Poetry of Catullus – Let Us Live and Love

These days I was enjoying the poetry of the Roman poet Catullus (84-54. B.C) who wrote in the neoteric style of poetry, that is, the style of his poems was emotional, intimate, relatable and full of ardour, and he chose to focus, not on heroes and gods as was the norm, but on his personal life, often mentioning his friends in his poems. Poems such as his 5th Poem are written for and about a woman he loved called Clodia Metelli whom Catulus calls “his Lesbia” out of affection. Catullus’ poems follow the path of his falling in love, from the first ardour to disappointment and bitterness. This mix of lyrical beauty and honest emotions is what gives Catullus’ poetry a lasting appeal; after he was rediscovered in the Middle Ages other poets such as Petrarca and later even the Romantics loved his poetry. As a visual companion to Catullus’ poetry, these softly sensual paintings by John William Godward come to my mind; the warm colours, the Medditeranean shrubs and flowers, the cypresses, oleanders and the sea, the curves of female body stretched on marble and fur, these indolent girls with gorgeous long hair and flimy see-through gowns and the dolce far niente mood is just captivating. I must also add how much the line “bright were the suns that shone once for you” from Poem 8 reminds me of these lines “Once, if I remember well, my life was a feast where all hearts opened and all wines flowed” from Rimbaud’s “A Season in Hell”; both is a lament for the old good times.

John William Godward, Dolce Far Niente, 1906

Poem 5

“Let us live and love, my Lesbia.
Here’sa copper coin for the criticism
of elderly men with exalted morals.
Suns have the power to set and return.
Our light is brief and once it fails,
we have to sleep in the dark forever.
Give me a thousand kisses, a hundred,
another thousand, a second hundred,
a thousand again, a hundred more
until we ourselves lose track of the score,
confusing the kissing count as a sly
method of thwarting the evil eye.”

John William Godward, Girl in Yellow Drapery, 1901

Poem 8

“Poor Catullus, stop playing the fool!
Seeing that something has died, deem it dead.
Bright were the suns that shone once for you,
the times you followed the girl everywhere.
No girl will ever be loved more than she.
Many amusing things happened then,
things you wished and the girl never spurned.
Suns most certainly shone bright for you.
Now she turns her back. Do the same!
Give up your hopeless pursuit! End your grief !

Endure with a resolute mind. Steel yourself.
Girl, Catullus has now steeled himself.
Farewell! Rejected, he makes no appeal.
But you’ll be sorry when all courtship ends.
What kind of life, you whore, waits for you?
What man will come and sing beauty’s praise?
Whom will you love and whose girl be called?
Whom will you kiss? For whom bite the lips?
But you, Catullus, be firm. Steel yourself.”

Music Is the Most Romantic of All Arts

“Just as Orpheus’ lyre opened the gates of the underworld, music unlocks for mankind an unknown realm—a world with nothing in common with the surrounding outer world of the senses. Here we abandon definite feelings and surrender to an inexpressible longing…“

George Roux, Spirit, 1885

I read a sentence in a schoolbook a few years ago which said that “music is the most romantic of all arts” and this line stuck with me. It awoke something inside me, it inspired me at school and at home, it was the most beautiful sentence I had read. The idea that music was the most romantic of all arts enchanted me beyond belief. Later I read the entire essay by E.T.A. Hoffmann, a study of Beethoven’s instrumental music which first appeared in 1810 and was revised in 1813. Perhaps in our day and age the word “romantic” is simplified, overused and misunderstood, it stands for something shallow and sugary, but when Hoffmann used it to describe Beethoven’s music, he used it to describe the powerful, unrestrained passion, emotions and expressiveness. As much as I love paintings and enjoy reading books, I must say that only music awakens that something within me, and I imagine most of you would agree with me. When I listen to Chopin’s Nocturnes and his Waltz in A minor, Debussy’s work for flute and harp, some Ravel, and even other music such as Tindersticks or Echo and the Bunnymen, it sends me into a trance, my imagination is awakened and images appear before my eyes, sentiments I never knew I had suddenly posses me and afterwards I feel a catharsis calmness and a new found love and inspiration. Even in visual arts this romantic nature of music is portrayed. In George Roux’s painting “Spirit” a gorgeous ghostly white lady is seen playing the piano. Her thin waist and ethereal form are aesthetically pleasing and the man’s face shows both shock and awe. Perhaps he is a widow and this is the ghost of his wife playing their favourite tune. Painting is open to interpretation, but one thing is certain; only the music has such power to move us, bring us to tears, purify us, infuse us with yearning and romance, and even make us fall in love with whoever is playing it or sharing our love for it.

