Food for the Spirit and the Soul

Contemporary American Art – Murray Taylor

Below – “Perpetual Contemplation”; “Sea Sky 4”; “In The Stream of Eternity”; “Before Night”; “The Bright Abyss”; “August Sky.”

This Date in Literary History: Died 28 October 1998 – Ted Hughes, an English poet and Poet Laureate from 1984 until his death.

“Hawk Roosting”
by Ted Hughes

I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed.
Inaction, no falsifying dream
Between my hooked head and hooked feet:
Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.

The convenience of the high trees!
The air’s buoyancy and the sun’s ray
Are of advantage to me;
And the earth’s face upward for my inspection.

My feet are locked upon the rough bark.
It took the whole of Creation
To produce my foot, my each feather:
Now I hold Creation in my foot

Or fly up, and revolve it all slowly –
I kill where I please because it is all mine.
There is no sophistry in my body:
My manners are tearing off heads –

The allotment of death.
For the one path of my flight is direct
Through the bones of the living.
No arguments assert my right:

The sun is behind me.
Nothing has changed since I began.
My eye has permitted no change.
I am going to keep things like this.

Below- Lauren Murphy: “Hawk Roosting”

Contemporary German Art – Andreas Zeug

Below – “Alma”; “Anna”; “Helena”; “Hoki”; “Edith on the chair”; “sisters.”

This Date in Literary History: Died 28 October 2014 – Galway Kinnell, an American poet and recipient of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

“Wait”
by Galway Kinnell

Wait, for now.
Distrust everything, if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven’t they
carried you everywhere, up to now?
Personal events will become interesting again.
Hair will become interesting.
Pain will become interesting.
Buds that open out of season will become lovely again.
Second-hand gloves will become lovely again,
their memories are what give them
the need for other hands. And the desolation
of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness
carved out of such tiny beings as we are
asks to be filled; the need
for the new love is faithfulness to the old.

Wait.
Don’t go too early.
You’re tired. But everyone’s tired.
But no one is tired enough.
Only wait a while and listen.
Music of hair,
Music of pain,
music of looms weaving all our loves again.
Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,
most of all to hear,
the flute of your whole existence,
rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.

Below – Edward Zentsik: “Singing Flute”

Contemporary Russian Art – Tatiana Chepkasova

Below – “Desert series: Dune”; “Desert series: Tree”; “Desert series: Cracks”; “Desert series: Oasis”; “The boy with the dog.”

This Date in Literary History: Born 27 October 1940 – Maxine Hong Kingston, an American writer, novelist, author of “China Men,” and recipient of the National Book Award.

Some quotes from the work of Maxine Hong Kingston:

“In a time of destruction, create something: a poem, a parade, a community, a school, a vow, a moral principle; one peaceful moment.”
“Do the right thing by whoever crosses your path. Those coincidental people are your people.”
“Joy and life exist nowhere but the present.”
“The images of peace are ephemeral. The language of peace is subtle. The reasons for peace, the definitions of peace, the very idea of peace have to be invented, and invented again.”
“I am confirmed in my belief that war is utter destructive violent chaos. There is no ‘art,’ no ‘order(s),’ no ‘just war.’ No matter what the ideologies, wars are the same.”
“The difference between mad people and sane people… is that sane people have variety when they talk-story. Mad people have only one story that they talk over and over.”
“We’re all under the same sky and walk the same earth; we’re alive together during the same moment.”

Contemporary Italian Art – Paolo Borile: Part I of II.

Below – “The fortune teller”; “Erasmo – Faces”; “Olivia in her living room”; “Alesia – The toy car”; “The repetitions master”; “Fearless.”

This Date in Literary History: Born 27 October 1932 – Sylvia Plath, an American poet, novelist, and short story writer.

“Morning Song”
by Sylvia Plath

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.

Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.
In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.

I’m no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind’s hand.

All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat’s. The window square

Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.

Contemporary Italian Art – Paolo Borile: Part II of II.

Below – “Summer inside”; “Tired rooster”; “La croisette”; “By the sea”; “Alba”; “Giulio sleeps.”

This Date in Literary History: Born 27 October 1914 – Dylan Thomas, a Welsh poet and playwright.

“Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night”
by Dylan Thomas

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieve it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Below – Birgit Huttemann-Holz: “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night”

This Date in Art History: Died 25 October 1916 – William Merritt Chase, an American painter: Part I of II.

Below – “Open Air Breakfast”; “A Friendly Call”; “Afternoon by the Sea”; “Landscape: Shinnecock, Long Island”; “An Afternoon Stroll”; “In the Studio.”

This Date in Literary History: Born 25 October 1941 – Anne Tyler, an American novelist, short story writer, literary critic, author of “The Accidental Tourist” and”Breathing Lessons,” and recipient of the Pulitzer Prize.

Some quotes from the work of Anne Tyler:

“I read so I can live more than one life in more than one place.”
“I’ve always thought a hotel ought to offer optional small animals. I mean a cat to sleep on your bed at night, or a dog of some kind to act pleased when you come in. You ever notice how a hotel room feels so lifeless?”
“It seems to me that good novels celebrate the mystery in ordinary life, and summing it all up in psychological terms strips the mystery away.”
“People always call it luck when you’ve acted more sensibly than they have.”

This Date in Art History: Died 25 October 1916 – William Merritt Chase, an American painter: Part II of II.

Below – “Study of a Girl in a Japanese Dress”; “A Sunny Day at Shinnecock Bay”; “At the Seaside”; “Girl in a Japanese Costume”; “Studio Interior”; “Back of a Nude.”

A Poem for Today

“Red Ballon Rising”
by Laurel Blossom

I tied it to your wrist
With a pretty pink bow, torn off
By the first little tug of wind.
I’m sorry.

I jumped to catch it, but not soon enough.
It darted away.

It still looked large and almost within reach.
Like a heart.

Watch, I said.
You squinted your little eyes.

The balloon looked happy, waving
Good-bye.

The sky is very high today, I said.
Red went black, a polka dot,

Then not. We watched it,
Even though we couldn’t

Spot it anymore at all.
Even after that.

Below – Amanda B Johnson: “She Watches”

This Date in Art History: Born 25 October 1888 – Nils Dardel, a Swedish painter.

Below – “Japanese Woman”; “Waterfall”; “Farm girl”; “Mexican girl”; “Dreams and Fantasies”; “Black Diana.”

This Date in Literary History: Died 25 October 1989 – Mary McCarthy, an award-winning American novelist and critic.

Some quotes from the work of Mary McCarthy:

“We all live in suspense, from day to day, from hour to hour; in other words, we are the hero of our own story.We all live in suspense, from day to day, from hour to hour; in other words, we are the hero of our own story.”
“If someone tells you he is going to make a ‘realistic decision’, you immediately understand that he has resolved to do something bad.”
“Congress – these, for the most part, illiterate hacks whose fancy vests are spotted with gravy, and whose speeches, hypocritical, unctuous, and slovenly, are spotted also with the gravy of political patronage.”
“Our language, once homely and colloquial, seeks to aggrandize our meanest activities with polysyllabic terms or it retreats from frankness into a stammering verbosity.”

Contemporary Italian Art – Federico Bebber

Below (photographs) – “We Are All Made Of Stars”; “My head is slowly exploding”; “Dream has faded”; “Methylphenidate”; “Forgive”; “Crystals.”

A Poem for Today

“Disarmed”
by Wendy Videlock

I should be diligent and firm,
I know I should, and frowning, too;
again you’ve failed to clean your room.
Not only that, the evidence
of midnight theft is in your bed—
cracked peanut shells and m&m’s
are crumbled where you rest your head,
and just above, the windowsill
is crowded with a green giraffe
(who’s peering through your telescope),
some dominoes, and half a glass
of orange juice. You hungry child,

how could I be uncharmed by this,
your secret world, your happy mess?

Below – Marcel Garbi: “In the realm of dreams (I)

Contemporary American Art – Felix Burgos

Below – “Dog’s Best Friend”; “Cruising Along Chelsea”; “Double Dutch”; “The Kite Runner”; “Watching The City Go By”; “Crosswalk.”

A Poem for My Grandson on His Birthday

“Birthday Lights”
by Calef Brown

Light bulbs on a birthday cake.
What a difference that would make!
Plug it in and make a wish,
then relax and flip a switch!
No more smoke
or waxy mess
to bother any birthday guests.
But Grampa says, “it’s not the same!
Where’s the magic?
Where’s the flame?
To get your wish without a doubt,
You need to blow some candles out!”

