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Eyes

Eyes

@tmariis.bsky.social

390 followers 340 following 1.3K posts

🪟🖐️👀🖐️ eYES... HA HA HA... eYES He/him.

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Eyes @tmariis.bsky.social · 2d

If you didn't understand the quote, well happy halloween to you, and also here's a literal translation:

I've got eyes, real eyes
Living eyes, eyes of flame,
Wonderful eyes
That touch the bottom of the soul
And in many a case
Can even lend one to those who don't have one.

Eyes @tmariis.bsky.social · 2d

"J’ai des yeux, de vrais yeux,
des yeux vivants, des yeux de flamme,
des yeux merveilleux
qui vont jusques au fond de l’âme
et qui même en bien des cas
en peuvent prêter une à ceux qui n’en ont pas"

Jules Barbier, after Hoffmann, for Offenbach

⬇️ Robert Wilson's "The Sandman"

The Sandman (aka Coppelius) looking terrifying, before a wall of eyes.

Eyes @tmariis.bsky.social · 4d

The word "pick-pocket" appears in the first Rocambole story, but:
- The story was published in 1857
- The word appears in a sentence that establishes Sir Williams as a former "leader of the pick-pockets" in... London.
Rocambole himself is a teenager who works for Sir Williams.

Eyes @tmariis.bsky.social · 4d

It was translated in 1858, but regardless of whether the French read it in English or in French, I like to think that, because Dickens gave names and a faces to a bunch of fictional English pickpockets, while the French "tireurs" remained nameless and faceless, one word ended up replacing the other.

Eyes @tmariis.bsky.social · 4d

In 1837, Vidocq published a book about thieves. In it, pickpockets are called "tireurs". In 1900, another chief of police, Rossignol, published his memoir, in which the favored word is "pickpocket". So what happened in between? Well, Oliver Twist was published in 1838...

Eyes @tmariis.bsky.social · 4d

Hard to say exactly. The article quoted above insists on how organized the London pickpockets are. They "hold meetings in taverns, manage a collective safety fund, take care of the sick and the emprisoned". Perhaps this was what fascinated the French. The stories they heard, be they real or made-up.

Eyes @tmariis.bsky.social · 4d

Much earlier. This is from the "Grand Dictionnaire Universel du XIXe siècle", specifically from the twelfth volume, published in 1874. The word became more and more common in the following years. In 1908, it was mainstream enough for Clémenceau to use it in official letters.

The definition of "pickpocket", followed by some facts about pickpocketry in England and in France.

Eyes @tmariis.bsky.social · 5d

My favorite sundial inscriptions are the ominous ones, the ones that remind me that any hour could be my last. Like "ultima multis", "ultima latet", "una tibi" or "forte tua".

Reposted by Eyes

Daniel Bellingradt @dbellingradt.bsky.social · 6d

Nothing to see here? Well, this is a slow moving 🧵 for #skystorians and others about #eyeglasses of the past, about how to read in the past, where to buy eyeglasses, and how to do with them in general. The hashtag is #HowToDoWithGlassesInThePast

Let's roll.

Detail of the "Glasses Apostle" painting in the altarpiece of the church of Bad Wildungen, Germany. Painted by Conrad von Soest in 1403, the painting is considered to be among the oldest depictions of eyeglasses north of the Alps

Eyes @tmariis.bsky.social · 6d

"In vain are our graces,
In vain are your eyes.
In vain are our graces
If love you despise."

John Dryden, King Arthur

Botticelli, Portrait of a Young Woman

The hazel eye of a young woman who may or may not be Simonetta Vespucci. A bit of wavy blond hair can be seen on the left edge of the image.

Eyes @tmariis.bsky.social · 8d

I'm afraid it's just a dumb pun on the guy's name:
Le Général Oku --> Le Général aux culs (the general with the butts)

Eyes @tmariis.bsky.social · 10d

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oikos_(...

Oikos (journal) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Eyes @tmariis.bsky.social · 11d

You can go to the art museum, see the mustachioed ghost and the hurdy gurdy man.

The Ballad of Lenore by Horace Vernet. An illustration of Gottfried August Bürger's ballad, it depicts the end of the midnight horseback ride, when they reach the cemetary and Lenore realises that she has been riding with a ghost. She lifts the rider's visor and reveals a bare skull with an old-timey moustache. A dazzling white light is radiating out of the skull's eye sockets. The black stallion is jumping over a tomb effigy, making visible sparks as its horseshoe scrapes against the stone.

A close-up of the mustachioed ghost.

An old man playing the hurdy-gurdy with his eyes shut and his mouth agape.

Eyes @tmariis.bsky.social · 20d

I usually don't reply with my own last four albums, but in this case I have a nice colour scheme going.

Cover for Out There by Eric Dolphy. A surrealist illustration, depicting an airship made of musical instruments flying over a giant metronome that stands atop a round hill, while the sun sets.

Eugène Ysaye, "Neiges d'antan" and other symphonic poems.
Illustration is a painting by Guillaume Vogels entitled "Panzanis painting in the snow" (Panzanis is seen from the back, in or at the edge of a forest of deciduous trees)

Galaxie 500 - On Fire
Two men and a woman seen through an orange filter. Low angle shot means we see an orange sky behind them.

Wire - Chairs Missing
A purple flower in a vase before a window. Grey drapes on both sides of the window, and behind it a grey sky.

