“When you are going into a challenge, imagine all those who love you, all who have ever loved you, surrounding you.”
–Maya Angelou
Evan Carmichael Check out these books by Maya Angelou: * The Complete Poetry: https://amzn.to/2JA3Igd * I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings: https://amzn.to/2PAJHLW * Letter to My Daughter: https://amzn.to/2JyOVlN * And Still I Rise: https://amzn.to/2QeszbP * Mom & Me & Mom: https://amzn.to/2SEXJe2 She was an American poet, memoirist, and civil rights activist. She’s best known for her series of seven autobiographies, which focus on her childhood and early adult experiences. She was respected as a spokesperson for black people and women, and her works have been considered a defense of Black culture. She’s Maya Angelou and here are her Top 10 Rules for Success. $$$$ CHECK OUT MY BOOK $$$$ Some used the ideas in this book to build multi-billion-dollar businesses. I’ll give you the simple-yet-powerful formula that they used (and you can) to realize your dreams. Get yours. http://www.evancarmichael.com/oneword/ .:;$ JOIN MY #BELIEVE NEWSLETTER $;:. This is the best way to have entrepreneur gold delivered to your inbox, and to be inspired, encouraged and supported in your business. Join #BelieveNation and feel the love. http://www.evancarmichael.com/newslet… .:SOURCES:. https://youtu.be/sr6LMr-rXEchttps://youtu.be/xWTXkVPhEXUhttps://youtu.be/70RH-h7QfP0https://youtu.be/yH0kPCgWtCMhttps://youtu.be/0nYXFletWH4https://youtu.be/ewvcTjTejZ4https://youtu.be/aHvTWvKIPHohttps://youtu.be/lhRlCY0_JNghttps://youtu.be/Wj9tw23f3vw 1. Just do right! She became a poet and writer after a series of occupations as a young adult, including fry cook, sex worker, and nightclub dancer. 2. Be courageous She was an actor, writer, director, and producer of plays, movies, and public television programs. 3. Love In 1982, she earned the first lifetime Reynolds Professorship of American Studies at Wake Forest University. 4. Laugh She was active in the Civil Rights movement and worked with Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. 5. Be a blessing to somebody Beginning in the 1990s, she made around 80 appearances a year on the lecture circuit, something she continued into her eighties. 6. Turn struggles into triumphs With the publication of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Angelou publicly discussed aspects of her personal life. 7. You are talented Attempts have been made to ban her books from some U.S. libraries, but her works are widely used in schools and universities worldwide. 8. Learn to say no She made a deliberate attempt to challenge the common structure of the autobiography by critiquing, changing, and expanding the genre. 9. Always do your best Her books center on themes such as racism, identity, family, and travel. 10. Keep rising She received dozens of awards and more than 50 honorary degrees.
MAY 10, 2022 AT 7:00 AM BY ROB BREZSNY (newcity.com)
Photo: Joshua Fuller
ARIES (March 21-April 19): “Choose the least important day in your life,” wrote Aries author Thornton Wilder. “It will be important enough.” I recommend that you make those your words to live by in the next two weeks. Why? Because I suspect there will be no tremendously exciting experiences coming your way. The daily rhythm is likely to be routine and modest. You may even be tempted to feel a bit bored. And yet, if you dare to move your attention just below the surface of life, you will tune into subtle glories that are percolating. You will become aware of quietly wondrous developments unfolding just out of sight and behind the scenes. Be alert for them. They will provide fertile clues about the sweet victories that will be available in the months ahead.
TAURUS (April 20-May 20): “Every successful person I know starts before they feel ready,” declared life coach Marie Forleo. Author Ivan Turgenev wrote, “If we wait for the moment when everything, absolutely everything, is ready, we shall never begin.” Here’s what educator Supriya Mehra says: “There’s never a perfect moment to start, and the more we see the beauty in ‘starting small,’ the more we empower ourselves to get started at all.” I hope that in providing you with these observations, Taurus, I have convinced you to dive in now. Here’s one more quote, from businesswoman Betsy Rowbottom: “There’s never a perfect moment to take a big risk.”
