The Suicide - Little Cousins, Called Back
Saturday, August 22, 2015
"Little Cousins, Called back, Emily."
Emily Dickinson
In my 73 years of existence I have only met four suicides. Three
of them were men (two of which were married to the same woman when they took
their own lives. A third was a photographer and the fourth, was a woman, a
young exotic dancer called Carmen who ended her life in 1978. I have no idea
what may have caused the three men to take their life in their own hands. But
Carmen was more of an enigma. She was a happy, cheerful girl that at the time I
would have used the term bubbly.
All these years later, I wonder if anybody remembers
her. Carmen is in my files under C with
the extra addition of the word suicide. I never knew her last name.
I cannot begin to understand what would have led her to
leave us. My only very small insight is that through the years when I have been
driving alone on a curvy road and or one with precipices I get this small urge
to point my car towards that instant destruction. I wonder if this is a normal
urge that other people might have. I would be afraid to ask.
Andrea Stefancikova Did Not Smile
Friday, August 21, 2015
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| Andrea Stefancikova, Milano Roasters, August 20 2015 |
Yesterday morning I parked my Malibu in a back alley (I have municipal plates)
behind Milano Roasters on 8 th Avenue. As I walked to the street a young
woman in a red/orange skin-hugging long skirt sashayed past. She had a beauty
spot on the right hand side of her face, under the nose. I am 72. Had I been 40
I would have unfurled my matador cape and performed a veronica, ¡Óle! Alas! I am not
40.
But I am young enough (my memory in any case) to have noticed that this woman had more
curves than the Czechoslovakian Tatra (named after the Tatra Mountains between
Slovakia and Poland). The car made in the 30s and 40s was the most beautiful
(and curvy) car ever made.
Coincidentally I had a coffee date with a Slovakian woman (who had contacted me for photographs). She was a lovely woman a
bit over 30 who was born in Bratislava. My date was at Milano Roasters. Because of my
advanced age I did not feel uncomfortable when she offered to pay for my Americano.
There are two anomalies here.
1. I grossly underexposed my photograph as I forgot to set the camera on automatic. This is something I do in bathroom selfies (Milano Roaster bathroom). I have corrected the photograph as best I could but you cannot see the beauty spot underneath the nose on the right hand side of her face.
2. Ms. Stefancikova looks very sad. During our spirited conversation she was the opposite.
Rosa 'Gertrude Jekyll' August 20 2015
Thursday, August 20, 2015
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| Rosa 'Gertrude Jekyll' August 20 2015 |
What is one to say about June, the time of perfect young summer, the fulfillment of the promise of the earlier months, and with as yet no sign to remind one that its fresh young beauty will ever fade.
Gertrude Jekyll
If you look closely you might note that this bloom is a bit past its peak. The edges are going brown. I find a spent rose as beautiful as the glorious one before it begins to fade. This English Rose has immense perfume. Because are scent nerves seem to have a direct path to the brain my memory can remember and in late May or early June when Gertrude blooms and when I place my nose near the scent it is so familiar and warm to the soul. Because she is Gertrude Jekyll and because to me roses are female I have a problem with roses like the Gallica Charles de Mills. My guess is that in this 21st century of ambiguous, undetermined sexual persuasion it is not important at all.
Narcissus
Wednesday, August 19, 2015
Metamorphoses Ovid Bk III:474-510 Narcissus is changed into a flower
He spoke, and
returned madly to the same reflection, and his tears stirred the water, and the
image became obscured in the rippling pool. As he saw it vanishing, he cried
out ‘ Where do you fly to? Stay, cruel
one, do not abandon one who loves you! I am allowed to gaze at what I cannot
touch, and so provide food for my miserable passion!’ While he weeps, he tears
at the top of his clothes: then strikes his naked chest with hands of marble.
His chest flushes red when they strike it, as apples are often pale in part,
part red, or as grapes in their different bunches are stained with purple when
they are not yet ripe.
As he sees all
this reflected in the dissolving waves, he can bear it no longer, but as yellow
wax melts in a light flame, as morning frost thaws in the sun, so he is
weakened and melted by love, and worn away little by little by the hidden fire.
