I want a bed like this

...but without the pea.

Nowadays princesses are called HSP.

Picture by Edmund Dulac

Arletty (Léonie Marie Julie Bathiat), 1898-1992

Just take this longing from my tongue,

All the useless things my hands have done,

Let me see your beauty broken down,

Like you would do for one you love.

Leonard Cohen

- Comme vous êtes belle...
- Je ne suis pas belle, je suis vivante, c'est tout.
- Vous êtes la plus vivante! Jamais je n'oublierai cette nuit... et la lumière de vos yeux.
- Oh, la lumière... une petite lueur comme tout le monde. Tenez, regardez! Les petites lueurs, les petites lumières de Ménilmontant... Les gens s'endorment et s'éveillent, ils ont chacun cette lueur qui s'allume et qui s'éteint. C'est peu de chose, tout ça.


Dialogue entre Arletty et Jean-Louis Barreau, écrit par Jacques Prévert pour Les Enfants du Paradis, de Marcel Carné

Les Buttes-Chaumont, Paris (photo L. Reiz)

J'ai parfois voulu mettre fin à mes jours, mais je n'ai pas su par lequel commencer.

Jacques Prévert

Admonitions to a Special Person

Watch out for power,
for its avalanche can bury you,
snow, snow, snow, smothering your mountain.

Watch out for hate,
it can open its mouth and you'll fling yourself out
to eat off your leg, an instant leper.

Watch out for friends,
because when you betray them,
as you will,
they will bury their heads in the toilet
and flush themselves away.

Watch out for intellect,
because it knows so much it knows nothing
and leaves you hanging upside down,
mouthing knowledge as your heart
falls out of your mouth.

Watch out for games, the actor's part,
the speech planned, known, given,
for they will give you away
and you will stand like a naked little boy,
pissing on your own child-bed.

Watch out for love
(unless it is true,
and every part of you says yes including the toes) ,
it will wrap you up like a mummy,
and your scream won't be heard
and none of your running will end.

Love? Be it man. Be it woman.
It must be a wave you want to glide in on,
give your body to it, give your laugh to it,
give, when the gravelly sand takes you,
your tears to the land. To love another is something
like prayer and can't be planned, you just fall
into its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief.

Special person,
if I were you I'd pay no attention
to admonitions from me,
made somewhat out of your words
and somewhat out of mine.
A collaboration.
I do not believe a word I have said,
except some, except I think of you like a young tree
with pasted-on leaves and know you'll root
and the real green thing will come.

Let go. Let go.
Oh special person,
possible leaves,
this typewriter likes you on the way to them,
but wants to break crystal glasses
in celebration,
for you,
when the dark crust is thrown off
and you float all around
like a happened balloon.

Anne Sexton

"Matière de Bretagne" (koans)

L'eau que tu bois
A connu la mer

***

Il n'y a pas d'ailleurs
Où guérir d'ici

***

S'il suffisait de tendre la main
Comme on tend l'oreille

***

Courte est la journée
Courts sont tous les jours

Courte encore est l'heure

Mais l'instant s'allonge
Qui a profondeur

***

On t'accompagnera
Si tu trouves ta route

***

Eugène Guillevic est né à Carnac, Morbihan, en 1907. "Poète breton d'expression française", il meurt à Paris en 1997. Sa vie est marquée par un engagement communiste de près de quarante ans (il quittera le parti en 1980).
Ses poèmes semblent écrits au tableau noir. Ce sont des cailloux précieux, à serrer au creux de sa main, à garder toujours au fond de sa poche.

Le titre du message est emprunté à un poème de Paul Celan.
Dans la tradition du bouddhisme zen, un koan est un énoncé apparemment absurde, dont le sens peut soudainement se révéler à l'intution(soudainement, n'importe quand, mais peut-être jamais).
La photo a été prise sur le site mégalithique de Karahunge, dans le sud de l'Arménie.

Deluge


Sun-Setting

But this encompassment of her own characterization, based on shreds of convention, peopled by phantoms and voices antipathetic to her, was a sorry and mistaken creation of Tess's fancy - a cloud of moral hobogoblins by which she was terrified without reason. It was they that were out of harmony with the actual world, not she. Walking among the sleeping birds in the hedges, watching the skipping rabbits on a moonlit warren, or standing under a pheasant-laden bough, she looked upon herself as a figure of Guilt intruding into the haunts of Innocence. But all the while she was making a distinction where there was no difference. Feeling herself in antagonism she was quite in accord. She had been made to break an accepted social law, but no law known to the environment in which she fancied herself such an anormaly.

Th. Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles

Pictures by J. W. W Turner

Qu'est-ce donc que le temps ? Si personne ne me le demande, je le sais : mais que je veuille l'expliquer à la demande, je ne le sais pas.

Saint Augustin

Une tentative de définition ici.

A nice little run

Ingredients:

- a Sunday afternoon in December (recommanded brand: "climatic change")

- golden light on the suburb



- music to taste

"Être différente, c'est merveilleux! On peux faire plein de choses que les gens normaux n'auront jamais le temps de découvrir, tellement ils sont toujours occupés à essayer d'être comme les autres."

Un ethnopsychiatre, au cours d'une table ronde sur l'intégration, il y a quelques semaines.
Depuis, je me suis mise à détester le mot "intégration".

Late afternoon

- Did you say the stars were worlds, Tess?
- Yes.
- All like ours?
- I don't know; but I think so. They sometimes seem to be like the apples on our stubbard-tree. Most of them splendid and sound - a few blighted.
- Which do we live on - a splendid one or a blighted one?
- A blighted one.
- 'Tis very unlucky that we didn't pitch on a sound one, when there were so many more of 'em!
- Yes.
- Is it like that really, Tess? said Abraham, turning to her much impressed, on reconsideration of this rare information. How would it have been if we had pitched on a sound one?
- Well, father wouldn't have coughed and creeped about as he does, and wouldn't have got too tipsy to go this journey; and mother wouldn't have been always washing, and never getting finished.
- And you would have been a rich lady ready-made, and not have had to be made rich by marrying a gentleman?
- O Aby, don't - don't talk of that any more!

Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles

Tess's misery = long hours of pure delight

Escaliers

On ne pense pas assez aux escaliers.

Rien n'était plus beau dans les maisons anciennes que les escaliers. Rien n'est plus laid, plus froid, plus hostile, plus mesquin, dans les immeubles d'aujourd'hui.

On devrait apprendre à vivre davantage dans les escaliers. Mais comment?(1)


Murs

On pourrait écrire sur ses murs (comme on écrit parfois sur les façades des maisons, sur les palissades des chantiers, sur les murailles des prisons), mais on ne le fait que très rarement.(2)


Georges Perec, Espèces d'espace


*********

(1) demander aux enfants
(2) par exemple chez Nato et Vassiko, à Tbilissi. Privet!

Les éléphants sont généralement dessinés plus petits que nature, mais une puce toujours plus grande.

Jonathan Swift, Pensées sur divers sujets

Amour again

Aubrey Beardsley