John Anderson, Rest in Peace

Ol' John has passed.

Rekindles.

Homer, The Pumpkin Patch, 1878

"Jack-o'-Lantern, Jack-o'-Lantern,

Tell me where you hide by day?"

"In the cradle where the vapours

Dream the sunlit hours away."

"Jack-o'-Lantern, Jack-o'-Lantern,

Who rekindles you at night?"

"Any firefly in the meadow

Lends a Jack-o'-Lantern light."

John B. Tabb

Wish.

“There goes the Todd woman,” I said.

Homer Buckland watched the little Jaguar go by and nodded. The woman raised her hand to Homer. Homer nodded his big, shaggy head to her but didn’t raise his own hand in return. The Todd family had a big summer home on Castle Lake, and Homer had been their caretaker since time out of mind. I had an idea that he disliked Worth Todd’s second wife every bit as much as he’d liked ’Phelia Todd, the first one.

This was just about two years ago and we were sitting on a bench in front of Bell’s Market, me with an orange soda-pop, Homer with a glass of mineral water. It was October, which is a peaceful time in Castle Rock. Lots of the lake places still get used on the weekends, but the aggressive, boozy summer socializing is over by then and the hunters with their big guns and their expensive nonresident permits pinned to their orange caps haven’t started to come into town yet. Crops have been mostly laid by. Nights are cool, good for sleeping, and old joints like mine haven’t yet started to complain. In October the sky over the lake is passing fair, with those big white clouds that move so slow; I like how they seem so flat on the bottoms, and how they are a little gray there, like with a shadow of sundown foretold, and I can watch the sun sparkle on the water and not be bored for some space of minutes. It’s in October, sitting on the bench in front of Bell’s and watching the lake from afar off, that I still wish I was a smoking man.

Stephen King, from "Mrs Todd's Shortcut"

Thanks to Kurtastrophe for introducing me to this way, way back in those heady days.

Voices.

Steve suggested that I begin sharing the ideas my students share with me in my classroom, so may I introduced Voices in The Wood.

We were trying to define art, artists, and artistic talents ...

For me art is a metaphor or a myth. I fear a lot of people think of art as just a physical outcome: a painting, a song, a poem. And after many discussions people will think of it as an emotion or how it makes them feel: beautiful, creative, fury, regret, envy. But this is my problem, if art can make you feel a unique specific emotion, why don't they call themselves a beautyist, furyist, and so on, because that describes the specific emotion. 

Abby

I'm a wonder-ist.  You?

Happy Birthday, Robert Bridges

LOW BAROMETER

The south-wind strengthens to a gale,

Across the moon the clouds fly fast,

The house is smitten as with a flail,

The chimney shudders to the blast.

On such a night, when Air has loosed

Its guardian grasp on blood and brain,

Old terrors then of god or ghost

Creep from their caves to life again;

And Reason kens he herits in

A haunted house. Tenants unknown

Assert their squalid lease of sin

With earlier title than his own.

Unbodied presences, the pack’d

Pollution and remorse of Time,

Slipp’d from oblivion reënact

The horrors of unhouseld crime.

Some men would quell the thing with prayer

Whose sightless footsteps pad the floor,

Whose fearful trespass mounts the stair

Or burts the lock’d forbidden door.

Some have seen corpses long interr'd

Escape from hallowing control,

Pale charnel forms—nay ev’n have heard

The shrilling of a troubled soul,

That wanders till the dawn hath cross’d

The dolorous dark, or Earth hath wound

Closer her storm-spredd cloke, and thrust

The baleful phantoms underground.

Robert Bridges, born on this day in 1844

Old Blind Dogs, "Tatties and Herrin'"

But awa tae the north

'Mongst the brave and the darin'

Tae the lads that were brocht up

On tatties and herrin' ...

Tremendous.

Audubon: A New Golden Age of Observation Is Revealing the Wonders of Night Migration ...

Billions of birds travel north in spring and south in fall, hundreds of species keeping a cycle of movement, and they do so primarily at night. While some large birds like hawks, cranes, and waterfowl are daytime travelers, most migrants—including the vast majority of songbirds—are on the wing in the dark. The reasons include a calmer atmosphere, guidance from the stars, and safety from predators. Meanwhile we humans by and large have no inkling of the tremendous journeys made while we sleep. Even for those who study migration, the story is unfolding in ways never before possible.

