The Crow July 21, 2011
Posted by janehaynes in Becoming..., Thinking skywards.Tags: passerine crow, shamans
add a comment
And it came to pass at the end of forty days, that Noah opened the window of the ark which he had made: and he sent forth a raven, which went forth to and fro, until the waters were dried up from off the earth.
THE TUILERIES, Paris. COPYRIGHT JOHN HAYNES 2011
Is enthusiasm the opposite of depression… August 15, 2010
Posted by janehaynes in Atomies of love, Becoming..., dogs, Holistic health, Thinking skywards, Uncategorized.Tags: depression, desire, enthusiasm
2 comments
I haven’t felt like sharing my thoughts or logging in for months, but today there is something I want to share.
I have been struggling, wading or fumbling into the pages of Love in the Western World by Denis de Rougement. His thoughts are dense and intense and it’s easy to give up the effort to think these sentences through. But twice now he’s thrilled me and most recently it was with his elucidation, via Plato, of the original meaning of the word, ‘enthusiasm‘. It seems that to be enthusiastic is to be possessed by the Gods, I love that thought and get it because at the same time it fires another unthought thought in my head, and my sensory memory confirms it. When I am enthused about something I’m inhabiting my environment, I’m being fed by the universe and the mortal world is enough. I sparkle and my enthusiasm might even be contagious. The other thought is that when one stops being enthusiastic, one is, if not sad, depressed and I have been trying to figure out for a long time what might be the opposite of depression, which I often elucidate to my clients as losing desire for the world, and that explains to me why enthusiasm is so irrepressible and when something is irrepressible, whether it’s my dogs enthusiasm for her walk, or my irrational devotion to my dog’s feelings, it means that repression is absent. And, repression, whether it is anger, or denial, or love, yes we so often repress our love in the fear that it will not be returned is a broad walk to depression.
My enthusiastic dog, Lucy the Viszla in Regents Park, 2009. Copyright John Haynes
Carnival, Ligeti, and James Ensor October 11, 2009
Posted by janehaynes in Atomies of love, Becoming..., Thinking skywards, Uncategorized.Tags: carnival, death of tragedy, Greg Hicks, Hunter S. Thompson, James Ensor, Ligeti, love, Tristan and Isolde
add a comment
Not feeling like blogging - perhaps too much heady food is still being metabolised … Le Grand Macabre by Ligeti , whose life experiences are painfully tragic to read about and seemingly without much respite but from out of his cauldron of sensation emerged so much creativity, wit, love and subversion… and then in the same week even anticipating watching Tristan and Isolde on Friday induced a physical vertigo.
Ligeti has drawn me, or rather my Proustian partner who inducted me, has inadvertently drawn me to the surreal dramatist Michel Ghelderode. I have been trying to memorize his name by imagining that I am riding a geldered stallion, along with Keats’ Bright Star, and hope that I have got the spelling right and then galloping off to Amazon Prime for the catalogue of James Ensor who was as fascinated by Carnival and Masks and Love and Death and Anxiety as I am, except Ensor painted them and I try to get behind them….many of his works remind me, and are I think, indebted to Goya’s black paintings. (Retrospectively, I also feel that Paula Rego must feel indebted to his visceral imaginings and teasing.) I wish I knew where those black Goya paintings are hidden as so few of them are displayed in Madrid, unless they are stored away in unnamed archives.
Even before these artists, discovered by courtesy of my Ligeti-trail, came as a gift into my vision I was intending to blog about Carnival and the Death of Tragedy, and Rio de Janeiro, and my Capoeira thrusting Berimbar drumming friend Greg Hicks whose life embodies Carnival and who next year will be playing King Lear at the RSC, and then another unexpected pleasure, to revel in the fact that Rio and not Chicago won the Olympic bid, which is what made me think of Greg because he has a flat in Rio at the foot of the statue of Christ the Redeemer … but for now I still need to absorb and metabolize rather than write. And then last night – at my grandson, Dan’s direction – I watched the documentary Gonzo and discovered the death driven genius, the carnival energies, the insight and death-sight. of Hunter S. Thompson, the beauty of Johnny Depp, and today I am still more undone and I don’t, after watching the inspiring and fittingly minimalist staging while listening to the frantic and god-like desires, demons and visions and woundings, or should I write wounds, of Tristan and Isolde – with my Wagnerian loving/ Proust reading partner – where nothing remains black or white, but returns to shadow, have much to spare.
James Ensor: Pierrot and skeletons.
The mobility, the anxiety and the waivering of his nature explain at once the feverish searches,the steps forwards, the steps backwards, the brusque advances and the sudden retreats, in a word all the unevenness of his art. Emile Verhaearen, 1908
The Intrigue.
And Self Portrait at top of the page.
‘For the times they are a-changin’: John Haynes photograph of the week South Bank/ quote of the week October 4, 2009
Posted by janehaynes in Becoming..., Thinking skywards.Tags: 'They fuck you up your mum and dad' Larkin, Bob Dylan, graffiti, mothers and fathers, sons and daughters
add a comment
Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don’t criticize
What you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly agin’
Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are -changin’.
Bob Dylan
(I much prefer Dylan’s version to Larkin’s poem.)
South Bank, John Haynes copyright 2009
Word/quote of the week September 17, 2009
Posted by janehaynes in Becoming..., Thinking skywards.Tags: meme, Richard Gregory, the mind
add a comment
Word of the week: Meme A unit of cultural transmission; meme includes stories, songs, skills. Culture, according to a theory of memetics, evolves by the process and selection of the memes.
