Abstract Nº37

One dream, last night's:

One guy, late thirties, dishevelled, -some days of beard, beer belly, filthy black t-shirt, dirty skin, worn out blue jeans- was with his hands on his knees, spitting his own tennis shoes (!). I was some meters away, trying to say something to him, but I only moved my mouth erratically and babbled, he looked at me and asked "what?" several times, but continued spitting his own feet later. My effort for articulating was hard, then my eyes started to blink fast, moved my head back, and blacked out. I was recovering consciousness on the floor, felt warm my forehead, so I saw him taking saliva out of his mouth and rubbing it onto my "third eye" in the middle of my forehead. He asked: "Can you speak now?"... I noticed I could, but was sleepy and nothing came to my mind, "Yes, you can", said he, as he stand up and raised his face to the sky, the light illuminated his dirty face, and he said: "love is pedestal enough for everyone" (?) and I woke up.

Solar being

When I was experimenting with genetic algorithms for creating 3D images, this nice unnamed being came to light, published long ago into my renderosity gallery.



I've never liked much of the work of Philip Larkin; between the few of him that I like, this poem is on top, and may come to the case:

Suspended lion face
Spilling at the centre
Of an unfurnished sky
How still you stand,
And how unaided
Single stalkless flower
You pour unrecompensed.

The eye sees you
Simplified by distance
Into an origin,
Your petalled head of flames
Continuously exploding.
Heat is the echo of your Gold.

Coined there among
Lonely horizontals
You exist openly.
Our needs hourly
Climb and return like angels.
Unclosing like a hand,
You give for ever.

Philip Larkin, "Solar".

The Moon and the clouds II

And this is the end of the prisms serie; no longer a simulated prism any more, not an oneiric vision either: just a moon over the clouds.
Late (means today) have noticed that this serie of twelve may represent enough accurately my last twelve months, since early february 2007, starting with a stress triggered disease, a breaking point in april (3rd prism), another un july (sixth), two months in very ill or faded colours -august and september: 7th and 8th-, two clear flourations of the mind in october and november (ninth and tenth), a conclusion in december (eleventh), and a clear vision from january on, again, represented by this ending. To my surprise, the serie represents my last working year.

We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon;
How restlessly they speed, and gleam, and quiver,
Streaking the darkness radiantly! — yet soon
Night closes round, and they are lost forever:

Or like forgotten lyres, whose dissonant strings
Give various response to each varying blast,
To whose frail frame no second motion brings
One mood or modulation like the last.

We rest.— A dream has power to poison sleep;
We rise.— One wandering thought pollutes the day;
We feel, conceive or reason, laugh or weep;
Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away:

It is the same! — For, be it joy or sorrow,
The path of its departure still is free:
Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow;
Nought may endure but Mutability.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Mutability".

Prism XI (The Moon and the clouds)

So the simulated prisms evolved into a oneiric sight of a moon under the cover of the clouds. You may know the common symbology: the moon is the object of desire -the beloved; and the clouds are the level of conciousness; but here, with the clouds over the moon, in this dreamy sight, the conciousness seems to represent a waste ground without the beloved, so the image is more representative of lovers known and united by the dream state, not the wakefulness... like in a second life, lived in dreams and nightmares, and beyond life and death. Strange indeed.

I.
How warm this woodland wild Recess!
Love surely hath been breathing here;
And this sweet bed of heath, my dear!
Swells up, then sinks with faint caress,
As if to have you yet more near.

II.
Eight springs have flown, since last I lay
On sea-ward Quantock's heathy hills,
Where quiet sounds from hidden rills
Float hear and there, like things astray,
And high o'er head the sky-lark shrills.

III.
No voice as yet had made the air
Be music with your name; yet why
That asking look? that yearning sigh?
That sense of promise every where?
Belovéd! flew your spirit by?

IV.
As when a mother doth explore
The rose-mark on her long-lost child,
I met, I loved you, maiden mild!
As whom I long had loved before--
So deeply had I been beguiled.

V.
You stood before me like a thought,
A dream remembered in a dream.
But when those meek eyes first did seem
To tell me, Love within you wrought--
O Greta, dear domestic stream!

VI.
Has not, since then, Love's prompture deep,
Has not Love's whisper evermore
Been ceaseless, as thy gentle roar?
Sole voice, when other voices sleep,
Dear under-song in clamor's hour.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "Recollections of love".

