Adieu tristesse, Bonjour tristesse. Tu es inscrite dans les lignes du plafond. Tu es inscrite dans les yeux que j’aime Tu n’es pas tout à fait la misère, Car les lèvres les plus pauvres te dénoncent Par un sourire.
Bonjour tristesse. Amour des corps aimables. Puissance de l’amour Dont l’amabilité surgit Comme un monstre sans corps. Tête désappointée. Tristesse, beau visage.
“I
do believe in an everyday sort of magic -- the inexplicable
connectedness we sometimes experience with places, people, works of art
and the like; the eerie appropriateness of moments of synchronicity; the
whispered voice, the hidden presence, when we think we're alone.” Charles de Lint
I was in the office one day and suddenly it was like I was hearing all these voices. Some were just separate words, some were sentences, some were laughs, some were tears... were did they come from? Well, from all over the Earth. It was like I could hear what everyone was saying and feel what everyone was feeling. All these different emotions, some very painful, some ecstatic, words of rage, words of wisdom, words of comfort... and many many more.
I felt that I should take a piece of paper and a pencil to write everything down. At some point I got the impression that all these words and feelings - well, actually the feelings people were experiencing transferred into words - were making circles around the Earth. Going from and eventually coming back to their owners. But only after they had touched everyone else's souls. And they were what we were all feeling, more or less. The same emotions, just different situations.
And in that moment, I felt so connected with everyone. It was like seeing the person who felt something, said a word, a sentence and then in the next second I would pass to the next person. It was amazing experiencing this because that was probably the first time I felt such a deep connection with everyone.
I love the Internet! I really do! Besides the huge amount of information you can find in this virtual - actually non existent space, and at the same time existent space - life happens. People you meet in this space just through a click, friends you may have lost touch with appear out of nowhere, colleagues and so on. And from time to time, you happen to stumble upon someone who is on the same wavelenght as you as no one else is. It's like they read your thoughts, they're inside your mind, they're inside your soul.
I think about them as very sensitive beings, people who perceive the subtle world, the reality of what is. So far, it's happened to me twice. I find it incredible and a little scary at the same time. Reading my thoughts and feelings on that person's blog or post, hearing them out loud. And then I stop and think: ahhhh, but aren't we made of the same energy? Isn't what I'm feeling now the same - more or less - as what some other person felt or will feel? I can't explain it very well - what it is I'm feeling in regard to this because it is such a powerful emotion, I can not express it in words.
Sometimes, I feel so in tune with what someone is saying or writes that I would start to cry. Just like that. Their words may remind me of something, of lives past, of feelings I once had, situations I have been in, a past love... And every time, I am overwhelmed by this sense of wonder. And I just want to ask: how did you know? how did you know what I was feeling, that's exactly what I wanted to say but I couldn't put into words.
Connections - I think it's all about being connected. With yourself, with others, with the Universe. I feel I got a little lost on the way, but coming back on track, a little more every day.
And in this huge network, I am waiting... and so are you. And I'm sure we'll meet someday. And I'm sure my tears will fall then too, tears of happiness, for I have found you... again. And in that moment, I will be complete. We are all mirrors for each other. Finding you - finding me - I will find myself. You are me and I am you. There is no separation. Only the space it takes to make that one step that will finally bring us face to face. That space between the acts of this play we have been acting for so many years... millennia. For we are old, you and I. The time we have been apart - just the space it takes to pass from one life to another...
On a field... somewhere... only desolation can be found. It looks like a deserted piece of the Earth that floats, with no apparent aim. The terrible heat of the sun makes it worse - burning the land, burning the crops, burning the grass - no rain in sight! When did it last rain? People don't remember. Lucky cow still found grass to chew, making its way through the thorns. You could hear the earth crying, screaming, as if in pain, but not only from the heat - there is garbage everywhere. The crops have been invaded and through the waste, food still grows. Food that people still pick to eat. Has garbage become the best fertilizer?
No apparent hope for the crops as people just stand and watch them fade due to the heat wave. A heat wave that is hard to bear, even for humans. Measures taken? None! Irrigation? Ha? What is that? I don't care, I'll just wait for the rain. And if it doesn't come, well, that's too bad then, but at least I'll still have someting to complain about. Because, you see, if I can't complain and paint myself as the victim I don't feel well. Measures? What measures? Get out of here! There is nothing I can do. Have I tried to do something? Of course, not - there is nothing I can do, I tell you. It's too tiring to even try.
