Category: Journal

  • Trial and Error

    • “The Triumph of the Nightingale” – mixed media, 7 x 14 in (17.5 x 35 cm).

    In spite of my head cold, trips to the vet, money woes, and general malaise over the last couple of weeks, I did manage to get two new pieces of artwork done.

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  • On Aging

    From “Mathios Paschalis among the Roses”, by George Seferis:

    Her aunt was a poor old body, — veins in relief,
    Many wrinkles about her ears, a nose about to die;
    Yet her words always full of wisdom.
    One day I saw her touching Antigone’s breast,
    Like a child stealing an apple

    Will I perhaps meet the old woman as I keep descending?
    When I left she said to me “Who knows when we shall meet again?”
    Then I read of her death in some old newspapers
    And of Antigone’s wedding and the wedding of Antigone’s daughter
    Without an end of the steps or of my tobacco
    Which imparts to me the taste of a haunted ship
    With a mermaid crucified, when still beautiful, to the wheel.

    (Excerpted from “George Seferis: Poems”, translated from the Greek by Rex Warner, Nonpareil Books, 1960)

  • Peredur and the Empress of the East

    • Anna Komnene, Empress of the East

    I’m in the process of reading Book One of the Lady Charlotte Guest’s collection and translation of the Mabinogion, the Welsh cultural epic, and I’ve just finished the story of Peredur of the Long Lance. (Quiet, you in the back row…)

    In the course of his adventures Peredur meets (and ultimately marries) a beautiful woman known as “the Empress of Cristinobyl the Great”, who lives in “India”. This Empress is fabulously beautiful, fabulously wealthy, a sorceress, and she needs a good fighting man at her beck and call.

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