Accompaniment ...

Happy Birthday, Franz Liszt

For a whole fortnight my mind and my fingers have been working around me like two lost souls. Homer, the Bible, Plato, Locke, Byron, Hugo, Lamartine, Chateaubriand, Beethoven, Bach, Hummel, Mozart, Weber are all around me. I study them, meditate on them, devour them with fury; besides this, I practice four to five hours a day of exercises (thirds, sixths, octaves, tremolos, repetition of notes, cadenzas, etc.). Ah! provided I don't go mad, you will find me an artist!

Franz Liszt, born on this day in 1811

Vladimir Horowitz plays Liszt's Consolation No. 3 ...

Happy Birthday, Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Allston, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1814

FROST at MIDNIGHT

The Frost performs its secret ministry,
Unhelped by any wind. The owlet's cry
Came loud—and hark, again! loud as before.
The inmates of my cottage, all at rest,
Have left me to that solitude, which suits
Abstruser musings: save that at my side
My cradled infant slumbers peacefully.
'Tis calm indeed! so calm, that it disturbs
And vexes meditation with its strange
And extreme silentness. Sea, hill, and wood,
This populous village! Sea, and hill, and wood,
With all the numberless goings-on of life,
Inaudible as dreams! the thin blue flame
Lies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not;
Only that film, which fluttered on the grate,

Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing.
Methinks, its motion in this hush of nature
Gives it dim sympathies with me who live,
Making it a companionable form,
Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit
By its own moods interprets, every where
Echo or mirror seeking of itself,
And makes a toy of Thought.

But O! how oft,
How oft, at school, with most believing mind,
Presageful, have I gazed upon the bars,
To watch that fluttering stranger ! and as oft
With unclosed lids, already had I dreamt
Of my sweet birth-place, and the old church-tower,
Whose bells, the poor man's only music, rang
From morn to evening, all the hot Fair-day,
So sweetly, that they stirred and haunted me
With a wild pleasure, falling on mine ear
Most like articulate sounds of things to come!
So gazed I, till the soothing things, I dreamt,
Lulled me to sleep, and sleep prolonged my dreams!
And so I brooded all the following morn,
Awed by the stern preceptor's face, mine eye
Fixed with mock study on my swimming book:
Save if the door half opened, and I snatched
A hasty glance, and still my heart leaped up,
For still I hoped to see the stranger's face,
Townsman, or aunt, or sister more beloved,
My play-mate when we both were clothed alike!

Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side,
Whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm,
Fill up the intersperséd vacancies
And momentary pauses of the thought!
My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart
With tender gladness, thus to look at thee,
And think that thou shalt learn far other lore,
And in far other scenes! For I was reared
In the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim,
And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.
But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze
By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags
Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,
Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores
And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
Of that eternal language, which thy God
Utters, who from eternity doth teach
Himself in all, and all things in himself.
Great universal Teacher! he shall mould
Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.

Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,
Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch
Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall
Heard only in the trances of the blast,
Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, born on this day in 1772

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

Happy Birthday, Arthur Rimbaud

My turn now. The story of one of my insanities.

For a long time I boasted that I was master of all possible landscapes-- and I thought the great figures of modern painting and poetry were laughable.

What I liked were: absurd paintings, pictures over doorways, stage sets, carnival backdrops, billboards, bright-colored prints, old-fashioned literature, church Latin, erotic books full of misspellings, the kind of novels our grandmothers read, fairy tales, little children's books, old operas, silly old songs, the naive rhythms of country rimes.

I dreamed of Crusades, voyages of discovery that nobody had heard of, republics without histories, religious wars stamped out, revolutions in morals, movements of races and continents; I used to believe in every kind of magic.

I invented colors for the vowels! A black, E white, I red, O blue, U green. I made rules for the form and movement of every consonant, and I boasted of inventing, with rhythms from within me, a kind of poetry that all the senses, sooner or later, would recognize. And I alone would be its translator.

