December 18th offerings

Love is an attribute of God wanting nothing
repentance is an attribute of man, it is a worm
to Love's dragon, absurd in Love's presence.
Love for anything but Him is unreal
for that which is not Him is a gilded object
shining outside yet empty inside,
light and golden on the outside yet dark within.
The moment divine light disappears
darkness is revealed and unreal love
is extinguished like a candle,
the body is discarded and beauty returns to its source.
The moonlight goes back to the moon
and its reflection disappears from the black wall.
Divine Love is the Sun of Perfection
the Divine Word is its Light
and the creatures are its shadow.
~Rumi

You have been caught in the claws of a lion
my friend, do not look for happiness.
Only harshness can defeat the hidden enemy inside you.
A man beating a rug with a stick does not
aim at the rug but at the dust inside it.
Your ego is covered with many dusty veils
you cannot remove them at once.
With each blow, little by little
they will disappear from the face of your heart.
But do not try to escape into sleep
the Beloved's sharp claws will chase you in your dreams.
A carpenter does not carve a piece of wood out of cruelty
but in order to create a beautiful shape.
The harsh hand of the Beloved is a blessing, my friend,
it will refine you and make you pure in the end.
~Rumi

The lover's concern is passion and madness
the charming game the Beloved plays is aloof detachment.
Learn the dance of light from the atoms
learn to jump into the fire like the moth.
Learn to charge like a lion, not sneak like a fox.
Learn to soar like a falcon, not flutter
from flower to flower like a butterfly.
Spring water tastes sweet but is incomparable
to the majesty of the ocean.
Your being is the cup that holds all secrets
do not let them leak through your eyes and ears.
~Rumi

Tree of Lights

Feliz Natal

A lovely reminder of family values.

The warm time being shared by the people in the foreground was as bright as the tree. I'm guessing these ladies are loving daughters, nieces, or friends of the older men in the wheelchairs who they so lovingly were making laugh. 

Beautiful moments, wishes for all.

Poesia dentro e fora

La praia

I didn't need to touch it

because it got in my hair

~
O Palácio

In the silence, in the echoes

I pursue my path

Covert depression

and ripples of revelation

Structures of power as in history

soon discoverable

with the voice

that arose

I discovered

the mechanisms at work

in the brutishness of time memorial

where pain grazed many days after

The start of fresh tears before the dawn

destinies entwined

in his small hand

Time confined to a particle,

its reflection in a fun house mirror

at all hours of the night.
I doggedly made haste

Only through the camera lens

which fell on my body like drops over time
could I comprehend the mark and spasm,
see the soul and what happened to it

Can you believe it?
I ask myself.

In the process it was, I let go

and out of nowhere I'm ready to speak

Can you hear it?

Silence waking up

I didn't know I had been waiting

 

Words seeking light within

Unfolding as if for a friend

Armistice Day in Paris: Crossing Paths with World Leaders

It was raining off and on in Paris last weekend. We took our time with le petit déjeuner and the rain, and made our way to the Louvre, but because of the line, we decided to keep walking and try our luck with the line at the Musée d'Orsay. There we stood under umbrellas, cold and damp.

Then, a voice comes over the intercom announcing that the museum will close at 14h (2pm) due to raisons officielles, although in English they said "special event." It was 12:30pm. As I said to Carol, even if we get in at 1:00 it's still worth it to see the museum, which is itself a historic monument. The old Orsay train station, with its gorgeous original clock, was built in 1900 for the World Fair.

1900, Exposition universelle au bord de la Seine

And today under a gorgeous glass roof....

      ...the Musée d'Orsay houses art from the latter part of the 19th century through WWI. 

As we slowly move up in line while people are being turned away behind us, we hear that Trump is in town and that he and Melania are coming to the Musée d'Orsay, thus the reason it is to close. And when we leave as the museum closes an hour later, we see national security outside with vans and guns, waiting to sweep the museum before the president enters. Carol says what he would appreciate of the museum and I wonder where can one find old tomatoes for sale in the city center.