GEMINI (May 21-June 20): Poet Ranata Suzuki writes, “There comes a point where you no longer care if there’s a light at the end of the tunnel or not. You’re just sick of the tunnel.” That’s good advice for you right now, Gemini. The trick that’s most likely to get you out of the tunnel is to acknowledge that you are sick of the damn tunnel. Announce to the universe that you have gleaned the essential teachings the ride through the tunnel has provided you. You no longer need its character-building benefits because you have harvested them all. Please say this a thousand times sometime soon: “I am ready for the wide-open spaces.”
CANCER (June 21-July 22): In the coming weeks, your imagination will receive visions of the next chapter of your life story. These images and stories might confuse you if you think they are illuminating the present moment. So please keep in mind that they are prophecies of what’s ahead. They are premonitions and preparations for the interesting work you will be given during the second half of 2022. If you regard them as guiding clues from your eternal soul, they will nourish the inner transformations necessary for you to welcome your destiny when it arrives. Now study this inspirational quote from poet Rainer Maria Rilke: “The future glides into us, so as to remake itself within us, long before it occurs.”
LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): “Remember that you will never reach a higher standard than you yourself set,” wrote author Ellen G. White. That’s true! And that’s why it’s so crucial that you formulate the highest standards you can imagine—maybe even higher than you can imagine. Now is a favorable phase for you to reach higher and think bigger. I invite you to visualize the best version of the dream you are working on—the most excellent, beautiful and inspiring form it could take. And then push on further to envision even more spectacular results. Dare to be greedy and outrageous.
VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Before Virgo-born Leslie Jones achieved fame as a comedian and actor, she worked day jobs at United Parcel Service and Roscoe’s House of Chicken and Waffles. Her shot at major appreciation didn’t arrive until the TV show “Saturday Night Live” hired her to be a regular cast member in 2014, when she was forty-seven years old. Here’s how she describes the years before that: “Everybody was telling me to get a real job. Everybody was asking me, What are you doing? You’re ruining your life. You’re embarrassing your family.” Luckily, Jones didn’t heed the bad advice. “You can’t listen to that,” she says now. “You have to listen to yourself.” Now I’m suggesting that you embrace the Leslie Jones approach, Virgo.
LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): “A person must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.” Author Jean Genet wrote that, and now I’m offering you his words as the seed of your horoscope. If you’ve been attuned to cosmic rhythms, you have been doing what Genet described and will continue to do it for at least another ten days. If you have not yet begun such work, please do so now. Your success during the rest of 2022 will thrive to the degree that you spend time dreaming big in the darkness now.
SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): “Cursed are those who feel floods but who can only express a few drops.” So says an internet proverb. Luckily, this principle won’t apply to you in the coming weeks. I expect you will be inundated with cascades of deep feelings, but you will also be able to articulate those feelings. So you won’t be cursed at all. In fact, I suspect you will be blessed. The cascades may indeed become rowdy at times. But I expect you will flourish amidst the lush tumult.
SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): “It takes a great deal of experience to become natural,” wrote Sagittarian author Willa Cather. I’m happy to report that in recent months, you Sagittarians have been becoming more and more natural. You have sought experiences that enhance your authenticity and spontaneity. Keep up the good work! The coming weeks should bring influences and adventures that will dramatically deepen your capacity to be untamed, soulful and intensely yourself.
CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): “I intend to live forever,” proclaims sixty-six-year-old comedian Steven Wright, who then adds, “So far, so good.” I offer you his cheerful outlook in the hope that it might inspire you to dream and scheme about your own longevity. Now is a great time to fantasize about what you would love to accomplish if you are provided with ninety or more years of life to create yourself. In other words, I’m asking you to expand your imagination about your long-term goals. Have fun envisioning skills you’d like to develop and qualities you hope to ripen if you are given all the time you would like to have. (PS: Thinking like this could magically enhance your life expectancy.)
AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): “Stop insisting on clearing your head,” advised author Charles Bukowski. “Clear your f—ing heart instead.” That will be a superb meditation for you to experiment with in the coming weeks. Please understand that I hope you will also clear your head. That’s a worthy goal. But your prime aim should be to clear your heart. What would that mean? Purge all apologies and shame from your longings. Cleanse your tenderness of energy that’s inclined to withhold or resist. Free your receptivity to be innocent and curious.
PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): “The winner will be the one who knows how to pick the right fights,” wrote author Jane Ciabattari. Heed her advice, please, Pisces. You will soon be offered chances to deal with several interesting struggles that are worthy of your beautiful intelligence. At least one will technically be a “conflict,” but even that will also be a fruitful opportunity. If you hope to derive the greatest potential benefit, you must be selective about which ones you choose to engage. I recommend you give your focus to no more than two.
Homework: Is there somewhere in your life where you try to exert too much control—and should loosen your grip? Newsletter.FreeWillAstrology.com
“To stop rushing around, to sit quietly on the grass, to switch off the world and come back to the earth, to allow the eye to see a willow, a bush, a cloud, a leaf, is an unforgettable experience.” Frederick Franck (1909-2006) Dutch Painter
AN OPPORTUNITY FOR DAILY REFLECTION BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE SCHOOL OF PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY
“Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied,” Zadie Smith counseled in her ten rules of writing. But how does one befriend this perennial dissatisfaction while continuing to unlock, to borrow Julia Cameron’s potent phrase, the “spiritual electricity” of creative flow?
To this abiding question of the creative life, legendary choreographer Martha Graham (May 11, 1894–April 1, 1991) offers an answer at once remarkably grounding and remarkably elevating in a conversation found in the 1991 biography Martha: The Life and Work of Martha Graham (public library) by dancer and choreographer Agnes de Mille.
Martha Graham (Photograph: Barbara Morgan)
In 1943, De Mille was hired to choreograph the musical Oklahoma!, which became an overnight sensation and ran for a record-setting 2,212 performances. Feeling that critics and the public had long ignored work into which she had poured her heart and soul, De Mille found herself dispirited by the sense that something she considered “only fairly good” was suddenly hailed as a “flamboyant success.” Shortly after the premiere, she met Graham “in a Schrafft’s restaurant over a soda” for a conversation that put into perspective her gnawing grievance and offered what De Mille considered the greatest thing ever said to her. She recounts the exchange:
I confessed that I had a burning desire to be excellent, but no faith that I could be.
Martha said to me, very quietly: “There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. As for you, Agnes, you have so far used about one-third of your talent.”
“But,” I said, “when I see my work I take for granted what other people value in it. I see only its ineptitude, inorganic flaws, and crudities. I am not pleased or satisfied.”
“No artist is pleased.”
“But then there is no satisfaction?”
“No satisfaction whatever at any time,” she cried out passionately. “There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.”
The Lord of Oppression is a hard card to come to grips with, for it indicates blocked or thwarted Will. We want something badly, and yet we seem to stand no chance of getting it. We feel frustrated, irritable and disappointed.
If a situation marked by the Ten of Wands goes on for too long, we will begin to feel trapped and deeply unhappy. We will begin to lose faith in ourselves, and our abilities to make our lives into what we want.
There are a couple of things to bear in mind if the influence of the Lord of Oppression is a fairly fleeting one – sometimes we have to wait for the right moment to get our heart’s desire.
However it’s worth bearing in mind, if you ever read on a specific situation, and this card comes up in the final result position, the reading is probably telling you not to waste any more effort on a conflict that you cannot win. Sometimes we are better off just walking away.
The long-term appearance of this card carries a warning with it that you really cannot ignore. If the Ten of Wands is a regular feature of your readings for some time, you are probably hurting yourself more than you care to admit. You are not fulfilling your needs, and you are leaving yourself open to negativity.
Time to get a little bit of Ace energy in there, and sort things out!
We have a Ukraine Emergency Translation Group meeting scheduled for this Friday, May 13, at 11:00 AM Pacific Time, noon Mountain time, 1pm Central time, 2pm Eastern time, 8pm Greece, 9pm Turkey.
We will share your Translation with the group, if you like. You can email your Translation to me at zonta1111@aol.com.
Or perhaps you have a sense testimony you’d like to share. Or other insights or comments you may have.
Open to all Translators. Translate whatever you like or don’t Translate anything at all. Your choice.
See you Friday.
