand and rock shelf, sea,
lost generations
lost progenitors
past sadness, sea

© 2009, Joan Metelerkamp
From: Burnt Offering
Publisher: Modjaji Books, Cape Town, 2009
ISBN: 9780980272949

a love letter

Gustave Flaubert to Louise Colet
Croisset, midnight, 8-9 August [1846]

My deplorable mania for analysis exhausts me. I doubt everything, even my doubt. You thought me young, and I am old. I often spoke with old people about the pleasures of this earth, and I have always been astonished by the brightness that comes into their lackluster eyes; just as they could never get over their amazement at my way of life, and keep saying 'At your age! At your age! You! You!' Take away my nervous exaltation, my fantasy of mind. the emotion of the moment. and I have little left. That's what I am underneath. I was not made to enjoy life. You must not take these words in a down- to- earth sense, but rather grasp their metaphysical intensity. I keep telling myself that I'll bring you misfortune, that were it not for me your life would have continued undisturbed, that the day will come that we shall part (and I protest in advance). Then the nausea of life rises to my lips, and I feel immeasurable self-disgust and a wholly Christian tenderness for you.
At other times - yesterday, for example, when I had sealed my letter - the thought of you sings, smiles, shines, and dances like a joyous fire that gives out a thousand colours and penetrating warmth. I keep remembering the graceful, charming, provocative movement of your mouth when you speak - that rosy, moist mouth that calls forth kisses and sucks them irresistibly in. What a good idea I had, to take your slippers. If you knew how I keep looking at them! The bloodstains are fading: is that their fault? We shall do the same: one year, two years, six, what does it matter? Everything measurable passes, everything that can be counted has an end. Only three things are infinite: the sky in its stars, the sea in its drops of water; and the heart in its tears. Only in that capacity is the heart large; everything else about it is small. Am I lying? Think, try to be calm. One or two shreds of happiness fill it to overflowing, whereas it has room for all the miseries of mankind.
By the way, - so we'll christen the blue dress together. I'll arrive some evening about six. We'll set the night ablaze! I'll be your desire, you'll be mine, and we'll gorge ourselves on each other to see whether we can be satiated. Never! No, never! Your heart is an exhaustible spring, you let me drink deep. it floods me, penetrates me, I drown. Oh! The beauty of your face, all pale and quivering under my kisses! But how cold I was! I did nothing but look at you; I was surprised, charmed. If I had you here now... Come, I'll take another look at your slippers. They are something I'll never give up; I think I love them as much as I do you. Whoever made them, little suspected how my hands would tremble When I touch them. I breathe their perfume, they smell of verbena - and of you in a way that makes my heart swell.
Adieu, my life, adieu my love, a thousand kisses everywhere. Phidias has only to write, and I will come. Next winter there will no longer be any way for us to see other, but if Phidias writes between now and the beginning of the winter I'll come to Paris for at least three weeks. Adieu, I kiss you in the place where I will kiss you, where I want to; I put my mouth there, je me roul sur toi, mille braisers. Oh! donne-m'en, donne-m'en!

your radiance

"Not flesh of my flesh
Nor bone of my bone,
But still miraculously
My own.
Never forget
For a single minute:
You didn't grow under my heart
But in it.”
--Fleur Conkling Heyliger

Rituals

*warning* Not to be viewed with a weak stomach.

Enter with care...

sensitivity to symbolism can be harmful to your health.

Truth or myth?
Can art be meant to hurt?
Or is it fear that keeps one from seeing the truth.
Creativity knows no apology's. and there is no other than
"art with intention"

A painting that frightened me as a child like no other. Examined in secret like stolen pornography. Appalled then loved through heightened perception.

Hieronymus Bosch - The Garden from The Garden of Earthly Delights

Written for deviantART August 4, 2008

Krzysztof Kieślowski - Film Maker

Some years back, I watched The Double Life of Veronique with a friend. This being the second time of four times I've watched it myself. She couldn't speak when it was over and when I asked her how she felt? She simply scratched her head and shrugged. I mention this because, how do you describe an emotion really?

