Tori Amos and her Rendition of REM's Losing My Religion

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqJDfRD9Vp4

Oh Mama, I am so sorry that I could not be who you wanted me to be. I had to be me.

Oh life, is bigger
It's bigger than you
And you are not me
The lengths that I will go to
The distance in your eyes
Oh no I've said too much
I set it up

That's me in the corner
That's me in the spot-light
Losing my religion
Trying to keep up with you
And I don't know if I can do it
Oh no I've said too much
I haven't said enough

I thought that I heard you laughing
I thought that I heard you sing
I think I thought I saw you try

Every whisper, of every waking hour
I'm choosing my confessions
Trying to keep an eye on you
Like a hurt, lost and blinded fool, fool
Oh no I've said too much
I set it up

Consider this
Consider this, the hint of the century
Consider this the slip
( From: http://www.elyrics.net )
That brought me to my knees, failed
What if all these fantasies come
Flailing around
Now I've said too much

I thought that I heard you laughing
I thought that I heard you sing
I think I thought I saw you try

But that was just a dream
That was just a dream

That's me in the corner
That's me in the spot-light
Losing my religion
Trying to keep up with you
And I don't know if I can do it
Oh no I've said too much
I haven't said enough

I thought that I heard you laughing
I thought that I heard you sing
I think I thought I saw you try

But that was just a dream
Try, cry, fly, try
That was just a dream
Just a dream
Just a dream, dream

Copy Cat

I have almost zero comments on my blog. But one comment that was left here felt like an arrow straight into my heart. The poster seemed to think I was stealing her writings and posting them here for my own.



I have no claim to any of the beautiful things that I paste and copy here. Just like I decorate my home with beautiful paintings by artists other than myself, and read beautiful literature by wonderful authors other than myself. I cherish beautiful things that make my heart sing, things that feed my brain , my eyes and my heart. I always try to make sure the original poster is given credit for their work.

I appreciate wonderful things but as of yet have not been able to create any of my own. Still trying though, the wonderful artist Varo whose works follow below only began to paint in the last ten years of her life.

And in my own little way, this blog, is my creation, even if most of it is merely appreciation of other's works. But is that a bad thing? Perhaps in my own little way I help to point out bits of beauty and song here and there.

I hope so.

So please if I have offended by my copying and pasting to my blog, please forgive me, I had only cherished what you had created and wanted to save it in my treasure box of curious and beautiful things.

The Female Quest of Remedios Varos

(from Arthurian Legends)
The quest motif in Arthurian literature is traditionally a male paradigm, but some contemporary women writers and artists have been creating a counter tradition of "revisionist mythmaking"--a re-writing or re-visioning of the quest that foregrounds the female implications of traditional quest/grail imagery and addresses specifically the relations among women, nature, and the creative imagination. Scholar Estella Lauter claims that the fantasy and female-centered art of Remedios Varo reveals the same stages found in traditional quests: the Separation, the Initiation, and the Return. See what you think as you view the following images accompanied by selected quotations from Lauter's Women as Mythmakers: Poetry and Visual Art by Twentieth-Century Women (Indiana UP 1984).

Born in 1908, Anglés Cataluńa Spain. Died 1963, Mexico City, Remedios Varo is probably one least known of the great Surrealist painters, even though she is rumored to have taken classes together with Salvado Dalí. Her presentation of dreams, imagery and symbolism has a unique style all its own, entriely fanatastic, yet still full of subtle wit and enigma.

In 1942 she moved to Mexico City with her husband, Benjamin Péret, to escape the nazi occupation of France. It was in Mexico that she painted many of her finest works.

Rupture
(Ruptura)1955

[Page 89] "One of Varo's first paintings . . . shows a cloaked and hooded female descending a walled flight of steps from an imposing building, under the ominous gaze of six human figures. She walks straight toward us with . . . her hands folded in resolution. . . . Her garment suggests that she is leaving a convent; its folds, however, suggest the vaginal shape that surrounds several questers in Varo's later work."

Solar Music
(Musica Solar)1955
[Page 81] "[In Solar Music] . . . a woman plays a stringed sunbeam with her bow, and the music releases the birds in nearby trees from their cocoon-like capsules. Where illumination from the sun falls, it makes both the forest floor and her mantle green; but [Page 83] it is her own music, rising in arcs from the point where her bow touches the strings, that releases the birds from their torpor. . . ."

Celestial Pabulum
(Papilla estelar)
1958

[Page 90] "[This painting creates] an image of female nurturing . . . . The protagonist is seated at a table inside an octagonal enclosure in the sky. She is grinding the food from the stars and feeding it to the moon in its cage. She is at once powerful and impotent. Because the moon is waning, it seems likely that she is saving it from death. . . . A closer look at her setting reveals the source of her ambivalence; although there are steps leading from her enclosure, she could not take them unless she could walk on clouds. . . . [She] is as caged as the moon. . . ."

