The Lovers’ Chronicle 8 October – carin’ – art by Max Slevogt & Hans Heysen – birth of Marina Tsvetaeva – photography by Serge de Sazo

Dear Zazie,  I just found the note you left sayin’ you were sick.  Well I care and I hope you are feelin’ better!  And Mac Tag is usin’ carin’ as the theme for today’s Lovers’ Chronicle.  Follow us on twitter @cowboycoleridge.  Who do you care about?  Who cares about you?  Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

this is about givin’ a damn
“Frankly my dear”
ha that is funny
wait, hold please
just had a Waylon lyric
pop up, gotta go with it,
“Where do we take it from here”
that is how it works here, writin’
whatever the Muse sends
you provide the reason,
She provides the words
anyway, where were we
“Frankly my dear”
oh yes,
i do give a damn

© copyright 2023 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

who or what i chose, mattered most, till you; never gave much thought to what came back, expectations kept very low, disappointment can be cripplin’, thought it best to avoid that, did not have feelin’s or needs so why give a damn, would not have changed anything; somethin’ else that came with you, carin’

© copyright 2022.2023 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

will have to add
to the list

always good at givin’
never worth a damn
at receivin’
a form of selfishness
i ‘spose

one of the reasons
we are here
self-ponderin’

this place, you
allow the words,
feelin’s to flow

only question is
where to next

thank you
may i have some more

© copyright 2021.2023 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

Pale Love, Pale Rider

amidst the memories, widely dispersed
and some never shared with anyone,
the verse comes, it cannot wait

as i write, you grab me
my hand will not fail
movin’ across the page
as you would have it

we are sure to end up here,
my ardent reader/lover
feelin’, listenin’, engagin’

© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

i know the answer
gave up all the others
no need to struggle,
look, it is nearly night
what do you speak of,
poets and lovers

to know and to hide

to know about the one
you choose yet to hide

till the knowin’
overpowers
the hidin’,
the passion
for the hidden
for the revealed

***

“When were you
most happy?”

now

“And when where you
least happy?”

now

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

i know
and you know

shall we leave
the worst behind
for what it was
and take the trail
that lies ahead
for what it will be

only this matters

there has been
one constant
since that day

through the years
and over distance

even through
other loves
that faded away

because
what was meant to be
has not yet been

because
what began that day
has been waitin’
to be fulfilled

and the time is at hand

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

i god Marina
talk about sorrow

got nothin’ on you

wish i coulda known ya
not that i am arrogant
enough to think
i coulda helped

i just know
that those in sorrow
need all the friends they can git

and special thanks
to Zazie, my beautiful
Carolina friend
for sharin’ your sorrow
hope my words helped

not a man of constant sorrow
but of often enough sorrow
to have seen it all
and to realize
there is but one course

***

© copyright 2017 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

Fun? Oh, that sumbitch
gave up on me a
long, long, time ago

© copyright 2015 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

for Kelli

She said, Take the reins. So he did.
The ties that bind, so intense, so
intimate, hot, fervent, ardent,
risin’, fallin’, together now

© copyright 2014 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

Who Really Cares

Who really cares, you ask
Well I care, so take my hand
Let me release you from the struggle
Let me lead you to the field of dreams
I will keep away the agents of despair
I will keep away thrown together prose

© copyright 2012 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

The Song of the Day is “Who Really Cares” by Powderfinger

Today is the birthday of Max Slevogt (Landshut, Germany 8 October 1868 – 20 September 1932 Leinsweiler, Bavaria, Germany); Impressionist painter and illustrator. He was, together with Lovis Corinth and Max Liebermann, one of the foremost representatives in Germany of the plein air style.

portrayed in a 1917 etching
by Emil Orlik

He studied at the Munich Academy, and his early paintings are dark in tone, exemplifying the prevailing style in Munich. In 1889 Slevogt visited Paris, where he attended the Académie Julian. In 1896, he drew caricatures for the magazines Simplicissimus and Jugend, and the next year he had his first solo exhibition in Vienna.

Toward the end of the 1890s his palette brightened. He travelled again to Paris in 1900, where he was represented in the German pavilion of the world exhibition with the work Scheherezade. In 1901 he joined the Berlin Secession.

A trip to Egypt in 1914 resulted in 21 oil paintings in a fresh bright style, as well as numerous watercolors and drawings; on the return journey he stopped off in Italy. In June he acquired the country seat Neukastel. After the outbreak of World War I he was sent as official war painter to the western front. The war experience brought about a search for new style appropriate to the expression of the horrors of war. In the same year he became a member of the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin.

