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Jean Jaurès
(1859 – 1914)
La Couleur Fille De La Lumière
Pourquoi la couleur ne serait-elle pas un produit de notre sphère? Pourquoi ne supposerait-elle pas des conditions qui ne soient pas réalisées dans l’indifférence de l’espace infini? Elle ne se manifeste aux sens qu’à la rencontre de la lumière et de ce qui est essentiellement contraire à la lumière, les corps résistants. Pourquoi donc supposer qu’elle est déjà contenue dans la lumière? On a la ressource de dire qu’elle s’y cache et qu’elle attend, pour se montrer, que la libre expansion de la clarté rencontre un obstacle. Mais il est permis de penser aussi que ce qui se cache si bien n’existe pas encore ; la couleur est fille de la lumière et de notre monde corporel et lourd. Pourquoi en appesantir la lumière elle-même dans son expansion une et simple à travers l’infini? Quel sens auraient le vert et le rouge dans les espaces indifférents? Ici ils résultent de la vie et ils l’expriment dans son rapport avec la lumière; hors de la sphère vivante, ils n’ont pas de sens . . .
Par les couleurs, la lumière fait amitié avec notre monde: la couleur est le gage d’union; la matière pesante peut enrichir l’impondérable en manifestant d’une manière éclatante ce qui se dérobait en lui; l’obscurité, en faisant sortir les couleurs de la lumière, lui vaut, dans notre sphère, un joyeux triomphe; et la lumière en même temps, en s’unissant à la matière pesante dans la couleur, l’allège et l’idéalise: rien ne demeure stérile; tout fait œuvre de beauté. Les molécules dispersées dans l’air nous donnent les splendeurs du couchant; l’obscurité infinie des espaces vides, se répandant dans la clarté du jour, l’adoucit en une charmante teinte bleue; le mystère même de la nuit et la brutalité de la lumière, saisis au travers l’un de l’autre et l’un dans l’autre, conspirent à une merveilleuse douceur: le jour manifeste la nuit; car, plus la lumière est abondante et pure, plus le ciel est profond, et plus le regard devine l’immensité des espaces qui sont au delà; et le soir, quand le voile de clarté tombe pour laisser voir la nuit à découvert, on la trouverait bien vulgaire et bien triste, si elle ne s’emplissait lentement d’un autre mystère.
Devenue expressive dans la couleur, la lumière s’est rapprochée du son: elle peut concourir avec lui à manifester l’âme des choses; tandis qu’un son qui s’élèverait dans la pure clarté serait comme une voix dans le désert, sans rien qui la soutienne ou lui réponde, les sonorités du monde s’harmonisent à ses splendeurs. La magnificence ou la tristesse des teintes correspond à la plénitude joyeuse ou à la douceur voilée des sons: la lumière, dans sa lutte et son union avec l’obscurité, est devenue dramatique, et elle s’accorde avec un monde où tout est action; l’ombre, en pénétrant dans la clarté, y a glissé d’intimes trésors de mélancolie que le bleu pâlissant du soir communique à l’âme, et la sérénité impassible de la clarté pure est devenue, au contact de l’ombre qu’elle dissipe en s’y transformant, quelque chose de plus humain, la joie.
Jean Jaurès poésie
fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: Archive I-J, Jaurès, Jean
Karoline von Günderrode
(1780 – 1806)
Der Gefangene und der Sänger
Ich wallte mit leichtem und lustigem Sinn
Und singend am Kerker vorüber;
Da schallt aus der Tiefe, da schallt aus dem Thurm
Mir Stimme des Freundes herüber. –
„Ach Sänger! verweile, mich tröstet dein Lied,
Es steigt zum Gefangnen herunter,
Ihm macht es gesellig die einsame Zeit,
Das krankende Herz ihm gesunder.“
Ich horchte der Stimme, gehorchte ihr bald,
Zum Kerker hin wandt’ ich die Schritte,
Gern sprach ich die freundlichsten Worte hinab,
Begegnete jeglicher Bitte.
Da war dem Gefangenen freier der Sinn,
Gesellig die einsamen Stunden. –
„Gern gäb ich dir Lieber! so rief er: die Hand,
Doch ist sie von Banden umwunden.
Gern käm’ ich Geliebter! gern käm’ ich herauf
Am Herzen dich treulich zu herzen;
Doch trennen mich Mauern und Riegel von dir,
O fühl’ des Gefangenen Schmerzen.
