Tim Buckley, "Love from Room 109 at the Islander (On Pacific Coast Highway)"

One's mental journey flows like streams.
They start out smoothly;
their surfaces glisten like transparent lids.
Sunshine be the first one to bid them farewell,
for it has the strong belief that the odyssey will definitely augur well.

So they flow,
with the illusion of meandering in a fairyland.

Then the streams run into pebbles,
freckled at first but permeated the next.
The waves therefore occur.
At times they can grow so strong that the initial pureness of the streams' colour is muddled.
The streams race at full tilt,
as troops of horses fleeing out of a conflagrant barn.

The aforesaid case should be diagnosed as some usual undulations human lives,
but their nosy friends can hardly care no straw of it.
They stir up the waves again;
verify the eternal delusion.

The streams are propelled into gushes.
Despite of how the others might consider them- to be mad,
their words can still be sane and genuine,
just like the notorious Septimus in Mrs. Dalloway.

But who will lend ears to them?
People are constantly seeking for balance,
but how the balance will exist if the world is already tipped over?

A polychromatic butterfly waltzes by,
doing somersaults,
swiftly.

The streams (or the gushes) do find their balance eventually.
When the grueling journey marks out in a sudden swoop of elevation,
the streams are home again,
with the sun welcoming them in balmy beams.

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"Truth fails not; but her outward forms that bear
The longest date do melt like frosty rime."- William Wordsworth, "Mutability"

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Paintings in Proust: Vesuvius Erupting by J.M.W. Turner

In Proust’s Swann’s Way , the narrator’s grandmother is described as one who inculcates in her grandson a reverence for the “elevated ideals.” Infinitely disdainful of the mechanical nature of replica, when shown photograph of the magnificent Mount Vesuvius his grandmother dismisses it with a lofty query as of whether other more acknowledged artists did paintings of the volcano in the first place. She is having in mind the great J.M.W. Turner, whose depiction of Vesuvius in flame displays, in her view, “a stage higher in the scale of art.” The enduring fascination with volcanoes was especially evident in the 19 th century, which saw an irregularly high frequency of Vesuvius eruptions that, at the time, alarmed many of the imminent cataclysm that a thousand of years before destroyed the city of Pompeii. Turner, according to a number of sources, may not be amongst the first-hand witnesses of those eruptions, but badgered his geologist friends, John MacCulloch and Charles Stoke

Franz von Stuck, Two Dancers

Dancers can be like jousters. Fear and excitement wring their hearts so into tangled skein. Fluttered air brushes against their skins like chill. In anticipation of a good, likely interminable, fight both cannot be more well-prepared, grimacing to each other some distances afar as menacing demonstration of their unconquerable audacities. Everything is all so punctiliously rehearsed and choreographed. Even when darkness descends and everything is shrouded in utter invisibility, each dancer will know by heart when to put which foot forward, to which direction she will sway elegantly her supple bodice to duck narrowly from her opponent, and when the time is ripe, she will let her skirt billow like an arch of rainbow, the more fiery and colourful the rainbow the likelier the chance the dancer is going to claim the final victory. It is always something with Art Nouveau that, when beholding a piece that epitomises most substantially the essence of the said art mov

Review: La Jetee (1962)

In Matter and Memory , French philosopher Henri Bergson posits an implausible notion – the pure present: “The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.” Since time is a movement , an unending progression, there is not a definite point as that of a present moment, Bergson seems to suggest, but an admixture of the past and the future, the has-beens rapidly encroaching on, and eventually subsuming, the what-ifs. In a sense, and as absurd as this may sound, the present is ever elusive to our consciousness: what we perceive of the now , at the very moment in which it is being registered, is already relegated to the realm of the past. The past seems, therefore, the only reality we have really experienced; the reality that we are predestined to never possess. Chris Marker’s La Jetee (1962) envisages a future in which man finally discovers the means of triumphing over time’s irrevocable logic: experiments are

Musings. Ex Libris

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