The Lovers’ Chronicle 10 April – pictures – art & verse by Æ – art by Alfred Kubin – The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Dear Zazie,

Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag.

Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

the great dream…
-This was an easy choice for the Dream Goddess;
she has placed them, he and the beautiful redhead,
at a new private estate on Long Island, She has attired
both of them in the the latest Jazz Age fashions-
look at you, a flapper
And check out your hat and suit, she says
love it, wonder if we can take with
Do you know where we are
i believe in one of the Eggs, West or East,
i could never keep them straight
Is that Tom and Daisy, she asks
yes and here comes Nick and Gatsby
Good thing we can’t get liver damage
from a dream, if we’re going to be
hanging out with this crowd
right, hey i think this is the part
where they all go to The Plaza, and look,
how convenient, a 1922 Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost
Oh can I drive, she asks
of course, good thing it is black and not yellow
Yes, we don’t want the Death Car
when we get to the city, lets ditch them
and find a speakeasy 
Absolutely, too much drama
and no point in gittin’ shot, even in a dream
Hey, picture this, us in the roaring twenties 
we can picture us anytime, anywhere 

© copyright 2024 mac tag/cowboycoleridge all rights reserved

that is yet another way
of lookin’ at all this verse
“Every one tells a story don’t it”
yes they do
from the High Plains
to Avondale and Peachtree
“From Beverly Beach to Nashville”
from the High to the Brooklyn
“From your daily chronicles”
but most important,
the pictures of us
tellin’ our story

© copyright 2023 mac tag/cowboycoleridge all rights reserved

oh so many come to mind; from the past to the present, the past ruled by the High Plains and many missteps, some worse than others, the worst the ones repeated because i chased what could not be caught; the present all about us the places we have been and to the future of what will be

© copyright 2022.2023 mac tag/cowboycoleridge all rights reserved

that worth havin’
as the tale is told

all the morn within me
a rhyme, in and out
of time, the vision lights
round the sanctuary sought,
whispers visit, in dreams
we are one and just findin’
for beauty follows along
seek thee for a song
i to lose myself in thee

© copyright 2021 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

Pale Love, Pale Rider

how much do you ask

look around
there just within’ reach

believe in a future
e’en though
it has always eluded

because tomorrow
we will create more,
stretch our dreams farther

and one fine mornin’…

so, carry on,
against the odds,
ceaselessly
into what may come

© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

when you make
a wish tonight…

far up the sunset
the last light dances
over the high plains

light grows faint, silent
and still we are, unheeded
star on star it comes

our communion
completes
the view
only our eyes can see

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

see…
twilight spreads
over the high plains
stars begin their dance
across the big open sky
nothin’ but the wind
and the coyotes howl
for company

hard to imagine out here
a higher beauty
except of course
the pictures of you
that play out
in this wanderers dreams

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

pictures
beginnin’
to break up
blown away
the wind is pullin’
ever so gently

the idea
of without
as the end
somewhat harder
than before
wonder why

beyond all that
amazin’ and marvelous
yes, but only if you have it
and i do not have it
the pictures are fadin’

© copyright 2016 Mac Tag all rights reserved

An innocent
touch. Just fingers
touchin’ fingers
briefly. So tell
me; why does that
moment have such
a hold on me

© copyright 2015 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

Who was that beautiful woman
dancin’ through my dreams
last night, kissin’ me
and teasin’ me?
Please tell me

© copyright 2014 Mac Tag all rights reserved

Today is the birthday of George William Russell (County Armagh, Ireland 10 April 1867 – 17 July 1935 Bournemouth, England) who wrote with the pseudonym Æ (sometimes written AE or A.E.); writer, editor, critic, poet, artistic painter and Irish nationalist.  He was also a writer on mysticism, and a central personage in the group of devotees of theosophy which met in Dublin for many years.

In 1898, he married Violet North.  Frank O’Connor, who was a close friend of Russell in their later years, remarked that his family life was something of a mystery even to those who knew him best: O’Connor noticed that he never spoke about his wife and seemed to be at odds with his sons.  While his marriage was rumoured to be unhappy, all his friends agreed that Violet’s death in 1932 was a great blow to Russell.

Gallery

Figures by a Moonlit Sea

Verse

Far up the dim twilight fluttered
Moth-wings of vapour and flame:
The lights danced over the mountains,
Star after star they came.

The lights grew thicker unheeded,
For silent and still were we;
Our hearts were drunk with a beauty
Our eyes could never see.

• “The Unknown God” (1913)

Let thy young wanderer dream on:
Call him not home.
A door opens, a breath a voice
From the ancient room,
Speaks to him now. Be it dark or bright
He is knit with his doom.

• “Germinal” in Vale and Other Poems (1931)

I thought, beloved, to have brought to you
A gift of quietness and ease and peace,
Cooling your brow as with the mystic dew
Dropping from twilight trees.
Homeward I go not yet; the darkness grows;
Not mine the voice to still with peace divine:
From the first fount the stream of quiet flows
Through other hearts than mine.
Yet of my night I give to you the stars,
And of my sorrow here the sweetest gains,
And out of hell, beyond its iron bars,
My scorn of all its pains.

The great deep thrills for through it everywhere
The breath of beauty blows.

