The Lovers’ Chronicle 24 August – offer – art by Lavinia Fontana & Ernest Rouart – birth of John Taylor, Robert Herrick & Jorge Luis Borges

Dear Zazie,  Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag.  Has a cowboy ever taken you away?  Do you want a cowboy to take you away?  Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

brings Don Vito to mind
“One we cannot refuse”
exactly, we have all
given or received one
“Though not deadly ones”
presumably
i feel like the muse,
thus you, has made me one,
this compulsion to write
and how convenient,
the best part,
i offer these words to you

© copyright 2023 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

this these words, infused by my vision; from readin’ mostly long dead, depressin’ authors, observin’ life from a safe distance, probably too safe, listenin’ more than i talk, no, way more, watchin’ more movies, wait, watchin’ more dark, sad movies than anyone, and from wonderin’ where the story will take us

© copyright 2022.2023 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

we vow to each other
this affection,
this shared vision

give and to that more

this we have
created together,
the sum of all we have read,
all the music we have heard,
all we have witnessed
all we have lived

gather while we may,
this held today
will not fade away

© copyright 2021 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

Pale Love, Pale Rider

for Gay

awoke this mornin’,
no other word for it,
enraptured, still

phased and dazed all day
kept replayin’ the scenes
was it a dream or real
from where were we sent

i was right about this,
your fire burns deep

consume a careless man

good thing i am not

come on, take us away

© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

ni contigo ni sin ti
tienen mis males remedio
contigo porque me matas
sin ti porque me muero

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

all the words i have read
all the friends i have made
all the women i have loved
all the sins committed
and times of madness,
well travelled in

not makin’ excuses
nor seekin’ forgiveness
for this existence

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

first talk of one thing
then another
while tranquil music
cascades
we try the effect
of exchangin’ verse
mine and yours

the words dispatch
the affairs of the world
the verses amount
to prayers
we offer up
to stave off time
to never let go

© copyright 2017 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

i know this;
the heart that shuts out
romantic passion
can write some dang
fine sad verse

finally feel
indigenous
immersed in verse

“I want you to feel
you deserve to be
with someone special.”
deserves got nothin’
to do with it

to not know what
it is to love well
or to be well loved

what you feel is real
what you do with it is all

© copyright 2016 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

She told me that my
unforgivable
sins would not allow
me to ever feel
or see the splendour

Madness is
as madness does

The problem with
lovin’ her is,
you have to throw
yourself off the
nearest buildin’
all the dang time
to prove your love

Misfortune, not understandin’ things,
Goin’ about with eyes shut and ears closed
The great faith continues to elude

Whatever you do
take care of the Angel’s share
For the Devil’s cut awaits thee

I cheated on the Angel’s share
Now i pay for the devil’s cut

© copyright 2015 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

Since my words are currently dictated by the Dark Muse and my letters have been more about the lack thereof than love, I thought I would turn again to Jett for inspiration.  He received an interestin’ letter from his friend Adele:

Dear Jett,

I have been in a cowboy state of mind for about a week now.  A week ago, I had a dream that I was in Vegas with a cowboy.  We ended up having a little too much to drink, well really a lot too much, and had the most amazing sex of my life.  Then we went back out on the Strip, drank some more and got married by Elvis.  He was taking me for my first horseback ride when I woke up.  It was hard to think about it this past week and not want to run out and grab the first cowboy that turned my head.  You are the only true cowboy I have ever known.  It’s in your blood. Something about that honest, rugged, cowboy way.  Had things been different could you have loved me?

Maybe it is the memory of the dream or this glass of wine, but I can’t help it as my mind is in a flurry of cowboy passion.  Are you the cowboy of my dreams?

Adele

Tune in tomorrow for Jett’s response

The Song of the Day is “Cowboy Take Me Away“ by The Chicks.  (C) 1999 Monument Records

Today is the birthday of Lavinia Fontana (Bologna; August 24, 1552 – August 11, 1614 Rome); painter.  She is regarded as the first woman artist, working within the same sphere as her male counterparts, outside a court or convent.  She was the first woman artist to paint female nudes.

Fontana married Paolo Zappi (alternately spelled Paolo Fappi) in 1577.  After marriage, Fontana continued to paint to support her family.  Zappi took care of the household and served as painting assistant to his wife, including painting minor elements of paintings like draperies.

Gallery

Today is the birthday of John Taylor (Gloucester; 24 August 1578 – 1653 London); poet who dubbed himself “The Water Poet”.

He spent much of his life as a Thames waterman, a member of the guild of boatmen that ferried passengers across the River Thames in London, in the days when the London Bridge was the only passage between the banks. His occupation was his gateway into the literary society of London, as he ferried patrons, actors, and playwrights across the Thames to the Bankside theatres.

Taylor was also the first poet to mention the deaths of William Shakespeare and Francis Beaumont in print, in his 1620 poem, “The Praise of Hemp-seed”. Both had died four years earlier:

In paper, many a poet now survives
Or else their lines had perish’d with their lives.
Old Chaucer, Gower, and Sir Thomas More,
Sir Philip Sidney, who the laurel wore,
Spenser, and Shakespeare did in art excell,
Sir Edward Dyer, Greene, Nash, Daniel.
Sylvester, Beaumont, Sir John Harrington,
Forgetfulness their works would over run
But that in paper they immortally
Do live in spite of death, and cannot die.

