‘Double Moon’
@sedsemperamor
November 2013
“The moon lives in the lining of your skin”
‘Ode to a Beautiful Nude’, Pablo Neruda
“Double moonshine
These hidden universes
Tremble in my hand”
@sedsemperamor, November 2013
Metamorphosis, Central Park
@sedsemperamor
April 2009
“At no other time does the earth let itself be inhaled in one smell, the ripe earth…
Containing depth within itself, darkness, something of the grave”
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Cezanne
At the autumnal equinox, the winds and waves highlight the changes occurring in the natural world. Autumn stands poised between “mellow fruitfulness” and withering decay, a seasonal reminder of death in life and life in death. Let us, dear reader, pause from our daily routine, step into this season and take a moment together.
“My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
…Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?
…There they were, dignified, invisible,
Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves,
In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air”
T.S.Eliot, The Four Quartets
For all of us, grief, loss and separation is a part of the solemn, natural rhythm of life. The falling leaves, darkening hours, grey skies and chilling, autumnal atmosphere can be an external reflection of inner turmoil and sorrow.
“It is autumn. The leaves are falling from the trees like burning tears – the wind howls. Why must you mimic them?”
Mervyn Peake, Titus Groan
A weariness of life, a lack of interest or enthusiasm, a darkness of heart can be exacerbated by an autumnal frame of mind:
“My way of life
“No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace
As I have seen in one autumnal face.”
John Donne, Elegy IX
The delicate, autumnal balance is beautifully captured by the fertile mind of our beloved e.e. cummings in his poem, ‘a wind has blown the rain away’
“a wind has blown the rain away and blown
the sky away and all the leaves away,
and the trees stand.”
The poem can be read in its entirety here:
http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/10045/
The poem begins with positivity – the rains have gone. But with the rains, the world has been stripped bare, leaving only the naked trees. This barren place is terrifying, disturbing, loveless, cruel. Yet it is as our world is dismantled and exposed that we see ourselves afresh:
“O crazy daddy
of death dance cruelly for us and start
the last leaf whirling in the final brain
of air!)Let us as we have seen see
doom’s integration”
The words of the poem spin across the page like autumn leaves, concealing their careful sonnet structure. Like the Shakespearean sonnets that their structure echoes, Cummings blows apart our notions of beauty, love and time, whirls us around in the dancing wind and reintegrates us into the beginning of our journey. Against the harvest moon – waxing and waning, many-hued, eternal yet ever-changing – the trees stand and wait.
The trees stand. Unmoved by the storms, self-contained, effortlessly themselves, they endure the rhythms of the seasons, unafraid of the darkness. Bending but unbroken, without fear or self-pity, they remain central in the garden of life, strong and proud. And so can we.
“a wind has blown the rain
away and the leaves and the sky and the
trees stand:
the trees stand. The trees,
suddenly wait against the moon’s face.”
Title page of Alexander Blok’s 1909 book, ‘Theatre’, designed by Konstantin Somov
“LORD POLONIUS: What do you read, my lord?
HAMLET: Words, words, words.”
‘Hamlet’, William Shakespeare
I am a simple soul. I have never been good with abstractions. Numbers, spatial problems, algebra bring me out in a cold sweat. Formulae, philosophies, methodologies baffle me.
With words, one seems to be able to manage perfectly well without such things. You merely need a good idea and then you can set to work spinning a web of connections and conundrums to divert yourself with. Words are simple.
Pause for effect…
You know that’s not true…
Words sit on the fault line between thought and action.
“Art is the expression of the invisible by means of the visible.”
Eugene Fromentin
Each combination of letters creates a seismic wave of signs, implications, signifiers, contexts, meanings, sounds. Don’t even get me started on semiotics, psycholinguistics, formalism, postmodernism, social control etc. etc. You know it will confuse me.
Words are not simple any more than life is simple.
“the word is origin
and green life…
words give crystal to the crystal
blood to the blood
and give life to life”
Pablo Neruda
It is not only a question of what words mean. It is also their shape, their sound, their memories, their ripples, their dreams. It is whose ear hears them and whose mouth speaks them.
So, in light of all this, I leave an ‘amuse-bouche’ for you to consider:
Les Ingénus – Paul Verlaine
Les hauts talons luttaient avec les longues jupes, En sorte que, selon le terrain et le vent, Parfois luisaient des bas de jambes, trop souvent Interceptés--et nous aimions ce jeu de dupes. Parfois aussi le dard d'un insecte jaloux Inquiétait le col des belles sous les branches, Et c'était des éclairs soudains de nuques blanches, Et ce régal comblait nos jeunes yeux de fous. Le soir tombait, un soir équivoque d'automne: Les belles, se pendant rêveuses à nos bras, Dirent alors des mots si spécieux, tout bas, Que notre âme depuis ce temps tremble et s'étonne. "words that had such charms That ever since our stunned soul has been trembling."
‘The Rock of Doom’ by Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones.
From the ‘Perseus Cycle’ – http://beautiful-grotesque.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/perseus-cycle-edward-burne-jones.html
“Let these words touch you as my hands.” Twitter @HANKarcher
I was six or seven years old, at infant school, when my classmate Tony revealed his feelings for me; he gave me a box of chocolates. I remember my teacher being very puzzled and ‘keeping them safe’ in the stock cupboard.
“Are you sure they are for Helen?”
Alas, glasses and geekiness then ensued and I waited in vain for another Valentine’s day delivery at infant, junior or secondary school…Sob…
“My aim in this blog is to draw attention to beautiful, thought-provoking and inspiring words.” (October 2011) But perhaps Tony was right in thinking that there are some things that words can’t quite express. Love, in every sense of the word, is a deeply personal, intimate and extraordinary emotion – a tender, warm, passionate affection – beyond language or intellect.
Amidst the rose-shaped soap, fluffy pink pigs and DVDs of ‘Titanic’, I do not dare to suggest that I can label your emotions or tell you how to feel. I humbly offer a few suggestions of apposite and compelling words for Valentine’s Day.
To begin, a triplet of songs. The first is “heartfelt and nutty in equal measure”; Madness, ‘It Must be Love.’ The video alone will bring a smile to anyone’s face:
“I never thought I’d miss you half as much as I do
And I never thought I’d feel this way, the way I feel about you.”
The second couplet is The Cure live; a whimsical pairing of the melancholy ‘Catch’:
“Yes I sometimes even tried to catch her
But I never even caught her name”
and the effervescent ‘Why Can’t I be You?’:
“You’re so gorgeous, I’ll do anything!
I’ll kiss you from your feet
to where your head begins!
You’re so perfect!
You’re so right as rain!
You make me, make me, make me,
make me hungry again.”
The lovely e.e. cummings, of course, offers a myriad of stunning and consummate lines:
“love is the voice under all silences,
the hope which has no opposite in fear;
the strength so strong mere force is feebleness:
the truth more first than sun more last than star”
‘being to timelessness as it’s to time’
‘Dancer’ by Joan Miró
or, from perhaps his most famous poem, [i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]
where nothing at all needs saying”
‘It is Born’, Pablo Neruda
sedsemperamor 