danse un petit poésie

college has taken me away from dance, and i am missing it more than ever. it seems school has encouraged me to resort to personal poetry, but part of my new year's resolution this year will be to embrace poetry in motion back into my life!

my perception of insane control, precision, strength, grace, poise = Daniil Simkin. this intense young prodigy gives me a headache he's so phenomenal.

and fin with a fave classic -nouvelle vague- with a fave classic -bande a part-

cynical demeanour

heard about this band from my friend jonah, and the more i listen to them, the more their sound grows on me. indie, peaceful, quirky. also makes me want to wear glasses.

i've been meaning to read a certain masterpiece in Russian literature: The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy... about life, death, fear, epiphanies of reality. as Tolstoy said in his own words, "Ivan Ilyich's life had been...most ordinary and therefore most terrible." note to self: READ IT.

radical glory

heads up if you like sufjan stevens, bon iver, postal service, gorky's aygotic mynci, paul simon, the mountains goats, or animal collective. heard about this band radical glory who is very similar to these artists. i love his obsession with houses, the diverse stories they retain; what has happened in them over the years. this is what his new album ghost is ideally based upon. each song in this album is a story itself and some of the stories are told from the house's point of view. also what's super cool about this guy (ben cooper) is that most of his work was conducted in an old tool shed behind his house. another awesome fact... he's from good ol' cracker country, my floridian home

a scenic world

after the storm - mumford & sons

it's windy and chilly outside finally, oh happy day. i'm admiring some of my baby sister's photography... good job, bridgette! makes me miss home. also some random photog after.

 

awake my soul - mumford & sons

some thoughts on my obsession with another of chesterton's phenomena

In Oscar Wilde’s Humanitad he describes anarchy as “freedom's own Judas, the vile prodigal licence who steals the gold of Liberty and yet has nothing…” The Man Who Was Thursday has a dreamlike quality in effect, and indeed throughout this nightmarish reality, anarchy, or more rather the appearance of it runs rampage. Gabriel Syme, the poetical artist, is thrown into a mad-gash psychological hurricane and with diligent valor strives to conquer this anarchical movement in which he finds himself involved. Chapter Twelve “The Earth in Anarchy” aptly describes the reader’s impression of the world during the majority of the novel. In Syme’s mad­ - and I use that word lightly - pursuit of Sunday he finds himself repeatedly under hilariously stressful situations and immediately following discovers his concern and efforts were wholly superfluous. He has many successive experiences like these: intense stress, confusion, frustration, embarrassment, humiliation, immense relief, and so on. He learns from these that nothing is as bad as it looks, the first message of the novel: “Syme had for a flash the sensation that the cosmos had turned exactly upside down…he only knew the happy and silly fact that the shadow which had pursued him with an intolerable oppression of peril was only the shadow of a friend trying to catch him up…he knew simultaneously that he was a fool and a free man.” However, as Syme realizes that his supposed enemies are in reality his friends, he continues to pursue Sunday, the supposed awful cause of Syme’s utter confusion and terror. The nightmarish story builds more and more pressure and ascends to its peak towards the finish when Sunday, the ultimate enigma, reveals himself as God Himself. Syme’s world has now been turned upside down and in this phenomenal conversion he no longer takes life seriously, or in a grave manner. Having seen God and survived, he now has the peace of God and is no longer threatened by nihilism, blasphemous ideology, or anarchism. He now knows that God is so much bigger than all these things and because he takes himself so lightly and experiences an “unnatural buoyancy” and a “crystal simplicity” he sees all else as triviality. Through him the novel’s observable second message is expressed: he now puts his trust entirely in God. In the beginning of and during the story Syme appears to be the courageous hero, but ends with the revelation of his complete silly blindness. Contrastingly, Sunday in the beginning and throughout appears to be quite beneath a hero, and ends up being ultimately above and beyond a mere hero. Sunday presumably can be said to signify Nature, a complete and indifferently beautiful enigma, but when the mask is torn off he shines forth as Divinity Himself, an even more beautiful enigma. As Nature he is the artistic mask, the skeleton of reality that holds up and mirrors the True Artist. Gregory, the real anarchist, questions and challenges Sunday and expresses his anger that a distant and insufferable god that is indeed insufferable. But Sunday’s reply is an ineffable verity that to know, to be, to live is to suffer, and with the acuity of such comes understanding. The dream and waking up experience for Syme strikes his whole being indelibly that we live in the best of all impossible worlds, that truly the only explanation for our world is a miracle. Though the story starts out and unfolds as a sort of desperate and despairing nightmare with limiting human collisions, it concludes with a revelation, a poignant birth of a poetic soul, and a waking up to the tremendous paradox that reality, for us, is too Good to be True. 

I've been hop hop hoping to this masterpiece of haecceitas inscape and paradoxical irony: The Man Who Was Thursday <---- a must read!!

"the dream reveals the reality, which conception lags behind. that is the horror of life - the terror of art." -kafka

 don't be scared of the night...

"yeah i have seen it too, just a little different from how you do"... a little beauty from the lips of augie march

"we sit perhaps in a starry chamber of silence, while the laughter of the heavens is too loud for us to hear...." -chesterton

today's study break = browsing thru some of my art and photography faves. made me want to start wearing purple