John William Waterhouse, Saint Cecilia, 1895

Now here are E.T.A Hoffmann’s words:

“When music is discussed as an independent art, should it not be solely instrumental music that is intended, music that scorns every aid from and mixing with any other art (poetry), music that only expresses the distinctive and unique essence of this art? It is the most romantic of all arts, and we could almost say the only truly romantic one because its only subject is the infinite. Just as Orpheus’ lyre opened the gates of the underworld, music unlocks for mankind an unknown realm—a world with nothing in common with the surrounding outer world of the senses. Here we abandon definite feelings and surrender to an inexpressible longing. . . .
Thus Beethoven’s instrumental music opens to us the realm of the monstrous and immeasurable. Glowing rays shoot through the deep night of this realm, and we sense giant shadows surging to and fro, closing in on us until they destroy us, but not the pain of unending longing in which every desire that has risen quickly in joyful tones sinks and expires. Only with this pain of love, hope, joy—which consumes but does not destroy, which would burst asunder our breasts with a mightily impassioned chord—we live on, enchanted seers of the ghostly world! Romantic taste is rare, romantic talent even rarer, and perhaps for this reason there are so few who are able to sweep the lyre with tones that unveil the wonderful realm of the romantic. Haydn grasps romantically the human in human life; he is more accommodating, more comprehensible for the common man. Mozart laid claim more to the superhuman, to the marvelous that dwells in the inner spirit. Beethoven’s music wields the lever of fear, awe, horror, and pain, and it awakens that eternal longing that is the essence of the romantic. Thus he is a purely romantic composer, and if he has had less success with vocal music, is this because vocal music excludes the character of indefinite longing and represents the emotions, which come from the realm of the infinite, only by the definite affects of words? . . .”

Sir William Quiller Orchardson, Her Mother’s Voice, exhibited in 1888

Monotonous beige and yellow colours and a slightly sentimental mood of this late Victorian genre scene painted by English painter William Quiller Orchardson hides a more wistful theme. Evening has fallen and a lamp is casting a yellowish glow all over the sumptuous interior and yet, despite the richness of the interior, a certain sadness hangs like a cloud over the room. An old gentleman was sitting in his armchair and reading the newspapers until something happened… A familiar voice, a very dear voice, colours the stuffy air filled with memories and hopeless wistful reveries. The voice awakens old wounds and merry memories that he can never get back “And all the money in the world couldn’t bring back those days”, to quote the song “This is the Day” by The The (and later Manic Street Preachers). His daughter, dressed in a fashionable pale pink evening gown, is sitting at the piano, playing and singing while a young man is standing by her side. She has her mother’s voice, as the title of the painting suggests. It is through music, singing, but still music, that the inexplicable yearning enters the man’s heart and soul and awakens a river of emotions which usually remain buried deep within him.

Anaïs Nin – We Write to Taste Life Twice

These days I have been reading Anaïs Nin’s essays, and thinking about them a lot, in particular I am fascinated by her devoted diary keeping, the conflict of dreams vs reality, the reason one writes and the importance of spontaneity and naturalness in writing.

Anais Nin in Havana, c. 1920s

“I can connect deeply or not at all.”

A sensitive and imaginative child, Anais Nin started writing her diary in 1914 at the age of eleven. Other girls her age would probably pretend they were writing to their imaginary friends, but Anais envisaged her diary as a string of letters to her father who had abandoned the family and left to live with his lover. How poignant to imagine this gentle and pale, dark-haired and sad-eyed little girl clutching her notebook, living half in those words and half in dreams, and know that her desire for writing appeared out of her childlike sadness, longing and a desire to gain his love. What began as a desire to be loved and to connect, not only with her father, but with the world, turned into a lifelong occupation; Anais continuously wrote her diary since the age of eleven to her death in 1977.