Abstract Nº 36

Lewis Carroll was born 176 years ago from today.

"Tweedledum and Tweedledee Agreed to have a battle; For Tweedledum said Tweedledee Had spoiled his nice new rattle. Just then flew down a monstrous crow, As black as a tar-barrel; Which frightened both the heroes so, They quite forgot their quarrel."
"I know what you're thinking about," said Tweedledum: "but it isn't so, nohow."

"Contrariwise," continued Tweedledee, "if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic."

Lewis Carroll, "Through the looking-glass" (Chapter IV).

Abstract Nº35

The dream reveals the reality which conception lags behind. That is the horror of life — the terror of art.

From the Franz Kafka Diaries.

Mask of green leaves

I'm a spy in the house of love
I know the dream, that you're dreamin' of
I know the word that you long to hear
I know your deepest, secret fear
I'm a spy in the house of love
I know the dream, that you're dreamin' of
I know the word that you long to hear
I know your deepest, secret fear
I know everything
Everything you do
Everywhere you go
Everyone you know

I'm a spy in the house of love
I know the dream, that you're dreamin' of
I know the word that you long to hear
I know your deepest, secret fear
I know your deepest, secret fear
I know your deepest, secret fear
I'm a spy, I can see
What you do
And I know

Jim Morrison, "The spy".

Floration

Apple-green west and an orange bar,
And the crystal eye of a lone, one star...
And, "Child, take the shears and cut what you will,
Frost to-night — so clear and dead-still."

Then, I sally forth, half sad, half proud,
And I come to the velvet, imperial crowd,
The wine-red, the gold, the crimson, the pied, —
The dahlias that reign by the garden-side.

The dahlias I might not touch till to-night!
A gleam of the shears in the fading light,
And I gathered them all, — the splendid throng,
And in one great sheaf I bore them along.

In my garden of Life with its all-late flowers
I heed a Voice in the shrinking hours:
"Frost to-night — so clear and dead-still"...
Half sad, half proud, my arms I fill.

Edith M. Thomas, "Frost to-night".

Orange form II

Tell me what you see in it:
The pine tree like a Rorschach-blot
black against the orange light:

Plant an orange pumpkin patch
which at twelve will quaintly hatch
nine black mice with ebon coach,

or walk into the orange and make
a devil's cataract of black
obscure god's eye with corkscrew fleck;

put orange mistress half in sun,
half in shade, until her skin
tattoos black leaves on tangerine.

Read black magic or holy book
or lyric of love in the orange and black
till dark is conquered by orange cock,

but more pragmatic than all this,
say how crafty the painter was
to make orange and black ambiguous.

Sylvia Plath, "Black pine tree in an orange light".

Behind bars

I always remember those visits we, my mother and I, did to my father when he was injustifiedly imprisoned during the last dictatorship; I was a child. There is a face I'll never forgive, a tough man with a beard, crying because I reminded him his own son. Who knows if he was injustifiedly incarcerated too, who knows if he went free, who knows if he died already, who knows if he went back to his son; who knows his name.

Fouad Al-Farhan was injustifiedly incarcerated too (left column), wonder who may be the next one incarcerated for blogging. Who knows...?

Frail friends, I love you all!
Maybe that's the trouble,
storm in the eye of a storm.
Everyone wants too much.
Instead we gratefully accept
some stylized despair:

suitcoats left hanging
on folding chairs, snow falling
inside a phonebooth, cows
scouring some sad pasture.
You know the sort of landscape,
all sensibility and no trees.

Nothing but space, a little
distance between friends.
As if loneliness didn't make us
responsible, and want accomplices.
Better to drink at home
than to fall down in bars.

Or to read all night a novel
with missing heirs, 513 pages
in ten-point type, and lay my body
down, a snarl of urges
orbited by blood,
dreaming of others.

William Matthews, "A life of crime".

Orange form I

Woodcutter.
Cut my shadow from me.
Free me from the torment
of being without fruit.

Why was I born among mirrors?
Day goes round and round me.
The night copies me
in all its stars.

I want to live without my reflection.
And then let me dream
that ants and thistledown
are my leaves and my parrots.

Federico García Lorca, "The song of the barren orange tree".


But as the spanish sound of Lorca loses too much in the translation, I offer the original:

Leñador.
Córtame la sombra.
Líbrame del suplicio
de verme sin toronjas.

