Life imitates art ...



interplanetary astronaut

The remarkable visionary 1968 science fiction film "2001: A Space Odyssey" suggests that the entire history of humankind from the ape-like creatures foraging and fighting in the opening scenes to a climatic ill-fated odyssey to the planet Jupiter, has been the result of manipulation by extra-terrestial forces.



This picture of actor Keir Dullea in the role of an interplanetary astronaut, remains as a photo icon of 60-70's pop-culture lore. In a perilous bid for survival, he matches wits with “HAL”, a spaceship computer gone amuck, only to become ensnared in a surrealistic Einsteinian curved space-time realm where in a remarkable sequence, he ages dramatically before our eyes and then is transformed into a heavenly "star child" ... a fascinating rendering of science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke's existential metaphor for being and nothingness set in the vastness of space. This particular movie scene is depicted here, synced with Barber’s Adagio for Strings affording a curiously haunting atmosphere of dignity and wonder:



... 40 years later

This scene has prompted controversy largely concerning confusion between the imaginary world depicted and the real; but in truth, the same drama is being played out today as portrayed by the gracefully aging Mr. Dullea himself, pictured some 40 years later, caught as all are, in the same curved space-time realm, albeit not traveling in a speeding Jupiter-bound spaceship, but essentially beset on a speeding planet in a holding pattern around the sun.

Stanley Kubrick, the reclusive director, apparently destroyed all the props for the movie because he didn't want them reused for lesser movies or sold as memorabilia.

... the pleasure principle

"Personally, I think that the unique and supreme delight lies in the certainty of doing 'evil' -- and men and women know from birth that all pleasure lies in evil."


... Baudelaire [pictured in 1863 at 42]

... the ethics of ambiguity

"Naughty"

"Since we do not succeed in fleeing it, let us therefore try to look truth in the face. Let us try to assume our fundamental ambiguity. It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our life that we must draw our strength to live and our reason for acting"

... Simone de Beauvoir (1908-86)


The great love of de Beauvoir’s life was arguably not Sartre but the American novelist Nelson Algren (1909-81). She would visit him in Chicago, finding his small rundown apartment in the Polish section to be “refreshing, after the heavy odour of the dollars in the big hotels and the elegant restaurants which I found hard to take.” His friend, the photographer Art Shay, took a snapshot of her just after she had emerged from a bath, seen nude from the rear, with her rather elegant upper half and sturdy buttocks and legs. He wrote: “She had taken her bath. It was while she fussed at the sink afterwards that I had the sudden impulse. She knew I took it because she heard the click of my trusty wartime Leica Model F. ‘Naughty man’ she said”.



Buried beside Sartre with his ring

de Beauvoir observed of Sartre that he was “a warm, lively man everywhere, but not in bed”; but of Algren, her “Division Street Dostoievski”, she readily admitted that, at age 39, she had entered into the first sexually fulfilling relationship of her life. Their affair though intermittently intense over some 17 years was fitful. Algren was moody, undisciplined and insecure, and his literary star blazed briefly and then fizzled, while de Beauvoir moved on to enormous success.

The relationship had a nasty aftermath when de Beauvoir wrote about it in her 1954 novel The Mandarins, to Algren’s fury. Until his death in 1981, he was recalling the affair bitterly, although upon de Beauvoir’s death in Paris five years later, she was buried beside Sartre wearing a silver ring that Algren had given her nearly forty years before.

"Nevermore!"

"Vainly I had sought to borrow … surcease of sorrow. Darkness there and nothing more.”

   ... Poe (1809-49),  "The Raven"

The fairy tale image of the friendly giant found dead in his orchard lying under a soft blanket of tree blossoms by bewildered, adoring children conveys a wondrous sense of beauty in profound sadness. Such poetry, if we can call it that, attempts through sheer force of will to burst the fetters of aching pain, or at least to alleviate it through absorption in a happy past. But not just in fairy tales; these attempts happen in music and art too ... however, alas, all in vain! The clear and present reality is agonizingly stark, for the heart does not lose something -- it loses everything.

