Without Lifting A Finger

The Kereru (NZ Pigeon) @ Orana Wildlife Park in Christchurch NZ. Happy Monday and take things easy (if you can). There's "life" and then there's "real life.";)♥️🎈 #rlswihart #newzealand #christchurch #oranawildlifepark #pigeonsofinstagram #kereru #nzpigeon #nature #beauty #poetry #mondaymonday #readmorepoetry2024🎈

Yet the way in which Walser then breathes life into them, in an act of complete assimilation and empathy, reveals how in the end emotions are perhaps most deeply felt when applied to the most insignificant things. “Indeed,” Walser writes about ash, “if one goes into this apparently uninteresting subject in any depth there is quite a lot to be said about it which is not at all uninteresting; if, for example, one blows on ash it displays not the least reluctance to fly off instantly in all directions. Ash is submissiveness, worthlessness, irrelevance itself, and best of all, it is itself pervaded by the belief that it is fit for nothing. Is it possible to be more helpless, more impotent, and more wretched than ash? Not very easily. Could anything be more compliant and more tolerant? Hardly. Ash has no notion of character and is further from any kind of wood than dejection is from exhilaration. Where there is ash there is actually nothing at all. Tread on ash, and you will barely notice t

This description of the distinctly melancholic scrawl is reminiscent of the blue sheets of paper that Keller used as blotters as he toiled over his Bildungsroman at his desk in Berlin, and which over and over again repeat the name of his unrequited love in long intricately entwined lines, swirls, columns, and loops in a myriad variations—Betty Betty Betty, BBettytybetti, bettibettibetti, Bettybittebetti [Bettypleasebetti] is scrawled and doodled there in every calligraphic permutation imaginable. And around and between these five or six letters there is nothing, save here and there a sketch of a gateway to a walled garden, also with Betty inscribed above it, a Betty-mirror, a Betty-room, and a Betty-clock and next to it a Reaper, and another skeleton playing the fiddle, a funeral bell, and a kind of miniature coat of arms in which, through a magnifying glass, something can be made out which looks like a heart pierced through with pins. The art of writing is the attempt to contain the t

#rlswihart #newzealand #auckland #rangitoto #nzbirdsofinstagram #túi #magicaltui #nature #beauty #poetry #tgif #readmorepoetry2024🎈♥️🪶

The painter Friedrich Pecht, in a reminiscence from this time, relates how on several occasions he observed Mörike noting down things which came into his head on special scraps and pieces of paper, only soon afterward to take these notes and “tear them up again into little pieces and bury them in the pockets of his dressing gown.”

  New Zealand Blue Duck @ Orana Wildlife (near Christchurch). I didn't see this beauty in the wild (it's endangered), but was lucky enough to get a few good shots at Orana. TGIF. Enjoy the weekend. #rlswihart #newzealand #christchurch #oranawildlifepark #blueducksofinstagram #blueducks #magical #nature #beauty #poetry #endangeredspecies #readmorepoetry2024🎈♥️🪶

New Zealand's Red-crowned Parakeet (Maori name kakariki) in the Orana Wildlife Park (near Christchurch). A Happy Little Fella for you on a cloudy Friday in SoCal: TGIF. Enjoy your weekend.;)🎈🦜 #rlswihart #oranawildlifepark #newzealand #christchurch #parakeetsofinstagram #redcrownedparakeet #nature #beauty #poetry #readmorepoetry2024🎈🦜🪶

One of the best scholars of Sebald, Uwe Schütte, argues that his grief for his grandfather was the real one in his life and work, the one for the victims of the Third Reich a psychic cover. That is going much too far: it is as wrong to say that the Holocaust is not Sebald’s subject as to say that it is his only one. His grief over German crimes was what broke him, and what he wrote about. But this grief was the first.†

New Zealand Birds: White-fronted Terns @ Rangitoto Wharf. They and some Variable Oystercatchers (my shots of those were less impressive) were there to greet us. Gone by the time we went back.  #rlswihart13 #newzealand #rangitotoisland #newzealandbirds #whitefrontedterns #ternsofinstagram #summithike #insearchofthesaddleback #pestfreeisland #nature #beauty #poetry #readmorepoetry2024♥️ 🪶

The other question concerns Dr Abramsky. He is certainly invented: no doctor can talk about a patient, and everything he tells the narrator about Ambros’s torture is in the books Sebald consulted. He is also symbolic: a saint and martyr for the guilt of Samaria, with his fire-red hair like the flames over the heads of the Apostles. But now there’s a problem. The horror for which he bears the guilt, though he has deeply repented, is German: the annihilation method, so reminiscent of other German annihilation methods. But Abramsky is a Jewish name, and he grew up in Leopoldstadt, which is the Jewish quarter of Vienna. And Samaria, as Abramsky’s sanatorium is called, is Jewish too – Judea and Samaria made up the ancient kingdom of Israel. Sebald certainly knew all these things; yet he chose them. It is strange enough that the models for Sebald’s Jewish characters are so often non-Jews. But that is a hidden strangeness; this one is visible to every reader. Why is Abramsky, the bearer of Ge

Cosmo Solomon is Sebald’s image of what happens when you can hear the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, as George Eliot wrote; when you hear the roar on the other side of silence.

NZ Fantail (I thought "Helicopter Bird" but I guess for the Maori he had several long names, e.g., piwaiwaka, and was a messenger from the gods concerning life or death). This one I shot in heavy shade on Rangitoto (pest free island about a 40 minute ferry ride from Auckland), and if you don't like the flowers I'll try to post one later that I took mid-trip near Hokitika (South Island, West Coast). New Zealand: trip of a lifetime, though I told my wife if we ever go back I want to go all the way to Stewart Island. New Zealand Birds: many "lifers" (seen or "sacked"). But also nice to be back.♥️ 🪶 #rlswihart13 #newzealand #rangitotoisland #pestfree #shoescrub #summithike #newzealandfantail #helicopter #messengerofgods #lifeanddeath #nature #beauty #poetry #readmorepoetry2024♥️

Idly I turned the pages of an India paper edition of Samuel Pepys’s diary, Everyman’s Library, 1913, which I had purchased that afternoon, and read passages at random in this 1,500-page account, until drowsiness overcame me and I found myself going over the same few lines again and again without any notion what they meant. And then I dreamed that I was walking through a mountainous terrain. A white roadway of finely crushed stone stretched far ahead and in endless hairpins went on and up through the woods and finally, at the top of the pass, led through a deep cutting across to the other side of the high range, which I recognised in my dream as the Alps. Everything I saw from up there was of the same chalky colour, a bright, glaring grey in which a myriad of quartz fragments glimmered, as if the rocks, by a force deep inside them, were being dissolved into radiant light. From my vantage-point the road continued downward, and in the distance a second range of mountains at least as lofty