Starlings of Gretna

•12/09/11 • 4 Comments

 

MURMURATIONS

 

No one knows why they do it. Yet each fall, in exquisite choreographed perfection, thousands of starlings dance in the twilight above Gretna, Scotland. The birds gather in magical shape-shifting flocks called murmurations, having migrated in the millions from Russia and Scandinavia to escape the biting chill of winter.

What is the source of this aerial majesty? No one knows, not even those, like people of science, who study such phenomena. Even complex algorithmic models fail to explain how the starlings’ acrobatics, which rely on the tiny bird’s quicksilver reaction time of under 100 milliseconds, manage to avoid aerial collisions—and predators—as they dance across the sky in perfect harmony. Like traditions repeated year after year, the classic ballet, the Nutcracker at Christmas, for example, this magical performance faithfully returns each season to tell of the coming of winter.

Sadly, their show of force is in danger of becoming nothing more than an illusion, however, as the population of starlings have declined over the years in the UK, perhaps because of a drop in nesting sites. But for now, the birds still roost in several of Britain’s rural pastures, settling down to sleep (and chatter) after the evening’s final bow.

 

For something akin to a religious experience, you might want to witness this spectacle as it happened.

VIDEO

 

A murmuration of starlings arriving at Gretna in the Scottish Border, November 1, 2011.

 

 

•11/10/11 • 4 Comments

 

Blue Pond, Hokkaido

 

It might be difficult to imagine this frozen pond etched in solitude as a place frequented by many, yet in spring, summer, and autumn, the “blue pond” in Biei, Hokkaido, is a famous gathering spot for travelers the world over. I love it just as it is, in all its regal stillness. How magical it must have been for the photographer to capture this moment during the first snow of the season as it fell in hushed silence over the water.

 

Photograph by Kent Shiraishi
National Geographic

 

 

Celestial Locomotive

•11/06/11 • 2 Comments

 

In his short and troubled life, it is told that Vincent Van Gogh was sensitive, gifted and emotionally honest. He suffered from both extreme despair to sublime ecstasy — some have called it hallucination — and died by his own hand in a “wheat field that had engaged his attention.” Despite the mystery surrounding his death and the search for enchantment that fueled his life, there is no disagreement on his love and life-long devotion for the stars.

It is the stars as a final destination that I draw your attention to, taken from one of the most profoundly moving pieces on life, death, and the myriad of contemplations on both.

The book, that is its source, is by film critic, Roger Ebert, entitled Life Itself.

The excerpt, I Do Not Fear Death, is an eloquent and thoughtful piece that one can’t help but feel the need to capture and preserve. It is penned in loveliness and grace and the simple reading of it leaves you aching for a belief in divinity.

From the author’s wistful note that, “One of these days I will encounter what Henry James called on his deathbed “the distinguished thing,” to a favored passage on kindness he memorized, which reads in part, “I respect kindness in human beings first of all, and kindness to animals,” (taken from a photograph of the Irish poet, Brendan Behan, on the wall of the legendary O’Rourke’s in Chicago), that Ebert says covers all his political beliefs, there is raw truth here in all its uneasiness.

Yet, it is the beautifully moving passage on a celestial locomotive to the stars, from the tragically flawed Van Gogh, that forms the heart of Ebert’s incandescent essay.

 

 

Looking at the stars
always makes me dream,
as simply as I dream
over the black dots
representing towns and villages
on a map.

Why, I ask myself,
shouldn’t the shining dots of the sky
be as accessible
as the black dots
on the map of France?

Just as we take a train
to get to Tarascon or Rouen,
we take death to reach a star.

We cannot get to a star
while we are alive
any more than we can
take the train
when we are dead.

So to me
it seems possible that
cholera, tuberculosis and cancer
are the
celestial means of locomotion.
Just as steamboats, buses and railways
are the terrestrial means.

To die
quietly of old age
would be to go there
on foot.

 

 

Painting: Starry Night over the Rhone, Vincent Van Gogh, Arles, 1888

 

 

élégance simple

•10/08/11 • 7 Comments

 

A random search for a bit of inspiration today yielded this:
The poster of the 64th edition of the prestigious Cannes Film Festival. An elegant black-and-white shot of Faye Dunaway photographed by photographer/director Jerry Schatzberg in 1970 for her role in the film, Puzzle of a Downfall Child.

On the official website, the poster is described as thus:

“Model of sophistication
and timeless elegance,
it is an embodiment
of the cinematic dream
that the
Festival de Cannes
seeks to maintain.”

