Frangelico

I Won't Think About That Now. I'll Think About It Tomorrow.

It's the best kept secret on how to get by some days. 

And Then, One Day. . .

My Light

My mother spoke of the origin of my name:

"The first ray of the sun's light"

And a lifelong chase ensued

Always the subtle glow in the distance

Warmth of a Vermeer hearth

Painted in tender brushstrokes

Whispering promises

Of a future when all will be drenched

In a lightness of being Milan Kundera knows

Said simply, 

In the right light, at the right time, everything is extraordinary.

-Anisha

The Lost Generation

"You are all a lost generation." -Gertrude Stein

Upon My Birthday Eve

Total solar eclipse

And a new moon

In Cancer

The first year

Of my home on 69th street

Absence of light only sheds clarity

The Moon child sees best

In the dark

It has always been that way.

The Way We Were

The All American Smile

by Hubbell Gardner (played by Robert Redford)

"In a way he was like the country he lived in; everything came too easily to him. But at least he knew it. About once a month he worried that he was a fraud, but then most everyone he knew was more fraudulent. Sometimes he felt. . . there's really no reason for us to change.  Of course by then they were too lost, or too lazy.  It had always been too easy."

-The Way We Were, 1973

Movie Script

Je Sais Ce Que Tu Veux Dire

Il bel far niente means “the beauty of doing nothing.” Italians have traditionally always been hard workers, but even against that backdrop of hard work, il bel far niente has always been a cherished Italian ideal. The beauty of doing nothing is the goal of all your work, the final accomplishment for which you are most highly congratulated. The more exquisitely and delightfully you can do nothing, the higher your life’s achievement. You don’t necessarily need to be rich in order to experience this, either. There’s another wonderful Italian expression: l’arte d’arrangiarsi – the art of making something out of nothing. The art of turning a few simple ingredients into a feast, or a few gathered friends into a festival. Anyone with a talent for happiness can do this.

People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that's what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that is holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life. A true soul mate is probably the most important person you'll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then leave. A soul mates purpose is to shake you up, tear apart your ego a little bit, show you your obstacles and addictions, break your heart open so new light can get in, make you so desperate and out of control that you have to transform your life.

On That Midnight Street

We Always Remember

So You Think Money Is The Root Of All Evil? How I Define Money...

"So you think that money is the root of all evil?" said Francisco d'Aconia. "Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can't exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?

"When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others. It is not the moochers or the looters who give value to money. Not an ocean of tears nor all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into the bread you will need to survive tomorrow. Those pieces of paper, which should have been gold, are a token of honor – your claim upon the energy of the men who produce. Your wallet is your statement of hope that somewhere in the world around you there are men who will not default on that moral principle which is the root of money. Is this what you consider evil?

Wisdom in Obscurity

Their lives were ruined, he thought; ruined by the fundamental error of their matrimonial union: that of having based a permanent contract on a temporary feeling.

People go on marrying because they can't resist natural forces, although many of them may know perfectly well that they are possibly buying a month's pleasure with a life's discomfort. 

It is foreign to a man's nature to go on loving a person when he is told that he must and shall be that person's lover. There would be a much likelier chance of his doing it if he were told not to love. If the marriage ceremony consisted in an oath and signed contract between the parties to cease loving from that day forward, in consideration of personal possession being given, and to avoid each other's society as much as possible in public, there would be more loving couples than there are now. Fancy the secret meetings between the perjuring husband and wife, the denials of having seen each other, the clambering in at bedroom windows, and the hiding in closets! There'd be little cooling then.

As you got older, and felt yourself to be at the center of your time, and not at a point in its circumference, as you had felt when you were little, you were seized with a sort of shuddering, he perceived. All around you there seemed to be something glaring, garish, rattling, and the noises and glares hit upon the little cell called your life, and shook it, and warped it.

Sometimes a woman's love of being loved gets the better of her conscience, and though she is agonized at the thought of treating a man cruelly, she encourages him to love her while she doesn't love him at all.

It seems such a terribly tragic thing to bring beings into the world.

