An eclectic reflection about life in the present. Photography. Brief writings.
Thursday, October 2, 2014
Hollow Empty Beauty and Sorrow
Originally Posted Tuesday, June 24, 2014
You can't believe it when it happens. All of life conditions us against it. We believe it when we are young, of course, for all things are possible then, but life teaches us bad lessons. Can good things really come? I mean other than the feeling you get listening to music, reading a good book, watching "Mad Men," or looking at paintings by someone like Hopper? There is a haunting hollowness to everything good, everything bad. In between is the life they show in a Sears Catalog. I've never cottoned to that one, as they say. I have rather taken a chance on the good and learned to live with and even appreciate the emptiness and loneliness of the other that is so close, so akin to it. Like the emotion in this painting. It is as close to a Frost poem as I believe a visual artist can come. There is a feeling in life or there is nothing. Feeling, not thought, is what stays us against the coming blankness. I guess that is why people believed. Thought might end, they reckoned, but you could feel beyond the grave. I don't believe so, but it is pretty enough a thought for tonight. Metaphorically speaking. And there are songs, too. Like this one. Listen. You will see. Hollow. Empty. Beautiful.
"The only thing that ever stood between me and success was me."
Woody Allen
Arrested Development
"You're not a moron. You're only a case of arrested development."
- Chapter 6, The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
Tiziano Terzani
"The truth is, at fifty-five one has a strong urge to give one's life a touch of poetry, to take a fresh look at the world, reread the classics, rediscover that the sun rises, that there is a moon in the sky and that there is more to time than the clock's tick can tell us."
Wild At Heart
"This whole world's wild at heart and weird on top"
Barry Gifford, Wild at Heart
Secret About A Secret
A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.
Diane Arbus
I am, I am
Blind moil in the earth's nap cast up in an eyeblink between becoming and done. I am, I am. An artifact of prior races.
Cormac McCarthy
Suttree
Transformation
The photograph isn't what was photographed, it's something else. It's about transformation. . . . There is a transformation, you see, when you just put four edges around it. That changes it. A new world is created.
Gary Winnogrand
LIfe Is Short
Life is short, But by God's Grace, The Night is Long
Joe Henry
Safe Passage
Here I am, safely returned over those peaks from a journey far more beautiful and strange than anything I had hoped for or imagined - how is it that this safe return brings such regret?
Peter Matthiessen
A Generation of Swine
"What do you say, for instance, about a generation that has been taught that rain is poison and sex is death?. . . [T]here is not much left except TV and relentless masturbation."
Dr. Hunter S. Thompson
Orson Welles
"If you try to probe, I'll lie to you. Seventy-five percent of what I say in interviews is false. I'm like a hen protecting her eggs. I cannot talk. I must protect my work. Introspection is bad for me. I'm a medium, not an orator. Like certain oriental and Christian mystics, I think the 'self' is a kind of enemy. My work is what enables me to come out of myself. I like what I do, not what I am. . . . Do you know the best service anyone could render in art? Destroy all biographies. Only art can explain the life of a man--and not the contrary."
Orson Welles, 1962
Late Work
“ ‘Late work.’ It’s just another way of saying feeble work. I hate it. Monet’s messy last waterlilies, for instance — though I suppose his eyesight was shot. ‘The Tempest’ only has about 12 good lines in it. Think about it. ‘The Mystery of Edwin Drood.’ Hardly ‘Great Expectations,’ is it? Or Matisse’s paper cutouts, like something from the craft room at St. B’s. Donne’s sermons. Picasso’s ceramics. Give me strength.”
"Engleby" Sebastian Faulks.
The Sun Also Rises
It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night is another thing."
Ernest Hemingway
What's Remembered
"The only things that are important in life are the things you remember."
Jean Renoir
Winesburg, Ohio
"One shudders at the thought of the meaninglessness of life while at the same instant. . . one love life so intensely that tears come into the eyes."
Sherwood Anderson
Perception
“The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.”
Henri Bergson
Joyce's Lament
"History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake."
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