Contemporary American Art – Matt Harding

Below (photographs) – “Far Off Near the Desert”; “Main Street – DTLA”; “Canadian Geese – Belle Isle”; “The Ritz”; “Hollywood”; “The Broad.”

A Poem for Today

“Warning”
by Jenny Joseph

When I am an old woman I shall wear purple
With a red hat which doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me.
And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves
And satin sandals, and say we’ve no money for butter.
I shall sit down on the pavement when I’m tired
And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells
And run my stick along the public railings
And make up for the sobriety of my youth.
I shall go out in my slippers in the rain
And pick flowers in other people’s gardens
And learn to spit.

You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat
And eat three pounds of sausages at a go
Or only bread and pickle for a week
And hoard pens and pencils and beermats and things in boxes.

But now we must have clothes that keep us dry
And pay our rent and not swear in the street
And set a good example for the children.
We must have friends to dinner and read the papers.

But maybe I ought to practice a little now?
So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised
When suddenly I am old, and start to wear purple.

Contemporary British Art – Izabella Hornung

Below – “Turquoise delight”; “Desire”; “Emerald”; “Forget me not”; “Spring whisper nr3”;“Carnival in the garden.”

A Poem for Today

“Chiller Pansies”
by Debra Wierenga

Your pansies died again today.
All June I’ve watched them scorch and fall
by noon, their faces folding down
to tissue-paper triangles.
I bring them back with water, words,
a pinch, but they are sick to death
of resurrection. You planted them
last fall, these “Chillers” guaranteed
to come again in spring. They returned
in April—you did not. You who said
‘pick all you want, it just makes more!’
one day in 1963,
and I, a daughter raised on love
and miracles, believed it.

Below – Vasile Bogdan Antochi: “Pansies”

Contemporary American Art – Kim Kimbro

Below – “until the end of the world”; “zero effs”; “don’t stop believin’”; “heralds, travellers and thieves”; “if I can’t have you I don’t want nobody baby”; “wrath and tears.”

A Poem for Today

“Taos”
by Jillena Rose

Bones are easier to find than flowers
in the desert, so I paint these:
Fine white skulls of cows and horses.

When I lie flat under the stars
in the back of the car, coyotes howling
in the scrub pines, easy to feel how those bones
are so much like mine: Here is my pelvis,
like the pelvis I found today
bleached by the sun and the sand. Same
hole where the hip would go, same

white curve of bone beneath my flesh
same cradle of life, silent and still in me.

Below – Georgia O’Keeffe: “Pelvis with the Distance”

This Date in Art History: Born 23 October 1945 – Maggi Hambling, an English painter and sculptor.

Below – PAINTINGS: “The Mirror Bar”; “Wave Crest”; “View through a window”; “Barn owl hunting”; SCULPTURE: “Scallop”; “Big Wave.”

This Date in Literary History: Born 23 October 1942 – Douglas Dunn, a Scottish poet and critic.

“Anniversaries”
by Douglas Dunn

Day by nomadic day
Our anniversaries go by,
Dates anchored in an inner sky,
To utmost ground, interior clay.
It was September blue
When I walked with you first, my love,
In Roukenglen and Kelvingrove,
Inchinnan’s beech-wood avenue.
That day will still exist
Long after I have joined you where
Rings radiate the dusty air
And bangles bind each powdered wrist.
Here comes that day again.
What shall I do? Instruct me, dear,
Longanimous encourager,
Sweet soul in the athletic rain
And wife now to the weather.

Below – Federico Bebber: “a sad tale” (photograph)

Contemporary Australian Art – Chris Wake

Below -“Summer Light 5”; “Summer Light 1.”

Contemporary American Art – Olga Regina Doi-Kollegger

Below – “Kodomo no Ringo”; “Shouin: Incredible Light from the Sky”; “Kumi Uma: Dark Horse.”

A Poem for Today

“The Wood Road”
by Edna St. Vincent Millay

If I were to walk this way
Hand in hand with Grief,
I should mark that maple-spray
Coming into leaf.
I should note how the old burrs
Rot upon the ground.
Yes, though Grief should know me hers
While the world goes round,
It could not if truth be said
This was lost on me:
A rock-maple showing red,
Burrs beneath a tree.