Es ziehet mich mancherlei Sehnsucht zu dir;
Doch Ketten umfangen mein Leben,
Drum gehe mein Lieber und laß mich allein,
Ich Armer ich kann dir nichts geben.“ –
Da ward mir so weich und so wehe ums Herz,
Ich konnte den Lieben nicht lassen.
Am Kerker nun lausch’ ich von Frührothes Schein
Bis Abends die Farben erblassen.
Und harren dort werd’ ich die Jahre hindurch,
Und sollt’ ich drob selber erblassen.
Es ist mir so weich und so sehnend ums Herz
Ich kann den Geliebten nicht lassen.
Karoline Günderrode Gedichte
fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: Archive G-H, Karoline von Günderrode
Sibylla Schwarz
(1621 – 1638)
Cloris
Cloris
deine rohte Wangen
deiner Augen helles Licht
und dein Purpurangesicht
hält mich nuhn nicht mehr gefangen.
Ich kan nicht mehr an dir hangen
weil du dich erbarmest nicht
ob mir schon mein Hertze bricht;
deiner schnöden Hoffart Prangen
und dein hönisches Gemüht
krencket mir mein jung Geblüht
daß ich dich wil gerne meiden
wan mich meine Galate
die mir macht dis süße Weh
wil in ihren Diensten leiden.
Sibylla Schwarz poetry
fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: Archive S-T, SIbylla Schwarz
William Shakespeare
(1564-1616)
O, now, for ever
O, now, for ever
Farewell the tranquil mind! farewell content!
Farewell the plumed troop and the big wars
That make ambition virtue! O, farewell!
Farewell the neighing steed and the shrill trump,
The spirit-stirring drum, the ear-piercing fife,
The royal banner, and all quality,
Pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war!
And, O you mortal engines, whose rude throats
The immortal Jove’s dread clamours counterfeit,
Farewell! Othello’s occupation’s gone!
William Shakespeare, “Othello”, Act 3 scene 3
Shakespeare 400 (1616 – 2016)
fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: Archive S-T, Shakespeare, William
Round the Red Lamp: Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Table of Contents
The Preface
Behind the Times. (#01)
His First Operation. (#02)
A Straggler of ‘15. (#03)
The Third Generation. (#04)
A False Start. (#05)
The Curse of Eve. (#06)
Sweethearts. (#07)
A Physiologist’s Wife. (#08)
The Case of Lady Sannox. (#09)
A Question of Diplomacy. (#10)
A Medical Document. (#11)
Lot No. 249. (#12)
The Los Amigos Fiasco. (#13)
The Doctors of Hoyland. (#14)
The Surgeon Talks. (#15)
The Preface.
[Being an extract from a long and animated correspondence with a friend in America.]
I quite recognise the force of your objection that an invalid or a woman in weak health would get no good from stories which attempt to treat some features of medical life with a certain amount of realism. If you deal with this life at all, however, and if you are anxious to make your doctors something more than marionettes, it is quite essential that you should paint the darker side, since it is that which is principally presented to the surgeon or physician. He sees many beautiful things, it is true, fortitude and heroism, love and self-sacrifice; but they are all called forth (as our nobler qualities are always called forth) by bitter sorrow and trial. One cannot write of medical life and be merry over it.
Then why write of it, you may ask? If a subject is painful why treat it at all? I answer that it is the province of fiction to treat painful things as well as cheerful ones. The story which wiles away a weary hour fulfils an obviously good purpose, but not more so, I hold, than that which helps to emphasise the graver side of life. A tale which may startle the reader out of his usual grooves of thought, and shocks him into seriousness, plays the part of the alterative and tonic in medicine, bitter to the taste but bracing in the result. There are a few stories in this little collection which might have such an effect, and I have so far shared in your feeling that I have reserved them from serial publication. In book-form the reader can see that they are medical stories, and can, if he or she be so minded, avoid them.
Yours very truly,
A. CONAN DOYLE
P.S.—You ask about the Red Lamp. It is the usual sign of the general practitioner in England.
Behind the Times
by Arthur Conan Doyle
My first interview with Dr. James Winter was under dramatic circumstances. It occurred at two in the morning in the bedroom of an old country house. I kicked him twice on the white waistcoat and knocked off his gold spectacles, while he with the aid of a female accomplice stifled my angry cries in a flannel petticoat and thrust me into a warm bath. I am told that one of my parents, who happened to be present, remarked in a whisper that there was nothing the matter with my lungs. I cannot recall how Dr. Winter looked at the time, for I had other things to think of, but his description of my own appearance is far from flattering. A fluffy head, a body like a trussed goose, very bandy legs, and feet with the soles turned inwards—those are the main items which he can remember.