He no longer retains his colour, the white mingled with red, no longer has life
and strength, and that form so pleasing to look at, nor has he that body which
Echo loved. Still, when she saw this, though angered and remembering, she
pitied him, and as often as the poor boy said ‘Alas!’ she repeated with her
echoing voice ‘Alas!’ and when his hands strike at his shoulders, she returns
the same sounds of pain. His last words as he looked into the familiar pool
were ‘Alas, in vain, beloved boy!’ and the place echoed every word, and when he
said ‘Goodbye!’ Echo also said ‘Goodbye!’
He laid down his
weary head in the green grass, death closing those eyes that had marveled at
their lord’s beauty.
And even when
he had been received into the house of shadows, he gazed into the Stygian
waters. His sisters the Naiads lamented, and let down their hair for their
brother, and the Dryads lamented. Echo returned their laments. And now they
were preparing the funeral pyre, the quivering torches and the bier, but there
was no body. They came upon a flower, instead of his body, with white petals
surrounding a yellow heart.
Tuesday, August 18, 2015
The Spirit lasts — but in what mode -
Below, the Body speaks,
But as the Spirit furnishes -
Apart, it never talks -
The Music in the Violin
Does not emerge alone
But Arm in Arm with Touch, yet Touch
Alone — is not a Tune -
The Spirit lurks within the Flesh
Like Tides within the Sea
That make the Water live estranged
What would the Either be?
Does that know — now — or does it cease -
That which to this is done,
Resuming at a mutual date
With every future one?
Instinct pursues the Adamant,
Exacting this Reply -
Adversity if it may be, or
Wild Prosperity,
The Rumor’s Gate was shut so tight
Before my Mind was sown,
Not even a Prognostic’s Push
Could make a Dent thereon -
Emily Dickinson
Red Blaze
He touched me, so I live to know
Pasado
Monday, August 17, 2015
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| Michael Audain circa 1990 |
My Rosemary has charmed me for years with some of her quirks.
One of them is about her pronunciation of the Spanish word pasado. Rosemary’s
Spanish is very good but when she says something is pasado she emphasizes a
gringo pronunciation.
When a fruit is overripe in Spanish we say it is pasado.
In many other blogs I have shown my scans, particularly of
red Gallica roses that to my eyes look very beautiful when they are pasado.
Currently I am methodically weeding out my negatives since 1975.
I want to reduce my metal four-drawer filing cabinets from 10 to perhaps 5.
Many Vancouver law firms and business men are achieving mortality in these
files. I don’t recycle the negatives as plastic as I don’t want anybody to
retrieve them. They are going straight into the garbage.
In the drawer with the a’s I found Polygon Homes’s
Michael Audain. I was hired by Equity, a local business magazine to photograph
him around 1990. I did this in his office using a Widelux swivel-lens panoramic
camera. This one in his office very near the Cambie Stree Bridge indicates that
some years back Audain was collecting art.
Should he see this 8x10 photograph
which I printed, not archivally, in resin coated photographic paper he just
might like its “pasado” quality. The staining is due to either insufficient fixing or
washing or both. I kind of like it too.
It is neat that both Rosa “The Fairy” and Audain today are
pasado.
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| Rosa 'The Fairy' |
Sukie- The Last To Leave Eastwick
Sunday, August 16, 2015
Sukie
was the last to leave Eastwick; the afterimage of her in her nappy
suede skirt and orange hair, swinging her long legs and arms past the
glinting shopfronts, lingered on Dock Street like the cool-colored ghost
the eye retains after staring at something bright. This was years ago.
The young harbormaster with whom she had her last affair has a paunch
now, and three children, but he still remembers how she used to bite his
shoulder and say she loved to taste the salt of the sea-mist condensed
on his skin. Dock Street has been repaved and widened to accept more
traffic, and from the old horse trough to Landing Square, as it tends to
be called, all the slight zigzags in the line of the curb have been
straightened. New people move to town; some of them live in the old
Lennox mansion, which has indeed been turned into condominiums. The
tennis court has been kept up, though the perilous experiment with the
air-supported canvas canopy has not been repeated. An area has been
dredged and a dock and small marina built, as tenant inducement. The
egrets nest elsewhere. The causeway has been elevated, with culverts
every fifty yards, so it never floods — or has only so far, in the great
February blizzard of ‘78. The weather seems generally tamer in these
times; there are rarely any thunderstorms.
The Witches of Eastwick — John Updike
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