Creation of the Birds
(Creacion de las aves)
1958


[Page 84-5] ". . . [T]he protagonist has assumed the form of an owl in order to paint birds who will come to life and take flight for the first time. . . . She dips the brush, attached to her own violin (in the place of her heart), into paint from an alchemical alembic where the substance from the stars is stored. With her other hand, she holds a triangular magnifying glass to intensify the light from the moon. . . . The woman/owl gives wings to her visions of the birds."
[Page 91] ". . . [This] is her image of what will be required if human creators wish to make a world in which all the species of life can survive. Her choice of the owl, always a figure of wisdom, is clarified by the information that the pre-Hellenic, Cretan Athena was a patron of the arts and a goddess of renewal . . . ."

Exploration of the Sources of the Orinoco River
(Exploracion de las fuentes del rio Orinoco)
1959

[Page 92] "In the midst of all these images of the transformed or the stymied quester is Varo's most explicit image of a journey. In Journey to the Sources of the Orinoco River, an amazon dressed in army fatigues and a bowler hat nagivates a womb-like egg-shaped vessel . . . riveted together and equipped with modern instruments for navigation. The journey has ended in a primeval forest which has drowned in the water that spouts from a goblet-fountain on a table in a hollow tree-trunk. . . . This may have been a sacred place of origins, but now it is nothing more than another landmark of civilization."


Born Again
(Nacer de Nuevo)
1960


[Page 92] "The moment of discovery in Varo's rendition of the quest occurs in Born Again. It is the discovery of the grail, which eluded all but three of King Arthur's knights. The naked female breaks through a wall into a sacred space that contains the grail, miraculously full and containing the reflected image of the crescent moon. . . . It is an ecstatic moment, . . . entirely feminine because of the ancient association of the woman with the vessel and the moon, and because of the vaginal imagery presented in the tearing wall. . . . [T]he protagonist has become her own fate."

The Calling
(or, The One Who Is Called; La llamada)
1961

[Page 92] ". . . [T]he quester is dressed in an incandescent flame-like garment. Her[Page 94] red hair reaches up to and wraps around the largest celestial body in the dark sky. She moves forward swiftly, carrying a vial of precious fluid and wearing an alchemist's mortar around her neck. The citizens, so immobile that they have become part of the city walls, indicate no awareness of her presence. No one acknowledges her triumph, her apotheosis as a goddess of fire or as a spiritual alchemist who has produced the elixir of life."

Woman Coming Out of the Psychoanalyst's
(Mujer saliendo del psicoamalista)
1961


[Page 94] ". . . [T]he woman, wearing a green cloak, holds her father's head by the beard and prepares to drop it into the well. . . . Her vision has enabled her to discard her father's head (the most powerful embodiment of all that is threatening to her) along with other elements (a clock, a key, a pacifier) that Varo labels 'psychological waste.' Part of her mask has slipped in the process, but her mouth is still covered."

[Page 96] "Far from achieving atonement with the father, she must dispose of his head and assume the ultimate task of creation, the resurrection of nature, by herself. . . ."

Still-life Being Resurrected
(Naturaleza muerta resucitando)
1963


[Page 86] "[This painting] shows plates of fruit being set in motion by a candle in the center of a table, and spiralling upward and outward until the fruit smashes to release its seeds, which become plants and flower immediately . . . . Varo's creator must now resurrect vegetable life. . . . Perhaps this is the most radical image of human creativity we can imagine--this god-like responsibility for the continuation of inanimate life."

Thomas Pynchon – The Crying of Lot 49

“In Mexico City they somehow wandered into an exhibition of paintings by the beautiful Spanish exile Remedios Varo: in the central paintings of a triptych, titled ‘Bordando el Manto Terrestre’, were a number of frail girls with heart-shaped faces, huge eyes, spun-gold hair, prisoners in the top room of a circular tower, embroidering a kind of tapestry which spilled out the slit windows and into a void, seeking hopelessly to fill the void: for all the other buildings and creatures, all the waves, ships and forests of the earth were contained in this tapestry, and the tapestry was the world.”
Thomas Pynchon – The Crying of Lot 49

http://www.dcpages.com/Museums/Art/041700varomus.shtml
National Museum of Women in the Arts : The Magic of Remedios Varo
Review by: Marilyn Millstone

Step inside the gold-and-marble grandeur of the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA), and you'll find on view the remarkable surrealist paintings of Spanish artist Remedios Varo.

Varo, who was born in 1908 and died of a heart attack at age 55, devoted herself to painting only in the last decade of her life. Seventy-seven of her most famous works are on display at NMWA, many for the first time ever in the U.S.

The exhibit is aptly entitled "The Magic of Remedios Varo," for the word magic conjures an aura of whimsy, unpredictability and a bit of spookiness. Varo's paintings deliver exactly that: images, juxtapositions and allusions so fantastic and haunting that audiences have been entranced by them since her first one-woman show was held in Mexico in 1956.

