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Yddishland. Reblog from my own blog

by Ewa Maria Blog

because it is really worth of reblogging. Just so!

Dr Lidia Głuchowska

Yiddishland and the utopie of Avant-Garde

adler-berlewi-chagall-lissitzky(…) …„Yiddishland“, the patria of the new, secular Yiddish culture of the Central East European Diaspora. To its inhabitants or rather residents belonged pro-Russian Litvaks, sympathising with socialism and rooted in the misnagda tradition; pro-Austrian Galitsianers influenced by Haskala and open to assimilation; and Hasidic pious Polakes, loyal to the pre-partioned Poland. This population was subject to migration and urbanisation processes, which additionally differentiated it. The cultural revival of the “Yiddishland” depicts in an especially evident way the problem of the deterriorisation of the international avant-garde.The interdisciplinary and transborder Yiddish avant-garde was active mainly in the former “Ansiedlungsrayon” of the Russian Empire, which means in Poland, Ukraine and Belarus, but also in other parts of Central Europe – like in Latvia, Romania or Germany – and in the United States. Its representatives emphasised ties with the Yiddish language and culture – common among the inhabitants of these areas, so called Yiddishism. This movement was considered to be a conception opposite to the Haskala renaissance, the revival of Hebrew and Zionism, aiming at founding an independent Jewish state and based on the restitution of Hebrew as an official literary language.

The following essay presents the structure of Yiddish avant-garde within the universal network of international avant-garde consisting of such components as art groups, magazines exhibitions, cafés, cabaret and theatre, and communicating with its own lingua franca. (…)

The avant-garde network has been often compared with the Diaspora. A paradigmatic avant-garde artist was cosmopolitan, multilingual and mobile – acting in the transborder cultural space and the distribution radius of the avant-garde manifestos extending from Scandinavia to the Balkans, and from Paris to Moscow. Against this background, Central Eastern Europe, which could be geographically identified with the area of the utopian “Yiddishland“, was more specifically “a region of constant migration, immigration and emigration, of people arriving, departing and moving around”. “Nomadic modernism” was another essential phenomenon of artistic internationalism in this period. (…)

katznelson-golfaden-borderzon… it has to be pointed out, that while, in general, in looking for the realisation of the utopia of a borderless “new world”, most of the émigrés were outsiders acting as insiders, the members of the Yiddish avant-garde were always outsiders, acting in foreign national or international contexts.

According to the political limitations, for example after a period of the flourishing of the avant-garde tendencies in the Soviet Union, several Jewish artists felt pushed to emigration. As a consequence of less or more convenient political or economical conditions the process of the deterriorisation considered not only actors of the cultural process themselves, but also their works. A number of art journals also appeared initially at one, then at another place, sometimes abroad (…) or been published in the German Metropolis parallel in Yiddish and Hebrew and was addressed to the different competing fractions of the Jewish national-artistic movement, divided between the Yiddishists and Zionists. Lissitzky, Berlewi or Marc Chagall – who in opposition to his two colleagues did not explicitly support the idea of Yiddishism – were active in different countries and published their manifestoes in various languages.

The fact of a great relevance is that in a way, the Yiddish avant-garde was a Diaspora in a double sense. It participated in an avant-garde network on two levels. On an international level its members cooperated locally with Russian, Polish, Romanian or German groups in the singular national “household” countries and their representatives abroad. Simultaneously, on the national level they had several other local and cross-border contacts and were involved in the artistic life of their Yiddish-speaking communities. (…)

Some characteristics of the international avant-garde as a utopian borderless “new world” seem to fit to the Yiddish avant-garde in a particular way. The “Yiddishland” as a political utopia generated several images of the cultural transfer associated with its maps as a whole. (…) Such maps gave a glimpse of a major myth for a whole generation of artists, their collaborative project, a dream like imago mundi. Attempts in creating the artistic topography, sometimes in a comprehensive global way, sometimes on a smaller scale, were also the Panslavism, the zenitist aim of the Balkanisation of Europe or – much less researched idea of Yiddishism concerning the bigger part of Central-Eastern Europe. (…)

aronson-ravitch-markish-segalowiczThe echo of these historical maps or symbols of the cultural transfer are the schemes of the network, which correspond with the current historiographical concepts (…). While the first one seems to symbolize the stable construction of the right angled lines, the other one, through the usage of the diagonals, suggest the dynamic of the exchange-processes, a motion. (They are) not identical; this means on the one side that the Yiddish network has got partly other exchange centres, and, on the other side it also evaluated in the time. After the limitations of the artistic autonomy in the Soviet Union, the Yiddish avant-garde network became smaller and shifted to the West… (…)

In the past two decades, the avant-garde have been examined as an intellectual and spiritual alliance, as a model of a “new community” pursuing a “new world”, consisting of the interconnected locations of cosmopolitan artistic life in Central Europe such as Bucharest, Budapest, Łódź, Prague and Zagreb, with links to Amsterdam, Berlin, Dessau, Moscow, Paris, Vienna and many other cities in other parts of Europe and the world. In this way the newer narratives contribute to overcoming the previous dualistic approach to the European avant-garde, which divided the artistic map of the continent between Western “centres” and Eastern “peripheries”. The old canon has meanwhile been replaced by a more sophisticated approach, in which the geographical centre of the continent is no longer perceived as its periphery. In opposition to that the visualisations of the network of the Yiddish avant-garde, with its centres in Minsk, Kiev, Kharkov, Riga, Odessa, Saint-Petersburg, Odessa, Moscow, Vilna, Łódź and Warsaw, as well as in Berlin, Paris and New York, are of a much younger datum and the discussion on it in the more general, supranational context is still a desideratum of new cultural historiography.

