every so often when doing this

the most bizarre coincidences occur

so, you all know I have one of those things that people have for 1950s fabric. . . so the lovely and thoughtful dinahmow sent me this link. . . which shows these fabrics: remember that image on the top left? why! we were looking at it just the other day. . . (with regard to Jacqueline Groag) (you were paying attention that day, weren't you?) (yes, you!)

and then yesterday, when I was researching Kathleen Raine, I notice an interesting link in the obituaries column, informing me that Lucienne Day has died. . . and she created the fabric on the top right of the image above. . . and these:and this:

Lucienne Day inspecting Aspects of the Sun, 1991
installation for the John Lewis department store at Kingston upon Thames

(which is really really really really strange, because I sat in the John Lewis cafe at Kingston many a time in my penultimate life, wondering about that piece); and her fabrics were used for a book cover too (which was one of the weird things I discovered about Jacqueline Groag, if you'll recall):

and Lucienne grew up in Croydon, as I did (not usually something I'd confess to, but for the purposes of today I shall - but I expect you to immediately forget about that fact) and then of course we musn't forget that Hepworth also created work for John Lewis. . .

so let's just leave coincidence aside for a moment and look again at some of the beautiful words of Raine. . .
.
Confessions

Wanting to know all
I overlooked each particle
Containing the whole
Unknowable.

Intent on one great love, perfect,
Requited and for ever,
I missed love's everywhere
Small presence, thousand-guised.

And lifelong have been reading
Book after book, searching
For wisdom, but bringing
Only my own understanding.

Forgive me, forgiver,
Whether you be infinite omniscient
Or some unnoticed other
My existence has hurt.

Being what I am
What could I do but wrong?
Yet love can bring
To heart healing
To chaos meaning

perspective

I must have read many books in the past five years

Gormley

The Time Traveller's Wife, for example - even tho it was published in 2003, I'm not sure if I read it straight away; The Vintner's Luck - 2000; The Five People You Meet In Heaven - 2003; The Lovely Bones - 2002; Astonishing Splashes of Colour (2004) and Flights of the Human Mind (2006); She's Come Undone - as far back as 1992 and I Know This Much Is True (1998); to name but barely a few. . .
.

Serra

I've reread lots of work by Gabriel García Márquez, Milan Kundera, Bruce Chatwin and have found new authors such as Nicole Krauss (The History of Love) and Stefan Merrill Block (The Story of Forgetting)

Hepworth

(and I've lived thru - despite my best attempts - many changes in my life, and altho I started writing my "book" when I was happy, in 2004, perhaps I am now back on a more even keel than I was in 2005. . .)

Goldsworthy

(yesterday I looked thru the words that I had been beginning to assemble - it was like remembering baby photos but seeing an adolescent)

Ryan

back in 2004 I was only just beginning my love affair with Hepworth altho I was already engrossed in the artists of The Newlyn School; I'd seen many works by Andy Goldsworthy and Richard Long, but was only just becoming familiar with that of Antony Gormley - hadn't heard of Richard Serra

Minton

.
I hadn't seen an illustration by John Minton, didn't know the wonder that is the art work of Rob Ryan, was still to come across the words of Carol Ann Duffy, but I was already in love with the poetry of Kathleen Raine, for I had owned a book of hers since 1983. . .
.
however it wasn't until 2007 that I was to come across the following:
.

Shells

Reaching down arm-deep into bright water
I gathered on white sand under waves
Shells, drifted up on beaches where I alone
Inhabit a finite world of years and days.
I reached my arm down a myriad years
To gather treasure from the yester-milliennial sea-floor,
Held in my fingers forms shaped on the day of creation.

Building their beauty in three dimensions
Over which the world recedes away from us,
And in the fourth, that takes away ourselves
From moment to moment and from year to year
From first to last they remain in their continuous present.
The helix revolves like a timeless thought,
Instantaneous from apex to rim
Like a dance whose figure is limpet or murex, cowrie or golden winkle.

They sleep on the ocean floor like humming-tops
Whose music is the mother-of-pearl octave of the rainbow,
Harmonious shells that whisper forever in our ears,
The world that you inhabit has not yet been created.

Kathleen Raine

(rereading the prologue of my "book" reminds me of the above, possibly my favourite piece by Raine. . . and yet I'd written my prologue before I'd read her poem)(remember this)