Self-Portraits

Inner changes? I'm feeling depressed, most uncharacteristically, which implies withdrawal of energy, transformation of the depths. What I'm feeling is a strength and a softness coming, these already as I define myself - independent and sensitive - but more so. Whatever anger I once had is long washed away; I am one of those people who loves to laugh. When I took these self-portraits today, I wasn't sure who I was seeing, pensive, yes, but lightness too.



Sunday morning: It's passed, only an evening or so, but uncharacteristic and thus important to pay attention to whatever newness is arising. An older layer of thinking passing away for a newer, fresher, more innocent self to emerge. If that makes sense! I edited the blurb to better reflect the inner process... I like the image of going to the depths to find the light, yes, the shamanic, visionary journey, and each time the depths are different and each time the light is a more complete spectrum of understanding.

There is a negative conventional view of depression. It's not seen as part of a larger process of the psyche in communion with its depths, nor the deep changes that may be occurring because it's seen as a problem, as anger turned in, that needs therapy and/or anti-depressants, and so the whole process of inner discovery is truncated. How can we develop wisdom when we are afraid of our shadows?

The sadness has always been in me, it's there in my photos as a young child, it's still there. Yet I am one of those people who loves to laugh, good deep belly-laughing!

I think I'm moving away from any sense of judgment, of applying systems of thought to people's actions, events, the way things are, that layer of thinking is disappearing, dying, thankfully, most thankfully, and a greater strength and softness is emerging.

The moment of 'depression' has passed and I'm feeling my usual quietly exuberant self today, ready to continue manifesting my dreams.

'portrait' & 'in the café'

portrait

colour scores your skin
like massage oil,
almonds & apricots,
mandarin
& magnolia.

I paint you with strokes
of my heart.

*















in the café

bushel of gold apples,
........some darkly bruised;
bushel of dark purple plums,
........ripe.
gourd of stone vegetables
........fired in kilim
...............zucchini, squash,
......................yam.

polished granite tabletop
woven rattan chairs.

sultry jazz.

custard tart glazed
strawberries, blueberries
kiwi, peach.

sipping espresso
& cappuccino
coffee.

the late hour
our intense bond.

The White Ocean

She stopped to rest.

Momentarily, in the field of pure possibility, her position unfixed, indeterminate.

Without hovering, or insecurity.

It was an image of being in the vast field of life.

Without knowing. In a position of unknowing, positionless, I suppose. Existing without location or momentum. Vibrating with possibility. It wasn't exciting or fearful, just what is.

Nothing is fixed or certain, though there are always solutions to problems.

Then she continued on.

She didn't doubt her certainties.

Still painting...

How little space for painting! This is the corner. You can see the original sketches from which I composed the composite image I posted last week. What's nice is that if I don't like the way the painting turns out, I can create another one. The painting on the board is influenced by the one on the wall, isn't it. I did that one in Vancouver and it's quite large: Celestial Dancers, 2004, oil on canvas, 4' x 5'.

(click to enlarge)

The Waterfall is Truth

A moral universe?

No!

Nor a religious one.

The will to truth is different. Where stated actions and actions match. Where the description of the deed and what was done match. Where there are no discrepancies. Where what is done is what is said was done. No lies, deceptions, hypocrisies, veils. There is something that wills clarity, a force, a power, a drive towards.

This will to truth that's inherent in the structural energies of what composes the universe, oh, how I must sound!, who knows what to call it, is evident in the Scientific Principle. Verifiable truth. Then it's a trustworthy knowledge on which action can be based. It's there, and it's strong. I feel it everyday.

Call on it! Call on the truth, it'll come. What was obscure or hidden will become clear. Truth will expose the lies. It's a trustworthy force.

Two and two equal four because truth favours clarity, predictability, stability. Truth is a will and an organizing principle. Listen to me rant! Me, who loves 'shades of grey' and thrives on paradox!

Truth isn't ultimatum, nor is it like light opposed to darkness. Not like that at all. The real workings, that's truth's domain.

And perhaps it's the heart's view. The beating heart needs truth.

Gates of Truth are a Waterfall

It's always seemed normal. What everyone does except me. I don't because I can't. I've seen consequences. It's against my ethic to knowingly create situations where others will get hurt. I want relationships of integrity. Love means too much too me to play around with it. An intense woman of intensities, I don't need to take more than my share.

