she is blithe in Fantasia now
not a care in the world
be it of forged legend
or of unfeigned history
the word of the vanquished
is legitimate evidence
of a reflection of what once was
essential the open door
heralding impossible freedom
turning the door handle
she found it locked
foul words and a temper
tears and tantrum
only I knew where
the key was stored
thankfully
not that I cared back then
I had the resolve to
kick the door in regardless
before the Jackboot had
hankered for the self-same thing
albeit with pernicious bent
as for her
she held a benevolent gun
to my temple
offered me a choice
I declined
the weapon was more
nuisance than of relevance
a mere nothing
my consciousness blown to Kingdom come?
I could ‘live’ with that
in hindsight maybe that
would have been for the best time was fast running…
How I love this man as he opened my mind-eyes to the world of fairy tales and magic. Of course, the magic followed me all in my life as my name: Aladin.
My father had chosen the name not because of “the magic-lamp” unfortunately, but just as he was a master of the Arabic language, wanted to give me the best piece of ritual, as this name means. Because “Ala” means the best and “Din” means the ritual also, the best of the rituals!!
But as you know, and everybody knows, the name goes into the story or better to say, to the tails of the Aladdin with the magic lamp.
I have nothing against it. though in Iran the peoples around had shortened it in Ala, therefore, no chance about dragging the magic lamp after but as I came in Europe and finally in Germany, the name became the Name! Everywhere I go and introduce myself there comes my lovely inspiration: Ah! With the magic lamp!
I have nothing against it, You know; it works well, though I have not found the lamp yet 😉
Anyway, let’s now have a look at this wonderful article about the love, the love of the great writers whom we loved but might never know of their “surprising love stories.
Harriet Hosmer — whose remarkable forgotten story I tell in Figuring (public library), from which this essay too is adapted — was not yet thirty when she became the world’s first successful female sculptor, claimed a place for American art in the European pantheon, and furnished queer culture with a bold new vocabulary of being. Her studio in Rome became a pilgrimage site for royalty and luminaries, drawing such esteemed admirers as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Maria Mitchell, the Prince of Wales, the Crown Princess of Germany, and the exiled queen of Naples (who would become Hosmer’s lover).
Among her famous visitors was Hans Christian Andersen (April 2, 1805–August 4, 1875) — a man of supreme storytelling genius and aching self-alienation, which Hosmer instantly intuited. In a letter home, she described Andersen as “a tall, gaunt figure of the Lincoln type with long, straight, black hair, shading a face striking because of its sweetness and sadness,” adding that “it was perhaps by reason of the very bitterness of his struggles, that he loved to dwell among the more kindly fairies in whose world he found no touch of hard humanity.”
Hans Christian Andersen (Portrait by Christian Albrecht Jensen, 1836)
Andersen’s struggles were ones of a heart unsettled, ambivalent, at war with itself. By all biographical evidence, he died a virgin. For years, he was infatuated with the Swedish opera diva Jenny Lind, but his great erotic love was reserved for Edvard Collin — a boyhood beloved who remained the single most intense emotional relationship throughout Andersen’s life. “The femininity of my nature and our friendship must remain a mystery,” he wrote to Edvard, who left in his memoir a forlorn record of the dual heartbreak that scars all such relationships between people who love each other deeply but differently: “I found myself unable to respond to this love, and this caused the author much suffering.” Andersen was unambiguous about both his feelings and his suffering, writing to Edvard with heart-rending plaintiveness:
I languish for you as for a pretty Calabrian wench… my sentiments for you are those of a woman.
Jenny Lind, on the other hand, was a woman of the highest caliber of femininity, and one of the most successful women artists of her time. Andersen sent her passionate, pouting letters, then wrote his classic story “The Nightingale” out of his frustrated reverence shortly before making an awkward marriage proposal in a letter handed to her on a train platform. The tale didn’t earn him Lind’s reciprocity, but it earned her the monicker “the Swedish Nightingale.”
Jenny Lind (Portrait by Eduard Magnus, 1862)
To make art out of heartache is, of course, the most beautiful thing one could do with one’s sorrow, as well as the most generous — no artist knows how the transfiguration of their pain into beauty will salve another heart, give another sorrower the language of their own truth, the vessel for navigating their own experience.