Reposted by Eyes

Eyes @tmariis.bsky.social · Feb 4

and they are all screaming, and not only are there cataracts in their bulging eyes, but they are all blind, they stand leaning to one side in pieces and corroded from the acids around the collapsed graves, and blindly they scream in the darkness,they scream that this was awaiting them

Krasznahorkai

The eyes of a marble sculpture bust by Gian Lorenzo Bernini (dated 1619)
Entitled "The Damned Soul", it consists of the screaming head of a man.

Eyes @tmariis.bsky.social · 28d

Other word plays that come to mind :
- "Tirer un trait sur mes années" could mean both "strike them off" (with a pen) and "shoot an arrow at them" (which would cause them to flee)
- coche/coche (a notch on a stick or a tick on a list/a horse carriage)
Probably not helpful but who knows!

Eyes @tmariis.bsky.social · 28d

It seems you made a play on the double meaning of "ticked off", so there's a chance that the original line had word play in it too.
Something like: j'ai barré (crossed out) les années et elles se sont barrées (took off)
Obviously not that, but remembering the pun might help you remember the line.

Eyes @tmariis.bsky.social · Oct 3

The original French:

Et, puisque tes lentes cadences
Rythment le pouls des soirs d'été,
Fais-nous croire que les cieux dansent
Parce qu'un aveugle a chanté.

Eyes @tmariis.bsky.social · Oct 3

I tried to translate Yourcenar's "Cantilène pour un Flûtiste Aveugle", with no success, except maybe (???) with the last stanza:

"And, since your steady cadences
Guide the heartbeat of summer nights,
Make us believe the sky dances
Because a blind man sang just right"

🖼️ Titian? (disputed)

A teenage boy with long curly hair, wearing a simple white tunic and a blue cape, holding a pipe in his right hand. Oil on canvas, circa 1515.

Eyes @tmariis.bsky.social · Sep 30

L'Avenir du Prolétariat was a pension fund, created in the 1890s. The buildings housed bourgeois families, but they belonged to the workers through the fund. Forty such buildings were enough to provide revenues to tens of thousands of retired workers.

Eyes @tmariis.bsky.social · Sep 24

"My eyes are like telescopes
I see it all backwards, but who wants hope?
If I ever catch that ventriloquist
I'll squeeze his head right into my fist"

Tom Verlaine, "Friction"

🖼️ Paul Klee, "Ventriloquist and Crier in the Moor"

A head of sorts, checkered in different hues of pink. The face seems to be upside down. The nose resembles that of a cat. There is no mouth. From a work in watercolor and ink on cardboard.

Eyes @tmariis.bsky.social · Sep 19

I'm in the town where the author of Das Passagen-Werk, fearing the Spanish authorities would not grant him passage into Spain, requested passage from Charon instead.
The Walter Benjamin memorial monument, aptly titled "Passages" is an underground stairway leading to the sea.

The entrance of the stairway.

A view of the stairway from the upper steps. The light at the end is made blue by the sea.

Getting closer to the end, the ceiling disappears, offering a more open view of the sea, the sky and the land.

A glass pane prevents the visitors from going further, but the stairway goes on.

Eyes @tmariis.bsky.social · Sep 19

Every transmission tower along the road I'm driving on has a stork nest on top of it. Every single one.

A transmission tower in Spain, with a stork nest on top.

Eyes @tmariis.bsky.social · Sep 19

Good morning!
Upper-left pic is the view I had for breakfast. The others were taken yesterday in the same place (Albarracín, Spain)

The first rays of sunlight hit a Spanish village. Low mountains in the background, trees in the foreground.

The opposite viewpoint. Another part of the village, and behind it a hill with a medieval defensive wall running along the hillcrest.

Closer view of the wall. Partly cloudy sky.

The remains of a medieval castle, atop a cliff.

Eyes @tmariis.bsky.social · Sep 19

Are you familiar with this passage from Proust's "Swann's Way"?

"it would be my duty to shake out of the chemist's little package on to a plate the amount of lime-blossom required for infusion in boiling water. The drying of the stems had twisted them into a fantastic trellis, in the interlacings of which the pale flowers opened, as though a painter had arranged them there, grouping them in the most decorative poses. The leaves, having lost or altered their original appearance, resembled the most disparate things, the transparent wing of a fly, the blank side of a label, the petal of a rose, which had all been piled together, pounded or interwoven like the materials for a nest. A thousand trifling little details—a charming prodigality on the part of the chemist—details which would have been eliminated from an artificial preparation, gave me, like a book in which one reads with astonished delight the name of a person one knows, the pleasure of finding that these were sprigs of real lime-trees, like those I had seen, when coming from the train, in the Avenue de la Gare, altered indeed, precisely because they were not imitations but themselves, and because they had aged. And as each new character is..."

continued : "...merely a metamorphosis from something earlier, in these little grey balls I recognised green buds plucked before their time; but beyond all else the rosy, lunar, tender gleam that lit up the blossoms among the frail forest of stems from which they hung like little golden roses—marking, as the glow upon an old wall still marks the place of a vanished fresco, the difference between those parts of the tree which had and those which had not been "in colour"—showed me that these were indeed petals which, before filling the chemist's bag with their spring fragrance, had perfumed the evening air. That rosy candleglow was still their colour, but half-extinguished and deadened in the diminished life which was now theirs, and which may be called the twilight of a flower. Presently my aunt would dip a little madeleine in the boiling infusion, whose taste of dead leaves or faded blossom she so relished, and hand me a piece when it was sufficiently soft."