hope

"Mahler is matter-of-fact even in the supreme metaphysical sense, in that he jettisoned the aesthetic illusion of meaningful totality which no longer existed, if indeed it ever did. Mahler, whose uncompromising spirituality separated him from the hedonism of his age, from Debussy and from Strauss and whose mind selflessly strove to conceive of something that goes beyond mere existence - Mahler discovered the impossibility of such a task simply by refusing to be deflected from his path. A metaphysician like no other composer since Beethoven, he made the impossibility of metaphysics his central belief, even while battering his head against the brick wall this represented. His world, like that of his compatriot Franz Kafka, is a world infinitely full of hope, although not for us."

- Adorno, Quasi una Fantasia

heads

More tears are shed over answered prayers than over unanswered prayers.

- St. Teresa of Avila

Guest entry by Anne Gibbs of THE LOST SOCIETY OF COLLECTORS
http://lostsocietyofcollectors.blogspot.com/

friendship

"Friendship cannot be separated from reality any more than the beautiful. It is a miracle, like the beautiful. And the miracle consists simply in the fact that it exists."



"The essence of created things is to be intermediaries. They are intermediaries leading from one to the other, and there is no end to this."



"…It is necessary to be dead in order to see things in their nakedness."


Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

- Guest entry by Louise Despont

What seems paradoxical about everything that is justly called beautiful is the fact that it appears.

- Benjamin, Schriften I, 349

saints

Josephine's road, however, must go downhill. The time will soon come when her last notes sound and die into silence. She is a small episode in the eternal history of our people, and the people will get over the loss of her. Not that it will be easy for us; how can our gatherings take place in utter silence? Still, were they not silent even when Josephine was present? Was her actual piping notably louder and more alive than the memory of it will be? Was it not rather because Josephine's singing was already past losing in this way that our people in their wisdom prized it so highly? So perhaps we shall not miss her so much after all, while Josephine, redeemed from earthly sorrows which to her thinking lay in wait for all chosen spirits, will happily lose herself in the numberless throng of the heroes of our people, and soon, since we are no historians, will rise to the heights of redemption and be forgotten like all her brothers.

(Kafka, Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk)

Image: The dancer Wera Ouckama Knoop, whose sudden illness and death at the age of 19 inspired Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus.

ponies

The midnight, the morning, or the middle of day,

Is the same to the miner who labors away.

Where the demons of death often come by surprise,

One fall of the slate and you're buried alive.

Merle Travis - Dark as a dungeon (additional stanza, rarely performed...)

closing doors

Eilidh, Eilidh, Eilidh, heart of me, dear and sweet
In dreams I am hearing the whisper, the sound of your running feet
that like the sea-hoofs beat a music by day and night, Eilidh,
On the sands of my heart, my sweet.

O sands, of my heart, what wind moans low along thy shadowy shore?
Is that the deep seaheart I hear with the dying sob at its core?
Each dim lost wave that lapses is like a closing door:
'Tis closing doors they hear at last who soon shall hear no more,
who soon, soon shall hear no more, my grief, no more!
Eilidh, Eilidh, Eilidh!

Come home to the heart of me! 'tis pain I am having ever,
Eilidh, the pain that will not be.
Come home, come home, for closing doors are like the waves of the sea;
once closed, they are closed forever,
Eilidh, lost lost, lost for you and me.

"...and love, though in a sense it may be admitted to be stronger than death, is by no means so universal and so sure. In fact, love is rare - the love of men. of things, of ideas, the love of perfected skill. For love is the enemy of haste; it takes count of passing days, of men who pass away, of fine art matured slowly in the course of years and doomed in a short time to pass away, too, and be no more."

Joseph Conrad, The Mirror of the Sea

overcome

Nothing, for us, can fill the place of undiminished brightness except the unconscious dark, nothing that of what once we might have been, except the dream that we had never been born.

- Adorno, Minima Moralia

When we are no longer children, we are already dead.
-Brancusi

substitutes

At first sight I really believed that the only reminders in the Piana graveyard of the nature which, we have always hoped, will endure long after our own end, were the artificial purple, mauve, and pink flowers, obviously pressed upon their customers by French undertakers, made of silk or nylon chiffon, of brightly painted porcelain, wire, and metal appearing not so much a sign of enduring affection as the final emergence of a kind of proof that, despite all assurances to the contrary, we offer our dead only the cheapest substitute for the diverse beauty of life.