Unexpected

Full Circle

Finally, after all these years, I am exactly where I was always meant to be.

It was written in the stars. . . all we have to do is look up.

Now It Seems It Was History. . . Life Making Fast Time

Astrophil & Stella

My Revision
(on the collection of sonnets by Sir Philip Sidney)

Astrophil, lover of stars
Stella will never hurt you, never betray you
Foolish, irrational, passionate man
You plunder knowingly down each fallen path
Early light and the same recognition
Of each blended morning
A prism of years
Crystalline revelry casts light
On dusty books, unopened boxes
Things that needed attending to long ago
But now the reason escapes the necessity.

Didn't you know
When you chased her light
Endless sonnets of bitter regret
That she was with you all along?
Nobody remembers his name
Only yours
And hers
You won her in the end
She loves you best of all
Poor, sad, broken poet
Lost, aimless, darkened spirit
Stella always thought you a god.

You had only to look up

That is where the stars are

Yet you spent so much time down there

In the darkened hole

Seeking distraction, following trails with ends in sight
At the very beginning

Perhaps your misery was a choice

So many words, so many miscommunications

So much poetry

And never a simple

"Run away with me, this world is mad."

I would follow in a heartbeat.

But that's not how the story went, is it

No - this is just a revision -

On sonnets that were written long ago

Nobody cares 

It's too late

That's how our story will go, too

Yet daily you stumble into the dark

And I continue to light your path

It's Stella, don't you know

Who felt it worst of all 

You prolific, immortal fool.

-A.L.

Moonlight Orchard on 69th Street

The White Light

Drowning by Billy Collins 

I wonder how it all got started, this business

about seeing your life flash before your eyes

while you drown, as if panic, or the act of submergence,

could startle time into such compression, crushing

decades in the vice of your desperate, final seconds.

After falling off a steamship or being swept away

in a rush of floodwaters, wouldn't you hope

for a more leisurely review, an invisible hand

turning the pages of an album of photographs-

you up on a pony or blowing out candles in a conic hat.

How about a short animated film, a slide presentation?

Your life expressed in an essay, or in one model photograph?

Wouldn't any form be better than this sudden flash?

Your whole existence going off in your face

in an eyebrow-singeing explosion of biography-

nothing like the three large volumes you envisioned.

Survivors would have us believe in a brilliance

here, some bolt of truth forking across the water,

an ultimate Light before all the lights go out,

dawning on you with all its megalithic tonnage.

But if something does flash before your eyes

as you go under, it will probably be a fish,

a quick blur of curved silver darting away,

having nothing to do with your life or your death.

The tide will take you, or the lake will accept it all

as you sink toward the weedy disarray of the bottom,

leaving behind what you have already forgotten,

the surface, now overrun with the high travel of clouds. 

The High Road

. . . the loneliest road.

Amsterdam Muses Too

For your sake I hope heaven and hell are really there but I wouldn't hold my breath you wasted life why wouldn't you waste death?

Jerz

Frosted

But I have promises to keep

And miles to go before I sleep

And miles and miles and miles and miles to go. . .

And really it would be so much easier if we hadn't gone

Quite so far

In opposite directions

We're just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl

Year after year

Running over the same old ground

What have we found?

The same old fears.

Oh how I wish you were here.

Honey & the Moon

Don't know why I'm still afraid
If you weren't real I would make you up
now
I wish that I could follow through
I know that your love is true
and deep
as the sea
but right now
everything you want is wrong,
and right now
all your dreams are waking up,
and right now
I wish I could follow you
to the shores
of freedom,
where no one lives.

Remember when we first met
and everything was still a bet
in love's game
you would call; I'd call you back
and then I'd leave
a message
on your answering
machine

But right now
everything is turning blue,
and right now
the sun is trying to kill the moon,
and right now
I wish I could follow you
to the shores
of freedom,
where no one lives

Easter, 1916 William Butler Yeats

...I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
That woman's days were spent
In ignorant good will,
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill.
What voice more sweet than hers
When young and beautiful,
She rode to harriers?
This man had kept a school
And rode our winged horse.
This other his helper and friend
Was coming into his force;
He might have won fame in the end,
So sensitive his nature seemed,
So daring and sweet his thought.
This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vain-glorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

I was feeling kinda seasick. . . the crowd called out for more

You said there is no reason, and the truth is plain to see. . . and although my eyes were open, they might just as well be closed.