Wikipedia describes the film as follows:
"The film follows the lives of a young woman first in Poland, Weronika, and then a young woman in France, Véronique, both played by Irène Jacob. Though unrelated, the two appear identical, share many personality traits, and seem to be aware of each other on some level, as if they are doppelgängers; but except for a brief glimpse through a bus window in Kraków, they never meet. After Weronika sacrifices everything in the pursuit of a singing career, Véronique abandons her own similar goal because of poor health and attempts to find an independent course for her life, while becoming involved with a manipulative man who is fascinated by clues to her double nature. The man is a puppeteer and maker of marionettes, helping raise the questions that are central to the film: is there such a thing as free will, or is it up to a creator of some kind, or is it just a matter of chance that one acts and thinks as one does?"

It is almost an impossibility to reduce this film to mere fact, for which it is an imperative view of intuition. A "self conscious meditation," if you will of how we perceive characters and how we look at the world. I've seen this movie several times and I can tell you that the literal themes of some one out there in the world that resembles us is appealing. It appeals to my nature in terms of my origin and questions within myself. Equally alluring and enigmatic is the visual distortions and divided frames offering metaphysical meaning as well as query. Kieślowski has said himself that he didn't consider himself an, "artist because an artist offers answers rather a craftsman who uses film to pose questions." Poetic is the way in which Zbigniew Preisner ties the film with his rich and haunting score inspired by Dante's Versus, lyrics which he used. Véronique is a film much to do about music as it is the visual rhymes.

The cinematography of rich filtered light, reflections, shots though windows and circular as well as strait lines all play an intricate roll in the film and it is essential that you pay close attention to detail while viewing the works of Kieslowski in general. I highly suggest that you see The Three Colors Trilogy three separate movies of three concepts where liberation, impartiality and fraternity are explored.



In The Double Life of Veronique there is a gentle balance of exploitation, sensitivity and love. Transcendent clues leading to the romantic aspects give the film its metaphysical weight and it is very worth renting the DVD. It's been said that, "you need to look with eyes wide open, to look with lucidity and perception." "This film not only allows for uncertainty but encourages it. Krzysztof Kieślowski does not want a complacent audience that thinks it understands everything rather wants to leave us with haunting questions that remains for us to answer in our own lives." It's simply a visual poem with metaphysical concern. The brilliant attempt to convey an emotion.

Written for Imeem July 11, 2009.

The Blackbird Says...

She walked down the path on what seemed like any other morning. Her tempo with a fearless skip, for she was the apple of her fathers eye and the china doll her mother dressed in tights, white gloves and lace. She first noticed the sounds in the remoteness of the silent break of day. She curved her head toward the cypress trees just making out a murder of large black birds throughout the mist. Like a great wind the shrill and flapping of wings encompassed her. Her school books dropped to the ground like stones. Shock gave way to panic as the raven took hold of her scalp, claws intertwined and matted in her curls as droplets of blood rolled down her cheeks. The raven shook her viciously and didn't release her for ten years.

Through a plight of exhaustion she spotted a garden just across the way with a green meadow and a strong Oak tree. She laid her head to rest in the cool grass feeling for the safety of the rich soil below. In the shade coveted by the Oak she fell asleep, there she lay in peaceful slumber for twenty years where she grew roots that knotted with the mighty Oak which seeded the Earth.

She dreamed and dreamed until one day, she awoke to the soft nuzzle of a dove. "I will make all your thoughts and ideas come true," said the beautiful white bird. "And all your dreaming while you slept will happen for you." He showed her images of what could be and offered her love and knowledge of the sea. The dove began to fly fading from her vision like a ghost dissolving to the clouds. Desperately she tried to follow pulling at the roots, breaking them to shard split wood. The meadow where she lay turned brittle as she collapsed to a thatch prickly and sharp. Watching the Oak wither and die a wave of misery came over her.

Through the pain that she created there she reached to her head to feel the mark of the raven, when a blackbird sat beside her. The blackbird smaller than the raven you see, says, in his most mocking tune, "How foolish is she?" "For it is a fool indeed who tries to escape her destiny."

