Varanasi (also known as Benares)

I have a miserable cold which is sapping my energy and much of my enthusiasm.  I lost a battle with the scanner yesterday.  Downloaded alien entities to my laptop and achieved complete paralysis of any scanning software that might once have been harbored in my printer's entrails.  Must wait for hubby to come home and bail me out technologically.

Yesterday I was thinking oh no, these do look so flimsy and negligible compared to the pieces I shared from the Boston Globe.  But today the sun is shining again in L.A. and the colors seem more felicitous and conducive to our lightened atmosphere.  They want to be shared.

Varanasi:  home of silks, of a venerable university and probably the holiest Hindu pilgrimage site: the ghats and temples on the banks of the Ganges River. Known affectionately by the Indians as "Ganga Ji", the Ganges is considered the mother of all life, a goddess.

On the other hand, it is said that the Ganges at Varanasi is biologically dead because of the paradox of the many myriad aspects of life that are ritualized in it.

Washing oneself

Prayer.

Washing other peoples'

 clothes

If you like these pictures don't forget to click and enlarge them.

There is a world of mysterious beauty here.  (If I say so myself!) 

Once the scanner is reconquered my great ambition is to achieve larger pictures WITHOUT having to ingeniously revise code or enlist the assistance of intermediary software.

Yeah right.  Meanwhile life will go on in Varanasi.  As will death.

The dear deceased will be burned at its banks.  And ashes sent into the water.

The whole of life is lived and comes full circle here.  

Varanasi takes the world into its arms.

And sends it's young into our future.

For Poppy Fields because of the Mistral

Santons Fouques, Aix-en-Provence

I read http://poppyinprovence.blogspot.com/ because she is living the life I sooooooo wanted once upon a time and think I still do.  She lives in Salon-de-Provence, a quiet country town between Aix-en-Provence and Avignon.  I went through there on the bus with my friend Sylvine and fell quite in love with it.  It looked a little sleepy and peaceful and was washed in splashes of orange and yellow and green - all dusty.  With the gnarled shady sycamores that every southern French town has.  As we rode further on we saw a shepherd standing in his field with a flock of sheep.  I thought I could hear the jingle of their bells.  It was evening and the sun cast an almost electric light over this man and his herd and he and the animals and the ridgetops of the mountains behind were outlined in a fluid neon.  That was it for me.  A picture for a thousand years.  Otherwise the countryside was green and lush and darkening in the declining light and tucking itself in from the world.  The houses were dusty, the roofs were orange tiles and all the shutters were a faded dusty green.....there were geraniums in nearly every window box.

Life in the "Midi" as it was called then, is glamorized in magazines and movies but the one I loved is so different from those polished up images.  It's the sound of gravel under your feet, or high heels clicking on the cobblestones and someone calling up to a window in an otherwise still, still night.  The rattle of someone's motor scooter as it barrels past you between narrow walls.  The sound of water running in mossy fountains and the sour-salty whiff that rises up from them with the wind.  The same smell that comes from the streets when they wash them after the market.  It's the aromas of the plat-chauds that float out from those deep windows with iron bars where the radio is playing in the background and the canaries are singing on the window sill.  Where people are eating humble dinners of pates aux viandes and salades aux oeufs durs with sauce vinaigrette.  And chatting in those family ways.

Now the Mistral has arrived.  It is the wind that comes from North Africa and rakes and batters the provencal countryside from time to time.  It is legendary.  Probably it would have made me crazy living in a small town in France, especially in the winter.  Where all the streets lead to the same place (the bus station or the market).  And everybody knows everything about you.  And your husband is in front of the TV every night watching le "foot" or at the cafe with his buddies.  While you stay at home and put the kids to bed and fold the laundry and get their clothes ready for school the next day.  Thinking about what to make for tomorrow's dinner.  With that wind blowing and blowing and nowhere to get away from it.

But oh!  To have just had the CHANCE.........

WE ARE INTERRUPTING TODAY'S PROGRAM...........

