#whiskeyriver

Katharina Gaenssler’s book of photography commemorates the 500th anniversary of Raphael’s Sistine Madonna (2012).

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“Mysticism keeps men sane. As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity. The ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic. He has permitted the twilight. He has always had one foot in earth and the other in fairyland. He has always left himself free to doubt his gods; but (unlike the agnostic of today) free also to believe in them. He has always cared more for truth than for consistency. If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and the contradiction along with them. His spiritual sight is stereoscopic, like his physical sight: he sees two different pictures at once and yet sees all the better for that. Thus he has always believed that there was such a thing as fate, but such a thing as free will also.”

"The important thing about despair is never to give up, never wrap up and put away a sterile life, but somehow keep it open. Because you never can know what's coming; never. That's the great thing about life, the crucial thing to remember. You may beat your fists on a stone wall for years and years, and every consideration of common sense will say it's hopeless, forget it, spare yourself; and then one day your bleeding hand will go through as if the wall were theatrical gauze; you'll be in another realm where birds are singing and love is possible, and you'd have missed it if you'd given up, because it might be only that one day the wall was not stone."

- Allen Wheelis

from whiskey river link

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sad and laughing onward we go together broken and brave

AUTUMN CORNFIELD , Tempera , 1950.:: Andrew Wyeth. (Andrew Newell Wyeth)

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Already one day has detached itself from all the rest up ahead. It has my photograph in its soft pocket. It wants to carry my breath into the past in its bag of wind.

I write poems to untie myself, to do penance and disappear Through the upper right-hand corner of things, to say grace.

@moms4liberty is what happens when a customer complaint makes a wish upon a burning cross to become a political movement and starts wanting to speak with all the managers.

[The Daily Don]

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"Totalitarianism is not only hell, but all the dream of paradise - the age-old dream of a world where everybody would live in harmony, united by a single common will and faith, without secrets from one another. Andre Breton, too, dreamed of this paradise when he talked about the glass house in which he longed to live. If totalitarianism did not exploit these archetypes, which are deep inside us all and rooted deep in all religions, it could never attract so many people, especially during the early phases of its existence.

Once the dream of paradise starts to turn into reality, however, here and there people begin to crop up who stand in its way. and so the rulers of paradise must build a little gulag on the side of Eden. In the course of time this gulag grows ever bigger and more perfect, while the adjoining paradise gets even smaller and poorer."  

- Milan Kundera The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

[my front garden this morning]

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THE ORDINARY WEATHER OF SUMMER

In the ordinary weather of summer with storms rumbling from west to east like so many freight trains hauling their cargo of heat and rain, the dogs sprawl on the back steps, panting, insects assemble at every window, and we quarrel again, bombarding each other with small grievances, our tempers flashing on and off in bursts of heat lightning. In the cooler air of morning, we drink our coffee amicably enough and walk down to the sea which seems to tremble with meaning and into which we plunge again and again. The days continue hot. At dusk the shadows are as blue as the lips of the children stained with berries or with the chill of too much swimming. So we move another summer closer to our last summer together - a time as real and implacable as the sea out of which we come walking on wobbly legs as if for the first time, drying ourselves with rough towels, shaking the water out of our blinded eyes.

 - Linda Pastan Carnival Evening

The Carpathian Woman, 1957, Victor Brauner

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“But I think it is very useful, and indeed more accurate, to call it "the mind” instead of “my mind.” Imagine if for the next twenty-four hours you had to wear a cap that amplified your thoughts so that everyone within a hundred yards of you could hear every thought that passed through your head. Imagine if the mind were broadcast so that all about you could overhear your thoughts and fantasies, your dreams and fears. How embarrassed or fearful would you be to go outside? How long would you let your fear of the mind continue to isolate you from the hearts of others? And though this experiment sounds like one which few might care to participate in, imagine how freeing it would be at last to have nothing to hide. And how miraculous it would be to see that all others’ minds too were filled with the same confusion and fantasies, the same insecurity and doubt. How long would it take the judgmental mind to begin to release its grasp, to see through the illusion of separateness, to recognize with some humor the craziness of all beings’ minds, the craziness of mind itself?“

- Stephen and Ondrea Levine Who Dies? [from Whiskey River]