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A Day in the Brine

~ Unkempt Mind dribbling in the seethe

A Day in the Brine

Tag Archives: Grief

Steps that Rap like Rain, Guest Hosting for #WQWWC

30 Wednesday Dec 2020

Posted by smilingtoad in Uncategorized

≈ 39 Comments

Tags

#WQWWC, Abstract, Black and White, Cinema, Existence, Experimental, Florida, Grief, Hope, Nature, Night, Ocean, Photography, Quotations, Sunset, Water, Writing

I gaze into jukebox skies.

Sun-blotted days have bleached my shoulders. My mane is turning white. Hunch-backed, I grasp a scallop-shelled walking-stick, ambling along on driftwood legs.

“My characters are drifters and searchers and they look for something. The journey is a state of mind for them.” ―Wim Wenders

Details peel from my face and trickle away into the citrus breeze.

(Sometimes, I can hear atomies skitter across the metalled sands of apathy.)

“The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.” ―John Milton

A froth of dinoflagellates sparks electric blue ‘round my stubble-feet. Each step is measured, defying suction as I trace along the arrow of time.

“It all looks the same. You can’t imagine anything anymore. Above all, you can’t imagine any change. I became estranged from myself. All I could imagine was going on and on like this forever.” ―Alice in the Cities, 1974, Written by Wim Wenders and Veith von Furstenberg

(There’s a black maw gaping in the back of my brain.)

“Today was a gloomy, rainy day without a glimmer of sunlight, like the old age before me. I am oppressed by such strange thoughts, such gloomy sensations; questions still so obscure to me are crowding into my brain- and I seem to have neither power nor will to settle them.” ―Fyodor Dostoevsky, White Nights

I used to retreat into the zebra-striped dusk beneath the sagging porch of childhood. Heaps of detritus gathered ‘round like friends- termite-mounds of frass, sparrow bones, and mulberry seeds.

(The subtle sounds of decay became my life’s refrain.)

“Some people turn sad awfully young. No special reason, it seems, but they seem almost to be born that way. They bruise easier, tire faster, cry quicker, remember longer and, as I say, get sadder younger than anyone else in the world. I know, for I’m one.” ―Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine

Mewling cries swarm like midges inside my weltering mind. I turn away from the virason gasping off the sea.

Flailing like a killdeer, I struggle toward the lavender dunes. A wide yellow moon grins overhead.

“I don’t take care of myself. I think, if I don’t take care of myself and I sit still and I don’t move, maybe they’ll forget about me. But then I’m scared of that too, because I think maybe if I sit there too long, maybe when I want to move, I won’t be able to move.” ―Mikey and Nicky, 1976, Written/Directed by Elaine May
Memory microfilms at the margin: Coarse sheets forming little mountain ranges of wet, crimson-black spires. Cloven hands of ivory clacking against shiny metal bars. Hillocks of pillows burning like red coals against a dried-leaf body.

“Sweet is sweet, bitter is bitter, hot is hot, cold is cold, color is color; but in truth there are only atoms and the void.” ―Brian Greene, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

I can hear the wail of a train from across the lagoon, punctuating the still-water-night. The cloistered whine of mosquitoes quickly throttles the noise. And then, the sound of my quickening steps.

“A lot of people enjoy being dead. But they are not dead, really. They’re just backing away from life. Reach out. Take a chance. Get hurt even. But play as well as you can. Go team, go! Give me an L. Give me an I. Give me a V. Give me an E. L-I-V-E. LIVE! Otherwise, you got nothing to talk about in the locker room.” ―Harold and Maude, 1971, Written by Colin Higgins, Directed by Hal Ashby

Steps that begin to rap like rain. And thunder through the frenzied lights of the howling causeway. Steps that are heading north.

“I’m glad we went to the Rhine. For the first time I see myself…as someone who’s gone through a certain time, and that time is my story. [Pausing] That feeling is quite comfortable.” ―Kings of the Road (Im Lauf der Zeit, “In the Course of Time”), 1974, Written/Directed by Wim Wenders

Determined to run into myself again.

“We all talked about leaving, but only one of us, one morning, without a word to a soul, actually left.” ―I Vitelloni (“The Bullocks/The Layabouts”),1953, Written/Directed by Federico Fellini
…………….…………………………………………………………………………………………………………

A little over a year ago, I traveled north and did something I’d never done before. Toured a series of universities.

Here’s to new beginnings.

“I have to go on makin’ a livin’…so I can die.” ―Pickup on South Street, 1953, Written/Directed by Samuel Fuller

…………….…………………………………………………………………………………………………………

This effort was created for Marsha Ingrao’s Always Write: Writer’s Quotes Wednesdays Writing Challenge (#WQWWC).

This week’s theme: New Beginnings.

I invite you to accent your own post with a quotation or two that expresses your own sense of New Beginnings.

Here is further information on How to Participate in the Wednesday Writers Challenge.

