Drowning Beautiful

Feeling Loudly

Earlier times may not have understood it any better than we do, but they weren't as embarrassed to name it: the life force or spark thought close to divine. It is not. Instead, it's something that makes those who have it fully human, and those who don't look like sleep walkers... It isn't enough to make someone heroic, but without it any hero will be forgotten. Rousseau called it force of soul; Arendt called it love of the world. It's the foundation of Eros; you may call it charisma.

Is it a gift of the gods, or something that has to be earned? Watching such people, you will sense it's both: given like perfect pitch, or grace, that no one can deserve or strive for, and captured like the greatest of prizes it is. Having it makes people think more, see more, feel more. More intensely, more keenly, more loudly if you like; but not more in the way of the gods. On the contrary, next to heroes like Odysseus and Penelope, the gods seem oddly flat. They are bigger, of course, and they live forever, but their presence seems diminished...The gods of The Odyssey aren't alive, just immortal; and with immortality most of the qualities we cherish become pointless. Withing nothing to risk, the gods need no courage.

You Pin Both The Wings On Us

Say no more, use your eyes

The world goes and flutters by...

I see the walls and see them fall

You break through them all
I see you crawl, now you stand tall
Grow and grow till tall

In storm we scream against the stream, our eyes watering
Jump into lakes, the surface breaks
We swim underwater, and our mouths - In tune

I see forest, a treasure chest full of labyrinth
I see a door, holes in the floor
We'll breed seeds - We grow

We all want to grow with the seeds we will sow

We all want to go with the trees we will grow
We all want to know when we're all meant to go
To a place you and I - Will call home

There's songs, songs you bring to us

You pin both wings on us
I hear it, I see you sing for us
You go tie a string around us

We all grow, use your life,

The world goes and flutters by.

The Language of Allen Ginsberg

*click on picture to enlarge

Once Upon A Time...

I am unwritten, can't read my mind,

I'm undefined, I'm just beginning,
The pen's in my hand, ending
unplanned.....

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small, unregarded yellow sun. ~The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. ~The Call of Cthulhu', by H. P. Lovecraft

My purpose is to tell of bodies which have been transformed into shapes of a different kind. ~Metamorphoses by Ovid

It was a pleasure to burn. ~Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. ~One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Marquesas

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. ~The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

If you're going to read this, don't bother. ~Choke by Chuck Palladium

My suffering left me sad and gloomy. ~ Life of Pi by Yann Martel

The trawler plunged into the angry swells of the dark, furious sea like an awkward animal trying desperately to break out of an impenetrable swamp.

~ The Bourne Identity by Robert Ludlum

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. ~Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson

Call me Ishmael. ~Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. ~Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood

Midway on our life's journey, I found myself in dark woods, the right road lost. ~The Inferno by Dante Alighieri

Charlie lived in a place where the illegal was legal, where the immoral was moral, and where some people’s fantasies were other people’s realities. ~An Island Away by Daniel Putkowski.

Once upon a midnight dreary, as I pondered weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
~The Raven', by Edgar Allan Poe.

I am a sick man… I am a spiteful man. I am an unpleasant man. I think my liver is diseased. ~Notes from Underground by Fedora Dostoevsky

A screaming comes across the sky. ~Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. ~The Go-Between by L. P. Hartleyn

The regular early morning yell of horror was the sound of Arthur Dent waking up and suddenly remembering where he was. ~Life, the Universe and Everything by Douglas Adams

To be born again,' sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, 'first you have to die.'" ~The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie

Antigone

Sophocles’ Antigone is a beautifully written Greek tragedy that has long captured the attention of philosophers and revolutionaries alike. It is a story of conflicting orders of values, of radical divisions and of opposition between family and state, men and women, ethics and politics, individuality and collectivism and religion and law.

In this play Antigone, the unflinching and uncompromising heroin, defies an ordinance issued by the King of Thebes (Creon) to let her slain brothers body rot and deteriorate above ground without a proper burial because of his betrayal of the city of Thebes. Antigone defies the king and buries her brother citing her duty to her family and to divine law.

"I intend to give my brother burial. I'll be glad to die in the attempt, if it's a crime, then it's a crime that God commands."

Antigone feels no remorse for her actions and refuses repentance, thereby inflaming the king who quickly decries:

“Show me a greater crime in all earth!
She, she destroys cities, rips up houses,
Breaks the ranks of spearmen into headlong rout.
But the ones who last it out, the great mass of them
Owe their lives to discipline. Therefore
We must defend the men who live by law,
Never let some woman triumph over us.
Better to fall from power, if fall we must,
At the hands of a man—never be rated
Inferior to a woman, never.”

