THE HOLY LONGING Part I - A Diary of Beauty & Bella da Morire

All roads start from the body and lead back to it.

The Body is the Road - Edmond Jabès, Egyptian Poet   
 

Chateau de la  Mercerie, Magnac-Lavalette  - The stage before arrival of  French-Irish band, Dagan - May 2015

The Holy Longing

Tell a wise person or else keep silent,

because the mass man will mock it right away.

I praise what is truly alive,

what longs to be burned to death. 

In the calm water of love-nights,

where you were begotten, where you have begotten.

a strange feeling comes over you,

when you see the silent candle burning.

Now you are no longer caught in the obsession with darkness,

and a desire for higher love-making sweeps you upward.

Distance does not make you falter.

Now, arriving in magic, flying,

and finally, insane for the light,

you are the butterfly and you are gone.

And so long as you haven't experienced this: to die and so to grow,

you are only a troubled guest on the dark earth.  

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, translated from the Germany by Robert Bly

Invocation - Dagan

Italian Tile - Chateau de la Mercerie

Often, I feel like a "troubled guest" upon this earth.  Oh, what to do, what to do? Another cappuccino? glass of wine? Episode of  "House of Cards?"  In French, the word for guest is invité, an endearing word, because it means to be invited.  We are not merely hungry guests or ghosts upon this earth. We received an invitation, which we accepted.  We belong here, for awhile. 

The gorgeous poet, Seamus Heaney said, (paraphrasing), we dwell in the fantasy world as well as the "get-up and at "em" day to day, and if we dwell too much in either one, it's not good.  My antidote:  A Diary of Beauty, wherever you happen upon it.  And beauty is on offer everywhere; cracked and spider-webbed statues, an old dog in the sun, hay bales, wheat fields, a tangle of poppies, cows and cascading roses, or pawing through Leondard da Vinci's Notebooks.  Among his lists of drawings, between Gian Francesco Borso and some completed nude figures, lies several old women's throats.

If only Nora Ephron had seen those drawings, she wouldn't have had to write a whole book about her crinkling neck.  But I'm glad she did.  She made us laugh over and over about our human foibles and especially the vanties of women.  We miss you Nora, your brazen humor and bedazzling brain.

"...the amount of maintenance involving hair is genuinely overwhelming.  Sometimes I think that not having to worry about your hair anymore is the secret upside of death."
  ― Nora Ephron, I Feel Bad about My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman

Found on blessedwildapplegirl.Tumblr.com

This Algerian woman doesn't look worried about her neck.  During the late 50's and 60's, many Algerian women tattooed their faces and necks (during the War of Independence) to appear unattractive and thus avoid rape by French soldiers.  How times have changed - as far as tattoos are concerned. 

Bodnant Gardens, Wales - Sphinx-like Statue

 

Fountain Head, Chateau de la Rochefoucauld

 

Statue at Canal Terrace, Bodnant Gardens, Wales

 

 DUINO ELEGIES 

Ranier Maria Rilke

FIRST ELEGY

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angelic Orders?

and what if one of them would suddenly take me to his heart:

I would fade away in his stronger presence. Because beauty is

nothing else but the beginning of terror, which we are just able

to bear, and we are stunned by it because it so serenely disdains to

destroy us. Each Angel is terrifying... 

Angel, Montparnasse Cemetery, Paris

Swimming Angel - Palazzo Pitti, Florence Italy

Bandes Dessinées Angel, side of building - Angouleme, France

"...Angels (they say) often do not know, whether they are moving among the living or the dead.  The never-ending torrent relentlessly tosses all epochs through both realms forever, and drowns out their voices in both."  First Elegy

Many many moons ago, when I lived in New York, I would wander into the Metropolitan Museum - the wing where they house the collection of Egyptian artifacts. I would sit amongst the Mummies & Daddies (Sarcophagi) for long afternoons.  I know it sounds morbid, but it wasn't.  It was a cool, marble home away from home. It was the detailed gems that often caught my attention, e.g., a small, ivory comb decorated with rows of wild animals.  Embarrassed to admit I had been watching the "Mummy" movies, the originals with Lon Chaney, Jr. (also Wolfman) and Boris Karloff, followed by

the Hammer Studio Horror series with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee.  I never really became addicted to them as I did to Frankenstein and Count Dracula, but they were just spooky enough to make the heart race, and to imagine that there was an encased mummy a few feet from where I was sitting.  I kept waiting for a scratching or scraping sound from the false lid: the mummy board.  It's fun to scare yourself sometimes.   