Mike Zonta Ukraine Emergency Translation Group
Prosperos Meetings is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting. Topic: Ukraine Emergency Translation Group Time: May 13, 2022 11:00 AM Pacific Time (US and Canada)
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On May 11th, 2022 Jupiter enters Aries. This is undoubtedly one of the most important transits of the year.
Jupiter in Aries is big and bold. This is not your usual Aries “just do it” type of energy… this is a “let’s do it BIG” type of energy. From May 2022 until May 2023, we have 12 months of Aries opportunities on steroids.
And what does Aries stand for?
Aries keywords are action, initiative, boldness, determination, taking a stand, listening to our gut, bringing things into existence, making things happen.
Aries is the first sign of the zodiac and it’s all about “Me”. Not in a selfish way. Knowing who we are and what we want are a prerequisite for everything else. Jupiter in Aries shifts our focus away from the collective (Jupiter in Pisces), asking us to pay attention to our own needs.
If Jupiter in Pisces was a good time to dream of a new vision of the future, Jupiter in Aries is the time to take decisive action towards turning these visions into realities. When Jupiter is in Aries, nothing can stop us from going for what we want.
One interesting thing about this transit is that while Juptiter is in Aries, we will have all the slow-moving planets occupying 5 consecutive signs of the zodiac, in a locomotive-like formation.
We have Pluto in Capricorn, Saturn in Aquarius, Neptune in Pisces, Jupiter in Aries, and Uranus in Taurus. The last 3 signs of the zodiac connect with the fist 2 signs of the zodiac, setting things into motion.
Jupiter In Aries 2022-2023 – The Dates
These are the most important dates of the Jupiter in Aries transit:
May 11th, 2022 – Jupiter Enters Aries
May 29th, 2022 – Jupiter conjunct Mars at 3° Aries
July 29th, 2022 – Jupiter goes retrograde at 8° Aries
October 28th, 2022 – Jupiter re-enters Pisces
November 24th, 2022 – Jupiter goes direct at 28° Pisces
December 20th, 2022 – Jupiter re-enters Aries
March 2nd, 2023 – Jupiter conjunct Venus at 12° Aries
March 12th, 2023 – Jupiter conjunct Chiron at 14° Aries
March 28th, 2023 – Jupiter conjunct Mercury at 18° Aries
April 11th, 2023 – Jupiter conjunct Sun at 21° Aries
May 16th, 2023 – Jupiter leaves Aries
May 17th, 2023 – Jupiter at 0° Taurus squares Pluto at 0° Aquarius
The Jupiter in Aries transit starts with a BANG. The bang is the highly dynamic Jupiter-Mars conjunction on May 29th, 2022.
After this conjunction, Jupiter goes into a sort of hibernation, and doesn’t make any major aspects for 9 months.
In March 2023, Jupiter in Aries ‘wakes up’, making a highly energizing, 4-stellium conjunction with Chiron, Venus and Mercury. All the energy that Jupiter has been building up in the first 9 months of the transit powerfully unleashes in March 2023. This is when we will get to witness the true power of this transit.
Jupiter in Aries transit starts with a BANG and ends with a BIG BANG. Exactly as it leaves Aries and moves into Taurus, in May 2023 Jupiter squares Pluto at 0° Aquarius.
Aspects at 0° of signs are very important because they speak of important new beginnings. This Jupiter-Pluto square is the first square of the Jupiter-Pluto cycle that began in March 2020.
The Jupiter-Pluto square carries an “all or nothing” energy that will shake us to the core.
Aquarius is a collective sign that symbolizes society with its norms and conventions. Taurus is our personal, individual values.
When these 2 giants are at cross purposes, our personal values clash with those of society.
Jupiter-Pluto square will address the same themes the Saturn-Uranus square has addressed in 2021-2022, but will take a completely different approach.
If the Saturn-Uranus square has been sloooow and frustrating, Jupiter square Pluto is fast and furious. This is a ‘let’s get on with it’, ‘let’s get it done at all costs’ type of energy.
Jupiter Conjunct Chiron In Aries – March 2023
The most important transit of the Jupiter in Aries cycle is Jupiter conjunct Chiron. We only have a Jupiter-Chiron conjunction every 17 years on average, so Jupiter conjunct Chiron is by far, the most important Jupiter transit during its stay in Aries.
