Throw it Back, Quick, We're Already Over Quota!

 

Having posted this, yesterday, I'm looking at the picture and thinking a little more what a disturbing image it is. I've always liked sea pictures, and been fascinated by the way in which painters portray water, but am also fascinated by the stories told in paintings.
Semiotics again, the undercurrents, the unstated, the stories not voiced.
There's no way we now, in our time can read this painting as the viewer of the painter's time did.

The painting is "The Sea Maiden" by James Herbert Draper.

'A song of drag-nets hauled across thwart seas,
And plucked up with rent sides, and caught therein
A strange-haired woman with sad singing lips'

(from Chastelard, by Swinburne.)

There was,  at the time, something of a fascination with mermaids and sirens, amongst painters, and Draper painted a number of paintings of mermaids, sirens, water-nymphs.
We're in the late Victorian era, 1894, when this painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy.
In the era, whilst ladies were buttoned and covered, chin to toe, the market for classical or fantasy nudes was huge. Households where man and wife possibly never saw each other naked,  proudly displayed pictures like this, and bronze nudes, which often became strangely shiny where hands caressed.

The girl in the picture is a strangely amalgamated young lady, her body is that of  a Miss Bowry, but the face is that of Ethel Warwick. I can't be sure, but I wonder if that's the Ethel Warwick whose portrait is in the National Portrait Gallery in London, she who became an acclaimed actress, and a feted beauty.

The men in the boat? Luigi De Luca, Domenico Mancini, Angelo Colarossi and others. They were italians, from Rome, professional artist's models, and this group of ruffians appear in the works of many artists of the era

The painting, I would describe as disturbing, though I joked about it. We see the hunters and the hunted, our mermaid is fearful of those reaching hands, the men rapacious and lustful, the next few  minutes bode ill for all.
I think it's pretty clear they're not about to wrap her in a warm blanket and give her a cup of hot cocoa.
The cost to all will be high.
A mermaid is immortal, but has no soul, until she couples with a human male. Yet her embrace is fatal to men, her kiss contains poison. Men are entranced by her, and in that trance lies their doom.  So she, in the near future, will be in possession of a fishing boat, the men, one by one, will meet their fate and slip, senseless, beneath the waves.
How, I wonder will it play out? She can not return to the sea, for she will be pregnant, and must have her child upon the land, can she sail the boat? Speak the language of humans? Because she must come ashore, find a home, be a human  woman.
It may be, in the future, posing perhaps as a shipwreck victim cast ashore, speaking no english, she'll meet someone, start a new life, no longer toxic to her lover, she'll raise children, but some stormy night, she'll feel the pull of the tides, a day will come when she walks into the breakers, and swims again, back, far away, back to her sisters.

Oh: by the way, if you wanted to own this painting? it would have cost you £937,250 ($1,383,318) at Christies, London, in June 2010.

Serious News

 

In Ilkley this probably classes as excitement. There's probably an awning in Brook St. with stripes that are a quarter inch too wide....

Ideas Before Their Time

And then, it seems a repost of one from wayback might be in order...

The First Car in Shipley.

What can I say?
Mr Brooks was obviously the coolest guy around.

Loopy as a loopy thing, but cool with it.

One very small horsepower.

No shit.

Forgetfulness

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

Billy Collins

Pestilential Pigeon

Where Have I Been Recently?

Well, it's a long story.

This lady's been taking up a lot of my time. Just a short while after this picture was taken, she got married, and her second child just happened to be me.  As a child, I suffered a lot from severe asthma and eczema, and she had more than her share of sleepless nights, hospital visits, nursing, and worry. Now it's my turn to repay some of that debt.
This year has been difficult. Bit by bit, time is stealing her memory. Clarity comes and goes, some days she's sharp as a tack, doing the crossword, telling me stories of people long gone, and it's all there and fluent, other days, she'll repeat several times what she's just told me.

This year, this year might be the year in which I say, "I lost my mother". The memory thing seems to have started over the last winter. Then there was/is the lump.  The lump. In her neck. Scans, mri, ct, x-rays, biopsies... I've been taking time out of work to take her on hospital visits, luckily, my employers are very understanding.
This week, we finally got the diagnosis, Hodgkins Lymphoma (it's causing trouble in her spleen too). On friday, she started chemotherapy.

Then there are balance problems. A couple or three weeks ago, I got a call at work, from my sister, who lives about three hours away, that my mother'd called her to say she'd had a fall, had been helped by a passer-by, taken home, but was in pain and seemed confused.  I left work early, got the doctor to see her. No bones broken, just lots of bruises.

This week she started the chemo, took a double dose of some of her drugs because she couldn't remember .... So now we've had to get a visiting nurse to come, every morning, to be sure she takes the right ones in the right amounts. I go there every day, make her a meal, make sure she's eating and drinking regularly. 

Some days she's up, positive, full of ideas and plans, other days, she's had enough. Wants not to be here any more.

It's not easy, I'm not any sort of expert at being a nurse. But then nor was she, in those years when she would sit by my bed through the night.

It's my turn now.

Comment Spam.

I've been getting some odd comments, on older posts, they're like comment-spam, but seem not to contain links of any sort. The poster is anonymous, obviously english is not anon's first language, and usually the comment seems to have little relevance to the post.
Consequently, I've enabled moderation for older posts, and I'm reporting as spam, then erasing anything that doesn't look like a bona-fide comment.
I like people to identify themselves in some way, comments made as "Anonymous" are likely to be summarily executed.