Below – Edward Hopper: “Road and Trees”

Contemporary American Art – Karley D

Below- “Swimming”; “NYC at Night”; “Train in the City”; “The KingFisher.”

A Poem for Today

“A Shropshire Lad, XXXVI”
by A. E. Housman

White in the moon the long road lies,
The moon stands blank above;
White in the moon the long road lies
That leads me from my love.

Still hangs the hedge without a gust,
Still, still the shadows stay:
My feet upon the moonlit dust
Pursue the ceaseless way.

The world is round, so travellers tell,
And straight though reach the track,
Trudge on, trudge on, ’twill all be well,
The way will guide one back.

But ere the circle homeward hies
Far, far must it remove:
White in the moon the long road lies
That leads me from my love.

Below – Kathleen McDermott: “Night Road”

Contemporary South Korean Art – Zinna Yoo

Below – “Beyond”; “Stay”; “Starlit”; “Querencia”; “Beyond”; “Thinking person.”

A Poem for Today

“Snapshot”
by Linda Parsons Marion

My mother sends the baby pictures she promised—
egg hunting in Shelby Park, wooden blocks
and Thumbelina tossed on the rug, knotty pine
walls in a house lost to memory. I separate out
the early ones, studying my navel or crumbs
on the tray, taken before my awareness
of Sylvania Superflash. Here I am sitting
on the dinette table, the near birthday cake
striking me dumb. Two places of wedding china,
two glasses of milk, posed for the marvelous
moment: the child squishes the fluted rosettes,
mother claps her hands, father snaps the picture
in the face of time. When the sticky sweet
is washed off the page, we are pasted in an album
of blessed amnesia. The father leaves the pine house
and sees the child on weekends, the mother
stores the china on the top shelf until it’s dull and crazed,
the saucer-eyed girl grips her curved spoon
like there’s no tomorrow.

Below – Elekes Reka: “Birthday”

Contemporary American Art – Anna Hammer

Below – “Meet Me Underneath The Moonlight”; “Bad Blood”; “Scream No Evil”; “Technicolor”; “Latte”; “Greetings From Paris.”

This Date in Literary History: Born 22 October 1919 – Doris Lessing, a British novelist, poet, playwright, author of “The Golden Notebook,” and recipient of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Some quotes from the work of Doris Lessing:

“What a luxury a cat is, the moments of shocking and startling pleasure in a day, the feel of the beast, the soft sleekness under your palm, the warmth when you wake on a cold night, the grace and charm even in a quite ordinary workaday puss. Cat walks across your room, and in that lonely stalk you see leopard or even panther, or it turns its head to acknowledge you and the yellow blaze of those eyes tells you what an exotic visitor you have here, in this household friend, the cat who purrs as you stroke, or rub his chin, or scratch his head.”
“Very few people really care about freedom, about liberty, about the truth, very few. Very few people have guts, the kind of guts on which a real democracy has to depend. Without people with that sort of guts a free society dies or cannot be born.”
“Any human anywhere will blossom in a hundred unexpected talents and capacities simply by being given the opportunity to do so.”
“A public library is the most democratic thing in the world. What can be found there has undone dictators and tyrants.”
“I’m always astounded at the way we automatically look at what divides and separates us. We never look at what people have in common.”
“People who love literature have at least part of their minds immune from indoctrination. If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.
“Political correctness is the natural continuum from the party line.” What we are seeing once again is a self-appointed group of vigilantes imposing their views on others. It is a heritage of communism, but they don’t seem to see this.”
“This is a time when it is frightening to be alive, when it is hard to think of human beings as rational creatures. Everywhere we look we see brutality, stupidity, until it seems that there is nothing else to be seen but that–a descent into barbarism, everywhere, which we are unable to check. But I think that while it is true there is a general worsening, it is precisely because things are so frightening we become hypnotized, and do not notice–or if we notice, belittle–equally strong forces on the other side, the forces, in short, of reason, sanity and civilization.”

Contemporary American Art – Mary Chamberlain

Below- “Yellow House”; “Garden Shed”; “Suburban House”; “White Barn with Bicycle”; “Two Red Chairs”; “Blue Awnings”; “White Barn.”