Written for Imeem June 12, 2009

everyday was one last look

Addiction

"What have I became
in this false fantasy?
Thriving on something sweet,
submerging into another world.
Without it I tumble
transforming into nothing.
I'm locked in a stalemate
not capable to stir.
Look closely through my eyes,
as deep as the end of sight.
See! My ailment and do
your very best to repair.
Save me from this ogre
I have become, before
I sit in a dark painful void...

lost inside my addiction"

- Claire Nixon

every fruit has its secret

"There never was any standing aloft and unfolded on a bough

Like other flowers, in a revelation of petals ;

Silver-pink peach, venetian green glass of medlars and sorb-apples,

Shallow wine-cups on short, bulging stems

Openly pledging heaven :

Here’s to the thorn in flower ! Here is to Utterance !

The brave, adventurous rosaceæ."

"Folded upon itself, and secret unutterable,
And milky-sapped, sap that curdles milk and makes ricotta,
Sap that smells strange on your fingers, that even goats won’t taste it;
Folded upon itself, enclosed like any Mohammedan woman,
Its nakedness all within-walls, its flowering forever unseen,
One small way of access only, and this close-curtained from the light;
Fig, fruit of the female mystery, covert and inward,
Mediterranean fruit, with your covert nakedness,
Where everything happens invisible, flowering and fertilization, and fruiting
In the inwardness of your you, that eye will never see
Till it’s finished, and you’re over-ripe, and you burst to give up your ghost."

Text by, D.H. Lawrence - Figs and photography by, Diane Powers.

"the beauty of all this uncertainty"

"It might take us a lifetime to find out what it is we need to say. Most of us fall into where our feelings are headed while we're quite young. But the beauty of all this uncertainty would be that in the process of exhausting all the possibilities, we might actually stumble unconsciously into the recognition of something that's useful to us, that speaks to a deep need within ourselves. At the same time, I like to think that in order for any of us to really do anything new, we can't know exactly what it is we are doing."- Emmet Gowin

deviantART journal entry: Fri. Dec. 26, 2008.
Photography by, Emmet Gowin.

The Bucket - Prompt #1

She passed by him in the hall. Her handbag flailing confidently at her side. What made him think of her as a little girl, arms flailing her bucket on the beach? "Unaware," he thinks to himself, like the innocent child in the sand. How can she possibly know her fate? That he would be her death.

Prompt created by Zoe for http://continuum-art.blogspot.com/
"**Given the character of an elegantly-gowned young lady, write a story in the hard-boiled detective genre, using the subject a bucket and the theme man versus the supernatural."

Resurrection of Venus - Wingate Paine

I was born in Los Angeles during 1966. It was this time photographer Wingate Paine published his boudoir book of muses 'Mirror of Venus.' It's been noted that Paine burned and destroyed all the negatives after the publication. It has also been said that the models were all friends and lovers.

I held little charm with my biological parents at this time, two mythological persons I call the Bios. You see, after three months with me they left me with the nuns where I was quickly claimed by a lovely Dutch couple who showed me the world so that the Bios could go on with their life. All that's known of them barely fill page in a profile of feedings and sleep habits. It's been written that he was a poet and she a clerk. He was dark and small in stature. She was tall with long red hair and big blue eyes. So why do I think of the Bios at a time like this? I'll get to that.

Almost forty three years later Wingate Paine's images of muses were celebrated once again in a lovely little vintage clothing store called Resurrection on Melrose Avenue in West Hollywood last month. Designs by Katy Rodriguez, walls adorn by the women of Wingate Paine. The images captured theses beauties in intimate moments that give you that feeling of a time filled with morning luminosity after the surrender when the mood is light and warm. A time between the purity of the 1950's and the sexual revolution of the 1960's. Rodriguez designed a collection inspired by this celebration of female openness and femininity and is quoted in saying, " The book is “fashion without clothes,” whose designs have a lot of Paine’s girlishness to them." The collection was donated from private collectors. The exhibit ran from May 21 to June 15 this year under the title "Venus Revisited."






Viewing and admiring the frivolity of these moments of women playfully running nude on the beach, laughing in the bath and posing within clean white sheets I began to speculate the relationship of the Bios. Was she the muse of his creativity? Did he destroy the remnants of words as he blatantly threw me away? Did she in fact survive the artist muse relationship? My entire existence in fact based on question and query, never to be answered. However, not worth tormenting oneself. I now posses a sense of romanticism when it comes to the Bios. Maybe he wrote of a smile and pleasant afternoon that seized him with a passion to burn all that was lost.

