Notes From A NonExistent Himalayan Expedition

So these are the Himalayas.
Mountains racing to the moon.
The moment of their start recorded
on the startling, ripped canvas of the sky.
Holes punched in a desert of clouds.
Thrust into nothing.
Echo--a white mute.
Quiet.
.
Yeti, down there we've got Wednesday,
bread and alphabets.
Two times two is four.
Roses are red there,
and violets are blue.
.
Yeti, crime is not all
we're up to down there.
Yeti, not every sentence there
means death.
.
We've inherited hope--
the gift of forgetting.
You'll see how we give
birth among the ruins.
.
Yeti, we've got Shakespeare there.
Yeti, we play solitaire
and violin. At nightfall,
we turn lights on, Yeti.
.
Up here it's neither moon nor earth.
Tears freeze.
Oh Yeti, semi-moonman,
turn back, think again!
.
I called this to the Yeti
inside four walls of avalanche,
stomping my feet for warmth
on the everlasting
snow.
.
--Poem by Wislawa Szymborska (Polish)
and the winner of the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1996. From her volume
of collected poems, View With A Grain
Of Sand

Latest Quotation: Attributed To Its Author Below

In The Temple

In the temple of science are many mansions --- and various indeed are they that dwell therein and the motives that have led them there.

Many take to science out of a joyful sense of superior intellectual power; science is their own special sport to which they look for vivid experience and the satisfaction of ambition; many others are to be found in the temple who have offered the products of their brains on this altar for purely utilitarian purposes. Were an angel of the Lord to come and drive all the people belonging to these two categories out of the temple, it would be noticeably emptier but there would still be some men of both present and past times left inside --- If the types we have just expelled were the only types there were, the temple would never have existed any more than one can have a wood consisting of nothing but creepers --- those who have found favor with the angel --- are somewhat odd, uncommunicative, solitary fellows, really less like each other than the hosts of the rejected.

What has brought them to the temple --- no single answer will cover --- escape from everyday life, with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one's own shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from his noisy cramped surroundings into the silence of the high mountains where the eye ranges freely through the still pure air and fondly traces out the restful contours apparently built for eternity.

-From a 1918 speech by a young German scientist named Albert Einstein

An Excerpt from "The Elegance of the Hedgehog"

The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery. A best-seller published by Europa editions. Chapter 11 Existence Without Duration

What is the purpose of Art? To give us the brief, dazzling illusion of the camellia, carving from time an emotional aperture that cannot be reduced to animal logic. How is Art born? It is begotten in the mind's ability to sculpt the sensorial domain. What does Art do for us? It gives shape to our emotions, makes them visible and, in so doing, places a seal of eternity upon them, a seal representing all those works that, by means of a particular form, have incarnated the universal nature of human emotions.

The seal of eternity . . . What absent world does our heart intuit when we see these dishes and cups, these carpets and glasses? Beyond the frame of the painting there is, no doubt, the tumullt and boredom of everyday life---itself an unceasing and futile pursuit, consumed by projects; but within the frame lies the plenitude of a suspended moment, stolen from time, rescued from human longing. Human longing! We cannot cease desiring, and this is our glory, and our doom. Desire! It carries us and crucifies us, delivers us every new day to a battlefield where, on the eve, the battle was lost; but in sunlight does it not look like a territory ripe for conquest, a place where---even though tomorrow we will die---we can build empires doomed to fade to dust, as if the knowledge we have of their imminent fall had absolutely no effect on our eagerness to build them now? We are filled with the energy of constantly wanting that which we cannot have, we are abandoned at dawn on a field littered with corpses, we are transported until our death by projects that are no sooner completed than they must be renewed. Yet how exhausting it is to be constantly desiring . . . We soon aspire to pleasure without the quest, to a blissful state without beginning or end, where beauty would no longer be an aim or a project but the very proof of our nature. And that state is Art. This table---did I have to set it? Must I have covet this repast in order to see it? Somewhere, elsewhere, someone wanted that meal, someone aspired to that mineral transparency and sought the pleasure offered by the salt, silky caress of a lemony oyster on his tongue. This was but one project of a hundred yet unhatched, leading to a thousand more, the intention to prepare and savor a banquet of shellfish---someone else's project, in fact, that existed in order for the painting to come to life.

But when we gaze at a still life, when---even though we did not pursue it---we delight in its beauty, a beauty borne away by the magnified and immoble figuration of things, we find pleasure in the fact that there was no need for longing, we may contemplate something we need not want, may cherish something we need not desire. So this still lilfe, because it embodies a beauty that speaks to our desire but was given birth by someone else's desire, because it cossets our pleasure without in any way being part of our own projects, because it is offered to us without requiring the effort of desiring on our part: this still life incarnates the quuintessence of Art, the certainty of timelessness. In the scene before our eyes---silent, without life or motion---a time exempt of projects is incarnated, perfection purloined from duration and its weary greed---pleasure without desire, existence without duration, beauty without will.

For art is emotion without desire.

Permission to Come Aboard?

Good afternoon. It'a pleasure to join with the Docent Council members and staff to support and assist in the things that the Haggin Museum does. I'll look forward to your posted items and I'll try to follow Janet's example of interesting offerings. Talk to you soon.