Interjections from the Art Department

Still In Silence

Image | Posted on by Christine

A Little Poem on Still-life With A Teapot

All those apples and apricots, oranges, pears –
I don’t really know if they are.
I am looking at silence.

The line of beauty does not even whisper.

Somebody leans on my shoulder:
“T’was me, I came along accidentally and took a bite.”
Who is he? Must be Adam, smiling at an apple.

 

 

(1) A healthy-looking man from the countryside

Posted on by Christine

He is tall and broad in his shoulders. He looks just a little bit too heavy and, yes, he is slow. That’s what you have already expected when he was walking towards you. He is slow in speech, in vision and in hearing alike. He has knitted his thinking into the outside world and it takes him much time to follow his own complicated patterns. That knitting business happened a long, long time ago, probably when he was still a boy. Everything had been so flat, that’s what he remembers about being a small child. But after he had started weaving his words into the flatness next to him everything became light and friendly and comprehensible. For ever and ever, if he only stuck to it. All that he has forgotten and so he doesn’t realize that his gazing at you is meaningless. That he is unable to understand by using his senses. Instead he needs endless chain molecules of words to decipher life around him. While talking to you he actually reads from a kind of woven carpet – tales from Arabian nights in chemical codes.

A single voice and a body plus high-pitch and a mouth plus wood and a shadow –  must be Rosa in the living room. Oh, Rosa, you’ve brought flowers, ah, yellow tulips, my favourites in April. And I can see, they aren’t from those endless rows of greenhouses in the Netherlands, they are from here, from the countryside where we live. Have I told you about the article on cultivating tulips in the Netherlands? I am all against greenhouses, you know that, but in the countryside it’s different. I’m glad we have some farming left so that we can support our local dealers. You are right, I shouldn’t talk like the government does. But it’s true what the mayor says, we do live in a closely-knit, eh, human, let’s say, eco-system, together with the local farmers, and their wives. And of course, there’s more to it than producing and selling and buying and, eh, vice versa, year after year. It’s tradition and it’s future, and it all happens at the same time, Rosa. Shouldn’t you take the white porcelain vase instead of the glass vase? The cylindrical form looks somewhat industrial, doesn’t it? Thank you for the beauty in my life, Rosa. I see, it’s already time for dinner.

But he doesn’t see, he’s only using words.

Confidential Flowerpot Convention

Posted on by Christine

A confidential flowerpot convention on Easter Monday could settle all disputes between the  flowerpot cohabitants and holier-than-thou rabbit. Although a full-length manuscript of rabbit’s lectures in the flowerpot could not be located, he took an unequivocal stand on some quotations which had been  circulating since Easter Sunday and finally apologized in an acceptable manner. In the end everybody agreed that Easter Holidays had been pleasant and restful. The weather had been splendid with long hours of brilliant sunshine so that, all in all, one had every reason to end Easter in a happy mood.

The stumbling block to the preceding annoyance seemed to have been rabbit’s profoundly unjust way of addressing the flowerpot community in his annual Easter Lectures which he had actually announced as strictly botanical – without any bias toward wild flowers or cultivars. But then holier-than-thou rabbit had opened his speech with: “Distinguished President Hyacinthus, my esteemed Ladies Bellis Perennis and highly respected Nemesia Strumosa ‘Kumquat’! Be greeted, thou splendid Tulipan in the neighboring flowerpot! Dear group of half-faded Pseudo-Narcissuses right here under my nose!”

Addressing the daffodils as “half-faded” and  “Pseudo-Narcissuses”  obviously had a degrading twist and amputated the correct term ‘Narcissus pseudonarcissus’ into a lemur-like botanical existence. Rabbit’s words were – of course – taken as an outright offense by the daffodils. This was even more so the case when in the further run of his speech holier-than-thou rabbit maintained that the daffodils had not even been grown in native grounds as e.g. Wales which, as they all knew, had the wild daffodil as its national emblem. No, the bulbs had been re-imported from the Falklands! He additionally pointed out that the Falklands had recently started cultivating the so-called Welsh Wild Daffodils or Triple W and selling the cultivars back to  Wales. Rabbit’s cruel remarks caused a great deal of fuss and disquiet in the audience which ended in complete uproar when he claimed that according to Lady Wilkinson’s classification of weeds and wild flowers from 1858 the Falkland N.pseudonarcissus should be categorized as weed!

After some wavering back and forth, however, rabbit apologized for his rudeness and his botanical misjudgement calling it “an unintentional faux-pas”. He addressed N.pseudonarcissus as his “beloved golden daffodils”, recited Wordsworth with great momentum and appeared misty-eyed  when the daffodils tossed their heads in forgiveness into his direction. He promised to post some lines from the Wordsworth poem and not to mention the Falklands ever again.

“I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.”
Flowerpot With Daffodils

Flowerpot With Daffodils

seasons

Rabbit’s Activities in Flowerpots

Aside | Posted on by Christine

Announcement

People are taken aback by rabbit’s activities in a flowerpot on Easter Sunday. They strongly demand to be informed about the contents of his lectures. I’ll try my very best to get hold of the paper and do hope that rabbit’s lecture will soon be publicized on theses pages. I’m afraid though, that daffodil is unwilling to check against delivery so that there will be open questions anyway. C.

Looking At Clouds

Posted on by Christine

Every day I look at clouds. They sail into sight like birds but they don’t fly. They move freely and still they cannot sit, not even a brief moment. Sometimes, they will leave a deep shadow and make me shiver. They belong to earth, yet they are in the sky. When the sky is blue and without a cloud I feel somewhat uneasy. The horizon is too far and the sky seems empty. A cloudless sky looks as if nature were banished from the universe. On other days, when everything is grey in grey and all the clouds available have given up their singular existence to form a heavy bed cover for the world I rather stay indoors and use the car if I have to leave the house. So that there is a three-dimensional shelter against the  flatness of grey. Clouds well up from somewhere, they appear in uncountable numbers and forms at all times. Suddenly they arise from the forest or billow up behind the high rises in the distance. Nothing is as changeable as a cloud but if you get near it dissolves into water and mist.

Single Cloud

 

Today, voluminous spring clouds float along  and  I would like to trust them some words to carry along, let’s say, to a friend some hundred miles to the East. But those clouds won’t take my messages, they move on wordlessly.