22 days ago a wonderful friend offered to send me a daily dose of inspiration, to feed something in me which lays dormant. It has begun to crack the chrysalis
Day 1The artist is the creator of beautiful things. [...] Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Day 2
...ex-lovers, all lined up on the mantle piece...Day 3
Entry no. 42
The tortoise is a funny creature. Its protection is so disproportionately heavy that it has lost all sense of speed. It is a wonder that anything with such an impenetrable shell can even open itself up to love. And yet somehow there is always a way into the heart of even the toughest customer. The tortoise will, eventually, lift up its shell and let its partner in... Danny Scheinemann, Random Acts of Heroic Love
Day 4
The tortoise is a funny creature. Its protection is so disproportionately heavy that it has lost all sense of speed. It is a wonder that anything with such an impenetrable shell can even open itself up to love. And yet somehow there is always a way into the heart of even the toughest customer. The tortoise will, eventually, lift up its shell and let its partner in... Danny Scheinemann, Random Acts of Heroic Love
My words fly up, my thoughts remain below.
Shakespeare, Hamlet
Like slipping stitches
or unmaking a bed
or rain from tiles,
they come tumbling off:
green dress, pale stockings,
loose silk – like mown grass
or blown roses,
subsiding in little heaps
and holding for a while
a faint perfume – soap,
warm skin – linking
these soft replicas of self.
And why stop there?
Why not like an animal,
a seed, a fruit, go on
to shed old layers of moult,
snakeskin, seed-husk, pelt
or hard green-walnut coat,
till all the roughnesses
of knocking age
are lost and something
soft, unshelled, unstained
emerges blinking
into open ground?
And perhaps in time
this slow undoing will arrive
at some imagined core,
some dense and green-white bud,
weightless, untouchable.
Yes. It will come,
that last let-fall of garment,
nerve, bright hair and bone –
the rest is earth,
casements of air,
close coverings of rain,
the casual sun.
Beatrice Garland
Shakespeare, Hamlet
Day 5
undressing
Like slipping stitches
or unmaking a bed
or rain from tiles,
they come tumbling off:
green dress, pale stockings,
loose silk – like mown grass
or blown roses,
subsiding in little heaps
and holding for a while
a faint perfume – soap,
warm skin – linking
these soft replicas of self.
And why stop there?
Why not like an animal,
a seed, a fruit, go on
to shed old layers of moult,
snakeskin, seed-husk, pelt
or hard green-walnut coat,
till all the roughnesses
of knocking age
are lost and something
soft, unshelled, unstained
emerges blinking
into open ground?
And perhaps in time
this slow undoing will arrive
at some imagined core,
some dense and green-white bud,
weightless, untouchable.
Yes. It will come,
that last let-fall of garment,
nerve, bright hair and bone –
the rest is earth,
casements of air,
close coverings of rain,
the casual sun.
Beatrice Garland
Day 6
Life itself is not reality. We are the ones who put life into stones and pebbles.
Frederick Sommer
Day 7
Never, never, never give up. Winston Churchill
Day 8
Today is just a list of some favourite words:
humbug, vexed, bonnet, bumblebee, azure, candlewick, hedgehog, serendipity, wearisome, arse, honeysuckle, blizzard, goliath,
onamatapoeia,foppery,mellifluous....
Day 9
So like a forgotten fire, a childhood can always flare up again within us. Gaston Bachelard
Day 10
Inspired by last night's talk of new prospects - one of sylvia's photographs
Day 11
One may not reach the dawn save by the path of the night. Germaine Greer
Day 12
Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart. William Wordsworth
Day 13
It was dark by the time I reached Bonn, and I forced myself not to succumb to the series of mechanical actions which had taken hold of me in five years of traveling back and forth: down the station steps, up the station steps, put down my suitcase, take my ticket out of my coat pocket, pick up my suitcase, hand in my ticket, cross over to the newsstand, buy the evening papers, go outside, and signal for a taxi. Heinrich Böll, The Clown (Ansichten eines Clowns)
Day 14
How does a project mature?
It is obviously a most mysterious,
imperceptible process.
It carries on independently of ourselves,
in the subconscious,
crystallizing on the walls of the soul.
It is the form of the soul
that makes it unique,
indeed only the soul decides
the hidden 'gestation period' of that image
which cannot be perceived
by the conscious gaze.
Andrej Tarkovsky
It is obviously a most mysterious,
imperceptible process.
It carries on independently of ourselves,
in the subconscious,
crystallizing on the walls of the soul.
It is the form of the soul
that makes it unique,
indeed only the soul decides
the hidden 'gestation period' of that image
which cannot be perceived
by the conscious gaze.
