Well…..two days later, and one more, small picture down the road…..?

I doubt that anyone who knows me and/or my current life well will need to have this picture “explained” or contextualized. I would add, however, that it’s been kicking around for a while, but I knew where I was going with it after two very stimulating conversations with a new friend of mine (she’s a wildly-intelligent nano-engineeer who claims she’s an “introvert”; I maintain that, insofar as I’ve been able to determine, she’s merely & admirably self-contained…..and there’s a BIG difference between the two categories…..as though any of us needs to be mashed up into some category by other folks?). So, I finished this picture today.  Thank you, April.

The poem/title is, of course, taken from W.B. Yeats.  I still use, on an almost daily basis, the hardbound copy of his collected poems, which was given to me and inscribed by my grandmother and Father on Christmas Day, 1976. They never gave me silly gifts, even when I was very young.  He happens to still be quite alive (we talk on the telephone daily)……so things may change.  Thus far, they haven’t.

Perhaps more interestingly?……the girl is the all-grown-up Alice Liddell  (yup….she who got sent to “Wonderland” without being asked if she wanted to go)…..who, having escaped the literary/pederastic clutches of the Wrong Reverend Dodgson (aka “Lewis Carroll”) of Oxford, later found herself, at age 19, being photographed by Margaret Cameron….who later turned out to be Virginia Woolf’s great-aunt.

I know….it all sounds quite improbable….unless you happen, as I do, to be familiar with the mating habits of the British upper-middle class and intelligentsia.  They got out, so to speak, a lot without getting around very much.

I’ve loved this poem since I was young:

“Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams. “

—W.B. Yeats (from “The Wind Among the Reeds”, 1899)