Grief is not date-stamped. Lines written by John Donne (1572-1631) or Ben Jonson (1572-1637) or Anne Bradstreet (1612-72) cannot be surpassed in controlled agony, nor can Poe's anguished "nevermore" lament resignedly muttered repeatedly in his poem "The Raven". But where words leave off, music begins as in Chopin's (1818-49) magnificent Nocturne Op.48 No.1. It was described eloquently by a contemporary as a work whose “chief subject is a masterly expression of a great powerful grief ... told in an agitated recitando; celestial harps come to bring one ray of hope, which is powerless in its endeavor to calm the wounded soul, which sends forth to heaven a cry of deepest anguish. There are fevers and cold sweats in this music; it is not healthy music, and it is not to be performed in a robust manner, but rather rendered almost as if in a somnambulant daze, with a tremulous delicacy of intensity, as if it were a living thing whose nerves were being operated upon, where every touch might mean life or death”:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_vZtpjNKVE&feature=player_embedded]

Perhaps Beethoven’s (1770-1827) weighty "marcia funebre" of the Eroica Symphony plumbs the pathetic depths of grief as powerfully as any ... so much so that people reportly were unnerved, even spooked by it in early concert performances ... a work considered then in 1805 to be a dramatically "new", even "revolutionary" kind of music:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJj9EydBM5g&feature=player_embedded].
In this noble and expressive passage of fugal music we might well be present at the actual obsequy of a renowned and deeply loved person, with all that is good and great looking on as bodily remnants of insensate dust are respectfully and ceremoniously dispatched; and the motto might well be Tennyson's (1809-92) eloquent words:

"In the vast cathedral leave him,
God accept him, Christ receive him."

Oscar Wilde: "Do you mind if I smoke?" . . . . . . . Sarah Bernhardt: "I don't care if you burn".

''Alas, poor Yorick! ... Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs? Your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now, to mock your own grinning?''







Pictured above in the gravedigger scene in the Shakespearean play "Hamlet" is the actor (err ... actress) Sarah Bernhardt at 56, one of the few women to play the role, and arguably the most famous actress of the 19th century. Her Hamlet tour opened in 1899 in Paris, and continued for two years showing in London, Scotland, Switzerland, Austria and Hungary. The tour attracted considerable attention in the literary press at the time. An interesting piece of contemporary published criticism has “Madame Bernhardt’s assumption of masculinity ... so cleverly carried out that one loses sight of Hamlet in one’s admiration of the tour de force of the actress”.

The gloves are off though as the same critic blasts the very scene pictured above:

“This skull, too, which had “lain in the earth three and twenty years,” instead of being brown, discolored, was of a staring and indecent whiteness, as of bone boiled and bleached. It was not pleasant to see the grinning object handled so callously. Some of the dramatic effect, too, went by the board in this; for what’s the use of bringing in the ironic emblem of mortality if it is treated as lightly as a lap-dog? Indeed, I feel sure that Madame Bernhardt treats her lap-dog more considerately, for it would be strange if she made gestures with it as unconcernedly as she does with the skull. If my eyes did not deceive me, she tapped the grinning teeth with her finger; and she certainly is far from objecting as genuinely to the odor of mortality as Shakespeare makes Hamlet when he asks if Alexander “looked o’ the fashion i’ earth, and smell so? Pah!” Here the actor is expressly directed to “put down the skull”, but Madame Bernhardt could not only endure to hold it without “Pah!” she seemed to forget what it was she had in those eloquent hands of hers, as she emphasized feelingly the lines on imperious Caesar by gesticulating with a skull of a former acquaintance.”

Bernhardt began touring internationally in 1880, travelling in special luxury railway cars and appearing for big money in cities across Europe and the United States. Reportedly not the most beautiful or even the most talented, she knew how to cultivate her stardom. She worked like a pack horse, her French patriotism made her a national emblem; her wit, temper tantrums and willingness to try new things ensured that her worldwide super stardom would last from her first hit in 1869 through to her death in 1923.



