This month in Canberra we have the flower festival, Floriade. And this week Floriade carries on into the night, beginning tonight. I’ve just come home from a fun evening watching circus performers and crazy light shows. Problem is, at night the flowers are coloured by swinging beams of red and blue and green and purple light, so I have no idea what colour these tulips really are.
But I thought it was all ideal for a ‘lines and patterns’ theme: the gardens are planted with flowers of different heights to form geometric patterns, and the ferris wheel behind them makes a great show of light lines glowing on and off as it turns. Slowly. Very slowly.
I’m at home sick today. When I lay in my bed this windy afternoon I saw clouds sailing through the sky and camellia bushes swaying to and fro past my window frame. I immediately thought of the photo challenge to find an unusual point of view. I don’t usually photograph on my back, but I thought I’d give it a try.
Negative shapes with camelliaCamellia silhouette – clouds on the moveCamellia silhouette against greying sky
Marianne has challenged me to find a photo of something pink this month. I wasn’t keen because I’ve had three sons so I’ve never had to buy pink stuff, and I almost never wear pink myself (give me red or turquoise). However, this afternoon I drove past this line of trees near my house which have recently burst into bloom, looking spectacular in straight masses. They’re minutes from my house, so I stopped and snapped them. When I moved closer to the flowers (go to the subject, don’t zoom in – that’s what I’ve been told) I was tickled to see red stalks and centres. Check out the photo in the header.
Flowering prunus, Canberra, today
Marianne requests we spread news about great blogs we’ve read. One I’ve commented on recently is Wholeyjeans, where Jean has a very interesting look at environmental destruction and adds a poem that I had to read twice; it was meaningful and not beyond me (as much poetry is…).
I also commented on Ici & Là Nature Pictures, a blog about the beauty of France seen by biking and walking. I commented simply because I love France almost as much as I love Australia.
When I was 19 and foolish I went swimming alone in an unpatrolled sea. A rip caught me and dragged me out of my depth, where waves dumped and submerged me three times. There was nothing beneath me but water. The fourth wave dumped me on the shore.
These days there are instructive signs at beach entries. Clearly, large numbers of beachgoers were not washed ashore as I was, were not given a second chance. Now lifesavers are trying to warn and educate poor swimmers:
Instructions for battling a rip current, Jervis Bay, NSW
Since then I’ve respected the power of the sea and have retreated from its depths. But I’ve learned a lot by observing it from the edge.
Late one October afternoon, I was returning from the Louvre when an orchestra began to set up in the square I was passing through. I stopped to see what they would play; as they began Danse hongroise by Brahms I nearly floated with love for Paris. And that was despite my swollen and aching feet; moments before, I had been desperate to return to my apartment to take my shoes off. (The Louvre is immense and I’d walked miles viewing its exhibits.) But I didn’t want to forget these musicians playing me live classical music for the price of a coin donation, so I snapped them and responded eagerly to their proposal that I buy their CD of pieces by Brahms, Dvořák, Bizet and Albeniz.
The CD cover says simply “Classique Metropolitain” without naming the musicians. Pity. I’ve played it frequently since that day and never tire of it. It’s particularly good when I’m translating, when I don’t want to hear the words of songs sung.
Impromptu orchestra, Paris
Ailsa proposed this travel theme of ‘Play’ after seeing some people play football waiting for a traffic jam to clear! Take a look.
We went to Gundaroo today, a short drive from Canberra out into the country, where we walked past a little library that always amuses me. It is typical of pioneer architecture in Australian country towns established a hundred or more years ago. Today the sky was a perfect winter blue, a great day to be out in the street photographing in portrait and landscape.
The photo challenge is to take a photo of the same subject vertically and horizontally. I took 99 photos today, less than half of them vertical, more than half … well, horizontal. Here are two.
Gundaroo Literary Institute, NSW, 1888Gundaroo Literary Institute, NSW, 1888
“Wuthering Heights is the name of Mr Heathcliff’s dwelling, ‘Wuthering’ being a significant provincial adjective, descriptive of the atmospheric tumult to which its station is exposed in stormy weather. Pure, bracing ventilation they must have up there, at all times, indeed: one may guess the power of the north wind, blowing over the edge, by the excessive slant of a few, stunted firs at the end of the house; and by a range of gaunt thorns all stretching their limbs one way, as if craving alms of the sun.”
Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
Wuthering is the word that played in my head one day in May as I walked along the cliffs beside the Mediterranean, in winds strong enough to blow me over the edge. I was alone up here for half an hour until defeated by howling gusts. The wilder the wind blew, the more scenes I recalled from Brontë novels where heroines wander in windy places. This isn’t the English moors, but these cliffs gave me nonetheless a Gothic taste of desolation with a hint of fear. At least on the moors there is no jagged edge to tumble over.
Schist cliffs, Mediterranean, between Collioure and Port-Vendres, FranceSchist cliffs between Collioure and Port-Vendres, France
Before you leave, click here to see Ailsa’s photos of places where the wild things are.
John Milton, I’ve read, completed his Masters degree at Cambridge in 1632 at 24 years of age and then moved back home with his parents for five years, where he worked on some of his best-loved writing. But it wasn’t until 1645 that any of his poetry was published; the book was called Poems of Mr. John Milton, both English and Latin, compos’d at several times.
His poetry was not published again until 1667 at the age of 59 when he had been totally blind for 13 years and had been married 3 times, and after he had worked on the piece for at least 9 years. He was paid £5 for a print run of 1500 copies of his masterpiece, Paradise Lost.
Here’s an excerpt:
Now came still evening on, and twilight grey
Had in her sober livery all things clad;
Silence accompany’d; for beast and bird,
They to their grassy couch, these to their nests,
Were slunk, all but the wakeful nightingale;
She all night long her amorous descant sung;
Silence was pleas’d. Now glow’d the firmament
With living sapphires; Hesperus, that led
The starry host, rode brightest, till the moon,
Rising in clouded majesty, at length
Apparent queen unveil’d her peerless light,
And o’er the dark her silver mantle threw.
Last night I found this excerpt from Paradise Lost in my old school poetry anthology. When I read the line ‘Now glow’d the firmament With living sapphires’, I remembered a 12th-century church ceiling that I recently saw in Saint-Génis-des-Fontaines in the Pyrénées-Orientales, France. During the day the skylight produces a simulated moon shining in a starry midnight blue sky, and the patches no longer covered in paint resemble night clouds or constellations. Even in this interior, the moon has thrown ‘o’er the dark her silver mantle’. The photo, left sitting on my computer screen and viewed from across a room, has fooled me more than once.
Click twice on the photo to enlarge it.
Vaulted ceiling, Saint-Génis-des-Fontaines Abbey, France
It does me good to read that a Cambridge Masters graduate worked on his writing for 35 years before producing a masterpiece.