The language of Ancient Egypt didn't have vowels.  It was called Kmt.  An aside:  for some odd reason, I got it in my head that the Austrian, Gustav Klimt, was a throwback from Egyptian times?! But, it may not be so farfetched, as Klimt used Greek & Egyptian motifs in many of his paintings and friezes.

Pallas Athene - Vienna, 1898

His image of Pallas Athena, derived from the classical forms, is one of his most compelling, with the emphasis on her divinity - a Goddess with masculine powers - as opposed to the sexuality of his Nuda Veritas.  The desire for power strongly connected to sexual desire.

The inscription on top of  Nuda:  If you can't please many with your deeds and your art, please only few.  To please many is bad.  Schiller

Klimt - Nuda Veritas, 1899

The Greeks called the people from Kmt, Aegyptos, their culture, "Kemetic".  They didn't believe in death, but rather that we were always coming back and forth from the unknown to the actual.  And the translation of the ancient, funerary Egyptian Papyrus, commonly known as, "The Book of the Dead" is more accurately translated:  "Book of Coming Forth by Day".  Hey, you don't know whether you're coming or going.   That's a line from Lil' Wayne song, featuring Bruno Mars. 

I do digress.  Back to my "Diary of Beauty."
                                                                      

Chateau de Charras - May, 2015

"...Yes, the Spring-time needed you for sure. Many stars waited for you, so that you'd notice them.  A wave from the past swelled up for you, or, as you passed by an open window, a violin presented itself to you."  First Elegy

PIED BEAUTY

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Village of Charras, Wood Sculpture

 Glory be to God for dappled things –

   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

      For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

   Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;

      And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

                                Praise him.

  

Hay Bales - Grassac

Guiness at Le Pontilou

The Siesta - Vincent Van Gogh

"...And distant places give us refuge in territories where our own histories aren't so deeply entrenched, and we can imagine other stories, other selves, just drink up quiet and respite...the bigness of the world is redemption..."  Rebecca Solnit from, The Faraway, Nearby

Beauty gives me a sense of belonging, not to any particular group or religion, or even to family and friends, but to life itself. The poet, Robert Haas, said "to learn not to be a stranger is the burden of the Duino Elegies."  What makes me feel like I belong here is seeing laundry drying in the sun; or sharing a moment of mutual joy with the cashier from Grand Frais over an extravagant head of Italian lettuce and a tomato.

In Beauty and the Soul, Piero Ferruci describes "Bella da morire - Beautiful to die for.  A feeling we have when we come face-to-face with beauty, we feel ready to die, as though we have now seen and felt all that is worth seeing and feeling.  We perceive beauty because we are free from worry and regret, or discontent.  We feel so complete and fulfilled, happy almost beyond capacity, we could die at that moment.  It springs from an intense love of life and a state of total surrender, which, by one of the strange paradoxes of beauty, allow us, as we say in Italy, to exclaim:  'Bella da morire'."

La Quinta at La Grande Metairie

I had a true bella da morire experience long ago, hiking in the Ventana Wilderness with my girlfriend.  We became lost for over three days, bushwacking thru brambles and bushes, running out of water in 100 degree temps. At twilight on the fourth night  (with all hope of rescue gone) a couple of moist swallows left, (shades of "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre"), I felt a sense of peace and quiet ecstasy settle on me as the warm breezes danced around the Madrones.  I'm ready to die, I told my friend.  I hasten to add, she was not ready to join me!  In the end, we found water and I shed another skin. I'm glad I didn't die then, there was so much more I would have missed. 

And now it's time for another adventure in shedding skins - The Chariot is waiting, the Wheel of Fortune is Spinning and the Karmic Key of Destiny is at hand.   Once the Chariot starts moving there is no turning back.  It's my Hermit year & Pallas Athena is at my side, along with a whole cast of guides and wonderful characters. I'm blessed with many Anam Caras (soul friends) and wise owls.

I'm vanishing into pencil dust & ink smudged notebooks - "of all the paths you take in life make sure some of them are dirt." Unknown

"I'm insane for the light"

A poem my brother, Mark, wrote for me; I will keep it close at hand.  

