2013 New Year Birds : Happy New Year!

2013 New Year Birds   @fourteenth







 My Best to All for The New Year

an immense journey

underwater  ©fourteenth

“Perhaps he knew, there in the grass by the waters, that he had before him an immense journey.”
Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey: An Imaginative Naturalist Explores the Mysteries of Man and Nature

Nothing endures but change. Heraclitus

tide ~  κύμα     ©fourteenth

τὰ πάντα ῥεῖ καὶ οὐδὲν μένει ~ Ήράκλειτος


Nothing endures but change ~ Heraclitus  

winter goldfish--χειμερινά χρυσόψαρα

winter goldfish--χειμερινά χρυσόψαρα  ©fourteenth

winter goldfish slip on redbrown mud
little trails of ocherlines left behind

smile! the new year's not too long away!

trees tug to rooted ground; sea sprayed wind
needles the eye lids tender

laugh! the time is just right.

we struggle, we balance, we can fly

birdnest  ©fourteenth

we struggle, we balance, we can fly

Let Earth and Sea and Air be still And Heaven itself: Plotinus

distant trail©fourteenth

Let Earth and Sea and Air be still



And Heaven itself.



And then let the Body think



Of the Spirit as streaming, pouring,



Rushing and shining into it from



All sides while it stands quiet.


Plotinus

sun and the sound of wind on rock: ο ήλιος κι ο ήχος του ανέμου στην πέτρα

©fourteenth

Sound Room October 20th Improv 1


The white moon takes the sea away from the sea
and gives it back to the sea. Beautiful,
conquering by means of the pure and tranquil,
the moon compels the truth to delude itself
that it is truth become whole, eternal, solitary,
though it is not so.

Yes.
Divine plainness,
you pierce the familiar certainty, you place
a new soul into whatever is real.
Unpredictable rose! you took the rose away
from the rose, and you could give back
the rose to the rose.

from Diario de Poeta y Mar,
from the spanish of juan ramon jimenez,

translated by james wright

xo
erin

(thank you erin)

twig©fourteenth

χάρτης το σώμα
ποταμοί διατρέχουν
λάσπη και πόνο

makis tselentis

...the lifting of the mist

©fourteenth

The Hundred Thousand Places

as if you were implicated
the lifting of the mist
from the water

the grey wake of a boat
unmoored at dawn

Thomas A. Clark 

inner harmony

rocks and grass, ©fourteenth

But the beauty of Einstein's equations, for example, is just as real to anyone who's experienced it as the beauty of music. We've learned in the 20th century that the equations that work have inner harmony.

Edward Witten

ΠΑΛΙΝΤΡΟΠΟΝ: Οδυσσέας Ελύτης

rock and thorns, ©fourteenth

ΠΑΛΙΝΤΡΟΠΟΝ

Θάρρος: ο ουρανός αυτός είναι
Και τα πουλιά του εμείς

                όσοι αλλού δε μοιάζουμε



Καταποντισμένη μέσα μας

Θάλασσα δημητριακή με γαίες και αχανή βουστάσια

Μόνος απ' όξω απόμεινε ο ηλίανθος

Αλλά ποιος είναι αυτός που περπατάει στον ήλιο
Μαύρος όσο το φως πιο δυνατό;

Θάρρος: ο άνθρωπος αυτός είναι
ο Κύων που λένε άλλ'

                  ο παραλίγο Αρχαλκυών

Άπλες αμάλαγες του Ιουνίου νομάδες άνεμοι
Χαρακωμένα καστανά χώματα που ανεβήκαμε

Διψασμένοι για λίγη λάμψη όρους Θαβώρ

Αλλά τι να 'ναι αυτό που χαμηλά περνάει κι ανατριχιάζει
Σαν άλλου κόσμου που έφτασε αεράκι;

Θάρρος: ο θάνατος αυτός είναι
Στην παπαρούνα την πλατιά

                   και στο λιανό λιανό χαμομηλάκι.


Οδυσσέας Ελύτης

ΤΟ ΦΩΤΟΔΕΝΤΡΟ ΚΑΙ Η ΔΕΚΑΤΗ ΤΕΤΑΡΤΗ ΟΜΟΡΦΙΑ

(1971)

I dream my painting and I paint my dream : Vincent van Gogh

dream2©fourteenth

“I dream my painting and I paint my dream.”
― Vincent van Gogh

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things: Gerard Manely Hopkins

open mountain ©fourteenth

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Gerard Manley Hopkins 1844–1889

The silence is all white : Ivan Goll

©fourteenth

The temple is all white
The god is all white
The silence is all white

Yet somewhere a dark water breathes
and prays

My body is all white
Yet somewhere my dark blood breathes
And prays

Der Tempel ist ganz weiss
Der Gott ist ganz weiss
Die Stille ist ganz weiss

Nur irgenwo atmet ein dunkles Wasser
und betet

Mein Leib ist ganz weiss
Nur irgendwo atmet mein dunkles Blut
Und betet

Ivan Goll

from the Malayan Love songs

nature abstracts

©fourteenth

♪

Bee- eaters and a small brush left on a rock.