It's been around me all my life. Nothing new. I'm blasé about it.

And then, finally I understand betrayal, this particular humiliation, pain. A breakthrough. Increase in understanding, empathy. To know how it feels helps me to be sensitive, more so because experienced. How a kind of post-traumatic stress syndrome takes over as scenes of deception are played and replayed in their horrifying truth.

I think there is a will in the structure of reality, something part of the energy of the universe's being, towards truth. In all things. The way it works; what really happened. It is not the nature of life to hide its realities. Revealment, over and over of the secrets of nature. Of each other. Of our atrocities.

I think it is there in the core of my being, expressed in the archetypal imagery of my dreams, represented in me thus.

The will to truth.

When I encountered her as the strange and fragile Maat, the ancient Egyptian goddess of truth I understood how old. Always ultimately the truth, a tallying in the hereafter, in the karma which determines the future of the soul.

The ledger of life. When dishonesties are exposed.

The universe has a force of
truth to it.
Incredible. How this is.
But it is.

II

In my inability to comprehend
myself.

I feel like a collection of attitudes, beliefs, feelings, thoughts and sensations which are in constant flux.

Whatever is now is all, and it can be diametrically opposed to yesterday and not seem inconsistent.

When I say I love you, I do, though it is a complex unfolding.

Leafless vines cling to the walls, ready for Spring, the verdant carpet. The concrete waterfall is a melody of its own. Pigeons hop along the top to drink and bathe where the water crests forth. As I sit nearby on a bench, my notebook is sprinkled and I look up to see a tiny wren on the naked branches ruffling its tail feathers. "Little bird!" It shakes a few more drops that fall on the cement walkway in front of me before it flies off to my laughter. My baptized book.

This little notebook
of my truths.

New Café on the Block

I'm at a new coffee shop that hasn't quite opened yet across the street from where I live where I have been given a free Americano with frothed milk and it's delicious. They sell Bodum here. A little pricey, but the coffee is excellent and while the shops are a bit distracting outside there is a good view of the magnificent sky. It is the sky that I need to see when I write - which made writing a challenge in Gideon's basement! When I had the money, I went to an Italian café nearby and wrote. That's a little far now, but perhaps this café, where I am now, will be my "spot." Here's a cell phone pic to show you...

(click on photo to enlarge)

Still Life

I would never have left, that's how it was.

But I am shifted into the expanse of light.

There's no attitude I can think of to express this.

The streets are busy, and I walk them, Spring warmth. I can't say if it's love. It's very strange to be here, where it's incipient.

I'm not sure how we stay together when we do, or how we fall away from each other.

There are many ways of being. It's pointless to talk about singular, unitary things. Fluxes and flows. There is a trajectory, though. That's what's most surprising after many years. A path in the pathlessness.

I don't know how I ended up there, or why it was over. Or why we never spoke. Or why there was a significant effect anyhow.

It makes me aware that most of life goes on under the surface.

Which is strange, when the pathways map these routes to and fro.

Nothing was stable, but everything remained as it was, only more so.

I don't mean to sound vague. All the things I thought weren't close to what was unfolding in the underground ways that it was. We didn't understand, but we knew this had to be.

I can't fathom a design, but perhaps there is one in an absent fashion.

An inner directive.

Of which we're hardly conscious, except in retrospect.

Nothing stays still.

The Path

Now where?

The life of the writer!

Agility, especially in uncertainty. Move nimbly when required.

There is nowhere to settle, at least not for long. The path continues, and it must be traveled, step by step.

Resting. Missing. Mourning. Dancing over the edges.

Adrift

Out of the fertility of the ocean, sea tides within, rhythms following the moon's wake, I sought you.

My planet of fire.

You'd disappeared into steaming mist. I lost you in the clouds. Perhaps you'd transformed into the raptor flying overhead. Or the dark loam of the shore looming.

You were always only figments,
imagined.

Pink roses
falling in the wind.

What could be fired her desire, kept her enthralled. Only now she sees what is.

For love is beautiful and painful, this is its nature. "A great love carries within it a mourning for love." [Edmund Jacobs.]

The way the processes of love unite what is disparate, the longings and communions, and hold us to our wanton paths amidst the fluxes of the heart.