Apart of the comparison of the imaginative maps of the avant-garde and Yiddish avant-garde universe, also a closer glance at another self-advertising strategy of the(se) movement(s), shows both interesting similarities and differences. One of their major media promoting the universal spirit of art were the little magazines, which all together contributed to a “worldwide network of periodicals”. (…)

Warsaw thereby acquired the status of a European centre for Yiddish literature, with Paris and Berlin serving as its satellites. (…) However, what has to be pointed out is that, even if Yiddish as a language was represented here, the magazine popularised not the idea of Yiddishism, but the opposite one – Zionism. (…)

Paradoxically, both in the case of the international avant-garde and the Yiddish one as its very specific case, their cartography, manifestos and the network of magazines presented a new sphere of the transborder artistic exchange, which can be seen as the anticipation of a future perfect, of modernisation projects characterised by new forms, frequently with an emphasis on ethics rather than aesthetics. In both cases they refer to a utopian community, neglecting the political reality of the period.

Almanac Yung-Yidish – Songs in word and image (…)

One of its innovative qualities was the breaking the rules of the Jewish tradition, such as the biblical ban on images. The typical avant-garde integration of word and image, (…) the domination of the forbidden image over the word was a kind of redefinition of a cultural code and its extension into the zone of taboo. (…) The three issues of Yung-Yidish were published on packing paper between February and December 1919 with a print-run of 350 to 500 copies. (…) Like most avant-garde periodicals, it was an ephemeral publication, even if it grew more interesting and bigger with each new issue. (…) Despite the advanced plans, the 4th issue, dedicated to the biblical Ruth, never came out because of financial reasons. (…)

The Yung-Yidish magazine, representing the main ideas of Yiddish avant-garde, set out its programme in two manifestos. The first, unsigned, in the periodical’s first issue, rebelled against the chaos and materialistic character of the present, and defended the eternal values of God, beauty, and truth. Yung-Yidish artists defined themselves as realists in a mystical faith, admiring art and both Jewish languages: the young one – Yiddish – and the ancient one – Hebrew – the language of the prophets. In the manifesto of the second issue, Broderzon stressed the ties of the Yiddish avant-garde with the millennium tradition of universal culture. Invoking the Bible, including the Psalms and “The Song of Songs”, and thus the tradition of Judaism, he once again pointed to the metaphysical concept of art. Adler too, in the same issue, evoked the Chasidic tradition in his “Prayer”. (…)

Historiography of the avant-garde, written by representatives themselves or by specialised scholars since World War II, often assumes that at the end of the first decade of the twentieth century an internationalist inclination superseded nationalist tendencies which had typified the nineteenth century, when art and architecture were instrumentalised as true manifestations of nationhood. In Central Eastern Europe the internationalist avant-garde conception of a “new world” had to compete with the predominance of conceptions of national modernisation and the idea of a national responsibility of the arts in the “new states”. (…) Internationalism, multiculturalism and multilingualism though not desired in the official life, belonged to the reality of art and present life. (…)

turkow-rotbaum-schwarz-weichertOne of the consequences of this process, intensified by the multilingualism and multiculturalism on a personal level, was the cultural syncretism both in the form and content of artistic production. Among others, this syncretism is apparent in a non-confessional religiousness which combined Christianity or Jewish religious conceptions, via theosophy, with Buddhism and other Eastern religions. (…) there was an explicit demand for a plurality of styles (…) and it was Futurism that played the key role in “new art”. (…)

The problem of the national awakening (…) concerns, however, not only the real existing “new” national states in Central Eastern Europe, but also (re)constructing the national consciousness and culture of the “Yiddishland” being in general the “underground structure” of the really existing political organisms in the interwar period, the same way as the literature of the Yiddish avant-garde was an exterritorial one, which but did not have any foundation in any specific national country.

Yiddish, which since the 1908 conference in Czernowitz was recognised as the language of Jewish culture on a par with Hebrew, was here the prime token of identity. In contrast to it, other languages like German, Russian and Polish, were the means of communication of assimilated Jews, whereas Hebrew, the language of religion, was unknown to the general Jewish population and was removed from its Central and Eastern European roots. The style of the poetry of the Yiddish avant-garde is characteristic of the entire literature of a community that survived the atrocities of World War I and a history of pogroms and revolutions. It expressed less the beauty than the horror. Its poetics bear the imprint of Yiddish Expressionism. (…)

In this context one has to maintain a paradoxical fact: not only as a literary but also as a communicative medium Yiddish often has to be constituted/restituted among the members of the Yiddishist movement. (…) And – which is not a well known fact – they mostly communicated in the languages of the “household” states (…). On the other hand, the Yiddish poets, like e.g. Peretz Markish, creatively used the polysemiotic senses of the Slavic languages, even in their programmatic manifestoes.

