Love Again

To love, and to be hurt often, and to love again - this the brave and happy life.

J. E. Buchrose
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Hello Bruce
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As one who was recently wearing a broken heart I can speak with some authority about this topic. A broken heart is a terrible thing to have. It resembles the end of life as you know it. It takes a moment to break it and takes a long time to heal. And one of the wrest parts about it is that it puts you into a state of denial. You don't want to accept that it happened because the relationship that ended was too important and you try to regain what you had even though you know in your reasoning mind it's impossible.

As Pearl Buck said "What really broke a heart was taking away its dream - whatever that dream may be."

But this time around I uncovered another even more horrifying effect. I woke up one morning having had a dream in which I was talking to some actors I used to work with about a theatre that no longer existed. One of the older actresses said "It's over. No more. Never again."

I bolted awake and sat up in a panic. I interpreted the dream as saying that in my advanced age I had just had my last chance of loving anyone. That the love that lives in my heart would never again have a chance to express itself to anyone. "No more. Never again."

I can't describe the terrifying sense of loss I went through that day, and it took a full day of stern reasoning with myself to come to understand it was a fear, not a truth. Now I can say as I put it in one of my Jottings "I loved and lost, but I will live to love again."

It takes courage to be a lover. Love is risky business. There is always the chance for a broken heart. But I like to recall a song Mabel Mercer used to sing "It's true your not the first, but maybe you'll be the first to last."

DB - Vagabond Journeys
Never give up.
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Drawing It Out

What we play is life?

Louis Armstrong
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I have a book on learning how to draw by Robert Beverly Hale, "Anatomy Lessons from the Great Masters." In a very active and full career as an artist, writer and lecturer, Hale also was an instructor in drawing at the Art Students League in New York City. I was blessed to be able to take his last 12 classes before he retired back up to New England. He had an infectious joy in art, an amazingly perceptive eye for the best in his students' works and a sense of humor.

Is music notes in a score correctly played? Is poetry a proper string of words depicting an image?. Is painting expertly made brush stokes? Is drawing the human figure accurate lines on a piece of paper? What did the old masters know that we need to know?

One evening at the Cafe Carlyle in New York I saw Mabel Mercer sing "Both Sides Now" and when she sang "I really don't know love at all" my heart burst and tears came. I thought if Mabel Mercer, in her long and magical life, didn't know love than no one did.

Right now I'm listening to Nathan Milstein play the Bach Chaconne for solo violin. It is an amazing 14 minute journey through human experiences and when I hear it I feel privileged to be a part of Bach's and Milstein's life.

If it's great art it's not just tones, words, colors and lines, it's not just melodies, poems and pictures. Look behind those things, look beyond them to what is really there. The dancer is dancing it, the musician is playing it, the author is writing it, the actor is acting it, the painter is painting it.

There comes a point in the study of life drawing when you stop drawing a human figure and start drawing a human being. You start drawing life.

Dana Bate
The Vagabond
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AUTUMN QUESTION

(This is not a contest.)

At what event of the past do you wish you could be present? Why?

2 responses so far.

dbdacoba@aol.com

Thank you.
DB
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