One step forward/Two steps back (anon, anon, anon) – Three Steps into 2017

December 31, 2016December 31, 2016startind

Left: Found Text in Samuel Butler Exhibition Catalogue ‘Travelling the Way of All Flesh’, Right: Robert Edwin Peary at the North pole by an unknown photographer.

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”

Yours for a resolute 2017

Extract from T.S Eliot’s Little Gidding, the last of Eliot’s Four Quartets, 1942. Quote reproduced from http://www.columbia.edu/itc/history/winter/w3206/edit/tseliotlittlegidding.html

The Nature of Life – John Ruskin meets Joan Miro

December 29, 2016December 30, 2016startind

Joan Miro, Barcelona, Carborundum Print, 1970, 75 x 105cm

A thought for the new year:

“The foxglove tells us that our life is a whole, consisting of youth and age, of flowering moments and dying moments, of buds and seeds, of uses and needs. It is not one big blossom, but a whole plant. Its wealth resides in its wholeness and the relationships of all its parts to the whole. The dust gathers to make foxgloves, you and me. We too can shape the dust. What shape will that be…?” John Ruskin

What shape will you be?

Image reproduced from http://www.printed-editions.com/art-print/joan-miro-barcelona-20174

Merry Christmas Everybodies/Thanks for following

December 23, 2016December 23, 2016startind

Winter Path © Denise Startin

“Did I Love a dream?”

My doubt, accumulation of a former night, ends up
As many a subtle branch, that having remained the true
Woods themselves, proves, alas! that I offered myself alone.”

Extract from “L’après-midi d’un faune”, The Afternoon of a Faun 1875 by Stéphane Mallarmé, quoted in The Poetics of Occasion, Mallarmé and the Poetry of Circumstance, Marian Zwerling Sugano, Stanford University Press, California, 1992:pp.38.

The Nature of Work

December 13, 2016December 14, 2016startind

John Ruskin, British Art Critic, 1819-1900

“Life can be a labour of greed or a labour of love. Nature shows us that if we compete with others our gain is at their expense, but that if we co-operate, we can benefit each other. This is the Law of Help. We all need to help each other, because sometimes we are weak, and sometimes we are strong, sometimes our efforts are rewarded by success, sometimes by failure. This variegation in each of us reflects our personality and is the most precious form of beauty revealed in the daily work of our hands and minds.”

Image reproduced from http://architecture.about.com/od/greatarchitects/ss/John-Ruskin-Todays-19th-Century-Critic.htm

Nothing passes…

December 12, 2016December 18, 2016startind

“Nothing that happened ever passed out of reality: all was still in existence, every image, every voice, all occurrences, filed away as it were on cosmic film if you like to call it that, so long as you understood that it was in no way a representation, but rather actual and eternal, its temporal divisions being merely a human argument. That was to say, Time though often seemingly important, inconvenient, even dangerous, was not ultimately serious. Realization could only be approximated in language, talked about but not experienced […]

[She] had understood this from the first. Though normally loquacious enough – [he] loved to hear her bright chatter – when they were Realizing together she silently took her cue from him. This sympathy had been essential to his efforts. Never before and not since had [he] approached so closely to an Absolute Realization: the first AR, which would be known in the records as AR1, for this was a science and [he] knew he was forever the forerunner, a kind of Archimedes of the great Realizers to come.”

Killing Time, Thomas Berger, 1976:pp65

Save