Three Things

The Wind, the Water and the

Moon.

Cards in the deck of

Infinity.

You, crooked smile, subtle

hands, wise, illuminated, and

windblown.

Rain visits you, like

tears, like a

baptism.

But it is always the

Moon that reminds me of

you.

Silver when it wishes and

amber and

yellow and even

blue.

You turn the night into

kindness.

You bring the

tides home and send them

out again to visit the

oceans. You consummate the

air.

Moon. Water.

Wind.

Light. Truth.

Love.

These are the cards that I see in your

eyes. In your

touch. In your

smile.

Stone head in wall at La Grande Metairie

Poetry makes nothing happen.  It survives in the valley of its saying.

W.H. Auden

Tree Love - Jaume Plensa - Yorkshire Sculpture Park

Beauty is the true Priestess of individuation - John O' Donohue, Irish Poet

To be continued in:   "The Holy Longing in Cumbria - Part II  - Divine Thoughts & Augurs, Omens, Murmurations" coming soon.  I'm taking a "poetry dream-ladder to God." 

"Something moves without moving"  - Lazaris

ARRETEZ, REGARDEZ, ECOUTEZ - Moths Drinking the Tears of Sleeping Birds

There's grace in the mundane -

Twenty scarecrows in the fields of Rougnac, a few kilometers down the road.  Only the French would take the time to dress up a load of sticks and hay.
                      
                                             

SNAIL

I stuck to the road,

fell under the tire's spell!

Fuji climb cancelled.

Homage to Kobayaski Issa, master Haiku poet

Selfie with Sheep - Le Pontilou

I'm a myopic introvert wandering around the campagne. 

Somebody could use a new coat

New born - Le Pontilou

                             

The spring lambs were consorting and cavorting in the lush greenness.  Tiny ones in the fields, mewling and glassy eyed, startled at their own birth.  There was a cacophony of country sounds converging...hum of bees, the insistent Cuckoo, church bells, barking dogs on a hunt, a tractor several fields over, roosters crowing, bird songs I couldn't identify and beneath it all, murmur of wind. It was the first time in my life i heard "sound" itself, layered like a parfait, nothing taking dominance.  A small orchestra, all playing the same Chorale tuned to the key of spring.

Welcome to the World

The scent of wild coriander was all along the roads, but I could never track the plants down.  I came across a herd of cows in Le Grande Brassac.

As I rode my bike along the fence, a large group of calves chased me for a a few meters. I stopped my bike and faced them. Staring, clumped together, they came closer and closer, but not too close to the clôture électrique. We knew, two-legged and four-leggeds, what could happen!  Communion with calves, a singular moment.  Then they went back to their "nursery". Fat hawk on spool of hay kept watch.

Maybe because Dad showed up

The lad below was by himself in a field near the cows - low maintenance livestock.

The Eighth Elegy (a portion of)

With all their eyes the creatures gaze into the Openness.

But our eyes are as if reversed and completely encirled it

like snares, obstructing its free movement.

What is out there, we know only from the faces of animals;

because early on we make the infant turn around and make him

look backwards to see what was in the past rather than the 

Openness, that lies so deep in the faces of animals.  Free from

death. We, alone, see that; the free animal always has its destruction

behind and god in front of it, and when it moves, it moves in eternity,

like a flowing spring.  We never have, not even for a single day, that

pure space in front of us, in which the flowers endlessly unfold...

Rainer Maria Rilke - from the Duino Elegies

 April showers brought May flowers and the Great Peacock/Emperor Moth, saturnia pyri.  In french it is called le grand paon de nuit.  Supposedly it is extinct in many parts of Europe, so it is a joy to see one and have it look back at you with those eyes. 

Le Grand Paon de Nuit

The moth brought back memories of the year we lived in a Gare (old railway station) in Savigny-sous-Faye, the Vienne. It was quite rustic, and we were helping with the renovations.  I had a room/office on the second floor with elegant floor to ceiling windows, but no curtains or screens. In the day time, the hornets, bees, flies & acrobatic spiders would join me. If I was lucky a praying mantis might show up.  On hot summer nights I would leave the windows open, and all manner of night creatures would fly in, but mostly bats and moths. It was a little like being in a Guillermo del Toro film - Pan's Labyrinth.

