WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
The Tempest

Be not afeard, the isle is full of noises,
Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not,
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometimes voices,
That if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again, and then in dreaming
The clouds methought would open, and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked
I cried to dream again.

MARILYNNE ROBINSON

I am grateful for all those dark years, even though in retrospect they seem like a long, bitter prayer that was answered finally.

RAY BRADBURY

Thinking is to be a corrective in our life — it’s not supposed to be a center of our life. Living is supposed to be the center of our life, being is supposed to be the center — with correctives around, which hold us like the skin holds our blood and our flesh in. But our skin is not a way of life — the way of living is the blood pumping through our veins, the ability to sense and to feel and to know. And the intellect doesn’t help you very much there — you should get on with the business of living.

JIMMY WALES
Wikipedia Founder

Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet has free access to the sum of all human knowledge.

DONALD BARTHELME
"The Crisis"

Self-criticism sessions were held, but these produced more criticism than could usefully be absorbed or accommodated.

ERICH FROMM

Respect is not fear and awe; it denotes, in accordance with the root of the word (respicere = to look at), the ability to see a person as he is, to be aware of his individuality and uniqueness.

Debbie Harry photographed by Pierre-Ange Carlotti for Wonderland Magazine, 2017.

ITALO CALVINO

The knowledge of foreign cultures is a vital element of any culture; I don’t believe we can ever have enough of it. A culture must be open to foreign influences if it wants to keep its own creative power alive.

A. R. AMMONS - "Stills"

I have nowhere
to go and

nowhere to go

when I get
back from there

SCARLETT STREET

Fritz Lang
USA, 1945

TTHE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW

Fritz Lang
USA, 1944

MILTON KRESSLER
"Route 40—Ohio, U.S.A."

It is dark now.
Nets of snow
tumble about us.
We slide like fish,
the road dissolving.
And in the fields
the farmlights chant:
You have no land—
You have no land.

DARK VICTORY

Edmund Goulding
USA, 1939

THE PRIVATE LIVES OF ELIZABETH AND ESSEX

Michael Curtiz
USA, 1939

CORMAC McCARTHY
After Dark

It howled execration upon the dim camarine world of its nativity wail on wail while he lay there gibbering with palsied jawhasps, his hands putting back the night like some witless paraclete beleaguered with all limbo’s clamor.

KID GALAHAD

Michael Curtiz
USA, 1937

ERICH FROMM

The same polarity of the male and female principle exists in nature; not only, as is obvious in animals and plants, but in the polarity of the two fundamental functions, that of receiving and penetrating. It is the polarity of earth and rain, of the river and the ocean, of night and day, of darkness and light, of matter and spirit.”

THE PETRIFIED FOREST

Archie Mayo
USA, 1936

NIGHTFLYERS

USA, 2019

SAMUEL BECKETT
Molloy

I get up, go out, and everything is changed. The blood drains from my head, the noise of things bursting, merging, avoiding one another, assails me on all sides, my eyes search in vain for two things alike, each pinpoint of skin screams a different message, I drown in the spray of phenomena

ANAÏS NIN

It is a sign of great inner insecurity to be hostile to the unfamiliar.

OF HUMAN BONDAGE

John Cromwell
USA, 1934

BETH GYLYS
"The Trouble with Love Poems About Men"

They're not of curves and shadows made.
They don't wear skirts to swoop and tease
the eye, nor toss their hair, nor sway.
So arduous to package men to please:
a slant of hip, or buttocks tucked in faded
jeans—they lack aesthetic flair. A spray

of curls might fan their brows, or bellies bloom
above their belts. To paint men in the best
of light, requires certain skill. The groom
looks better if he's built. He'll fill
his tux with sculpted flesh. His chest
will taper to the cummerbund. Still,

what work to capture men's appeal!
A rise between the legs will also shade
and shape their usual lines. Alas, revealed,
the bulge is but a stick. We live dismayed.
It's difficult to bring men warm regard.
We try. Their love is always hard.

CHARLOTTE SMITH
"Reflections on Some Drawings of Plants"

I can in groups these mimic flowers compose,
  These bells and golden eyes, embathed in dew;
Catch the soft blush that warms the early Rose,
  Or the pale Iris cloud with veins of blue;
Copy the scallop’d leaves, and downy stems,
  And bid the pencil’s varied shades arrest
Spring’s humid buds, and Summer’s musky gems:
  But, save the portrait on my bleeding breast,
I have no semblance of that form adored,
  That form, expressive of a soul divine,
  So early blighted, and while life is mine,
With fond regret, and ceaseless grief deplored—
  That grief, my angel! with too faithful art
  Enshrines thy image in thy Mother’s heart.

EARTHA KITT
"Los Angelitos Negros / Little Black Angels"

ERICH FROM from The Art of Loving

Care and responsibility are constituent elements of love, but without respect for and knowledge of the beloved person, love deteriorates into domination and possessiveness.