Nin’s writing fascinates me as much as her family ancestry and her life. She was born in France to Cuban parents; her mother Rosa was a singer of French and Danish descent, and her father Joaquín was a pianist born in Havana, but the hot Catalan Spanish blood flew his veins. Anais spent her childhood in Spain, teenage years in America where she posed for painters, got married in 1923 in Havana to Hugo Parker Guiler, moved to Paris the following year, then lived in the United States for the rest of her life. While in Paris, she wrote the most interesting part of her diary and had an affair with the writer Henry Miller which is documented in “Journal of Love: Henry and June”, and also studied flamenco dancing! It was in Paris that she started pondering seriously on the matter of being an artist, a writer, and she realised there, in the grey suburbs of shiny Paris, that just being a wife isn’t fulfilling. Her Journals of Love witness her sensual and artistic awakening, and her, at the same time, passionate and intellectual relationship with Henry. She says: “How wrong it is for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself.”

Creating a world of one’s own, through writing and daydreaming

“Don’t wait for it,” I said. “Create a world, your world. Alone. Stand alone. And then love will come to you, then it comes to you. It was only when I wrote my first book that the world I wanted to live in opened to me.” (The Diary of Anais Nin, Vol 1: 1931-34)

And created a world she did! She stopped expecting the world to come to her, and instead gave herself to her diary, and by building a rich inner life, the real life began.

“Why one writes is a question I can answer easily, having so often asked it of myself. I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live. I could not live in any of the worlds offered to me — the world of my parents, the world of war, the world of politics. I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and recreate myself when destroyed by living. That, I believe, is the reason for every work of art. (…)

We write to heighten our own awareness of life. We write to lure and enchant and console others. We write to serenade our lovers. We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection. We write, like Proust, to render all of it eternal, and to persuade ourselves that it is eternal. We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it. We write to teach ourselves to speak with others, to record the journey into the labyrinth. We write to expand our world when we feel strangled, or constricted, or lonely… If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don’t write because our culture has no use for it. When I don’t write, I feel my world shrinking. I feel I am in prison. I feel I lose my fire and my color. It should be a necessity, as the sea needs to heave, and I call it breathing.“

I know this quote by heart because it really chimes with me, but there is one line in particular which I can’t get out of my mind for two weeks now: “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection.” To write, then, means to trick transience because a moment of beauty is captured forever in words, and what a luxury a memory is because we can play it out in our minds as many times as we want. A sunset and a sight of a flower, can give birth to stories and daydreams in our imagination, the past can be relived and transformed, beautified and idealised until it becomes a whole new fantasy. Writing brings freedom and it shields you from reality, it’s like a soft flimsy dusty pink veil of protection, it offers beauty instead of loneliness. Writing heals the wounds inflicted by living, and turns our tears into flowers.

Henry Miller and Anais Nin, c. early 1930s

The Importance of Diary

Anais’s literary legacy lies in her diaries, and in her essay “On Writing”. self-published in 1947, she praises her diary for its spontaneity and naturalness:

“It was while writing a Diary that I discovered how to capture the living moments. Keeping a Diary all my life helped me to discover some basic elements essential to the vitality of writing.

When I speak of the relationship between my diary and writing I do not intend to generalize as to the value of keeping a diary, or to advise anyone to do so, but merely to extract from this habit certain discoveries which can be easily transposed to other kinds of writing.

Of these the most important is naturalness and spontaneity. These elements sprung, I observed, from my freedom of selection: in the Diary I only wrote of what interested me genuinely, what I felt most strongly at the moment, and I found this fervor, this enthusiasm produced a vividness which often withered in the formal work. Improvisation, free association, obedience to mood, impulse, bought forth countless images, portraits, descriptions, impressionistic sketches, symphonic experiments, from which I could dip at any time for material.“

In the same essay she points to the importance of writing continuously, and the dangerous of perfectionism:

“To achieve perfection in writing while retaining naturalness it was important to write a great deal, to write fluently, as the pianist practices the piano, rather than to correct constantly one page until it withers. To write continuously, to try over and over again to capture a certain mood, a certain experience. Intensive correcting may lead to monotony, to working on dead matter, whereas continuing to write and to write until perfection is achieved through repetition is a way to elude this monotony, to avoid performing an autopsy. Sheer playing of scales, practice, repetition — then by the time one is ready to write a story or a novel a great deal of natural distillation and softing has been accomplished.”