We were staying in the 8th arrondissement by the Madeleine in the center of the city. With police and closed roads here and there, a major stage set up under the Arc de Triomphe, and flags up the Champs Elysées where we had lunch, it made even more sense when we learned that in fact 72 of the world's leaders were having dinner at the Musée d'Orsay that evening. Those were pretty official reasons for cutting our museum visit short! It was kind of cool, in the end, that the trip I'd planned for my friend's 40th fell on the same weekend as the celebration of the 100th anniversary of the WWI armistice. (That part was not planned!)

And if many were delighted to see a reprint of the Le Figaro from 100 years ago declaring that Germany had surrendered in that morning's edition, we can only imagine the joy and relief of readers back then....

The next day, as we waited in a rainy line once again for the Louvre, three jet planes flew overhead with puffy, faded trails of the French tricolore, bleu, blanc, and rouge. I read that Macron urged world leaders gathered at the Arc de Triomphe to cast off nationalism. Admirable. Later, a young French man would tell me that he doesn't much like Macron. I ask why and he says, taxes. I asked, mais c'est votre système, non? He nodded, wobbling his head. Macron's speech is worth quoting in part as the French president asked how the photos taken that morning would be remembered in the future: "A symbol of lasting peace? Or the last moment of unity before the world falls into disorder? That depends on us."

To the ears that needed to hear it most, and which are perhaps the most deaf of all, Macron said: "Patriotism is the exact opposite of nationalism. Nationalism is a betrayal of patriotism. In saying ‘our interests first, whatever happens to the others,’ you erase the most precious thing a nation can have, that which makes it live, that which causes it to be great and that which is most important: its moral values."

  

Screw tomatoes! These women were much more resourceful.

In his speech, Macron also stated: "Old demons are resurfacing. History sometimes threatens to take its tragic course again and compromise our hope of peace. Let us vow to prioritise peace over everything."

LET'S!

And on a special note, when we'd fly home last monday, a 93-year-old WWII veteran who was invited by the president to the ceremony played the harmonica over the intercom in his pins and leather jacket, dedicating his rendition of the national anthem to pilots, crew, and passengers. It was very touching.

And when a young woman thanked him for his service as we boarded, I overheard him respond: "Thank you for yours!"

Impressionism & Belle Époque Paris

Salon of 1890

Paris of the Belle Époque was imbued with an ethereal quality and gave rise to revolutionary forms of art, music, and literature. The years between 1879 and 1914 bore elements of beauty, innovation, and highly multidisciplinary art forms, a legacy embedded in the ambiance of present-day Paris. The first metro line opened in 1900, daring women exchanged confining skirts for trousers, and artists, writers, and musical composers gathered in cafés and music halls. 

The Gare St-Lazare, Claude Monet (1877)

It was the era of invention—not only of the motion picture and telephone, but also of self-fashioning women who entered the public sphere as writers, actresses, and scientists. Yet if Belle Époque Paris was the center of progress and pleasure, it was also a time of decadence. In contextualizing both the hope and melancholy of the times, we look to Impressionist art for a sense of modern subjectivity as it grapples with changing conceptions of time and beauty. The Impressionists’ audacity to situate the mundane in the visual arts was deeply unpopular in the Belle Époque—a controversy that speaks to the angst underlying modernity as it continually brings about new forms of society and, with it, ways of feeling and seeing.

Today, we may look at serene, light-filled landscapes and portraits by Impressionists like Renoir, Monet, or Pissarro and wonder what is so radical about them. Why did these painters in Paris suffer, even starving at times? Unlike artists of the past who painted or sculpted in exchange for support from kings, popes, or nobility, Impressionists didn't create to endorse the status of any man or institution. They were shockingly autonomous!

Gustave Courbet’s La Rencontre (1875)

Scandalous paintings such as Courbet’s La Rencontre (1875) allow us to understand emerging notions of the artiste libre who makes a forceful break with long practiced arts patronage to make his own artistic choices. Here we see the haughtiness of the artist who looks upon his mécène, Alfred Bruyas, accompanied by his valet and dog. This painting caused a scandal at the universal exposition, where it was described as une manifestation d'un monstrueux orgueil.

Caillebotte’s Les raboteurs de parquet (1854)

In contextualizing Caillebotte’s Les raboteurs de parquet (1854), we can imagine the shock it gave jurors who criticized its “vulgar subject matter” of half-clad, working-class men. 