From this time onwards the epochs of my life were the periodical assaults which Dr. Winter made upon me. He vaccinated me; he cut me for an abscess; he blistered me for mumps. It was a world of peace and he the one dark cloud that threatened. But at last there came a time of real illness—a time when I lay for months together inside my wickerwork-basket bed, and then it was that I learned that that hard face could relax, that those country-made creaking boots could steal very gently to a bedside, and that that rough voice could thin into a whisper when it spoke to a sick child.
And now the child is himself a medical man, and yet Dr. Winter is the same as ever. I can see no change since first I can remember him, save that perhaps the brindled hair is a trifle whiter, and the huge shoulders a little more bowed. He is a very tall man, though he loses a couple of inches from his stoop. That big back of his has curved itself over sick beds until it has set in that shape. His face is of a walnut brown, and tells of long winter drives over bleak country roads, with the wind and the rain in his teeth. It looks smooth at a little distance, but as you approach him you see that it is shot with innumerable fine wrinkles like a last year’s apple. They are hardly to be seen when he is in repose; but when he laughs his face breaks like a starred glass, and you realise then that though he looks old, he must be older than he looks.
How old that is I could never discover. I have often tried to find out, and have struck his stream as high up as George IV and even the Regency, but without ever getting quite to the source. His mind must have been open to impressions very early, but it must also have closed early, for the politics of the day have little interest for him, while he is fiercely excited about questions which are entirely prehistoric. He shakes his head when he speaks of the first Reform Bill and expresses grave doubts as to its wisdom, and I have heard him, when he was warmed by a glass of wine, say bitter things about Robert Peel and his abandoning of the Corn Laws. The death of that statesman brought the history of England to a definite close, and Dr. Winter refers to everything which had happened since then as to an insignificant anticlimax.
But it was only when I had myself become a medical man that I was able to appreciate how entirely he is a survival of a past generation. He had learned his medicine under that obsolete and forgotten system by which a youth was apprenticed to a surgeon, in the days when the study of anatomy was often approached through a violated grave. His views upon his own profession are even more reactionary than in politics. Fifty years have brought him little and deprived him of less. Vaccination was well within the teaching of his youth, though I think he has a secret preference for inoculation. Bleeding he would practise freely but for public opinion. Chloroform he regards as a dangerous innovation, and he always clicks with his tongue when it is mentioned. He has even been known to say vain things about Laennec, and to refer to the stethoscope as “a new-fangled French toy.” He carries one in his hat out of deference to the expectations of his patients, but he is very hard of hearing, so that it makes little difference whether he uses it or not.
He reads, as a duty, his weekly medical paper, so that he has a general idea as to the advance of modern science. He always persists in looking upon it as a huge and rather ludicrous experiment. The germ theory of disease set him chuckling for a long time, and his favourite joke in the sick room was to say, “Shut the door or the germs will be getting in.” As to the Darwinian theory, it struck him as being the crowning joke of the century. “The children in the nursery and the ancestors in the stable,” he would cry, and laugh the tears out of his eyes.
He is so very much behind the day that occasionally, as things move round in their usual circle, he finds himself, to his bewilderment, in the front of the fashion. Dietetic treatment, for example, had been much in vogue in his youth, and he has more practical knowledge of it than any one whom I have met. Massage, too, was familiar to him when it was new to our generation. He had been trained also at a time when instruments were in a rudimentary state, and when men learned to trust more to their own fingers. He has a model surgical hand, muscular in the palm, tapering in the fingers, “with an eye at the end of each.” I shall not easily forget how Dr. Patterson and I cut Sir John Sirwell, the County Member, and were unable to find the stone. It was a horrible moment. Both our careers were at stake. And then it was that Dr. Winter, whom we had asked out of courtesy to be present, introduced into the wound a finger which seemed to our excited senses to be about nine inches long, and hooked out the stone at the end of it. “It’s always well to bring one in your waistcoat-pocket,” said he with a chuckle, “but I suppose you youngsters are above all that.”
We made him president of our branch of the British Medical Association, but he resigned after the first meeting. “The young men are too much for me,” he said. “I don’t understand what they are talking about.” Yet his patients do very well. He has the healing touch—that magnetic thing which defies explanation or analysis, but which is a very evident fact none the less. His mere presence leaves the patient with more hopefulness and vitality. The sight of disease affects him as dust does a careful housewife. It makes him angry and impatient. “Tut, tut, this will never do!” he cries, as he takes over a new case. He would shoo Death out of the room as though he were an intrusive hen. But when the intruder refuses to be dislodged, when the blood moves more slowly and the eyes grow dimmer, then it is that Dr. Winter is of more avail than all the drugs in his surgery. Dying folk cling to his hand as if the presence of his bulk and vigour gives them more courage to face the change; and that kindly, windbeaten face has been the last earthly impression which many a sufferer has carried into the unknown.
