No More Books

I'm back with another New Year's resolution, namely to do at least one post a week (hopefully more) focused on ideas rather than images. What got me going was thinking about some old texts that I studied years ago. Lots of things struck me, one in particular being the fact that the physical texts no longer matter to me. My wife and I have moved continents 5 times dragging 3 or 4 thousand books along with us until we finally got rid of most of them somewhere in California. They seemed so important back then, now the books don't matter, but I have rediscovered, much to my delight, that the ideas really do matter. More anon.

Pews

It's Sunday. Something from Robert Louis Stevenson, though the pews in the picture are above the alter in a Catholic church, scene to some different temptations perhaps.

YOU looked so tempting in the pew,

You looked so sly and calm -

My trembling fingers played with yours

As both looked out the Psalm.

Your heart beat hard against my arm,

My foot to yours was set,

Your loosened ringlet burned my cheek

Whenever they two met.

O little, little we hearkened, dear,

And little, little cared,

Although the parson sermonised,

The congregation stared.

Celebration in a rear view window

Landscape catching the light

I often wondered where Hieronymous Bosch got his ideas for the Garden of Earthly Delights. I think this is it!

There's something about the colors, the odd proportions of the bodies and especially the mindless, restless, questing in the mud that irresistibly reminds me of Bosch's bizarre vision.

Cloudy day, looking down, not up.

The background is water, not clouds.

In another bird's image.

There is something very satisfyingly ambivalent about the picture. At least to my eye, the bird in the air looks as though it is right over the one in the water. Actually, if you look at the reflections, it seems as though the bird in the air is much closer.