И в памяти чёрной, пошарив, найдёшь

mentalblog - muscle memory

Drop Curtain for Petrushka, a ballet by Starvinsky. Alexandre Benois.

In 1960 Anna Achmatova was 71 yo, she wrote this:

И в памяти чёрной, пошарив, найдёшь
До самого локтя перчатки,
И ночь Петербурга. И в сумраке лож
Тот запах и душный и сладкий.
И ветер с залива. А там, между строк,
Минуя и ахи и охи,
Тебе улыбнется презрительно Блок –
Трагический тенор эпохи.

In my mind, this poem pares with Alexandre Benois, the elegant Russian artist who left to France and therefore had a much different fate than Anna Achmatova. But who really knows fates? Better not to think about it. Better for whom?

Set design by Alexandre Benois for Pavillon d'Armide, garden for act II. Watercolor, ink and pencil on paper. Inscription at bottom: A ma chère fille bienamiée Anne pour son anniversaire de papa - Alexandre Benois. 1909. Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University

This is hopeless, I need antidote ones in a while. This time now is too visual, with the ugly AI trash, people lose the ability to see and recognize beauty. It’s a stream of disfigured images. In the future, we might not see beauty at all. Like, we lost forever the ability to memorize text.

Alexandre Benois. Summer evening. 1899 Paper on cardboard, watercolor. National Art Museum of the Republic of Belarus.

We are fronting the flood of distractions. It distracts us from what is important and vital. In a way, it is all out Stockholm syndrome. It supposed to break you into forgetting who you really are and what gifts you carry.