Antigone’s sprit of defiance has long been heralded by feminists as a noble and revolutionary act in which Antigone stands in opposition to Creon in what seems to be an irreconcilable debate, Antigone becoming the embodiment of moral idealism and individuality and Creon political realism and collectivism.

Antigone espouses the ability to use social rebellion and civil disobedience to destabilize a society and traditional gender roles. As the story unfolds, Antigone exposes the falsities and failures of such oppositions and seeks to reveal and break down such false dichotomies as man and woman, individualism and collectivism and morality and law, showing a radical transcendence of an outsider living in a patriarchal society.

“I didn't say yes. I can say no to anything I say vile, and I don't have to count the cost. But because you said yes, all that you can do, for all your crown and your trappings, and your guards—all that your can do is to have me killed.”

Uncovered

The majestic curve of a river cutting through rolling plains can be seen in the enigmatic expanse of the spine's journey across a back. The monumental simplicity of a single atom is no more awe inspiring than the ridges and valleys, lines and curves of the human neck. The towering power of a mountain is held within the stunning peaks of a bottom laid bare. The mysterious draw of the moons path across the sky hints at the pilgrimage of the eye as it wanders across the sweep of a leg.

Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights; the accumulations of a lifetime gather there. In places the palimpsest is so heavily worked that the letters feel like braille. I like to keep my body rolled up away from prying eyes. Never unfold too much, tell the whole story.

She arches her body like a cat on a stretch. She smells of the sea. She smells of rockpools when I was a child. She keeps a starfish in there. I crouch down to taste the salt, to run my fingers around the rim. She opens and shuts like a sea anemone.

In the heat of her hands I thought, This is the campfire that mocks the sun. This place will warm me, feed me and care for me. I will hold on to this pulse against other rhythms. The world will come and go in the tide of a day but here is her hand with my future in its palm.

Begin to see yourself as a soul with a body rather than a body with a soul.

Photos by Stan Trampe, to see more click here .
Selected quotes written by Jeanette Winterson.

Eccentricities

They refuse to see the world through the rose colored glasses of the masses nor through the cynical spectacles of the disenchanted. Rather they watch reality unfold as if on a psychedelic journey - finding deeper, more profound dimensions than most people imagine possible, finding inspiration in the ordinary. They exist on the fringes of society, never quite fitting in to the social mainstream of everyday life, usually preferring it that way. Astonishingly simple in their miraculousness and surprisingly intricate in their simplicities they inspire us and we, in turn, inspire them. Some call them strange, some call them crazy, some say they are fucked up, others say they are eccentric, most find them confusing, I find them beautiful.

They are artists in the purest sense of the word, masters of the amazing they are capable of drinking deeply from the wellspring of the void. The works they create speak to the depths of my soul, calling to that part of me that each of us share, the unconscious mind that is, in a word, human. The mediums through which they touch my life vary, from poetry to paintings, from music to movies, yet the manner in which their magic has shaped me is penetratingly universal. To my mind they are more enlightened, their souls have swam in the abyss and have discovered a higher state of being. Through the power of their vision they pull me through the looking glass, carrying me along on the wave of their eccentricity...

The words swim before me as the language fades, replaced by an immense dreamscape. I am carried along by the river as my mind wanders across mountains and meadows, through forests and plains. The landscape curves about me and the fathomless beauty of the poet's imagination consumes me entirely.

As I study the oil soaked canvas my thoughts sprout wings and take flight, lifting from my mind and soaring from this world. The power of those thoughts and emotions pull away the curtains of ignorance from my sight and lay bear to me the majesty and mystery of existence. Though the span of a thousand years separates us I am taken by the hand to unknown places, innumerable worlds, lifetimes unimagined.

Standing in a crowd the vibrations and tone fill my body, shaking the mortar that holds my soul in place, filling me so completely that there is no room left for my conscious self. I lift away on a crescendo, my body and the crowd are left behind as I drift along the current of sound. Impressions are lost within me and I lose myself inside of them. A journey spanning the heavens, I am the same yet fundamentally I am changed.

The Space Between...

The creative process, so far as we are able to follow it at all, consists in the unconscious activation of an archetypal image and elaborating and shaping the image into the finished work. By giving it shape, the artist translates it into the language of the present and so makes it possible for us to find our way back to the deepest springs of life." - Carl Jung

From the Dada activities of World War I, Surrealism was formed. The cultural hub of the movement was Paris in the 1920s, but it's influence quickly spread around the globe. Poet and critic André Breton has long been considered the major spokesman for the Surrealism movement. In his 1924 work "The Surrealist Manifesto" Breton proclaimed that Surrealism was a means of reuniting conscious and unconscious realms of experience so completely, that the world of dream and fantasy would be joined to the everyday rational world in "an absolute reality, a surreality."

