Season of the witch...

a heap of broken images....

Chi son io tu non saprai

I'm in the south of France.....

How to relax....

No....  Wait a sec.....  I'm back.  Back in the RA.....

Or maybe that wasn't me....?

Damn it! Where am I? And who's that I'm with?

It's all a bit blurry.....

Paul Signac - The Quay at Saint-Tropez, 1899

When I look out of my window.....

Henri Matisse - Interior at Nice, c 1919

What do you think I see?   

Henri Matisse - Seated Woman, Back Turned to the Open Window, c 1922

When I look out of my window.....

Pablo Picasso - Côte d'Azur, 1962

Many sights to see.....

Raoul Dufy - Open Window, Nice, 1928

And when I look in my window

So many different people to be

That it's strange

So strange

Yves Klein - Untitled Anthropometry (ANT 104), 1960

But, that's not me....

Where the hell am I?

When I look over my shoulder

What do you think I see?

Some other cat lookin' over 

His shoulder at me

And he's strange

Nicolas de Staël - Seagulls, 1955

Sure is strange

You got to pick up every stitch

Play it again, Sam....

You got to pick up every stitch, yeah

Oh no, must be the season of the witch....

Just to remind us that we are all Europeans....

And then within next to no time, [Next to when?  Ed.] I find myself in Japan.....

Where, thanks to Lafcadio Hearn, Alan Watts, R H Blyth et al, I find myself almost at home.....

It's a world within a world, like so many others, where the bewitching is just part of the seasoning....

Even if the topsy turvy world is hard to ignore.....

So I wander, wondering..... 

The world of today so cosmopolitan, so confusing:

So unlike those days of yore, when T S Eliot had the naivety to say, My mind may be American but my heart is British, as if, intellectually speaking, you can either differentiate or categorise.....

What is living? I hear you cry....

And so I find myself again transported, lost in the ozone, transmuted, transposed, and transplanted to the everlasting present of Mozart.....

And back to the Veneto, where I think I was last week.....

And to Vicenza, where I may have transgressed:

Aaaah.... Those Palladian Villas, those masks and costumes.....

Two rabbits runnin' in the ditch.....

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats

And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,

And the dry stone no sound of water.....

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

T.S. Eliot

The Waste Land 

The Burial of the Dead

(Peace)

Georges Braque - Landscape at L'Estaque, 1906

*******

With thanks to the Royal Academy, T S Eliot and Donovan, and to all those who made me what I might have been and where I will be....

*******

Là ci darem la mano,

Là mi dirai di sì.

Vedi, non è lontano;

Partiam, ben mio, da qui.

*******