When Dr. Patterson and I—both of us young, energetic, and up-to-date—settled in the district, we were most cordially received by the old doctor, who would have been only too happy to be relieved of some of his patients. The patients themselves, however, followed their own inclinations—which is a reprehensible way that patients have—so that we remained neglected, with our modern instruments and our latest alkaloids, while he was serving out senna and calomel to all the countryside. We both of us loved the old fellow, but at the same time, in the privacy of our own intimate conversations, we could not help commenting upon this deplorable lack of judgment. “It’s all very well for the poorer people,” said Patterson. “But after all the educated classes have a right to expect that their medical man will know the difference between a mitral murmur and a bronchitic rale. It’s the judicial frame of mind, not the sympathetic, which is the essential one.”
I thoroughly agreed with Patterson in what he said. It happened, however, that very shortly afterwards the epidemic of influenza broke out, and we were all worked to death. One morning I met Patterson on my round, and found him looking rather pale and fagged out. He made the same remark about me. I was, in fact, feeling far from well, and I lay upon the sofa all the afternoon with a splitting headache and pains in every joint. As evening closed in, I could no longer disguise the fact that the scourge was upon me, and I felt that I should have medical advice without delay. It was of Patterson, naturally, that I thought, but somehow the idea of him had suddenly become repugnant to me. I thought of his cold, critical attitude, of his endless questions, of his tests and his tappings. I wanted something more soothing—something more genial.
“Mrs. Hudson,” said I to my housekeeper, “would you kindly run along to old Dr. Winter and tell him that I should be obliged to him if he would step round?”
She was back with an answer presently. “Dr. Winter will come round in an hour or so, sir; but he has just been called in to attend Dr. Patterson.”
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859 – 1930)
Round the Red Lamp: Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life
Behind the Times. (#01)
fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: Doyle, Arthur Conan, Doyle, Arthur Conan, DRUGS & DISEASE & MEDICINE & LITERATURE, Round the Red Lamp
Max Jacob
(1876 – 1944)
La Guerre
Quand le soleil est en colère,
les vagues de la mer vont plus vite,
les nuages du ciel se dépêchent.
Les yeux du
Sage s’exorbitent
le nombril de
Bouddha était
comme une coupe vide : la coupe maintenant
déborde
Max Jacob poetry
fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: Archive I-J, Jacob, Max
Kate Tempest vecht met twee wapens; haar pen en haar stem. Als artiest won ze meerdere poetry slams en bracht in 2014 als rapper haar tweede album ‘Everybody Down’ uit. Daarnaast publiceerde ze als schrijfster een dichtbundel en een roman en schreef tussendoor nog een toneelstuk. Op het podium brengt Kate Tempest verhalen tot leven met haar unieke mix van indie-hiphop vol rauwe, poëtische raps over het grauwe stadsleven in Londen. Tekstueel één van de meest interessante en urgente lyricisten van dit moment.
KATE TEMPEST
donderdag 10 november 2016 – 19:30 uur
The Max
Melkweg
Lijnbaansgracht 234a
1017 PH Amsterdam
Telefoon: 020-5318181
Verkoop start vrijdag 19 aug
# Meer info op website Melkweg Amsterdam
fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: #Archive A-Z Sound Poetry, #More Poetry Archives, Archive S-T, Art & Literature News, Kate/Kae Tempest, Poetry Slam, STREET POETRY, Tempest, Kate/Kae, THEATRE
Katharine Lee Bates
(1859-1929)
The Great Twin Brethren
The battle will not cease
Till once again on those white steeds ye ride,
O heaven-descended Twins,
Before humanity’s bewildered host.
Our javelins
Fly wide,
And idle is our cannon’s boast.
Lead us, triumphant Brethren, Love and Peace.
A fairer Golden Fleece
Our more adventurous Argo fain would seek,
But save, O Sons of Jove,
Your blended light go with us, vain employ
It were to rove
This bleak,
Blind waste. To unimagined joy
Guide us, immortal Brethren, Love and Peace.
