Capture

Work from life, work from memory; capture a moment of life: movement, intensity, realism, 'driven always', wrote Suzanne Valadon, 'by a feeling for life itself.' Capture, in other words, the truth of the world: its beauty and its squalor. Capture the everyday: the ordinary movements of ordinary people; and the positions human bodies contort themselves in; and the places they frequent or inhabit. Capture the imitation of life, the imitation of art. An aspiring painter mirrors in her art that of her established patron's; a writer models himself, herself, their lived life on Woolf's Orlando. Become it! Become life, become art; and capture others becoming so.

Picture credit: Jeune Fille au Bain (Young Girl Bathing), Suzanne Valadon (source: WikiArt).

See Mistress of Montmartre: A Life of Suzanne Valadon by June Rose. 

Written March 2022.

Hunter

To sit quietly and work – read, write, study – one needs first a precious opportunity and then the perfect setting: an institution dedicated to the mind, the pen; or a solitary table with a solitary chair set before it, placed in a small room housing one, where one may read for pleasure and study from a mountain of books; and here make notes from the text or of one's own thoughts and questions, which may lead to further investigation.
Compelled like a Benedictine monk to read, though unbound by any rule, such individuals let life's normal transactions slip from them. But a book, like a revolution, like the discovery of an unknown continent, like an army sieging the gates or walls of a city to occupy land they think should be theirs, can be an agent of change; can be akin to a wall built, a wall toppled; a leader made, a leader taken down; a flag planted in the soil, a flag waved in triumph at the summit of a mountain; or less dramatically, a traveller falling mysteriously ill: a sneeze, a cough, a fever. A book's influence may be slow to gather pace, may be a less thrilling event than other heroic moments, but Time will record it, and Time will notice. And thus preserved, curiosity, once said by the Church to be a mortal sin, will compel new generations (of readers) to hunt, to read, to learn.

Picture credit: Roman de la Rose (Author of a manuscript at his writing desk), Wikipieda, National Library of Wales.

Written March 2022.

The Age Was ...

The age was Shakespearean, Dickensian, Wellsian, Orwellian; named for poets and writers, not Kings and Queens. The age was... not our own; their morals not ours; nor their...; nor their...; nor their... even. The age was dot dot dot; that unsaid left to the imagination, to the poets and writers to supply. The modern reader would feel everything was different; another temper altogether. The moment put to paper brief, the moment gone in pages; the moment alive then dead in the act of reading.
A fictional Russia caught in a different era: its landscape pine and snow and wild horses. A fictional London, the Thames frozen over, in the Court of King James. The poets sing of a disastrous winter that saw frost and flood; that saw Shakespeare's Othello staged in a carnival atmosphere, with ice and skating as its backdrop. The writers speak of the trance that followed, of thousands comatose, as if put under a spell by a wicked fairy or by too many party sedatives, which no amount of noise would waken before the advent of Spring. And then both - in poetry, in prose – describe how if Russia was mentioned an uneasy hush, an uneasy gloom would fall; though with all memories wiped nobody could – if pressed – explain why. A note that penetrated modern minds...

Picture credit: The Sleeping Beauty, 1890, Edward Burne-Jones (source: WikiArt).

Indebted to Orlando by Virginia Woolf. 

Written February 2022.