Just in Time

Peonies in German are called ...

... Pfingstrosen (Whitsun Roses).

Saturday Night Music – Khatia Buniatishvili

Khatia Buniatishvili *21 June 1987
Franz Schubert (31 January 1797 – 19 November 1828)

Friday is Skyday

From my diary of May 29th, 1985,
which was my first of 66 evenings in Ireland
[Killarney]
"Having dinner in a restaurant
I hear about the desaster in Bruxelles.
One hour later entering a pub,
the game still has not begun.
Two hours later,
the "battle" not ended,
the dead bodies not yet driven away,
the teams are entering the pitch.
What a farce.
'The show must go on.'
Without me, though.
I empty my glass and walk to my B&B.
At 11 p.m. I am in bed."

Laughing Lhursday*

Old beholder:
Fine piece of artwork.
What is its title?
Young artist:
Storm.

* [For first time visitors]: Typo in the title? Nah. It's just that I would not let a tiny T spoil an avantgardistic alliteration.

World Champions

And the Winner is:
Nation of Procrasti!
Who cares about peace?!

On Convention

Today, while admiring the elegance of the swallows giving me the honour to again spending a summer under Seanhenge's roof, suddenly Chapter 5 [On Convention] in 'The Short Story' by Sean O'Faolain came to my mind.
I jumped up, took the book, opened page 173, finally put on my skirt in order to type the following:
'We forget when enjoying the pleasure of any art, of music, poetry, painting or the theatre, that a very great part of our pleasure has been dependent on convention. We are expected to forget it. In the theatre we have all tacitly agreed to see nothing odd about a room that, on the stage, has only three sides; or, in painting, it does not seem odd to us that we see a view as if our heads were held in a vice whereas in life we let our eyes wander east and west, shift position a dozen times and see the landscape under fifty changing lights. The point is elementary; that is why it so important; because it is so very obvious it is constantly forgotten, and this forgetting has, as I will show in this chapter, profound implications. I will here barely hint at one of them by recalling how a humourous philosopher once pointed to a cow in a field and said to me, 'What do you see there?'
I obligingly said that I perceived a cow. 'But you do not,' he replied. 'You deduce a cow. All you see is the appearance of one-half of the outside of a cow. And when you look at a portrait of your aunt all you see is a picture of the outside of one-half of your aunt. You go through a series of lightning processes before accepting this superficies as a portrait of your aunt. It is, for instance, the whole case against realism that it concentrates on giving us the outside of the one-half of everything.' In other words the convention of realism depends for its success on our forgetting that realism is a convention. So does every other convention.'

The peace of the night!

Chimneys

. . .

Those were the days – Dublin 1960s

Saturday Night Music – Max Bruch's Scottish Fantasy

Max Bruch (6 January 1838 – 2 October 1920)

Friday is Skyday

. . .

Another Birth

Forough Farrokhzad (29 December 1934 – 13 February 1967)


Another Birth

Translations by Ismā'il Salāmi

My entire soul is a murky verse
Reiterating you within itself
Carrying you to the dawn of eternal burstings and blossomings

In this verse, I sighed you, AH!
In this verse,
I grafted you to trees, water and fire

Perhaps life is
A long street along which a woman
With a basket passes every day
Perhaps life
Is a rope with which a man hangs himself from a branch
Perhaps life is a child returning home from school
Perhaps life is the lighting of a cigarette
Between the lethargic intervals of two lovemakings
Or the puzzled passage of a passerby
Tipping his hat
Saying good morning to another passerby with a vacant smile
Perhaps life is that blocked moment
When my look destroys itself in the pupils of your eyes
And in this there is a sense
Which I will mingle with the perception of the moon
And the reception of darkness

In a room the size of one solitude
My heart
The size of one love
Looks at the simple pretexts of its own happiness,

At the pretty withering of flowers in the flower pots
At the sapling you planted in our flowerbed
At the songs of the canaries
Who sing the size of one window.