This Date in Literary History: Died 22 October1982 – Richard Hugo, an American poet.

“Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg”
by Richard Hugo

You might come here Sunday on a whim.
Say your life broke down. The last good kiss
you had was years ago. You walk these streets
laid out by the insane, past hotels
that didn’t last, bars that did, the tortured try
of local drivers to accelerate their lives.
Only churches are kept up. The jail
turned 70 this year. The only prisoner
is always in, not knowing what he’s done.

The principal supporting business now
is rage. Hatred of the various grays
the mountain sends, hatred of the mill,
The Silver Bill repeal, the best liked girls
who leave each year for Butte. One good
restaurant and bars can’t wipe the boredom out.
The 1907 boom, eight going silver mines,
a dance floor built on springs—
all memory resolves itself in gaze,
in panoramic green you know the cattle eat
or two stacks high above the town,
two dead kilns, the huge mill in collapse
for fifty years that won’t fall finally down.

Isn’t this your life? That ancient kiss
still burning out your eyes? Isn’t this defeat
so accurate, the church bell simply seems
a pure announcement: ring and no one comes?
Don’t empty houses ring? Are magnesium
and scorn sufficient to support a town,
not just Philipsburg, but towns
of towering blondes, good jazz and booze
the world will never let you have
until the town you came from dies inside?

Say no to yourself. The old man, twenty
when the jail was built, still laughs
although his lips collapse. Someday soon,
he says, I’ll go to sleep and not wake up.
You tell him no. You’re talking to yourself.
The car that brought you here still runs.
The money you buy lunch with,
no matter where it’s mined, is silver
and the girl who serves your food
is slender and her red hair lights the wall.

Below – Susana Sancho Beltran: “Beer 1”

This Date in Art History: Died 21 October 2020 – Minnie Evams, an American artist.

Below – Untitled (Night/Day); Untitled (Asymmetrical floral design); Untitled (Faces); Untitled (Still Life with Vases); “Mirror Image Morning Glory”; Untitled.

A Poem for Today

“Elegy. with Oil in the Bilge”
by Patrick Phillips

By the time we got out on the water
the sun was so low, it wasn’t like water

but a field of gray snow that we plowed
in one endless white furrow of water

as I skirted the rocks and wrecked trawlers
and abandoned old jetties just under the water,

while you moaned in the bow, slick with fever,
whispering back to whatever the water

chattered and hissed through the hull—
until at last there were lights on the water

and I let the old Mercury rattle and sputter
its steaming gray rainbows out onto the water

as we drifted, at idle, for the last time in your life,
through that beloved, indifferent harbor.

Below – Alan Dixon: “Mystery”

Contemporary Spanish Art – Paz Barreiro: Part I of II.

Below – “The Woman of the Window”; “I do not know where I’m going”; “Two friends”; “Otra digestion interminable”; “An afternoon in the pool”; “Pool stories”; “Garden party.”

This Date in Literary History: Died 21 October 1969 – Jack Kerouac, an American novelist, poet, and author of “On the Road” and “The Dharma Bums.”

Some quotes from the work of Jack Kerouac:

“Because in the end, you won’t remember the time you spent working in the office or mowing your lawn. Climb that goddamn mountain.”
“Live, travel, adventure, bless, and don’t be sorry.”
“There was nowhere to go but everywhere, so just keep on rolling under the stars.”
“Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life”
“I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till i drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.”
“A pain stabbed my heart, as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world.”
“I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn’t know who I was – I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I’d never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn’t know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn’t scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost.”
“Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road.”

Contemporary Spanish Art – Paz Barreiro: Part II of II.

Below – “Woman reading”; “The Lady of the parrot”; “Las tardes perdidas”; “reina de mi Corazon”; “Girls only just want to be fun”; “Tres mujeres.”

This Date in Literary History: Born 21 October 1929 – Ursula K. Le Guin, an award-winning American novelist, critic, poet, and author of “The Left Hand of Darkness,” best known for her speculative fiction, including science fiction and fantasy works: Part I of II.