Will we ever change? Will we even once try to change something? Try to save something - these lands, ourselves... trying to grab the future without living the present. Rows and rows of dried crops, of dried people, of dried souls. How did we come to this? This indolence for everything!? I feel like screaming: wake up! We're still alive! Live! Love! Feel!But all I get is an echo...
Among the burned sunflowers, there is still a survivor. A promise of good things to come, of never giving up. The battle with ourselves. That, I think, is the hardest.
And yet we all yearn to be free, to be who we want to be, not who others think we should be. So many give opinions on how they think we should live our lives, but they don't know who we truly are and they haven't and never will live our life for us, so what do they really know? In their fear of really starting to live, they try to enclose us with rules and restrictions.
'And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.'
Nietzsche
And so, alone we stand in our search.
But stand alone we must. For only after finding our true selves can we completely open up to others and offer our love, understanding, friendship, touch... our true entity.
And I think kindness can change the world.
'I shall not pass this way but once; any good, therefore that I can do or any kindness that I can show to any human being let me do it now. Let me not defer nor neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.'
And so, I find that the pieces of my faded heart which I had thought had stopped beating, is actually whole again. The only restrictions, limitations that I still face are of my own making, I understand that now. And I imagine a world in which everyone just stops for a moment and takes this time to listen... to themselves, to their true nature, discovering that they are free!
No longer caught in the web of fear, of deceit, of running away from everything and anyone that could make them feel! And so, I continue my journey. Each day, each moment, I discover new things about myself, about others, I sometimes feel like crying and screaming from the pain I feel coming from me - evolution kind of hurts sometimes - from others, from the earth. But then I smile and think of how wonderful it is to be feeling so many things! And I am happy that I have people around me to share my moments with!
A promise and a hope of a better tomorrow! A hope of love and understanding and helping each other. And with this tought, I conclude my journey of today and I truly hope we will be able to find this wonderful, caring, playful, smart dog a home! She is about two years old and in need of love!
Fiindcă nu ştiam
ce să fac, mi se pare că scriam în noaptea aceea, în pat, privindu-mi, din când
în când, umbra pe perete, sau ascultam tăcerea nopţii care nu trebuie să fie
ascultată…Se părea că exist, şi chiar mă speriam că exist.
Se ştie aceasta din cărţile adânci,
sau nebuneşti, unde se vorbeşte foarte mult despre om, ca ceva foarte periculos
sau foarte măreţ, care a greşit de la început şi greşeşte mereu, de nu se mai
înţelege nimic.
Tot oamenii au spus că sunt prea mulţi
oameni, şi de aceea, mă gândeam la câmpiile depărtate, şi la izolare…
Dacă în noaptea aceea mai treceau
drumeţi întârziaţi vorbind tare lucruri prea cunoscute, dar cu importanţa lor,
am înţeles că e mai bine să stau fără a cugeta nici ziua, nici noaptea. Se
poate, însă, spune ceea ce ar putea spune şi alţii…
Supraalimetaţia sau alimentaţia sunt
recomandate pentru a se evita fuga pământului şi ameţeala produsă de astre.
…Ea, care nu era prinsă de aceste
întrebări, deşi era palidă şi ca bătută de vânt, voia în noaptea caldă să-şi
liniştească o legănare amoroasă, pe banca ascunsă în fundul grădinii ce se
termina fără îngrădire, într-o margine a pământului.
Privighetoarea cânta pe când am
intrat s-o aştept pe banca aceea şi, luna repeta lumină şi întuneric prin
nouri. Erau şi foşniri, şi dacă era şi trist, fiecare ştie şi nu se poate reda.
Ea sosi târziu…pe când aproape
uitasem pentru ce am venit…Aşteptam răsăritul soarelui, sau mă deprinsesem să
fiu singur…Ea spunea că totul e potrivit de frumos şi că privighetoarea va
înceta pentru a se auzi curând ciocârlia; aburii se vor ridica de pe ape şi
zorii vor fi dureroşi prentu cei care au uitat să vorbească…Întâlnirile de
noapte sunt prea instructive…şi povestiri enervante.
