Posts tagged Nostalghia and Spirituality

I feel a strong desire to leave.  It’s the only way to come back with the eyes of a child. ~ü [Image: Helen Korpak on Flickr]

I feel a strong desire to leave.  It’s the only way to come back with the eyes of a child.

~ü

[Image: Helen Korpak on Flickr]

Flickr / helenkorpak

In the late 1880s, the body of a 16-year-old girl was pulled from the Seine.  She was apparently a suicide, as her body showed no marks of violence but her beauty and her enigmatic smile led a Paris pathologist to order a plaster death mask of her face. In the romantic atmosphere of fin de siecle Europe the girl’s face became an ideal of feminine beauty.  The protagonist of Rainer Maria Rilke’s 1910 novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge writes, “The mauler, whose shop I pas every day, has hung two plaster masks beside his door.  [One is] the face of the young drowned woman, which they took a cast of in the morgue, because it was beautiful, because it smiled, because it smiled so deceptively, as if it knew.” Ironically, in 1958 the anonymous girl’s features were used to model the first-aid mannequin Rescue Annie, on which thousands of students have practiced CPR.  Though the girl’s identity remains a mystery, her face, it’s said, has become “the most kissed face of all time.”

In the late 1880s, the body of a 16-year-old girl was pulled from the Seine.  She was apparently a suicide, as her body showed no marks of violence but her beauty and her enigmatic smile led a Paris pathologist to order a plaster death mask of her face.

In the romantic atmosphere of fin de siecle Europe the girl’s face became an ideal of feminine beauty.  The protagonist of Rainer Maria Rilke’s 1910 novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge writes, “The mauler, whose shop I pas every day, has hung two plaster masks beside his door.  [One is] the face of the young drowned woman, which they took a cast of in the morgue, because it was beautiful, because it smiled, because it smiled so deceptively, as if it knew.”

Ironically, in 1958 the anonymous girl’s features were used to model the first-aid mannequin Rescue Annie, on which thousands of students have practiced CPR.  Though the girl’s identity remains a mystery, her face, it’s said, has become “the most kissed face of all time.”

I don’t remember my first steps.  My first foray into freedom.  But I do remember my first venture into womanhood, at once the burden of the human race and a unique blessing. ~ü [Image: Memories  Lord Frederick Leighton]

I don’t remember my first steps.  My first foray into freedom.  But I do remember my first venture into womanhood, at once the burden of the human race and a unique blessing.

~ü

[Image: Memories  Lord Frederick Leighton]

sisterwolf

Memory

Your memory is a monster; you forget - it doesn’t. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you - and summons them to your recall with will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you.

~ away-withthesea

decrepito

Like an ancient monastic order, we carry within us the seeds of renewal - the grain of hope - which we plant again and again after each fresh disaster, digging even deeper into the past to re-establish only what is essential, that which alone can endure across time.  In such times (and therefore all times) the role of the artist is the preservation of spiritual values, a role which demands exploration and sacrifice, quite as much as conservation. ~ Paul Hillier Arvo Pärt [Image: Untitled Claes Källarsson (2011)]

Like an ancient monastic order, we carry within us the seeds of renewal - the grain of hope - which we plant again and again after each fresh disaster, digging even deeper into the past to re-establish only what is essential, that which alone can endure across time.  In such times (and therefore all times) the role of the artist is the preservation of spiritual values, a role which demands exploration and sacrifice, quite as much as conservation.

~ Paul Hillier Arvo Pärt

[Image: Untitled Claes Källarsson (2011)]

ckck

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3 plays

The NPR Classical 50 - A Weekly Guide to Essential Classics

John Dowland’s Art Of Melancholy presented by Ted Libbey and Fred Child

Much of John Dowland’s (1563-1626) music is sad and melancholy, but that’s not to say that he was a self-pitying person. In his time, melancholy was the sign of a superior individual, of someone who was mature and capable of deep feeling. Dowland was a fine artist capable of giving voice to what was considered an appropriate emotion. ~ John Dowland’s Art Of Melancholy by Ted Libbey

Much of John Dowland’s (1563-1626) music is sad and melancholy, but that’s not to say that he was a self-pitying person. In his time, melancholy was the sign of a superior individual, of someone who was mature and capable of deep feeling. Dowland was a fine artist capable of giving voice to what was considered an appropriate emotion.

~ John Dowland’s Art Of Melancholy by Ted Libbey

oldenglishmiscellany

The Stuff of Thoughts

Thought is verbalized sensation; thought is the response of memory, the word, the experience, the image. Thought is transient, changing, impermanent, and it is seeking permanency.

~ J. Krishnamurti, The Book of Life (thanks kvashee)

kvashee

If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient; at others, so bewildered and so weak; and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control! We are, to be sure, a miracle every way; but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting do seem peculiarly past finding out.
Jane Austen, English novelist whose works of romantic fiction (1775-1817), ‘Mansfield Park’, cited in Roger Highfield, 75th stories: Mapping memories - Eleanor Maguire and brain imaging, Wellcome Trust, 5 July 2011 (via amiquote)

amiquote

People draw premonitions from different places.  Animals.  Numbers.  Charged objects.  We identify them through patterns seen.  And yet, they all come from within this incredibly complex universe we call the soul.  The soul exists outside of time and memory.  It can actually contain this wisdom.  But the truth is often obscured by what we see in our linear existence. ~ü Henryk Weyssenhoff Przeczucie [Premonition] (1893?)

People draw premonitions from different places.  Animals.  Numbers.  Charged objects.  We identify them through patterns seen.  And yet, they all come from within this incredibly complex universe we call the soul.  The soul exists outside of time and memory.  It can actually contain this wisdom.  But the truth is often obscured by what we see in our linear existence.

~ü

Henryk Weyssenhoff Przeczucie [Premonition] (1893?)

uncertaintimes