Sarah was as famous a personality as she was an actress. She painted, sculpted and wrote; she engaged in violent feuds and equally violent love affairs. Oscar Wilde apparently held her in awe, “throwing lilies at her feet” when she arrived in England, but curiously in a sonnet represents her as a “vampire from hell”, the recipient of kisses from “the loveless lips” of dead men. She obligingly slept in a coffin for photographers, though she used a normal bed for more private slumber. Her romantic conquests were legend involving royalty [presumably Edward VII of England for example], and countless famous artists and actors of both sexes. She is famously quoted as saying "We ought to hate very rarely, as it is too fatiguing, remain indifferent a great deal, forgive often, and never forget."

... a precise duty

"If we are honest—and as scientists honesty is our precise duty—we cannot help but admit that any religion is a pack of false statements, deprived of any real foundation. The very idea of God is a product of human imagination.... I do not recognize any religious myth, at least because they contradict one another...". Paul Dirac, antimatter progenerater, Solway Conference 1927 [pictured centre in 1947 with Oppenheimer, developer of the atomic bomb at his right].

... the delicate art of seduction

"It wasn't the way I looked at a man, it was the thought behind it.''

 Gloria Grahame (1923-81)

The greatest thing you ever learn ...

Nat King Cole recorded "Nature Boy" in 1948 which was an immediate major hit. Rumour had it that the lyrics were apparently written by a homeless man who tried without success to present them personally to Mr. Cole, who did receive them in due course and was impressed enough to want to meet the author, but alas, the man was never heard from again.

Turns out that Nat King Cole did indeed track the man down. His name was Eden Ahbez* [pictured right with his wife and son in the 40's], a songwriter and recording artist who was something of a personality in southern California, living a bucolic life, traveling in sandals and wearing shoulder-length hair and beard, and white robes. He became the focus of a short-lived media frenzy when Cole's version of "Nature Boy" became a hit song. He continued to live on the street, or in his van or with friends. He died in 1995 at 87 of injuries sustained in a car accident.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bReW4LQ3Yc&feature=related

*Reference: http://www.google.ca/imgres?imgurl=http://www.hoohoohouse.com/.a/6a00e55395d127883301156e8e2b07970c-800wi&imgrefurl=http://www.hoohoohouse.com/hoohoo_house/2009/03/eden-ahbez.html&h=542&w=432&sz=61&tbnid=yPjxNdp0ywApuM:&tbnh=132&tbnw=105&prev=/images%3Fq%3DEden%2BAhbez&hl=en&usg=__eLAJlN-syKANvKR_LU_V96ogCow=&ei=oG75Sp7DL83jlAeYy9G7DQ&sa=X&oi=image_result&resnum=6&ct=image&ved=0CBMQ9QEwBQ

Why aren't people more interested?

“It's biology. Those who remember are dying, and the young are brainwashed by black-and-white versions of history which, in reality, is multi-coloured, like life".
 
 ... observed recently by Poland's Jaruzelski (its last communist leader) pictured here in court at 86. He was commenting on why Poles don't seem to be interested in his take on the country's liberalization history and his role in it.

Some 25 years earlier, Jaruzelski imposed martial law, initiating a brutal 19-month crackdown on the pro-democracy Solidarity trade-union movement, an event which apparently disturbed Pope John Paul II (himself a pole) sufficiently enough to prompt a visit. The poignancy of the moment captured in the iconic photo below is palpable.

... the inner music that words make

"Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act".  

     ... Truman Capote (1924-84)

"The only way you can control people is to lie to them" - L.Ron Hubbard, Journal of Scientology

Old Mother Hubbard
Went to the cupboard,
To give the poor dog a bone:
When she came there,
The cupboard was bare,
And so the poor dog had none.


This wonderful dog
Was Dame Hubbard's delight,
He could read, he could dance,
He could sing, he could write;
She gave him rich dainties
Whenever he fed,
And erected this monument
When he was dead.

Capucine's complaint

"Men look at me like I'm a suspicious-looking trunk, and they're customs agents".