Va trebui, altă dată, s-o aştept
ziua, prin grădini publice…Da, e interesant să scriu ceea ce spunea ea şi ea
dispăru printre copacii deşi, iar eu – pe drumurile pustii…Curba pământului
fuge…Astrele sunt ameţitoare…A te destăinui, însă, prea mult, e înstristător…
Edè come ti avevo sognato ma non riuscivo a ricordare chi eri. Forse eri uno fantasma, forse eri solo il prodotto della mia immaginazione. Il cielo... hmmmm... sono anni da quando non lo vedo più. Sai, sto sempre aspettando una lettera da te - ma non arriva mai. Mi piacerebe sappere dove sei. In paesi stranieri? Paesi stranieri per me... Sai, ancora non lo so... sono ancora viva o sono già morta? Cheègiàda qualche tempo che non mi sento più. O forse si. Non sono sicura. Che le mie lacrime - le sento; i miei brividi- li sento; ma non sento più il calore del sole sulla pelle. E nemmeno il freddo non lo sento più. Tutte queste cose mispaventanoun po'. Forse sono già scomparsa da questo mondo e ho solo lasciatol'ombra che se ne è perduta. Forse è solo lei che plana su questo mondo, su di te... Ma ti cerco ancora... dove sei? Perché non mi rispondi? Ahhhh... adesso ho capito chi sei. Ma certo, sei l'altra parte di me. Non me ne avevo resa conto che mi mancavi. Perché sai, il mio corpo, non c'e più. E'tutto fatto di aria. Sì, sì,è così, è proprio così. Quantescopertestasera! Ma è sera? E notte? E giorno? Che per me proprio non c'e nessuna differenza. Sono malata! Sì, sono proprio malata! Di quella malattia chiamatasolitudine! Siamo buone compagne, io e lei. Mi piace molto. Penso che siagiàcronica, e in questo caso, non mi lascerà mai. Ma non so che ho questa sera. Solo una tua foto mi ha fatto pensare ai vecchi tempi. Sai, quelli che non sono più, ma li ricordi e pensi: ahhhh, forse li ho sognati? Ma li abbiamoveramente vissuti?
Credo che e già sera, o forse la notte è già venuta quando non ero attenta. Si sente la pioggia. Sai quanto adoro l'aroma della terra dopo la pioggia? E un'aroma che dà l'impressione che tutto rinascera nelsecondo successivo.
E mi ricordouna canzoneche era così:
Amo questa canzone... Mi sento come svegliata da un brutto sogno. Le mie parole... non hanno senso. Not being able to say anything, not being able to do anything. Just watching, powerless,as life unfolds. My tears, my feelings, my thoughts: they hurt. Ma chi sono io? Chi sei tu? Siamo la stessa persona dici? Ahhhh - tu sei il corpo, io sono l'anima!
E alla fine, non siamo mai soli... ma questa sera, permettimi di sentirmi sola... Knowledge is sometimes a burden... tanta responsabilitàsulle mie spalle. "The winner is always alone" ... o forse ho solo i miei momenti... Winner!? Credo davvero chesiamo tuttiperdentiinquesta battagliacon noi stessi, con la vita, con il tempo...
Oforse è solola malinconiadi oggi... o forse è la foto che ho trovato su le onde delle connessioni formate chissà dove...
After centuries of isolation from the West, Japan, constrained in 1854 by the fleet of the United States to establish commerical relations with Europe and America, found itself in direct contact with the Western metropolises, which became fascinated by that mysterious culture that had showed itself, officialy, at the Universal Exhibition in London in 1862. The Japanese articles (furniture, decorations, ceramics and daily objects) that were exhibited with this occasion, but also in Paris in 1867 and 1878, Viena in 1873 and in Philadelphia in 1876 conquered the Western taste through their exotic charm and syntheticlines that depicted elegant and stylizedforms in such a way that "Japonisme" has had significant aestheticandstylistic consequences on Western fashion, art and culture of the XIXth century. Actually, Japanese art has influenced literary works, theatre, paintings, sculptures and most of all decorative arts, contributing, at the end of the XIXth century to the birth of the Art Nouveau movement, that took its name from the furniture shop opened in Paris in 1895 by Siegfried Samuel Bing.
Utagawa Hiroshige - "Snow falling on a town"
In France, this influence has been called Japonisme, which started with the frenzy to collect Japanese art, particularly woodblock print art (ukiyo-e). The woodblock prints from Japan were among the first of Asia to strongly influence the West. The Japanese art, which for almost a millennium hadn't gone too far from the austerity of the Chinese tradition from which it came, found in the XVIIIth century an original field of specialization in the production of coloured woodprints representing scenes full of life from the daily existence of ordinary people, made with fantasy andtechnicalrigor. These stamps, which were not so appreciated in Japan because they contrasted with the refinement of the tradition, got to Europe as packing paper for porcelains and other commercialized products.