Yiddish as a language of the Diaspora which before World War II appealed to readers in most parts of Central Eastern Europe (…) …transgressed political borders, but at the same time had a national function. Because of that, with time however some of the representatives of the Yiddish avant-garde (…) looking for broader recognition decided to use mainly other languages and in a way lost this part of their identity, at least as a means of artistic expression. (…)

barcinski-kaminska-horowitz-nazoIn Central Eastern Europe the tensions between the universal and the particular, the international and national, were stronger than elsewhere on the continent. The modernisation impulse from the respective political centres in the single new states contributed to hybrid results privileging local materials, ornaments and themes. Artists tried (…) to transform foreign artistic patterns, creating local idioms of the international avant-garde code (…). Sometimes these permutations and hybridisations of Central European art are perceived as a consequence of the Jewish influence, with the affinity to richness and orientalism. Sometimes, however, both the whole (Central) Eastern European art and the new secular Jewish one being one of the main aims of the Yiddish avant-garde, has been associated with the hybrid components and the biomorphic metaphor of a world in statu nascendi (…)

In a special way, the avant-garde interest in new universal signs in the visual arts and design also resulted in a standardised typography. Innumerable examples which can be found in books, little magazines or posters, including collages or photomontages and especially exotic and impressive when printed in Cyrillic or Hebrew letters, established “a sort of international hieroglyph”. And often – only this one component of the Jewish identity, the language being, next to the culture and religion – Judaism a proof of “Jewishness”. In its written form it was used not only as and artistic medium, but also as a symbol of identity (…)

Efforts to create a universal style and an avant-garde corporate identity were crowned with an International Art Collection in Łódź in 1931, the first presentation of contemporary art to be permanently exhibited in a state museum in Europe. (…)

Jankel Adler in his article (1920) about expressionism which at that the time was still generally identified with the whole of progressive art stressed out its links with the sacral sphere: “We are the children of the 20th century. […] Stuffy air was our first breath. Our first walk are accompanied by the thousand fold by a choir of ringing trams, the staccato of horse-cabs, whimpering freight trains, speeding automobiles and a choir and noisy passages with criss-cross the streets with a thousand diagonals […] Art of the 20th century, the art of expressionism was born at that longing [after the God LG] and became the seventh day of the working week.”

Two years later his colleague Berlewi already after his return from Germany became a follower of the “new form” and meant: “I had to give up purely Yiddish problems completely and then I devoted myself to cubists and the constructivist’s experiments. Currently my task is to create something European”. (…)

lindenfeld-zarnower-aronson-altmanTo the general components of the avant-garde paradigm belongs the performative character of its manifests and manifestations. Regarding the Yiddish avant-garde, the most authentic and most long lasting emanations of its identity was, next to the programmatic texts and new secular visual art, the theatre, reflecting the every day life experience of the Yiddish population. In its carnival-like art (…) it appeared as especially attractive to a wide audience in Central Europe. In this sense, being even a mirror and mimicry of life and the part of life itself, it can be considered as the most and thus effective, performative manifesto of the Yiddish avant-garde.

Due to the hostility of orthodox religious communities it was formed relatively late, in 1876 in Jassy (Romania). The name of its founder, Graham Goldfaden, inspired the description of the whole genre, inspired by such folk songs and the traditions like the Purim-spiel of Biblical motifs. Between 1878 and 1905 the Tsar had forbidden the staging of performances in Yiddish, but Goldfaden’s theatre still used this “Jargon”. It was partly disregarded also among Jewish intellectuals, opting for the revival of Hebrew or the assimilation, concerning it as shund (garbage). (…) As an alternative to it several other theatre groups were grounded (…) (also) small artistic theatres and cabarets…(…), performances (…).

If internationalism is generally considered a conditio sine qua non of the avant-garde, the national question can be perceived as the contrasting intertext, as a negative point of reference for an international avant-garde ideology, or at least as a set of ideas which had to be addressed. The artists of the Yiddish avant-garde gathered e.g. around such magazines as Yung-Yidish or Yung-Vilne (…) deserve special attention. They were major platforms of Yiddishism, (…) unlike the rest of the Jewish artists who were often assimilated (…). They represented a second generation of new Jewish culture. Whereas the first one tried to create a European opening for Yiddish culture, the second, on the contrary, strove to introduce “the Jewish world” into European culture. As such, the Yiddish avant-garde operated “in-between”, addressing the issue of “the other” in a more poignant way than the rest of the avant-garde, provoking a deconstruction of the official conception of the “new state” as an ethnic and cultural monad, which they considered to be merely a political construct. As “universal others”, they were predestined to become spokespeople for an ‘inter-national’ avant-garde. The motivation for their stylistic choices was, however, not underpinned by a universal aesthetic based in an “escape from history”, but rather by a symbolic discourse of the marginalised in relation to the relevant national cultural context and historiography.(…)

shor-shifrin-ryback-ingerTheir common work and the three issues of Yung-Yidish over the previous two decades are treasured by a handful of libraries in the world as an imposing body of work by the Yiddish avant-garde, arriving at its dire epilogue in the Nazi Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition of 1937 and the Holocaust. (…)

Because of its national aims and structures, but possibly also a missing recognition from the outside, it can be, on the one hand perceived as a hermetic or maybe separate/isolated network, parallel to a universal one and not its subdivision. On the other hand, its exterritorial character and numerous transborder links predestined it to be even a model of the international network as its pars pro toto.