Previous contributors to last week’s theme, Celebration:

  • It’s Tradition by Myrna Migala
  • Here Comes the Holiday Season by Tina Schell
  • A very Merry Christmas by Sadje
  • Beach Walk Reflections by Frank who included some music via YouTube Fantasia on For All the Saints

Thank you for drizzling by,

Autumn Jade

Song by Improved Sound Limited, from Kings of the Road

Sometimes, Silence is Reckless…

01 Tuesday Mar 2016

Posted by smilingtoad in Experimental, Introspection, Video

≈ 70 Comments

Tags

Addiction, Black and White, Depression, Experimental, Florida, GIF, Grief, Introspection, Nature, Poetry, Prose, Video, Writing

(Some experimental refractions.  Thank you for drizzling by.)

MentalErosionThe clattering waves. The intractable sky. Mute again, with gloomy grey eyes. A bit of bone cuts into my thumb. A touch of wind whispers through decaying feathers. I do not remember the last thing I felt before the embalming.

AbandoningSometimes, Silence is reckless.

PurgatoryMy mind is fossilized. As lively as the oldest stone. I lean back on the retracting cushion of Entropy, and gaze blankly toward the heavens. How dazzling is this thatch of scattering sparrows; how enchanting their dance of dewdrop shadows.

RelapseThorny bliss is this mindlessness, oblique amongst the dried thistle and snapping bramble. I can vaguely hear it, somewhere wrapped in gauze; a little Life fizzing at the bottom of the quiet stream, beyond.

Like a mosquito, I insert a needle into it, now and then.

RecklessSilenceIt is easy to forget the threat of a wave’s smooth caress, that its languorous massage of oblivion is still a form of erosion.

Breathing2When I was a child, my favourite thing to draw was a noose.

TheMomentBeforetheFalterHe rang the other night. I could hear that his lips were cracked and bleeding. He wept and begged forgiveness, but I had never felt slighted to begin with. Yet, my response was blank-eyed silence. There was only the sound of the restive wind moaning through the eaves to answer for me.

PugnatiousSkiesHow stealthy a foe is this stifling captor; like a cashmere cloud, its downy coolness yawned over me. Its strangeness seemed safe, nestled inside its gossamer embrace, bound in a world without senses or thought. I am far too gone to feel alarm, now.

TheBreathofEntropySometimes, love is just impotent rage that is a little too tired to bear its bulbous face.

TenacityofGriefWhat an obdurate knot Shame so deftly creates, twisting away, as the years smoothly slip by, pressure mounting against my spine.

FlyingonaFeversBackRegaining a pulse requires resurfacing. To drag the bloated body from the turgid depths. To pry open its chalky eyes, exposing them to the bone light of the wild ocean sky, above. To kiss its mucid, slimy visage and blow through its cold stringy-white lips.

DejectionTo let the cherry rivulets of pus and water drain from the self-inflicted punctures.

HoldingOnI do not know if I will dry out, chafe these wrists, and feel again. I despise the sound of my own voice, the rattle and scrape of my defunct brain and the trepid rasp of my rusty breath.

LayDowntoCompostSometimes, though, Silence can be much deadlier than the noose.

How I Wish There Were No End to Rain

14 Monday Sep 2015

Posted by smilingtoad in Introspection, Photography, Quotations, Stories

≈ 57 Comments

Tags

Black and White, Death, Florida, Grief, Introspection, Music, Nature, Ocean, Pain, Photography, Prose, Quotation, Rain, Sea, Writing

Ocean-bw-8404-BIII loomed beneath a dark feathering of sea-oats, pointed tips glazed with recent rain. I listened to the subdued murmur of little waves. The fetid and russet beds of sea-wrack had been washed away, leaving the sand barren and strange. A forlorn gull loitered at the swash line, analyzing the crinkling water as it fizzed in and out.

Beach- bw-8456-BDistant lightning lazily branched from the moody-blue squall-lines and spidered across a sullen sea of herbal green. Coy ghost crabs emerged, removing dark masses of dripping sand from drowned burrows. They built little, lumpy mounds around the entrances to their small, black holes.

The storm was leaving me. How I longed for it to stay.

Beach- bw-8441-BI was tortured the other night, seized with the memory of my little Siamese cat squeezing her eyes tightly shut for the last time. How swiftly she was gone, her soft, cinnamon cheek resting upon a colorful, flowing blanket that masked the metal slab beneath. I had never seen an animal euthanized, before. I understood, logically, that it ended the physical misery of her little, bony body.

Yet, how troubled I am by that last image of peace…of life tenderly released.

Beach- bw-8742-BMy mum died of a similar ravenous kind of disease. I remember that final image. Her face waxen and unreal, her mouth a small, black hole. She did not tightly close her eyes. She was not escorted quietly, through a warm wash of sleep, into the darkness beyond. Yet, I was not so disturbed by her image in death. And how vividly there lacked any look of peace…

Beach- bw-8752-BI do not know what that reveals about me.

But I wish the storm would never leave. I want, forever, to hear its screams over this cold and fleeting sea of herbal green. How I wish there were no end to rain. Just as there seems to be no end to Grief.

