Garden of Words

Editing Suite for @uncharted.passions on instagram

[petrodragonicapocalypse]

Blood and Sand / Milk And Endless Waters (song lyric illustration)

This is a series of paintings that me and my partner @bennyfourtwenny have been working on, based on the lyrics to "Blood And Sand / Milk And Endless Waters" by All Them Witches. They closed the set with this song when we saw them live in October and I think my soul left my body for a bit, it was THAT good. Lacking the ability to transport my tumblr followers back in time to that moment, I would highly reccomend giving All Them Witches a listen.

[uncharted-passions]

All-seeing eye of God

Pack up your tents to travel

Through lonely countryside

Lay down your hammers, brother

Through open passageways

I felt my breath grow shallow

Lend me a voice, oh God,

To scream and shout and bellow

Chew up your love, then swallow

- All Them Witches

[uncharted-passions]

Are there lyrics more raw and soul-burning than "Lend me a voice, oh God, to scream and shout and bellow, chew up your love, then swallow"???

[uncharted-passions]

This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. 

They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.

- C.S. Lewis, On Living in an Atomic Age (1948) in Present Concerns: Journalistic Essays

[uncharted-passions]

I hear “The words hung above / But never would form / Like a cry at the final / Breath that is drawn / Remember me, love / When I'm reborn / As the shrike to your sharp / And glorious thorn” and return to my home inside the trees to sleep until the end of the world.

[uncharted-passions]

How beautiful we are, with all the stars glistening in our eyes, how we can write "I loved you once - perhaps I should exclaim" and still leave our four walls to explore the Great Unknown, how the sky paints itself purple and red and the hand we hold is soft and grasps us back, how there is such a piece as Claire de Lune out in the world and it melts into Black Swan and explodes into a Caprice, how when you put your hands on the head of your best friend, it's like opening the shutters towards the brightest sunlight you ever felt.

How beautiful we are and how we live to bear witness and give birth to the art that outlives us.

[uncharted-passions]

Well, do you know what I hope for, once I allow myself to begin to hope? It is that the family will be for you what nature, the clods of earth, the grass, the yellow wheat, the peasant, are for me, in other words, that you find in your love for people something not only to work for, but to comfort and restore you when there is a need. So, I beg you not to let yourself get too exhausted by business, but to take good care of yourselves, both of you - perhaps there will still be some good in the not too distant future.

- Vincent writing to Theo, after the latter's marriage and honeymoon, from The Letters of Van Gogh

[humansoflatecapitalism]

[theladyonfire]

Generate questions to yourself when you think over a certain thing. Because questions always deepen your level of understanding and introspecting but answers mostly overstate the existing. It is through questions that evolution occurs, every question may generate unfoldment and just like that every unfoldment may create a shift.

—Tiyasha Chaudhury

[uncharted-passions]

But I cannot help thinking that the best way of knowing God is to love many things. Love this friend, this person, this thing, whatever you like, and you will be on the right road to understanding Him better, that is what I keep telling myself. But you must love with a sublime, genuine, profound sympathy, with devotion, with intelligence, and you must try all the time to understand Him more, better and yet more. That will lead to God, that will lead to an unshakeable faith.

- The Letters of Van Gogh

[uncharted-passions]

You cannot always tell what keeps you confined, what immures you, what seems to bury you, and yet you can feel those elusive bars, railings, walls. Is all this illusion, imagination? I don't think so. And then one asks: my God, will it be for long, will it be for ever, will it be for eternity?

- The Letters of Van Gogh

[uncharted-passions]

The world concerns me only in so far as I owe it a certain debt and duty, so to speak, because I have walked this earth for 30 years, and out of gratitude would like to leave some memento in the form of drawings and paintings - not made to please this school or that, but to express a genuine human feeling. So that work is my aim - and when one concentrates on this notion, everything one does is simplified, in that it isn't muddled but has a single objective.

- The Letters of Van Gogh

[uncharted-passions]

On Mary Somerville, the first female member of the Royal Astronomical Society and an incredible polymath

The commonly used term up to that point - "man of science", clearly couldn't apply to a woman, nor to what Whewell considered "the peculiar illumination" of the female mind: the ability to synthesize ideas and connect seemingly disparate disciplines into a clear lens on reality. [...]

[Whewell] recognized in Somerville the uncommon achievement of the finest science writers of every generation - first explaining the abstract ideas of the science at hand, then elucidating their connection to other abstract ideas and to the real world, finally enchanting the reader with truth of a higher order illuminated by this kaleidoscopic perspective, truth that radiates not mere information, but a poetry of understanding, Thoreau's "knowledge useful in a higher sense".

- Figuring, by Maria Popova

[uncharted-passions]

I loved you once, perhaps I should exclaim

My love still lingers deep within my core

But I do not want to cause you any pain,

So grieve thee not for me a moment more.

Silently and hopelessly I loved you

Tormented, I was too jealous and too shy

May God provide another who will love you

Just as gently and as fervently as I.

- I loved you once, by Aleksandr Puskin

[uncharted-passions]

Mozart being the ultimate Ling Ling prodigy

In 1770, Mozart, on tour with his father in Italy, gave an exhibition (for it was an exhibition rather than a concert, even though it was "reviewed") at the Reale Accademia in Mantua. At the Accademia there were several professional musicians, and they prepared the program. First, one of the boy's symphonies was played. Then he was soloist in a piano concerto that he had to read at sight from manuscript. Then he was supplied with a solo sonata which he not only had to read at sight but also supply with variations; and, that done, he had to transpose the work to another key. Then he had to compose an aria on the spot, to words given him, sing it himself and accompany himself on the clavier. Following this, the concertmaster of the orchestra gave Mozart a theme, and Mozart had to improvise a sonata from it. Then he had to improvise a strict fugue. Then he had to play the violin in a trio. Finally he conducted, from the clavier, one of his own symphonies. Mozart was fourteen years old at the time.

- The Great Pianists, by Harold Schonberg

[uncharted-passions]

She was no longer able to cope with all that her sister reminded her of. She'd been unable to forgive her for soaring alone over a boundary she herself could never bring herself to cross, unable to forgive that magnificent irresponsibility that had enabled Yeong-hye to shuck off social constraints and leave her behind, still a prisoner. And before Yeong-hye had broken those bars, she'd never even known they were there.

- The Vegetarian, by Han Kang

[uncharted-passions]

This audience considered itself highly sophisticated. Indeed, it was, and also it was shallow. In music it demanded gaiety and grace. It did not want to think. Rather, it wanted to be charmed. Charles Burney, one of the first of the great music historians and a spokesman for his age, expressed the need when he called for music that offered with clearness and propriety "whatever is graceful, elegant and tender," rather than music expressive of "complicated misery and the tempestuous fury of unbridled passions."

- The Great Pianists, by Harold C. Shonberg