In opposition to the predominant meanings it was not isolated from the local context of the “household” countries. In contrary, following the own national aims, it also looked for the universal perspectives and acceptance in Central Eastern European “new states”, which in opposition to the “Yiddishland” became real political organisms. (…)

For the Yiddish avant-garde attempts of the transmission of their own heritage and ideological proposals were a difficult compromise. Often the transfer from the different “householders’” cultures appeared as dominant and the transmission turned out into cultural transgression. (…)

In fact, in a great scale, after the revolution in the Soviet Union the Yiddish avant-garde network became smaller and its idea of an independent national modern culture failed. It was misused by the propaganda and became “an art for the masses”. According to the Lissitzky’s conception it was the third stage of the transgression. The fourth one was represented by the stylistic turn of the Yiddish avant-garde, e.g. by his own pangeometry. (…)

Not only the idea of Jewish art, but also – in particular, the message transferred in the name of the prominent group of the Yiddish avant-garde – Jung Vilne – were perceived as oxymorons. The last one, created in the old centre of Jewish culture – the Jerusalem of the North ceased to exist much later than the other groups of the Yiddish avant-garde movement – in the Nazi time (…)

Arie Ben-Menachem created an album of photomontages Ghetto. Terra Incognita (…) Its title seems to define the status of the “Yiddishland” and its new secular art, as well as its little reception in the international avant-garde studies.

All the mentioned examples of the contradictory attitude towards the perspectives of the proper milieu for the development of their own identity stand on the one side for the tendency to transgress and as a consequence a compromise of partly assimilation and acculturation in the foreign context, and on the other side – for a strong opposition against it. In this sense the history of the Yiddish avant-garde is a document of both – plurality of Judaism on the one side and of the – (pre)modern liquid identity of Jewish artists in general – on the other one.

albatros-khalistra-jung-jidysz

Yiddishland Image captions:
Pola Lindenfeld with her sister Eugenia, Photo, courtesy S. Karol Kubicki, Berlin
Teresa Żarnower, c. 1920, Photo from: Andrzej Turowski, Budowniczowie swiata, Cracow 2000.
Other photos:
Nathalie Hazan-Brunet and Ada Ackerman (eds.): Futur antérieur: L’avant-garde et le livre yiddish (1914–1939), Paris 2009.
& Wikipedia Commons, http://www.ecoledeparis.org, http://www.infocenter.co, http://www.e-teatr.pl, http://www.rp.pl, US Holocaust Memorial Museum, http://www.museumoffamilyhistory.com, http://www.jewishgen.org

Full text version with footnotes published in: Lidia Głuchowska, From Transfer to Transgression. Yiddish Avant-Garde – a Network within the Universal Network of the International Movement or a Complementary One? In: Harri Veivo (ed.): Transferts, appriopriations et fonctions de l’avant-garde dans l’Europe intermédiataire et du Nord [Cahiers de la nouvelle Europe, hors serie], Paris 2012, pp. 143-168.
http://www.fabula.org/actualites/harri-veivo-sous-la-dir-de-transferts-appropriations-et-fonctions-de-l-avant-garde-dans-l_52704.php

Also to read: about „Jidyszland” in Polish press

Wieder eine Buchseite auf der Strasse

by Ewa Maria Blog

…am Tag der Deutschen Einheit in Berlin gefunden. Eine Seite auf der Strasse direkt vor meinem Haus liegend. Ich kann nicht umhin, jetzt muss ich einfach all diese aus den Büchren rausgerissenen Seiten IMMER aufheben und entdecken, was für ein Buch es ist. Es ist inzwischen eine Sucht geworden…

Ich bin schon geübt, ich weiss schon, was ich aus dem sorgfältig gelesenem text als Keywords herauspicken muss, um das Buch im Google zu identifizieren. Diesmal schrieb ich die Reihe nach alle Namen, die auf den beiden Seiten auftauchen in die Suchspalte: Travis Amy Leiche David George Frankie Craig. Die Antwort kam prompt:

Craig Morgenstern is a total scaredy cat, even with his reputation as such being well known amongst everyone. But as of late, things are looking up for Craig! He has moved to a new town and even saved a baby from being hurt in a car accident. Everyone is then considering Craig to now be very brave for what he did. Despite him falling off of his bike and nearly getting hit by the careening car. Not to mention, accidentally getting inside of it and managing to stop it. The car slows to a stop in front of his new school on his first day of classes, branding him a hero to the entire student body, save a few skeptical students. The mother of the baby rushes over to thank him, having accidentally left the car for just a moment while the baby was still inside.

Craig’s good fortune continues to escalate even higher! He befriended the cutest girl in school, Amy. Who is very impressed with his bravery. Unfortunately, her best friends Travis and Brad happen to be Craig’s harshest critics. They refuse to be won by the boys charms, even after he saves a bird’s nest. Other random lucky streaks happen to strike Craig also. Such as screaming in horror during a scary movie, which Amy agrees that it is fun to scream along with characters in films.

But jealous of all the attention Craig receives, Travis becomes obsessed with trying to prove that Craig is a scaredy cat. He then talks with a cousin, who happens to know about Scaredy Cat Craig from his previous town/school. So Travis shows up with a jar full of spiders and dares Craig to stick his hand in the jar for five minutes. Craig is goaded on by Amy and does so, only to be bitten so many times that he can’t even remove his swollen hand after five minutes are up. So Amy talks Travis into going double-or-nothing and Craig has to keep his hand submerged twice as long.