¿Por qué nací entre espejos?
El día me da vueltas.
Y la noche me copia
en todas sus estrellas.

Quiero vivir sin verme.
Y hormigas y vilanos,
soñaré que son mis
hojas y mis pájaros.

Leñador.
Córtame la sombra.
Líbrame del suplicio
de verme sin toronjas.

Federico García Lorca, "Canción del naranjo seco".

Abstract Nº34

One of my favourite moments of my favourite novel:

"The question," I went on, "is how to raise the fifty thousand francs. We cannot expect to find them lying about on the floor. Listen. What of Mr. Astley?" Even as I spoke a new and strange idea formed itself in my brain.

Her eyes flashed fire.

"What? YOU YOURSELF wish me to leave you for him?" she cried with a scornful look and a proud smile. Never before had she addressed me thus.

Then her head must have turned dizzy with emotion, for suddenly she seated herself upon the sofa, as though she were powerless any longer to stand.

A flash of lightning seemed to strike me as I stood there. I could scarcely believe my eyes or my ears. She DID love me, then! It WAS to me, and not to Mr. Astley, that she had turned!
Although she, an unprotected girl, had come to me in my room--in an hotel room--and had probably compromised herself thereby, I had not understood!

Then a second mad idea flashed into my brain.

"Polina," I said, "give me but an hour. Wait here just one hour until I return. Yes, you MUST do so. Do you not see what I mean? Just stay here for that time."

And I rushed from the room without so much as answering her look of inquiry. She called something after me, but I did not return.

Sometimes it happens that the most insane thought, the most impossible conception, will become so fixed in one's head that at length one believes the thought or the conception to be reality. Moreover, if with the thought or the conception there is combined a strong, a passionate, desire, one will come to look upon the said thought or conception as something fated, inevitable, and foreordained--something bound to happen. Whether by this there is connoted something in the nature of a combination of presentiments, or a great effort of will, or a self-annulment of one's true expectations, and so on, I do not know; but, at all events that night saw happen to me (a night which I shall never forget) something in the nature of the miraculous. Although the occurrence can easily be explained by arithmetic, I still believe it to have been a miracle. Yet why did this conviction take such a hold upon me at the time, and remain with me ever since? Previously, I had thought of the idea, not as an occurrence which was ever likely to come about, but as something which NEVER could come about.

The time was a quarter past eleven o'clock when I entered the Casino in such a state of hope (though, at the same time, of agitation) as I had never before experienced. In the gaming-rooms there were still a large number of people, but not half as many as had been present in the morning.

Fiodor Dostoievsky, "Игрок" (The gambler), Chapter XIV.

Abstract Nº33

The surest way to remain poor is to be an honest man.

Napoleon Bonaparte.

Prism X

The tenth out of twelve in the serie of simulated prisms.

[...]
Is my house dreary, wall and floor,
Will not the darkness flit,
I go outside my shadowy door
And in thy rainbow sit.

George MacDonald, "The Prism" (tenth stanza).

Just because

Just because, today I wanted to post this image because I like it, so this is purely just because. If no-one like it just because, the cycle won't be closed and I will keep posting just because until someone do; but if luckily someone like it right now just because, the cycle will be closed and that person will post something just because too someday, and I'll visit its blog just because, opening we both -in this way- a bigger cycle, just because, that will enclose the previous two little cycles, just because, and so on, and on, until the world will be a chain of consequences, just because... oops, I see that someone came up with this idea before me, just because. ;-)

Grey or sepia

Whenever I see a photograph in greyscale or sepia I have my personal taste; if it's an image with many details and good focus I'd prefer grey; if not, sepia. So this is grey or sepia, but not grey and sepia, I prefer them separated. However I'm pleased with the soft abstract combination between grey and sepia here.

Blue pond

As in a pond that sleeps o'erhung by trees,
Two things at once in many a soul one sees: --
The sky, which points, the surface pure and calm,
With all its rays and clouds the heart to charm;
And then the depth, slime, hideous, dark, and dead,
Where foul black reptiles swarm, and vaguely tread.

Victor Hugo, "As in a pond".

The pit

Another image from a complicated time that already passed on. It doesn't looks like what the name promises.

Does the Eagle know what is in the pit?
Or wilt thou go ask the Mole?
Can Wisdom be put in a silver rod?
Or Love in a golden bowl?

William Blake, "Thel's Motto", from the Book of Thel.