Andrej Tarkovsky
Day 15
Forgotten Narratives 1 of 2 - one of sylvia's photographs
Day 1s
Forgotten Narratives 2 of 2 - another of sylvia's photographs
Day 17
Dare to err and to dream. Deep meaning often lies in childish plays. Friederich Schiller
Day 18
a little passage from Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca:
Packing up. The nagging worry of departure. Lost key, unwritten labels, tissue paper lying on the floor. I hate it all. Even now, when I have done so much of it, when I live, as the saying goes, in my boxes. Even today, when shutting drawers and flinging wide a hotel wardrobe, or the impersonal shelves of a furnished villa, is a methodical matter of routine, I am aware of sadness of a sense of loss. Here, I say, we have lived, we have been happy. This has been ours, how ever brief the time. Two nights only have been spent beneath the roof, yet we leave something of ourselves behind. Nothing material, not an hair-pin on a dressing-table, not an empty bottle of Aspirin tablets, not a handkerchief beneath a pillow, but something indefinable, a moment of our lives, a thought, a mood.
This house sheltered us, we spoke, we loved within those walls. That was yesterday. Today we pass on, we see it no more, and we are different, changed in some infinitesimal way. We can never be quite the same again. Even stopping for luncheon at a wayside inn, and going to a dark, unfamiliar room to wash my hands, the handle of the door unknown to me, the wallpaper peeling in strips, a funny little cracked mirror above the basin; for this moment, it is mine, it belongs to me. We know one another. This is the present. There is no past and no future. Here I am washing my hands, and the cracked mirror shows me to myself, suspended as it were, in time; this is me, this moment will not pass.
And then I open the door and go to the dining-room, where he is sitting waiting for me at a table and I think how in that moment I have aged, passed on, how I have advanced one step towards an unknown destiny. We smile, we choose our lunch, we speak of this and that, but - I say to myself - I am not she who left him five minutes ago.She stayed behind. I am another woman, older, more mature . . .
Packing up. The nagging worry of departure. Lost key, unwritten labels, tissue paper lying on the floor. I hate it all. Even now, when I have done so much of it, when I live, as the saying goes, in my boxes. Even today, when shutting drawers and flinging wide a hotel wardrobe, or the impersonal shelves of a furnished villa, is a methodical matter of routine, I am aware of sadness of a sense of loss. Here, I say, we have lived, we have been happy. This has been ours, how ever brief the time. Two nights only have been spent beneath the roof, yet we leave something of ourselves behind. Nothing material, not an hair-pin on a dressing-table, not an empty bottle of Aspirin tablets, not a handkerchief beneath a pillow, but something indefinable, a moment of our lives, a thought, a mood.
This house sheltered us, we spoke, we loved within those walls. That was yesterday. Today we pass on, we see it no more, and we are different, changed in some infinitesimal way. We can never be quite the same again. Even stopping for luncheon at a wayside inn, and going to a dark, unfamiliar room to wash my hands, the handle of the door unknown to me, the wallpaper peeling in strips, a funny little cracked mirror above the basin; for this moment, it is mine, it belongs to me. We know one another. This is the present. There is no past and no future. Here I am washing my hands, and the cracked mirror shows me to myself, suspended as it were, in time; this is me, this moment will not pass.
And then I open the door and go to the dining-room, where he is sitting waiting for me at a table and I think how in that moment I have aged, passed on, how I have advanced one step towards an unknown destiny. We smile, we choose our lunch, we speak of this and that, but - I say to myself - I am not she who left him five minutes ago.She stayed behind. I am another woman, older, more mature . . .
Day 19
Every person's story is written plainly on his face, though not everyone can read it... August Sander
Day 20
The Sleepers
No map traces the street
Where those two sleepers are.
We have lost track of it.
They lie as if under water
In a blue, unchanging light,
The French window ajar
Curtained with yellow lace.
Through the narrow crack
Odors of wet earth rise.
The snail leaves a silver track;
Dark thickets hedge the house.
We take a backward look.
Among petals pale as death
And leaves steadfast in shape
They sleep on, mouth to mouth.
A White mist is going up.
The small green nostrils breathe,
And they turn in their sleep.
Ousted from that warm bed
We are a dream they dream.
Their eyelids keep the shade.
No harm can come to them.
We cast out skins and slide
Into another time.
Sylvia Plath
No map traces the street
Where those two sleepers are.
We have lost track of it.
They lie as if under water
In a blue, unchanging light,
The French window ajar
Curtained with yellow lace.
Through the narrow crack
Odors of wet earth rise.
The snail leaves a silver track;
Dark thickets hedge the house.
We take a backward look.
Among petals pale as death
And leaves steadfast in shape
They sleep on, mouth to mouth.
A White mist is going up.
The small green nostrils breathe,
And they turn in their sleep.
Ousted from that warm bed
We are a dream they dream.
Their eyelids keep the shade.
No harm can come to them.
We cast out skins and slide
Into another time.
Sylvia Plath
Day 21
"A cultivated woman - a woman of breeding and intelligence - can enrich a man's life immeasurably. I have those things to offer, and time doesn't take them away. Physical beauty is passing - transitory possession - but beauty of the mind, richness of the spirit, tenderness of the heart - I have all those things - aren't taken away but grow! Increase with the years!"
Blanche DuBois' (Vivien Leigh) in A Streetcar Named Desire
Blanche DuBois' (Vivien Leigh) in A Streetcar Named Desire
Day 22
Everyone chases after happiness, not noticing that happiness is right at their heels. Bertholt Brecht