a2nyc

[The Death of Caesar, 1798, oil on canvas, Vincenzo Camuccini, Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples]

“Togas, however, were the formal, national dress: Romans could define themselves as the gens togata, ‘the race that wears the toga’, while some contemporary outsiders occasionally laughed at this strange, cumbersome garment.”

[The Two Fridas (Las dos Fridas), 1939, oil on canvas, Frida Kahlo,  Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City]

“And he was history in Pat’s eyes, too, as she had quite recovered from her brief infatuation with him. How could I? she had asked herself, in agonising self-reproach. To which a Latinist, if there were one about, might have answered amor furor brevis est - love (like anger) is a brief madness.” 

[Embrace (Couple II) 1917, oil on canvas by Egon Schiele, Oberes Belvedere, Austria]

[Three Women, Kasimir Malevich, Ukrainian (1879 - 1935)]

“Lena M. - from Kyrgyzstan. She sits at the entrance to her home as if posing for a photograph. Her five children sit near her as does their cat, Metelitsa, whom they brought with them:

We had a motherland, and now it’s gone. What am I? My mother’s Ukrainian, my father’s Russian. I was born and raised in Kyrgyzstan, and I married a Tatar. So what are my kids? What is their nationality? We’re all mixed up, our blood is all mixed together. On our passports, my kids and mine, it says “Russian,” but we’re not Russian. We’re Soviet! But that country - where I was born - no longer exists. The place we call our motherland doesn’t exist, and neither does that time, which was also our motherland. I have five children. The oldest is in eighth grade, and the youngest is in kindergarten. I brought them here. Our country no longer exists, but we do. 

And I was happy once. All my children were born of love.” 

[The Madonna and Child embracing in an interior, a landscape with Saint Joseph beyond, Giovanni Battista Salvi, il Sassoferrato (Sassoferrato 1609-1685 Rome) , oil on canvas, Private Collection]

“On my first trip to the Zone I measured a background radiation level in the forest five to six times higher than on the roads or the fields. But high doses were everywhere. THe tractors were running, the farmers were diggin on their plots. In a few villages we measured the thyroid activity for adults and children. It was one hundred, sometimes two and three hundred times the allowable dosage. There was a a woman in our group, a radiologist. She became hysterical when she saw that children were sitting in a sandbox and playing. We checked breast milk - its was radioactive.  ...

We see a woman on a bench near her house, breastfeeding her child - her milk has cesium in it - she’s the Chernobyl Madonna.” 

“Usually Phryne woke all of a piece, knowing who she was and where she was (thought not, on some occasions, the actual name of the person reposing beside her). Many of her bedfellows had informed her that this was one of her most irritating qualities. She had lost the devotion of a French poet, for instance, who had departed yelling, ‘Can’t you at least find some existential angst?’ and she had been laughing too much to properly bid him farewell. Phryne knew who she was and what she was and she liked all of her.” 

“She thought of something that Angus Lordie had said when he had quoted from Sydney Goodsir Smith, who talked of the earth spinning around in the emptiness. 

Yes, the earth spun in a great void in which our tiny issues and concerns were really nothing, and what small pleasure or meaning we could extract from this life we should surely clutch before our instant was over.” 

[The Little Thief, by Christian Schloe]

“This was the unhappiness of knowing that you simply cannot have what you want to have - an unhappiness which is a bitter discovery for the young. The young rarely believe that they will not be able to get what they want, because there is always an open future.

And it was important, he thought, to understand that the last thing that the unhappy wish to be reminded of is the greater unhappiness of others.”

‘I’ve had a Proustian moment,’ Matthew said, bringing himself back to reality. ‘That happens all the time,’ said Big Lou. ‘We all have Proustian moments, but don’t really know about it until we read Proust.’

Phryne’s father had always held that the best drinks were free drinks and there was something in what that detestable old lush the pater said, she thought. 

‘But what if I still feel something for him?’ 

‘You won’t,’ said Domenica. ‘Believe me, there’s nothing more brittle than human beauty. Encounter it. Savour it, by all means, Then watch how it turns to dust.’

‘...I do like your Papa, you know,’ he mused. ‘He is perfect, in his way.’ 

‘As a viper is a perfect viper or a tarantula a perfect tarantula,’ Phryne riposted. ‘You want papa, Sylvanus dear, he is all yours.’ 

[Clinton Hill, Brooklyn 2016]

Spring is like a perhaps hand (which comes carefully out of Nowhere)arranging a window,into which people look(while people stare arranging and changing placing carefully there a strange thing and a known thing here)and

changing everything carefully

spring is like a perhaps Hand in a window (carefully to and fro moving New and Old things,while people stare carefully moving a perhaps fraction of flower here placing an inch of air there)and

without breaking anything.

[The Song of Love or Le chant d’amour, 1914 by Giorgio de Chirco at Museum of Modern Art, NYC]

“Everything large enough to love eventually disappoints you, then betrays you, and finally, forgets you. But the things small enough to fit into a shoebox, these stay as they were.”