Argenteuil, Édouard Manet
(1874)

And when Manet submitted Argenteuil (1874) to the Salon, critics ridiculed it for the vivid blue of the water, calling it “too intense” as they preferred the traditional, somber colors of academic painting. In its defense, writer Emile Zola offered this perspective: “Imagine that on the ruins of classical rules and romantic humbug, in the waste of dullness and the impenetrable fog of banality and mediocrity, a tiny flower has sprung up, a green shoot on the old, exhausted stump [….] That is why I feel cheerful when I look at Manet’s works amid those others, reminiscent of decay, that are hung alongside.”

Like Monet and Renoir who worked with tubes of paint and canvas in the open air, Degas, Manet, Pissarro, Morisot, and Gauguin decided artwork would be their own way of seeing the modern world, foregoing mythological, biblical, and aristocratic subjects of the past. This meant a more democratic type of painting, one that arguably mirrors France’s shift from monarchy to republic. What they were painting, how they were painting, and where they were painting were radical. Light changed the appearance of what one saw hour to hour and became an object of study itself as Monet painted haystacks or train stations at various times of the day. Impressionists realized something that John Berger said in the 1970s: “In the end, the art of the past is being mystified because a privileged minority is striving to invent a history which can retrospectively justify the role of the ruling classes, and [seeking] such a justification.” Impressionists invented ways of seeing the present, inviting spectators to engage with change itself, with the modern world, and with reforms in society. In this way, painting became a privileged mode for accessing and witnessing the world.

Un Atelier aux Batignolles, Henri Fantin-Latour (1870) 
Manet painting, with Astuc seated nearby. Standing, from Left to Right:
Scholderer, Renoir, Zola, Maître, Bazille, and Monet

To appreciate Impressionism, we turn to literature, musical composition, and poetry of the Belle Époque as these art forms looked to painting for interplay and innovation in the struggle to represent their experience. Literary movements such as Naturalism, which was also inspired by scientific methods of observation, became interchangeable with Impressionist painting: Zola was an Impressionist with a pen. As Kahnweiler, a well-known art dealer of Cubists Picasso and Braques, said: “Painting is in fact a form of writing.” The French musical composer, Erik Satie, contemporary of the Impressionists, would agree as he said he learned more from painters than he ever did from musicians. Like composers Ravel and Debussy, Satie was seeking new paths in musical expression, a quest predicated by “the necessity for a Frenchman to free himself from the Wagnerian adventure.” In his view, it did not matter whether music made use of methods discovered by Symbolism or Impressionism, so long as one went one’s own way. 

Indeed, the painting in series that Monet invented suggests that our observations of the world are incomplete and that modern life needs constant revision. The Belle Époque marks the awareness of change, and the back-and-forth of the various arts therein allows us to delve deeper into the limitless debate between Classical traditions and modernity.

Monet's study of the portal of the Rouen Cathedral

Bazille's Studio; 9 Rue de la Condamine, Frédéric Bazille (1870)
Left to Right: Renoir (sitting), Zola (on stairs), Manet & Monet next to Bazille

Poetry, musical composition, and paintings of the Belle Époque occasionally hearkened back to the Classical period, a period that--not without coincidence--witnessed the birth of La Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes. In peering from our own viewpoint to the Belle Époque, we exercise historical perspective once again as we look from the Belle Époque back to the early modern period, a time when Louis XIV’s renown was derived by the way he framed his own portraiture with attributes of Apollo, the Greek god of the sun. If seventeenth-century Paris is regarded as a time of high art and renown, it was in part due to its artistic emulation of the high beauty of Classical Greece. In observing how society grafts itself onto previous ones for stability, we see how art embodies the struggle to release the restraints of a heavily coded past and create newer expressions of experience. As Apollinaire wrote in “La jolie rousse” (1919), Pitié pour nous qui combattons toujours aux frontiers de l'illimité et de l’avenir.

Le déjeuner sur l'herbe, Édouard Manet (1863)
The woman looks directly at the viewer, interrogating his or her way of seeing.