Of hole digging, wall taping, laundry washing, cat chasing, contractor emailing, reference-seeking, list-making to bring you:



OK these will make my pictures look like doo-doo but I embrace risk for your AND MY (I'm sure ultimate, no-yes I mean IMMEDIATE) edification.  My stomach is churning and my temperature's just gone up about 20 degrees.


I credit Toujours Dimanche (the Canadian one from What Possessed Me's blogroll) for leading me to these images.


http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/09/recent_hindu_festivals_and_rit.html


I'm showing you a picture that more closely characterizes my current state.  Rather than a picture that I hope will elicit such a state in you.  Those other pictures, they peter out in interest factor (to me) towards the end.  But in all there are 35 of them or so.  With the first 8-10 I gasped out loud as each one came along.


I didn't think an "outsider" could get these first pictures.  OOPS!  I'm wrong.  Apologies to AP's Kevin Frayer, he is the exception (-al photographer), the others are all done by South Asians.  They are so intimate in a way.


I've said it before, I am not a religious person.  But religion sure makes people do amazing things, good and bad.  In fact, I did witness some religious ceremonies in India and being ignorant and disinclined to the tedium of religious ritual I was not so moved.  These do make amazing visuals though.  And I'm not about sharing to shock in a gratuitous way.  It's not about shock.  It's the sensation.  And the transposition and near derailing of almost physical/physiological norms.  Your eyes are so accustomed to sending the usual messages to the same brain places and filing that information off.  India just twists your brain into loops.  The patterns that can be created by so much colorful humanity acting in concert are just very unexpected to us.  As our Western world neutralizes, homogenizes, degrades and denudes its public face of color and variety - India's particularity persists.  I hope it can be impressed upon them before it is too late that what they have is of tremendous value.  Probably I will be disappointed.  


Now if someone knows if this has been made into a book, let me know.  Because I need to have that book.  But I would only look into it about once every five-ten years because I would not want the images to become banal and routine to me.  I want to have that WHOOSH of sensation and jumping out of my skin everytime I saw them.

OK HERE GOES.......CHANDNI CHOWK, OLD DELHI

Now.  I will either lose you.

Or you will stay with me.

You will feel intoxicated.  Pixillated.  Exasperated.   Strung out.

This is what India does to me.  It is a drug.

I felt this way about it before I even got there.  It did not disappoint.  Some days I say, seen it-been there-done it. Don't need to do it again.

Other days the India crazies come on and I need it.  Like I've never needed anything else.  I came back from this place with brand new skin and eyes.  Can you hang in there with me?  It's going to be some ride.

I feel peace.  I feel frenzy.  I feel bewilderment.  I feel joy.  I got ripped off.  I got saffron.  I got a garish temple figure of Krishna with his flute.  I will go back.

Cause I've only seen a whisper of it.  And it still beats in my veins.  My Indian heart.  

Roasted dried red peppers in yogurt.  Food memory.

So ends my blog-a-thon for this second weekend in October.  Can I bring you yet Varanasi, Sarnath, Orcha, Agra, Mysore?  Don't worry I will be gentle with you.  And at some point you will get a decent explanation for why this blog-place has A FRENCH NAME.  

That's when I figure out the scanner again.

Paula Kehoe and the Huichols

In the course of my greater adventures last week I ran into this artist.
Oh.  My.  God.

Have you ever seen anything like this ever??????????  I think they are stunning.