Jupiter conjunct Chiron comes with opportunities for healing and growth. Jupiter expands the qualities of the planet it touches; when Jupiter is conjunct Chiron we will have an expansion of Chiron themes: body-spirit integration, holistic healing, coming to terms with our dual nature.
Jupiter makes Chiron more accessible, bringing coherence and alignment. When Jupiter is conjunct Chiron, healing doesn’t have to be that hard – Jupiter will point to the path of least resistance.
Jupiter and Chiron have a lot in common.
Jupiter rules Sagittarius, which is symbolized by a half-man, half-horse centaur. Chiron is a centaur himself. Both Jupiter and Chiron are connected with spirituality, teaching, and mentorship.
When Jupier conjuncts Chiron, we are offered opportunities to find healing by integrating our duality, by coming to terms with the different parts of ourselves that don’t normally ‘work’ together.
Jupiter conjunct Chiron is also a great time to find a mentor or a teacher we deeply resonate with, or to become a teacher ourselves.
PS: March 2023, when we have the Jupiter-Chiron conjunction, is also when we will run the next live version of “Chiron-Your Deepest Wound, Your Greatest gift” program. If you’re interested, mark your calendar; you will receive more details closer to the date.
Jupiter In Aries 2022-2023 – How It Will Influence You
Jupiter is in Aries every 12 years, activating the same area of your chart.
Jupiter was in Aries in June 2010-June 2011, February 1999-February 2000, March 1987-March 1988, March 1975-March 1976, April 1963-April 1964 and so on. If you find a common theme during these past transits, you can expect a similar theme to come into focus now.
When Jupiter changes signs, a particular area of your life will come into focus. A new topic will require your full attention, and not just for one week or two, but for an entire year. This area of your life is where you’ll experience Jupiter’s expansive energy.
Let’s have a look at what type of opportunities Jupiter in Aries will bring into your life, based on your Ascendant sign.
Note: we use whole sign houses, if you use other house systems, instead of looking at your Ascendant sign, look at the house(s) where Aries sits in your chart.
If you have an Aries Ascendant, Jupiter transits your 1st house. This is the beginning of a new chapter of your life. You can expect a major boost of confidence and opportunities in all areas of your life. You will become more self-confident and will attract opportunities to live your life on your own terms.
If you have a Taurus Ascendant, Jupiter in Capricorn transits your 12th house. The 12th house is a wisdom house, since it encompasses all the other houses – including everything that is hidden behind the surface of our awareness. This is a time to connect with your intuition to get guidance straight from the source. You can become more interested in spirituality, self-reflection and anything that connects you with the collective unconscious.
If you have a Gemini Ascendant, Jupiter transits your 11th house of friends, communities, groups of people, and hopes and dreams. Jupiter in Aries can help you turn your long-term vision into reality, but for this, you need to surround yourself with the right type of people. Even if you’re not a social butterfly, while Jupiter is in Aries you will network more than usual and join new groups and communities based on your interests.
If you have a Cancer Ascendant, Jupiter transits your 10th house of career, social achievements, status, and reputation. During this transit, you can decide to embrace a new career or a new life direction that is more aligned with your true purpose. If you’re not happy with your career or path in life, Jupiter in Aries will give you the confidence to step outside your comfort zone and go for what you truly want. This is also when you can get recognition for your achievements, gain popularity, or become a sought-after expert in your field.
If you have a Leo Ascendant, Jupiter transits your 9th house of faith, hope, beliefs, learning, and life purpose. Jupiter in Aries will help you find a new purpose, a new perspective, a new meaning in your life. To make this new purpose a reality, you’ll come with a plan on how to get there: learn new skills, go back to school, find a teacher or a mentor, travel more than usual, explore different topics, and have meaningful learning experiences.
If you have a Virgo Ascendant, Jupiter transits your 8th house of shared resources, intimacy, power and control. Jupiter in Aries will show you that the world is a place of infinite opportunities, and, just as destruction and loss are part of life, infinite abundance is a part of life too. You will discover that you have much more power than you knew and you’ll learn how to assert it in a healthy way. Investments, business opportunities and partnerships will become more abundant than usual.
