o momento

Quando participas num jogo, tens de te situar dentro dele, não vale pores-te de fora e colocares-te na posição de observador…o teu pensamento deixará de estar sincronizado com o jogo e as tuas jogadas serão sempre lentas e denunciadas.
Olha o jogador que em contra-ataque tem a linha de passe perfeita para isolar um colega, deslumbra-se com a antecipação do sucesso, quando o passe sai, um defesa adivinhou-lhe as intenções e intercepta a bola : - Aaaaaahhhhhh…
Perdeu-se o momento.

Death's Echo

"O who can ever gaze his fill,"
Farmer and fisherman say,
"On native shore and local hill,
Grudge aching limb or callus on the hand?
Father, grandfather stood upon this land,
And here the pilgrims from our loins will stand."
So farmer and fisherman say
In their fortunate hey-day:
But Death's low answer drifts across
Empty catch or harvest loss
Or an unlucky May.
The earth is an oyster with nothing inside it,
Not to be born is the best for man;
The end of toil is a bailiff's order,
Throw down the mattock and dance while you can.

"O life's too short for friends who share,"
Travellers think in their hearts,
"The city's common bed, the air,
The mountain bivouac and the bathing beach,
Where incidents draw every day from each
Memorable gesture and witty speech."
So travellers think in their hearts,
Till malice or circumstance parts
Them from their constant humour:
And slyly Death's coercive rumour
In that moment starts.
A friend is the old old tale of Narcissus,
Not to be born is the best for man;
An active partner in something disgraceful,
Change your partner, dance while you can.

"O stretch your hands across the sea,"
The impassioned lover cries,
"Stretch them towards your harm and me.
Our grass is green, and sensual our brief bed,
The stream sings at its foot, and at its head
The mild and vegetarian beasts are fed."
So the impassioned lover cries
Till the storm of pleasure dies:
From the bedpost and the rocks
Death's enticing echo mocks,
And his voice replies.
The greater the love, the more false to its object,
Not to be born is the best for man;
After the kiss comes the impulse to throttle,
Break the embraces, dance while you can.

"I see the guilty world forgiven,"
Dreamer and drunkard sing,
"The ladders let down out of heaven,
The laurel springing from the martyr's blood,
The children skipping where the weeper stood,
The lovers natural and the beasts all good."
So dreamer and drunkard sing
Till day their sobriety bring:
Parrotwise with Death's reply
From whelping fear and nesting lie,
Woods and their echoes ring.
The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews,
Not to be born is the best for man;
The second-best is a formal order,
The dance's pattern; dance while you can.


Dance, dancefor the figure is easy,
The tune is catching and will not stop;
Dance till the stars come down from the rafters;
Dance, dance, dance till you drop.


1936

Aubade

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what's really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.
The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
- The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused - nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear - no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anasthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small, unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can't escape,
Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

Philip Larkin

Federico

"Pensavo di non essere tagliato per la regia. Mi mancavano il gusto della sopraffazione tirannica, la coerenza, la pignoleria, la capacità di faticare e tante altre cose, ma soprattutto l’autorità. Tutte doti assenti nel mio temperamento. Da bambino ero un tipetto chiuso, solitario, aggredibile, vulnerabilissimo fino allo svenimento. E sono rimasto, checché ne pensi la gente, molto timido. Tutto questo come si poteva combinare con gli stivali, il megafono, l’urlata, le armi tradizionali del cinema? La regia di un film è sempre il comando sulla ciurma di Cristoforo Colombo che vuol tornare indietro."

Federico Fellini | January 20, 1920 — October 31, 1993

spooky action at a distance

"Using a variety of camera formats to affect perception and plane, Jan Groover creates complex, abstract spatial arrangements in her still-life, portrait, and landscape photography. Untitled #1308, a platinum/palladium print on luminous vellum-like paper, aptly demonstrates her craftsmanship in the darkroom with its finely-wrought delicacy. A painter by training, Groover makes reference to art history in her photographs, from Renaissance perspective drawings to Cezanne’s tabletops.

Groover was born in New Jersey in 1943. She received her BFA in 1965 from the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, and her MA from Ohio State University in 1970. Her work has been the subject of one-person exhibitions at the Baltimore Museum of Art; Cleveland Museum of Art; the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; International Museum of Photography, George Eastman House, Rochester, New York; and Museum of Modern Art, New York. She is also the recipient of fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation."

taken from here : http://www.mocp.org/collections/permanent/groover_jan.php

"You will think I am self-opinionated"

Salman Rushdie perspective on her here :
http://artpunjab.deviantart.com/journal/Amrita-Sher-Gil-from-Salman-Rushdie-s-perspective-223563799

uncomplicated

A Poem of Unrest

A Poem of Unrest, by John Ashbery


November 05, 1995


Men duly understand the river of life,

misconstruing it, as it widens and its cities grow

dark and denser, always farther away.