Venus
adrift...

Titles

Sometimes I have trouble with titles. The Red Flower was the only one I could ultimately use because those were the first three words of the poem (which I hope you get, how it was written I mean), and that's okay when you can't come up with anything else. The Red Flower seems to be part of another series, a 'Vishnu, The Preserver' series perhaps, who knows if a theme is developing. The Venus Poems are continuing to develop. Mostly I'm fine with the titles I choose. Though In the Throes of Love... really was a bit much, sort of 40s romance, or I thought, this morning Venus in Lament would I think be better, since she's left being Celestial Aphrodite and entered the realm of Pandemos, where there are no rules and it isn't altogether fun, but why give away the last line? Oh, it's so impossible, this naming of the words of love that poetry is...

The Red Flower

(I think this poem goes with what may be a "Vishnu" series, the first of which is Vishnu on Chinese New Year.)


The red flower spirals
or it's a fractal
folding.

His heart is a window
box with a red flower

Beating. Petals spiral in, or out,
Magritte-like.

A map in water, a warehouse, snowblue.
Lost pink dancing slippers,
a church in black and white,
a chorus singing carols.

Quarantine. Insolence. Defiance.
Burlap and cold steel.
Madness in prison.

I heard the message,
its jumbled sanity.

Fragments of patterns,
like this poem,
torn from the epic.

Worlds within worlds.

Bullets and blood, the heart floods.
Five billion dying in biological warfare.
What was that movie where he dreamed his death,
unable to save the world.

Saviour, the preserver.

We'll all be saved on a microchip,
says the prophetess.

In the Throes of Love...

If there is a ground,
it is a quantum of vibrating molecules.

Like walking on water during a storm at sea.

No guides in this emotional terrain,
it's new.

I don't know where I'm going or how to get there. Logic has failed; intuition, senseless.

Furies and lies and deceptions blow like crazed winds everywhere. Nothing can be trusted to be what it seems or purports to be. The stories you are told aren't the real ones. Secrets are everywhere. The underside is sleazy, riven with seething. And you wonder how you missed the way through, or if it ever was there. And when the revelations come, and they do, like light through the floods, you don't know how to survive them, and if you do, what direction you should be travelling in now.

Rudderless, without navigation.

How can you find ground when there is no ground?

What is continuous in the discontinuous?

What lasts in impermanence?

What is it in the wavering flame that doesn't go out? Even in the storm I travel though.

Perhaps on a scallop seashell, a Venus in lament.

She Who Came Forth

The Embrace. Their children couldn't emerge into the light. He was heaven and she was earth. Uranus and Gaia, his wife, who he loved and refused to separate from. Creation waited. The embrace was tight, intimate, sensual, blissful, deeply in each other, unending. Cronus, his son, time, cruel time, cut off his genitals and threw them into the sea. Heaven and Earth separated. Out of the foam, Aphrodite was born. Love.

Aphrodite, who she was to the Ancient Greeks, though she was older than that, and linked to Ishtar-Astarte, and probably brought to the Greek islands by Phoenician sailors, Aphrodite, who later became Venus to the Ancient Romans, is one of the world's oldest divinities.

She was born from an act that separated Heaven and Earth. An ancient divinity present at the beginning of time. She Who Came Forth at the birth of the world.

Or, this is Hesiod's version in his Theogony. Aphrodite represents pure and spiritual love. From her foamy birth the Three Graces received her and wrapped her in rich garments and decorated her with gold ornaments.

The Goddess of Love.

Aphrodite Urania, or Celestial Aphrodite.

The Venus Botticelli saw, painted, understood.

Oh, there was another one, Homer's in his Iliad. Venus Pandemos or Common Aphrodite. She was born from Zeus and the Titan Goddess, Dione. This Aphrodite was baser, lust-driven and associated with physical satisfaction...

Humanitas, the flowering

Venus - 'Humanitas,'
guiding force of the Renaissance
precious fantastic spirit
which transformed Western
civilization

Allegory of Spring

Spirit of the Renaissance

Out of the Dark Ages
with the rediscovery
of classical antiquity

Herald of the golden age
flowering of arts and sciences
under her tuteledge,
the great goddess
in her many
guises


What if Venus bucked
her symbolism as
spiritual value and
swung her scallop
shell around and
dove into
deep seas,
an intensity
of dark
passion?

