Bloody Helicopter, Ragwort, Nijinsky
Aug. 6th, 2024 07:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
poliphilo A helicopter flew over at around a quarter to six this morning, making a frightful racket. The birds didn't like it either....
I cut the grass yesterday. I'd been holding off to give the wildflowers a chance to bloom and seed- and now they're mostly finished. The ragwort is still going strong, though, and I've very carefully mown around it. Ragwort used to give us a headache at the farm because we had horses in the fields and it's supposedly poisonous. The horses' owners- house dwelling Romany- who presumably know as much about horses as anyone on the planet- were never bothered. I think they thought their horses were smart enough not to eat it. Anyway, I don't have to worry about it here. There are no horses within a mile- and ragwort is beautiful and smells glorious....
For some reason, and don't ask me how it came about, I'm taking an interest in Vaslav Nijinsky. There is no footage- not even the tiniest scrap- of his dancing, because Diaghilev thought the primitive cinematography of the day wasn't up to doing it justice. And maybe that's OK. It means there's nothing in existence to make us question how supernaturally good he was. Sarah Bernhardt came away from a performance going, "I'm scared, I'm scared. I've just seen the greatest actor in the world".
People affirmed that when he leaped through the window in The Spectre of the Rose the laws of physics were temporarily suspended. Asked how he did it, Nijinsky said, "I jump and when I get to the top of the arc I just pause a little before coming down."
He "went mad". I don't know what that means- because it seems to me that as he wrestled with the restraints that were holding his mind together he was never more brilliant, more frightening, more enlightened. I've been reading snippets from the Diary he kept at that time- and they're astonishing. "My madness, he wrote, "Is my love towards mankind."
His last public performance- towards the end of the Great War- was in front of an audience of silk hats and their ladies at a posh hotel in Switzerland. He sat in silence, facing the audience for half an hour (can it really have been that long?) then rose and said "I'm going to dance you the War- which you did nothing to stop..."
I cut the grass yesterday. I'd been holding off to give the wildflowers a chance to bloom and seed- and now they're mostly finished. The ragwort is still going strong, though, and I've very carefully mown around it. Ragwort used to give us a headache at the farm because we had horses in the fields and it's supposedly poisonous. The horses' owners- house dwelling Romany- who presumably know as much about horses as anyone on the planet- were never bothered. I think they thought their horses were smart enough not to eat it. Anyway, I don't have to worry about it here. There are no horses within a mile- and ragwort is beautiful and smells glorious....
For some reason, and don't ask me how it came about, I'm taking an interest in Vaslav Nijinsky. There is no footage- not even the tiniest scrap- of his dancing, because Diaghilev thought the primitive cinematography of the day wasn't up to doing it justice. And maybe that's OK. It means there's nothing in existence to make us question how supernaturally good he was. Sarah Bernhardt came away from a performance going, "I'm scared, I'm scared. I've just seen the greatest actor in the world".
People affirmed that when he leaped through the window in The Spectre of the Rose the laws of physics were temporarily suspended. Asked how he did it, Nijinsky said, "I jump and when I get to the top of the arc I just pause a little before coming down."
He "went mad". I don't know what that means- because it seems to me that as he wrestled with the restraints that were holding his mind together he was never more brilliant, more frightening, more enlightened. I've been reading snippets from the Diary he kept at that time- and they're astonishing. "My madness, he wrote, "Is my love towards mankind."
His last public performance- towards the end of the Great War- was in front of an audience of silk hats and their ladies at a posh hotel in Switzerland. He sat in silence, facing the audience for half an hour (can it really have been that long?) then rose and said "I'm going to dance you the War- which you did nothing to stop..."
no subject
Date: 2024-08-06 09:14 am (UTC)With a family name like Appleby, I suspect my ancestors would have known horses.
no subject
Date: 2024-08-18 07:21 am (UTC)