La Vallée d'Obermann

                                                                                          

Liszt a few months before his death. Photo by Nadar

 This is Franz Liszt (1811-86) seemingly larger than life, photographed at 74, warts and all, a few months before he died. In contrast the younger Liszt pictured below as he appeared in his prime at 47 (1858). In the time between, this remarkable man was transformed from a renowned brilliant pianist, and an important and influential composer, adulated everywhere he went, to a disconsolate person increasingly plagued with feelings of desolation, despair and death occasioned by a period of severe catastrophes in his private life. Music critic Robert Cummings writes of Liszt: "he was the only contemporary whose music Richard Wagner (1813-3) gratefully acknowledged as an influence upon his own. His lasting fame was an alchemy of extraordinary digital ability — the greatest in the history of keyboard playing — an unmatched instinct for showmanship, and one of the most progressive musical imaginations of his time. Hailed by some as a visionary, reviled by others as a symbol of empty Romantic excess, Franz Liszt wrote his name across music history in a truly inimitable manner”.



... Liszt in his prime (1858)

Perhaps Liszt’s “La Vallée d'Obermann” is as good an example as any of the man’s musical legacy, arguably the most profound work in an extraordinary collection of piano works entitled “Années de Pèlerinage” apparently initially inspired by scenes or moods associated with Liszt's travels with his one-time lover, Marie d'Agoult (a popular writer) throughout Switzerland and Italy during the period 1835-39, but in gestation for some 20 years before publication. This piece usually runs close to fifteen minutes and is the longest in the set. A quotation from Byron prefaces the music:

"Could I embody and unbosom now that which is most within me --could I wreak my thoughts upon expression, and thus throw soul, heart, mind, passions, feelings, strong or weak, all that I would have sought, and all I seek, bear, know, feel and yet breathe --into one word; and that one word were Lightning, I would speak; but as it is, I live and die unheard, with a most voiceless thought, sheathing it as a sword”.

... the great maestro

According to recent biographical research, Liszt in later life resisted hearing his Vallée d'Obermann. Apparently whenever a student brought the piece to play he declined to hear it ... "his music seemed to be burdened with memories for him, some too painful to bear".

There exists a superb recording of the work in a remarkable live concert performance (Carnegie Hall, 1966) by a celebrated virtuoso pianist which subtly captures the wonderful essence of the work, its power, deep pathos, and sheer majesty. It is fascinating because due to the exemplary skill and mature muscianship of the artist, it almost seems like a surreal time warp sound-bite from somewhere in the distant past, conceivably conveyed directly and serendipitously from the great master himself:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9p1qK57H_6k&feature=g-all-u 

"I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land"

"I wanted the American eagle to go screaming into the Pacific ...Why not spread its wings over the Philippines, I asked myself? ... I said to myself, Here are a people who have suffered for three centuries. We can make them as free as ourselves, give them a government and country of their own, put a miniature of the American Constitution afloat in the Pacific, start a brand new republic to take its place among the free nations of the world. It seemed to me a great task to which we had addressed ourselves. But I have thought some more, since then, and I have read carefully the treaty of Paris which ended the Spanish-American War, and I have seen that we do not intend to free, but to subjugate the people of the Philippines. We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem. It should, it seems to me, be our pleasure and duty to make those people free, and let them deal with their own domestic questions in their own way. And so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land".

  ... Mark Twain (1835-1910) describes [in 1900] his political awakening from being "a red-hot imperialist'' in the context of the Philippine-American War.  

"Wait for me, Ellen: No one ever loved you as I love you!"

 War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it

"Yet one guesses that there was something more than an accelerating Catholic fanaticism in her resolute and zealous devotion. She was perhaps trying to expiate a little the horrors and griefs of Georgia, and her son's dedication to the priesthood was perhaps the price paid by his father for the reckless elation of the March to the Sea. In the remarkable painting of Ellen [pictured below] by G.P.A. Healy, the cross that hangs on her bosom, unobtrusive though it is at first sight, comes inevitably, as one looks, to draw attention as the center of the picture.

Ellen died in 1888. When her husband was called to her bedside, he came running upstairs, calling out, 'Wait for me, Ellen: No one ever loved you as I love you!'. He fell immediately after her death into one of his abysmal depressions and survived her only three years. He died in February, 1891; he had collapsed just after his 71st birthday, which he had spent in the room in which Ellen had died. He had been sitting in a rocking chair in front of the fire, rereading 'Great Expectations'."