Prism IX

[...]
For daily bread we daily pray—
The want still breeds the cry;
And so we meet, day after day,
Thou, Father in heaven, and I.
[...]

George MacDonald, "The Prism" (ninth stanza).

Prism VIII

[...]
Thy grace, O Lord, it is thyself;
Thy presence is thy light;
I cannot lay it on my shelf,
Or take it from thy sight.
[...]

George MacDonald, "The Prism" (eighth stanza).

Abstract Nº32

"So you counted the minutes while I slept, did you, Evgenie Pavlovitch?" he said, ironically. "You have not taken your eyes off me all the evening --I have noticed that much, you see! Ah, Rogojin! I've just been dreaming about him, prince," he added, frowning. "Yes, by the by," starting up, "where's the orator? Where's Lebedeff? Has he finished? What did he talk about? Is it true, prince, that you once declared that 'beauty would save the world'? Great Heaven! The prince says that beauty saves the world! And I declare that he only has such playful ideas because he's in love! Gentlemen, the prince is in love. I guessed it the moment he came in. Don't blush, prince; you make me sorry for you. What beauty saves the world? Colia told me that you are a zealous Christian; is it so? Colia says you call yourself a Christian."

The prince regarded him attentively, but said nothing.

Fiodor Dostoievsky, "The Idiot", Part III, Chapter V.

Something

If you like something you shall like this, because this is something, no? ;-)



Well, I leave in hours, will take a short vacation, ten days to ease my mind after five years without any day of real rest. Trip alone. Hope to find something interesting :-)
Will not take the laptop with me to not have the temptation of doing something related to work, but will keep posting anyway; I have some images and some quotes prepared for some days, also I should end with the simulated prisms serie. The last two are cool. So if you read, won't get rid of me easily :-P

Will hit the road. Woohoo!

Copper flower

To my detriment I'll never be neat. This is one more proof to myself and everyone: this work was meant to be posted during the southern springtime, during my series of simulated flowers, but was saved into a different format, in a different folder -mislayed in the end.
Found now, belatedly posted now. Lovely, lovely deep poem to enclose. Copper. How many health hazards and deaths for mining this copper, for just having communication lines open for little global advance.

I am a copper wire slung in the air,
Slim against the sun I make not even a clear line of shadow.
Night and day I keep singing—humming and thrumming:
It is love and war and money; it is the fighting and the
tears, the work and want,
Death and laughter of men and women passing through
me, carrier of your speech,
In the rain and the wet dripping, in the dawn and the
shine drying,
A copper wire.

Carl Sandburg, "Under a telephone pole".

Chess

Seems invented, would be unfortunate, in any case I thank the fate when have one gift of the night like this one. Have another ride inside my mind while I was dreaming, two nights ago, a good symbol of not feeling in control of my own life:

I was seating in front of a chess board, with the white pieces from my side, concentrated in the board and didn't saw who was playing against me with the black pieces; so one of my white pawns looked at me and said "look!" and moved himself alone, I was more confused than surprised. My right wing knight said "this way! F3!" and jumped over the line of pawns while the notation F3 come out of his mouth, -"Stop, stop" said I, "Let me think", -"There is no time!" another pawn said, like upsetted, and moved himself too; I didn't catched what were they doing while moving by themselves; I really tried to catch up, but the left wing bishop shooted far away and screamed "Do or die, stupid! G5!" (with truly bad temper), the queen looked at me really menacing: "You should do better!", -"What am I doing?" said I, like justifying, "You are doing nothing", intervened the king, "See?", he asked me, pointing to the board in front, while they were taking over the game that I never managed to start; I saw a kingside castling as I said "Oh-oh!" while I saw the notation 0-0 in front of my eyes coming out of the king and the rook; "Wait, please!", struggeled I, trying to understand the moves, pressing hard my temples with my fingers, right when one gentleman, grey hair, slightly bald, dressed in sort of a red and black etiquette, came and swept away every piece of the board into a red wooden box with gold threads, folded the board and took them both with him, box and board under his left arm.
- What? -asked I, annoyed.
- Time's up. -said he.
- Time? -I replied.
- Yes!, what you think?
- I don't think. -said I, and woke up stunned about it.


"Like that other, this game is for ever" says the outstanding poem, unique in history:

I

In their solemn corner, the players
move the gradual pieces. The board
detains them until dawn in its hard
compass: the hatred of two colors.

