Beautiful Women

The song:

What the Water Gave Me - Florence + The Machine


The Singer:

Florence Welch

The woman that inspired the song:

Virginia Woolf

The painting that inspired the title:

What the Water Gave Me, Frida Kahlo, 1938, Oil on Canvas

The Painter:

Frida Kahlo, Self Portrait

My Favorite Surrealists: Focus on Joan Miro

The Lark's Wing, Encircled with Golden Blue, Rejoins the Heart of the Poppy Sleeping on a Diamond-studded Meadow, 1967, Oil on canvas

Dancer, 1925, Oil on cardboard

Ladders Cross the Blue Sky in a Wheel of Fire, 1953, Oil on canvas

The Farm, 1921-1922, Oil on canvas

Quick trivia for those who are too lazy to read the links below, The Farm was bought by Ernest Hemingway for 5,000 francs.  He loved the painting so much and actually said "I would not trade it for any picture in the world. It has in it all that you feel about Spain when you are there and all that you feel when you are away and cannot go there. No one else has been able to paint those two opposing things."

The Garden, 1925

If you want to learn more about Joan Miro, here are useful links:


http://www.joan-miro.info/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/mar/20/joan-miro-life-ladder-escape-tate
http://kateri.blog.com/2010/10/25/joan-miro-the-garden-1925-prades-the-village-1917/
http://joanmiro.com/
http://www.arthistoryguide.com/Joan_Miro.aspx
http://fundaciomiro-bcn.org/fundaciojoanmiro.php?idioma=2

Miro:  Sculptor by Michal Boncza
http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/news/content/view/full/117684


Whole New Dimension:  Miró’s sculptures reveal how the challenge of a new medium
inspired the artist in his final years 
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/a7afc2f4-7296-11e1-9be9-00144feab49a.html#axzz1rnQQ6P5P

The Year of Reading Madly & Writing Dangerously

I'm on a mission.  I've been delaying this for the longest time.  I tried locking it away, I tried to bury it, I tried to eat the key, burn the spade, I tried to throw it towards the deepest foulest bowels of my mind's hell, I tried everything to keep my heart from reaching out and claiming what it always wanted.  I've climbed in and out of shit pits, sinkholes, black holes, made an asshole of myself, I bled, I crawled, I've traveled the depression highway, blindly (and barely) surviving the labyrinthine urban guerilla warfare I imposed on myself, and yet I kept on refusing that one thing that I know could truly save me.  I need to write.  Or to borrow words from one of my favorite writers Adrienne Rich - "You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it."  And truly now, my life does depend on it.  I know it will not get me out of the financial rut I'm in, I know I might turn out to be the worst wannabe writer in this fickle cruel world, I know it will not provide me the comfort and stability people say I should have achieved at my age, I know it will not provide a solution to any of my so-called "real life" problems.  I know too that if I don't start opening up my mind and let all the words, stories, images gush out, my imagination will rot and fester away into non-existence.  When you are all alone feeling like shit for something that you regret you did or didn’t do, or for whatever reason you suddenly find yourself inside the pitch-black cavern of moods, where the darkness is a viscous liquid fear attempting to drown you in wretchedness, imagination is the only thing that can save you. 

“Logic will take you from A to B.  Imagination will take you everywhere.” (Albert Einstein)

“What is now proved was once only imagined.” (William Blake)

This year started with me reading voraciously and writing sporadically.  This must change.  I need to sit my ass down everyday for a few hours and fuckin’ write.  I need to finish all the stories, all the poems I’ve started.  I can no longer defer this dream.  I need to write as if I’m traversing a very sharp narrow mountain ridge where the winds are strong and the drop full of spikes and boulders.  I need to write as if I’m dancing on hot coals.  I need to write as if there’s an electrical storm happening inside my body, with lightning shooting off my sweat pores.  I need to write as if I’m a rocketship shooting towards the sun, skirting it’s teasing licking flaming tongues.  I need to write like a lioness stalking an equally vicious prey.  I need to write as if a hot thick bubble of poison is waiting to explode inside my mouth. I need to write as dangerously as a supernova waiting to happen, daring to explode, consume an entire galaxy but birthing new stars in the aftermath.  I.Need.To.Write.

The writing process is different for every aspiring nut like me who wants to take on the big fat trolls and muses and lava surfers prancing around inside one’s mind.  Thank goodness for the masters who came before us, generous with their nuggets of whimsy and inspiration:

Kurt Vonnegut  http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/04/03/kurt-vonnegut-on-writing-stories/

Margaret Atwood  http://gu.com/p/2f62t

Jack Kerouac http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/03/22/jack-kerouac-belief-and-technique-for-modern-prose/

Junot Diaz  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/05/junot-diaz-creating-a-str_n_1077760.html

Adrienne Rich  http://www.nbu.bg/webs/amb/american/5/rich/writing.htm

Federico Garcia Lorca’s Play and Theory of the Duende is my Narsil, my patronus,  my direwolf, my own ferociously tenacious weapon against that mammoth of a villain called mental block.  http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Spanish/LorcaDuende.htm

These are my other valuable sources of techniques and inspiration:

Taken randomly from my shelf, some of the books that continually astound me:

A very good advice (that I failed to follow wholeheartedly) from one of my literature professors was this:  Keep everything you write. No matter how ugly you think it is now, keep it. It may just prove useful later on.  Thankfully, I managed to keep a few.  

