R.L. Swihart's Blog, page 30

European Widgeon (Video)

 

Milosz's "Conversation with Jeanne"

A Conversation With Jeanne

By Czeslaw Milosz

Let us not talk philosophy, drop it, Jeanne.

So many words, so much paper, who can stand it.

I told you the truth about my distancing myself.

I've stopped worrying about my misshapen life.

It was no better and no worse than the usual human tragedies.

For over thirty years we have been waging our dispute

As we do now, on the island under the skies of the tropics.

We flee a downpour, in an instant the bright sun again,

And I grow dumb, dazzled by the emerald essence of the leaves.

We submerge in foam at the line of the surf,

We swim far, to where the horizon is a tangle of banana bush,

With little windmills of palms.

And I am under accusation: That I am not up to my oeuvre,

That I do not demand enough from myself,

As I could have learned from Karl Jaspers,

That my scorn for the opinions of this age grows slack.

I roll on a wave and look at white clouds.

You are right, Jeanne, I don't know how to care about the salvation of my soul.

Some are called, others manage as well as they can.

I accept it, what has befallen me is just.

I don't pretend to the dignity of a wise old age.

Untranslatable into words, I chose my home in what is now,

In things of this world, which exist and, for that reason, delight us:

Nakedness of women on the beach, coppery cones of their breasts,

Hibiscus, alamanda, a red lily, devouring

With my eyes, lips, tongue, the guava juice, the juice of la prune de Cythere,

Rum with ice and syrup, lianas-orchids

In a rain forest, where trees stand on the stilts of their roots.

Death, you say, mine and yours, closer and closer,

We suffered and this poor earth was not enough.

The purple-black earth of vegetable gardens

Will be here, either looked at or not.

The sea, as today, will breathe from its depths.

Growing small, I disappear in the immense, more and more free.

Guadeloupe

W G Sebald: The Rings of Saturn

Janine maintained that the source of Flaubert’s scruples was to be found in the relentless spread of stupidity which he had observed everywhere, and which he believed had already invaded his own head. It was (so supposedly once he said) as if one was sinking into sand. This was probably the reason, she said, that sand possessed such significance in all of Flaubert’s works. Sand conquered all. Time and again, said Janine, vast dust clouds drifted through Flaubert’s dreams by day and by night, raised over the arid plains of the African continent and moving north across the Mediterranean and the Iberian peninsula till sooner or later they settled like ash from a fire on the Tuileries gardens, a suburb of Rouen or a country town in Normandy, penetrating into the tiniest crevices. In a grain of sand in the hem of Emma Bovary’s winter gown, said Janine, Flaubert saw the whole of the Sahara. For him, every speck of dust weighed as heavy as the Atlas mountains.

W G Sebald: The Emigrants

The young woman in the middle is blonde and has the air of a bride about her. The weaver to her left has inclined her head a little to one side, whilst the woman on the right is looking at me with so steady and relentless a gaze that I cannot meet it for long. I wonder what the three women’s names were – Roza, Luisa and Lea, or Nona, Decuma and Morta, the daughters of night, with spindle, scissors and thread.

W G Sebald: The Emigrants

Afterwards we were in the great hall of the palace, and I stood beside Uncle, craning up at Tiepolo’s glorious ceiling fresco above the stairwell, which at that time meant nothing to me; beneath the loftiest of skies, the creatures and people of the four realms of the world are assembled on it in fantastic array. Strangely enough, said Ferber, I only thought of that afternoon in Würzburg with Uncle Leo a few months ago, when I was looking through a new book on Tiepolo. For a long time I couldn’t tear myself away from the reproductions of the great Würzburg fresco, its light-skinned and dark-skinned beauties, the kneeling Moor with the sunshade and the magnificent Amazon with the feathered headdress. For a whole evening, said Ferber, I sat looking at those pictures with a magnifying glass, trying to see further and further into them. And little by little that summer day in Würzburg came back to me, and the return to Munich, where the general situation and the atmosphere at home were steadily becoming more unbearable, and the silence was thickening.

W G Sebald: The Immigrants

Afterwards we were in the great hall of the palace, and I stood beside Uncle, craning up at Tiepolo’s glorious ceiling fresco above the stairwell, which at that time meant nothing to me; beneath the loftiest of skies, the creatures and people of the four realms of the world are assembled on it in fantastic array. Strangely enough, said Ferber, I only thought of that afternoon in Würzburg with Uncle Leo a few months ago, when I was looking through a new book on Tiepolo. For a long time I couldn’t tear myself away from the reproductions of the great Würzburg fresco, its light-skinned and dark-skinned beauties, the kneeling Moor with the sunshade and the magnificent Amazon with the feathered headdress. For a whole evening, said Ferber, I sat looking at those pictures with a magnifying glass, trying to see further and further into them. And little by little that summer day in Würzburg came back to me, and the return to Munich, where the general situation and the atmosphere at home were steadily becoming more unbearable, and the silence was thickening.

W G Sebald: The Emigrants

According to the article, the British Medical Association’s archives contained the description of an extreme case of silver poisoning: in the 1930s there was a photographic lab assistant in Manchester whose body had absorbed so much silver in the course of a lengthy professional life that he had become a kind of photographic plate, which was apparent in the fact (as Ferber solemnly informed me) that the man’s face and hands turned blue in strong light, or, as one might say, developed.

Red-breasted Merganser @ Bolsa Chica

Red-breasted Merganser (male) @ Bolsa Chica. I've seen him many times but never got any decent pics. These are a bit of an improvement.🎈

Happy Sunday!

#rlswihart13 #bolsachica #socal #huntingtonbeach #mergansersofinstagram #redbreastedmerganser #nature #winterbirds #beauty #poetry #readmorepoetry2024♥️ 🎈

W G Sebald: The Emigrants

It had always been of the greatest importance to him, Ferber once remarked casually, that nothing should change at his place of work, that everything should remain as it was, as he had arranged it, and that nothing further should be added but the debris generated by painting and the dust that continuously fell and which, as he was coming to realize, he loved more than anything else in the world. He felt closer to dust, he said, than to light, air or water. There was nothing he found so unbearable as a well-dusted house, and he never felt more at home than in places where things remained undisturbed, muted under the grey, velvety sinter left when matter dissolved, little by little, into nothingness.

W G Sebald: The Emigrants

The last entry in my Great-Uncle Adelwarth’s little agenda book was written on the Feast of Stephen. Cosmo, it reads, had had a bad fever after their return to Jerusalem but was already on the way to recovery again. My great-uncle also noted that late the previous afternoon it had begun to snow and that, looking out of the hotel window at the city, white in the falling dusk, it made him think of times long gone. Memory, he added in a postscript, often strikes me as a kind of dumbness. It makes one’s head heavy and giddy, as if one were not looking back down the receding perspectives of time but rather down on the earth from a great height, from one of those towers whose tops are lost to view in the clouds.