Musings. Ex Libris

                                                Brother Rabbit , William Morris. “You live, you flourish, you bloom.” The refrain her mother used to sing when she was still a child. In retrospect those words seemed to belie an admonition of imminent danger- there was no guarantee that everyone could smoothly ascend from “live” to “flourish,” and rarely, she thought, could one’s blooming maturity last well after the tail-end of summer. Musingly she stared out of a dormer window and stretched her tired back. Ladylike elegance made every woman look like a wooden crane. Her listless gaze landed on a tree overladen with burnished leaves; so plastic they seemed that one had the illusion of time finally ticked away to its finality- life only lived on as a pure artificial image. If so, she refused to become anything but a piece of cherished memory. The scenery from ...

She still lied restless on the ground days after she was created and sent forth to this unknown land. The land that seemed to her bristle with unnamed objects whose sharpness oftentimes rubbed her skin from pink to scarlet red. When it happened, some ineffable feeling scudded throughout her body like a little creature with spiky teeth that were liable to gnaw. And gnawed, and continuously gnawed until she wanted to rid the little creature of her body, insofar as she howled, a voice so ugly and thunderous that every other living thing bowed down and humbled in astonishment. She did feel prickings, both from within her body and outside it, after making such a shameless exhibition of her nature. Hunger was yet another “ineffable feeling,” but something less intolerant. There were periods when the feeling rendered her so euphoric that she guffawed. For days she fed on nothing but light and air. The age of Unknowing and Savagery lasted only a few winks of sleeps. She proved to ...

Auguste Rodin always endowed his sculptures with life, locating them in the medium between stones and human beings. That partly accounts for their analogy to sculptures in the Classic periods, those that assume the likeliest verisimilitude with the Holy Divine, standing redoubtably and imparting Wisdom without the means of sounds. Indeed, silence is pronounced in most sculptures, in a magnitude even more palpable than that of an unoccupied room. Sundry feelings and sentiments are made tangible; every trace of happiness or sadness is indelibly etched on the sculptures' cold, pristine faces. Whenever love is magnified, it is like flickers against a dark sky, explosive but ephemeral. Almost all forms of art display their expertise of turning the mobile into the immobile, the departing into the stagnant. However in some occasions, especially in the case of sculptures, paintings and photography, the fleeting moment and sensation are emphasised. In Rodin’s Eternal Spring, th...

Symmetry is a manifestation of Beauty at its purest and most disciplined. Some might dismiss it as banal; the only mechanism the reactionaries will trot out when their definition of Beauty is constrained by the age-old tradition. But symmetry begets a feeling of orderliness and reverence; it seems like an impossible creation that only the Divine can conceive. What the victor most wants to witness, when returning home from a gruelling battle, is the ponderous portal that welcomes his victory with a low murmur of solemnity, and the symmetrical symbols of his country that engraved on the portal will become the indelible memory that lives with him until he is the Elder, who with voice wispy but sober recounts countless tales of his heroic deeds, his glorious past. Symmetry also inspires a feeling of uncanniness, as in the case of Salvador Dali’s The Elephants (1948): two elephants, with legs rail-thin, stand face-to-face against a barren background of vast, blood-red heaven. ...

The room is resounded with a little wearied voice chanting plaintively of flowers. Flowers, as the chant goes, are like fugitive happiness, utterly ravaged the point when you too dearly fondle them. Flowers, however, are what this room is deprived of. The room is dismally poky and contains only some cumbersome cupboards, which are glass-fronted, and show the reflection of a young lady who professes a penchant of having her life staring back at her. But the presence of the young lady remains invisible to whoever witnessing the depicted scene, saves the white lace dress, which whiteness is now somewhat compromised by a few stains of dirt, she was wearing on the day of her unaccountable disappearance. Away the white dress sashays and dances, controlled by a pair of hands that are also nowhere to be seen. No sentiments or emotions reign supreme in this derelict house. Nor are evil spirits that are provoked to their vicious extremes. Rancours of long ago, of yesterday, are pardoned...