Beautiful Cynicism III

Photo: pic.rhuseth.com

Lentement, doucement, de peur qu’elle se brise,
Prendre une âme; écouter ses plus secrets aveux,
En silence, comme on caresse des cheveux;
Atteindre à la douceur fluide de la brise;

Dans l’ombre, un soir d’orage, où la chair s’électrise,
Promener des doigts d’or sur le clavier nerveux;
Baisser l’éclat des voix; calmer l’ardeur des feux;
Exalter la couleur rose à la couleur grise;

Essayer des accords de mots mystérieux
Doux comme le baiser de la paupière aux yeux;
Faire ondoyer des chairs d’or pâle dans les brumes;

Et, dans l’âme que gonfle un immense soupir
Laisser, en s’en allant, comme le souvenir
D’un grand cygne de neige aux longues, longues plumes.

Albert Samain, Lentement, doucement…

Dine by candlelight
And hold your savings tight
‘Cause you never, never know
When that bridge falls apart…

Pavement, Grounded

« Ah! comme la neige a neigé
Ma vitre est un jardin de givre »

Émile Nelligan

Or, if you prefer, “The Wabbit of Seville“…

(To the tune of Rossini’s ‘Barber of Seville’)

Bugs Bunny: How do?… Welcome to my shop / Let me cut your mop / Let me shave your crop / Daintily, daintily… Hey, you!… Don’t look so perplexed / Why must you be vexed? / Can’t you see you’re next? / Yes, you’re next, you’re so next! (…) How about a nice, close shave? / Teach your whiskers to behave / Lots of lather, lots of soap / Please hold still, don’t be a dope / Now we’re ready for the scraping / There’s no use to try escaping / Yell and scream and rant and rave / It’s no use, you need a shave!

Elmer Fudd: Ooh! Ouch! Ouch! Ow! Ooh! Ooh! Ouch!

Bugs Bunny: There, you’re nice and clean / Although your face looks like it might have gone through a ma-chine.

8:44, the sun is peeking out behind the clouds. Rejoice – this means for once I slept for over 6 hours! Maybe that feeling of rest that keeps eluding me will finally stop by and stay for awhile. It’s cold again, -29C, which means no skating on the river today. I used to skate on the river, when I was younger, but I’ve become terribly sensitive to the cold and the last time I was out on the river I actually cried, I was so cold. But this I do live in a very wintry place, after all, and not everyone has the opportunity to skate outdoors nearly every day for several months of the year… I should seize this opportunity. But so often, I’d just rather stay in my pyjamas…
I’ve been wanting to post a photograph of my old dog, Whiskers. He died 12 years ago Friday. There is one specific photo I want to post; it’s my favourite picture of him, taken the day before I left for Quebec on a school trip, about 3 weeks before he was killed. I believe it was the last photo of him – but it’s nowhere to be found. I spent several hours in my closet last night, searching in vain. I did find some nice surprises: a 45″ I had been looking for, and a few pictures that I thought I had lost – but no photo of Whiskers.
And what always happens when I do these grand closet-searches, happened: the time spent looking was stretched out immesureably because as I opened each cardboard box, a flood of memories would wash over me, and I would just have to spend 40 minutes looking thoroughly at each item contained inside: reading each note, flipping through each book, gazing at each photograph. My closet is full of boxes, you see. I am and always have been a pack rat. I periodically do a big clean-up, tossing out years of faded memories, but generally I keep things – I have a few boxes of magazines; a few boxes of school work (dating back to my elementary school days!); a few boxes of letters and postcards, interesting newspaper clippings, and old journals and diaries; many boxes of books (I’ve run out of space on my few bookshelves); boxes of art, boxes of crafts supplies, boxes of boxes… Sounds daunting, but my closet is navigable, surprisingly. I have the boxes arranged in such a way that I can access them all, with the… shall we say more relevant ones near the top.
And so I peeked and I poked and I rifled and I shuffled and I searched for that photo, but to no avail. No matter; my soul fed itself on all the memories available to me, and I was soon laughing and crying alternately. My evening was filled with nostalgia, always bittersweet. While progress is good, and my current life is fairly wonderful, there’s always that lingering question in the back of the mind:why? And although I’ve seen the pictures, read the journal entries, played the records hundreds of times, and I’m generally acutely aware of the passage of time, I’m always struck by just how much things change, and how quickly. People often say change is good; trouble is, they’re not usually the ones to whom change is happening!
So here I am the next morning, feeling slightly hungover from my nostalgia binge, still without that picture. But one day my old dog will be here on these pages, and I will write a few words about him, and I will once again be carried off by a wave of nostalgia. In the meantime, maybe I’ll think about going skating.