"Wingate Paine, 1915 – 1987, was a member of a Mayflower New England family with ties to law, banking and the ministry. He broke from those traditions and became a Marine captain, connoisseur of French wine, devotee of Hatha-Yoga and finally a gifted photographer and filmmaker. Described as his “visual valentine to feminine beauty,” Paine’s series of female nudes were published in his 1967 book Mirror of Venus. This 1960s classic was printed in ten editions and features text written by Federico Fellini and Françoise Sagan. Paine later abandoned photography for sculpture. Mirror of Venus represents the culmination of his photographic career."

Written for Imeem August 23, 2009.
Photography by Wingate Paine.

Cinderella

"You always read about it:

the plumber with the twelve children
who wins the Irish Sweepstakes.
From toilets to riches.
That story.

Or the nursemaid,
some luscious sweet from Denmark
who captures the oldest son's heart.
from diapers to Dior.
That story.

Or a milkman who serves the wealthy,
eggs, cream, butter, yogurt, milk,
the white truck like an ambulance
who goes into real estate
and makes a pile.
From homogenized to martinis at lunch.

Or the charwoman
who is on the bus when it cracks up
and collects enough from the insurance.
From mops to Bonwit Teller.
That story.






Once
the wife of a rich man was on her deathbed
and she said to her daughter Cinderella:
Be devout. Be good. Then I will smile
down from heaven in the seam of a cloud.
The man took another wife who had
two daughters, pretty enough
but with hearts like blackjacks.
Cinderella was their maid.
She slept on the sooty hearth each night
and walked around looking like Al Jolson.
Her father brought presents home from town,
jewels and gowns for the other women
but the twig of a tree for Cinderella.
She planted that twig on her mother's grave
and it grew to a tree where a white dove sat.
Whenever she wished for anything the dove
would drop it like an egg upon the ground.
The bird is important, my dears, so heed him.

Next came the ball, as you all know.
It was a marriage market.
The prince was looking for a wife.
All but Cinderella were preparing
and gussying up for the event.
Cinderella begged to go too.
Her stepmother threw a dish of lentils
into the cinders and said: Pick them
up in an hour and you shall go.
The white dove brought all his friends;
all the warm wings of the fatherland came,
and picked up the lentils in a jiffy.
No, Cinderella, said the stepmother,
you have no clothes and cannot dance.
That's the way with stepmothers.

Cinderella went to the tree at the grave
and cried forth like a gospel singer:
Mama! Mama! My turtledove,
send me to the prince's ball!
The bird dropped down a golden dress
and delicate little slippers.
Rather a large package for a simple bird.
So she went. Which is no surprise.
Her stepmother and sisters didn't
recognize her without her cinder face
and the prince took her hand on the spot
and danced with no other the whole day.

As nightfall came she thought she'd better
get home. The prince walked her home
and she disappeared into the pigeon house
and although the prince took an axe and broke
it open she was gone. Back to her cinders.
These events repeated themselves for three days.
However on the third day the prince
covered the palace steps with cobbler's wax
and Cinderella's gold shoe stuck upon it.
Now he would find whom the shoe fit
and find his strange dancing girl for keeps.
He went to their house and the two sisters
were delighted because they had lovely feet.
The eldest went into a room to try the slipper on
but her big toe got in the way so she simply
sliced it off and put on the slipper.
The prince rode away with her until the white dove
told him to look at the blood pouring forth.
That is the way with amputations.
They just don't heal up like a wish.
The other sister cut off her heel
but the blood told as blood will.
The prince was getting tired.
He began to feel like a shoe salesman.
But he gave it one last try.
This time Cinderella fit into the shoe
like a love letter into its envelope.

At the wedding ceremony
the two sisters came to curry favor
and the white dove pecked their eyes out.
Two hollow spots were left
like soup spoons.

Cinderella and the prince
lived, they say, happily ever after,
like two dolls in a museum case
never bothered by diapers or dust,
never arguing over the timing of an egg,
never telling the same story twice,
never getting a middle-aged spread,
their darling smiles pasted on for eternity.
Regular Bobbsey Twins.
That story."