Joan Miro , a Spanish artist is recognized as one of the most important of the Surrealists. He created fantasy worlds that lacked realism and challenged reason, as in" Hirondelle Amour", 1933-34, oil on canvas. Notice the elements of surprise, unexpected juxtapositions and non sequitur.

Another artist who painted in the surrealist style was the Belgian painter Rene' Magritte. Her paintings force the viewer to reconsider what is real and what is not, for example the "Les Promendades d' Euclide ", 1955, oil on canvas. The work seems to show a room with a painting mounted on an easel. A window just behind the easel displays a view of a city. Yet a longer look raises a question Is the object on the easel really a painting or the scene behind it? Why is the shape of the tower identical to that of the street? Magritte offers no answers to these questions but instead, leaves us to ponder a picture that makes as much sense as a dream. Surrealism created new styles and techniques that inspired artists to go beyond their dreams with new ideas, new creations and a new world.

Surrealist writers and artists wanted to drive out reason, they were looking for states in which what is deep down in our minds may come to surface. I love the strange confusion between dream and reality, I call this place home, it is freedom in its truest form. I believe in the reality of our dreams and yes Dali... you read my mind.

The Prince of Pop

When I got my first television set, I stopped caring so much about having close relationships.

They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.

I think having land and not ruining it is the most beautiful art that anybody could ever want to own.

I suppose I have a really loose interpretation of "work," because I think that just being alive is so much work at something you don't always want to do. The machinery is always going. Even when you sleep.

I try to think of what time is and all I can think is.... Time is, time was.

I never understood why when you died, you didn't just vanish, everything could just keep going on the way it was only you just wouldn't be there. I always thought I'd like my own tombstone to be blank. No epitaph, and no name. Well, actually, I'd like it to say 'figment.'

I like boring things.

I have Social Disease. I have to go out every night. If I stay home one night I start spreading rumors to my dogs.

Fantasy love is much better than reality love. Never doing it is very exciting.

Love and sex can go together and sex and unlove can go together and love and unsex can go together. But personal love and personal sex is bad.

Everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.

Dying is the most embarrassing thing that can ever happen to you, because someone's got to take care of all your details.

The symptom of love is when some of the chemicals inside you go bad. So there must be something in love because your chemicals do tell you something.

During the 1960s, I think, people forgot what emotions were supposed to be. And I don't think they've ever remembered.

Don't pay any attention to what they write about you. Just measure it in inches.

I used to think that everything was just being funny but now I don't know. I mean, how can you tell?

Everybody has a different idea of love. One girl I know said, "I knew he loved me when he didn't come in my mouth."

I'm afraid that if you look at a thing long enough, it loses all of its meaning.

I'm the type who'd be happy not going anywhere as long as I was sure I knew exactly what was happening at the places I wasn't going to. I'm the type who'd like to sit home and watch every party that I'm invited to on a monitor in my bedroom.

I've decided something: Commercial things really do stink. As soon as it becomes commercial for a mass market it really stinks.

If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There's nothing behind it.

Some people, even intelligent people, say that violence can be beautiful. I can't understand that, because beautiful is some moments, and for me those moments are never violent.

Isn't life a series of images that change as they repeat themselves?

It's the movies that have really been running things in America ever since they were invented. They show you what to do, how to do it, when to do it, how to feel about it, and how to look, how you feel about it.

America is really The Beautiful. But it would be more beautiful if everybody had enough money to live.

Once you 'got' Pop, you could never see a sign again the same way again. And once you thought Pop, you could never see America the same way again.

People need to be made more aware of the need to work at learning how to live because life is so quick and sometimes it goes away too quickly.

Death, I don't believe in it, because you're not around to know that it's happened. I can't say anything about it because I'm not prepared for it.

Sex is more exciting on the screen and between the pages than between the sheets.

The most exciting attractions are between two opposites that never meet.

The most exciting thing is not doing it. If you fall in love with someone and never do it, it's much more exciting.

Being born is like being kidnapped. And then sold into slavery.

In the 60's everybody got interested in everybody else.

Since people are going to be living longer and getting older, they'll just have to learn how to be babies longer.

People should fall in love with their eyes closed. Just close your eyes. Don't look.