A Quote by Nathalie Handal
I went to West Texas and started writing a cycle of Americana poems after the space conjured images that, as a child, I only saw on television-John Wayne, cowboys, borderlines. But suddenly, I felt close to these once-foreign imageries and wondered how I'd changed. Each evening brought the darkest skies in the country, and I understood the expansiveness of our inner selves. Ultimately nothing divides us except the worlds and words we allow.
Quote Topics
After
Allow
Americana
Brought
Changed
Child
Close
Country
Cowboys
Cycle
Darkest
Divides
Each
Evening
Except
Expansiveness
Felt
Foreign
How
Images
Inner
John
Nothing
Once
Only
Our
Poems
Saw
Selves
Skies
Space
Started
Suddenly
Television
Texas
Ultimately
Understood
Us
Wayne
West
West Texas
Wondered
Words
Worlds
Writing
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It is important to understand, not intellectually but actually in your daily life, how you have built images about your wife, your husband, your neighbor, your child, your country, your leaders, your politicians, your gods-you have nothing but images. The images create the space between you and what you observe and in that space there is conflict, so what we are going to find out now together is whether it is possible to be free of the space we create, not only outside ourselves but in ourselves, the space which divides people in all their relationships.
I definitely remember doing 'The Alamo' with John Wayne and Lawrence Harvey and Linda Cristal. We'd work six days a week, and then John Wayne would invite us down to a little place in Texas called Del Rio, and we would break bread and have some wine and tell stories.
Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world only, our own, we see that world multiply itself and we have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists, worlds more different one from the other than those which revolve in infinite space, worlds which, centuries after the extinction of the fire from which their light first emanated, whether it is called Rembrandt or Vermeer, send us still each one its special radiance.
In Eden I "saw" that Adam or Eve probably spoke each word FOR THE FIRST TIME and that seemed wild and seemed to me that that might have brought them to some essence of language. Once I "saw" the city, I knew it was real. once I saw that a poem was a house, i knew it was real and could go back to it or else write a flurry of poems around it, both worked.
Words can enhance experience, but they can also take so much away. We see an insect and at once we abstract certain characteristics and classify it - a fly. And in that very cognitive exercise, part of the wonder is gone. Once we have labeled the things around us we do not bother to look at them so carefully. Words are part of our rational selves, and to abandon them for a while is to give freer reign to our intuitive selves.
We thought: we're poor, we have nothing, but when we started losing one after the other so each day became remembrance day, we started composing poems about God's great generosity and our former riches.
We sat there and I knew that this was how it felt to be totally accepted. You sit close to another person and are understood, everything is understood and nothing is judged and you are indispensable.
You're not going to be able to look like anyone else, no matter how hard you try, unless you're a mimic, then you're not acting, you're just mimicking. You can't go on being John Wayne, that's John Wayne. So you're not going to steal from John Wayne. I'm not going to steal from John Wayne and you're not going to come back and say 'Didn't you get that from the circus?' You know. But he is one of those people who instructs me, whom I look up to - whom I think is one of the masters of his craft that I am so enamoured of.
It was about finding the sacred within myself, my center, my peaceful core. We each have a sacred space within us, a part of us. This sacred space is a temple, a temple to our inner power, our intuition, and our connection with the divine. Discovery of psychic powers, spells, and meditation are all things that lead us to the temple. They help us find the road within and walk our path to the inner temple.
Once, in my father's bookshop, I heard a regular customer say that few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the first book that finds its way into his heart. Those first images, the echo of words we think we have left behind, accompany us throughout our lives and sculpt a palace in our memory to which, sooner or later—no matter how many books we read, how many worlds we discover, or how much we learn or forget—we will return.
I saw Ben Stiller's movie Walter Mitty [2013]; it's very beautiful. You look at some of the movies John Ford did with John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart, and then look at Remington and Ansel Adams, and I think you see a connection, certainly in the imagery of the West.
Let us pause before the Child of Bethlehem. Let us allow our hearts to be touched, let us allow ourselves to be warmed by the tenderness of God; we need his caress. God is full of love: to him be praise and glory forever! God is peace: let us ask him to help us to be peacemakers each day, in our life, in our families, in our cities and nations, in the whole world. Let us allow ourselves to be moved by God's goodness.
What faith in man must in our new world beat, Thinking how once he saw before his face The west and all the host of stars retreat Into the silent infinite of space!
Do any of us, except in our dreams, truly expect to be reunited with our hearts' deepest loves, even when they leave us only for minutes, and on the most mundane of errands? No, not at all. Each time they go from our sight we in our secret hearts count them as dead. Having been given so much, we reason, how could we expect not to be brought as low as Lucifer for the staggering presumption of our love?
Many of us are trying to lead multiple lives: child, mother, wife, lover, star, giving small doses of oxygen to each and imploding under the weight of so many competing roles. The women I have written in Bombshells struggle - sometimes hilariously, sometimes tragically - to bridge the chasm between the wilderness of their inner worlds and the demands of their outer worlds. And humour, in the end, is our saviour.
I saw that the incorporation of Texas into this Union would be indispensable both to her safety and ours. I saw that it was impossible she could stand as an independent power between us and Mexico without becoming the scene of intrigue of foreign powers, alike destructive of the peace and security of both Texas and ourselves.
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