... Edmund Wilson (1895-1972)  comments about William Tecumseh Sherman (1820-91) and wife Ellen. "Patriotic Gore"

Miss Mary who?

Clear evidence indicates Mary Jo Kopechne died an agonizing cruel death. John N. Farrar, a scuba diver with the Edgartown Rescue Squad which recovered the woman's body from an upside-down vehicle in eight feet of chilly water, testified she most likely stayed alive in an air pocket for several hours:

"Farrar thrust himself through the open window and into the car. Looking up, he found the body of a young woman. Her head was cocked back, her face pressed into the footwell. Both hands gripped the front edge of the back seat to hold herself in conformity with its upholstered contours. It was not the position assumed by a person knocked unconscious by the impact of a crash, Farrar said. "If she had been dead or unconscious, she would have been prone, sinking to the bottom or floating on top. She definitely was holding herself in a position to avail herself of the last remaining air that had to be trapped in the car.

Farrar took hold of the woman's thigh, and as soon as he touched the body he knew she was dead; the flesh in his hand was hard as wood. "Instead of life-saving, I realized I was now evidence-gathering," Farrar said. "Because I was the only person who would be able to observe this situation, it behooved me to pay attention to what I saw underwater to be able to report it."

(Grand jury testimony, 1969)

Ted Kennedy (1932-2009) who had driven the car off a small bridge in the middle of that fateful night in 1969 and had managed to free himself and swim to safety, abandoned the scene and his hapless trapped 28 year old "companion". Inconceivably, he didn't call for emergency help. Instead apparently, he squandered precious seconds, minutes, and hours conferring with Kennedy family operatives as survival chances for Mary Jo ebbed, and then went to bed. He only reported the mishap to authorities the next morning, some 11 hours after it happened, by which time the upside down car had been discovered. When he finally completed an accident report, he didn’t even know her name, referring to her simply as “Miss Mary ___.”

personification

Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there.


"I'm jealous of the old generation that has social skills and role models instead of TV and computer screens!"

Figure of speech in which human characteristics are attributed to an abstract quality, animal, or inanimate object. An example is "The Moon doth with delight / Look round her when the heavens are bare" (William Wordsworth, "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood," 1807). Another is "Death lays his icy hand on kings" (James Shirley, "The Glories of Our Blood and State," 1659). Personification has been used in European poetry since Homer and is particularly common in allegory; for example, the medieval morality play Everyman (c. 1500) and the Christian prose allegory Pilgrim's Progress (1678) by John Bunyan contain characters such as Death, Fellowship, Knowledge, Giant Despair, Sloth, Hypocrisy, and Piety. Personification became almost an automatic mannerism in 18th-century Neoclassical poetry, as exemplified by these lines from Thomas Gray's "An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard": Here rests his head upon the lap of earthA youth to Fortune and to Fame unknown:Fair science frowned not on his humble birth,And Melancholy marked him for her own.

truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are

- most media are dominated by acting ... people watching people act ... a flimsy surrogate for the real thing, at best.
- idiosyncracies of the actor; certain mannerisms contrived or inherent
may intrigue the viewer but are an adulteration of the “truth”, the thing
immitated.
- there’s a gap between a sense of what is real and what is contrived
- the gap in itself is innocuous , unless it shrinks to nothing, as the act
becomes reality in peoples mind

http://www.u.arizona.edu/~kamtekar/papers/personification.pdf


[Note: this entry is a work in process ... exploring the concept of personification as all perversive/Plato's identification of it/dramatic arts and acting/social interaction and communication/language structure and evolution/peer pressure behaviour/etc]

terrible passions in red and green ...

Night Café

"I have tried to express the terrible passions of humanity by means of red and green" van Gogh wrote. Yellow walls give on to blood-red walls that lead to an obtrusive green ceiling, and lining the walls are the locals at the bar tables, hunched over in late-night stupor. Lamps hang from the ceiling, surrounded by Vincent's wheels of curving yellow strokes. A stark black and white clock looms in the background, impossible to miss. It is almost a quarter past midnight in this desolate scene.