Some quotes from the work of Ursula K. Le Guin:

Capitalism’s grow-or-die imperative stands radically at odds with ecology’s imperative of interdependence and limit. The two imperatives can no longer coexist with each other; nor can any society founded on the myth that they can be reconciled hope to survive. Either we will establish an ecological society or society will go under for everyone, irrespective of his or her status.
The creative adult is the child who has survived.
People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.
You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.
Change is freedom, change is life. It’s always easier not to think for oneself. Find a nice safe hierarchy and settle in. Don’t make changes, don’t risk disapproval, don’t upset your syndics. It’s always easiest to let yourself be governed. There’s a point, around age twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities. Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I’m going to go fulfil my proper function in the social organism. I’m going to go unbuild walls.
Fantasy is not antirational, but pararational; not realistic but surrealistic, a heightening of reality. In Freud’s terminology, it employs primary not secondary process thinking. It employs archetypes which, as Jung warned us, are dangerous things. Fantasy is nearer to poetry, to mysticism, and to insanity than naturalistic fiction is. It is a wilderness, and those who go there should not feel too safe.

Contemporary Argentinean Art – Helena Wierzbicki

Below – “Soft And Warm”; “Gentle Girl”; “Mind And Soul”; “Corners Of Her Mind”; “Locked Up Inside”; “Blond Seated Girl.”

This Date in Literary History: Born 21 October 1929 – Ursula K. Le Guin, an award-winning American novelist, critic, poet, and author of “The Left Hand of Darkness,” best known for her speculative fiction, including science fiction and fantasy works: Part II of II.

“Leaves”
By Ursula K. Le Guin

Years do odd things to identity.
What does it mean to say
I am that child in the photograph
at Kishamish in 1935?
Might as well say I am the shadow
of a leaf of the acacia tree
felled seventy years ago
moving on the page the child reads.
Might as well say I am the words she read
or the words I wrote in other years,
flicker of shade and sunlight
as the wind moves through the leaves.

Below – Clifford Palmer: “Wind Blowing Through The Trees”

This Date in Art History: Born 20 October 1847 – Frits Thaulow, a Norwegian painter.

Below – “A River”; “Norse winter landscape”; “Ambiance Du Soir”; “Marmortrappen”; “Moonlight in Beaulieu”; “Fra Dieppe med elven Arques.”

This Date in Literary History: Born 20 October 1946 – Elfriede Jelinek, an Austrian novelist, playwright, and recipient of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature for her “musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that, with extraordinary linguistic zeal, reveal the absurdity of society’s clichés and their subjugating power.”

Some quotes from the work of Elfriede Jelinek:

“Love points the way. Desire is its ignorant advisor.”
“Very few women wait for Mr. Right. Most women take the first and worst Mr. Wrong.”
“Seek and you shall find the repulsive things you secretly hope to find.”
“Eroding solidarity paradoxically makes a society more susceptible to the construction of substitute collectives and fascisms of all kinds.”
“Literature that keeps employing new linguistic and formal modes of expression to draft a panorama of society as a whole while at the same time exposing it, tearing the masks from its face – for me that would be deserving of an award.”

This Date in Art History: Born 20 October 1909, Died 20 October 1993 – Yasushi Sugiyama, a Japanese painter.

Below – “Water”; “Gracefulness”; “Dancing”; “Crystal Clear”; “Brilliance”; “Fuji.”

A Poem for Today

“Telling Time”
by Jo McDougall

My son and I walk away
from his sister’s day-old grave.
Our backs to the sun,
the forward pitch of our shadows
tells us the time.
By sweetest accident
he inclines
his shadow,
touching mine.

Contemporary American Art – Kristin Moore

Below – “Lost Horse Saloon (Marfa)”; “Circus Liquor (North Hollywood)”; “Highway 90”; “Over California”; “Desert Moon (Marfa)”; “LA Cityscape (Purple).”

A Poem for Today

“The Promise”
by Jane Hirshfield

Stay, I said
to the cut flowers.
They bowed
their heads lower.

Stay, I said to the spider,
who fled.

Stay, leaf.
It reddened,
embarrassed for me and itself.

Stay, I said to my body.
It sat as a dog does,
obedient for a moment,
soon starting to tremble.

Stay, to the earth
of riverine valley meadows,
of fossiled escarpments,
of limestone and sandstone.
It looked back
with a changing expression, in silence.