If you have a Libra Ascendant, Jupiter transits your 7th house of relationships, bringing new relationship opportunities. The 7th house is also the house of “open enemies” or “conflict” so Jupiter could bring an abundance of conflict too. As a result, you may let go of some relationships that are not aligned with your integrity and purpose. If instead your current relationships are built on healthy foundations, Jupiter in Aries will bring you even more opportunities for growth, expansion, and win-win agreements.
If you have a Scorpio Ascendant, Jupiter transits your 6th house of work, health, diet, routines, and service to others. Jupiter in Aries will help you improve your routines and make better lifestyle choices – you can engage in new health routines, improve your nutrition, work out more efficiently, and become more productive. If you’ve been looking for work, Jupiter in Aries will bring you opportunities to find something lucrative. Of course, as with any transit, to make things happen, you’ll have to actually grab these opportunities, and not let them slip.
If you have a Sagittarius Ascendant, Jupiter transits your 5th house of creativity, romance, and children. Jupiter in your 5th house will show you what it’s like to have fun and live from the heart. You will have more opportunities to step into your creative power, dedicate more time to your hobbies, improve your relationship with your children, and open up to romance and love. If you start a new venture with Jupiter in Aries, this venture won’t be just a side hustle – it will be aligned with your true passions and interests.
If you have a Capricorn Ascendant, Jupiter transits your 4th house of home, roots, security, and family. You can improve your relationships with your family members, and spend more quality time with people that are important to you. This is also a good transit to expand your home, buy a new property, or relocate. You can become a parent, or a grandparent, or welcome new family members.
If you have an Aquarius Ascendant, Jupiter will transit your 3rd house of communication, learning, commerce, siblings, and your everyday environment. Jupiter in Aries is a great transit for personal development and for acquiring new skills. You’re more curious than usual, and more keen to learn new things and upgrade your skills. Jupiter in Aries is also a great time to improve your communication skills, start a blog, or write a book.
If you have a Pisces Ascendant, Jupiter transits your 2nd house of possessions, money, talents, self-worth, and values. Jupiter in Aries will boost your self-worth and confidence, and as a result, you will take more chances and risks than normally. Jupiter in Aries will help you let go of limiting or scarcity beliefs around self-worth, so you can embrace abundance and make decisions that serve your growth. The key to success is engaging in those activities that are aligned with your highest values.
One Friday this February, I took the Métro to the Tuileries Garden, then walked across the old Solférino bridge to the Musée d’Orsay. After scanning my vaccine health pass and joining the other masked visitors inside, I went for a third spin through a temporary exhibition of works from the collection of the painter Paul Signac. It was the show’s final weekend, and I wanted to get one last look at a small painting by Signac’s contemporary and fellow pointillist, Georges Seurat, an oil study of a model standing nude in an atmosphere of blue and lilac brush marks.
Poseuse debout, de face (1886) by Georges Seurat. Photo courtesy the author
I was immediately drawn to this study the first time I saw it, though it’s no bigger than a piece of writing paper, and was in danger of being eclipsed by the largest Seurat on display, an unfinished painting of an acrobat performing on horseback in the ring, called The Circus (1891). The study – Poseuse debout, de face (1886) – demanded my attention. The particulate blue light floats in front of the model’s body, colouring her skin, but also catching her up in a swirl of atmosphere, a little cyclone of vibrating beingness. Although the model stands in a studio, the colourful aura reminded me of the air on a beach at dusk, when you can almost see the negative ions shimmer, all forms revealed as a swarm of atoms, electric. The atmosphere advances to debunk the myth of material solidity. Signac acquired the study shortly before Seurat’s death, liking sketches as much as he did finished paintings, and noting in 1895: ‘What charm emanates from these smiles and thoughts of a painter.’
All painting is a form of optical illusion, but pointillism – the technique Seurat pioneered in the 1880s when he was in his 20s – aims to deconstruct the act of seeing itself. Trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Seurat studied classical art, but he was keenly interested in how the eye interprets colour, and drawn to the theories of the chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul. Chevreul explored the workings of colour after he became director of the historic Gobelins tapestry factory in 1824 – originally a manufacturer of medieval dyes. He observed that two colours, when placed near to one another, would look like a third colour when viewed from a distance, and called the effect ‘simultaneous contrast’.