Travis pledges to go double or nothing again the following day. The bravery challenge this time will be to kiss a poisonous snake on the lips, but really what one boy does it pluck out a single eyeball of his own and shove it into Craig’s mouth. Craig comes out of this one looking brave by spitting out the eyeball and nobody is really surprised when they find it is a fake gag eyeball. They do not think this is enough to prove how brave Craig is however and Travis reveals that his father works at a funeral parlor. So now the newest bravery test involves Craig sneaking into the funeral home and sitting in a coffin.

But unfortunately for him, the coffin he chooses is occupied. His “friends” egg him on anyways, as a truly brave person would sit in a corpse-filled coffin no problem. The corpse then comes to life and tries to choke Craig, but Craig allows himself to be choked by the “corpse”. This shocks Travis, who had been the corpse in hopes of outing him. But then Amy challenges Travis to let Craig repeat the challenge again the next day. At some point, Craig comes clean with Amy, but Amy just thinks he is not only brave but sweet to not want to take Travis’ money by pretending to be afraid.

Sometime after then, Craig accidentally beats up Brad’s older brother! Once again everyone is at the funeral home when all of the corpses rise and begin to attack! Everyone runs away, but Craig stays to bravely defend those who abandoned him. Proving to them all that he really was brave all along.

It turns out that the corpses were all set up by Craig, with some help from Brad. Who felt bad about how devoted Travis was to proving Craig’s bravery. The zombies were actually Brad’s older brother (the one Craig “beat up”) and his friends. Brad’s brother walks in and apologizes for his friends not being able to make it to the cemetery, which results in Brad racing away to vomit in horror.

It turns out Brad’s brother just said that to get back at Brad! Craig walks home and remarks to the reader on how it turns out he really is brave… even if he is still afraid of the dark.

A Holy Vision

by Ewa Maria Blog

Sorry, Peter, I think, it is a story from the category, what the men think the women want… But interesting 🙂

(c) Peter Wortsman

The nun sat with a tin cup in Penn Station. She sat there silently, clutching the cup in her lap, and stared down at the ground. She never once looked into the faces that belonged to the anonymous hands that dropped coins into her cup. For years I saw her seated at that same spot.
Shoe styles changed from heavy Irish brogues to the flimsier narrow-toed Italian imports. Pennies turned to nickels to dimes, and then—she did not know how old she was, how many years she had been sitting there in that station—then it was the clink of quarters by which she measured time, not clock time—God’s time, she called it. Each clink of a coin marked a celestial second; sixty clinks made a minute; sixty times sixty an hour of eternity. And when she felt the cup grow heavy, she knew it was time to go.
She folded the stool, clasped it under her arm, slipped the cup and its precious contents into a hidden pouch, and joined the crowd of shuffling shoes.
Not that she’d never had the urge to look up.

It was the frenzied click of running high heels on one particular evening that forced her eyes upward. The click of heels and a woman’s shriek: “No, Johnny, don’t!”
The nun pressed her frail body up against a column. It was late. Later than usual. The commuters had already disbursed for the day. She was alone in the station with high heels and Johnny. And from behind the column she watched as a tall lanky man dressed in white chased after a woman in red.
“Stop, Johnny, stop!” the young woman pleaded.
The nun shivered.
She watched as the man caught up with the woman, grabbed her by the back of her dress. Sister Maria shut her eyes and bit her lips as she heard the rip of cloth and the slap of an open palm across a face, and a howl that tore through the surrounding silence.
The man’s footsteps retreated and the nun took all the courage she possessed and stepped out from the shadow of her hiding place. There on the filthy floor of the station lay the woman, shaking and sobbing, her dress split open, her shoes scattered about.
Sister Maria was overcome.
How long had it been since she’d touched or been touched by anyone but God?
She knelt down, lowered her head and kissed the woman’s back. “Oh Holy Mother of God!” she prayed aloud.
The woman stopped weeping. She turned and smiled: “I have been waiting for you, Sister—remove your habit!”
And without hesitation, the nun did as she was told, stripped herself naked and let the sacred garment fall to her feet.
“Now put on this torn red dress!” the woman whispered, kissing the nun on her pale white breast.
“Yes, Mother,” said Sister Maria, her eyes downcast, as she heard the woman slip into her habit.
“You will walk out into the street,” said the Mother of God, “and you will smile at the first man you see. And he will take you to a hotel and kiss your back and bosom. And the tin cup will no longer be large enough to hold the holy offerings.”
–“But what of my shaven head, Mother? Will the man not laugh?”
–“Yes, my daughter, he will laugh and he will call you mad. And he will take care of his lust and leave you lying naked on a strange mattress in a strange room.”
–“But am I not too old for a man’s touch, Mother?”
The Mother of God laughed. Her bosom shook under the black cloth of her habit.
“Jesus!” she cried, and the man in white came running. “Take her, Jesus, my son,” said the Mother of God, “and teach my daughter what it is to be alive before her time comes to die.”
And Jesus led Sister Maria, now dressed in the torn red dress, to a public toilet.
“Lie down!” he commanded.
She felt his hands tear away the remains of the dress. She felt him roughly part her legs. And then she felt a fiery pain and something pierced her there between the legs, something like a giant thorn.
“Jesus! Jesus!” she wailed, as the blood of her womanhood ran down her legs.

The nun heard the clink of a coin in her cup. She heard the click of high heels receding among the shuffling shoes and, as I watched, she shivered for she knew she had had a holy vision.