Eostre, Or Cross of Sheer Light

Click here for an MP3 Recording of Eostre, Or Cross of Sheer Light(2:25min)





Eostre, Or Cross of Sheer Light

I found myself ebbing
away, and so I fasted.
When my commitment to
life renewed itself, I broke
my fast.

If you've ever been dead and come back to life,
been hopeless and found a way to continue,
thrown yourself into nothingness to find meaning.

An elusive tune,
slender wash of light,
bare opening in the wall,
a sliver, crescent through which.

Or what's a moment but a casting through.
If you've been too tired to get up and then you get up.
Filled with silent despair and then the will to.

Nothing's even, that's the problem. Many impermanent states.
All taking turns or colliding. Interpenetrating or scattering.
Flowing or stuck. Constraining or freeing.

I like to have clean thoughts because then I can live in my mind.
Sometimes the dust, anger, grime.
Throw what's scathing out.

I feel your bright and beautiful presence
even if you feel like you've disappeared into nothing.

The edges of the sky hang like an aurora borealis of silk.

The trompe l'oeil of the moment. Discreet packets of time.
If you didn't tell me I was going to die, I wouldn't believe it.

And then the scaffolding crashed, blocks fell apart,
what resisted melted, and it was time to resurrect.
Passing beyond memory into. Or the rising.


©Brenda Clews
Good Friday, 2006 ( A repost of a poem and image I wrote and created for Easter on Friday, April 14, 2006, but recorded today, two years later.)
----------------
photographic path: a photo I took of sheer fabric over light, cropped, layered on itself, rotated, made somewhat transparent; then I may have used a marque tool to crop the uppermost layer to better reveal the brocade ribbon below, or was that one of the trajectories I didn't use; various marque tools to crop the right & left edges of the uppermost layer on right angles; the stamp tool to fill in a line that was left over from who knows what process; the burn tool to darken the upper and bottom right corners for visual balance. A collage I composed after writing the poem...

This is a photopoem: I've digitally embedded the poem in the image along with copyright information.

Psychic Moon

I couldn't sleep and saw the full moon in the West when I rose but after I'd made coffee and let the dog out, it was gone. A full moon on the Equinox is auspicious, and I saw a light of mystery and psychic radiance that the clouds swirled over in the night sky.

It's been a Winter of great snow, more than in half a century. Toronto is usually warm and wet, it snows and turns to slush and melts. This year the snows fell, and fell, and fell. We haven't seen ground in months.

The parkette onto which I gaze is like trampled sugar icing with a coating of ice that makes it shiny.

It's been a Winter of shocking revelations for me.

A month ago I fell on the ice, straight like an ironing board, only I curved a little and protected my head while my hip took the impact.

A bruise the size of a snowball turned from brown to black to red to purple and is still present as a pale ochre shadow and I wonder if I will always carry it.

Slowly dawn melts into the sky.

The light is bluish-grey,
the colour he once said
of my eyes.

On the Mystical Theology of Spring

*the consequences of
what the composition is
centred around are of
great importance*

theologica mystica
the deep interior

Botticelli's Venus, innocent and flowering, beautiful
and fragile, a powerful goddess and
untouched maiden, a blossom of love
that is the garden itself...

Who is the
birth

of

Hidden Masterpieces

Botticelli's Venus
like pure meditation.

Sky and sea and shell.

Fabric of wind blowing.

Is she a heliotropic metaphor, painted by a man whose preference wasn't women, who presented an idealized version of woman without her dark burning orchard?

No contrary opposing forces
dark intrigues, smoldering
passions
erupting
like the fire rock
that buried Pompeii.

Nor is she a poetry of free association, drifting over the waves opening out towards non-meaning but fully signified: beauty, love, goddess.

She doesn't point us to the conflict of the unrepresentable, but to a representation of
beauty, a solar vision, of innocence, of love.

Botticelli's Venus carries no arrows, or armory.

A surface of
sweetness
idyllic.

No lusty, passionate,
vengeful goddess.

Appearing fragiley
on the ocean's
horizon.

Thin layers of translucent
paint.

The Birth of Venus and the Primavera kept from public view for almost five centuries, and then she rose like the morning star, radiating feminine beauty far and wide.