“I am sick of my own romanticism!”

Another thing I love about Anais Nin is her ability to crystallise her thoughts and feelings so well, and in so few words. She gets to the point. Some writers would need thousands of words to explain why one writes, and they still wouldn’t deliver a wise or interesting definition. Anais lived equally in her words as she did in real life, and, as years went on, she mingled the two; her life and loves became a dream, and her inner life was enriched by real experiences. Her wisdom and intuitiveness, and her understanding of her own moods and emotions comes well in her writing and it gives it beauty.

I have learned, and am learning so much from Anais. Firstly, the already mentioned idea of creating a world of your own. Imagination, dreams and daydreams are just as real as real life, and to cultivate them is to cultivate your inner life. In the world dominated by extroverts, daydreaming is sadly seen as escapism, and not as a gift of transcending reality. Secondly, the importance of emotional experiences, she says “And nothing that we do not discover emotionally will have the power to alter our vision.” I learned a great deal through observing Anais’s reactions to some sad situations in her journals, mostly with love. Detaching yourself from life in moments of despair, and observing the situation rather than being in it, frees your from pain of living it and feeling you are one with it. Out of this detachment arises bliss, and even the situation which would usually cause me pain or sadness can seem trivial and laughable. At the same time, Anais allows herself to experience emotions, but grows from the experience and doesn’t let herself be drowned in the dark oceans of sadness.

Anais inspired me to never leave the blooming fragrant garden of my imagination and seek happiness in the dry barren desert of reality where pains loom on the horizon like tall green cactuses and eagles seek their prey. Sadness is a deceptive shadowy creature, and happiness is like warm golden rays of sun, it touches your for a moment but you cannot possess it fully. Passion, enthusiasm, rapture, Imagination, daydreams, eternal quest for beauty and abundance of love to give; these are some things that are mine entirely, cannot be taken away but grow with me. In a way, writing connects our inner world with the real world. To end, here is another brilliant quote by Anais:

“I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn’t impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.”

Robert Delaunay – Joie de Vivre

Robert Delaunay, Le Premier Disque, 1912-13

If colours were emotions, this painting would be pure joy, euphoria, ecstatic rapture… Delaunay’s painting Le Premier Disque exudes playfulness, mainly because colours are in charge, and geometrical composition isn’t that dominant.

Delaunay’s colours are art therapy for me. This painting resembles a musical symphony, with colours instead of notes; deep red, cherry red, blue as the sky, the sea, then green, green like woods, yellow, van Gogh’s yellow, mystical shades of purple. Delaunay was a lyrical colourist, and after experimenting with Cubism, he returned to his greatest love – colour. He said himself: ‘This happened in 1912. Cubism was in full force. I made paintings that seemed like prisms compared to the Cubism my fellow artists were producing. I was the heretic of Cubism. I had great arguments with my comrades who banned color from their palette, depriving it of all elemental mobility. I was accused of returning to Impressionism, of making decorative paintings, etc.… I felt I had almost reached my goal.‘ It was necessary for him to experiment in order to find his own path, and he did, in 1912, when he finally succumbed to his passion for bright and dynamic colours. But his aim was different than those of Impressionists and Fauvists who still painted portraits and landscapes but with sometimes unnatural colours. Delaunay, like Kandinsky, wanted the paint to became valuable for itself.

Whenever I see this painting, it reminds me of Mayakovsky’s poem ‘But could you?’; in it Mayakovsky splashes a pot of colour on the trivialities of daily life, work-hours and boredom. Delaunay’s painting has the same effect on me; it stands as a spiritual border between school obligations and free time which I cherish immensely.

‘I blurred at once the chart of trite routine
by splashing paint with one swift motion.‘ (‘But could you? by Vladimir Mayakovsky)

For me, this painting is a true visual representation of ‘joie de vivre’, and therefore reminds me of Renoir’s paintings. While Renoir painted people dancing and laughing, Delaunay here uses nothing but colours, but provokes the same feeling from the viewer – joy of life. This is a painting which brings happiness, do you need more?