Wrong from the Start (Deviant Easter Egg)

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Egg of Columbus: photo by Jacper "Kangel" Aniolek, 27 January 2007

The path of least resistance
is a straight line
but once you deviate
even slightly
the path of least
resistance becomes
that of greater
and greater
deviation

Egg of Columbus: photo by Jacper "Kangel" Aniolek, 27 January 2007

Stevie Smith: Yes, I know

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Portrait of a woman (thought to be Lucrezia Borgia): Bartolomeo Veneto (1470-1531), 1520-25, tempera and oil on poplar panel, 44 x 35 cm (Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt)

That pale face stretches across the centuries
It is so subtle and yielding; yet innocent,
Her name is Lucretia Borgia.

Yes, I know. I knew her brother Cesare
Once. But only for a short time.


Stevie Smith (1902-1971): Yes, I know, from Poems, 1962

Portrait of a woman (thought to be Lucrezia Borgia), detail: Bartolomeo Veneto, 1520-25, tempera and oil on poplar panel (Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt)




Portrait of a woman (thought to be Lucrezia Borgia), detail: Bartolomeo Veneto, 1520-25, tempera and oil on poplar panel (Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt)

The Disputation of St Catherine (detail: Lucrezia Borgia as St. Catherine of Alexandria): Bernardino di Betto (Il Pinturicchio) (1454-1513), 1492-94, fresco with gold leaf (Borgia apartments, Palazzi Pontifici, Vatican)

The Disputation of St Catherine: Bernardino di Betto (Il Pinturiccio), 1492-94, fresco with gold leaf (Borgia apartments, Palazzi Pontifici, Vatican)

Profile portrait of Cesare Borgia: believed to be a copy of an original contemporary painting by Bartolomeo Veneto (1470-1531) , c. 1500-10 (Palazzo Venezia, Rome)




Portrait of a Gentleman (aka Cesare Borgia): Altobello Melone (1490-1543). c. 1500-1524, oil on panel, 58.1 x 48.2 cm (Galleria dell'Accademia Carrara, Bergamo)

The Good Man

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Dead Christ supported by the Madonna and St John (Pietà) (detail): Giovanni Bellini, 1460, tempera on panel (Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan)

''I do not know these good men," replied the prisoner.

''Is that the truth?"

''It is."

''And now tell me why you always use that expression 'good men'? Is that what you call everybody?"

''Yes, everybody," answered the prisoner. "There are no evil people on earth."

Yeshua and Pontius Pilate conversing, in Book One of Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita, 1967 (translation by Diana Burgin and Katherine O'Connor)

They Have Gone

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Cliff Palace was once a village of over 200 people and 23 kivas (ceremonial spaces), Mesa Verde, Montezuma County, Colorado

Up there in their eyrie

where the winds swirl

eagles afloat on thermals

the people knew what the face of nature

is there to conceal

beneath the infinite horizon

Very much here when they were here

when gone very

much gone

 

Part of Cliff Palace, an ancient Indian village built between 1100 and 1300 A.D., Mesa Verde, Montezuma County, Colorado

Cliff Palace is the largest remaining village of the pre-Columbian Indians. They lived in the Mesa Verde area until drought drove them out at the end of the 13th century

Eroded sandstone, part of Indian ruins dating from 1100 to 1300 A.D., Hovenweep National Monument, Colorado

 Shiprock in smog, seen from Mesa Verde, Montezuma County, Colorado



Four-storey-high square tower house, built about 800 years ago,  Mesa Verde, Montezuma County, Colorado

Photos by Boyd Norton for the Environmental Protection Agency's Documerica project, May 1972 (US National Archives)

D. H. Lawrence: The Grudge of the Old

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Susanna and the Elders: Gert Van Ort, 1520-25, stained glass, diameter 24 cm (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)

The old ones want to be young, and they aren't young,

and it rankles, they ache when they see the young,

and they can't help wanting to spite it on them

venomously.

The old ones say to themselves: We are not going to be old,

we are not going to make way, we are not going to die,

we are going to stay on and on and on and on and on

and make the young look after us

till they are old. We are stronger than the young.

We have more energy, and our grip on life is harder.

Let us triumph, and let the young be listless

with their puny youth.

We are younger even now than the young, we can put their youth in abeyance.

And it is true.

And they do it.

And so it goes on.

 

D. H. Lawrence: The Grudge of the Old, from Pansies (1929)

Children's Games

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Children's Games: Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1559-60, oil on wood, 118 x 161 cm (Kunsthistorisches Museum. Vienna)

The system of a game in which everyone is a player
The game an enclosed system
There is no outside. The roadside is not an outside.
To play the game you need the tokens
which permit you to make the moves
that keep the game going.
(Outside and inside are the same.)
Some do well at this game
but it's getting dark now
and some don't want to play.

Blind Man's Buff: Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, 1788-89, oil on canvas, 269 x 350 cm (Museo del Prado, Madrid)

Robert Creeley / Ernst Halberstadt: Somewhere

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Switch House at the Taunton railroad crossing: photo by Ernst Halberstadt, April 1973

The galloping collection of boards
are the house which I afforded
one evening to walk into
just as the night came down.