Pan's Labyrinth Screen Shot

I didn't mind the moths so much; they have the power of the whirlwind, the ease of movement in the shadows and the big ticket items of  transformation/metamorphosis, plus the Voyante's stock and trade: hearing spoken and unspoken messages. On the other hand, there is an old German myth that if a bat flies into your house, the devil is after you.  I felt like Tippi Hedren in the "Birds".  One night after falling asleep near my laptop,  hundreds of moths flew in.  When I awoke, there were strange little jewels all over my laptop.  They looked like tiny pearls.  Eventually I realized they were moth eggs.  I took some photos, but they are long gone, along with that laptop.  

Here is a better photo from Charles Krebs:

Moth Eggs

I read a piece in Rebecca Solnit's, The Faraway Nearby a while back, about moths drinking the tears of sleeping birds.  Some moths feed at the eyes of deer and elephants, water buffalo.  "There are crocodile tears and moths that feed upon them.  In the forests of Southeast Asia several species feed at the eyes of human beings."  This was documented by entomologist Hans Banziger, and reported in Remarkable New Cases of Moths Drinking Human Tears in Thailand.

Butterflies/bees drinking crocodile tears from Caiman - Photo Carlos de la Rosa

"He photographed one drinking from his own right eye with its furry wings outspread, looking like a tremendous tear or a misplaced brooch or a flower petal, an ornament invading his face...the word for teardrinkers is lachryphagous."  Solnit tied this together elegantly, connecting feeding on sorrow, heartbreak, empathy, pop songs, delicate grief, sadness, the blue like dusk, with the reminder that all things are ephemeral.  But all I could think of (with a shiver) was what else those moths were doing all night long besides laying eggs.  I do remember my eyes felt rather dry. 
                               

Back to the mundane. 

Rhubarb from Jacs garden

 

At my own kitchen window this morning, a friend's gift of early rhubarb simmering away, I thought of how rhubarb was traditionally harvested by candlelight in the forcing sheds in the UK, to get the sweetest, tenderest stalks; I then thought of all the writing that gets done in the "dark" by candlelight, or the silvery light of the moon.  Though more likely by the blue light of the computer screen. We're  rendering one way or another.  "Rendering" - a word with many meanings.  In French, it usually means covering up a beautiful old stone wall with plaster, or processing/melting down the carcass of an animal.  


Blossoms arrived on schedule this spring...

Our secret garden

We threw some parties in the Cherry Orchard; it was like a Chekhov play without the Russians.

The Usual Suspects

Lady Sara & Jodie

 
 All Russia is our orchard. The earth is so wide, so beautiful, so full of wonderful places. Just think, Anya. Your grandfather, your great-grandfather and all your ancestors owned serfs, they owned human souls. Don't you see that from every cherry-tree in the orchard, from every leaf and every trunk, men and women are gazing at you? if we're to start living in the present isn't it abundantly clear that we've first got to redeem our past and make a clean break with it? And we can only redeem it by suffering and getting down to real work for a change. Chekhov

The Party's Over

Sundown in the Orchard

Getting down to real work for a change...I read Tarot at the Spring fayre at Le Marquisat again this year and Jake & John made me my own Tarot Casbah.  It was raining, but I was tucked in the back of the garden with all the geese, horses, dogs, self-important chickens, gargoyle presiding over it all. I had a conga line of clients, so it was a wonderful day. 

Jake holding down the fort

Reading for Belle Italianne, Monica

Self-important chicken

In May I was invited to read at Le Perroquet Vert spring fayre in Chalais.  It was another rainy day and not a great turnout, but as my English grandfather, George Bray, was fond of saying:  "Some days chickens, some days feathers."

My companion at Le Marquisat

Pomegranate on Stone - Persephone's Gift

Gaston Bachelard on Doors, from "The Poetics of Space":
"On May nights when so many doors are closed, there is one that is just barely ajar. We have only to give it a very slight push! The hinges have been well oiled. And our Fate becomes visible."

*Watch for the Strawberry Moon (called the Rose Moon in Europe) June 2nd, aka flower moon, honey moon, planting moon, hot moon.  The June full moons so named by the North American native Algonquin tribes, signaling that the strawberries were ready to be picked (strawberries not native to Europe, hence the Rose Moon).  We'll be picking cherries!

Rose Moon over Rome 2013 - Fillipo Monteforte, Getty Images