Deetjen’s Breakfast in Big Sur.
My name is Etah, he said, with an h at the end. Understood, I said. And you are Father Urrutia Lacroix. The very same, I said. Beside me, Mr. Raef was smiling and nodding without a word. Urrutia is a Basque name, isn’t it? It is indeed, I said. Lacroix, of course, is French. Mr Raef and I nodded in time. Do you know where the name Etah comes from? I have no idea, I said. Take a guess, he said. Albania? You’re cold, he said. I have no idea, I said. Finland, he said. It’s half-Finnish, half-Lithuanian. Quite, quite, said Mr. Raef. In times long gone there was a good deal of commerce between the Finns and the Lithuanians, for them the Baltic Sea was like a bridge, or a river, a stream crossed by innumerable black bridges, imagine that. I am, I said. And Mr. Etah smiled. You’re imagining it, are you? Yes, I’m imagining it. Black bridges, oh yes, murmured Mr. Raef beside me. And streams of little Finns and Lithuanians going back and forth across them endlessly, said Mr. Etah. Day and night. By the light of the moon or the feeble light of torches. Plunged in darkness, guided by memory. Not feeling the cold that cuts to the bone up there near the Arctic circle, feeling nothing, just alive and moving. Not even feeling alive: just moving, inured to the routine of crossing the Baltic in one direction or the other. A normal part of life.
- Roberto Bolaño
By Night in Chile
“The terrible, cold, cruel part is Wall Street. Rivers of gold flow there from all over the earth, and death comes with it. There, as nowhere else, you feel a total absence of the spirit: herds of men who cannot count past three, herds more who cannot get past six, scorn for pure science and demoniacal respect for the present. And the terrible thing is that the crowd that fills the street believes that the world will always be the same and that it is their duty to keep that huge machine running, day and night, forever.”
-Lorca
I think that I shall never see
A billboard lovely as a tree.
Perhaps, unless the billboards fall,
I’ll never see a tree at all.
-Ogden Nash
The Cuckoo Calls from the Bamboo Grove
The cuckoo calls from the bamboo grove.
Cherry blossoms litter the path.
A girl walks under the full moon,
Trailing her silk skirts in the grass.
- Anonymous (Six Dynasties)
(Translated by Kenneth Rexroth)
HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO LINKY
You are three
O joy to be three!
All around Linky
Smiles and trees and sunbeams
Jump and sing and twirl
Sweet boy with the curls
Joy to the garbage truck and the train
The pirate’s story and the tractor’s crane
Joy to Mommy, Daddy, and Oscar-baby
And hot dogs, ice-cream, and the potty!
You are three, what a great thing to be!
All around Linky is a world
Bursting with love
For the sweet boy with the curls
Hooray for the very day of life
You get to be three
For the very first time!
So run and dance and play and shine
Beautiful bright star Linky
Sweet nephew of mine
Orpheus leading Eurydice from the Underworld, 1861/ Corot
The most famous story in which Orpheus figures is that of his wife Eurydice (sometimes referred to as Euridice and also known as Agricope). While walking among her people, the Cicones, in tall grass at her wedding, Eurydice was set upon by a satyr. In her efforts to escape the satyr, Eurydice fell into a nest of vipers and she suffered a fatal bite on her heel. Her body was discovered by Orpheus who, overcome with grief, played such sad and mournful songs that all the nymphs and gods wept. On their advice, Orpheus travelled to the underworld and by his music softened the hearts of Hades and Persephone (he was the only person ever to do so), who agreed to allow Eurydice to return with him to earth on one condition: he should walk in front of her and not look back until they both had reached the upper world. He set off with Eurydice following, and, in his anxiety, as soon as he reached the upper world, he turned to look at her, forgetting that both needed to be in the upper world, and she vanished for the second time, but now forever.
Every branch of mine which does not bear fruit, He takes away. And every one which bears fruit, He prunes that it may bear more fruit. John 15:2 (via Jen)
What I want & have as my aim is infernally difficult to achieve, and yet I don’t think I am raising my sights too high. I want to do drawings that will touch some people… What I want to express, in both figure and landscape, isn’t anything sentimental or melancholy, but deep anguish. In short, I want to get to the point where people say of my work: that man feels deeply, that man feels keenly. In spite of my so-called coarseness - do you understand? - perhaps for that very reason. It seems pretentious to talk like that now, but that is the reason why I want to put all my energies into it.
What am I in the eyes of most people - a nonentity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant person - somebody who has no position in society and never will have, in short, the lowest of the low.
All right, then - even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart.
That is my ambition, based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me, I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest corners. And my mind is driven towards these things with an irresistible momentum…
So you must picture me sitting at my attic window as early as 4 o’clock in the morning, studying the meadows & the carpenter’s yard with my perspective frame just as they’re lighting the fires to make coffee in the yard and the first worker comes strolling in. A flock of white pigeons comes soaring over the red tile roofs between the smoking black chimney stacks. Beyond it all lies an infinity of delicate, soft green, miles & miles of flat meadow, and a grey sky, as calm, as peaceful as Corot or Van Goyen.
That view over the ridges of the roofs & the gutters with grass growing in them, very early in the morning, & those first signs of life & awakening - the flying bird, the smoking chimney, the small figure strolling along far below - that is the subject of my watercolor. I hope you will like it.
I’m sure that it depends more on my work than on anything else whether or not I succeed one day. Provided I can just keep going, well then, I shall fight my fight quietly in this way & no other - by calmly looking through my little window at natural things & drawing them faithfully and with love. For the rest, I shall just adopt a defensive attitude against possible molestation, but beyond that I love drawing too much to want to be distracted by anything else. The peculiar effects of perspective intrigue me more than human intrigues…
-Van Gogh to his brother, July 1882