“… combien ce serait beau si, pour chaque mer qui nous attend, il y avait un fleuve pour nous. Et quelqu’un – un père, un amour, quelqu’un – capable de nous prendre par la main et de trouver ce fleuve – l’imaginer, l’inventer – et nous poser dans son courant, avec la légèreté de ce seul mot, adieu.”

-Alessandro Baricco, Océan Mer, trad. Françoise Brun
—–

“Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.”

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Des montagnes très loin paraissent toutes proches.
La grève se déroule à l’ombre des sapins,
Et la haute marée ensevelit les roches.

Alphonse Beauregard
—–

You are Schroeder!

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Elle marchait, et elle savait vers quoi. C’était ça l’important. Une sensation merveilleuse. Quand le destin finalement s’entrouvre, et devient chemin visible, trace indéniable, et direction certaine. Le temps interminable de l’approche. Ce moment où l’on accoste. On voudrait qu’il ne finisse jamais. Le geste de s’en remettre au destin. C’est une émotion, ça. Plus de dilemmes, plus de mensonges. Savoir où. Et y aller. Quel qu’il soit, ce destin.

Alessandro Baricco, Océan Mer, trad. Françoise Brun
—–

Une poulette jeune et sans expérience,
En trottant, cloquetant, grattant,
Se trouva, je ne sais comment,
Fort loin du poulailler, berceau de son enfance.
Elle s’en aperçut qu’il était déjà tard.
Comme elle y retournait, voici qu’un vieux renard
A ses yeux troublés se présente.
La pauvre poulette tremblante
Recommanda son âme à Dieu.
Mais le renard, s’approchant d’elle,
Lui dit: hélas! Mademoiselle,
Votre frayeur m’étonne peu;
C’est la faute de mes confrères,
Gens de sac et de corde, infâmes ravisseurs,
Dont les appétits sanguinaires
Ont rempli la terre d’horreurs.
Je ne puis les changer, mais du moins je travaille
A préserver par mes conseils
L’innocente et faible volaille
Des attentats de mes pareils.
Je ne me trouve heureux qu’en me rendant utile;
Et j’allais de ce pas jusques dans votre asile
Pour avertir vos soeurs qu’il court un mauvais bruit,
C’est qu’un certain renard méchant autant qu’habile
Doit vous attaquer cette nuit.
Je viens veiller pour vous. La crédule innocente
Vers le poulailler le conduit:
A peine est-il dans ce réduit,
Qu’il tue, étrangle, égorge, et sa griffe sanglante
Entasse les mourants sur la terre étendus,
Comme fit Diomède au quartier de Rhésus.
Il croqua tout, grandes, petites,
Coqs, poulets et chapons; tout périt sous ses dents.
La pire espèce de méchants
Est celle des vieux hypocrites.

Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian, La jeune poule et le vieux renard

On trouve dans les monts des lacs de quelques toises,
Purs comme des cristaux, bleus comme des turquoises,
Joyaux tombés du doigt de l’ange Ithuriel,
Où le chamois craintif, lorsqu’il vient pour y boire,
S’imagine, trompé par l’optique illusoire,
Laper l’azur du ciel.

Ces limpides bassins, quand le jour s’y reflète,
Ont comme la prunelle une humide paillette;
Et ce sont les yeux bleus, au regard calme et doux,
Par lesquels la montagne en extase contemple,
Forgeant quelque soleil dans le fond de son temple,
Dieu, l’ouvrier jaloux!

Théophile Gautier, Les yeux bleus de la montagne

“Snow and ice isolate us, threaten our comfort every year in ways that life in warmer places never does. To triumph over winter, however temporarily, actually to have fun in the freezing cold… is an accomplishment unknown to people who live in places where it’s always some version of summer. In other words… winter isn’t just a season. It’s a place in the mind.”

Ian Brown, on why Canadians love the Winter Olympics, writing in the Globe and Mail

Il nous faut peu de mots pour exprimer l’essentiel.

Paul Eluard

« Evite d’être trop timide ou trop émotif dans tes actions. La vie est une expérience. »

Ralph Waldo Emerson