Goldengrove

Spring and Fall

to a young child

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow’s springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844 - 1889)

A few years ago, not long after fellow writer Curtis Cottrell and a few other friends had shared commentary on "Spring and Fall," I happened to come across these old headstones, both of which seem to go perfectly with Hopkins' poem (more pics).

The stone says that Margaret was the "Consort of" Lewis Davisson.
Did they live at the edge? Drink life to the lees?
(Thanks to "Tombstone Tourist @ A Grave Interest"
for additional information on how to read old gravestones.)

Both tombstones are located
a few miles from my house in West Lafayette, Indiana
in nearly forgotten Burton Cemetery ~ Tippecanoe County

This once rural graveyard
now stands on the corner of a busy highway,
adjacent to the parking lot of a Menards DIY;
probably not the final resting place that Margaret & Lewis
envisioned for themselves at the time . . . kind of sad.

It is Margaret we mourn for.

***************************

Here is my friend Victoria in 1978 at another,
as yet unidentified Indiana cemetery.
We are on a quest to find this long lost grave.
Any leads for us?
"Everretta T. Parsons ~ AD 1815"

Is it Everretta that Victoria mourns for?
Or is it Victoria?

Christmas Forward Backward

from One Increasing Christmas
by Winifred Kirkland
"The study of Christmas as a shining date growing ever clearer and more significant in human thought, is the study of a dream. And the dreams of humanity are tricksy things to examine, not susceptible to argument or statistics. One may hazard only guesses into the subtleties of human wistfulness. It is a curiously interesting search to gaze far back into the dusk of history as slowly, hesitantly Christmas appears. . . .

"Still dawns yearly upon our human calendar an ever more beautiful Christmas. Clearer, brighter each year there glows upon the dark expanse of time the recurrent luminous picture . . . Before it, after it, extends the long, long fabric of dark days, fog-ridden . . . But steadfastly the glow of Christmas spreads forward, backward, upon the stretching murk of the years. . . . Back over the black mystery of old years, forward into the black mystery of the years to come,* shines ever more confident the golden kindliness of Christmas."

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
*Kind of like Janus, the Roman god of doors, choices, beginnings and endings, with two faces, one facing forwards and one facing backwards, representing time, looking into the past with one face and into the future with the other.
Janus ~ January 8, 2010

January: Forward Vision, Backward Glance ~ January 28, 2011

Janus, Orpheus, Obsolescing ~ January 30, 2011

Fast Away the Old Year Passes ~ December 28, 2009


Left: "Janus" / Right: "Janus"- watercolour by Tony Grist

And currently on my Fortnightly Blog:
Perfect Twins: Going Out, Coming In

Art Appreciation

"For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing
but the highest quality to your moments as they pass,
and simply for those moments' sake."
from The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry
by Walter Pater, 1839 - 94
English Literary & Art Critic

The Glorification of Saint Dominic
by Fra Angelico, 1395 - 1455
Artist of the Early Italian Renaissance

Thanks to my friend Ann de Forest at Obscolescing,
who suggested that I share a painting by Fra Angelico!

Ordinary Objects, Ordinary Time

Clay Sculpture featured in the St. Louis Post Dispatch,
mid - 1970's
Back in highschool, maybe even junior high, I cut this clipping of the crayon sculpture out the "everyday" section of the Post - Dispatch and have saved it all these years without even know the name of the artist or the exhibit / museum it was in. I guess I should have saved the article that went with the picture!

***************************************
I've always liked the way that this little patch of the year between Christmas and Lent is called Ordinary Time. One ordinary day after the next descends upon us, as the fun times recede first into the recent, then into the distant past. We mark the time. The light changes. What will happen next?

My most recent Fortnightly Blog, January: Forward Vision, Backward Glance is about our ever - changing perspective of what is ordinary, as is the featured blog of my friend Ann de Forest -- the timely and time - conscious Obsolescing: watching technologies as they wane.

If you haven't had a chance yet, why not take a moment now to check out Ann's January response and to look at one of my favorite essays from the "Obsolescing" archives, The Kindly Mirrors of Future Times, which includes this passage from Vladimir Nabokov, so applicable to the goal of my Quotidian blogposts:

"I think that here lies the sense of literary creation: to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of future times; to find in the objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern and appreciate in far-off times when every trifle of our plain everyday life will become exquisite and festive in its own right: the times when a man who might put on the most ordinary jacket of today will be dressed up for an elegant masquerade."

[Vladimir Nabokov, “A Guide to Berlin”
(first published, in Russian, in 1925;
later translated by Nabokov and his son Dimitri
and included in the 1976 collection,
Details of a Sunset and Other Stories.]
I particularly like Ann's concluding observation: "As a writer, I’m particularly intrigued by what Nabokov seems to be asserting about the writer’s (or any artist’s) task – to be present and alert to the current commonplace, to record it in specific detail, and thus preserve it for a future audience’s enraptured rediscovery."

Her response to Nabokov speaks to my heart as a beautifully succinct summation of the quotations (up above & to the right -> -> ->) that I have chosen to govern the Quotidian Kit:

realizing every minute (Wilder)
spreading the big ideas over the daily bread (Duval)
looking for the beautiful in the small (Kant)
finding significance in the commonplace (Woolf).

NEW FORTNIGHTLY BLOG POST TOMORROW!
~ VALENTINE'S DAY ~
"Cold Morning Poems by Naomi Shihab"

Janus, Orpheus, Obsolescing

Republican Janus Coin, c. 225 - 212 BCE
I'd like to take a moment here on my daily blog to recommend a couple of things:

1. my most recent Fortnightly Blog:
January: Forward Vision, Backward Glance
[excerpt below]

and

2. a timely, stylish, and informative blog out of Philadelphia: Obsolescing: watching technologies as they wane. It is a nostalgic blog, but also forward thinking -- like Janus!

One of my favorite recent posts on Obsolescing is the autumnal "Ode for the Season" October 6, 2010 with it's allusion to the bereft Orpheus and Gerard Manley Hopkins' mournful little Margaret: "I think that the emotions that autumn elicits, the melancholy my own primitive soul starts feeling as the days shorten, are akin to the distress and sorrow we feel as the objects of our life, the utilitarian technologies that once surrounded and defined us, fade into memory. News of a past technology’s demise makes us suddenly, desperately long to hold, to touch, to smell, to hear the things of our past. Like Orpheus leading his beloved from the Underworld, we look back to reassure ourselves that the everyday things we have known and loved and remember still exist in their full corporeal presence (That’s why we revel in the sensory details — the typewriter’s clacking keys, the mimeograph ink’s distinctive scent.) Instead, we turn back to watch, in sadness and horror, as the objects of our lives, the tangible evidence of our own existence, slip from our outstretched arms" (~ Ann de Forest).

detail from
"Orpheus Leading Eurydice from the Underworld," 1861
by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796 - 1875)
French Landscape Painter
So as January comes to a close, should you crave a late night reminiscence of the old year or desire some early morning reading in contemplation of the new months ahead, turn on your astonishingly capable laptop computer and take a further look at Obsolescing: watching technologies as they wane. Enjoy the nostalgic, visionary musings of Ann de Forest and David Comberg.