ABRAHAM VERGHESE
Cutting For Stone

To be around someone whose self-confidence is more than what our first glance led us to expect is seductive.

Getcha little somethin' that ya can't get at home.

- Tom Waits

RYŌKAN

have you forgotten me
or lost the path here?
i wait for you
all day, every day
but you do not appear.

More or less:

I've done better but this is a good start.

LUMINOUS MELODIES
Essential Dohas of Indian Mahāmudrā

Karl Brunnhölzl
Wisdom, 2019

PHILIP LARKIN
”The Old Fools”

What do they think has happened, the old fools,
To make them like this ? Do they somehow suppose
It’s more grown-up when your mouth hangs open and drools
And you keep on pissing yourself, and can’t remember
Who called this morning ? Or that, if they only chose,
They could alter things back to when they danced all night,
Or went to their wedding, or sloped arms some September ?
Or do they fancy there’s really been no change,
And they’ve always behaved as if they were crippled or tight,
Or sat through days of thin continuous dreaming

Watching light move ? If they don’t (and they can’t), it’s strange:
Why aren’t they screaming ?

At death, you break up: the bits that were you
Start speeding away from each other for ever
With no one to see. It’s only oblivion, true:
We had it before, but then it was going to end,
And was all the time merging with a unique endeavour
To bring to bloom the million-petalled flower
Of being here. Next time you can’t pretend
There’ll be anything else. And these are the first signs:
Not knowing how, not hearing who, the power
Of choosing gone. Their looks show that they’re for it:
Ash hair, toad hands, prune face dried into lines-
How can they ignore it ?

Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms
Inside your head, and people in them, acting.
People you know, yet can’t quite name; each looms
Like a deep loss restored, from known doors turning,

Setting down a Iamp, smiling from a stair, extracting
A known book from the shelves; or sometimes only
The rooms themselves, chairs and a fire burning,
The blown bush at the window, or the sun’ s
Faint friendliness on the wall some lonely
Rain-ceased midsummer evening. That is where they live:
Not here and now, but where all happened once.
This is why they give

An air of baffled absence, trying to be there
Yet being here. For the rooms grow farther, leaving
Incompetent cold, the constant wear and tear
Of taken breath, and them crouching below
Extinction’ s alp, the old fools, never perceiving
How near it is. This must be what keeps them quiet.
The peak that stays in view wherever we go
For them is rising ground. Can they never tell
What is dragging them back, and how it will end ? Not at night?

Not when the strangers come ? Never, throughout
The whole hideous inverted childhood? Well,
We shall find out.

PENTHESILEA
Pascal Dusapin 

Franck Ollu

Natascha Petrinsky, Marisol Montalvo, Georg Nigl, Werner van Mechelen, Orchestre Symphonique, Choers de la Montaigne

ZELDA FITZGERALD“Eulogy on the Flapper”

She refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn’t boring.



HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN
“The Little Mermaid”

She laughed and danced with the thought of death in her heart.

GRENSELAND
-
BORDERLINER


Creator:
Megan Gallagher

Directors:
Bård Fjulsrud, Gunnar Vikene, Rune Denstad Langlo

Norway, 2017

ROBERT WARSHOW

The sense of tragedy is a luxury of aristocratic societies.

TABULA RASA

Creators:
Veerle Baetens, Malin-Sarah Gozin, Christophe Dirickx

Directors:
Kaat Beels, Jonas Govaerts

Belgium, 2017

JORGE LUIS BORGES

The image that I shall leave when I’m dead — we’ve already said that this is part of a poet’s works — and maybe the most important — I don’t know exactly what it will be, I don’t know if I’ll be viewed with indulgence, with indifference, or with hostility. Of course, that’s of little importance to me now; what does matter to me is not what I’ve written but what I am writing and what I’m going to write. And I think this is how every writer feels. Alfonso Reyes said that one published what he had written in order to avoid spending his life correcting it: one publishes a book in order to leave it behind, one publishes a book in order to forget it.

THE WICKER MAN

Robin Hardy,
UK, 1973

DakhaBrakha from Free Ukraine

PORTA World Music Festival, Latvia

June 11, 2015

NINA GARENETSKA

Vokals, cello, bass drum

MARKO HALANEVYCH

Vokals, darbuka, tabla, didjeridoo, accordion, trombone

IRYNA KOVALENKO

Vokals, djembe, bass drums, accordion, percussion, bugay, zgaleyka, piano

OLENA TSYBULSKA

Vokals, bass drums, percussion, garmoshka

JOHN KEATS
“To Autumn”

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o'er-brimm’d their clammy cells.
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.
Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,–
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Marlene Dietrich in Billy Wilder’s A FOREIGN AFFAIR (1948)

POST TENEBRAS LUX

Carlos Reygadas
Mexico, 2012

BASHŌ

Autumn moonlight -
a worm digs silently
into the chestnut.