"Night Café" painted in Arles in 1888 is, in the artist's own words, "…one of the ugliest I have ever done" ... a collection of clashing colors in the dreariest atmosphere with fully two-thirds of the painting the floor of the café, executed in sulphuric yellow with exaggerated lines of perspective that yank the eye into the painting. A green billiard table, outlined in heavy black, stops us cold. Beside the table stands a figure in a light-colored coat, staring out at us without expression, perhaps the cafe owner for whom allegedly the painting was made to pay off a debt.

A case of superficial vitality ...

"He projected a superficial vitality; both women and men were drawn to him by that alone. Closely observed, however, one sensed a secret fatigue, a lack of any real optimism. His wife was severely aware of it, and why not? She was its principal cause."

      ... Music For Chameleons, Truman Capote (1924-84)

Rememberance of things past and the chaos of clear ideas ...

When a drowsy, dreamy influence seems to hang over sessions of sweet silent thought, and to pervade every nook and cranny of a mind in repose, I marvel at the vividness of  early childhood memories, and the immediacy of their intricately woven sensations ... a chaos of clear ideas that form the very essence of being and consciousness. The recall, for example, of summer languidness on the last day of a school year in an empty classroom, windows flung open to the enticing bright sunny freedom of a cooling breeze, mingled with the sharp anguished lonely dismay of sudden release from routine. These memories linger as vivid mood pictures imbedded in the mind, involving feelings which in manifold variety shape individual personalities. The subtle nuances and flavors of a whole culture and way of life long past, essentially permanent archetypes of human character and experience, can and do haunt the cavernous corridors of a vast unconsciousness  curiously shaping en masse the character of a whole community.



uncanny musical genius



Czech composer Dvorak (1841-1904) [pictured with his wife in 1886] captured with uncanny musical genius the sense of such a time past … wide open country settings languishing under vast cathedralic canopies of  pale blue skies and billowy wisps of pure white clouds, coalescing with the rapturous intricacies of simple rural life. His music conveys a sense of this bucolic past with such delicate knowing intimacy that tears might easily well up in one's eyes … for there is profound sadness in this music, a compelling intuition that Dvorak was driven to capture a thing of wondrous beauty knowing full well it was fleeting:
 
"https://www.youtube.com/embed/PbNWuTC4n_8"
 

This was a time of ancestors long gone and forgotten, their remnants buried in little country church cemeteries, slowly succumbing to nature’s inexorable disintegrating forces:

nature’s inexorable disintegrating forces:

Gadgets and copycats

Nagasaki 9Aug45

"Fat Man"

US B-29 Superfortress Bockscar and crew

The atomic bomb "Fat Man" was dropped on Nagasaki 9Aug45 by the US B-29 Superfortress Bockscar [pictured with crew below]. It was modeled on "the gadget", the very first experimental atomic bomb detonated just a month before at the so-called "Trinity test"* in Socorro, New Mexico. The mushroom cloud resulting from the nuclear explosion over Nagasaki [above] rose 18 km (11 mi, 60,000 ft) into the air from the hypocenter. 80,000 were killed, half on the first day.



"Joe-1"

So porous was the security at the Manhatten Project where all the intense work was done to accomplish the deed, that the first Soviet bomb, RDS-1 (a.k.a. "Joe-1" in reference to Stalin) was almost a direct copy, even in its external shape, of the US-developed Fat Man bomb. It was test-exploded a mere 4 years after the Nagasaki drop in Aug49.



Theodore Hall (1925-99), one of several physicists working at the time on the Manhattan Project eventually fessed up some 50 years later to divulging critical intelligence to the Soviets. He believed strongly (along with others, some caught much earlier, and executed for their deemed treachery) that an American monopoly on nuclear weapons was dangerous. He explained it this way in 1998, just before he died:

"I decided to give atomic secrets to the Russians because it seemed to me that it was important that there should be no monopoly, which could turn one nation into a menace and turn it loose on the world as ... as Nazi Germany developed. There seemed to be only one answer to what one should do. The right thing to do was to act to break the American monopoly".

