“Your mantra is thank you. Just keep saying thank you. Don’t explain. Don’t complain. Just say thank you. Say thank you to existence.”
– Mooji
Photo: Anastasia Cojocaru
Tag: art
Studio 1995
Photos: Anastasia Cojocaru
at the Gallery of Modern Art
Photo: Anastasia Cojocaru
Bliss
“If you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.”
― Joseph Campbell
I want
‘Would it be too childish of me to say: I want? But I do want: theatre, light, color, paintings, wine and wonder’.
— Sylvia Plath
Becoming
“The most important thing for everyone in Gringolandia is to have ambition and become ‘somebody’, and frankly, I don’t have the least ambition to become anybody.”
― Frida Kahlo
Photo: lauragiovanetti.com.ar
One Art
by Elizabeth Bishop
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.
—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
Continuing to Live
by Philip Larkin
Continuing to live — that is, repeat
A habit formed to get necessaries —
Is nearly always losing, or going without.
It varies.
This loss of interest, hair, and enterprise —
Ah, if the game were poker, yes,
You might discard them, draw a full house!
But it’s chess.
And once you have walked the length of your mind, what
You command is clear as a lading-list.
Anything else must not, for you, be thought
To exist.
And what’s the profit? Only that, in time,
We half-identify the blind impress
All our behavings bear, may trace it home.
But to confess,
On that green evening when our death begins,
Just what it was, is hardly satisfying,
Since it applied only to one man once,
And that one dying.
Taming art?
‘By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, comfortable. […] What is important is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more’.
– Susan Sontag
Escape
‘I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn’t impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.’
― Anaïs Nin
Photo: Anastasia Cojocaru