Love #24

Si l’Amour porte des ailes,
N’est-ce pas pour voltiger?
N’est-ce pas pour voltiger?
N’est-ce pas pour voltiger?

Beaumarchais, Le Mariage de Figaro (1784)

Auden #21, Love #23, Order of the Universe #33

Culture, in fact, is something more than merely a relative anthropological concept. “Men are born not with equal abilities but with an equal weakness.” Culture, then, is something to be won, and difficult to retain. It is not knowledge, though knowledge is essential; it is not intellect or will, though these are the means to its attainment; it is not self-expression, though those who have it are more truly themselves: it might be defined as a power to resist a blind all-or-none reaction to the immediate stimulus, a willingness to make choices and to admit when, as will often happen, they prove wrong, an awareness, with Dante, that “man was never without love natural and love rational. The natural is always without error, but the other may err through an evil object ... love is the seed of every virtue in you and of every deed that deserves punishment.”

W.H. Auden, review of Historian and Scientist, by Gaetano Salvemini, The Nation (July 6, 1940)

Order of the Universe #22, Love #22

Language has not the power to speak what love indites:
The soul lies buried in the ink that writes.

John Clare, fragment

Scopitone #33, Love #21

Nancy Sinatra sings "Bang Bang" (1967)

Cinema #34, Love, #20, Annals of Advertising #5

Trailer for Leave Her to Heaven
d: John M. Stahl cinematographer: Leon Shamroy (1945)

Auden #17, Christianity #7, Food #9, Love #19

It is no accident that the central rite of the Christian religion, its symbol for agape, love untainted by selfish desire or self-projection, should be the act of eating bread and drinking wine. For such a symbol, a sexual rite would never do. In the first place, since it presupposes two different sexes, it divides as well as unites; in the second, it is not intrinsically selfish enough. Though it is necessary to the survival of the race, the sexual act is not necessary to the survival of the individual so that, even at its crudest, it contains an element of giving. Eating, on the other hand is a pure act of taking. Only the absolutely necessary and absolutely self-regarding can stand as a symbol for its opposite, the absolutely voluntary and self-forgetful. From watching the way in which a person eats, one can learn a great deal about the way in which he loves himself and, consequently, about the way he will probably love or hate his neighbor. The behavior towards others of the gobbler will be different from that of the pecker, of the person who eats his titbit first from the person who leaves his to the last.


“The Kitchen of Life,” introduction to M.F.K. Fisher’s The Art of Eating (1963)

Love #18, Mathematics #4, D is for Dickinson #3

We shall find the Cube of the Rainbow.
Of that, there is no doubt.
But the Arc of a Lover's conjecture
Eludes the finding out.

(c. 1880)

Auden #15, Love #17

Half the literature, highbrow and popular, produced in the West during the past four hundred years has been based on the false assumption that what is an exceptional experience is or ought to be a universal one. Under its influence so many millions of persons have persuaded themselves they were "in love" when their experience could be fully and accurately described by the more brutal four-letter words, that one is sometimes tempted to doubt if the experience is ever genuine, even when, or especially when, its seems to have happened to oneself. However, it is impossible to read some of the documents, La Vita Nuova, for example, many of Shakespeare's sonnets or the Symposium and dismiss them as fakes.

(1963)

Manhattan #32, Love #16, Scopitone #28

Manhattan-I’m up a tree
The one I’ve most adored
Is bored
With me.
Manhattan, I’m awf’lly nice,
Nice people dine with me,
And even twice.
Yet the only one in the world I’m mad about
Talks of somebody else
And walks out.

With a million neon rainbows burning below me
And a million blazing taxis raising a roar
Here I sit while deep despair
Haunts my castle in the air
Down in the depths on the ninetieth floor.
While the crowds at El Morocco punish the parquet
And at “21” the couples clamor for more
I’m deserted and depressed
In my regal eagle nest
Down in the depths on the ninetieth floor.
When the only one you wanted wants another
What’s the use of swank and cash in the bank galore?
Why, even the janitor’s wife
Has a perfectly good love life
And here am I
Facing tomorrow
Alone with my sorrow
Down in the depths on the ninetieth floor.