I began it as an investigation. I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.

Arthur Rimbaud, born on this day in 1854, from "Alchemy of the Word"

Attentiveness.

Chatham, Grass Fires, 1989

Gullies, hummocks in swamps, swales in the middle of large fields, the small alluvial fan created by feeder creeks, undercut riverbanks, miniature springs, dense thickets on the tops of hills; like Bachelard’s attics, seashells, drawers, cellars, these places are a balm to me.  Magic is equated to the quality of attentiveness.

Jim Harrison, from “Passacaglia on Getting Lost”

Mad.

Happy Birthday, e.e. cummings

To be nobody but yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you just like everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight – and never stop fighting.

As for expressing, that means working just a little harder than anybody who isn’t a poet can possibly imagine. 

Why? Because nothing is quite as easy as using words like somebody else. We, all of us, do exactly this nearly all of the time – and whenever we do it, we’re not poets.

e.e. cummings, born on this day in 1894

Remembering.

Anders, Earthrise, 1968

Remembering is a noble and necessary act. The call of memory, the call to memory, reaches us from the very dawn of history. No commandment figures so frequently, so insistently, in the Bible. It is incumbent upon us to remember the good we have received, and the evil we have suffered ... On the day of universal judgment, man appeals to God to remember: our salvation depends on it. If God wishes to remember our suffering, all will be well; if He refuses, all will be lost. Thus, the rejection of memory becomes a divine curse, one that would doom us to repeat past disasters, past wars.

Elie Wiesel, from his 1986 Nobel lecture, "Hope, Despair and Memory"

Happy Birthday, Sammy Hagar

Sammy Hagar was born on this day in 1947.

"Turn Up the Music"...

Same.

Do we see the same sky as Crazy Horse?

Jim Harrsion, from "Passacaglia on Getting Lost"

Steve Winwood, "Dear Mr. Fantasy"

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

Sing.

An Oyster Months anthem to learn and sing ...

Purcell, Welcome to All the Pleasures, Z. 339

Antonin Rondepierre performs "Here the Deities Approve" with theorbist Gabriel Rignol ...

Fun.

It is more civilized to make fun of life than to bewail it.

Seneca, from On the Shortness of Life

Truer.

Anne Carson (from "Life is Not Fair") has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

That attention to details leads you somewhere truer than generalizing ...

Noticing.

When existence reveals itself as existentially intolerable, thinking collapses in on itself. In such situations—in the depths—it's noticing, not thinking, that does the trick.

Jordan B. Peterson, from 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

I would add that appreciation is required, as well.

That being said, thanks to Walker's Arms for the image and the respite.

Wonder.

