Festival of Blue Nets - Festival des Filets Bleus - Concarneau, Brittany, France

I felt transported back to a much earlier time at this festival in Brittany, August 2019. The people taking part have such seriousness and dedication to ancient music, dance, costume, and way of life. This seriousness shows also in great joy and liveliness and it's a wonderful thing to witness.

Festival of Blue Nets I

Parade participants

People have been taking part in it for nearly 100 years, and the roots go way, way back. Watching it had me think of these words by Eli Siegel from his early work, "The Middle Ages, Say":

There were people who lived in the Middle Ages and, who, so, suffered and enjoyed; the one difference between us and them is that their pains and pleasures are over and ours are not. These people are our fellowmen over the years..."

 And later:

We should look on the past passionately; we should see all reality passionately, not only the part we have right under our noses or nearly that. Our feelings should have no limits in either extensity or intensity...

Witnessing the parade one feels so much closer to people of 100, 200, 500 and more years ago, and these sentences are a celebration of their reality. Just as the parade itself does, they can have one feel even closer - and consciously, deeply closer - to the people of the past - as we are inspired to have a way of seeing the people and reality of today (and perhaps the person right next to us) that can make us proud because it means things really matter to us. 

See a video of the parade in Concarneau

See "History Is Ethics and Aesthetics" issue #1385 of the periodical "The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known" See also: "Is Beauty the Making One of Opposites?" - fifteen questions about beauty by Eli Siegel, written in 1955 on the occasion of the opening of New York City's Terrain Gallery

More photos of the parade:

Festival of Blue Nets II

Festival of Blue Nets III

Flag of Brittany

Festival des Filets Bleus the Festival of Blue Nets in Brittany
#Concarneau #LesFiletsBleus #Dance #Beauty #History

Festival of Blue Nets IV

Festival of Blue Nets V

Festival of Blue Nets VI

Festival of Blue Nets VII

Festival of Blue Nets VIII

Antiracism blog: https://cjbalchin.blogspot.com/

Dawn in Brooklyn, Light and Dark

I love the early-morning view from our porch in Brooklyn. There are big Victorian houses round about, and tall, graceful, trees. The combination of warm, glowing house lights with the wide, cooler spreading light of the dawn is magnificent, and at this time of year the air is alive with the songs of birds. This is what I saw the other morning, around 6:30 am:

Dawn in Brooklyn

In "Is Beauty the Making One of Opposites?", fifteen questions about beauty published in 1955 for the opening of New York City's Terrain Gallery, Eli Siegel asked, about light and dark:

Does all art present the world as visible, luminous, going forth?—does art, too, present the world as dark, hidden, having a meaning which seems to be beyond ordinary perception?—and is the technical problem of light and dark in painting related to the reality question of the luminous and hidden?

It is the opposites of light and dark in particular that affect me so much as I sit on the porch; also continuity and change, and point and width. The house lights are pointed and narrow compared to the growing light over the horizon. At this early time of day one is aware that the darkness, though powerful, is retreating before the sunrise. What is hidden is becoming more known. 

Visually, dark and light add to each other. Both are needed for the beauty to be felt. They are an inspiration to me to want to see more, and to value both brightness and darkness truly, what is shown and what is hidden, accurately, in the world and myself.   

Dawn in Brooklyn II

Antiracism blog: https://cjbalchin.blogspot.com/

A Crucial Guide during the Pandemic

At this time of trouble and fear, these words are my guide:

'Evil (which the coronavirus stands for and has) is certainly real. But what is good in this world is just as real. There is a terrific tendency—and it’s contempt—to have this pandemic make dim, dwarf, annul in one’s thoughts what is good and beautiful, from a blue sky, to a friend’s kindness, to the music of Beethoven. A central way of using COVID-19 to like the world is to feel, “I want to use this to value what is beautiful: to know it, love it, see it as more real and vivid than I ever did.”' - Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism Chairman of Education

(Read more here, including about the contempt of various persons "in high places" that helped get us into this situation):

Antiracism blog: https://cjbalchin.blogspot.com/