Anne Sexton

Photography by, Tim Walker.
Originally posted for Imeem.

Roseblood

Photo taken by, Eleonor Martin edit by me.
Texture by  JoesSistah...

she can taste the borrowed color on her lips

sweet that stings of a perfumed kiss

the poison aches within her blood

as she fades behind their ardent love

moments

Buster Keaton



At the market today I found myself entranced by this elderly gentleman in line right in front of me. He was dressed elegantly in his crisp white shirt and loose trousers. He moved very gingerly with purpose and care. I’d say he was in his mid eighties perhaps. I began thinking... what was he like in his day, a ladies man of course, charming at the very least. I imagined by the way in which he carried himself, that self assurance and enjoyment, meant a well lived life. I began un-loading his cart with him. He looked into my eyes and smiled and I swear I saw a sparkle in his. My posture straightened with poise reminiscent of my dance days as a child. I think even my voiced changed a bit.

When he was done with his business he turned to me before leaving and said, “I wish you nothing but joy Miss.” Caught me by surprise and for some reason I can’t stop smiling today. When I got home I wanted to run and play Billie Holiday records, draw and drink cappuccino. However, I have no Billie Holiday records I don’t even have a record player anymore. So I reach for some Nina Simone. Cappuccino? Try Folgers, I don't drink coffee to tell you the truth. As for the drawing, I assure you when I'm done sketching he will have some sort of hat on even though I'm pretty sure he wasn't wearing one. I think of a friend whom I miss who spoke with such intellect and grace. I do hope he comes back soon!

Just a moment in a lifetime of moments.

Written for deviantArt December 1, 2007.

Her Kind

"have gone out, a possessed witch,

haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.

I have found the warm caves in the woods,
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:
whining, rearranging the disaligned.
A woman like that is misunderstood.
I have been her kind.

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."

Anne Sexton

Photography by Deborah Turbeville.

Pianology

Light Warriors

When I was a little girl my father would close the house like a tomb. So silent and dark I could hardly breathe. A stage for music, cinema and slide shows without ever letting the world in. On an occasional warm Sunday he would open one curtain to run a small air conditioner. The sunshine would spill into the room settling into a steady flow. I would slide my little body underneath the ray of light, fan my hair onto the carpet, only to catch it, that ever so warm and decadent feeling... Pulling at each strand, carefully combing with my fingers and counting the gold and red highlighted waves that would glisten from my dark mane... A youthful form of self adoration only beset to a child. I would reach up to the stream of slow moving dust particles just above my head gently poking and changing their path as I drift into a daydream with my father asleep in his easy chair only two feet away. The hum of the forced air would lull me to sleep and sweep me away from my siesta ritual.

All my life I never stopped reaching for the light. It was always there to bend it, to flirt with, to paint it... like an old friend. I will always be a lover to its illumination. To consider it a benevolent gift to give and one to be had. Just one very long day ago a dear friend, gentle and new, found me in a dark place... my eyes swollen with tears my head throbbing with pain. I don't know where she came from, she must have been an angel because she took me in her arms from the unknown and promised me light in the morning. A gesture I hold in my heart.

I've come to realize that light can be fleeting, for one to forever chase.
There to warm you from within... To shed all possibilities and at the same time perpetually breeding new life. I'm no stranger to what people think of me. Warrior is not the word that comes to mind for some... Perhaps, a sensitivity that can often be misunderstood, a sentimentalist at best. However, I like to think that strength comes from places far more complex than most people realize.



Noted photographer Joyce Tenneson's exemplifies the spiritual and visual aspects of a woman's life and her direct and indirect relationship with the light in her book 'Light Warriors'. "what fascinates me is life's complexities, the darkness as well as the light." Perhaps we are drawn to people as we are the illumination of light. The imagery she puts forth is quite strong and one can't helped but be moved by the portraits of these remarkable women who give themselves over to you. I know what draws me to people, the wonder of that person the way in which I was stirred and forever touched. I believe some people are like fireflies... they just aren't meant to be caught they illuminate you from within. That's why I know I will always reach for a source of light...of wonder and ultimately. . . well. . . the possibilities are endless don't you think?

All photography by, Joyce Tenneson
Written for Imeem, May 20, 2009.