ANOTHER POEM of the GIFTS

I want to give thanks to the divine

Labyrinth of causes and effects

For the diversity of beings

That form this singular universe,

For Reason, that will never give up its dream

Of a map of the labyrinth,

For Helen’s face and the perseverance of Ulysses,

For love, which lets us see others

As God sees them,

For the solid diamond and the flowing water,

For Algebra, a palace of exact crystals,

For the mystic coins of Angelus Silesius,

For Schopenhauer,

Who perhaps deciphered the universe,

For the blazing of fire,

That no man can look at without an ancient wonder,

For mahogany, cedar, and sandalwood,

For bread and salt,

For the mystery of the rose

That spends all its colour and can not see it,

For certain eves and days of 1955,

For the hard riders who, on the plains,

Drive on the cattle and the dawn,

For mornings in Montevideo,

For the art of friendship,

For Socrates’ last day,

For the words spoken one twilight

From one cross to another,

For that dream of Islam that embraced

A thousand nights and a night,

For that other dream of Hell,

Of the tower of cleansing fire

And of the celestial spheres,

For Swedenborg,

Who talked with the angels in London streets,

For the secret and immemorial rivers

That converge in me,

For the language that, centuries ago, I spoke in Northumberland,

For the sword and harp of the Saxons,

For the sea, which is a shining desert

And a secret code for things we do not know

And an epitaph for the Norsemen,

For the word music of England,

For the word music of Germany,

For gold, that shines in verses,

For epic winter,

For the title of a book I have not read: Gesta Dei per Francos,

For Verlaine, innocent as the birds,

For crystal prisms and bronze weights,

For the tiger’s stripes,

For the high towers of San Francisco and Manhattan Island,

For mornings in Texas,

For that Sevillian who composed the Moral Epistle

And whose name, as he would have wished, we do not know,

For Seneca and Lucan, both of Cordova,

Who, before there was Spanish, had written

All Spanish literature,

For gallant, noble, geometric chess,

For Zeno’s tortoise and Royce’s map,

For the medicinal smell of eucalyptus trees,

For speech, which can be taken for wisdom,

For forgetfulness, which annuls or modifies the past,

For habits,

Which repeat us and confirm us in our image like a mirror,

For morning, that gives us the illusion of a new beginning,

For night, its darkness and its astronomy,

For the bravery and happiness of others,

For my country, sensed in jasmine flowers

Or in an old sword,

For Whitman and Francis of Assisi, who already wrote this poem,

For the fact that the poem is inexhaustible

And becomes one with the sum of all created things

And will never reach its last verse

And varies according to its writers

For Frances Haslam, who begged her children’s pardon

For dying so slowly,

For the minutes that precede sleep,

For sleep and death,

Those two hidden treasures,

For the intimate gifts I do not mention,

For music, that mysterious form of time.

Jorge Luis Borges

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

Bach, Jesu, der du meine Seele, BWV 78

The Netherlands Bach Society performs featuring Maria Keohane, soprano, Tim Mead, alto, Daniel Johannsen, tenor, Matthew Brook, bass, conducted by Jos van Veldhoven ...

Happy Birthday, Frederic Remington

Remington, The Outlier, 1909

Frederic Remington was born on this day in 1861.

Holborne, The Night Watch

Valery Sauvage performs ...

Happy Birthday, Jean-François Millet

Millet, Autumn Landscape with a Flock of Turkeys, 1873

It is the treating of the commonplace with the feelings of the sublime that gives to art its true power.  Art will never come except from some small disregarded corner where an isolated and inspired man is studying the mysteries of nature. 

Jean-Francois Millet, born on this day in 1814

Released.

The Police released their best album, Zenyatta Mondatta, on this day in 1980.

"Man in a Suitcase"...

Happy Birthday, Stevie Ray Vaughan

Stevie Ray Vaughan was born on this day in 1954.

"The Things (That) I Used to Do"...

Indian-Summer-Breathing.

Bradbury, The Halloween Tree, 1964

The pumpkins on the tree were not mere pumpkins. Each had a face sliced in it. Each face was different. Every eye was a stranger eye. Every nose was a weirder nose. Every mouth smiled hideously in some new way.

There must have been a thousand pumpkins on this tree, hung high and on every branch. A thousand smiles. A thousand grimaces. And twice-times-a-thousand glares and winks and blinks and leerings of fresh-cut eyes.

And as the boys watched, a new thing happened.

The pumpkins began to come alive.

One by one, starting at the bottom of the tree and the nearest pumpkins, candles took fire within the raw interiors. This one then that one and this and then still another, and on up and around, three pumpkins here, seven pumpkins still higher, a dozen clustered beyond, a hundred, five hundred, a thousand pumpkins lit their candles, which is to say brightened up their faces, showed fire in their square or round or curiously slanted eyes. Sparks leaped out their ripe-cut ears.

And from somewhere two voices, three or maybe four voices whispered and chanted a kind of singsong or old sea shanty of the sky and time and the earth turning over into sleep. The rainspouts blew spiderdust:

"It’s big, it’s broad…"

A voice smoked from the rooftop chimney:

"It’s broad, it’s bright…

It fills the sky of All Hallows’ Night…"

From open windows somewhere, cobwebs drifted:

"The strangest sight you’ve ever seen.

The Monster Tree on Halloween."

The candles flickered and flared. The wind crooned in, the wind crooned out the pumpkin mouths, tuning the song:

"The leaves have burned to gold and red

The grass is brown, the old year dead,

But hang the harvest high, Oh see!

The candle constellations on the Halloween Tree."