Dark inside, the candle
lit of its own free will, the attic
groaned then, the stairs
led me up into the air.

From outside, it must have seemed
a wonder that it was
the inside he as me saw
in the dark there.
 
Robert Creeley (1926-2005): Somewhere, from For Love, 1962

Aftermath of an auto accident on Storrow Drive, Boston, nine o'clock in the morning: photo by Ernst Halberstadt, February 1973

When two, seated on the lap of a nurse on the on the front seat of a car beside my father as he drove through the city of Boston on some errand or other, I was showered with broken glass full in the face when a stray lump of coal shattered the side window. Again I recall nothing of it, and perversely the year that followed must have been a very happy one because I was not allowed to cry for fear of causing the affected eye further damage. For some time, then, the eye was left in place although it seems to have had little function. It began to grow larger, however, and so, when I was five, just a year after my father's death, the eye was taken out. That I do remember because my mother told me we were to go to the hospital on some routine business of her own, and once there, she suggested I wait inside, which was common enough. But from there I was taken to the doctor, and so on and so forth, till I came to with a great bandage covering my head, and the eye gone. So I wish she had told me, although I rationally understood why she did not, and why she also had not made clear to me our father wasn't coming back after we saw him taken away in the ambulance across our front yard in the snow. We knew nothing of the funeral, or let me speak for myself. Those tracks fading in the spring thaws mark for me the end of that previous time entirely.

But it is luck, which was the point, and the paradoxical fact that that his death and my injury had a curious consequence. The company employing the person responsible for the careful shovelful of coal paid damages of some nine thousand dollars, enough to see me through college, toward which I'd been determinedly propelled by my mother's sense of duty to my father.

Robert Creeley: from Autobiography (1989), in Tom Clark: Robert Creeley and the American Common Place, 1993

Creeley was like the loyal philosopher brother one dreams of having. Creeley spoke almost dreamlike about loss. I truly believe he would have been the only one to help me see clearly. After all, he had suffered real loss himself, and his sense of psychic loss clung to him like a halo.

Jim Dine: from I Know About Creeley (2012)

Switch House and Taunton railroad crossing: photo by Ernst Halberstadt, April 1973

Rear of Lord and Jealous Wool Mill in City Mills, a manufacturing town on the Charles River: photo by Ernst Halberstadt, March 1973
 

Wool mill in City Mills, one of thirty-five manufacturing towns along the eighty-mile Charles River: photo by Ernst Halberstadt, June 1973

Abandoned building adjoins Lord and Jealous Wool Mill in City Mills, a manufacturing town on the Charles River: photo by Ernst Halberstadt, March 1973




Mercantile Building -- corner of Richmond and Commercial Streets, Boston: photo by Ernst Halberstadt, May 1973

Waltham Watch Company. Waltham is a busy manufacturing city on the Charles River: photo by Ernst Halberstadt, March 1973

Waltham Watch Company. Waltham is one of 35 manufacturing cities and towns on the Charles River: photo by Ernst Halberstadt, March 1973

Public playground on the Charles River, near Soldiers Field Road, Boston: photo by Ernst Halberstadt, June 1973

Washington Street under the El, looking toward Egleston Square: photo by Ernst Halberstadt, February 1973

Elevated railroad structure and blighted area below Washington Street, looking south from the corner of Bartlett, Boston, Massachusetts: photo by Ernst Halberstadt, February 1973

House on fire at Independence Point on Buzzard Bay at Onset: photo by Ernst Halberstadt, May 1973

 Auto accident on Storrow Drive, Boston, 9 a.m.: photo by Ernst Halberstadt, February 1973

Photos by Ernst Halberstadt (1910-1987), 1973, for the Environmental Protection Agency's Documerica Project (U.S. National Archives)

Edward Dorn: 1st Avenue

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1st Avenue between Union and Pike, Seattle: photographer unknown, September 1972 (Seattle Municipal Archives)

The truck shot forward across 1st Avenue to the Pike Street Market.  Through the rain, moving slowly down the plate glass shine of the store fronts, one can see the people of this world moving on their way to and from carrying the inevitable shopping bags.  The old ones carry umbrellas.  The old men have broad, flowered, disreputable ties around their necks.  In the plate glass reflected world are the brisker types in blue suits standing in the entrances of shoe stores and jewelry stores, ultimately, but they don't know it, in the hands of all these people with so little money each, but collectively what is referred to as a consumer power.  Something, each man in flimsy slacks is saying, will have to be done about it.  But probably nothing can be done about it.  With each new man born, a jewelry store is born for him.  The terrible leveling of Malthus plods on, on this frontier which no longer is a frontier.  A dead atmosphere.