Cole Porter (1936)

[Nicholas Ray is] Cinema #23, Love #15

Johnny Guitar d: Nicholas Ray (1954)

Love #14, Scenes from a Life #9

17th September 1927
Lovely, unexpected, hopeless summer's evening. Resolve: to live more and more in the present, cultivating especially intensity and inconstancy in personal relations, to break free, so far as loyalty permits, from all unions that chain one to the past, while retaining them in so far as they provide a commentary, otherwise to fall in love as impermanently as possible with whoever is nearest, to study life not death, the present not the past, the actual not the literary. Only by giving the whole of myself to the moment can I make it give its best to me. A rapid series of unbearable partings is the best proof that one is living--to live in the present is the most provident of all ways of life, for by that alone can one create a valuable past. "Pas de recherche sans temps perdu"---no chronicles without wasted time.

Cyril Connolly, "England My England"

Diptych #6, Love #13, Godard #5, Cinema #14

Alphaville (1965)

J’ai cru pouvoir briser la profondeur de l’immensité
Par mon chagrin tout nu sans contact sans écho
Je me suis étendu dans ma prison aux portes vierges
Comme un mort raisonnable qui a su mourir
Un mort non couronné sinon de son néant
Je me suis étendu sur les vagues absurdes
Du poison absorbé par amour de la cendre
La solitude m’a semblé plus vive que le sang
Je voulais désunir la vie
Je voulais partager la mort avec la mort
Rendre mon cœur au vide et le vide à la vie
Tout effacer qu’il n’y ait rien ni vire ni buée
Ni rien devant ni rien derrière rien entier
J’avais éliminé le glaçon des mains jointes
J’avais éliminé l’hivernale ossature
Du voeu de vivre qui s’annule

Tu es venue le feu s'est alors ranimé
L'ombre a cédé le froid d'en bas s'est étoilé
Et la terre s'est recouverte
De ta chair claire et je me suis senti léger
Tu es venue la solitude était vaincue
J'avais un guide sur la terre je savais
Me diriger je me savais démesuré
J'avançais je gagnais de l'espace et du temps
J'allais vers toi j'allais sans fin vers la lumière
La vie avait un corps l'espoir tendait sa voile
Le sommeil ruisselait de rêves et la nuit
Promettait à l'aurore des regards confiants
Les rayons de tes bras entrouvraient le brouillard
Ta bouche était mouillée des premières rosées
Le repos ébloui remplaçait la fatigue
Et j'adorais l'amour comme à mes premiers jours.

Les champs sont labourés les usines rayonnent
Et le blé fait son nid dans une houle énorme
La moisson la vendange ont des témoins sans nombre
Rien n’est simple ni singulier
La mer est dans les yeux du ciel ou de la nuit
La forêt donne aux arbres la sécurité
Et les murs des maisons ont une peau commune
Et les routes toujours se croisent.
Les hommes sont faits pour s’entendre
Pour se comprendre pour s’aimer
Ont des enfants qui deviendront pères des hommes
Ont des enfants sans feu ni lieu
Qui réinventeront les hommes
Et la nature et leur patrie
Celle de tous les hommes
Celle de tous les temps.

Paul Eluard, "La mort, l'amour, la vie" (1951)

Love #12, Scopitone #17

Chet Baker sings "You Don't Know What Love Is" (1956)

Love #11, D is for Dickinson #1

Poems listed by subject in index of The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (1960)

Cinema #8, Death #1, Love #10

I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me.

In a Lonely Place, d. Nicholas Ray (1950)

Love #9

Man has places in his heart which do not yet exist, and into them enters suffering, in order that they may have existence.

Léon Bloy

Scopitone #10, Love #8, Archaeology of the Music Video #2

The Flying Pickets, "Only You"

Diptych #1, Love #7, Time #1, Auden #7

Had we but World enough, and Time,
This coyness, Lady, were no crime
We would sit down and think which way
To walk and pass our long Love's Day.
Thou by the Indian Ganges side
Shouldst Rubies find: I by the Tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the Flood:
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the Conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable Love should grow
Vaster than Empires, and more slow;
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine Eyes and on thy Forehead Gaze;
Two hundred to adore each Breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An Age at least to every part,
And the last Age should show your Heart.
For, Lady, you deserve this State,
Nor would I love at lower rate.

Andrew Marvell, "To His Coy Mistress" (excerpt), first published 1681



  "Love has no ending.

"I'll love you, dear, I'll love you
  Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
  And the salmon sing in the street,

"I'll love you till the ocean
  Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
  Like geese about the sky.

"The years shall run like rabbits,
  For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
  And the first love of the world."

W.H. Auden, "As I Walked Out One Evening" (excerpt), 1938

Love #6

Sexuellement, c'est-à-dire avec mon âme.

Boris Vian, L'écume des jours

Godard #2, Love #5, Scopitone #4

Pierrot le fou (1965)