One of my favorite poets of all time is Amy Lowell. She has a wonderful quote I read once:
"Take everything easy and quit dreaming and brooding and you will be well guarded from a thousand evils."
"Quit dreaming?" you may find yourself asking. "We are told to follow dreams and dream big and never let our dreams die!" I supposed my reply would be, yes, quit dreaming and brooding and start living.
So why, after blogging has mostly gone out of fashion, would I start one up? I suppose I feel that after 30 trips around the sun, I have some things to say about life. I have long been a dreamer, a brooder, or both in some catastrophic synchronicity. When I've been lucky, I have surrounded myself with people who love me in any shape in which they find me.
So what can you expect to find here? Meanderings, musings, funny stories, fears, and other questions I wish to toss up to the universe.
The title of this blog "Pictures of the Floating World" is a reference the Japanese art of ukiyo-e ("pictures of the floating world"), originated in the metropolitan culture of Edo (Tokyo) during the period of Japanese history, when the political and military power was in the hands of the shoguns, and the country was virtually isolated from the rest of the world. It is an art connected with the pleasures of theatres, restaurants, tea houses, geisha and courtesans in the even then very large city. Many ukiyo-e prints were in fact posters, advertising theatre performances and brothels, or idol portraits of popular actors and beautiful tea house girls. Neat huh?
When I think of Japan during the shogun occupation and its "virtual isolation from the rest of the world", it is remarkable to me that they turned to art to help explain their lives and their culture. The word ukiyo is literally translated as "floating world" in English, referring to a conception of an evanescent world, impermanent, fleeting beauty and a realm of entertainments (kabuki, courtesans, geisha) divorced from the responsibilities of the mundane, everyday world.
In other words-stop dreaming, stop brooding, start living. So I begin this blog by bringing together two seemingly disparate artists- American poet Amy Lowell, and 17th century Japanese woodblock artists. In her book "Pictures of the Floating World", she writes of love and loneliness, "the upward swish of a rocket into the blue night", and "the green lantern of the firefly" and, of course, life and the human condition.
Until next time, I wish you protection from a thousand evils.
Nancy
Ref.
http://www.archive.org/stream/picturesoffloati00loweuoft/picturesoffloati00loweuoft_djvu.txt
http://www.ukiyo-e.se/
