Loving what we want to see...

“I loved something I made up, something that’s just as dead as Melly is. I made a pretty suit of clothes and fell in love with it. And when Ashley came riding along, so handsome, so different, I put that suit on him and made him wear it whether it fitted him or not. And I wouldn’t see what he really was. I kept on loving the pretty clothes—and not him at all.”
Scarlett in Gone with the Wind

I see people do this all the time...

the older I get, the more I love poetry...

Watching the Hour on BBC America, with all the family, seeing 1956 come to life again, and one of the characters quotes e e cummings. What a genius that man was... there is something about his love poetry especially, which is just so tender and beautiful


somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me,i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain, has such small hands



do so love the 'net - where else would I find such a perfect image! and thanks to Pilar Pedrosa Pilar for putting it on her body!
and to Will Cook for the beautiful flower photo

September 11th...

I've been reading about September 11th and seen some new and thoughtful photos I hadn't seen before, so I'm putting here, in commemoration of the 10th anniversary of the event that happened a few blocks away from where I live... We were not here on the day, we arrived about 5 months afterwards, but the day is very alive here (as indeed, it was in Sydney, which is where I was at the time)



I found the photo by Thomas Hoepker in an article in the Guardian about it

Then I saw this image taken by Matt Weber


which lead me to the poem by Auden...



Musee des Beaux Arts
W. H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.


In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.



Love how poetry can put everything in perspective, and show the terror and the beauty, the mundane and the exceptional, and what you see all depends where look...