Passionately interested in the sciences, the occult and the place of women in the world, Varo uses a wide array of subject matter in her work. Sometimes, she depicts women in traditional roles like weaving, though, characteristically, her depiction veers toward the fantastical. In "Weaver of Verona," an ashen woman seated in a dim room knits what is perhaps her alter-ego -- a winged woman in a bold red dress who is flying toward the light of the open window, her face turned enigmatically toward the viewer. In another piece called "Weaving of Space and Time," Varo interprets in delicate, swirling strokes the meaning of Einstein's theory of relativity.

The exhibit elicits a lot of "oohs" and "ahs" from viewers. "I've been to most of the famous art museums in the world, and I've never seen one of her works, or even heard of her," said one young Hispanic woman visiting the exhibit. "She's just wonderful."

Thematically complex and technically superb, Varo's challenging paintings take time to fully absorb and appreciate. You'll want to give yourself at least a full hour to experience the richness of the exhibit. A word of advice: be sure to follow from the beginning of the exhibit the beautifully written text panels offering insights that will enhance your understanding of Varo's work.

"The Magic of Remedios Varo" runs through May 29. The National Museum of Women in the Arts is located at 1250 New York Ave. NW, Washington, DC 20005, and is open Monday through Saturday 10-5 and Sunday 12-5. Admission is free; donations are requested.

-- Marilyn Millstone

Do you dream of the Magdalene?

from Blog Mary Magdalene Within)

There is a beautiful 14th century altar piece with the familiar Mary Magdalene and a worried looking "Authority Father". We see Mary's symbols of red clothing, a jar of special oil or ointment, a look of "all knowing", and long beautiful hair. Her hair is most often red or blonde, and it's almost always loose and flowing.

The lore of the Goddess from time immemorial has told us about her hair; how beautiful, magical, mystical is Her hair. No matter the insults, denigrations, mistellings of her story that Mary "called the Magdalene" has endured, she seems to have always kept claim to the glory of her hair. Painters and sculptors through the last 2,000 years have felt compelled to keep her hair long and beautiful. Apparently hair was so very potent an attribute of Woman that St. Paul needed to proclaim it forbidden in church. Woman's hair should be covered "because of the angels" (1 Corinthians 11:10), referring to a belief that women's hair would draw demons into the building. By that time, of course, the Magdalene's fate was sealed , even though Jesus had said so explicitly , "Wheresoever the gospel shall be preached throughout the whole world, that also which this woman hath done shall be spoken of in memorial of her..." (Mark 14:3-9 ) In Memory of Her.

Before Jesus the Christ and Mary the Magdalene stepped onto the world stage as Divine Couple, Isis and Osiris were the ones to enact the stories of Sacred Union on all levels, and hair was a potent force in those stories too. When Osiris died and Isis was in her lamentation period, she cut a lock of her hair to place on his burial garments. And when she was bringing to effect the resurrection of Osiris, it was her hair spread over him which represented the Life Force which brought him back. It was said that her hair created the warmth which started his heart again, and allowed her to conceive a child. And there we have the story of the life cycle within the Sacred Union, restoring her bounty to earth.

Isis and Osiris painting by Susan Seddon Boulet

Legends have it that Mary Magdalene was with child after she had played her part in enacting the ancient story of creation and re-creation. Her "Princess Sarah" of "the journey in the boat with no oars" went underground in the European tales of the fate of the feminine world soul.


Mary the Magdalene also lived through the feeling and intuition and love of the artists who brought her alive, with her long flowing tresses of power and magic and beauty. Perhaps her stories of the great love between she and Jesus met up with northern European stories of glorious women diety like Rhiannon and Gwenhwyfar. Both of these goddesses were said to have long, long beautiful hair and both inspired the love of the best of the kings. We know that the fair Guinevere was known, as was Mary Magdalene, as "female wisdom"...The Woman Who Knows the All. Rhiannon was Britain's woman diety with long and powerful hair, and she most often came riding to people on an enormous white unearthly horse.

One of our Christian stories (Revelations xix 11-14) tells us that Jesus will return on an unearthly white horse.....we can only hope that it belongs to the Goddess Rhiannon.

Rhiannon painting by Stevie Nicks

Rhiannon by Stevie Nicks

Rhiannon rings like a bell throu the night

And wouldnt you love to love her

Takes to the sky like a bird in flight

And who will be her lover

All your life youve never seen a woman

Taken by the wind

Would you stay if she promised you heaven

Will you ever winShe is like a cat in the dark

And then she is the darkness

She rules her life like a fine skylark

And when the sky is starless

All your life youve never seen a woman

Taken by the wind

Would you stay if she promised you heaven

Will you ever win

Will you ever win

Rhiannon

"Seest thou this woman? I entered into thy house, thou gavest me no water for my feet: but she hath wetted my feet with her tears, and wiped them with her hair. Thou gavest me no kiss; but she, since the time I came in, hath not ceased to kiss my feet." (Luke 7)


Her love flows easily like her unbound hair, she is the love capacity of the Goddess, the wisdom of the Goddess to love the Sacred Masculine with whom she creates life.