Pallas & the Centaur, Primavera, and The Birth of Venus commissioned by Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de'Medici in the late 1400s for his Villa di Castello in Florence.

Secret, hidden masterpieces. Not seen by the public until the 19th century.


Venus, the spiritual birth of Humanitas.

Lofty ideal. Hunger of hot desire
absent.

The messiness of reality
can't be faked.

"the soul establishes itself
through loving itself in the ideal"¹

______________________
¹ Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love (Columbia University Press, 1987), 110.

Poetry & Fruit

I'm sure I didn't look like that, and I don't know where all the people are. Strange. I travelled on a crowded subway and walked amid streaming crowds on the way to work this morning. A stranger snapped the photo. I said it was because my briefcase wasn't full of business papers but poetry and fruit. He hurried away. The subject of the photo is the briefcase, not moi, for surely that is what is important.

Days of Tears and Laughter

It passed, on the 7th, another year. By not telling, it was easier. My birthday and Christmas are the 2 days I miss my father most and so there is grieving. Only now I allow myself time to miss, to lament, to offer remembrance and praise, to understand perhaps a little more of the mysterious universe each time I enter sorrow, its spirals of loss and redemption, of endings and continuance, of knowing what is gone and what is to come. I offer myself time to remember, to feel instead of the denial I lived for years and which caused unexpressed despair on 'my day' and the day of festive giving. With recognition of the depth underlying these two days, allowing grieving, they are much happier, take on a glow of warmth and love, a radiance that they lacked when I was hiding sadness under a veneer of gloss. Oh, perhaps a half hour alone to weep, to be in the place of dissembling, of loss, of the irrationality of death, then the rest of the day is lighter - fun, joy, sparkle, and laughter.

Which it was, along with the chocolate truffle chocolate mousse chocolate cream cheese cake from Decadent Desserts and the company of my son and some fine white wine...

The Green Wire Shelf

It's a rickety wire corner piece with soldered leaves trailing in green over which I hung a couple of strands of small white festive lights. It fits in the tiny corner of the tiny room. The bottom shelf has a few scattered printed poems that I read into his voicemail, not that he should be the only one to receive them, and you should know that, and manuals for the Tivoli stereo and radio and the Bang & Olufson headphones; the middle shelf holds a refurbished black plug-in Northern Telecom phone with good unfuzzy sound, real retro; the top shelf, a small stack of articles and art books on Botticelli.

When I meditate I unplug the lights, and after lie down and close my eyes and let the silence take me deeper, when I come up from the depths I roll over and place the jack of the lights into the plug on the middle shelf, the one with the retro phone.

Oh, the books have fallen a few times. I know I should have fixed the wobbly wire garden corner shelf to the wall but I didn't have a large picture hook and the store I went to didn't have that size.

Of course it happened. The books tumbled and rolled and fell onto my head in the dark while I was trying to attach the plugs for the small trellis of lights.

I was stabbed by the hardcover corner of my favourite one, the prints are so lush, and I stare at them in the evenings wondering how the Renaissance master painted them.

I have a bruise on my right cheek bone. It's pale grey, and slightly sore. I cover it in a little tinted moisturizer.

My Botticelli bruise.

frozen seas
currents
hot and cold
intermixing
where Venus
wrapped in shawls
of frost
treachery of winds
is this cold
reception
poetry
in the world?

a la scallope

innocent and lyrically sensuous, fragile, beauty,
powerful goddess and untouched maiden, a blossom

of love

figure of spiritual ecstasy

incarnation of love under a paintbrush, in a vision, a feeling, expansive,
a Botticelli pink rose, Venus in her purity, born from the seafoam, coming into
being, music to ears that hear the seawinds bearing her
towards us

Ocean of Ice

Ice floes, sharp, jagged icicles. Hidden, floating icebergs. Tearing, sinking, drowning. We struggle amid snow squalls and tears of fire burn our cheeks. It's a dance of avoidance in the avalanche of the Arctic waters. Do not freeze, or turn to ice.

Ice moves quickly, unpredictably, in response to ocean currents and wind. Ice, like tectonic plates. Frozen earthquakes and ice mountains, ridges and blocky ice rubble. O be wary, what impales the heart, tides of ice.