Across the Atlantic, Andersen’s heartbreak-fermented fairy tales furnished the language of understanding between two other deeply entwined hearts. Susan Gilbert — the love of Emily Dickinson’s life, to whom the poet had written those electrifying love letters — had married Emily’s brother to be near her. Having managed marital celibacy for an impressive five years, Susan eventually gave birth to her first child. That season, Dickinson sent to her editor a famed cryptic letter on the meaning of which biographers would speculate for centuries to come, telling him of some great unnamed and perhaps unnameable hurt:
I had a terror… I could tell to none, and so I sing, as the Boy does by the Burying Ground — because I am afraid.
Illustration for Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Nightingale” by Ukrainian artist Georgi Ivanovich Narbut, 1912.
Not a “fright,” not a “shock,” but a terror. Whether or not she was the cause, Susan knew of Emily’s suffering and suffered in consonance, for any two hearts bound by love are also bound to share in sorrow. Drawing on an image from Andersen’s fairy tale “The Nightingale and the Rose” — which in turn drew, as most of his fairy tales did, on the terrors of his own unmet heart — Susan captured the parallel heartbreak of their impossible love in a letter apologizing for turning away from Emily’s kiss:
If you have suffered this past Summer — I am sorry — I Emily bear a sorrow that I never uncover — If a nightingale sings with her breast against a thorn, why not we?
Think about a country, a very productive one, where there is the best education system, the most advanced health system, excellent manufacture, a place where ingenious, hard working people have succeeded in making profit even out of one of the less quaint stretch of coastline of the Adriatic sea, creating well organized bathing resorts, a mix of good quality facilities and places to have fun, which attract thousands of tourists from all over the world. In this country poverty rate is very low, welfare truly works, good food is popular cult and lively music part of the cultural heritage. A paradise. Does such a place really exist in Italy? Yes, it does. It’s Emilia Romagna, 1 of the 20 administrative regions of Italy, the place where lasagne, tortellini and piadina, just to mention some of their worldwide most famous delicatessen were born. This region has been ruled by the same…
Hi Friends, yes I’m still alive and want to try to update my mood right now, though it’s hard to type with one hand as the other one is holding the compressor bag to cool down my thick cheek!
Anyway, I must confess that I had somehow feared to get under this surgery, of course, I had many moments in my life to learn how to win the anxiety which everybody might have in her/his life.
Especially, I can well remember how I learned to get down my fear to go to the dentist! Yes, it’s surely a common sense in many people and mine was because of my whole-life problems with my teeth.
It is, as I believe, a genetic matter of fact; my mother had to get a complete denture when she was just twenty-five!
But I got loose of this fear as I was a late teen and I had to decide to go or not to go to the dentist and I went! As I remember; I was shivering and the doctor said: Don’t you shame?! You are a grown-up man, pull yourself together! From that time I understood how to get down the fear and it was much necessary because I had to let many teeth pull out several times in my life.
Now as I had to go to the surgery and this was a very new adventure, therefore, not exactly fear but something such as worry or excitement which I had in my belly. But some words were in my mind saying; Fear and only the fear in my great enemy.
Okay, enough said; I think it is over now and I feel just better and better again. As the Beatles song: “Getting better, “Cause you’d be mine (this “you” means, of course, my pine implants) 😉
A 54-year-old woman from the north of England has expressed her dismay after the commemorative Brexit tea towel she had bought just days earlier fell to bits in the washing machine during its maiden wash.
Amanda Dann, a housewife and mother of two from Leeds, told the Yorkshire Post newspaper: “I was gutted when my Brexit tea towel fell to bits.
“It was a really nice one too with pictures of Nigel Farage and British bulldogs on it.
“It wasn’t cheap either. I paid fifty pounds for it from an online company called, The White Crusaders.co.uk.
“They told me that half the money would be given to a pressure group dedicated to driving all the blacks into the sea.
“I can only assume it was made abroad. Probably Africa or one of those other EU countries.”
When it was pointed out to Mrs Dann that the product was manufactured in…
“There is no point in using the word ‘impossible’ to describe something that has clearly happened.” === Douglas Adams
It happened and I let it happen. Not once, twice, or thrice, but over and over again. As impossible as it seemed, I let my life, wait, “let” seems too passive, I actively participated in the over-complication of my life.
Oh, I told myself I was simplifying. I did all the “right” things. I organized, sorted, classified, tidied, de-cluttered…tried to keep only things that sparked joy.
Yet my life felt like I was just moving round those deck chairs on the “Titanic” (there was room on the board for Jack, Rose, remember, never let go?).
Then complications, on tiny clawed feet creep, whether or not I leave them a treat…
1. First stage of grief – denial. In denial my life wa
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