"this afternoon with you was something like a letter, the kind that someone writes but never sends..."

I met the socialist sociologist, a loved and loving friend, at the museum, and spent several hours staring at paint. It seemed we all left with excitement and exhaustion and contentment and confusion. I was grateful we enjoyed and aren’t expert enough to be snobbish, but could value beauty and creativity simply. Much “nearness by likeness”, here is some of what we saw:

Vincent van Gogh: Bedroom in Arles, second version.
People may think van Gogh was crazy and look to the disproportion here as evidence. That he suffered can't be denied, but this room really was trapezoidal. Thank you audio tour.



Degas: Ballet at the Paris Opera.




Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec: Cirque Fernando, The Equestrienne
the Socialist Sociologist's favorite























Monet: Water Lily Pond
quintessentially

Autumn has come to town and the wind picks up in the evenings, blowing leaves, and before turning onto pavement I notice the sun under limbs, space that seems to glitter in the declining light. It looks alive until I realize it is only floating with no direction. If I’m not careful, sometimes this wind picks me up in breezes and I’m carried around the upper stories of downtown to drift about, beholden as the sunset is better viewed with the height. As the night settles, the city is lit by a moon with a face that offers one progressive and eternal note and is hung in clouds as it should be in October. I feel a refining and wonder if it is something to be enjoyed; if pleasure can be taken in pain, or at least peace. I am too often forgetful. Recent conversations seem to wonder if creativity necessitates this type of pain. In sound. In paint. Could the past be something to build on, acknowledging always the timeless Time-creator. Surely, though difficulty finds me wanting to recreate and recreate.

I stole my mother’s Leaves of Grass at the end of summer, and though she’s certainly a much closer relation than that title, it seems to fit with Whitman. Mothers should own poetry, which should be stolen by children. Anyways, I love her, and I like this, and he is better at words to convey the idea. So as with things people like, it should be shared:


For him, I sing,
I raise the present on the past,
(As some perennial tree out of its roots, the present on the past,)
With time and space I him dilate and fuse the immortal laws,
To make himself by them the law unto himself.
W.W.