 

 

Photo: Festival de Cannes
Credit: ©Faye Dunaway © photo by Jerry Schatzberg – Artwork: H5 (M. Lelièvre, B. Parienté)

Farewell

•10/06/11 • 4 Comments

 

“If you want
to build a ship,
don’t gather men
to provide wood,
to make tools
and to assign
the
different
tasks;
no,
just
kindle
the
yearning
for the
wide-open,
endless
sea.”

 

Mille Tendresse, Steve.

 

 

Quote: Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Fin d’été

•09/25/11 • 4 Comments

 

Summer
passed
with
nary
a
pause
for
contemplation.

 

 

Image: Moon River

 

 

Festina Lente (“Hurry Slowly”)

•09/16/11 • 27 Comments

 

“Drink your tea
slowly and reverently,
as if it is the axis
on which the
world
earth
revolves -
slowly,
evenly,
without rushing
toward the future.”

 

There have been countless times I thought to return. One reader called me the “errant blogger,” another, the “lackadaisical aesthete.”

Whatever the case, I return feeling like an arriviste making the fashionably late entrance to the party, only to discover everyone else has already left.

How and why did I leave at all, I wonder. I’m not entirely sure, nor can I commit to little more right now than a fleeting visit, but with autumn all around me and the days dwindling down, I feel the need, the compulsion really, to remind myself and, perhaps, acquaint a few of you, with a small shift in what passes for my own ‘banalities of the quotidian.’

Interestingly, it is a concept and a popular phrase of the Middle Ages that has me in its grip — “Festina Lente” or “Hurry Slowly.”

The origins of this beautifully mellifluous expression “Festina Lente” is the wonderful paradoxical motto of the Venetian renaissance publisher, Aldus Manutius, who, history tells us, adopted it from the classical scholar, Erasmus, also known by the sobriquet “Prince of the Humanists.”

And how very humane Erasmus was in creating a mantra of life he could not possibly have foreseen at a time when the only evidence of speed was born by the beasts bearing mounted knights in combat. As societies moved faster and faster across the span of the ages, who was to notice all that was being lost when delicate things were not treated with respectful slowness, when the tempo of life encouraged people to experience things in their full magnificent complexity.

Who might one day imagine a world where days were little more than blurs and lifetimes were missed in their entirety.

 

 

In honor of that time, before life was lived on the run with a rush toward forgetting, I thought a day devoted to a deep slow read was just the thing to break me away from my digitally crazed addictions.

I chose Milan Kundera’s appropriately titled “Slowness: A Novel” for obvious reasons. In his own inimitable style, Kundera ruminates on the lost art of living. We have become such unrecognizable creatures that we no longer can appreciate the small, the inconsequential, the nuanced, he seems to say.

Despite Kundera’s own personal disclaimer about the novel’s seriousness, (he proudly claimed the book had “not a single serious word in it”) reviewers were more astute in suggesting Slowness resonated with “a profound meditation on contemporary life,” where “the connection between our era’s desire to forget and the way we have given ourselves over to the demon of speed,” have changed us irrevocably.

 

 

To explore this idea Kundera tells the story of a midsummer’s night in which two tales of seduction, separated by more than two-hundred years, interweave and oscillate between the sublime and the comic.

In the present we have the trappings of an over cranked world, keeping us jittery, hyper vigilant and so focused on the destination, we fail to notice the journey. In the past, we have the drifters of yesteryear who, with their easy indolence, symbolized the leisurely pace of the times.

Kundera retells the story of Vivant Demon’s 18th century novel Point de lendemain, which describes one long, slow night of seduction and lovemaking between a young chevalier and an older woman, during which very little is lost. The seductress creates the tensions to build and relax symphonically over the course of the night “giving the small span of time accorded them the semblance of a marvelous small architecture…for what is formless cannot be grasped, or committed to memory. Conceiving their encounter as a form was especially precious for them, since their night was to have no tomorrow and could be repeated only through recollection.”

While the senses are fully sated for the romantic, there is much for the philosophical, as well. We encounter a narrator and his wife, who are taking an unplanned holiday, driving down a country highway in search of a romantic château. Impatient, the narrator inquires:

“Why has the pleasure of slowness disappeared? Ah, where have they gone, the amblers of yesteryear? Where have they gone, those loafing heroes of folksongs, those vagabonds who roam from one mill to another and bed down under the stars?”

Slowness: The Novel is typical Kundera: whimsical and thoughtful, unfocused and insightful. While no profound revelations are apparent, when the last word is read, there is a satisfaction to be had in knowing that here is a rather concise description of our time-starved, image-obsessed, future-shocked world, in a most eloquent form.

A marvelous book to read and savor very, very slowly.

 

 

The 16th Century French Poet Nicolas Boileau captured it beautifully in his Art of Poetry:

 

“Hurry… slowly,
one hundred times
go back
to your
intent
and
strengthen
it.”