Katsushika Hokusai - Mount Fuji with cherry trees in bloom
The French artist Félix Bracquemond first came across a copy of the sketchbook Hokusai Manga at the workshop of his printer; the woodblocks had been used as packaging for a consignment of porcelain from Japan. In 1860 and 1861 reproductions (in black and white) of ukiyo-e were published in books on Japan. In 1861 Baudelaire wrote in a letter:“Quite a while ago I received a packet of japonneries. I’ve split them up among my friends.” The following year La Porte Chinoise, a shop selling various Japanese goods including prints, opened in the rue de Rivoli, the most fashionable shopping street in Paris. In 1871 Camille Saint-Saëns wrote a one-act opera, La princesse jaune to a libretto by Louis Gallet, in which a Dutch girl is jealous of her artist friend’s fixation on a bijin (beautiful lady) in a woodblock print.
Utagawa Kunisada - from his 1852 series "Tale of Genji"
Genre painting and the wood-block print - a short history
In the Edo period, diversity and elegance in the fine arts was matched by the robust humour and virile self-confidence of the rising lower mercantile class. Anonymus craftsmen working on everyday items such as ceramics, textiles, farm implements, architecture, household furnishings, book illustration and printing catered to mass tastes. For ordinary people, peasants and townsmen alike, this was a vigorous artistic period. And it is this new urban and urbane culture that marks the most notable departure from previous eras. Although the Tokugawa had placed merchants beneath farmers and artisans in the new social hierarchy, this enterprising class nevertheless came increasingly to dominate life in the land. In cities and in towns, they created a vigorous commercial economy flourished; mass literacy was among the highest in the world; popular and satirical novels were extremely fashionable, and the printing business flourished.
Since the early sixteenth century, a favourite art-form among the rising bourgeoisie was genre-painting. These works featured a variety of popular recreations and amusements. Many such works provide tantalizing glimpses into the historical city with views of palaces and temples since burnt down. Artist were free to depict existing structures together with glorified versions of the present. On a simpler scale, scenes such as the anonymus Shijo-Kawara are the apotheosis of bourgeois collective self-portraiture. Bijinga or Pictures of Beauties showed elegant, beautiful women in leisurely pursuits; with meticulously recorded details of dress. Later versions revealed forms featuring the more down-market activities of lower grade prostitutes, or bath-house attendants working in the "water-trade", mizu-shbai. Towards the end of the seventeenth century, as the appeal of this kind of art increased, it began to be mass-produced. Urban life seemed at its most elegant and extravagant in the demi-monde of Edo, Kyoto and Osaka.
Suzuki Harunobu - The Tale of Genji
These 'floating world' pictures or uikyo-e, dominated both genre painting and the now world-famous Japanese wood-block prints.
In Edo, Hishikawa Moronobu and others began by producing black and white prints, hand-coloured in orange-red. Many of these were overtly and extravagantly erotic, and their style imitated the calligraphic character of the ink-brush line. By the early eighteenth century, a wider range of colours, including and attractive rose-red and a deep-toned black resembling lacquer, was added. A great many hand-coloured actor-prints of this type were now produced. In about 1745, a more elaborate and expansive technique of multiblock colour printing was used to produce limited editions of calendar prints.
The actor-prints featured the matinée idols of the time, the Kabuki actors. Prints announcing or celebrating particular performances, or portraying an actor in a certain role. Here was a medium for theatrical panache and irony. Eerie satire is the realm of Sharaku.
Toshusai Sharaku - Sakata Hangoro III As The Villian Fujikawa Mizuemon
He may have been a No actor; certainly his hardly flattering view of the more popular Kabuki style seems to have offended Kabuki actors, and his publisher dropped him after only ten brilliant months. Now figurative prints, including mythological heroes and actor-prints, became increasingly grotesque; the phenomenon also imbued the paintings of Rosetsu, Jakuchu and others with a sense of suppressed hysteria.
Little of this baroque exaggeration is found in the work of Katsuhika Hokusai (1760-1849) whose fame grew out of his numerous cartoons (manga) or humorous sketches. His landscape prints discovered vigorous new life in an ancient form. Like the great painters Taiga and Tanyu before him, Hokusai drew on a dazzling variety of sources, not the least among them Chinese illustrations, and was fired by extraordinary creative energy.
His famous views of Mount Fuji, so overexposed as to seem banal, remain nevertheless a synthesis of supreme draftmanship tinged with a remarkably humane view of the world he knows.
Katsushika Hokusai - View on a Fine Breezy Day
Encouraged by Hokusai's example, Ando Hiroshige (1797-1858) perfected a new genre of travelogue prints, with numerous series such as The Fifty-Three Stages of the Tokaido Highway. Making ample use of chemical dyes newly introduced from the West, Hiroshige provided a more lyrical vision in which the poetry of mood is given memorable expression, as in the feeling of loneliness and quietude in the snow-covered pass at Kambara.