Edward Dorn: from 1st Avenue (1956), in The Moderns: An Anthology of New Writing in America, ed. Leroi Jones, 1963

1st and Union, Seattle: photographer unknown, 1972 (Seattle Municipal Archives)

Shellback Tavern, Seattle: photographer unknown, 1972 (Seattle Municipal Archives)

1st Avenue between Cherry and James, Seattle: photographer unknown, 1973 (Seattle Municipal Archives)

Aerial of Pike Place Market, Seattle: photographer unknown, September 1970 (Seattle Municipal Archives)

Soldier's goodbye and Bobbie the cat (the spirit of animals goes Down Under)

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Soldier's goodbye and Bobbie the cat: photo by Sam Hood, c. 1939-1945 (State Library of New South Wales)

Who knoweth the spirit of man that goeth upward, and the spirit of the beast that goeth downward to the earth?
ECCLESIASTES 3:21

And yet the love of animals is as old as the human race.  Thousands of written or spoken testimonials, of works of art and of witnessed acts, prove that.  He loved his donkey, that Moroccan peasant who had just heard him condemned to death, because for weeks on end he had poured engine oil over his long ears covered with sores, since he thought it would be more effective because it was more expensive than the olive oil which was so plentiful on his little farm.  Bit by bit, the horrible necrosis of the ears had rotted away the entire animal, who didn't have long to live but who would continue his labors until the end, since the man was too poor to allow him to be sacrificed.  He loved his horse, that avaricious rich man who took the handsome gray animal for a free consultation with the European veterinarian; he had been the pride of the celebrations of Arab horsemanship, and it appeared that the only thing wrong with him was that he had been given poorly chosen feed.  He loved his dog, that Portuguese peasant who every day carried in his arms his German shepherd with its broken leg, just to have him near during his long day's work in the garden, and to nourish him with the kitchen scraps.  They love birds, that old man and old woman who feed the pigeons in shabby Parisian parks and whom we do wrong to mock, since, thanks to the fluttering wings around them, they are entering into a rapport with the universe.  He loved animals, the author of Ecclesiastes who asked if the spirit of beasts goes downward; or Leonardo, setting free the captive birds in the Florentine market; or that Chinese lady a thousand years ago who found a huge cage full of a hundred sparrows in a corner of her courtyard, which were there because her doctor had prescribed that she eat a still-warm brain every day.  She flung wide the doors of the cage: "Who am I to take preference over so many little creatures?"  Others before us have made the choices that continually confront us.

Marguerite Yourcenar: from Who Knows Whether the Spirit of Animals Goes Downward, a lecture given at the Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon, April 8, 1981; translated by Walter Kaiser in collaboration with the author in That Mighty Sculptor, Time, 1992

Soldier's goodbye and Bobbie the cat: photo by Sam Hood, c. 1939-1945 (State Library of New South Wales)

Kangaroo and girls: photo by Sam Hood, c. 1939-1945 (State Library of New South Wales)

Yap Yap (dog) in cart pulled by Achong, Trundle, NSW: photographer unknown, c. 1910 (State Library of New South Wales)

Mr Tulk and dog ("Sausage") going fishing using flying fox he built into other island -- Solitary Island: photo by Winifred Tulk, c. 1935 (State Library of New South Wales)

Royal Easter show: photo by Sam Hood, 1935 (State Library of New South Wales)

Study of a small girl with a prize Scottish terrier dog: photo by Sam Hood, c. 1935 (State Library of New South Wales)

Girl with a white Angora rabbit: photo by Sam Hood, 1930s (State Library of New South Wales)

 

Cats' food didn't come out of a can and it was nothing but the best fish -- Pt. Perpendicular: photo by Winifred Tulk, c. 1936, 1930s (State Library of New South Wales)

Police dog Tess [Ted?]: photo by Sam Hood, 29 January 1935 (State Library of New South Wales)

 
  
Two exhibitors eye each other's charges, Sheep Show: photo by Jeff Carter for Walkabout magazine, c. 1945 (State Library of New South Wales)

Adelaide Boys' Band at Koala Park: photo by Sam Hood, 15 January 1937 (State Library of New South Wales)

"Christening of Bears" at Koala Park: photo by Sam Hood, 15 January 1937 (State Library of New South Wales)

Cary Bay Zoo, Lake Macquarie, NSW: photo by Sam Hood, 1954 (State Library of New South Wales)

Cat sitting on radio, Sydney: photo by Sam Hood, 1930s (State Library of New South Wales)

Cat in the window: photo by Sam Hood, 1930s (State Library of New South Wales)

A schoolgirl exhibitor with her dog: photo by Sam Hood, c. 1930 (State Library of New South Wales)

Wreck of the Gratitude, Macquarie Island: photographer unknown, 1911, from First Australasian Antarctic Expedition (1911-1914) (State Library of New South Wales)

Adelie Royal Penguin: photo by Harold Hamilton, from First Australasian Antarctic Expedition (1911-1914) (State Library of New South Wales)

Suckling, Shackleton-Rowett Expedition, Antarctica: photographer unknown, 1921 or 1922 (State Library of New South Wales)

Greenland Esquimaux dogs (Basilisk and Ginger-bitch), Antarctica: photo by Frank Hurley, from First Australasian Antarctic Expedition (1911-1914) (State Library of New South Wales)

"Snooks" on a drum, Wilcannia, NSW: photo by Reverend Edward ("Ted") Alexander Roberts, 1935-1937(State Library of New South Wales)

Girl with two cats and a kitten, Sydney: photo by Sam Hood, 1930s (State Library of New South Wales)