SHADOW

My house would look a lot like this right now if there were more moonlight.  This isn’t  a moonshadow house like the one in Tuxedo (that’s what the realtors should have called it in their brochure, instead of the idiotic Italianate name they picked, Tramonto), but it can be wondrous at the apex of Chester County. You can’t help thinking about the Valley Forge regiments and the tree-houses they built for observation and surveillance.

7:30 pm last night, when the snow began falling heavily and steadily, mine was the only car on Sugartown Road.  Proceeding carefully east and returning two miles west, there wasn’t too much slipping and sliding, and no one would have noticed anyway.  Except for some mild arguing, silence then, and nothing until a just few minutes ago when grasping the stair rail and descending, the bells on the floor around the Christmas tree rang out on their own.  Pansy varies her activities, but she checks in every single day.   

Three photographs by Alvin Langdon Coburn:  Top – Shadows, 1903; Center, Hyde Park Corner, 1911;  Bottom: Winter, 1901.

John Cage: In A Landscape (Link)

CHOOSE LIFE

Choose life instead of those prisms with no depth even if their colors

     are purer

Instead of this hour always hidden instead of these terrible vehicles

     of cold flame

Instead of these overripe stones

Choose this heart with its safety catch

Instead of that murmuring pool

And that white fabric singing in the air and the earth at the same time

Instead of that marriage blessing joining my forehead to total vanity’s

                     Choose life

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They speak about ringing changes, especially at the New Year, and I like that.

No one should or will be subjected to and bored by My New Year’s Resolutions.  Ever again. It’s high time, past time, to execute against plan.

This recalls last week’s life changing event.  We were at the Tuxedo Club trying to use up our unexpended quarterly minimum at the Friday evening Shore Dinner.  The new assistant manager, so ashen-faced I thought a personal tragedy must have befallen him, told us that the kitchen was unexpectedly a lobster short because one of the captive living creatures had died of natural causes just before they could kill him for us to eat.  That was finally and fully IT.  As the great poet said:

                      Choose life.

 

Ollie Halsall: Airplane Food (Link)

Poem excerpt:  André Breton, Choose Life, 1923, from Clair de Terre (tr. Bill Zavatsky and Zack Rogow).

Eric Gill:  Three Martlets, wood engraving, 1914, showing St. Thomas à Becket's coat of arms and the inscription "Do not cease, Thomas, to protect us."

Pilgrim badge (bell) associated with St. Thomas à Becket and Canterbury, British Museum, London.

Ollie Halsall: Steppin' Out (Link)

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NEW YEAR'S PILGRIM

Now I'm going down to that river of Jordan
Just to bathe my weary soul
If I can just touch  the hem of His garment, good Lord
Then I know You'll take me home 

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Funny, up all night as usual, but with Rose and Claude (doing his Jackson Pollock paper-scattering-arranging thing) for company (Pansy also – opening closed cabinets and tilting pictures on the wall), and believing that Jane’s having a blast with Rachel and her other friends, things Augur well.  Healthy, wealthy and wise (a phrase with partial Philadelphia roots) sounds like a reasonable plan and priority order.  Wisdom is difficult to achieve or obtain.  Happy New Year !!  !!

 
   

Louvin Brothers: The River of Jordan (Link) 

Two medieval pilgrim badges associated with St. Thomas à Becket &  Canterbury, British Museum, London

I Am A Pilgrim lyric:  Merle Travis

Right Said Fred: I'm Too Sexy (Link) 

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