Drapings

"I believe in doing the thing you feel is right." - Dorothy Draper

Heart of Darkness

A lens into Fitzgerald's treatment of Dick Diver, Tender is the Night

He went back into his house and Nicole saw that one of his most characteristic moods was upon him, the excitement that swept everyone up into it and was inevitably followed by his own form of melancholy, which he never displayed but at which she guessed. This excitement about things reached an intensity out of proportion to their importance, generating a really extraordinary virtuosity with people. Save among a few of the tough-minded and perennially suspicious, he had the power of arousing a fascinated and uncritical love. The reaction came when he realized the waste and extravagance involved. He sometimes looked back with awe at the carnivals of affection he had given, as a general might gaze upon a massacre he had ordered to satisfy an impersonal blood lust. But to be included in Dick Diver’s world for a while was a remarkable experience: people believed he made special reservations about them, recognizing the proud uniqueness of their destinies, buried under the compromises of how many years. He won everyone quickly with an exquisite consideration and a politeness that moved so fast and intuitively that it could be examined only in its effect. Then, without caution, lest the first bloom of the relation wither, he opened the gate to his amusing world. So long as they subscribed to it completely, their happiness was his preoccupation, but at the first flicker of doubt as to its all- inclusiveness he evaporated before their eyes, leaving little communicable memory of what he had said or done.

The change came a long way back - but at first it didn't show.  The manner remains intact for some time after the moral cracks.  He used to think that he wanted to be good, he wanted to be kind, he wanted to be brave and wise, but it was all pretty difficult.  He wanted to be loved, too, if he could fit it in.  Often he felt lonely with her and frequently she tired him with the short floods of personal revelations that she reserved exclusively for him.  ...it was as if for the remainder of his life he was condemned to carry with him the egos of certain people, early met and early loved, and to be only as complete as they were complete themselves. There was an element of loneliness involved--so easy to be loved--so hard to love.

"You were like you used to be the night you helped us," she was saying, "except at the end, when you were horrid.  Why aren't you nice like that always.  You can be...Your friends still like you.  But you say awful things to people when you've been drinking.  I've spent most of my time defending you this summer..."

"You like to help everybody don’t you?”

“I only pretend to.”

"You're all so dull," he said. "I guess I'm the Black Death.  I don't seem to bring people happiness any more."

He had lost himself – he could not tell the hour when or the day or the week, the month or the year. “I must go,” he said. As he stood up he swayed a little; he did not feel well any more—his blood raced slow. He raised his right hand and with a papal cross he blessed the beach from the high terrace. Faces turned upward from several umbrellas.

"I'm going to him." She got to her knees.

"No, you're not.  Let well enough alone."

The Most Solemn 5th Grader In The World, Upon Encountering the Beginning of Sadness

On Turning Ten by Billy Collins The whole idea of it makes me feel like I'm coming down with something, something worse than any stomach ache or the headaches I get from reading in bad light-- a kind of measles of the spirit, a mumps of the psyche, a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul. You tell me it is too early to be looking back, but that is because you have forgotten the perfect simplicity of being one and the beautiful complexity introduced by two. But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit. At four I was an Arabian wizard. I could make myself invisible by drinking a glass of milk a certain way. At seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince. But now I am mostly at the window watching the late afternoon light. Back then it never fell so solemnly against the side of my tree house, and my bicycle never leaned against the garage as it does today, all the dark blue speed drained out of it. This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself, as I walk through the universe in my sneakers. It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends, time to turn the first big number. It seems only yesterday I used to believe there was nothing under my skin but light. If you cut me I could shine. But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life, I skin my knees. I bleed.

Soaring

Jonathan Livingston Seagull sighed.  The price of being misunderstood.  They call you devil or they call you god. What he had once hoped for the Flock, he now gained for himself alone; and was not sorry for the price that he had paid.