Katharine Lee Bates poetry
fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: Archive A-B, CLASSIC POETRY
Het grootste poëziefeest van het jaar strijkt weer neer in de Grote Zaal van Tivoli-Vredenburg! 20 gevestigde dichters én nieuwe sterren aan het poëtisch firmament vertegenwoordigen gedurende één ‘Nacht’ het beste wat de Nederlandstalige dichtkunst in de brede zin te bieden heeft.
Muzikale en theatrale entr’actes nemen tijdens deze nachtelijke estafette het stokje meerdere malen over van de dichters. En het programma eindigt niet bij de deuren van de Grote Zaal. Strek even de benen, haal wat te drinken en wissel literaire en culinaire geneugten af in de vele rondgangen waar ook de traditionele boekenmarkt verrijst. Om vervolgens weer terug te keren naar de omarming van de Grote Zaal waar de dichters en het publiek, elkaar steeds dieper de Nacht in leiden. Gelijktijdig met de boekenmarkt vindt een presentatie van kleine uitgevers, literaire tijdschriften en organisaties plaats.
Dichters:
Jan Baeke
Charlotte Van den Broeck
Hans Dorrestijn
Charles Ducal
Anna Enquist
Eva Gerlach
Jonathan Griffioen
Tjitske Jansen
Mustafa Kör
Joke van Leeuwen
Bart Meuleman
K. Michel
Marlene van Niekerk
Roos Rebergen
Marieke Rijneveld
Astrid H. Roemer
F. Starik
Anne Vegter
Christophe Vekeman
Edward van de Vendel
Presentatoren: Piet Piryns & Ester Naomi Perquin
Traditioneel blijft geheim wie hoe laat optreedt. Altijd op de hoogte van het laatste nieuws? Schrijf je in voor de nieuwsbrief!
Goed om te weten: de ‘Nacht’ duurt van 20.00 tot ±03.00, maar het is geen standaard van A tot Z-programma: het evenement kent doorlopend een vrije inloop dus je bent vrij om te komen en te gaan wanneer je wilt.
34ste Nacht van de Poëzie
zaterdag 17 september 2016
TivoliVredenburg, Utrecht
# Meer info en kaartverkoop via website Nacht van de Poëzie
fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: Art & Literature News, Jansen, Tjitske, Michel, K., MUSIC, Nacht van de Poëzie, POETRY ARCHIVE, Rijneveld, Marieke Lucas, THEATRE
Walt Whitman
(1819 – 1892)
Satan
Aloof, dissatisfied, plotting revolt,
Comrade of criminals, brother of slaves,
Crafty, despised, a drudge, ignorant,
With sudra face and worn brow–black, but in the depths of my heart proud
as any;
Lifted, now and always, against whoever, scorning, assumes to rule me;
Morose, full of guile, full of reminiscences, brooding, with many wiles,
Though it was thought I was baffled and dispelled, and my wiles done–but
that will never be;
Defiant I SATAN still live–still utter words–in new lands duly appearing,
and old ones also;
Permanent here, from my side, warlike, equal with any, real as any,
Nor time, nor change, shall ever change me or my words.
Walt Whitman poetry
fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: Archive W-X, Whitman, Walt
William Shakespeare
(1564-1616)
Romeo & Juliet
“Romeo:
If I profane with my unworthiest hand
This holy shrine, the gentle fine is this:
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.
Juliet:
Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
Which mannerly devotion shows in this;
For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss.
Romeo:
Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?
Juliet:
Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.
Romeo:
O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do;
They pray, grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.
Juliet:
Saints do not move, though grant for prayers’ sake.
Romeo:
Then move not, while my prayer’s effect I take.
Thus from my lips, by yours, my sin is purged.
Juliet:
Then have my lips the sin that they have took.
Romeo:
Sin from thy lips? O trespass sweetly urged!
Give me my sin again.
Juliet:
You kiss by the book.”
William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
Shakespeare 400 (1616 – 2016)
fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: Archive S-T, Romeo & Juliet, Shakespeare, William
Kringloop
Bij avondval vermoed ik uitgestorven kampen:
Het spit wildloos, verwaaiende koude asch.
Dan keert de jager huiswaarts, zonder buit.
In zijn hoofd dansen prooien en schreeuwen.
’s Nachts zijn dromen gevuld met rakelingse speren.
De driften in zichzelf gevlucht: alles om te vergeten.
Vergeefs pogen, pogen. Steeds maar weer.
Bert Bevers
Uit Afglans – Gedichten 1972-1997, Uitgeverij WEL, Bergen op Zoom, 1997
fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: Archive A-B, Bevers, Bert
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