Ah
This is my lot
This is my lot
My lot
Is a sky, which the dropping of a curtain seizes from me
My lot is going down an abandoned stairway
And joining with something in decay and nostalgia
My lot is a cheerless walk in the garden of memories
And dying in the sorrow of a voice that tells me:
"I love
Your hands"
I will plant my hands in the flowerbed
I will sprout, I know, I know, I know
And the sparrows will lay eggs
In the hollows of my inky fingers
I will hang a pair of earrings of red twin cherries
Round my ears
I will put dahlia petals on my nails

There is an alley
Where the boys who were once in love with me,
With those disheveled hairs, thin necks and gaunt legs
Still think of the innocent smiles of a little girl
Who was one night blown away by the wind
There is an alley which my heart
Has stolen from places of my childhood

The journey of a volume along the line of time
And impregnating the barren line of time with a volume
A volume conscious of an image
Returning from the feast of a mirror

This is the way
Someone dies
And someone remains
No fisherman will catch pearls
From a little stream flowing into a ditch

I
Know a sad little mermaid
Dwelling in the ocean
Softly, gently blowing
Her heart into a wooden flute
A sad little mermaid
Who dies with a kiss at night
And is born again with another kiss at dawn


Forough Farrokhzad (29 December 1934 – 13 February 1967)

Tango Tuesday – Balada para un loco

Astor Piazzolla (March 11, 1921 – July 4, 1992)

Horacio Ferrer (June 2, 1933 – December 21, 2014)

The Conquest of the Garden

That crow which flew over our heads
and descended into the disturbed thought
of a vagabond cloud
and the sound of which traversed
the breadth of the horizon
like a short spear
will carry the news of us to the city.
Everyone knows,
everyone knows
that you and I have seen the garden
from that cold sullen window
and that we have plucked the apple
from that playful, hard-to-reach branch.
Everyone is afraid
everyone is afraid, but you and I
joined with the lamp
and water and mirror and we were not afraid.
I am not talking about the flimsy linking
of two names
and embracing in the old pages of a ledger.
I'm talking about my fortunate tresses
with the burnt anemone of your kiss
and the intimacy of our bodies,
and the glow of our nakedness
like fish scales in the water.
I am talking about the silvery life of a song
which a small fountain sings at dawn.
we asked wild rabbits one night
in that green flowing forest
and shells full of pearls
in that turbulent cold blooded sea
and the young eagles
on that strange overwhelming mountain
what should be done.
Everyone knows,
everyone knows
we have found our way
Into the cold, quiet dream of phoenixes:
we found truth in the garden
In the embarrassed look of a nameless flower,
and we found permanence
In an endless moment
when two suns stared at each other.
I am not talking about timorous whispering
In the dark.
I am talking about daytime and open windows
and fresh air and a stove in which useless things burn
and land which is fertile
with a different planting
and birth and evolution and pride.
I am talking about our loving hands
which have built across nights a bridge
of the message of perfume
and light and breeze.
come to the meadow
to the grand meadow
and call me, from behind the breaths
of silk-tasseled acacias
just like the deer calls its mate.
The curtains are full of hidden anger
and innocent doves
look to the ground
from their towering white heigh

From forughfarrokhzad.org

Forough Farrokhzad (29 December 1934 – 13 February 1967)

On the other side of the world

Tom Waits *7 December 1949

Saturday Night Music – Friedrich Gulda

Friedrich Gulda (16 May 1930 – 27 January 2000)

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (27 January 1756 – 5 December 1791)

Friday is Skyday

Wish I were there ...

He did it his way

Frank Sinatra (12 December 1915 - 14 May, 1998)

Reminder

A birchtree
letting me think of
Dafydd ap Gwilym

Tango Tuesday – Kiss of Fire

The Quest goes on

The impossible Dream

Golden Helmet of Membrino

Or was it Perthino?

Friday is Skyday

. . . with appletree

St Claude

08:48

Returning

16:24

18:00

19:37

20:15

Natural Arts

La dolce vita

Revisited

Faro de Santa Pola

The snotgreen sea,
the scrotumtightening sea,
Mr Joyce would probably write.

Isla de Tabarca

Breakfast under palms

Under palms and Spanish sun

an English breakfast

three days later
four magic months
would end

Thalatta

The sea being the model.

Friday is Skyday

Colmena
iVivimos en celdas
de cristal,
en colmena de aire!
Nos besamos a través
de cristal.
iMaravillosa cárcel,
cuya puerta
es la luna!
- - -
Beehive
We live in cells
of crystal
in a beehive of air!
We are kissing each other
through crystal.*
Wonderful prison,
the door of which
is the moon!

* cristal: glass, crystal, water (poetical)

Federico García Lorca (5 June 1898 – 19 August 1936)