 

 

Image: “A Man seated reading at a Table in a Lofty Room” c.1630, Art Connu
Quote: Thich Nhat Hanh
Sculpture: Borghese Hermaphroditus, Louvre Museum
Google Images

 

Christmas 2010

•12/23/10 • 35 Comments

 

 

“Realize that Christmas is a pause.
The word is beautiful and the idea
behind it more beautiful.
Christmas is not just for children.
To believe that is to believe that innocence
without knowledge is better than
understanding and faith and grace.
To be clever about Christmas
is to be profoundly stupid.
The early springtime of the spirit,
Christmas is renewal and joy.”

 

*from Vogue dec 1965, author unknown.

 

My Dearest Readers,
This post was intended for Christmas several months ago when the Errant Aesthete was not so elusive. When it suddenly appeared in my email this morning in its previously ill formatted form, you were so wonderfully kind in not noting its irregularity or most unaesthetic of presentations, which has now been corrected. Your thoughtfulness and warm sentiments on this day of Christmas eve is more welcome than you can know.

I am touched (as I always am) by those of you who still remember their way back here despite my rather abrupt and unintended disappearance. The New Year beckons a return and I hope to, at the very least, honor what I have wrought. I hope this holiday season finds you filled with abundance, warmth, love, good health and prosperity.

Please know that each and every one of you are profoundly missed.

 

 

Mes Excuses

•08/17/10 • 23 Comments

 

It doesn’t take a refined mind or a discerning eye to realize The Errant Aesthete is undergoing some minor cosmetic changes. For all those who have squinted their way through countless posts, relief is imminent. I know many of you come here to bask in a bit of loveliness so how terribly gauche and ill-mannered of this aesthete to expose you to the backdrops, the props and the unsightly scaffolding that, in more polished sites, remains unseen until opening night.

My apologies.

 

The plaster head of a colossal Bavaria is unpacked at Crystal Palace, during its reconstruction at Sydenham Hill, South London.

 

 

Words, Wars, Weddings

•08/14/10 • 9 Comments

 

From the time Leo Marks was a boy, he yearned for the world of secrecy, deceit and camouflage. At the age of eight, he discovered the game of code-making and -breaking in his father’s London bookshop, after stumbling across an edition of Edgar Allen Poe’s, The Gold-Bug.

As World War II was being played out in earnest, the young Mr. Marks, now a strapping twenty-three-year-old lad, hoped to use his strengths for the Allies, but found his mission circumvented when he failed to get into British Intelligence’s cryptographic department. As everyone else on his course heads off to Bletchley Park (“the promised land”), he is sent to what his sergeant terms “some potty outfit in Baker Street, an open house for misfits.”

Nevertheless, as the aspiring code breaker tells it in his famed and wonderfully humorous memoir Between Silk and Cyanide: A Codemaker’s War 1941 – 1945, he was right in the thick of it, “a prodigy immersed in a pasty world of subterranean old men.” Assigned with monitoring code security, common wisdom held at the time that it was easiest for men and women in the field to transmit messages by memorizing and using well-known poems.

Unfortunately, since the Germans had equal access to the classics, particularly poems, Marks readily pointed out to his doddering colleagues that “Reference books are jackboots when used by cryptographers,” insisting, instead, that agents should write their own poems (or better yet, use his), several of which were cheerily obscene.

 

 

The title of Marks memoir was taken from a question posed to the codebreaker when asked why Europe should have their cryptographic material written on silk, which was in very short supply. (Codes printed on silk and hidden under clothing was undetectable in a pat-down, whereas paper was easy to detect). Marks wryly replied that it all came down to being “between silk and cyanide,” meaning that swaths of silk would save his agents from swallowing their “optional extra,” a cyanide capsule.

 

 

Ultimately, WOKs (worked-out keys) printed on silk replaced the older methods of transmission, with code breakers composing their own original poetic creations.

“The Life That I Have” (sometimes referred to as Yours) was just such a coded poem composed on Christmas Eve 1943, originally written by Marks in memory of his girlfriend Ruth, who had recently died in a plane crash in Canada. “I transmitted,” he writes in his memoir, “a message to her which I’d failed to deliver when I’d had the chance.”

 

 

In a curious twist of events, Marks subsequently passed the poem on to Violette Szabo, an Allied secret agent during WWII, who was eventually captured, tortured and killed by the Nazis. It was made famous by its inclusion in the 1958 movie about Szabo, Carve Her Name with Pride, where the poem was said to be the creation of Violette’s husband Etienne.

