FORGIVENESS - Maria Popova (read by NICK CAVE)

 Wot? We can have poetry . . .it’s a SUNDAY! It’s NICK CAVE! reading Maria Popova

on FORGIVENESS

FORGIVENESS

by Maria Popova

May the tide
never tire of its tender toil
how over and over
it forgives the Moon
the daily exile
and returns to turn
mountains into sand
         as if to say,
you too can have
this homecoming
you too possess
this elemental power
of turning
the stone in the heart
into golden dust.

Writer of the Day | URSULA K. LE GUIN on again and beauty + Maria Popova ‘The Marginalian'

I forget how beautiful she was as a younger woman.

Ursula K. Le Guin:

 If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself—as men have done to women, and class has done to class, and nation has done to nation—you may hate it, or deify it, but in either case you have denied its spiritual equality, and its human reality. You have made it into a thing, to which the only possible relationship is a power relationship. And thus you have fatally impoverished your own reality.

"American SF and The Other" in Science-Fiction Studies 7, 1975.

There were some interviews on Radio 4 ‘Women’s Hour’ this morning by women Sci Fi writers and all mentioned Le Guin who I greatly admire alongside many others

By sheer coincidence the newsletter this morning from the wonderful Maria Popova, her Marginalian, feature’s Le Guin on the transience of beauty

Beauty always has rules. It’s a game. I resent the beauty game when I see it controlled by people who grab fortunes from it and don’t care who they hurt. I hate it when I see it making people so self-dissatisfied that they starve and deform and poison themselves. Most of the time I just play the game myself in a very small way, buying a new lipstick, feeling happy about a pretty new silk shirt.

Ursula K. Le Guin

Le Guin, who writes about aging with more grace, humor, and dignity than any other writer I’ve read, turns to the particularly stifling ideal of eternal youth:

One rule of the game, in most times and places, is that it’s the young who are beautiful. The beauty ideal is always a youthful one. This is partly simple realism. The young are beautiful. The whole lot of ’em. The older I get, the more clearly I see that and enjoy it.

M. Popova

The Marginalian

I haven't posted anything from Brain Pickings for a while but have touched on Georgia O'Keefe before now and her relationship with Alfred Stieglitz always fascinated me. Indeed averything about O'Keefe fascinated me and this piece is no different truly fascinating read. Subscribe to Ms Popova's weekly newsletter her It's FREE! subscribe here 

Georgia O’Keeffe on the Art of Seeing In her stunning autobiographical reflection on the moment she understood what it means to be an artist, Virginia Woolf beheld the cosmos of connections in a single flower. Decades later, the Nobel-winning physicist Richard Feynman offered a different, complementary lens on the art of seeing through his now-famous monologue known as “Ode to a Flower.” Before Feynman, before Woolf, another titan of the creative spirit found a powerful metaphor for how we experience the world — how we see it, and how we don’t — in a flower. Georgia O’Keeffe, Red Canna, 1924 (Georgia O’Keeffe Museum) “I found that I could say things with colour and shapes that I couldn’t say in any other way things that I had no words for,” Georgia O’Keeffe (November 15, 1887–March 6, 1986) wrote in the foreword to a catalog for an exhibition of her work two decades before she became the first female artist honored with a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art — a triumph largely predicated on her arresting large-scale paintings of flowers, magnified and abstracted to radiate uncommon emotional intensity haloed by awe. Although art critics consistently insisted that O’Keeffe’s depictions of flowers were her commentary on women’s sexuality, the artist herself resolutely denied these interpretations. For her, they were her commentary on seeing — a magnifying lens for the attention. Painting these close-ups was a way of learning to look, a way of removing the blinders with with we gallop through the world, slowing down, shedding our notions and concepts of things, and taking things in as they really are.  Georgia O’Keeffe by Rufus Holsinger, 1915 (Albert & Shirley Small Special Collections Library) In a passage originally published in the exhibition catalog An American Place — which also gave us O’Keeffe’s serenade to blue — and later cited in Georgia O’Keeffe: The Poetry of Things (public library), she writes: A flower is relatively small. Everyone has many associations with a flower — the idea of flowers. You put out your hand to touch the flower — lean forward to smell it — maybe touch it with your lips almost without thinking — or give it to someone to please them. Still — in a way — nobody sees a flower — really — it is so small — we haven’t time — and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time. If I could paint the flower exactly as I see it no one would see what I see because I would paint it small like the flower is small. So I said to myself — I’ll paint what I see — what the flower is to me but I’ll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking time to look at it — I will make even busy New-Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers.  Well — I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower, you hung all your own associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower — and I don’t. Georgia O’Keeffe, Grey Lines with Black, Blue and Yellow, 1923 (Georgia O’Keeffe Museum) Complement with O’Keeffe on setting priorities, success, public opinion, and what it means to be an artist, and her passionate love letters to Alfred Stieglitz, then revisit cognitive scientist Alexandra Horowitz on the art of looking, Annie Dillard on the secret to seeing, philosopher Martin Buber on what a tree can teach us about seeing others as they truly are, John Ruskin on how drawing trains you to see more clearly and live with greater presence, and Emily Dickinson’s astounding herbarium — a forgotten masterpiece of attention at the intersection of poetry and science. and for the season today Georgia O’Keeffe’s Autumn Leaves, 1924

this . . . . . . . heaven knows we've been going on about it for long enough




 . . . . . farmer, farmer put away the DDT now, give me spots on my apples 
but leave me the birds and the bees

what have they done to the earth?
what have they done to our fair sister?
ravaged and plundered and ripped her and bit her
stuck her with knives in the side of the dawn
and tied her with fences and dragged her down

Jim Morrison - The Doors 'When The Music's Over'

oh, it was just a hippie sentiment huh? and now the bees are dying and we have GMO doctored food stuffs, fruit and vegetables causing all kinds of disastrous mayhem . . . . fortunately some folk are still spreading the word now and still . . . . . . . . . 

For Rachel Carson




Rachel Carson (May 27, 1907–April 14, 1964)