An Eclectic Journal of the Arts
A dash of this, that and the Other. Some homage to Kandinsky and Van Gogh, plus my own dreams and walking visions. It’s been much too long since I. Far too many months since I. Since I found my mountain tops. Since I floated there, with the wind, and music, and grief. Glad grief because of where I was, and where I floated. Because the sun was shining down on me and mine. Me and my shadow dreams.
This is what it will be like soon.…
Looking at an old poem from decades ago. Trying to see if it still holds up. Some poets, like Yeats, revised even published works, changing new editions of their collections over time.
This isn’t really like that. But it is a return to some dark cove, some ancient lough, for reassessment and advice:
Clever Autumns With Parochial Zephers
Blindness and cacophony
Like time underwater
The yews tremble for their
Lovers on the mountain tops
Four beats to every heart
And roses for the poor
I believe the groans
Of doctors if
They’re out of work
Scrounging in the meadow
For sustenance and rhubarb
If the play’s the thing
Why is the audience sleeping?…
New additions to Spinozablue include poems from Kyle Hemmings and Howie Good. Both bring the uncanny and the marvelous to the fore in unique ways. Two things sorely lacking in Art, to our great sadness.
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A few days ago I mused about The Other and difference. The foreignness of things, of certain subjects for Art, of their magnetism. In a sense, that could be a sign of my backsliding from the Zennish path, because Zen teaches the overcoming, the transcendence of difference. It teaches mastery over the process of discrimination and segregation, two of our biggest delusions:
That we are essentially different from one another.…
Composition as Cipher, or Number. The work after his ninth, or a painting to represent all paintings. Whatever his intentions regarding the title, the painting strikes me as musical, like pretty much all of his art, and he wanted that music to come from within all viewers so that they could become seers like Kandinsky. The inner artist meeting the work on the wall and turning it into a tunnel back to themselves. A tunnel with ears.
…In your works, you have realized what I, albeit in uncertain form, have so greatly longed for in music. The independent progress through their own destinies, the independent life of the individual voices in your compositions is exactly what I am trying to find in my paintings.
My poem from yesterday was about many things, but chiefly about fighting the inability to write. Poems, prose, in journals. The painting above is about something else, though it ties some things together for me. Kandinsky, in this work from his Der Blaue Reiter period, was painting in part theoretically, putting theories into his paintings, arming his colors with monads of thought. Color as spirit. Spiritual color(s). Color to invoke the spiritual. And music as the bridge of bridges.
…“Colour is a power which directly influences the soul. Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammer, the soul is the strings.
Kandinsky heard colors. They sang to him. His notes were colors, his colors notes. I see Jazz in the air, Bebop tickling the cerebral cortex, trailing after the watcher and the painter and the singer in all of us. I see blue notes, sharps and flats, choruses and improvs. The sun kisses that music and carries it through space and time. And there’s something not quite right, or unfinished, and waiting. There’s something ready to come into view on the right, like an unfinished symphony, an old Jazz or Blues number found in the papers of a known or unknown master.…