Tom felt his mouth stir like a small mouse, wanting to sing:

"The stars they turn, the candles burn

And the mouse-leaves scurry on the cold wind bourne,

And a mob of smiles shine down on thee

From the gourds hung high on the Halloween Tree.

The smile of the Witch, and the smile of the Cat,

The smile of the Beast, and the smile of the Bat,

The smile of the Reaper taking his fee

All cut and glimmer on the Halloween Tree

Smoke seemed to sift from Tom’s mouth:

“Halloween Tree …”

All the boys whispered it:

“Halloween … Tree …”

And then there was silence.

And during the silence the last of the triples and quadruples of All Hallows’ Tree candles were lit in titanic constellations woven up through the black branches and peeking down through the twigs and crisp leaves.

And the Tree had now become one vast substantial Smile.

The last of the pumpkins now were lit. The air around the Tree was Indian-summer-breathing warm. The Tree exhaled sooty smoke and raw-pumpkin smell upon them."

Ray Bradbury, from The Halloween Tree

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

O'er.

OCTOBER 

My ornaments are fruits; my garments leaves,
  Woven like cloth of gold, and crimson dyed;
I do not boast the harvesting of sheaves,
  O'er orchards and o'er vineyards I preside.
Though on the frigid Scorpion I ride,
  The dreamy air is full, and overflows
With tender memories of the summer-tide,
  And mingled voices of the doves and crows. 

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Brotzeit.

Outdoor Deutscher-types relied on landjäger as trail snacks during seasonal migrations to high pastures, carrying it as a provision that endured long journeys and harsh conditions. Like jerky, it was easy to carry easy in pockets or packs, ideal for daily labor and prolonged herding practices in Germany.

Landjäger is a German smoked hunter's sausage typically made from a blend of pork and beef, mixed with pork fat, and heavily seasoned with garlic, caraway seed, coriander, and black pepper.  It's traditionally was paired with simple accompaniments such as rye bread, cheeses, and beer, enjoyed in taverns or, as I was introduced by Grandma, a break called brotzeit. 

I can remember weekends, all though out the year, while working at Grandma and Grandpa's house, mid-mornings and later in the afternoon, Grandma would pile a tray full of bread, cheese, pickles, sausage, nuts, pretzels, chocolate, and mugs (bottles of beer in her apron pockets -- I was allowed a sip of the foamy elixir for my efforts) and carry it out to us in the yard or the garage.  The landjäger was always the first thing I went for.

Those were heady days.

The best landjäger (and many other necessaries) on the planet can be procured from Kern's in Frankenmuth.

Few.

Volterra, Michelangelo, 1545

Painters are not in any way unsociable through pride, but either because they find few pursuits equal to painting, or in order not to corrupt themselves with the useless conversation of idle people, and debase the intellect from the lofty imaginations in which they are always absorbed.

Michelangelo Buonarroti, from the "First Dialogue" of Francisco de Holanda’s Da Pintura Antiga

Thank you, Kurt.

Read it and weep, blogosphere.

Happy Birthday, Samuel Adams

Copley, Samuel Adams, 1772

The liberties of our country, the freedoms of our civil Constitution are worth defending at all hazards; it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors. They purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure and blood. It will bring a mark of everlasting infamy on the present generation – enlightened as it is – if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle, or to be cheated out of them by the artifices of designing men.

Samuel Adams, born on this day in 1722, submitted as "Candita" to the Boston Globe, 14 October 1771

Sings.

It may be that when we no longer know what to do

we have come to our real work,

and that when we no longer know which way to go

we have come to our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.

The impeded stream is the one that sings.

Wendell Berry

Peace.

Happy Birthday, Glenn Gould

In the best of all possible worlds, art would be unnecessary. Its offer of restorative, placative therapy would go begging a patient. The audience would be the artist and their life would be art. I believe that the justification of art is the internal combustion it ignites in the hearts of men and not its shallow, externalized, public manifestations. The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity.

Glenn Gould, born yesterday in 1932

Performing Bach's Contrapunctus I ...

'Tis Autumn.