Ocean-bw-8411-B“Darkness settles on the ground
Leaves the day stumbling blind,
Coming to a quiet close
And maybe just in time”
– From the song God Only Knows by Joe Henry

“The World in All Its Tainted Glory”

11 Tuesday Nov 2014

Posted by smilingtoad in Photography, Quotations

≈ 40 Comments

Tags

Abstract, Abstract Photography, Black and White, Grief, Hope, Literary Quotes, Nature, Photography, Quotes, Sadness, Swan, Water

Swannie“Everybody is supposed to be quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds.”
– Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five

If Only They Could See00“His dislike of mankind, of the mass of mankind, amounted almost to an illness.”
– D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love

Sailing“I want to confess as best I can, but my heart is void. The void is a mirror. I see my face and feel loathing and horror. My indifference to man has shut me out. I live now in a world of ghosts, a prisoner in my dreams.”
– Ingmar Bergman, The Seventh Seal

Park“I had a dream. I was walking a beautiful street. On one side were white buildings with columns. On the other side, a park. And under the trees along the street was a dark green band. Then I came to a high wall, covered completely by roses. A plane came and set fire to the roses. It was not such a bad thing, since it was so beautiful. I looked into the water. How the roses were burning.”
– Ingmar Bergman, Shame

Preening“It takes a great deal of courage to see the world in all its tainted glory, and still to love it.”
– Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband

Pastel Sadness

19 Tuesday Aug 2014

Posted by smilingtoad in Experimental, Photography, Poetry

≈ 35 Comments

Tags

Black and White, Experimental, Florida, Grain, Grief, Melancholy, Nature, Ocean, Photography, Poetry, Sadness, Sea, Sunset, Twilight

SadnessBWIn a fatal blue fugue,
she bruises
the edge of an hour.

She swallows the
Evening’s clear cries
of dark-dipping gulls

flung across the sunken wound
of Sunset.

grainHer brash toes dissolve through
the wrinkly-white
sibilance of quiet Tide;

her cloudy dress of Pastel Sadness
dragging carelessly behind.

grainzA summer child is Twilight,
as overhead, Night begins to swim.

grainyAnd in a rasp of
Rain-stung wind
she mutters something soft
and inarticulate
as she kicks away
the last cherry shadows
of an old rusty day.

Dragonfly Shadows and a Harried Sky

24 Saturday May 2014

Posted by smilingtoad in Photography, Quotations, Video

≈ 21 Comments

Tags

Abstract, Black and White, Forest, Grief, Loss, Nature, Nikon, Pain, Photography, Quotes, Reflection, Sadness, Thoughts, Toad, Video, Videography, Wandering, Water, Woods

Some stills from the wee forest video below.  Harried

“One thing you can’t hide – is when you’re crippled inside.”
― John Lennon

HarriedToad“Here I am trying to live, or rather, I am trying to teach the death within me how to live.”
– Jean Cocteau

Harried00“Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.”
― William Faulkner


Thank you for drizzling by,

Jubilant cheers,

Autumn Jade

A Shrewd Grief

02 Wednesday Apr 2014

Posted by smilingtoad in Art, Experimental, Introspection, Photography, Poetry

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

Abstract, Art, Black and White, Digital, Drawing, Experimental, Grief, Ink, Introspection, Nature, Night, Photography, Poetry, Rain, Thoughts

Milling01   Barbed malevolence

DeathA shrewd and blunt Grief

Fern3That his somber Absence

NightShould foster such Relief

Last Flare of Afternoon

13 Wednesday Feb 2013

Posted by smilingtoad in Introspection, Photography, Poetry

≈ 18 Comments

Tags

Black and White, Florida, Grief, Hiking, Landscape, Loss, Nature, Nature Photography, Photography, Poetry, Scrub Trails, Thoughts

I stopped by the roadside

To roam the silken sky

By the RoadsidePrairie hawk and starling

Sylvan AfternoonLeering down at me

In these Desert LandsRazor wire glinting in blank Sun

Bombilating Life

With the sound of Death

Transformed

Shadow Spills like Blood into the Hot White Sand

Shadow of your splayed soul

Spilled and spread like blood

In the bleached, rippled sands

Last Flare of Afternoon

And so in a splash of Amber Glow

Your Twilight arrived too soon-

The last Flare of afternoon

Liminal Overcast

13 Saturday Oct 2012

Posted by smilingtoad in Introspection, Photography, Poetry

≈ 19 Comments

Tags

Autumn, Fall, Fall Colour, Florida, Forest, Grief, Leaf, Nature, Pain, Photography, Poetry, Water

Autumn’s liminal overcast

Makes stark and bleak each vagrant leaf-

A translunary breath of Rain-

Such is the quiddity of Grief

That conjures a smile from Pain.

Mourner by the Sea

01 Saturday Sep 2012

Posted by smilingtoad in Photography, Poetry, Sea

≈ 15 Comments

Tags

Archie Carr, Black and White, Brevard, Death, Doleful, Drift Wood, Florida, Grief, Life, Malancholy, Memory, Mourn, Nature, People, Photography, Sad, Sea, Sebastian Inlet, Sepia, Texture

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