Entries Tagged as 'books & writing'

Relativity (Escher)

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Escher-Big

#78

I once stood staring down a long staircase,
Then stood up having fallen all the way down.
The time between appeared to have erased
Both itself and the memory of what I’d done.
Unhurt, staring up at the staircase, terrified
Of forms and forces I now understood, I cried.
There are many steps, floors, and bannisters
In this ant people world, but only one sun.
Yet all depends on the attitude of the stairs,
Which share the simultaneity of the boson.
Every direction ends in a shift of perspective,
Hinting that the fifth dimension may be us,
Each riser a mere extension of consciousness,
Until, falling down the stairs, we no longer live.

Note: This is one of more than 115 poems after paintings or images, which can be viewed at the blog, Zealotry of Guerin.

The Eternal City (Peter Blume)

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city

#68

The jack-in-the-box dictator dominates,
Green scowl squeezing envy into hate.
Sinners pray to Jesus in the store window.
Draped in gold chains, clutching His scepter,
He laughs at their ruler’s show of temper.
Henchmen wait for new orders from below.
Eternal cities outlive their architecture.
Columns collapse, statuary crumbles,
“Return my youth,” a lame crone mumbles.
Speeches, even sermons, become lectures,
Endless repetitions, what everybody knows.
When the militia gathers, the catacombs
Fill with refuges and would-be deserters.
No murderers here, we are only torturers.

Note: This is one of more than 115 poems after paintings or images, which can be viewed at the blog, Zealotry of Guerin.

 

Fish Magic (Klee)

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fish

#81

Is the sky to fish what the celestial is to men?
Do their eyes, being lidless, see more clearly
The dimming when moon eclipses the sun?
Do they wish as they die to swim above the sea?
Bonefish, flounder, barracuda, and drum,
Chaunt spells and curses from within a cauldron,
To tauten the cord and raise the draped muslin
Unveiling the face of the ancient clock tower,
While a three-eyed girl grabs at potted flowers,
And in a corner a boy in a dunce cap cowers.
The gods send down chum and baited hooks,
Dangling constellations and spiral galaxies,
Daring us to hope, to aspire, daring us to look
Past transparent and unfathomable seas.

Note: This is one of more than 115 poems after paintings or images, which can be viewed at the blog, Zealotry of Guerin.

Graphic Novel Review: “Crusades” by Izu, Nikolavitch and Xiaoyou

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One of the things I like most about European graphic novels is the wide range of genres on offer. Some of these are very different from what you can find in American comics, where you very rarely encounter historical epics. In France though, you can find stories set in the Middle Ages, Ancient Rome, Renaissance Italy, Byzantium or set in the Middle East during the crusades. Indeed, my understanding is that the French are crazy for stories set during the crusades. [Read more →]

The Astronomer (Vermeer)

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JohannesVermeer-TheAstronomer(1668)

#99

We know no more than he knew then.
We see farther and imagine numbers
Larger, but the same old infinities
Confront us, we still count to ten,
See through mirrors dying fire’s penumbra,
Envision alien cities,
And watch for asteroids to come too near.
Like him, we are empty of fear,
Assume the universe is like a globe,
To be dissected and mapped, lobe by lobe.
He touches the heavens and says a prayer,
Not for insight, guidance, or grace
(Though he longs to pierce the layers
Of darkness), but to transcend space.

Note: This is one of more than 100 poems after paintings or images, which can be viewed at the blog, Zealotry of Guerin.

Four Riffs on “Three Musicians” (Picasso)

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Three Musicians
#87

A tune is the ultimate abstraction,
An emotion expressed as a fraction.
Some notes invariably repeated
Become a cold emotion reheated.

Not all musicians are made of music.
Some are talent, some mere facility.
The best I’ve known live a necessity,
Like physicists slave to mathematics.

Picasso’s clowns can only make us dance,
Twist our senses into a whirling trance.

I’ve wept at the silence a conductor
Held at the end of the Ninth of Mahler,
As if to say, “Behold what’s gone before –
Anguish, redemption, hope — and don’t despair.”

Note: This is one of more than 100 poems after paintings or images, which can be viewed at the blog, Zealotry of Guerin.

Container for Stars (Klee)

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#75

We thought, when we were the heart of the universe,
The constellations accumulate the divine.
We chanted as we watched the gods slowly disperse,
Replaced by single stars and Albert Einstein.
A star can fall. There’s too much of velocity,
Distance, and duration in our current science,
Because there’s no such thing as specificity.
Even if we could fly a billion light years hence,
What we want to see would be just as far away.
We might find a planet where men would want to stay.
Life could be altered. The sky would remain the same,
New constellations we’d have to give new names.
The discovered universe is not what we sought.
The only container of the stars is a thought.

Note: This is one of more than 100 poems after paintings or images, which can be viewed at the blog, Zealotry of Guerin.