Jarosław Łukasik, Malarstwo / Malerei / Painting 2017-2018

by Ewa Maria Blog

Iwonie S.

Wakacje i inne przypadki życia ludzkiego

Przedtem malował meble, bezkrwawo pokawałkowane kobiety oraz męskie garnitury bez wypełnienia, teraz zmienił tematykę i światło, teraz jest lato, nawet w nocnym barze jest słonecznie… Japonki na wakacjach, Penelopa na wakacjach… Wakacyjne martwe natury z warzywami, no chyba że…

  

no chyba że…

 

Procol Harum and a whiter shade of pale

by Ewa Maria Blog

I was reading a wonderful book of W. G. Sebald, a German writer which left Germany in early 60. and went to Manchester. He is one of the best writer I ever read in my whole life, better as Marcel Proust. It means something when I say something like that. His book, Die Ausgewanderten / The Emigrants I am reading ever and ever again… It was published in German 1992 and in English 1996. Sebald won with it the Berlin Literature Prize, the Literatur Nord Prize, and the Johannes Bobrowski Medal. Wikipedia says: The Emigrants is largely concerned with memory, trauma, and feelings of foreignness. All the characters in the work are emigrants who have left Germany, mostly Jewish and mostly self-murder. In the 3rd novel in a scene which takes place in a bar in Deauville, he writes.

Die Instrumentalisten waren vier schon etwas gealterte Jünglinge mit lockigem Haar. Sie spielten songs aus den sechziger Jahren, die ich in der Union Bar in Manchester ich weiß nicht wie oft gehört hatte. It is the evening of the day. Hingebungsvoll hauchte die Vokalistin, ein blondes Mädchen mit noch sehr kindlicher Stimme, hinein in das Mikrofon, das sie mit beiden Händen ganz dicht an ihre Lippen hielt. Sie sang in englischer Sprache, aber mit deutlichen französischen Akzent. It is the evening of the day, I sit and watch the children play. Manchmmal, wenn sie die Worte nicht richtig erinnern konnte, ging ihr Gesang in ein wundervolles Summen über. Ich setzte mich auf einen der weißen Schleiflacksessel. Die Musik erfüllte den ganzen Raum. Rosarote Quellwolken bis unter den goldumrankten Plafond. Procol Harum. A whiter shade of pale. Die reine Rührseligkeit.

I needed urgently to listen to it…

Original lyrics were written by Keith Reid

We skipped the light fandango
turned cartwheels ‘cross the floor
I was feeling kinda’ seasick
the crowd called out for more
the room was humming harder
as the ceiling flew away
when we called out for another drink
the waiter brought a tray

and so it was that later as a mirror
told its tale that her face
at first just ghostly turned
a whiter shade of pale

She said: “There is no reason
and the truth is plain to see”
but I wandered through my playing cards
would not let her be one
of sixteen vestal virgins
who were leaving for the coast
and although my eyes were open
they might just as well’ve been closed

and so it was that later
as the miller told his tale
that her face at first just ghostly
turned a whiter shade of pale.

But all that was nothing in comparison to what was written underneath. So I just quote it, reading a book of Sebald and listening ever und ever again to Procol Harum, which I liked so much as I was young, and then forgot them totally till bei reading Sebald the 10th time or so I found them again. Rührselig.

Anyway, did you know it?

could you please stop commenting about it being ‘originally written by’ Johann Sebastian Bach? I tried to find similarities with “Air on G String”, “Ich steh mit einem Fuß im Grabe” (BWV 156), “O Mensch bewein dein’ Sünde groß” (BWV 622), “Sleepers, Wake!” from Bach, but honestly: None of them warrant the claim that the melody is borrowed from any of them. It’s quite a stretch to find similarities, even, between chord-schemes, bass-lines, and the two or three tone-sequences that match with aforementioned pieces by Bach; You could then say the same about ALL pop hits! To claim it borrows ideas from “When a Man Loves a Woman” (Percy Sledge) is like saying every pop-song in C-minor borrows ideas from songs with the same tempo. This composition stands tall on its own. Every song out there is *inspired* by those from other songwriters, you don’t need to brag about your miracle discovery; I’m holding a do-I-give-a-shit-o-meter in my hand, and the needle’s not moving.

Mmmmm… it was published on you tube on 09.09.2007 and since then people listened to it (only here of course) 89.577.793 times (the last  ten times it was me listening to it). 89 millions! It was commented 22 009 times.

I copied only comments from today and yesterday, I finished by a comment from somebody remembering Poland…

Do not forget to listen to the music by reading:

Qué lindo recuerdo, escuchar un tema tan lindo
I first saw this video on a “video jukebox” in a corridor in a mall in Quebec City in about 1967. There was a selection of less than a dozen videos to choose from, and you had to stand at the jukebox to see the film projected onto a small screen within the box. In the meantime, the music was almost drowned out by the passing shoppers and tourists. This was truly groundbreaking at the time.
💙💙💙💙💙💙💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔🌷🌷🌷🌷🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹💕💕💕💕💕💕❤❤❤❤
l’humour avant tout !!!
BROKER FISHER c’est PROCOL !!!
I loveeeeeeeeeeeeeee
Make me feel in peace…
Una de las mejores canciones de todos los tiempos!
When I was a teenager I would leave the radio on all night….this is the only song that would wake me up no matter what time in the wee hours it came on….always gave me goosebumps
MAGNIFICOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Esta é a música mais marcante da minha vida!!!!❤❤❤😘😘😂😂💏💏🌷🌷🌻🌻🌞🌞
прекрасная песня . настальгия 70х. Procol Harum такой музыки больше не будет. Олег Г. 2.07.18.
A whiter shade of pale has been N0 one a long time in 1967. One of the greatest year for music. What a thrill it was on Radio Caroline. How great it was to be in England for sweet Summer of Love..!!!
le batteur n’est pas gay malgré son gros sexe !!il n’a pas de slip !!!
My favorite song!
Sad world
Me encantó, que temas x favor.
dancei muito beijei muito vila Primavera soci da Vila Formosa feras do jd Primavera saudades das minhas namoradas e dos amigos.
The Commitments 😊😊😊🙋🙋🙋🙌🙌🙌
música lindona por demais que nós envolve por inteiro dessa banda inglesa que arrebatou os corações apaixonados em 1.976 na Hippoputumus disco Club em São Paulo, Dancei por demais.
En complacencias en tj,México yo escuchaba esta canción en 1972, mi hermana, Yani,amigas Irma,laya,maria vivíamos en colonia libertad p/a saturnino herrant,serca de iglesia Loreto y tienda maiza, my novio que quise mucho Victor lo recuerdo con estas cansiones,samba pa ti Santana ,color my world,Chicago,have you seen her,chi-lites,my world bee gees, my mama ya se fue en enero 22,2017 en San Diego ella escuchaba complacencias radio de tj, los Freddy’s moonlights,solitarios,los dos oros cros,
London is finished. Sad but thats liberalism for you
Happy days when London the capital city of Great Britain was full of white people
Look at those street scenes! When London was white!
I heard this at a karaoke, now I’m hooked. timeless indeed.
Lovely and haunting….
EVERY PERSON FADES WITH THE PASSAGE OF TIME AND POP MUSICIANS ARE NO EXCEPTION.
Sad that these boys are old men or gone, in what seems like a moment, as are we….
Probably my all time favorite…
En 1971 sonaba esta cancion en Colima Mexico un muchacho la cantaba con su guitarra sin saber Ingles la cantaba espectacular.
arrebentou meu coração…
There is a nice place – SĘPÓLNO KRAJEŃSKIE. First summer song, first young, no strings, love. Just crazy youngsters. Never to be forget!!!

and so on and so on…

Reblogging trees

by Ewa Maria Blog

Les arbres sont des poèmes que la terre écrit sur le ciel.

Kahlil Gibran

 

 

Budda powiedział, że jeśli uczepisz się jakiegoś wyobrażenia i uznasz je za “prawdę”, stracisz szansę poznania prawdy. Nawet kiedy prawda osobiście zapuka do twych drzwi, nie będziesz chciał otworzyć przed nią umysłu. Jeśli więc masz wyobrażenie tego, co jest prawdą albo jakie warunki muszą zostać spełnione, byś był szczęśliwy – bądź ostrożny.

Thích Nhất Hạnh


Drzewo Mahabodhi w Bodhgaya

Budda pod drzewem bodhi.

Reblog(s) and more: women lib and smoking

by Ewa Maria Blog

Well…
That pic was posted in Facebook, with funny and cute and awesome text underneath: Rosa Luxemburg, Simone de Beauvoir, and Emma Goldman on the beach, smoking pipes (1930’s.)

I shared it on my FB wall and my dear friend Esther Schulz-Goldstein wrote as a comment: Ungefähr 30 Jahre später, habe ich als junge Frau im Museumsrestaurant in Tübingen Zigarre geraucht und da zischte ein für mich damals alter Herr am Nebentisch, “eine deutsche Frau raucht nicht”. Ich zischte zurück, “deutsche Männer hätten lieber nicht soviele Menschen umgebracht”.

I was so taken over by this beautiful foto, that I did not notice, it could be a fake and in fact it is, what my two Polish friends – Ula Ptak and Elżbieta Jagiełło – immediately noticed. Sure it is a fake. The authors do not even try to say you it is not. Just look at it:
Emma Goldman 1869-1940
Rosa Luxemburg 1871-1919
Simone de Beauvoir 1908-1986

But obviously I am not alone in my being mistaked. Somebody found out, that that foto with it’s purposely false caption was shared 13,268 times. Well, so… I was the 13,269th one…

But I found the true story about that pic, it was so called WOPS in Mexico:

The Womens’ Pipe Smoking Group affectionately known as the WOPS or Borkum Riffs because of the sweet smells that trail behind them. They meet every early morning of the week and stroll along Olas Altas smoking and discussing shag tobacco. This wonderfully relaxed group sometime mix a blend of prime Moroccan hashish with their fine Borkum Riff fine cut shag from the Netherlands.

There is a waiting list to join these women of the below the knee dress wearing persuasion who want to become involved in this sedate pursuit of strolling and chatting and puffing away on their smooth Calabash Meerschaum pipes like steam locomotives struggling up a hill. The youthful countenances of this group suggest tobacco smoke is good for the complexion and has general health benefits.

Searching for the text above I found another two interesting texts about women and smoking and pipes and now I am rebbloging them for you: 

Women and Pipes

By Beth Maxwell Boyle

‘The guitar player’ by David Rijckaert III

By 1615 in England, the first consignments of Virginia tobacco for pipe smoking had arrived and some 7,000 shops in London sold tobacco .