Chevreul advised painters to incorporate such colour contrasts into their work, referring to its affect as ‘harmony’; Seurat, who copied out paragraphs from Chevreul’s works in his own notebook, was interested in the way it evoked emotion. This visual manifestation of emotion as Seurat experienced it, as a sense of blurred vibration, is part of what makes his works so captivating
If a photograph was a moment frozen in time, a painting still flowed, still breathed: it could defy the pinned stagnation of time
With the advent of chemical photography in the mid-19th century, painting began to change. As David Hockney notes in Secret Knowledge (2001), for centuries painters preferred an ‘optical look’, mimicking the life-like projections of light and form made by reflecting devices such as mirrors and camera obscuras. But after photography went mainstream, painting was no longer needed as a documentation tool in quite the same way, and so pioneering painters began to occupy themselves with what black-and-white photography couldn’t yet capture, emulating the ephemeral and the fleeting. Impressionists such as Claude Monet turned their eye to mists, and dusk, and the dappled colours of light on water. Berthe Morisot studied the movement of air across a woman’s bare shoulders in the glow of a low-lit dressing room. If a photograph was a moment frozen in time, a painting still flowed, still breathed: it could defy the pinned stagnation of time. The impressionists liberated colour and form from their former margins, making them the very subjects of the works themselves. Seurat followed on, with further attempts to get at the truth (or the illusion) of what it really is to see.
I wasn’t the only person struck by the small Seurat study. In the museum’s gift shop, I discovered that it was one of the select images turned into a postcard. Simultaneously, I experienced the sensation of reassuring disappointment that my creative sensibilities were not unique, and the dubious pleasure of having my tastes confirmed. This loosely rendered nude, never intended for public exhibition, was speaking to people other than myself. Dispersed throughout the world as a collectible object, like the seeds of a dandelion set adrift, it was releasing spores.
The work is a study for a larger painting called Models (1886-88), now at the Barnes Collection in Philadelphia, that shows three female nudes in a studio. One sits half-dressed on the edge of a settee, her back to the viewer. Another stands, ready to pose. A third, seen in profile, pulls on a pair of green knee-high stockings, beside a pile of clothes and shoes. In the background, on the studio wall, is a partial view of another Seurat painting, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884-86), his most famous; three models in front of a painting within a painting. It is one of Seurat’s finest. What was rendered in brushy daubs in the study has been transformed in the final version into a whirring constellation of dots in complementary colours, indigo, peach and acid green.
A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (1884) by Georges Seurat. Courtesy the Art Institute of Chicago
If you look closely at this painting, the models reveal themselves not to be three models after all, but the same woman shown three times. This raises the question of whether Seurat intended Models as a meditation on the passage of time itself, with all moments happening simultaneously – time collapsing within the meditative space of the studio. On the left, the model arrives, sits on the red settee and disrobes. In the middle, she’s at work; on the right, she readies to depart. That her discarded outfit changes colours from left to right suggests that these moments have been captured on different days. In this way, the canvas invokes the banal reality of painting itself, dependent on practice and repetition, on work put in at the easel, day in and day out. It is a montage, a time-lapse portrait of creative endeavour, that dismantles past, present and future.
The blur of coloured dots promises to reveal something, if only you’d move closer, but then the nearer you get to the canvas, the more the paintings atomise
Something about Seurat’s work just pulls you in. It possesses a sense of vibrating electricity. The blur of coloured dots promises to reveal something, if only you’d move closer, but then the nearer you get to the canvas, the more the paintings atomise. Sitting on the bench near the Seurat study, I watched it grab people, watched them fall in to it, the way Alan Ruck’s character Cameron does when he encounters A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte in John Hughes’s tender coming-of-age movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986). Hughes later described this scene, filmed at the Art Institute of Chicago, as ‘self-indulgent’, since the museum had been a refuge for him when he himself was in high school, and where he came to know ‘all the paintings’.