A Vision of Beauty

• Where we sat at dawn together, while the star-rich heavens shifted,
  We were weaving dreams in silence, suddenly the veil was lifted.
  By a hand of fire awakened, in a moment caught and led
  Upward to the wondrous vision: through the star-mists overhead
  Flare and flaunt the monstrous highlands; on the sapphire coast of night
  Fall the ghostly froth and fringes of the ocean of the light.
• We and it and all together flashing through the starry spaces
  In a tempest dream of beauty lighting up the place of places.
  Half our eyes behold the glory: half within the spirit’s glow
  Echoes of the noiseless revels and the will of beauty go.
  By a hand of fire uplifted—to her star-strewn palace brought,
  To the mystic heart of beauty and the secret of her thought:
• Here the wild will woke within her lighting up her flying dreams,
  Round and round the planets whirling break in woods and flowers and streams,
  And the winds are shaken from them as the leaves from off the rose,
  And the feet of earth go dancing in the way that beauty goes,
  And the souls of earth are kindled by the incense of her breath
  As her light alternate lures them through the gates of birth and death.
• O’er the fields of space together following her flying traces,
  In a radiant tumult thronging, suns and stars and myriad races
  Mount the spirit spires of beauty, reaching onward to the day
  When the Shepherd of the Ages draws his misty hordes away
  Through the glimmering deeps to silence, and within the awful fold
  Life and joy and love forever vanish as a tale is told,
  Lost within the mother’s being. So the vision flamed and fled,
  And before the glory fallen every other dream lay dead.

 Alter Ego

• All the morn a spirit gay
  Breathes within my heart a rhyme,
  ‘Tis but hide and seek we play
  In and out the courts of Time.
• Where the ring of twilight gleams
  Round the sanctuary wrought,
  Whispers haunt me — in my dreams
  We are one yet know it not.
  Some for beauty follow long
  Flying traces; some there be
  Seek thee only for a song:
  I to lose myself in thee.

A Woman’s Voice

• When the lips I breathed upon
  Asked for such love as equals claim
  I looked where all the stars were gone
  Burned in the day’s immortal flame.
  “Come thou like yon great dawn to me
  From darkness vanquished, battles done:
  Flame unto flame shall flow and be
  Within thy heart and mine as one.“

Today is the birthday of Alfred Kubin (Alfred Leopold Isidor Kubin; Leitmeritz, Bohemia, Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Litoměřice); 10 April 1877 – 20 August 1959 Zwickledt near Wernstein am Inn, Austria); printmaker, illustrator, and occasional writer. Kubin is considered an important representative of Symbolism and Expressionism.

Kubin is noted for dark, spectral, symbolic fantasies, often assembled into thematic series of drawings. Like Oskar Kokoschka and Albert Paris Gütersloh, Kubin had both artistic and literary talent. He illustrated works of Edgar Allan Poe, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Fyodor Dostoevsky, among others. Kubin also illustrated the German fantasy magazine Der Orchideengarten.

From 1906 until his death, he lived a withdrawn life in a Manor-House on a 12th-century estate in Zwickledt, Upper Austria.  In 1938, at the Anschluss of Austria and Nazi Germany, his work was declared entartete Kunst or “degenerate art,” but he managed to continue working during World War II.

Gallery

And it was on this day in 1925: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic The Great Gatsby was published.  

Set in the Jazz Age on Long Island, near New York City, the novel depicts first-person narrator Nick Carraway’s interactions with Jay Gatsby, a mysterious millionaire with an obsession to reunite with his former lover, Daisy Buchanan.

The novel was inspired by a youthful romance Fitzgerald had with socialite Ginevra King, and the riotous parties he attended on Long Island’s North Shore in 1922. Following a move to the French Riviera, Fitzgerald completed a rough draft of the novel in 1924. He submitted it to editor Maxwell Perkins, who persuaded Fitzgerald to revise the work over the following winter. After making revisions, Fitzgerald was satisfied with the text, but remained ambivalent about the book’s title and considered several alternatives. Painter Francis Cugat’s dust jacket art, named Celestial Eyes, greatly impressed Fitzgerald, and he incorporated its imagery into the novel.

After its publication by Scribner’s in April 1925, The Great Gatsby received generally favorable reviews, though some literary critics believed it did not equal Fitzgerald’s previous efforts. Compared to his earlier novels, This Side of Paradise (1920) and The Beautiful and Damned (1922), the novel was a commercial disappointment. It sold fewer than 20,000 copies by October, and Fitzgerald’s hopes of a monetary windfall from the novel were unrealized. When the author died in 1940, he believed himself to be a failure and his work forgotten.

During World War II, the novel experienced an abrupt surge in popularity when the Council on Books in Wartime distributed free copies to American soldiers serving overseas. This new-found popularity launched a critical and scholarly re-examination, and the work soon became a core part of most American high school curricula and a part of American popular culture. Numerous stage and film adaptations followed in the subsequent decades.

Gatsby continues to attract popular and scholarly attention. Scholars emphasize the novel’s treatment of social class, inherited versus self-made wealth, gender, race, and environmentalism, and its cynical attitude towards the American Dream. The Great Gatsby is widely considered to be a literary masterwork and a contender for the title of the Great American Novel.

quotes

“I wouldn’t ask too much of her,” I ventured. “You can’t repeat the past.”
“Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!”
He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.
“I’m going to fix everything just the way it was before,” he said, nodding determinedly. “She’ll see.”

• Nick and Gatsby, on Gatsby’s relationship with Daisy

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…. And one fine morning —
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

thanks for stoppin’ by y’all

mac tag