“I am a writer and I want to write.”
― Jane Bowles

Jane Bowles with her little dog.

Fear and Hope

“Like most people, you are not able to face more than one fear during your lifetime. You also spend your life fleeing from your first fear towards your first hope. Be careful that you do not, through your own wiliness, end up always in the same position in which you began. I do not advise you to spend your life surrounding yourself with those things which you term necessary to your existence. This is regardless of whether or not they are objectively interesting in themselves or even to your own particular intellect.

I believe sincerely that only those men who reach the stage where it is possible for them to combat a second tragedy within themselves, and not the first over and over again, are worthy of being called mature. When you think someone is going ahead, make sure that he is not really standing still. In order to go ahead, you must leave things behind which most people are unwilling to do.

Your first pain, you carry it with you like a lodestone in your breast because all tenderness will come from there. You must carry it with you through your whole life but you must not circle around it. You must give up the search for those symbols which only serve to hide its face from you. You will have the illusion that they are disparate and manifold but they are always the same. if you are only interested in a bearable life, perhaps this letter does not concern you. For god’s sake, a ship leaving port is still a wonderful thing to see.”

Jane Bowles, American Writer (1917-1973)

Jane Bowles and her husband the writer Paul Bowles.

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“In our life there is a single color, as on an artist’s palette, which provides the meaning of life and art. It is the color of love.”

Marc Chagall

Photo: Marc and Bella Chagall, 1923, by Hugo Erfurth

Marc and Bella in Marc’s Studio.

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Giorgio Morandi (1890 -1964) was an Italian painter and printmaker.

“There is nothing more surreal, nothing more abstract than reality.”

Natura Morta, Giorgio Morandi

“Everything is a mystery, ourselves, and all things both simple and humble.”

The paintings of this artist are subtle still life arrangements of bottles, jugs, kitchen utensils, and bowls that are devoid of any extraneous detail. The artist would peel off labels to be able to concentrate on the form of the subject matter itself.

The Italian Painter in his atelier

“I believe that nothing can be more abstract, more unreal, than what we actually see. We know that… the objective world… never really exists as we see and understand it… has no intrinsic meaning of its own, such as the meanings that we attach to it.”

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Some Wisdom by Fernando Pessoa

From The Book of Disquiet written by Fernando Pessoa. (1888-1935)

“What can I expect from myself? My sensation in all their horrible acuity, and a profound awareness of feeling. A sharp mind that only destroys me, and an unusual capacity for dreaming to keep me entertained. A dead will and a reflection that cradles it, like a living child.”

 Dreams

Frederic William Burton (1816-1900)
Dreams
Watercolor and body color over
-1861

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“Like a bird on the wire,  Like a drunk in a midnight choir,  I have tried in my way to be free.”

We mourn the passing of a Leonard Norman Cohen: Canadian Singer, Songwriter, Poet and Novelist. Cohen died today on the 11th of November 2016, at the age of 82. For many years, Leonard Cohen has been revealing his soul to the world through his poetry and songwriting. His profound and timeless words expressed through his poetical music have already touched 4 generations and will continue to do so for many to come.

When Cohen began writing poetry and novels his intellect became more abundantly present. Although for sure he will be remembered more for his songs he has written many beautiful books and poetry.
His bestseller “Book of Longing” contains a great collection of his poetry and drawings. It was published in 2006. Soon after the release Philip Glass composed modern classical music to the beautiful poetic lyrics. Glass and Cohen have been performing together and also recorded a CD that might still be available.

Other novels include “The Favorite Game” and “Beautiful Losers”. Some of his most elegant published poetry is “Let Us Compare Mythologies” and “The Spice-Box of Earth”. I personally think the mystery he added to the words in his songs is what makes his music attractive to people. You never get bored listening to it.

“Cohen is a master of the quasi-surrealistic phrase, of the ‘illogical’ line that speaks so directly to the unconscious that surface ambiguity is transformed into ultimate, if fleeting, comprehension: comprehension of the bewitching nuances of sex and bewildering assaults of culture,” author Tom Robbins wrote in the booklet of “Tower of Song,” a 1996 tribute album.

As a singer-songwriter, he had a literary sensibility that made him a popular artist. The older he got the happier he become which led him to say: “ … That background of distress dissolved. I’m worried now that my songs are too cheerful because I’m feeling well. I think I may be irrelevant pretty soon.” In the end, he didn’t… He will stay with us for a long time….

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“It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass. Yet regardless of where they come from, I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them — with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself. Still illiterate, I was ready for them, committed to all the reading I could give them …”
― Eudora Welty, One Writer’s Beginnings

Lady Clementina Hawarden
Lady Clementina’s daughter, also called Clementina
1860s

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“Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.”
― Gustave Flaubert

Henri Roger-Viollet
1893

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Edvard Munch – Jealousy (1895)

“O, beware, my lord, of jealousy;
It is the green-ey’d monster, which doth mock
The meat it feeds on.”
― William Shakespeare, Othello

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Imagination is the real and eternal world of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow.
William Blake

William Blake (1757-1827)
Hecate or the Three Fates
Watercolor and pen and black ink
1795

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“Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love.”
Claude Monet

Palazzo da Mula in Venice 1908

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