“Poets are the dreams of gods, and in each and every age someone hath sung unknowingly the message and the promise from the lotus-gardens beyond the sunset.”
– H.P. Lovecraft, Poetry and the Gods
I am no lotus eater, just a word eater. I gulp them ethereally and stubbornly, and innocently agree with their meanings. They tremble and describe another day in the garden beyond the sunset.
Art by Thomas Edwin Mostyn.
A rather late and overrated question… Following in the “footwords” of one wise wizard (Gandalf), I do things precisely when I mean to, not when they are supposed to happen, neither late nor early.
Write down all the things that make you so goddamn glad you’re alive. It can be simple things like: watering plants, the sunlight that seeps on your bed at 10:00 a.m., dancing in the rain or playing in the snow, watching the sunrise or sunset, decorating your room with fairy lights, googling for surrealistic paintings, lighting too many candles in mid-days, eating pizza while watching your favorite show, searching for how many people have the same name as you in the world—how wonderful is that? What do you want more than these?
More ways and words to say: “I love you”…
Armors for moments when I feel depleted and drenched of kindness. I dissolve this by writing. This is my predicament, situations, and people that make me forget who I am, how kind I am, and who make my heart turn to stone, but who never, ever were permitted to steal the real me.
“Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.” – Kurt Vonnegut
Building is King but maintenance is King Kong (inspired by Seth Godin’s words, “Content is king”, but distribution is King Kong)….
Maybe Happiness is in the building… One event creates the architecture of everything falling in the right place with light and joy and windows and mirrors as walls transparently maintaining the gift of the gab.
Art by Andrew Wyeth.
Buried moon, buried moon
Who to talk about at noon
When dreams are plundered by light
And powdered in gold and charcoal dust.
Crescent fairies are sad in the rouse
and at falter to surmise
the scanty slumbering traces
that led stupors into trenches.
The owners of the light
Do not know its might
and the pleasure of the sun
to astound and burn above…
Buried moon, buried moon
I want you soon…
As to play my feral dreams
around the all surviving tunes!
© Iulia Halatz
(Reposting an old poem)
Art – Buried moon by Edmund Dulac.
“Light is the left hand of darkness
and darkness the right hand of light.
Two are one, life and death, lying
together like lovers in Kemmer,
like hands joined together,
like the end and the way.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin (October 21, 1929 – January 22, 2018),
The Left Hand of Darkness
Art by Édouard Manet.
Sun chokes the atmosphere
Moon dies and takes
the truth and breath of you
Stars inscribe the sky
and determine
who’s alive…
What are your dreams?
Ask your heart
and put an old wish
to the slaughter.
Wild is the conspicuous green grass
that tells itself
to reach the stardust smell of spring.
Old is the key
that keeps away the chains
and charms unfathomed
to open a new gate
As you wear another’s
beating heart
melting in
and dripping of blue lust
Not knowing when
to destroy the dark
and say:
I am saving the meat
of my dreams for you!
© Iulia Halatz
Art by Konstantin Koborov.
Longing = a yearning desire.
“It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them.”
– George Eliot
Art by Aleksandr Golovin.
If you were to be enclosed in one word, what would that be?
We are already enclosed in small words, small events, small thoughts making up a bigger picture. But what if you respond to only one word?
My word is freedom. I know of nobody being free, but in our world populated with clouds that sweep away the silence of the sky above blue lilacs of amaranthine Spring, I am free. My freedom is but at the words’ length of a magic rub of the lamp of imagination.
Without freedom we cannot feel the wind’s promiscuous touch as if at ripe flowers and leaves, without freedom we cannot be as young as yesteryear’s roses. We cannot see the Autumn climbing up the vines and the heartbeat of the moon, alive and beckoning.
Only with freedom of vision and thought we can unleash our unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful world inside of us.
“Everybody has a secret world inside of them, I mean everybody. All of the people in the whole world, I mean everybody – Inside them they’ve got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds….” – Neil Gaiman
You cannot paint in colors and words unless your mind is free to travel to your imaginary legendary lands between the corner of sunset and the verge of dawn. Unless your heart dances at the tune hummed by a water-lily. Unless your mind is raving at the wild immaculate trees. With freedom and broken dreams you can do anything. The shards of olden dreams are lavish land for new unbroken dreams.
“A painting to me is primarily a verb, not a noun, an event first and only secondarily an image.”- Elaine de Kooning
A painting is not a noun, it is a verb – to love. To love with fierce freedom and lovely despair of losing one’s self into the loving.
In love we are maneuvering a human mechanism that at times refuses to work…That is clear, but the trying is enchanting. Buckets of enchantment color ethereal worldly beings in agonizing freedom and…love.
Art by Gustave Adolphe Mossa.
Grasp = a firm hold or grip.
“The body is not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp on the world and our sketch of our project.”
― Simone de Beauvoir
My “situation” has a penchant for grasping more and more of the world in different and divergent sporting circumstances; cycling, skating, skiing… Sketching over one’s limits melts the stresses of fitting an imperfect representation of perfect living.
Art by Evyn Fong.
Why can’t we
sleep with the Gods?
be with them
turn their thoughts to foam
touch and revere
their lapis lazuli skin
until myths flicker in the cave
and the earth booms at their voices
The rain from Olympus
is the fog in the valley.
Life is not all lovely thorns and screaming butterflies.
© Iulia Halatz
Art by Gervasio Gallardo.
Dread = great fear or apprehension.
…I find nothing fantastic in so-called fantastic art, it is an aspect of reality in search of sanity beyond the normal bounds. I believe that fantastic art is related to the protective dream, that it prolongs the healing dream and finds symbols that change dread into wonder, strangeness and beauty. – Thomas Häfner
After a pack of dogs jumped at my bike wheels, I developed a “protective dream”. The dogs in the tall dream protected me of the dogs in the tall grass.
Art by Kinuko Y Craft.