Quote of the week: ”I don’ think life has a meaning beyond what we put into it. It’s like vision. I mean one only projects colours onto objects – they’re not, of course, themselves coloured -one also projects meaning onto things. If you look at a painting, the viewer is projecting his own meaning into the paint, whatever the artist wants. And ditto with an oak tree; whatever God or Darwin decreed for it, you project meaning into it.” Richard Gregory
John Haynes’ picture of the week: Allen Ginsberg, ‘Mantra’ September 10, 2009
Posted by janehaynes in Atomies of love, Becoming..., Thinking skywards.Tags: Allen Ginsberg, Dialectics of Liberation
1 comment so far
Allen Ginsberg, ‘Mantra’, 1965, ‘The Dialectics of Liberation’. ( Copyright John Haynes 1965)
John Haynes’ photo of the week, Krapp’s Last Tape September 3, 2009
Posted by janehaynes in Becoming..., Thinking skywards.Tags: Harold Pinter, Krapp's Last Tape, samuel Beckett
add a comment
Harold Pinter in Krapp’s Last Tape by Samuel Beckett
Copyright John Haynes 2006
Word/Quote of the week September 3, 2009
Posted by janehaynes in Becoming..., Thinking skywards.Tags: Friday 13th, phobias, poetry, Quotes of the week, Schoenberg, The Prelude, Wordsworth
add a comment
Triskaidekaphobia: a morbid fear of the number thirteen. In some cases this fear is exacerbated by the thought of Friday 13th.
All his life, the composer Arnold Schoenberg wrestled with numerology, and he held an intense fear of the number 13. (For example, he named his unfinished opera Moses und Aron , instead of Moses und Aaron so that the title would have 12 rather than 13 letters.) A certain discomfort stemming from his birth date, September 13, haunted him, and indeed intensified during his later years. Perhaps he foresaw that he would die at age 76 (7 + 6 = 13, a fact not lost on Schoenberg) on Friday 13 July, 1951.
Quote of the week: William Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book 1:
Dust as we are, the immortal spirit grows
Like harmony in music; there is a dark
Inscrutable workmanship that reconciles
Discordant elements, making them cling together
In one society. How strange that all
The terrors, pains and early miseries,
Regrets, vexations, lassitudes interfused
Within my mind, should e’er have born a part,
And that a needful part, in making up
The calm existence that is mine when I
Am worthy of myself.
Goldilocks and the hornets. August 29, 2009
Posted by janehaynes in Thinking skywards.Tags: Emily Dickinson, fairy tales, friendship, hornets, John Keats, just right
2 comments
Goldilocks was never my favourite fairy story; (I much preferred Sleeping Beauty, or Beauty and the Beast, and I always found the dwarfs in Snowhite dead boring) particularly when I discovered that the word ‘Goldilocks’ was a Jacobean gibe for the ravages of syphilis with its ginger rash across the hairline. Yet, it is Goldilocks’ anxiety of not finding something that is just right - particularly when I sit down in a restaurant – let alone when I spend the day with a friend, or family, that so often comes into mind. Then, I am blissed-out if it’s OK.
It happened this morning when I treated myself to a forbidden cappachino and it was lukewarm: a cappachino can only disappoint unless the heated milk is just right and like so many things that require a small, if particular skill, it rarely is. I cannot think of anything more disappointing than a cappachino in which the milk beneath its froth is either too hot or too cold, except a hotel bedroom without access to a thermostat. I don’t think that life is often just right but I’m still not much good at compromise. I think that’s why flies were delivered into the universe, to remind us of our Fall. Even idyllic places are flawed by a bluebottle, a midnight mosquito, let alone a hornet, or a scorpion’s arcane shadow on the wall. That’s why I love Emily Dickinson’s poem, ‘I heard a fly buzz when I died’; maybe her lines were inspired by Keat’s ‘Ode To A Nightingale’ where he counterpoints the anticipated perfection of ‘ the coming musk rose’ with his ‘murmurous haunt of flies, (not bees) on summer eves’.
This summer our daughter spent her holiday in France in the unsolicited company of a hornet-swarm. She couldn’t locate their nest, so nobody could advise her what to do with her anxiety except to remain vigilant and to keep all the shutters closed at all times despite the heat-wave for hornets, she was warned, like Goldilocks, are partial to cool, clean sheets. And their sting can kill. Every night, as she turned on her bedroom light, the hornets slammed against her shutters with scifi sound effects, longing for her bedroom-cool. Nothing felt just right: all she could do was either to evacuate, or to adapt herself to their nightly vigil. On the final hour of departure when she threw open the shutters for the first time and there – suspended between the shutters and veranda glass – was the largest hornet’s nest that the gardener later reported ever having seen. My daughter gasped at its pale beauty and linty trails of weave. As she looked back towards the house she was taken by surprise at how sad she was feeling at the thought that her companions, once so close to her in their proximity now, with her absence, faced extinction.
John Haynes’ photograph of the week: ‘Bacchante couchee’ August 28, 2009
Posted by janehaynes in Atomies of love, Becoming..., Thinking skywards.add a comment
Copyright John Haynes 2008: Auguste Clesinger, ’Bacchante couchee’ 1848.