The deceptively simple poem was to be made famous again, a little over a fortnight ago at the opulent Astor Courts estate, a private Beaux-Arts mansion overlooking the Hudson River in upstate New York, when the decades-old poem was included in the wedding nuptials of former President Bill Clinton’s daughter, Chelsea to Marc Mezvinsky. The 1943 poem “The Life That I Have” by WWII cryptographer Leo Marks was read aloud by a friend of the couple:

 

 

“The Life That I Have”

 

The life that I have
Is all that I have
And the life that I have
Is yours

The love that I have
Of the life that I have
Is yours and yours and yours.

A sleep I shall have
A rest I shall have
Yet death will be but a pause
For the peace of my years
In the long green grass
Will be yours and yours and yours.

 

Czech Republic, Prague, painting of old town square at night; 19th century, Jacob Johann Verreyt (1807-1872), Muzeum Hlavniho Mesta Prahy (Prague Museum)
Woman in Dark Robe, Photograph: Jim Ballard, Getty Images
Remaining Photos: Random

 

 

May Your Glass Be Ever Full

•08/11/10 • 8 Comments

 

When Hobbes went hob-nobbing and Locke locked lips with a nice port, the vessels from which they sipped were as beautiful and complex as the thoughts that spilled from their fertile minds. If there is nothing else to be taken away from The Age of Enlightenment, an elixir-laced exhibit currently on display at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, it is this: it was, indeed, an era to fully and ferociously imbibe.

Or as, scribe and noted imbiber, Henry David Thoreau, might say:

 

“The
whole
body
imbibes
delight
through
every
pore.”

 

 

Drinking clubs abounded, as great thinkers, the fashionably lush, and the prominently disposed gathered in a haze of spirits to experiment, sample, and invent an assorted collection of the finest alcoholic beverages ever known to keep body and soul apart as the cocktail swilling savant, herself, might say. (And yes, the Errant Aesthete proudly declares a full imbibing half of Irish ancestry).

Drawn from the Museum’s collection, the exhibit brings together objects employed in both the service and the consumption of beer, wine, champagne, and even the occasional exotic newcomer, like punch, for example.

 

 

From simple lead crystal wine glasses to gleaming white porcelain jugs to classic silver tankards, there is enough here to entice, stimulate and inspire intimate reveries and quiet contemplations over a small etched crystal of “fortification.”

 

 

For the lover of the novel and unusual, delightful accoutrements include a swirling silver nutmeg grater made in Birmingham, England, a lovely blue-and-white porcelain wine glass cooler from Chantilly, France, and a much-admired colorful tin-enameled earthenware wine jug from early 18th-century Germany.

 

 

May Your Glass
Be Ever Full:
Drinking in Seventeenth -
and Eighteenth-Century Europe

 

 

1.) Goblet, c. 1745, possibly with later engraving. Artist/maker unknown, English. Lead-crystal glass with wheel-engraved decoration; drawn stem, Height: 8 3/8 inches (21.3 cm). Philadelphia Museum of Art, The George H. Lorimer Collection, 1953.

2.) Monteith, 1707-8. Workshop of Gabriel Sleath, English (active London), 1674 – 1756. Silver, 8 1/4 x 11 inches (21 x 27.9 cm). Philadelphia Museum of Art, Bequest of George D. Widener, 1972.

3.) Two-Handled Cup with Lid(1706-8). 3.) Workshop of David King, Irish (Dublin), active from 1690, died 1737. Made in Dublin, Ireland. Silver with engraved decoration. 13 x 13 x 7 1/2 inches (33 x 33 x 19.1 cm) The Henry P. McIlhenny Collection.

4.) Wine Jug, c. 1720. Decorated by M. Schmidt, German (active Nurnberg), from c. 1712. Tin-enamelled earthenware; pewter, 14 7/16 x 8 1/4 inches (36.6 x 21 cm). Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Bloomfield Moore Collection, 1882.

5.) Wine Glass Cooler, c. 1770. Made by the Chantilly porcelain factory, Chantilly, France, c. 1730 – 1792. Soft-paste porcelain with underglaze blue decoration, 4 1/8 x 6 1/8 inches (10.5 x 15.5 cm). Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift of Mrs. Morris Hawkes, 1942.

Images: The Curated Object

 

 

May your glass be ever full.
May the roof over your head be always strong.
And may you be in heaven
half an hour before the devil knows you’re dead.

Irish Blessing

 

 

Summer Grace

•08/10/10 • 3 Comments

 

“I don’t
think
photography
has
anything
remotely
to do
with
the
brain.

It
has
to do
with
eye
appeal.”

- Horst

 

 

Horst P. Horst, Advertisement for Chanel perfume, 1987

 

 

 
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