If you can dream—and not make dreams your master / If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim

Poetry for the day:

Going back more than a century today to a poem that I read many years ago as though he is no reader of poetry, my uncle really loves. It is the famous poem, If, by the English author and poet, Rudyard Kipling. It has been lauded as “an epic evocation of the British virtues of a ‘stiff upper lip’ and stoicism in the face of adversity, will once again be named as the nation’s favourite poem. The choice will certainly reignite the debate about whether it is, in fact, a great poem – which T. S. Eliot insisted it was not, describing it instead as ‘great verse’ – or a ‘good bad’ poem, as Orwell called it.”

Be that as it may, here it is:

 If—
by Rudyard Kipling

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

~*~

Music for the day:

Music from the British rock group, Pink Floyd. This track is from their fifth  album, Atom Heart Mother, released in 1970.

If I were a swan, I’d be gone.
If I were a train, I’d be late.
And if I were a good man,
I’d talk with you
More often than I do.

If I were to sleep, I could dream.
If I were afraid, I could hide.
If I go insane, please don’t put
Your wires in my brain.

If I were the moon, I’d be cool.
If I were a book, I would bend for you.
If I were a good man, I’d understand
The spaces between friends.

If I were alone, I would cry.
And if I were with you, I’d be home and dry.
And if I go insane,
And they lock me away,
Will you still let me join in the game?

If I were a swan, I’d be gone.
If I were a train, I’d be late again.
If I were a good man,
I’d talk with you
More often than I do.

~*~

Art for the day:

“Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening” painted by Salvador Dali in 1944, and currently in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid.

In 1962, Dali gave the following explanation for this painting:

“[It was intended] to express for the first time in images Freud’s discovery of the typical dream with a lengthy narrative, the consequence of the instantaneousness of a chance event which causes the sleeper to wake up. Thus, as a bar might fall on the neck of a sleeping person, causing them to wake up and for a long dream to end with the guillotine blade falling on them, the noise of the bee here provokes the sensation of the sting which will awaken Gala.”

Not emptiness, not negation, but a generous, cold nothing…

Poetry for the day:

A poem today by Mark Doty, from his book of poems, The Source, which I read last week.

The Source
by Mark Doty

I’d been traveling all day, driving north
—smaller and smaller roads, clapboard houses
startled awake by the new green around them—

when I saw three horses in a fenced field
by the narrow highway’s edge: white horses,

two uniformly snowy, the other speckled
as though he’d been rolling in flakes of rust.
They were of graduated sizes—small, medium,

large—and two stood to watch while the smallest
waded up to his knees in a shallow pond,

tossing his head and taking
—it seemed unmistakable—
delight in the cool water

around his hooves and ankles.
I kept on driving, I went into town

to visit the bookstores and the coffee bar
and looked at the new novels
and the volumes of poetry, but all the time

it was horses I was thinking of,
and when I drove back to find them,

the three companions left off
whatever it was they were playing at
and came nearer the wire fence—

I’d pulled over onto the grassy shoulder
of the highway—to see what I’d brought them.

Experience is an intact fruit,
core and flesh and rind of it; once cut open,
entered, it can’t be the same, can it?

Though that is the dream of the poem:
as if we could look out

through that moment’s blushed skin.
They wandered toward the fence.
The tallest turned toward me;

I was moved by the verticality of her face,
elongated reach from the tips of her ears

down to white eyelids and lashes,
the pink articulation
of nostrils, wind stirring the strands

of her mane a little to frame the gaze
in which she fixed me. She was the bold one;

the others stood at a slight distance
while she held me in her attention.
Put your tongue to the green-flecked peel

of it, reader, and taste it
from the inside: would you believe me
if I said that beneath them a clear channel

ran from the three horses to the place
they’d come from, the cool womb

of nothing, cave at the heart
of the world, deep and resilient and firmly set
at the core of things? Not emptiness,

not negation, but a generous, cold nothing:
the breathing space out of which new shoots

are propelled to the grazing mouths,
out of which the horses themselves are tendered
into the new light. The poem wants the impossible;

the poem wants a name for the kind nothing
at the core of time, out of which the foals

come tumbling: curled, fetal, dreaming,
and into which the old crumple, fetlock
and skull breaking like waves of foaming milk….

Cold, bracing nothing that mothers forth
mud and mint, hoof and clover, root hair

and horsehair and the accordion bones
of the rust-spotted little one unfolding itself
into the afternoon. You too: you flare

and fall back into the necessary
open space. What could be better than that?

It was the beginning of May,
the black earth nearly steaming,
and a scatter of petals decked the mud

like pearls, everything warm with setting out,
and you could see beneath their hooves
the path they’d traveled up, the horse road

on which they trot into the world, eager for pleasure
and sunlight, and down which they descend,

in good time, into the source of spring.

~

Music for the day:

Inchana Massina by one of my favorite musicians across all genres, Mali’s Ali Farka Touré. The track is from his 1992 album, The Source.

~

Art for the day:

Many different artists have drawn paints of horses. The Indian painter, M. F. Hussain is renowned for his many paintings of horses…

and my favorite, this painting of Leaping Horses.

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… but a quick look around at Wikipaintings.org shows there are many other painters who drew many paintings of horses.

For example, these realistic but animated paintings by a painter I had never heard of before today – Basuki Abdullah from Indonesia

Source                                                            Source

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I also loved these colorful close-ups by the German painter, Franz Marc.

Large Lenggries Horses, 1908                        Little Yellow Horses, 1912

The Large Blue Horses, 1911                  The Little Blue Horses , 1911

The Tower of Blue Horses , 1913               Three Horses , 1912

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And there’s also a painting of horses  by the famous American painter, John Singer Sargent, famous for his portrait paintings, many of which I have seen and enjoyed at the MFA and the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum in Boston.

 

Horses at Palma, painted in 1908

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.. and even one by the surrealist painter, Salvador Dali!

Caligula’s Horse (Dali’s Horses), painted in 1971.

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One last set – just look at these animated paintings of horses by Robert Goodnough (1917-2010), an American abstract expressionist painter, also about whom I had not heard of before today.

Movement of Horses, 1961                                   Running Horses

Horses I, 1997                                                    Wild Horses, 1965

And most interesting and intriguing of all…

Horses III, 1960

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I am sure there are many other paintings of horses but I should stop now … I’ve already added far more than my usual posts.

A vast heraldic shield of beautiful readable fragments

Poem for the day:

Composition
by Kay Ryan

 Language is a diluted aspect of matter.   
–Joseph Brodsky

No. Not diluted.
Flaked; wafered;
but not watered.
Language is matter
leafing like a book
with the good taste
of rust and exposure
the way ironwork
petals near the coast.
But so many more
colors than rust:
or, argent, others–
a vast heraldic shield
of beautiful readable
fragments revealed
as Earth delaminates:
how the metals scatter,
how matter turns
animate.

.

Music for the day:

John Cage’s Six Melodies, a collection of six pieces for violin and keyboard, composed in 1950. How slowly these musical fragments reveal a world of possibilities, animating this quiet Friday morning hour.

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Art for the day:

“…how the metals scatter / how matter turns / animate.”

Animated Surrealist Landscape by Salvador Dali

Source