Happy Birthday, T.S. Eliot

The ordinary reader, when warned against the obscurity of a poem, is apt to be thrown into a state of consternation very unfavourable to poetic receptivity. Instead of beginning, as he should, in a state of sensitivity, he obfuscates his senses by the desire to be clever and to look very hard for something, he doesn't know what-or else by the desire not to be taken ill. There is such a thing as stage fright, but what such readers have is pit or gallery fright. The more seasoned reader, he who has reached, in these matters, a state of greater purity, does not bother about understanding; not, at least, at first. I know that some of the poetry to which I am most devoted is poetry which I did not understand at first reading; some is poetry which I am not sure I understand yet.

T.S. Eliot, born on this day in 1888, from The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism

Blanche being unordinary ...

Happy Birthday, Bryan Ferry

Bryan Ferry was born on this day in 1945.

"The Right Stuff"...

Released.

The Furs released Forever Now on this day in 1982.

"Run and Run"...

Happy Birthday, Francesco Borromini

Borromini, Dome of Sant'Ivo alla Sapienz, 1660

Francesco Borromini was born on this day in 1599.

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

Record.

Volkov, The Old Divide, n/d

SONG of the STONE WALL

Come walk with me, and I will tell

What I have read in this scroll of stone;

I will spell out this writing on hill and meadow.

This is New England's entablature of rock,

Leagues upon leagues of sealed history awaiting an interpreter.

It is a chronicle wrought by praying workmen,

The forefathers of our nation.

The walls have many things to tell me,

And the days are long. I come and listen;

My hand is upon the stones, and the tale I fain would hear

Is of the men who built the walls,

And of the God who made the stones and the workers.

With searching feet I walk beside the wall;

I plunge and stumble over the fallen stones;

I follow the windings of the wall

Over the heaving hill, down by the meadow-brook,

Beyond the scented fields, by the marsh where rushes grow.

On I trudge through pine woods fragrant and cool,

And emerge amid clustered pools and by rolling acres of rye.

The wall is built of field stones great and small,

Tumbled about by frost and storm,

Shaped and polished by ice and rain and sun;

Some flattened, grooved, and chiseled

By the inscrutable sculpture of the weather;

Some with clefts and rough edges harsh to the touch.

Gracious Time has glorified the wall

And covered the historian stones with a mantle of green;

The sunbeams flit and waver in the rifts,

Vanish and reappear, linger and sleep,

Conquer with radiance the obdurate angles,

Filter between the naked rents and wind-bleached jags.

I understand the triumph and the truth

Wrought into these walls of rugged stone.

They are a miracle of patient hands,

They are a victory of suffering, a paean of pain.

All pangs of death, all cries of birth,

Are in the mute, moss-covered stones;

They are eloquent to my hands.

O beautiful, blind stones, inarticulate and dumb!

In the deep gloom of their hearts there is a gleam

Of the primeval sun which looked upon them

When they were begotten.

So in the heart of man shines forever

A beam from the everlasting sun of God.

Unresponsive, rude are the stones;

Yet in them divine things lie concealed.

I hear their imprisoned chant:

"We are fragments of the universe,

Chips of the rock whereon God laid the foundation of the world;

Out of immemorial chaos He wrought us.

Out of the sun, out of the tempest, out of the travail of the earth, we grew.

We are wonderfully mingled of life and death;

We serve as crypts for innumerable, unnoticed, tiny forms.

We are manifestations of the Might

That rears the granite hills unto the clouds

And sows the tropic seas with coral isles.

We are shot through and through with hidden color;

A thousand hues are blended in our gray substance.

Sapphire, turquoise, ruby, opal,

Emerald, diamond, amethyst, are our sisters from the beginning;

And our brothers are iron, lead, zinc,

Copper, and silver, and gold.

We are the dust of continents past and to come,

We are a deathless frieze carved with man's destiny;

In us is the record sibylline of far events.

Helen Keller, from "Song of the Stone Wall"

Companionship.

Namuth, Rothko in His Studio, 1964

A picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer. It dies by the same cause. It is therefore risky to work out into the world. It is often impaired by the eyes of the unfeeling and the cruelty of the careless.

Mark Rothko

Excellent.

An excellent album ...