Women Pipe smokers are rare today but female smoking was very popular in the 17th and 18th centuries. Respectable women were commonly seen smoking pipes in public. Many famous paintings exist of noble women of the period drinking in the smoke from a clay pipe. The middle classes were eager to enjoy this new pastime as well. In the Elizabethan times clays were quite delicate with graceful thin bowls and long stems. The Dutch redesigned these clays by enlarging the bowl and lengthened the stem.

Dutch, French and English women all enjoyed the “Indian Weed”. For centuries the favorite way of enjoying tobacco was to smoke it in clay pipes. As early as about 1575 pipes were being made in England, but by the 17th century Holland had become the dominant center for the manufacture of clay pipes. Clays were made in many other European countries at this time, as well. Such pipes were usually white, with small bowls and long stems. They were extremely fragile and did not last long. However, by the 1850s, when pipe smoking in general became associated with the working class, female smoking began to decline, at least in public. The acceptance of female smokers seemed to vary between regions at this time. It is believed that many women kept their old habits. It is more than likely it was done in secret while they outwardly treated the act as a disgrace.’

Marquise de Pompadour, the favorite mistress of Louis XV, was a passionate smoker and owned more than three hundred pipes!

In rural areas such as the Highlands of Scotland and in Ireland the women smoked without shame. Women in the Hebrides smoked well into the 1930s due to the cultural isolation just as Appalachian women in the US did. It was seen as a very crude and backwards habit by most of polite society but little changes in any society without contact with urban centers. Today a women smoking a pipe draws immediate notice and sometimes ridicule.

For more women pipes look HERE

And another text I just have to reblog:

I think I need to start smoking: or how to be an artist without a Gauloises hanging from your mouth.

Posted by Lisa Thatcher on January 19, 2012

Simone de Beauvoir – avec Gauloises.

I was rather disturbed to find out recently that some folk I admire are giving up smoking.

I was startled to say the least. No matter what anyone says, smoking remains the hallmark of cool. It’s as synonymous with art as booze, and as chic as any Euro fantasy.

Besides my obvious initial concerns (the loss of revenue for large faceless corporations and a drop in “cool” for those I admire) which are the same I think we all have when a dear one suggests they want to give up smoking, I had some broader concerns after giving the issue some thought.

Clarice Lispector. Smoking.

What about the health care professionals who are kept in a job because they have to care for the ill as a result of smoking all their life? (approx 48 billion a year is spent in smoking related health problems – approximately $11.00 of the cost of your cigarettes goes to health care professionals and their industries). The local tabac merchant, and all the other smaller stores that make the bulk of their revenue from cigarette sales. What of the poor governments loss of revenue (approximately $4 per pack) the drop of approximately 12.4 billion dollars from the advertising industry in the US alone (I think they’d notice this decrease, don’t you?) not to mention the drop in work for the legal industry. Tobacco is grown in 21 states of the United States, a leading producer of tobacco along with China and India. Think of all those farms and farmers, all those small communities kept alive – schools, libraries and hospitals because the local farmers grow tobacco.

Margurite Duras and Michelangelo Antonioni. Both Smoking.

And finally, the most poignant argument of all – almost everyone in Paris smokes.

Or is that all just bullshit?

If existence precedes essence, then I need to smoke in order to ‘be’ the writer I want to be. I know how the writer I want to be appears, because it has been determined (in essence preceding existence) by the writers I most want to emulate. Above you can see images of them smoking in the years before I took to the passion of writing. If I am determined by what surrounds me (according to Spinoza) the pressure to give up smoking is in direct confrontation with my experience of free will. It is in the world being a mirror of my free will that I am obliged to react. To overtake myself. The question here, is what self am I overtaking? Am I oppressed by my desire to give up cigarettes or my desire to smoke them in the first place?

Like Sartre’s waiter, I need to ‘play’ at being a writer until whatever (mysterious) criterion has been fulfilled that will have my inner self belive I am a writer. Scoff if you will, but this is a small charade that works for me. I had a blissful afternoon of writing today, in an atmosphere conducive to writing. Sometimes it is my desk and sometimes I will go mad if I have to look at my desk any longer and sometimes I need to play at being a writer just to feel its direction on my skin for the smallest while. Existence is defined by my concrete interactions with the world. Is it completely absurd that writers usually drink and smoke to excess? Of course it is – but again (if you adhere to the tenants of existentialism) that absurdism gives the action more meaning and puts us in touch with the basic humanity of existence.

Then, of course, we get into the nature of the cigarette itself. Should we roll our own? Can I still be an artist if the Gauloises are replaced by B & H extra mild?

And here comes the unpalatable truth. I have actually tried to smoke at several points in my life, and always given up in bitter disappointment, because I just can’t do it. I tend to be a very healthy person. The slightest upset in health regime sits poorly with me. I’ve never been able to smoke properly. I get too sick. For the most part, I’ve had to hang out with artists who do smoke, drinking in the second-hand, and wishing my little healthy body could tolerate it a little more hard-core.

And perhaps at the end of the day that is the source of my disappointment. Those around me giving up smoking results in me giving up the possibility of smoking. If I don’t see it, I wont remember it and horror of all horrors – I wont’ miss it. Perhaps my primal cry is more about the final shedding of the connection I have with the old artist image that fed me for so long. Just as I know the day of the depressed artist is over, perhaps the day of the drinking, smoking artist is over also.