When Even Friends Seem Out to Harm You

Nothing lasts forever, and we both know hearts can change.

Human. . .On My Faithless Arm

In Bed:  The Kiss

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec 1892

Lay your sleeping head my love

Human on my faithless arm;

Time and fevers burn away

Individual beauty from

Thoughtful children, and the grave

Proves the child ephemeral:

But in my arms till break of day

Let the living creature lie,

Mortal, guilty, but to me

The entirely beautiful. . .

Certainty, fidelity

On the stroke of midnight pass

Like vibrations of a bell

And fashionable madmen raise

Their pedantic boring cry:

Every farthing of the cost,

All the dreaded cards foretell,

Shall be paid, but from this night

Not a whisper, not a thought

Not a kiss nor look be lost.  

W.H. Auden

I Always Thought

Nocturne

My Boat's Name

"It's an answer to people long since dead. . . You see the sentence I heard most often in my childhood was 'You don't run things around here.'" - - Gail Wynand to Dominique Francon, The Fountainhead

I'm older now but still runnin' against the wind

Choices Questioned

English 101

Suck At Life

Robert Fulton's Clermont

Did not have nearly as much steam
Rising in angry, nonsensical vapors
Whistle about to blow
Fantastically always on the brink
Of some unrealized tantrum
Stifled since age two.
Gruff, awkward, irritable caveman
You call yourself "charming"
And tell me "I suck at life"
Really it's not funny
Neither of us should laugh
It's all kind of a mess, really
Dripping, grainy
uneven - this afternoon
This life.
But then - - admittedly, a little tired
Everywhere I turn these days
Seems they all have something slick to say
With a polish that gleams just a little grotesque
Been a long time since I made a friend
For the simple sake of having a friend
What a joy and a relief to be able to say
I find you rather annoying
And sometimes very kind.

Myth of Iphigenia

The eldest daughter of Agamemnon and Clytamnestra and sister of Electra and Orestes.  When The Achaean fleet was becalmed at Aulis, Iphigeneia's father sacrificed her to Artemis in order to secure favorable winds to carry the ships to Troy.  Her mother later avenged her death by murdering Agamemnon.

Antonio Tempesta

The All American Smile by Hubbell Gardner

In a way, he was like the country he lived in.  Everything came too easily to him.  But at least he knew it.  About once a month he worried that he was a fraud, but then most everyone he knew was more fraudulent.  Sometimes he felt. . . there's really no reason for us to change.  But of course by then, they were too lost or too lazy.  It had always been too easy.

And my problem, too. It has always been too easy. A gift, and a curse.

Journey to the Center of the Earth

In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia. . . the Greek word for "return" is nostos.  Algos means "suffering." So nostaliga is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.  - - Milan Kundera

Warning

She'll let you in her house
If you come knockin late at night
She'll let you in her mouth
If the words you say are right
If you pay the price
She'll let you deep inside
But there's a secret garden she hides
She'll let you in her car
To go drivin round
She'll let you into the parts of herself
That'll bring you down
She'll let you in her heart
If you got a hammer and a vise
But into her secret garden, don't think twice
You've gone a million miles
How far did you get
To that place where you can't remember
And you can't forget
She'll lead you down a path
There'll be tenderness in the air
She'll let you come just far enough
So you know she's really there
She'll look at you and smile
And her eyes will say
She's got a secret garden
Where everything you want
Where everything you need
Will always stay
A million miles away.
                     -Springsteen, of course.

Heartbeat

Dogs are our link to paradise.  They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a 

glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden where doing nothing was not boring - - it was peace.     --Milan Kundera

Paint it White

It was a baptism of sorts,
From chairs
To life.
The white brought clarity.
Life is a canvas.

Sailor's Yarn

"And this also," said Marlowe out of nowhere, "Has been one of the darkest places of the earth."
Joseph Conrad, The Heart of Darkness

Victoire de Samonthrace

Dagny Never Shrugged

If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling, but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore dow upon his shoulders, what would you tell him to do?"  --Ayn Rand