You all know the wild grief that besets us when we remember times of happiness. How far beyond recall they are, and we are severed from them by something more pitiless than leagues and miles. In the afterlight, too, the images stand out more enticing than before...
And constantly in our thirst-haunted dreams we grope for the past in its every detail, in its every line and fold. Then it cannot but seem to us as if we had not had our fill of love and life; yet no regret brings back what has been let slip. Would that this mood might be a lesson to us for each moment of our happiness.
Ernst Jünger (On the Marble Cliffs)
And constantly in our thirst-haunted dreams we grope for the past in its every detail, in its every line and fold. Then it cannot but seem to us as if we had not had our fill of love and life; yet no regret brings back what has been let slip. Would that this mood might be a lesson to us for each moment of our happiness.
Ernst Jünger (On the Marble Cliffs)
I haven't read anything by Ernst Junger but your post made me want to; any book you'd recommend?
ReplyDeleteWhat is 'fill of love'? When there is no more thirst?
ReplyDeleteUnd mein Stamm sind jene Azra,
welche sterben , wenn sie lieben
wild grief - nothing soft-sentimental about that - your photos of flowers & of 'your' women (secret or otherwise) have that wildness too.
ReplyDeletehi, mary-laure, thanks for coming by! yes, On the Marble Cliffs, but you should know that the book context is quite different from what my post might have suggested, it is not at all about lost loves etc. [I don't actually know what my post suggested, so I'm only guessing here, mainly because the picture shows a sad young woman :-)]
ReplyDeleteanonymous: hmmm - maybe, yes. I should check the german version though, but I don't have it here - to see what this 'fill of love' is supposed to be.
ReplyDeleteWer bist du, und was fehlt dir, Du fremder, kranker Mann?
ffflaneur: oh, if this is true - about the wildness - then I'm glad, you know, I asked myself before posting this picture: is the image of a woman plus flower [what a cliche! yes] automatically soft-sentimental? :-)
ReplyDeletei love this picture of you. you look so vulnerable.
ReplyDeletehow is it that you speak english so well?
Roxana hi
ReplyDeletei don't know why but i see something pathological about this pic, something that conveys disease rather than health. it seems as if the person has woken from a post opium dream or is post delirious and is waving "mad" flowers at us. the sense of distance is in the eyes, the fracture is always in the eyes.
i find this pic ominous but it is probably my paranoid imagination.
lotus, why do you think this is me? :-) it's not!
ReplyDeleteand I didn't write the text either, it's a quote from a Juenger-translation.
but I DID take that picture :-)
but kubla, if you see all this in the picture (I don't actually, for me, it is more about 'wild grief' and 'vulnerability', as ffflaneur and lotus said), then it was a good choice for this post: doesn't someone who is lost in a 'thirst-haunted dream' about what 'has been let slip' in life, the terrible loss, become estranged from the world and also from him/herself? how could the face/the eyes hide the fraction, as you say, the disruption, the alienation? why should this picture be about health? but you gave me an idea about today's post :-) let's think about disease then.
ReplyDeleteoh I forget: she is definitely NOT 'waving' the flowers at us :-), I think there is much stillness, frozen grief if you want, in this image.
no--i knew you didn't write the text-- i was asking in general. but i honestly thought all of the women in your photographs were you! i apologise. isn't that strange!
ReplyDeletelotus, sorry for the late reply. why on earth would you think that it is me all over the blog? :-) it's so funny - do I really make the impression of some kind of modern Narcissus? :-)
ReplyDelete[still, I post sometimes self-portraits]
re my English, no, three times no, it is actually very bad :-)
I thought this woman was seeing something 'other' in that flower, not the flower, in fact. The flower and its being composed seems to be the best cover for her thinking something that should not be thought, something that requires to be alienated by the present status, the present doing and being. the eye, i agree, is fissed in a different time/space frame with respect of the rest of the photo. And Rox seems to have unveiled the cover, seems telling: 'look, she was pretending arranging flowers, gestures that stands for other gestures, maybe...but really she was conceding herself a private moment of mind travelling, or getting lost in the mind, with no clear objective or goal, maybe in the past or the future or the kingdom of fear, but definitely in a land torbid enough to be unthinkable to cross it openly, or purposedly' ...oh my goodness! I am now interpreting Rox, who is interpreting the women? a matrioska! :D let's stop it
ReplyDelete