Ando Hiroshige - Snow at Kambara
Coming back to Europe, in the time of the first decades of the XIXth century, that artistic culture spread more and more in the West through the publication of picture books, through private collections and acquisitions ofsome museums that were just opening, or through sections dedicated to Japanese art in libraries and archives.
In England, James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) was the artistmostenthusiasticabout Japanese prints. But the vital centre of the Japanese culture myth remained Paris, fueled by at least two generations of writers (Edmond de Goncourt, Baudelaire, Zola) and artists, from Rousseau to Manet's circle of friends.
What interested the French impressionists the most about the Japanese graphics were the realism and the option for scenes of everyday and contemporary lives, for the simplification of thefigurativecomposition, for flat surfaces and uniform colour, with no chiaroscuro, for the freshness and spontaneity of the images with daring compositional lines, which contrasted so much with the rigid academic canons of the West. Many started to collect these stamps and imitate them in their works, initiating a real fashion.
Edgar Degas (1834-1917) attempted torecreate in his paintings the unconventionalangles from these Japanese scenes and the sensual idealization of the feminine faces of Kitagawa Utamaro (1753-1806), who represented women, alone or in a group, getting ready to comb their hair or wash, surprised with intimate gestures from the time of arranging themselves.
Edgar Degas - Woman combing her hair
Kitagawa Utamaro, Bijin Combing Her Hair
Also, Degas, through a stratification of warm and pasty colours, managed to imitate the brightnessof the backgrounds from thosepreciousprints, using mica, a mineral powder the reflects the light. The decorative aspect of the Japanese style also influenced the American artist Mary Cassat, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin and even the Czech Mucha, the British Beardsley, Bonnard, Vuillard and Matisse.
The Japanese artists also reflect, through the realism of their subjects and through calligraphic and chromatic perfection of their works, a special way of life, in a spiritual and pantheisticcommunion with nature and the surrounding world, which was the most difficult aspect to perceive and assmiliate in the Western mentality and culture of the XIXth century.
The artist who, maybe, managed to capture better than the others that 'spiritual' aspect of nature was Claude Monet, whose search took different and various aspects. He, who had been named 'faithful rival of Hokusai', had made even since 1867 the paintingJardin à Sainte-Adresse (Garden at Sainte-Adresse), mostly
inspired for the plunging perspective of the composition from the work Saizado from the Gohyaku-rakanji Temple of Katsushika Hokusai, which was a part of the famous series Thirty-six views of Mount Fuji, series from about 1834.
In the 70's, Monet's house in Argenteuil was full of Japanese objects, fans and stamps, from which the artist had an entire collection, enriched during his life. In that atmosphere, in 1875, he painted the portrait of his lover, Camillein Japanese Costume, as a sort of parody to the Parisian fashion 'à la japonaise'.
The young and beautiful Camille, with a look in no way Oriental, wears a blonde wig and a red kimono with exquisiteembroidery and seems to be having a coquettish fun, laughing and waving the fan (in the colours of the French flag), posing on a fan covered background.
At the same time, Monet had the ability to understand the deeppowerof suggestion due to the myriadformsof nature, as it can be seen, for example, in the representation of the sharp rocks of Port-Coton of the rock
from Belle-Île-en-Mer and the splendid evening of the Poplars, inspired by the images of Japanese artists
like Kunisada, Hokuju, Hiroshige and the great Hokusai.
Katsushika Hokusai - Hodogaya on the Tokaido Road
While painting Mount Kolsas from Norway, Monet wrote to Blanche Hoschedé in 1895: 'I am working at a view from Sandviken which resembles a Japanese village, then I will make a mountain which can be seen from everywhere, that gets me thinking of Fujiyama'. But the peak of Japanese influence on Monet is represented by the Garden at Giverny, which effectively reconstructed the exotic atmosphere and perspectives of the favourite prints made by Hiroshige and Hokusai, amidst the flowers in thousands of shades, the hidden paths, invaded by greenery, the weepingwillows and the 'Japanese' bridge that curved above the lake with water lilies. The imagination of Monet excedeed thecanvas,to becomerealspace.
Monet - Garden at Giverny
Utagawa Hiroshige - Inside Tenjin Kameido Shrine
Bibliography:
Joan Stanley-Baker: 'Japanese Art'
Collectia Pictori de geniu - "Viata si Opera lui Monet"
E. Frankel - "The Judith and Gus Leiber Collection of JapaneseWoodblock Prints"