Ice floes surge and spin, ice moves in packs, networks of cracks and patches of open water, pushing broken ice, loose chunks of ice, and ice jams. Icebreaking.

But the currents are intermixed in this strange painting of love, surging warmth and rigid cold. Where deceptions occur: what looks solid, isn't. And then the ice so thin it's a mirror down into the depths.

Venus comes aloft on her scallop seashell amidst the ice floes; the Zephyr winds are cold and northerly. The Horae await with a cloak embossed with delicately beautiful ice flowers, as fragile as morning frost. Where is the warmth? The sea is awash with cold and hot waters, whitecaps of ice or steam. Which currents are to be trusted?

Sun-washed Blossoms

Ishtar's high priestess, Inanna, queen of heaven and earth, of the rising and setting star in the East, Venus, sexual mystery of the darkness, not the sun-stroked beauty of Botticelli's.

Unclothed, unashamed but virginal, an untouched goddess of love blown in by waves whose whitecaps are like flocks of flying white birds. Botticell's Venus not the sensual 'come-hither' of Inanna and her Shepherd-King, Dumuzi. Or she of the Song of Songs.

Botticelli's Venus is the Virgin in a pagan landscape of delight in the beauty of the world. Fragile becoming on the wind-washed shores of our being. Her beauty not lustful but ethereal; the innocence of unblemmished spirituality.

Only, Botticelli, man who remained like a monk, single, dedicated to art, and art alone, your gorgeous muse causes all of Nature to bloom in your paintings where it bursts out of your canvases, the Birth of Venus and the Primavera.

Where is the sultry goddess of the dark gleaming gold temple of love?

Valentines Day

Those of you who have been reading my latest series of poems will understand the humour in this image, I say laughing. You never know where she will appear! Happy Valentines!

Temple of Love

Venus, star in the night. Love in the darkness. Your breath. Ecstasies of the body, erotic touch. This temple, its sacred creativities.

O, the goddess of love awaits, inviting. Sighing, and moans. The gleam of the god of war, his helmet golden red in the night.

When Anteros - god of requited love, "love returned," and the avenger of scorned love - came, wings beating like heartbeats, you knew me. For the first time. Anteros, brother of Eros, god of lust, love, erotic union.

Fire gleams in your eyes, volcanic. You didn't see me before though you had known me a long time. I was hidden in your life.

I'm tired of restrictions. Let's change what we have meant to each other. Like angels lying in a bouffant of chocolate and roses. The convergences on the public holy day of love, Valentine's.

Great art presents itself as presence in the world, alive, shimmering.

What the heart holds, for it prefers secrecy.

birth of beauty

times of decrease, recession, turmoil, depression, upheaval, war, loss and degradation, fear and grief, the unpardonable, what can't be retracted, the birth of love borne by beauty on the waves of the sea

Savonarola's body burnt in the Piazza della Signoria, it is 1498, he who convinced you to renounce the sensual pleasure of beauty - The Mystical Nativity painted in 1500 so different to when

you and Leonardo da Vinci, a friend who you studied with in Verrocchio's workshop in the 1470s

those angelic visions

art historians speak of spiritual tautness in your work, of the grace of line and that your figures are holy heiroglyphics

she appeared under your delicate sable brushes in 1492 and disappeared for centuries until the Pre-Raphaelites resurrected her and now she is a definer of feminine beauty in the modern world

with my curls, when I was a young woman, people used to compare me to 'Botticell's Venus'; I, too, have borne her...

rising from the sea

the rush of waves in my ears

listening to you


beauty, fragile, on the lip of, edges, knowing loss's inevitability, a flower blossoms, fragrant perfume and soft vivid colour of petal drifting away, it can't remain, you knew, Sandro, and

yet, she is, borne by the Zephyr on the scallop-shell and wrapped in veils of flowers by the Horae

washes of colour, seaspray of roses,

translucent robes

poetry we weave ourselves with

Divine Message of Beauty in the World

I write on vellum with sea-scalloped edges.

Birth blueness is everywhere, that particular nascent colour.

You bring the simplicity of writing with you.

While I wear a cloak of flowers, a shower of roses, lyrical, fragile birth, beauty, this flowing cape of words

That the goddesses of the seasons have woven for us.

___________
Botticelli's Birth of Venus hangs in the Uffizi, in Florence. It was painted in 1485.