He designed scenery for the performance of Mozart’s Don Giovanni in the Dresdner state opera in 1924. His work was part of the painting event in the art competition at the 1928 Summer Olympics.  In 1929 he was given a large 60th birthday exhibition in the Prussian academy of the arts in Berlin. During the last year of his life he worked on the religious mural Golgatha in the peace church in Ludwigshafen on the Rhine. It was destroyed by bombing raids during World War II.

He is buried in the burial place of the family Finkler east of his house, the so-called Slevogthof (with wall paintings) at Neukastel.

Gallery

Portrait of the Dancer Anna Pavlova

Today is the birthday of Hans Heysen (Hamburg; 8 October 1877 – 2 July 1968 near Hahndorf in the Adelaide Hills, Australia); artist.  He became a household name for his watercolours of monumental Australian gum trees.  Heysen also produced images of men and animals toiling in the Australian bush, as well as groundbreaking depictions of arid landscapes in the Flinders Ranges.  He won the Wynne Prize for landscape painting a record nine times.

Heysen by Harold Cazneaux ca. 1935

Heysen married Selma Bartels (1878–1962) on 15 December 1904.

Gallery

Marina Tsvetaeva
in 1925

Today is the birthday of Marina Tsvetaeva (Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva; Moscow 8 October 1892 – 31 August 1941 Yelabuga, Tatar ASSR, USSR); poet. In my opinion, her verse is among the greatest in twentieth century Russian literature. She lived through and wrote of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Moscow famine that followed it. Tsvetaeva left Russia in 1922 and lived with her family in increasing poverty in Paris, Berlin and Prague before returning to Moscow in 1939. Her husband Sergei Efron was arrested on espionage charges in 1941 and executed. Tsvetaeva died by suicide in 1941. As a lyrical poet, her passion and linguistic experimentation mark her as an important chronicler of her times and the depths of the human condition.

Verse

I Know the Truth

I know the truth – give up all other truths!
No need for people anywhere on earth to struggle.
Look – it is evening, look, it is nearly night:
what do you speak of, poets, lovers, generals?

The wind is level now, the earth is wet with dew,
the storm of stars in the sky will turn to quiet.
And soon all of us will sleep under the earth, we
who never let each other sleep above it.

“I know the truth” Tsvetaeva (1915).
Trans. by Elaine Feinstein

Amidst the dust of bookshops, wide dispersed
And never purchased there by anyone,
Yet similar to precious wines, my verse can wait
Its time will come. – Trans. Vladimir Nabokov, 1972

But as I ran,
Faith herself
Grabbed me by the hair with her heavy hand
(Juvenilia)

We are sure to end up in hell,
O my ardent sisters.
(November 1915, a poem about lawless women)

Their hands I will not sunder,
I would rather
I would rather
Blaze in scorching flames in hell!
(Evening Album)

A single post, a point of rusting
tin in the sky
marks the fated place we
move to, he and I

What is the main thing in love? To know and to hide. To know about the one you love and to hide that you love. At times the hiding (shame) overpowers the knowing (passion). The passion for the hidden – the passion for the revealed. – The House at Old Pimen, ch. 2 (1934).

• Freedom! A wanton slut on a profligate’s breast!
  • You came out of a severe, well-proportioned church (1917).

There are books so alive that you’re always afraid that while you weren’t reading, the book has gone and changed, has shifted like a river; while you went on living, it went on living too, and like a river moved on and moved away. No one has stepped twice into the same river. But did anyone ever step twice into the same book? – Pushkin and Pugachev (1937)

A deception that elevates us is dearer than a host of low truths. – Pushkin and Pugachev (1937).

And today is the birthday of Serge de Sazo (Serge Sazonoff; Stavropol, Russia; October 8, 1915 – January 24, 2012 Saint-Jean-d’Aulps, Haute-Savoie, France); photographer.

From 1945 when Parisian night life recommenced, with cabaret, jazz, the music-hall and cinema, and creative artistic activity flourished in the 1950s, he worked as a freelance photojournalist for clients including Air France, V: magazine illustré du Mouvement de libération nationale, Aviation, and Icare. His pin-ups and nudes were regularly published in the magazine Paris-Hollywood and are predominant in Paris Sex-Appeal during its brief revival 1950-1, and his naked swimmers appeared in an international exhibition of photographs of women organised by Gens d’Images at the Musée d’Orsay in 1955 and were mentioned, amongst those of Emmanuel Sougez, Jacques Adriaan (U.S.A.), Honjo Mitsuro (Japan) and Mario Finazzi (Italy) in Combat; “One should not miss the underwater ballet of Serge de Sazo”.

Gallery

Mac Tag