Constellations of Desire forms the third part of Solitary Ethics, a sequence on ethical and moral considerations. The book is available here. Book One, Caravaggio’s Dagger, deals with right action in the context of the experience of the individual will; Book Two, Mahler and Freud Meet in Leiden, in the context of the absolute nature […]
Constellations of Desire
Music as the Perfecting of Poetry: Liszt – Sonetto 104 del Petrarca (c. 1846)
Petrarch/Liszt, sonnet 104. “The effect of the abbaabba octave is truly remarkable. It is actually a blend of 3 brace-rhyme quatrains, since the middle 4 verses whose sounds overlap the others and echo their patterns, impress the reader with a similar sound pattern, thus, abBAABba.” (Alex Preminger, ed., Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics) Canzone […]
Kenneth Clark – Leonardo da Vinci
This is art historian Clark’s excellent study of Leonardo. Among his many books also is Civilization, which was subsequently turned into an excellent television series. A few points of especial consequence. In discussing the painting of the Virgin and St Anne, Clark writes Finally, [Leonardo] arrives at the solution which we know in the Paris […]
Constellations of Desire – Return to Vancouver
. Vancouver Vancouver, BC – Edmonton, AB, 2-26 February 2015 . In the accent-heavy emigrant’s taxicab We bridge the Fraser River, at the point Where the drive train sheared, nine years ago; The electric mentality of overwhelm Preamble to this reconfiguration. . Place of loss and flight of welcome. . Here at the sea the […]
Georg Trakl (1887-1914) – Stardust of the Crystal Angel
I have been interested in Trakl’s work for several years now, stimulated by several essays in the American literary press, the provenance of which I, alas, have forgotten.What does stay in particular is the poem De Profundis, which is both remarkable and devastating.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWiap8pmxagMichael Hamburger’s translation is this:There is a stubble field on which a black rain falls. […]
The Levendaal Canal, Leiden – Constellations of Desire I:III:1 – Aspects of Age
Levendaal, from the Kraaiers bridge near the Koene bridge Over the last many months I have read many articles and commentaries on the sadness of loss that is a part of age. Yes, it is harsh. And yes, aging is a physical deterioration, but it is not immediately an intellectual deterioration into oblivion. Oblivion will […]
Thomas Hardy – Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) – Sensual Preference and Longing
In his Far from the Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy depicts three forms of sexual desire, and their manifestations. … entirely the soul is the slave of the body, the ethereal spirit dependent for its quality upon the tangible flesh and blood. (Chapter LI) Three men desire one woman, the one woman desiring only the one, […]
In the Last of This Year : The Natural Conditions of Life
In the Last of This Year is from Constellations of Desire, the third part of the Solitary Ethics series. It is the concluding poem, influenced by Montréal poet Robert Melançon, of the the second section, the Ostinato for Casals, which deals with the permanent interrelationship of the natural conditions of life and human art. It […]
Proust and Schubert, Captive
Proust’s The Fugitive has taken me captive. Though I am nearing its end, because of the nature of its style, Proust requires a slow and not always continuous reading. Towards its conclusion it gathers an extraordinary density to and within itself and, furthermore, an extraordinary disposition to the refulgence of mortal change, the observations liberated therein […]