****

And of course that remote denseness suits

us, as lambs and clover might have

if things had been built to order differently.

****

But since I don't understand myself, only segments

of myself that misunderstand each other, there's no

reason for you to want to, no way you could

****

even if we both wanted it. Do those towers even exist?

We must look at it that way, along those lines

so the thought can erect itself, like plywood battlements.

From "Can You Hear, Bird" by John Ashbery. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $20; 175 pp.) 1995 Reprinted by permission.

pictures you take...

"The portrait of the corpse also had its “pictorial” stage, in line with a general trend of fin-de-siècle photography, considered by Roland Barthes as an exaggeration of a prejudice that photography had about itself. And over time, the portrait of the deceased has virtually disappeared with the spreading of photography, since we all store abundant pictures of our living relatives."

This is true...and curious.

I found it here :
http://riowang.blogspot.com/2012/01/dead-bodies-frozen-light.html

Art is difficult

"Art is difficult," says the 66-year-old firmly. "It's not entertainment. There are only a few people who can say something about art – it's very restricted. When I see a new artist I give myself a lot of time to reflect and decide whether it's art or not. Buying art is not understanding art."
Anselm Kiefer talking to The Guardian

a burguesia, sim senhor

Adoro a burguesia e não me via a afirmar isto publicamente nos meus heróicos e idos anos 70...aliás até esse século já se foi, como não haveria eu de ser outro ?!
Voltando à afirmação inicial : adoro a burguesia, a das luzes, a que participou na grande revolução francesa, aquela que quer queiramos quer não, ajudou a criar a Europa tal como a idealizamos, mesmo a América dos nossos sonhos…
Como andamos hoje tão longe destes valores e desta presença de espirito. Voltaremos algum dia à Terra ou continuaremos nesta vida virtual onde nos mantém ?

between heaven and hell

"Basohli Paintings evolved in the 17th and 18th centuries as a distinctive style of painting fusing Hindu mythology, Mughal miniature techniques, and the folk art of the local hills. The painting style derives its name from the place of its origin—the hill town of Basohli. . . in the state of Jammu & Kashmir."
Vinayak Razdan

I found those here :
http://50watts.com/2300847/Fourteen-Basohli-Paintings

A secret bowl of silence

A secret bowl of silence



a word you left unsaid

a kiss you decided not to give

this you kept


a gentle pang in your chest

keeps you company through the nights

this you have


a dwindling light

this you are.

CLASSIFIEDS

CLASSIFIEDS

WHOEVER'S found out what location
compassion (heart's imagination)
can be contacted at these days,
is herewith urged to name the place;
and sing about it in full voice,
and dance like crazy and rejoice
beneath the frail birch that appears
to be upon the verge of tears.

I TEACH silence
in all languages
through intensive examination of:
the starry sky,
the Sinanthropus' jaws,
a grasshopper's hop,
an infant's fingernails,
plankton,
a snowflake.

I RESTORE lost love.
Act now! Special offer!
You lie on last year's grass
bathed in sunlight to the chin
while winds of summers past
caress your hair and seem
to lead you in a dance.
For further details, write: "Dream."

WANTED: someone to mourn
the elderly who die
alone in old folks' homes.
Applicants, don't send forms
or birth certificates.
All papers will be torn,
no receipts will be issued
at this or later dates.

FOR PROMISES made by my spouse,
who's tricked so many with his sweet
colors and fragrances and sounds -
dogs barking, guitars in the streets -
into believing that they still
might conquer loneliness and fright,
I cannot be responsible.
Mr. Day's widow, Mrs. Night.

~ Wislawa Szymborska ~


(Poems New and Collected 1957-1997,
trans. by S. Baranczak and C. Cavanagh)

a life in the shadow

the whole story here :
http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/January-2011/Vivian-Maier-Street-Photographer/

to find perfection

to find perfection you don't need to go far...just pay atention to all that's around you.

be like a lotus flower

"...like a lotus in a dirty pond, be in the world but not of it."

found in Aravind Adiga "Last man in tower"

The Apparent Is the Bridge to the Real

é um novo dia

é um novo dia,
é um novo ano,
é um novo começo,
outra oportunidade de fazermos bem
as coisas,
que acabarão feitas...bem ou mal, mal ou bem

é um novo dia.

Italia

um blog interessante :
http://www.progettoqd-home.blogspot.com/