My old and new journals

Old drafts of poetry

A long long loooooong time ago, I used to make lists that I believe will inspire me in my writing journey. 

A list of mythological characters

A very old list of films and music I wanted to hear/see

I have a burning curiosity that makes me want to experience and try a lot of things.  I take photos, I shoot videos, I celebrate moments through various mediums available to me.  And I DOODLE, a lot.  I'M NO PAINTER, how I wish I am but I am sadly not. I just love to play around with color from time to time.  It helps "de-clutter" my mind.

And to end my personal rumination on writing, I'd like to share with you something from, again, Junot Diaz:

You see, in my view a writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden.  In my view a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway. 

   

Imagine ...

Sometimes, in the middle of work, my mind goes into overdrive and piles up so many images and words into my mind that I end up getting confused on what to do first.  "Do I stop working and write first?  But if I start writing, I end up delaying my work!  No, must.finish.work.must.finish.work!"  And that's what I do, and then after a while it happens again, and the cycle continues.  I suppress my own imagination and it scares me that it might actually, like a taken-for-granted person, pack its bags and leave me forever .  And if that goes, I go.  Imagination keeps me sane and alive, no matter how crazy and demented some of the things that do cartwheels inside my mind are.

Integrity (Adrienne Rich)
      the quality of being complete; unbroken condition; entirety ~ Webster

A wild patience has taken me this far


as if I had to bring to shore
a boat with a spasmodic outboard motor
old sweaters, nets, spray-mottled books
tossed in the prow
some kind of sun burning my shoulder-blades.
Splashing the oarlocks. Burning through.
Your fore-arms can get scalded, licked with pain
in a sun blotted like unspoken anger
behind a casual mist.

The length of daylight
this far north, in this
forty-ninth year of my life
is critical.

The light is critical: of me, of this 
long-dreamed, involuntary landing 
on the arm of an inland sea.
The glitter of the shoal
depleting into shadow
I recognize: the stand of pines
violet-black really, green in the old postcard
but really I have nothing but myself 
to go by; nothing 
stands in the realm of pure necessity 
except what my hands can hold.

Nothing but myself? ... My selves. 
After so long, this answer. 
As if I had always known 
I steer the boat in, simply.
The motor dying on the pebbles
cicadas taking up the hum
dropped in the silence.

Anger and tenderness: my selves. 
And now I can believe they breathe in me 
as angels, not polarities. 
Anger and tenderness: the spider's genius 
to spin and weave in the same action 
from her own body, anywhere -- 
even from a broken web.

The cabin in the stand of pines
is still for sale. I know this. Know the print
of the last foot, the hand that slammed and locked the door,
then stopped to wreathe the rain-smashed clematis
back on the trellis
for no one's sake except its own.
I know the chart nailed to the wallboards
the icy kettle squatting on the burner.
The hands that hammered in those nails 
emptied that kettle one last time 
are these two hands
and they have caught the baby leaping
from between trembling legs
and they have worked the vacuum aspirator
and stroked the sweated temples
and steered the boat there through this hot 
misblotted sunlight, critical light 
imperceptibly scalding 
the skin these hands will also salve.

Facades

Today I feel like this:




This art work's title is The Great War on Façades (La Grande Guerre Façades), by Rene Magritte. You might be more familiar with his The Son of Man, which was referenced/featured in films like The Thomas Crown Affair, Stranger Than Fiction and 500 Days of Summer:



Various interpretations of Magritte's art works are available online. If you want to read more on him, click on the following:

http://nomad0307.blogspot.com/2009/01/ceci-nest-pas-une-vie.html
http://www.brain-juice.com/cgi-bin/show_bio.cgi?p_id=22
http://www.artchive.com/artchive/M/magritte.html
http://www.dropbears.com/a/art/biography/Rene_Magritte.html

Today, I feel like the woman on the The Great War of Facades painting. Although I'm thankful I don't ever have to wear that silly frilly dress in real life, today it symbolizes all the preconceived notions of people about me. That flower is my f--- you to those who have boxed me in their labels.

And enough of the bitch-fit. I love Rene Magritte's work. Actually, I love almost all surrealist artists. They are such brave inventors of each of their own unique universes. As Magritte said:

To be a surrealist means barring from your mind all remembrance of what you have seen, and being always on the lookout for what has never been.