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*  This rare photo was taken at ground zero of the Trinity test site, after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and some time after the actual test. Oppenheimer, the so-called father of the atomic bomb, appears at the center in a light colored hat:

The ruins of the noblest man

This only known photograph* of Chopin (1810-49) at age 39 taken by Bisson in 1849 clearly reveals the ravages of the degenerative stages of tuberculosis which took his life only a few months later. Despite the carefully posed positioning, it is quite apparent his face is bloated from the inflammatory effects of his illness, and his whole countenance is rather pathetic and tragically sad. It used to be thought that this celebrated daguerreotype was taken in the summer of 1849, in the  Paris offices of Chopin’s publisher Maurice Schlesinger, and that date appears in many of the major iconographies of Chopin. We now know it to have been taken by Bisson in his atelier at 65 rue Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois toward the end of 1847, not long after Chopin’s break with George Sand. During Chopin’s lifetime it belonged to Schlesinger’s private collection and subsequently to the firm of Breitkopf and Härtel in Leipzig. It was later acquired by the Chopin National Institute in Warsaw. The original daguerreotype was destroyed during World War II. What we have today is a photograph of that daguerreotype made sometime before 1939.

Pianist and composer Ignaz Moscheles (1794-1870), a music contemporary, provided a precise description of him in better days:

"He was of slim frame, middle height [apparently 100lbs/5'7"]; fragile but wonderfully flexible limbs, delicately formed hands, very small feet, an oval, softly outlined head, a pale transparent complexion, long silken hair of a light chestnut color, parted on one side, tender brown eyes, intelligent rather than dreamy, a finely-curved aquiline nose, a sweet subtle smile, graceful and varied gestures."  

Curiously, the death mask below, inflammation clearly vitiated in mortal suspension, ironically provides perhaps a more realistic semblance of what the man must have looked like in Paris high society at the pinnacle of his fame as a strange, wonderful composer and musician for the piano, capturing a delicacy and a certain sublime aristocratic bearing that people of his day certainly witnessed, an essence of which pervades his works for which he is very much exalted today as indeed he was in his own time.

"Thou art the ruins of the noblest man
That ever lived in the tide of time".

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHjHzX79sdc&feature=related

*NOTE: Apparently this is a 2nd Chopin photograph (c.1847), sourced at the Fryderyk Chopin Society, Warsaw. I cannot vouch for its verity.

A grief observed ...

Here the whole world (stars, water, air,
And field, and forest, as they were
Reflected in a single mind)
Like cast off clothes was left behind
In ashes, yet with hopes that she,
Re-born from holy poverty,
In lenten lands, hereafter may
Resume them on her Easter Day.

  ... C. S. Lewis (1898-1963)

... the living and the dead

the lonely churchyard on the hill

"A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead".


... James Joyce (1882-1941) "The Dead" Dubliners

The American Dream

Guiseppe Zangara's failed attempt to assassinate U.S. President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945) demonstrated how the frustrations of financial misfortune in the Great Depression (1929 - early 1940s ... the longest, most widespread, and deepest depression of the 20th century) could lead to desperate and mindless acts of violence.

Zangara was born in 1900 in Italy. His mother died when he was two and his father remarried to a widow with six daughters. The expanded family, already poor, endured severe hardship and soon food became scarce. When Zangara was six his father took him out of school and put him to work digging deep ditches and hauling heavy bricks and stones. The strenuous work and poor nourishment was a contributing factor to his slight build and a burning stomach ache, and the pain began to drive him mad. His entire life began to revolve around his stomach pain and his health.

Zangara hated his father and blamed him for the horrible stomach pain he endured. He believed that his father should be punished, but the lousy capitalists in Italy were too busy to help him. Thus he developed a deep hatred for everyone who was rich or worked in government. Driven mad with pain, he came to believe that if he could kill the leader of the capitalists, his stomach pain might go away. He plotted to assassinate King Victor Emmanuel III (1869-1947), but left for the United States before carrying out his plan. He secured a job as a bricklayer in New Jersey. He and his uncle lived together for a year until his uncle married. Zangara and his new aunt did not get along well, so he moved out. He lived very frugally and saved most of his money, allowing him some freedom to travel. He traveled to Panama and California in hopes that the warmer climate would help his stomach.

