X X X
I love the writings of Rainer Maria Rilke.
X The beauty of his introspective lines are the lines of Bach-
erotic, restrained and expressed
with total sensuous abandon.
I am in communion with his sensuality
and his poetic genius.
X
My dear friend Justin lent me THE INNER SKY
diaries, fragments, essays and poems.
I cannot put it down!
Rilke’s writings revives my wan coal into spirals of fire
with their clear blue flame of passion.
X Rilke’s intensity and intimacy of his world is a hymn.
X
I attended my friend Adam’s play, Generations
The play was a moving account of domestic violence and childhood abuse.
Emotional and physical.
I held my hands.
X Adam and his company composed the tragedy
stating the stories of the invisible scars
and
the imprinted relational wounds,
with directness and simplicity.
X Healing is in the NAMING – confronting the truth, telling the truth – shattering denial and, finally, sluicing out the shame. REAL IS REAL. X When a concealed wound to the soul is slowly
set out under a vast blue sky
with tenderness and soft light,
the darkness and the dried blood lifts away
and, only after this courageous and witnessed process,
a NEW sound, breath, dance, life can rise
and a life can move forward.
X The healing is relational- creating new neural pathways
that receives the energy of stable, consistent love.
Love that upholds one’s unrepeatable essence
from which respect and trust is the foundation
and is the transport, the portal
in moving forward to a new life.
X Later I biked alongside the Mississippi River
with Jaspar running beside me.
A beautiful autumn day.
The steady winds today
unfastened the remainder of the tree’s leaves.
X And, today was the last day of Daylight Savings.
The wind muttered winter’s upcoming chill.
X I went out for dinner with friends at one my favorite restaurants,
babaganoush, and chicken shawarma!
X At our feast we discussed celebrity,
“reality” v real experiences and
how critical it is for artists to live love and experience
a sincere, authentic life to create songs/psalms
that calls out true beauty and true ugliness-
the light and darkness of breath
and humanity.
X How important it is for the artist to not
Artists are the light towers, beacons, crucibles.
We cannot be contained and merchandized as commodities.
We must tell the truth, truth which is not an economic unit, an appraisal of value.
Truth is the currency of illumination. X
Rainer Maria Rilke laying down on my Persian rug (I wish!).
X
Notes on the Melody of Thing
I to XXXX
*
VII.
when a person stands out
from his grandeur in clarity and silence before you.
These are rare festive pleasures you never forget.
You love this person from then on.
In other words, you work to retrace
with your own tender hands
the outlines of the personality
that you came
to know in this hour.
*
VIII.
For art is a farther reaching,
more immodest love.
It is God’s love.
It cannot stop with an individual,
who is only the portal of life itself:
it must move through that individual.
It cannot tire.
To fulfill its destiny,
it has to appear where everyone is- a someone.
Then it bestows its gifts on this someone ,
and boundless riches come over everyone.
page 47
*
XXXVI.
this seeing this recognition that the moment
you have found the melody of the
background you are no longer helpless
in your words and
vague in your decisions.
There is a security, without worries,
in the simple conviction that you are part of a melody,
that you rightfully possess a certain place
and have a certain duty to a broad,
general work in which the smallest part is worth
just as much as the greatest.
Not to be superfluous- that is the first
prerequisite for a calm and conscious unfolding.
page 61
*
XXXX.
greatest share of commonality.
I said earlier that one person
perceives more, another, less,
of the general melody of life;
each person is assigned a correspondingly smaller
or narrower task in the greater orchestra.
The one who could perceive the whole
melody would be most solitary
and most in the community at once.
He would hear what no one hears,
and only because he
understands, in his completion,
what the others overhear
vaguely and full of gaps.
page 63
X Note on Birds
I’ve figured it out, something that was never clear to me before
-how all creation transposes itself
out of the world deeper
and deeper into our inner world,
and why birds cast such a spell
on this path into us.
The bird’s nest is, in effect, an outer womb
given by nature, the bird only furnishes it
and covers it rather
than containing
the whole thing inside itself.
As a result, birds
are the animals whose feelings have a very special, intimate
familiarity with the outer world;
they know that they share
with nature their innermost mystery.
That is why the bird sings
its song into the world as though
it were singing into its inner
self, that’s why we take birdsong
into our inner selves so
easily, it seems to us that we translate it fully,
with no
remainder, into our feelings;
a bird song can even, for a moment,
make the world into a sky within us,
because we feel
that that the bird does not distinguish
between its heart and the world’s.
page 117
*
What birds hurtle through is not the familiar sky
that raises form and shape within you.
(Out in the open, out there, you are denied
to yourself and fade, fade farther, forever.)
Sky grabs from us and translates things:
that you might reach a tree in all its being
fling inner sky around it, from that sky
that abides in us. Ring it with measure.
It will not edge itself. Only the pressure
in your renouncing makes it truly tree.
page 153
X X X
Billie Holiday/ Nina Simone- Strange Fruit
NAMING the wound
VIDEO
VIDEO
X X Read Full Post »
X
PINKPAINTERSBLUES H Catherine L. Johnson 2017
PINKPAINTERSBLUES I Catherine L. Johnson 2017
PINKPAINTERSBLUES J Catherine L. Johnson 2017
CATHERINE L. JOHNSON 