Sunset (Paul Klee)

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#61

The day has taken a billion ages to die.
No more than mathematical points, infinite
In any space defined or without compass,
We, our thoughts, motes in a god’s eye,
God’s tearful eye, are not (at least) indefinite.
We are both dark energy and dark mass.
Something beyond the sun points to us.
A light beyond any spectrum we know,
Like a thought, but even more like a reason,
An unimaginable generator of purposes,
Flies at us, at our minds, not like an arrow,
To pierce, but with a kiss’s intent, a frisson.
It takes only a day for all our suns to set.
Sadly, that light is what we’ll least regret.

Note: This is one of more than 100 poems after paintings or images, which can be viewed at the blog, Zealotry of Guerin.

Melencolia (Durer)

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#93

An artwork is passage of time temporarily arrested.
Melancholy inevitably ensues, new effort wasted.
My world is not impossible, but imaginary,
A natural and a mechanistic menagerie:
The nodding babe and the slumbering hound,
The skull dreaming in the polyhedron,
The ladder to rainbow and splintered sun.
I must unbalance scales, ignore the bell,
And drain the hourglass sand out of its shell.
The nails and the knife both shorn of evil,
The age’s golden sphere now leaden still,
My calipers measure a pointless spell.
Despondently, I await the next alchemy of duration.
I’ll concentrate forever, then begin my final creation.

Note: This is one of more than 100 poems after paintings or images, which can be viewed at the blog, Zealotry of Guerin.

Rue De Paris, Rainy Day (Gustave Caillebotte)

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#92

Walking the streets of Paris with my wife,
Feeling her heart through her hand on my arm
(It is April and we’re here for a week),
We celebrate twenty five years, a life
Of mutual shelter beneath the storm,
Sharing a blue umbrella as we seek
Out the old soul behind the city’s charms,
What we’ve found in each other countless times
When the sun has broken through and we shine.
She gasped when she saw the Eiffel Tower,
Her wonder more thrilling than its power,
While the Winged Victory’s arms were not missed,
Because she sought to entwine hers with mine,
And in front of Rodin’s The Kiss, we kissed.

Note: This is one of more than 100 poems after paintings or images, which can be viewed at the blog, Zealotry of Guerin.

Time Transfixed (Magritte)

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#54

It is seventeen minutes to one.
The candlesticks are all empty
As they’ve been for all eternity,
Because of a window and a sun.
The mirror reflects the back of things
We see first hand. There is no second.
The train appears as though beckoned,
Flies on smoke and shadow wings.
No fire has ever burned in the fireplace,
No sign of ash, no sooty smudges.
Only the mind fixing this room budges,
Urging us deeper into interior space.
Look away, it’s twelve forty-four.
The minute lost is yours no more.

Note: This is one of more than 100 poems after paintings or images, which can be viewed at the blog, Zealotry of Guerin.

“. . . out of the air, a zebra appeared, with the face of a man . . .” (Ruth Diamond-Guerin)

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#42

That is my face on the zebra’s body.
The striped plain is habitat and prison,
But no dream, not even a vision.
Move but slightly, I become nobody.
I can’t remember how I came to be.
Perhaps I was bewitched by the gods.
I am a creature against all the odds,
A thinking, feeling singularity.
Animals are defined by their camouflage,
But not men, and I am neither one.
Come, capture me. I can dodge
Your eye — before you start, you’re done.
But, in doing so, I lose myself as well
In this dry, cold, vanishing point of Hell.

Note: This is one of more than 100 poems after paintings or images, which can be viewed at the blog, Zealotry of Guerin.

The Rock (Peter Blume)

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#46

Is it a living or a dying rock?
The girl with ponytail and frock,
Kneeling without shoe or sock,
Beseeches the insensate block.
Men working beyond the clock,
They don’t pause to take stock
Of the closed universe they unlock,
Don’t hear the crowing of the cock.
They lift each stone, sleepwalk
Toward those with chalk and caulk,
Like able, obedient livestock.
Work isn’t something they mock.
Damnation will come as a shock.

Note: This is one of more than 100 poems after paintings or images, which can be viewed at the blog, Zealotry of Guerin.

Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory (Dali)

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#83

There is no time. There’s only memory,
Rows of sodden boxes beneath a sea
So pure that even the sardines have dreams
Of swimming through the sun’s occluded beams.
A bullet from the brain becomes a memory box,
Transfigured by the melting of the clocks.
Floating mountains and rootless trees in pieces
Will linger, so, until duration ceases.
These aren’t headstones of recollection.
Impervious to breath and desiccation,
They can become too numerous to count.
I, for one, would like to know the amount.
Each box retains its substance, color, and shape,
But when it’s opened nothing can escape.

