What You Find in the Cracks

[For information about the above image(s), see the note at the bottom of this post.]

From whiskey river:

from Late Gazing, Looking for an Omen as the Sun Goes
I.
The window’s dark. Roll back the curtain’s waves.
What’s to be done about sunsets?
Climb up and stand in some high place,
lusting for a little more twilight.

(Yuan Mei [source])

…and:

Anyone can see that if grasping and aversion were with us all day and night without ceasing, who could ever stand them? Under that condition, living things would either die or become insane. Instead, we survive because there are natural periods of coolness, of wholeness, and ease. In fact, they last longer than the fires of our grasping and fear. It is this that sustains us. We have periods of rest making us refreshed, alive, well. Why don’t we feel thankful for this everyday Nirvana?

We already know how to let go — we do it every night when we go to sleep, and that letting go, like a good night’s sleep, is delicious. Opening in this way, we can live in the reality of our wholeness. A little letting go brings us a little peace, a greater letting go brings us a greater peace. Entering the gateless gate, we begin to treasure the moments of wholeness. We begin to trust the natural rhythm of the world, just as we trust our own sleep and how our own breath breathes itself.

(Jack Kornfield)

Not from whiskey river:

II.
From a thousand houses’ cooking fumes,
the Changes weave a single roll of silk.
Whose house, fire still unlit, so late?
Old crow knows whose, and why.

III.
Golden tiles crowd, row on row:
men call this place the Filial Tombs.
Across that vastness, eyes wander:
grand pagoda: one wind-flickering flame.

(Yuan Mei [ibid.])

…and:

Upon Discovering My Entire Solution to the Attainment of Immortality Erased from the Blackboard Except the Word “Save”

If you have seen the snow
somewhere slowly fall
on a bicycle,
then you understand
all beauty will be lost
and that even the loss
can be beautiful.
And if you have looked
at a winter garden
and seen not a winter garden
but a meditation on shape,
then you know why
this season is not
known for its words,
the cold too much
about the slowing of matter,
not enough about the making of it.
So you are blessed
to forget this way:
a jump rope in the ice melt,
a mitten that has lost its hand,
a sun that shines
as if it doesn’t mean it.
And if in another season
you see a beautiful woman
use her bare hands
to smooth wrinkles
from her expensive dress
for the sake of dignity,
but in so doing trace
the outlines of her thighs,
then you will remember
surprise assumes a space
that has first been forgotten,
especially here, where we
rarely speak of it,
where we walk out onto the roofs
of frozen lakes
simply because we’re stunned
we really can.

(Dobby Gibson [source])

…and:

The high priests of the disciplines controlling our cultural circle try to tell us that logic and reason are the sum total of things, or, if more is possible, that it is only so through _their_ controls, which are their own logical rules. Logic and reason are surely the stuff of which the clearing is made, and the high point of life’s thrust. Yet these techniques of mind tend to become destructive and to trap us in deadlocks of despair.

Logic and reason are like the tip of the iceberg. The naive realists, the biogenetic psychologists, the rats-in-the-maze watchers, claim the tip is all there is. Yet life becomes demonic when sentenced to so small an area. There are times when we need to open the threshold of mind to that unknown subterranean depth — and we always need to believe in its existence.

(Joseph Chilton Pearce, The Crack in the Cosmic Egg)

One thing about the music of the influential German band Kraftwerk: it invites the mind of a sedentary listener to make sense of it. (Dancing listeners, eh, maybe not so much.) This is helped along in the video of their mid-1980s hit “Tour de France,” which seems to be (or is?) “about” something other than a purely sonic experience:

Kraftwerk and numerous other German bands are considered representatives of a genre called (at least by the British press) krautrock. An encyclopedia of krautrock, by Alan and Steve Freeman, was called The Crack in the Cosmic Egg.

_____________________________

About the image at the top of this post: Han van Meegeren, says Wikipedia, “is considered to be one of the most ingenious art forgers of the 20th century.” At the left is the original The Witch of Haarlem, by Frans Hals; at the right, van Meegeren’s “interpretation” of the same work, as a site dedicated to van Meegeren delicately phrases it. (You can also see a larger version of the image at that site, by the way.) Note that van Meegeren cleverly did not try to duplicate the pose — just the “look” of the original. It’s as if Hals had just asked his model to change positions (evidently disturbing the owl on her shoulder).

Of van Meegeren’s “perfect forgery” techniques, Wikipedia says:

He bought authentic 17th century canvas and mixed his own paints from raw materials (such as lapis lazuli, white lead, indigo, and cinnabar) using old formulas to ensure that they were authentic. In addition, he used badger-hair paintbrushes, similar to those Vermeer was known to have used. He came up with a scheme of using phenol formaldehyde to cause the paints to harden after application, making the paintings appear as if they were 300 years old. After completing a painting, van Meegeren would bake it at 100 °C (212.0 °F) to 120 °C (248.0 °F) to harden the paint, and then roll it over a cylinder to increase the cracks. Later, he would wash the painting in black India ink to fill in the cracks…

[Van] Meegeren painted The Supper at Emmaus, using the ultramarine blues and yellows preferred by Johannes Vermeer and other Dutch Golden Age painters. After learning that the experts assumed Vermeer had studied in Italy, van Meegeren used The Supper at Emmaus by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, located at Italy’s Pinacoteca di Brera, as a model for his next work…

The painting was purchased by The Rembrandt Society for 520,000 guilders ($300,000 or about $4 million today).

I confess, van Meegeren’s story completely fascinates me. (Not least, because his work seems to have inspired its own cottage industry: forgeries of van Meegeren’s work. The mind reels)

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