Art is a lie

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth, at least the truth that is given to us to understand.

How can we know the dancer from the dance?

Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul.
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
— Among School Children, W. B. Yeats

Dante's Inferno series — William Blake

 

Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.
Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say
What was this forest savage, rough, and stern,
Which in the very thought renews the fear.
So bitter is it, death is little more;
But of the good to treat, which there I found,
Speak will I of the other things I saw there.
I cannot well repeat how there I entered,
So full was I of slumber at the moment
In which I had abandoned the true way.
But after I had reached a mountain's foot,
At that point where the valley terminated,
Which had with consternation pierced my heart,
Upward I looked, and I beheld its shoulders,
Vested already with that planet's rays
Which leadeth others right by every road.

Whatever is moved must be moved by something else

1. Vancouver Public Library, 6th F. Classics and Fine Art Dept. 

2. Kaos 1984, by Pablo e Vittorio Taviani 

3. Luigi Pirandello 1867-1936, Nobel Prize in Literature 

4. Mozart, Cavatina, L'ho perduta from Nozze di Figaro

5. Sicily, Italy

Create something that time will not willingly let die — Milton's Formula

 

Padre Padrone 
A shepherd boy from the backwaters of Sardinia molds himself into a linguistic scholar.

Night of the Shooting Stars 
Set on the night of the Feast of St. Lawrence during the last days of World War II.

Kaos
 
Adapted five short stories by Luigi Pirandello to capture the beauty of Sicilian landscape.
— All by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani

In the primal sympathy

We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be;
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering;
In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind.
—William Wordsworth

Poetry arrived

Poetry — Pablo Neruda 

And it was at that age... Poetry arrived 

in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where 

it came from, from winter or a river. 

I don't know how or when, 

no, they were not voices, they were not 

words, nor silence, 

but from a street I was summoned, 

from the branches of night, 

abruptly from the others, 

among violent fires or returning alone, 

there I was without a face 

and it touched me.