Stay, I said to my loves.
Each answered,
‘Always.’

Below – Sheila Javid: “Thinking of You”

This Date in Art History: Died 19 October 1943 – Camille Claudel, a French sculptor.

Below – “Perseus and the Gorgon”; “Sakuntala”; “The Wave”; “The Mature Age”; “La fortune”; “The Waltz.”

This Date in Literary History: Born 19 October 1966 – David Vann, an award-winning American novelist, short story writer, and author of
“Legend of a Suicide.”

Some quotes from the work of David Vann:

“Each thing that happens to us, each and every thing, it leaves some dent, and that dent will always be there. Each of us is a walking wreck.”
“Even now, I still believe metamorphosis is the greatest beauty.”
“The dead reaching for us, needing us, but this isn’t true. There’s only us reaching for them, trying to find ourselves.”
“Because you can choose who you’ll be with, but you can’t choose who they’ll become.”
“We live through evolution ourselves, each of us, progressing through different apprehensions of the world, at each age forgetting the last age, every previous mind erased. We no longer see the same world at all.”
“A change in those moments, some switch turned off forever, the end of trust or safety or love, and how do we ever find the switch again?”
“Memories are infinitely richer than their origins, I discovered; to travel back can only estrange one even from memory itself. And because memory is often all that a life or a self is built on, returning home can take away exactly that.”
“Origins…They don’t explain us, you know. They never do. Each of us is our own piece of work.”

This Date in Art History: Died 19 October 1945 – N. C. Wyeth, an American painter and illustrator.

Below – “Wash Day”; “Maine Islands”; “A Song of the South”; “View of the kelp beds, port clyde”; Untitled; “The Artist’s Studio.”

This Date in Literary History: Died 19 October 1950 – Edna St. Vincent Millay, an American poet and playwright: Part I of II.

“Euclid Alone”
by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare.
Let all who prate of Beauty hold their peace,
And lay them prone upon the earth and cease
To ponder on themselves, the while they stare
At nothing, intricately drawn nowhere
In shapes of shifting lineage; let geese
Gabble and hiss, but heroes seek release
From dusty bondage into luminous air.
O blinding hour, O holy, terrible day,
When first the shaft into his vision shone
Of light anatomized! Euclid alone
Has looked on Beauty bare. Fortunate they
Who, though once only and then but far away,
Have heard her massive sandal set on stone.

This Date in Art History – Died 19 October 1952 – Edward S. Curtis, an American ethnologist and photographer whose work focused on the American West and on Native American people.

Below – “A Navajo medicine man”; “Mandan girls gathering berries”; “Geronimo – Apache”; “Hopi mother”; “Boys in kayak, Nunivak”; “Canyon de Chelly -– Navajo. Seven riders on horseback and dog trek against background of canyon cliffs.”

This Date in Literary History: Died 19 October 1950 – Edna St. Vincent Millay, an American poet and playwright: Part II of II.

“Dirge Without Music”
by Edna St. Vincent Millay

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely.  Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost.

The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,—
They are gone.  They are gone to feed the roses.  Elegant and curled
Is the blossom.  Fragrant is the blossom.  I know.  But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know.  But I do not approve.  And I am not resigned.

Below – Margo Schopf: “Everyone leaves”

Contemporary Moldovan Art – Cozmolici Victoria

Below – “Cocktail”; “wildflowers with mountains”; “summer”; “red armchair”; “Model”; “woman.”

A Poem for Today

“Mockingbird II”
By Carol V. Davis

How perfectly he has mastered
the car alarm, jangling us from sleep.
Later his staccato scatters smaller birds
that landed on the wire beside him.
Perhaps the key to success
is imitation, not originality.
Once, when the cat slinked up
the orange tree and snatched a hatchling,
the mockingbird turned on us,
marked us for revenge.
For two whole weeks he dive bombed
whenever I ventured out the screen door
lured by his call: first tricked into thinking
the soft coo was a mourning dove courting,
next drawn by the war cry of a far larger animal.
He swooped from one splintered eave, his mate from the other,
aiming to peck out my eyes, to wrestle
the baby from my arms, to do God knows what
with that newborn.

Below- Andrey V Egorov: “Mockingbirds”