In the game, the forms give off
a severe magic: Homeric castle, gay knight,
warlike queen, king solitary,
oblique bishop, and pawns at war.

Finally, when the players have gone in,
and when time has eventually consumed them,
surely the rites then will not be done.

In the east, this war has taken fire.
Today, the whole earth is its provenance.
Like that other, this game is for ever.

II

Faint-hearted king, sly bishop, ruthless queen,
Straightforward castle, and deceitful pawn -
Over the checkered black and white terrain
They seek out and begin their armed campaign.

They do not know it is the player’s hand
That dominates and guides their destiny.
They do not know an adamantine fate
Controls their will and lays the battle plan.

The player too is captive of caprice
(The words are Omar’s) on another ground
Where black nights alternate with whiter days.

God moves the players, he in turn the piece.
But what god beyond God begins the round
Of dust and time and sleep and agonies?

Jorge Luis Borges, "Chess" ("Ajedrez").



But as the poem loses a lot in the translation, here's the original in spanish:

I

En su grave rincón, los jugadores
rigen las lentas piezas. El tablero
los demora hasta el alba en su severo
ámbito en que se odian dos colores.

Adentro irradian mágicos rigores
las formas: torre homérica, ligero
caballo, armada reina, rey postrero,
oblicuo alfil y peones agresores.

Cuando los jugadores se hayan ido,
cuando el tiempo los haya consumido,
ciertamente no habrá cesado el rito.

En el Oriente se encendió esta guerra
cuyo anfiteatro es hoy toda la tierra.
Como el otro, este juego es infinito.

II

Tenue rey, sesgo alfil, encarnizada
reina, torre directa y peón ladino
sobre lo negro y blanco del camino
buscan y libran su batalla armada.

No saben que la mano señalada
del jugador gobierna su destino,
no saben que un rigor adamantino
sujeta su albedrío y su jornada.

También el jugador es prisionero
(la sentencia es de Omar) de otro tablero
de negras noches y blancos días.

Dios mueve al jugador, y éste, la pieza.
¿Qué Dios detrás de Dios la trama empieza
de polvo y tiempo y sueño y agonías?

Jorge Luis Borges, "Ajedrez".

Vika

Turquoise and yellow.

Nature rarer uses yellow
Than another hue;
Saves she all of that for sunsets,—
Prodigal of blue,

Spending scarlet like a woman,
Yellow she affords
Only scantly and selectly,
Like a lover's words.

Emily Dickinson, XXXI.

Abstract Nº31

The man who dares to live his life with death before his eyes, the man who receives life back bit by bit and lives as though it did not belong to him by right but has been bestowed on him as a gift, the man who has such freedom and peace of mind that he has overcome death in his thoughts — such a man believes in eternal life because it is already his, it is a present experience, and he already benefits from its peace and joy. He cannot describe this experience in words. He may not be able to conform his view with the traditional picture of it. But one thing he knows for certain: Something within us does not pass away, something goes on living and working wherever the kingdom of the spirit is present. It is already working and living within us, because in our hearts we have been able to reach life by overcoming death.

Albert Schweitzer, "Reverence for Life".

Wedges of orange

The concept of oranges related to a mystical silence started to take form from an idea by Amber, months ago, about sharing oranges in silence under the sun. I made the artwork of wedges on a plate immediately, but didn't posted, without knowing why. I said to her something like "I have it done, the best I could, will send it to you", and never did. Exactly like in the poem I was shutted up to listen for something, instead of talking; something was lacking yet. Then, yesterday, I discovered the poem, that includes the Orange Tree, and the dialog, and the mystic silence, and then the post was ready, and here it is, and dedicated to my friend Amber.

The young girl stood beside me.
I Saw not what her young eyes could see:
- A light, she said, not of the sky
Lives somewhere in the Orange Tree.

- Is it, I said, of east or west?
The heartbeat of a luminous boy
Who with his faltering flute confessed
Only the edges of his joy?

Was he, I said, borne to the blue
In a mad escapade of Spring
Ere he could make a fond adieu
To his love in the blossoming?

- Listen! the young girl said. There calls
No voice, no music beats on me;
But it is almost sound: it falls
This evening on the Orange Tree.

- Does he, I said, so fear the Spring
Ere the white sap too far can climb?
See in the full gold evening
All happenings of the olden time?

Is he so goaded by the green?
Does the compulsion of the dew
Make him unknowable but keen
Asking with beauty of the blue?