-Sebald, Campo Santo

2)
The positive element of kitsch lies in the fact that it sets free for a moment the glimmering realization that you have wasted your life.

- Adorno, Quasi una Fantasia

today is my birthday!
hp

masks

"We have art that we may not perish of the truth."

- Friedrich Nietzsche

The cuckoo

The cuckoo is a merry bird, she sings as she flies,
She brings us good tidings and tells us no lies;
She sucks the sweet flowers to make her sing clear,
And she never sings "cuckoo" till summer is near.

O meeting is a pleasure, but parting a grief,
An inconstant lover is worse than a thief;
For a thief will but rob you and swear to be true,
And the very next moment they'll bring you to the grave.

The grave it will rot you and bring you to dust,
There is not one in twenty young men girls can trust;
They will kiss you, and court you and swear to be true,
And the very next moment they'll bid you adieu.

Come all you young women wherever you be,
Build your nest in the top of a tree;
For the leaves they will wither, the branches decay,
And the beauty of fair maids will soon fade away.

- Folk song from Sussex

toys

"All children talk to their toys. The toys become actors in the great drama of life, reduced in size by the camera obscura of their little brains. The child twists and turns his toy, scratches it, shakes it, bumps it against the walls, throws it on the ground. From time to time he makes it restart its mechanical motions, sometimes in the opposite direction. Its marvelous life comes to a stop. The child, like the people besieging the Tuileries, makes s supreme effort; at last he opens it up, he is the stronger. But where is the soul? This is the beginning of melancholy and gloom."

- Charles Baudelaire

2)

"Talent is perhaps nothing other than successfully sublimated rage, the capacity to convert energies once intensified beyond measure to destroy recalcitrant objects, into the concentration of patient observation, so keeping as tight a hold on the secret of things, as one had earlier when finding no peace until the quavering voice had been wrenched from the mutilated toy."

- Adorno, Minima Moralia

Actaeon out hunting chances upon the goddess Diana
and her nymphs bathing; furious, she changes him into
a stag; his own dogs no longer know him and tear him
apart.

debris

"All could be well, but in fact all is lost."

- L'ARGENT
- Adorno, 'Mahler'

the good wound

Among the great tragedies of childhood, De Quincey included that of the little boy's lips forever separated from his sister's kisses. Men with no sisters also share in this tragedy. Gloomy, incessant death of the sister in Munch's paintings. (Without a dead sister, abandoned lifeless at the foot of a distant staircase, a man cannot rediscover in the dark his sister's lips, the good wound happy to start bleeding again.) At its most ethereal and imaginative, a sister's wedding reaches the deepest endogamic intensity; it makes us feel as if our ties with Chaos and the contracted universe cannot be undone.

- Guido Ceronetti

image from the very fine batsandswallows.blogspot.com

"We were happy, all of us, but that was all."


Image via Anne of White Mule Picture Frames (wmpf.blogspot.com)

Thanks.

asleep in scotland

The Cotard delusion, also known as nihilistic or negation delusion, is a rare neuropsychiatric disorder in which a person holds a delusional belief that he or she is dead, does not exist, is putrefying or has lost his/her blood or internal organs.

Rarely, it can include delusions of immortality.
It is named after Jules Cotard (1840–1889), a French neurologist who first described the condition, which he called le délire de négation ("negation delirium"), in a lecture in Paris in 1880.
Young and Leafhead (1996, p155) describe a modern-day case of Cotard delusion in a patient who suffered brain injury after a motorcycle accident:
“ [The patient's] symptoms occurred in the context of more general feelings of unreality and being dead. In January, 1990, after his discharge from a hospital in Edinburgh, his mother took him to South Africa. He was convinced that he had been taken to hell (which was confirmed by the heat), and that he had died of septicaemia (which had been a risk early in his recovery), or perhaps from AIDS (he had read a story in The Scotsman about someone with AIDS who died from septicaemia), or from an overdose of a yellow fever injection.
He thought he had "borrowed my mother's spirit to show me round hell", and that he was asleep in Scotland. ”

- from wikipedia