Verse 

• Lewd did I live & evil I did dwel
  • Early author-attributed palindrome (c. 1614); reported in Dave Fisher, The Wonderful World of Palindromes (October 30, 2015).

• God sends meat, and the Devil sends cooks.
• Works, vol. ii, p. 85 (1630). Compare the 1735 Poor Richard’s Almanack.
• ‘Tis a mad world (my masters) and in sadnes
•  I travail’d madly in these dayes of madnes.

Wanderings to See the Wonders of the West, 1649; reported in Esther Moir, The Discovery of Britain: The English Tourists 1540-1840, page 26.

Robert Herrick
1904 illustration based on Hesperides impression

Today is the baptismal day of Robert Herrick (Cheapside, London; baptised 24 August 1591 – buried 15 October 1674 Dean Prior, Devon); lyric poet and cleric.  Perhaps best known for Hesperides, a book of poems.  This includes the carpe diem poem “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time”, with the first line “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may”.

Herrick was a bachelor all his life. Many of the women he names in his poems are thought to be fictional. The fictional kind are easier to live with.

Verse 

• You say to me-wards your affection’s strong;
  Pray love me little, so you love me long.
  • “Love Me Little, Love Me Long”.
• Give me a kiss, and to that kiss a score;
  Then to that twenty, add a hundred more:
  A thousand to that hundred: so kiss on,
  To make that thousand up a million.
  Treble that million, and when that is done,
  Let’s kiss afresh, as when we first begun.
  • “To Anthea: Ah, My Anthea!”
• Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
  Old Time is still a-flying,
  And this same flower that smiles today
  Tomorrow will be dying.
  The glorious Lamp of Heaven, the Sun,
  The higher he’s a-getting
  The sooner will his race be run,
  And nearer he’s to setting.
  • “To the Virgins to Make Much of Time”.

Some asked me where the rubies grew,
And nothing I did say;
But with my finger pointed to
The lips of Julie

Today is the birthday of Ernest Rouart (24 August 1874, Paris - 27 February 1942, Paris); painter, watercolorist, pastellist, engraver, and art collector.

He was one of four sons and a daughter born to the engineer and painter, Henri Rouart. He began by studying mathematics; intending to enter his father’s business but, like his father, he turned to painting, enlisting the aid of Edgar Degas, a family friend, who gave him lessons and advised him to copy paintings at the Louvre. He also had him experiment with older mixtures of paint, as they were prepared in the Renaissance.

It was Degas who introduced him to the model and future art collector, Julie Manet, daughter of the painters Berthe Morisot and Eugène Manet. They married in 1900 and had three sons.

He was an avid art collector, as was his father. In 1912, he and his siblings decided to sell their late father’s collection; which went for a considerable sum. Shortly after the beginning of World War I, in 1914, he obtained permission to hold a sale of Degas’ paintings, who then eighty years old, had fallen on hard times and needed assistance.

After beginning his career as a painter, he held numerous exhibits; first at the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1899. Later, he had showings at the Salon des indépendants, and the Salon des Tuileries. He was a member of the governing committee for the Salon d’Automne. In 1932, he organized the “Exposition du Centenaire de Manet” at the Musée de l’Orangerie. Similar exhibitions followed, for Degas in 1934, and Morisot in 1941

He died during the German occupation of Paris, and was interred at the Cimetière de Passy.

Gallery

Jorge Luis Borges
Borges in 1951, by Grete Stern

And Today is the birthday of Jorge Luis Borges (Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges; Buenos Aires; 24 August 1899 – 14 June 1986 Geneva); short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish-language literature.  His best-known books, Ficciones (Fictions) and El Aleph (The Aleph), published in the 1940s, are compilations of short stories interconnected by common themes, including dreams, labyrinths, libraries, mirrors, fictional writers, philosophy, and religion.

In 1967, Borges married the recently widowed Elsa Astete Millán.  The marriage lasted less than three years.

From 1975 until the time of his death, Borges traveled internationally.  He was often accompanied in these travels by his personal assistant María Kodama, an Argentine woman of Japanese and German ancestry. In April 1986, a few months before his death, they married.

Quotes:

No estoy seguro de que yo exista, en realidad. Soy todos los autores que he leído, toda la gente que he conocido, todas las mujeres que he amado. Todas las ciudades que he visitado, todos mis antepasados…

He cometido el peor pecado que uno puede cometer. No he sido feliz.

¿De qué otra forma se puede amenazar que no sea de muerte? Lo interesante, lo original, sería que alguien lo amenace a uno con la inmortalidad.

En mi juventud probé la mescalina y la cocaína pero enseguida me pasé a los pastillas de menta que me parecieron más estimulantes. Si las drogas producen el mismo efecto que el alcohol, no me interesan. Un borracho es evidentemente ridículo. He estado borracho algunas veces y lo recuerdo como una experiencia muy desagradable para los demás y para mí.

El infierno y el paraíso me parecen desproporcionados. Los actos de los hombres no merecen tanto.

Hay un concepto que es el corruptor y el desatinador de los otros. No hablo del mal cuyo limitado imperio es la ética; hablo del infinito.

Que el cielo exista, aunque mi lugar sea el infierno.

Yo, que me figuraba el Paraíso

Bajo la especie de una biblioteca

Mac Tag

thanks for stoppin’ by y’all

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