- Listen! the young girl said. For all
Your hapless talk you fail to see
There is a light, a step, a call
This evening on the Orange Tree.

- Is it, I said, a waste of love
Imperishably old in pain,
Moving as an affrighted dove
Under the sunlight or the rain?

Is it a fluttering heart that gave
Too willingly and was reviled?
Is it the stammering at a grave,
The last word of a little child?

- Silence! the young girl said. Oh, why,
Why will you talk to weary me?
Plague me no longer now, for I
Am listening like the Orange Tree.

John Shaw Neilson, "The Orange Tree".

Malström

And in the center of the twirling waters, where the pressure cracks the ships of thought, a slight flouration seems to bloom?...
Art, Religion, Science. Beauty, Goodness, Truth. I find the way for redeption and truth about nature also in art. That is my experience so far.

We judge the finality, and not causality of nature, if we judge its creations as artworks; in artworks made and estimated by human genius, therefore, their perfection is not a sign of the creator's skill only, it is a sign of overall and universal human finality. In an aesthetical sense, spirit (Geist) is what animates the soul (Seele) with finality. Animated with finality, and not causality, soul is in play. »Now my proposition is,« says Kant, »that this principle is nothing else than the faculty of presenting aesthetic ideas,« which is the imagination, the productive faculty of cognition. The material for imagination »can be borrowed by us from nature in accordance with that law, but be worked up by us into something else – namely, what surpasses nature.« Genius, then, is a talent for creating and estimating arts which presupposes a definite concept of the product: not of its causality or utility, which we would usually expect as an answer to the question »What is this good for?«. The concept required in genius is a concept of an end, of the finality of artwork. To give imagination some restrictions in its flying freedom, genius needs taste »so that it may preserve its character of finality«.

Lev Kreft, "Mission(s) of Art".

Prism VII

The seventh out of twelve.

[...]
The best of gifts will not be stored:
The manna of yesterday
Has filled no sacred miser-hoard
To keep new need away.
[...]

George MacDonald, "The Prism" (seventh stanza).

Ceiling fan II

Yes, I'll berate about the freaking heat, I'm a crispy fried frog, :-) the street is a frying pan! Today it was steady 38ºC (Over 100ºF) all day long, already before the sun was out, and until 8 pm, the "feels like" hitted 40ºC (104ºF), the breeze was sweating more than the people, and I've seen persons walking with their clothes all wet on the centric streets, they just throw themselves to the fountain of a park or square and kept walking with the shoes pretty wet. The previous rule of "You won't enter this store without a shirt" it is spitted over and forgotten, women walk around on their bikinis and with a pareo over... Envy? No, you won't like to be here. ;-)

The ceiling fan is running faster over my head, the other option I have is buying an air conditioner and galons of eyedrops, but I feel so insecure about it; I still see 20/20 at my 35 years and don't want to lose it.

Simichidas! whither, pray, hurriest thou
At this mid-day time, when even the lizard
Is sleeping by the dry-stone wall,
Nor do the crested larks wander about?

Theocritus, "The mid-Day heat"

Flower of twelve petals (Happy new year!)

Well, some simulated flowers will keep showing up when needed, I guess. Twelve upcoming months: may they bloom into a whole happy new year for everyone! And... Feliz cumpleaños papá! :-D (happy birthday dad!)

Fate now allows us,

'Twixt the departing

And the upstarting,
Happy to be;
And at the call of

Memory cherish'd,

Future and perish'd
Moments we see.

Seasons of anguish,

Ah, they must ever

Truth from woe sever,
Love and joy part;
Days still more worthy

Soon will unite us,

Fairer songs light us,
Strength'ning the heart.

We, thus united,

Think of, with gladness,

Rapture and sadness,
Sorrow now flies.
Oh, how mysterious

Fortune's direction!

Old the connection,

New-born the prize!

Thank, for this, Fortune,

Wavering blindly!

Thank all that kindly
Fate may bestow!
Revel in change's

Impulses clearer,

Love far sincerer,
More heartfelt glow!

Over the old one,

Wrinkles collected,

Sad and dejected,
Others may view;
But, on us gently

Shineth a true one,

And to the new one
We, too, are new.

As a fond couple

'Midst the dance veering,

First disappearing,
Then reappear,
So let affection

Guide thro' life's mazy

Pathways so hazy
Into the year!

Johann W. von Goethe, "On the new year".