A guiding symbol for a discussion of modernity and the shifts it produced is the Eiffel Tower. This iron tower emblematizes the dramatic shift from classical to modern aesthetics, the effects of which toy with notions of time, timelessness, and beauty--as can be sensed in the protests that arose with its construction (1887-89): “We come, writers, painters, sculptors, architects, passionate lovers of the beauty, until now intact, of Paris, to protest with all our force, in the name of threatened French art and history, against the erection, in the very heart of our capital, of the useless and monstrous Eiffel Tower."

Technology and progress inspire disenchantment and nostalgia for former ways of living, sparking questions surrounding identity, culture, and history that merit ongoing discussion. The visual arts serve as an ideal point de départ for comprehending the crossroads of tradition and modernity. In truth, painting maintained a remarkable role in buffering, interrogating, and ultimately forming our modes of seeing. When we look deeper into Impressionist painting and its context, we understand the sacrifice and remarkable passion that these artists demonstrated as seers of the world: They took a decidedly active role in questioning the boundaries set forth by the values of their culture and their time. Still today, their perspectives intimate alternate ways of coping with reality as modernity marches on.

Many thanks to Dalia Judovitz for teaching me about the aesthetics of the visible.

Merci beaucoup

Regarding Tallahassee

In my last post, I found myself tackling an overwhelming issue that many of us deal with at a conscious or subconscious level--processing the overwhelming nature of violence in the headlines. I was kind of wondering why I was writing such a post. Although horrifying news is something I often grapple with, I wasn't quite sure why I was writing about such a hugely vast (not to mention relatively upsetting) topic. Minutes after I hit the publish button, I saw the news on my computer that there was a shooting in a yoga studio in Tallahassee, FL. This struck home for many reasons: I had just written on the topic, thinking of the fear of violence far off coming closer to home as we see in the news, and then I see in the headlines an act of senseless violence against a yoga community in a town that I grew up in as my second home. It was a bit surreal and uncanny. My sisters and I all felt it and the text messages in our group thread began.

Our father's restaurant was in Tallahassee from the 80s up through 2004 or so. My dad had several restaurants and many friends in the community. He was the Italian restaurant of Tallahassee, and made his third and fourth World's Largest Pizza just outside the capitol. Here is a commercial featuring my father and his restaurant to give you a sense of his legacy and love for Tallahassee. I also just found a recent article (from 2014) from the Tallahassee Democrat, (written years after my father left Tallahassee) describing the history surrounding the making of the World's Largest Pizza and his reputation as a bon vivant.

There are funny commercials that I have on video cassette: one of him in a tuxedo running from one restaurant (on Tharpe street) to his other restaurant (on W. Tennessee Street) to the sound of Vivaldi as he balanced a straw bottle of Chianti on a server's tray and red linen. You can see why many people I would meet in Tally admired the character my father was--not to mention his genuine hospitality and the delicious "celebrity pastas." When there was the question surrounding the re-election of George W. Bush, international reporters were at our restaurant. Many respected FSU professors and coaches, as well as senators, would eat there. FSU was also my brother's and my alma mater. It was--and still is--a peaceful, slow, resilient community. 

So, given this family history, given the swaying Spanish moss, sturdy oaks, and canopy roads of this southern town (Tallahassee is "more southern Georgia than Florida" as they say) and given the peacefulness of residing in such a town, it was startling to see Tallahassee associated with such a horrifying tragedy. Of course, the whole point is that these things can happen anywhere.

Yet what also struck me was something my older sister, Nancy, shared--it was a quote from Mr. Rogers, who in fact was quoting his own mother: In any tragedy, you can "look for the helpers." My sister followed this with a blurb about a man who, in his bare feet, charged the shooter and saved other lives that morning. The helpers. They rise up. As I was saying in my last post, people take courage when they have to. 

Soon after the news broke, sixty people gathered in front of the capitol to do yoga in honor of the doctor / owner of the yoga studio who was killed, as well as the young woman too. The beauty of the community practice does not restore the lives of those who were lost, not by any stretch of the imagination. And yet the photo is very poignant given the context, as they take their bodies and hearts to the mat on the pavement, honoring the women whose lives were taken. Here is the incredibly touching photo my sister found in the news:

Tallahassee, FL. November 3, 2018

Two beautiful souls are carrying on their voyage beyond Tallahassee. May they find peace.

"Put flowers in the mud baby"

~U2