©fourteenth

The Bee-eaters circle above me. I let my small brush down on the rock.
All I can hear is their call. Will we ever meet again?

The longing of no longing : washed stones

 ©fourteenth

All is sand. The way it touches, mirrors and adheres to skin. Crystals clean as winnowed grain. Hot on the surface, cool in the under-dark. Poems distant on the horizon, belly-dancing in liquid heat. This is the longing of no longing. Hearing the far-off soul’s music, with no desire in my hips.

©Ruth of washed stones

©fourteenth

♪

Syria : Ziad Dalloul

©Ziad Dalloul

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

T.S.Eliot

from The Waste Land
I. The Burial Of The Dead

☯

A drawing with oil pastel

©fourteenth

A drawing with charcoal

©fourteenth

portrait exersices

    

















❄

Artists create out of a sense of desolation : El Greco

©fourteenth

                                           Artists create out of a sense of desolation.
                                           The spirit of creation is an excruciating, intricate exploration from within the soul.

                                        
                                           El Greco

A weightless word : Octavio Paz

©fourteenth

       Una palabra de poco peso
       para saludar al día
       una palabra de vuelo a vela
          Ah!
       A weightless word
       to greet the day
       a word for setting sail
         Ah!


       Octavio Paz
       from Salamander

We are only passing by.

©fourteenth

Looking down

lines of light reflecting;

little fish around my feet

Fish, light, cool sea-surface--

We are only passing by. We were never really here.

...windswept small, dry leaves

©fourteenth

Thursday evening

Walking uphill

whirling circles

of windswept small, dry leaves

at my feet

Those who are willing to be vulnerable move among mysteries.

©fourteenth

Those who are willing to be vulnerable move among mysteries.

Theodore Roethke

Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke

Kobayashi Issa: Summer night--

pine©fourteenth

Summer night-- even the stars
are whispering to each other.




Kobayashi Issa

Rabindranath Tagore: Listen, my heart...

©fourteenth

Listen, my heart, to the whispers of the world with which it makes love to you.

Rabindranath Tagore

from Stray Birds

☼


With infinite thanks 
to my mother

Simone Weil

© James Owens

We must try to love without imagining
-- to love the appearance in its nakedness without interpretation.
What we love then is truly God.

--Simone Weil





☼

long shadows, summer grass

summer grass, long shadows ©fourteenth

Pegasus hiding

hiding  ©fourteenth

colour-sketch #2

©fourteenth

a sketch

©fourteenth, 2012

I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you : T.S.Eliot (from Four Quartets)

I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you 

Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre, 

The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed 

With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness, 

And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama 

And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away— 

Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations 

And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence 

And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen 

Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about; 

Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing— 

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope 

For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, 

For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith 

But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting. 

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: 

So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing. T. S. Eliot. Four Quartets.

splash : Elizabeth Reninger

©fourteenth, 2009

splash


dawn's
baptism

gold light making
mountains fluid

again and again i melt
into You

(You turning might's
rivers into

bliss) receive the day's bright
touch as though

it were mine
with cupped hands offer

you This ...


Elizabeth Reninger

studio

On the nature of space and the image: Plato

©fourteenth

And there is a third nature, which is space, and is eternal, and admits not of destruction and provides a home for all created things, and is apprehended without the help of sense, by a kind of spurious reason, and is hardly real; which we beholding as in a dream, say of all existence that it must of necessity be in some place and occupy a space, but that what is neither in heaven nor in earth has no existence. Of these and other things of the same kind, relating to the true and waking reality of nature, we have only this dreamlike sense, and we are unable to cast off sleep and determine the truth about them. For an image, since the reality, after which it is modelled, does not belong to it, and it exists ever as the fleeting shadow of some other, must be inferred to be in another [i.e. in space ], grasping existence in some way or other, or it could not be at all. But true and exact reason, vindicating the nature of true being, maintains that while two things [i.e. the image and space] are different they cannot exist one of them in the other and so be one and also two at the same time. 

from Timaeus

Listening to the sap of life. (a new, less bluish photo...)

©fourteenth

Three sketches

13x18 cm rag paper

13x18 cm rag paper

#2

13x18 cm rag paper

Paul Valéry

"Entre la Voix et la Pensée, entre la Pensée et la Voix, entre la Présence et l’Absence, oscille le pendule poétique." - PAUL VALÉRY

#1

#2

#3

Paintings (stage 2) untitled

untitled stage 2   ©fourteenth