Note: This poem is one of many poems after paintings or images, which can be viewed at the blog, Zealotry of Guerin.

The good Stalinist

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Àíäðåé Ïëàòîíîâ

“Hm? What? Stalin? Yeah, I kind of dig him…”

As a fan of Soviet literature, one of my great frustrations is the lack of good writing from a pro-Stalin perspective. There is no shortage of books about the evils of Stalin and the system he created- Solzhenitsyn, Shalamov and Bulgakov all spring to mind- but what about those writers who actually believed in his vision for the USSR? [Read more →]

Orwell’s 1984: A Literary Appreciation

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Winston stopped reading for a moment. Somewhere in remote distance a rocket bomb thundered. The blissful feeling of being alone with the forbidden book, in a room with no telescreen, had not worn off. Solitude and safety were physical sensations, mixed up somehow with the tiredness of his body, the softness of the chair, the touch of the faint breeze from the window that played upon his cheek. The book fascinated him, or more exactly it reassured him. In a sense it told him nothing that was new, but that was part of the attraction. It said what he would have said, if it had been possible for him to set his scattered thoughts in order. It was the product of a mind similar to his own, but enormously more powerful, more systematic, less fear-ridden. The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already.

This past weekend I re-read Orwell’s 1984. Or maybe re-reread since I’m fairly sure I’ve read it twice before. You might expect from the title of this blog entry that it would be an appreciation of the book’s themes and significance and how today’s world is more like Oceania than ever … et cetera. But it (the blog) won’t be.

It’s not that I don’t appreciate the significance and incisiveness of the book. I very much do. And reading it again I appreciated it more than ever, even to the point that it didn’t seem all that ‘depressing’ – because it wasn’t all that shocking. The photo posted here was taken yesterday on an NJ Transit train. Note the flat, built-in ‘telescreen,’ the surveillance camera, and the loudspeaker. Seem familiar?

Speaking of significance, as a brief aside, I recently watched The Wire, and I was struck at how well 1984 depicts the drug trade, with its 24/7 surveillance, its complete intolerance for dissention and individual thought, and its willingness to ‘vaporize’ anyone for any reason. The parallel works because 1984 is describing a dictatorship, which is what the drug trade is, and exactly as Orwell writes: a dictatorship not as much about money or luxury but pure power. (We especially see this in drug lord Marlo Stanfield.) But don’t get me started on The Wire.

Reading 1984 this time, I especially wanted to examine the literary merits of the story. Would I see through the story and recognize 1984 as ‘merely’ a brilliant essay disguised as a novel?

Nope. Don’t doubt Orwell, is the lesson. On this go ‘round, I was lock-and-stock sold on the literary quality of 1984. Let’s look at just a few finer points:

[Read more →]

Enso (Hakuin)

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Turn over the road
and shove the wheel
beneath the void.
Make a deep breath.
Nothing and its time
can be destroyed.

Note: This poem, which arrived virtually complete in a dream, is one of many poems after paintings or images, which can be viewed at the blog, Zealotry of Guerin. “Enso” is Japanese for “circle.” A calligraphic enso is a symbol for enlightenment, strength, elegance, the universe, and the void.

Lisa reads The Punch Bowl: 75 Recipes Spanning Four Centuries of Wanton Revelry by Dan Searing

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If you think of punch as something in bowl with ginger ale, melting rainbow sherbet and fruit juice, this book will change your mind. The Punch Bowl: 75 Recipes Spanning Four Centuries of Wanton Revelry aims to take you back to the glory days of punch, when it was brewed from spirits, spices and not-too-clean water. Our sanitation has improved and so has our taste, which leaves me eager to try some of these recipes.

The book begins with a history of punch, which is actually more interesting than I anticipated.

“…in its golden era, punch embodied all things exotic and expensive: spice, sugar, fruit, imported spirits, and, if the imbibers were trult fortunate, clean water.” [Read more →]

Top ten favorite lines for a Valentine’s Day poem

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10. If anyone deserves a special day,

9. It’s you, my Valentine, my dear Maureen.

8. You are so fair, in every single way.
[Read more →]

The Flammarion engraving (artist unknown)

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#90

The Milky Way is stone and silent fire,
Flying ice and dust, and expanding gas,
But what we find within the heliosphere
Suggests a whilom laboratory
Where the essential elements were cast
And the residues made preparatory
For the distillation that’s planet Earth:
Europa’s water, Io’s sulfur,
Gases from Saturn and Jupiter,
Engineered for the terrestrial birth.
The traveler sees, beyond a starry veil,
Cosmic clockwork, eternal music.
Kneeling, he lifts a hand as if to hail
His Maker, the tinkering mechanic.

Note: This sonnet is one from a sequence of poems after paintings or images called “Brushstrokes.” The entire sequence can be viewed at the blog, Zealotry of Guerin.

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