Of the scene, in which Cameron stares and stares at the mother and child in Seurat’s painting, squinting to get better resolution, Hughes says (in a recorded commentary):
I always thought this painting was sort of like making a movie, you know, the pointillist style, which you’re very, very close to it; you don’t have any idea what you’ve made until you step back from it.
But Cameron does not step back. The closer he looks at the Seurat, the less he sees. He falls into it, experiencing a kind of personal dispersal. The abstracted field of colour composing the child’s face mirrors back to him his own facelessness and lack of belonging, his fear, as Hughes puts it, that ‘there isn’t anything there’.
Life slides away from us, meaning slides away, as does our idea of the concrete self. The mind wants patterns in the same way that the eye wants colours to merge. We are built to do this. We want definition and borders. But sometimes, no matter how hard we try to keep it together, we cannot.
In Elena Ferrante’s novel My Brilliant Friend (2011), Lila confesses the frightening episodes she refers to as ‘dissolving margins’:
[O]n those occasions the outlines of people and things suddenly dissolved, disappeared … It seemed to her that everyone was shouting too loudly and moving too quickly. This sensation was accompanied by nausea, and she had had the impression that something absolutely material, which had been present around her and around everyone and everything forever, but imperceptible, was breaking down the outlines of persons and things and revealing itself.
Humans are afterimage; we vibrate on the retina of the world after we are gone like the memory of a bright light making shapes against a closed eyelid
But the dissolution of our own margins does not have to be frightening. In Richard Linklater’s film Before Sunrise (1995), Julie Delpy’s Céline and Ethan Hawke’s Jesse come across a poster for a Seurat exhibition as they stroll through nighttime Vienna. ‘I love the way the people seem to be dissolving into the background,’ Céline says. ‘Look at this one. It’s like the environments, you know, are stronger than the people. His human figures are always so transitory.’
The couple’s meandering conversation returns again and again to the transitory nature of bodies and feelings in space and time. In the sequel Before Sunset (2004), set nine years later in Paris, an unhappily married Jesse says that if someone were to touch him, he fears he might ‘dissolve into molecules’. In the third film, Before Midnight (2013), they listen as a fellow dinner party guest talks about being able to see her late husband in the mornings:
He appears, and he disappears, like a sunrise or a sunset, or anything so ephemeral. Just like our life. We appear, and we disappear, and we are so important to some, but we are just passing through.
At the end of Before Sunrise, the camera takes us on a tour of all the places that the fleeting couple have themselves passed through: the bridge, the river, the park, the churchyard. As Céline observed, the environment is stronger than the people within it. They have already dissolved into the rest of their lives. But in Before Sunset, there is a similar montage of location shots, but this time it takes place at the beginning. We are shown the settings that await them. They hold the mysterious charge of things yet to come.
Humans are afterimage; we vibrate on the retina of the world after we are gone like the memory of a bright light making shapes against a closed eyelid. But we are also destiny, in landscapes that hold a prophecy of us.
Seurat’s life itself turned out to be fleeting too. He died at just 31, following an unknown illness, and with The Circus still in progress – the grid of blue lines used to arrange its figures still visible on the canvas. The painting had already been hung in its unfinished state at the Salon des Indépendants before Seurat fell ill. For a brief time afterwards, his mother hung it in the room where he’d died. But then Signac added the oil painting to his collection of Seurats, making 14 in total, where it joined the little study of the model swathed in blue.
To me, the Seurat study looks not so much like the model is dissolving into molecules, but that molecules are temporarily forming themselves as her, as though her body were a murmuration of matter rather than a fact. What are bodies, or the experience of them, except the precipitation of feelings in space and time? Maybe we are all like this, murmurations, a flight of starlings, momentarily caught in a form we call ‘self’.
Members of Handmaids Army DC walk silently during a protest in Washington against overturning Roe v Wade. Photograph: Allison Bailey/NurPhoto/REX/Shutterstock
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I confessed that I had a burning desire to be excellent, but no faith that I could be.
Members of Handmaids Army DC walk silently during a protest in Washington against overturning Roe v Wade. Photograph: Allison Bailey/NurPhoto/REX/Shutterstock