Finally he moved to Miami, Florida and again was working as a brick layer. In 1926 he went to see doctors about his stomach, who removed his appendix hoping that would solve the problem. However, it did not. In 1932, as the Great Depression had started to affect him, his stomach pain grew progressively worse. He decided that if he were to assassinate President Herbert Hoover (1874-1964) the problem would be solved, because everyone said Hoover was to blame for the Depression. However, Hoover lost the presidential election to Democratic candidate, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

On February 13, 1933, Zangara bought a .32 caliber pistol for $4 at a local drugstore, and planned to take a bus to Washington D.C. the next day. While walking to the bus station, he saw newspaper headlines reporting that President-elect Franklin Roosevelt was visiting the Miami area the next day. After giving a short talk at the Bayfront Park from the rear of a convertible car, FDR had just finished shaking hands with visiting Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak (1873-1933) [pictured here to the left of FDR] when Zangara fired upon the president. However, being only five feet tall, he was unable to see over other people, and had to stand on a wobbly folding metal chair. After the first shot,  people grabbed his arm, but he fired four more shots wildly. He missed the president-elect, but five other people were hit, including Cermak. The Chicago mayor suffered an abdominal wound [pictured below]. En route to Jackson Memorial Hospital in the presidential convertible, Cermak allegedly told FDR, “I’m glad it was me and not you, Mr. President”, words now inscribed on a plaque in Bayfront Park.

After Zangara's arrest, doctors examined him and discovered severe ulcers as the cause of his chronic pain. He was put on trial and sentenced to 84 years for injuring bystanders during his attempt to kill Roosevelt. He pleaded guilty and showed no remorse except for missing Roosevelt. Cermak's condition deteriorated and he died some three weeks after the assassination attempt. Zangara was then put on trial for his murder and was sentenced to death in the electric chair at the Florida State Penitentiary in Raiford. When he heard his sentence he yelled at the judge, "You give me electric chair. I no afraid of that chair! You're one of capitalists. You is crook man too. Put me in electric chair. I no care!".

On March 20, Zangara walked to the electric chair unaided and not afraid. He yelled and cursed at the guards. After a shroud was placed over his head, he screamed, "Lousy capitalists! No picture! Capitalists! No one here to take my picture. All capitalists lousy bunch of crooks. Go ahead. Push the button!" The guard pulled the switch and Zangara was no more. He had no family or friends present, and his unclaimed remains were buried in an unmarked grave at the prison.

Art for art's sake ...

"Only through art can we get outside of ourselves and know another's view of the universe which is not the same as ours and see landscapes which would otherwise have remained unknown to us like the landscapes of the moon. Thanks to art, instead of seeing a single world, our own, we see it multiply until we have before us as many worlds as there are original artists...And many centuries after their core, whether we call it Rembrandt or Vermeer, is extinguished, they continue to send us their special rays".

 ... Marcel Proust (1871-1942)

the surest poison is time

"From the point of sensuous experience, seen from the streets and markets and the haunts of pleasure and gain, the estimate of age is low, melancholy, and skeptical. Frankly face the facts, and see the result. Tobacco, coffee, alcohol, hashish, prussic acid, strychnine, are weak dilutions: the surest poison is time. This cup, which Nature puts to our lips, has a wonderful virtue, surpassing that of any other draught. It opens the senses, adds power, fills us with exalted dreams, which we call hope, love, ambition, science: especially, it creates a craving for larger draughts of itself. But they who take the larger draughts are drunk with it, lose their stature, strength, beauty, and senses, and end in folly and delirium. We postpone our literary work until we have more ripeness and skill to write, and we one day discover that our literary talent was a youthful effervescence which we have now lost".

  ... Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82), “Old Age” in The Atlantic 1862.