And Paula Kehoe looks like just a normal all-American blonde girl. Check out her website:

http://beadedmasks.com/Home.html

Paula's pieces were being sold at the gift shop of the Museum of Craft and Folk Art in San Francisco

www.mocfa.org

I know that these are not to everyone's taste but I think they do something on such a completely different level.  The artist says that she is influenced by indigenous Indian/Mexican art of the Huichol tribes.  The Huichol integrate their art (as have many cultures, early and late in human history) into their religious, shamanistic rituals - which often involve a drug (peyote) induced experience of the cosmos.  Here are examples of  masks done by Huichol artists.  I found them on:

http://www.tribesgallery.com/huichol/masks/tb_mask1.html

OK and then I found these on the following site

http://www.peyotepeople.com/

These last three use more universally commonplace folk color combinations.  The middle pieces and Paula's use colors that are more sophisticated and which add another dimension entirely.  I am definitely experiencing the cosmos through this artwork.  Without the drugs!  I have ALOT more to learn about the Southwest.  This is going to be a wonderful departure point.   Any further words would be redundant.  These pieces say so much about the people who make them and the internal/external spaces they tap into.  I would only add that they remind me also of the art of the indigenous Australians.  I bow.

Burghley House Series

I've been away from home for about a week.  And the week was so not about the kinds of images that follow.  They seem apropos to the time of year though, when colors are fading, some are ripening, all are becoming richer and mixing with many more grays.  And then, aren't there some of you who are still nostalgic for summer (as I would so be if I were in colder climes).....?   Here's a little nosegay to ease the passage.

A couple of years ago, I went to visit this house with my mother-in-law.  It is in Stamford, a graceful and gracious old town in Lincolnshire.  Parts of this house had just been used in one of those English costume dramas. Anybody recognize it?  It is one of the true treasure houses of Britain.

Burghley has been in the Cecil family for over 400 years.  The original Lord Cecil was a Treasurer of England.  And he made sure he got "some".  The house interiors are fairly distinctive in that they are quite dramatic, dark, baroque, and grandiose in an Italianate way.  It is all about scale. "Younger" "English""houses" tend to be a little more French in their style with paler, more delicate and feminine decoration.  This is pretty much a guy's house.  Don't remind my MIL that English style actually did originate "over there".  She will not hear of it.  Unless you mean to say that English style is a hodgepodge of everything and then she will agree that that is certainly true.

Go to: http://www.burghley.co.uk/ and you can find out more if you are planning to be in that part of the world. We went in late August and it was not too crowded.

Photo taking is not allowed inside but I seemed to find things to snap. Outside.  This series seems to be all about blues, textures, patterns.

I don't know about you, but I want to stick my hands right into these pictures and swish them around.  Just to see how the elements might rearrange themselves in artful combinations.  I love the mystery of the dark water and how the fish and the reflected colors slowly reveal themselves.

How the water takes on the color of the sky, and so an added dimension.

How beautiful black can be when it is swathed in blues and studded with orange and green.

How grey makes it more into a COLOR vs. it just being a space filler.

In nature, every color exists already in all the best combinations.  We humans try to be so clever and put it back together in original ways.  But the universe will always have gotten there first.

This could have been made into a William Morris fabric pattern.

And what could be more beautiful than hydrangea blue, forget-me-not-blue, robin's egg blue, cornflower blue?

Even the windows are blue.  See?  Nature got there first.

Blue Books - Contest - From "the Road"

Last month I posted pictures of blue books in the window at Appley Hoare. Here they are also in British Homes and Gardens last winter looking quite electric.

Meanwhile Wisteria

www.wisteria.com

is selling almost identical little boxes tied up in cord.  Not just for looking at - you could hide your secret stuff in them!  Still gorgeous huh?

It could get very expensive trying to amass enough to fill up a table like they do in my picture.  Would you do it?   Myself, I DO have a birthday coming up. DECISIONS, DECISIONS.  A table full of books, or dinner in my sleeveless dress in Las Vegas?

I have a few weeks yet to decide.  How about I let you all vote on it?  Birthday Dinner or Birthday Books?

OK, so the first person to send in a vote to PassageParadis comments gets a book/box from Wisteria sent to you from me.  To sweeten the deal for the universe, I will also send the equivalent sum of book/box, tax and shipping to Partners In Health in your name.

Look for my upcoming post on Partners in Health.  To find out more now, click on:  www.pih.org


Milles Mercis!




Pictures - British Homes and Gardens and Wisteria, respectively