Maya Angelou: The Song Bird Flies
what you said,
people will forget what you did,
but people will never forget
how you made them feel.
— Maya Angelou —
Maya Angelou, a voice that inspired generations through powerful prose and poetry and the light of a fiery and shining soul, has died at the age of 86.
Like thousands of others, I discovered the power of Maya Angelou’s writing when I came across the book “I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings” – seven words that I couldn’t get out of my head, and never left my heart. Why would someone put something as beautiful and free as a bird into a cage? And why would a caged bird choose to sing?
Three year old Maya and her brother Bailey Junior were sent to live with their grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas after their parents divorce. Maya spent 10 years discovering what it was like to grow up in one of America’s poorest regions with all the prejudice and racial segregation of the Deep South (such as the white dentist who refused to treat Maya’s rotting teeth, even when reminded by her grandmother that she had lent him money during the Depression).
Maya was born Marguerite Ann Johnson in St Louis, Missouri on 4 April 1928 and the name Maya originated from her brother’s way of saying “My-a sister”.
The Silent Voice
At the age of 7, when visiting her mother in St Louis, she was raped by her mother’s boyfriend. When she told her family what had happened, the man was arrested, tried and released, but was murdered shortly afterwards. For the next five years, Maya Angelou didn’t speak:
“When I heard about his murder, I thought my voice had killed a man and so it wasn’t safe to speak.
“After a while, I no longer knew why I didn’t speak, I simply didn’t speak.”
During her silence, she read incessantly and was eventually persuaded to speak again by Mrs. Bertha Flowers, “the aristocrat of Black Stamps” who encouraged her reading, and recognising her love of poetry told her that to be fully experienced, poetry had to be read aloud. “You will never love poetry until you actually feel it come across your tongue, through your teeth, over your lips.”
Maya Angelou went on to have an extraordinary career which she writes about in her books, including becoming San Francisco’s first female cable car conductor at 15, the experience of being a young mother at 16, time as a dancer, waitress, prostitute, actor and singer, travelling around Europe and Africa with the Opera Porgy and Bess, her involvement with the civil rights movement, working with both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King and experiencing the trauma of both their assassinations – King was killed on her birthday.
She writes of falling in love with South African civil rights activist Vusuma Make and moving to Cairo with him, practicing as a journalist in Egypt and later in Ghana during the time of decolonisation, her son’s car accident and the years after her return to the US in 1965 and her decision to start writing “I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings”.
Other autobiographical books that followed the Caged Bird include
“Gather Together in My Name “(1974),
“Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas” (1976),
“The Heart of a Woman” (1981),
“All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes” (1986),
“A Song Flung Up to Heaven” (2002), and
“Mom & Me & Mom” (2013, at the age of 85).
Ritual
Maya Angelou used the same “writing ritual” for many years and described her writing process as regimented.
The Ritual involved getting up at five in the morning and booking into a hotel room where the staff have been instructed to remove all pictures from the walls. She has a bottle of sherry, a deck of playing cards, a copy of Roget’s Thesaurus and the Bible, and she writes on legal pads.
She places herself back in the time she is writing about, even when traumatic and plays solitaire she says to reach a place of enchantment and access her memories more effectively. “It may take an hour to get into it, but once I’m in it—ha! It’s so delicious!”. It is not the process which she finds cathartic but rather the relief that she finds in “telling the truth”.
“I try to get there around seven, and work until around two in the afternoon … Maybe after dinner I’ll read to [my husband, Paul du Feu] what I have written that day. He doesn’t comment. I don’t invite comments from anybody but my editor.”
Angelou has credited African-American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar along with Shakespeare for inspiring her “writing ambition” and the title of her first book comes from Dunbar’s poem “Sympathy.”
the caged bird sings, ah me,
When his wing is bruised
and his bosom sore,
When he beats his bars
and would be free;
It is not a carol of joy or glee,
But a prayer that he sends
from his heart’s deep core,
But a plea, that upward
to Heaven he flings –
I know why
the caged bird sings.
— Paul Laurence Dunbar —
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Sculptor Anthony Caro
Sir Anthony Caro, one of Britain’s top sculptors and a pioneer of modernist art died of a heart attack on Thursday (October 24th 2013).
Caro is widely regarded as the greatest British sculptor of his generation and played a major role in the development of 20th Century sculpture.
He worked as an assistant to Henry Moore in the 1950s and first came to public attention with a show at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1963 in which he exhibited large abstract sculptures which stood directly on the ground (rather than on the tradition sculptural plinths) and were brightly painted, encouraging direct interaction with the viewer.
Above: Artist Sir Anthony Caro in conversation with Julius Bryant,
Keeper of Word & Image, Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
From the BBC in Pictures: Anthony Caro
more information on their website
Picture 1 : Sculptor Sir Antony Caro, who has died at the age of 89, first came to public attention with his large abstract sculptures in the 1960s. Widely regarded as one of Britain’s greatest sculptors, his work has continued to be displayed and enjoyed around the world.
Picture 2 : The sculptor’s Month Of May (1963) – made from steel and aluminium – was on display as part of The New Situation: Art in London in the Sixties exhibition at Sotheby’s auction rooms in September.
Picture 3 : An exhibition of monumental sculptures by Sir Anthony opened at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire in 2012. The show featured steel works arranged around the Canal Pond, facing the Duke of Devonshire’s historic home.
Picture 4 : A room was given over to Sir Anthony’s steel structure Shadows when it featured in the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition in June.
Picture 5 : His sculpture Millbank Steps 2004 has been displayed at Tate Britain. Made from 100 tonnes of steel, it is 5 metres tall and 25 metres across.
Picture 6 : The design team behind London’s Millennium Bridge comprised of Tony Fitzpatrick, Lord Foster and sculptor Sir Anthony. The bridge wobbled when it opened in June 2000 because of what engineers called “synchronised footfall” and had to be shut down to be fixed and reopened in February 2002.
Picture 7 : A sculpture titled Blazon by Sir Anthony was one of of five of his large-scale sculptures installed on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Roof Garden in 2011.
Picture 8 : The sculptor designed the gold Olympic UK Kilo coin for the Royal Mint, which was unveiled at the Royal Academy in 2011.
Read MoreFiddle Oak: Welcome to my World
The profoundest thought or passion
sleeps as in a mine,
until an equal mind and heart
finds and publishes it.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson —
Have you ever looked at a beautiful lichen covered rock with wild-flowers dropping pollen on it, and wished you could find a landscape as lovely to step into?
Autumn
With a bit of imagination you can, as
Fiddle Oak demonstrates in his photograph: “The Melody”
The Melody
Inspiration may come on a calm evening spent sharing
Summer Tales with a friend:
Summer Tales
.. Or even arrive with tomorrow’s dinner.
Visiting
Fiddle Oak: Travels with Betsy and Diana
This magical journey is brought to you by a 14 year old photographer who lives in a suburb of Boston and is home-schooled by his mother who is a sculptor.
Zev Hoover was eight when he started taking photos on his mobile phone for fun. His mother saw the potential he was showing and bought a point and shoot camera for him on eBay. It wasn’t long before she bought him a better one. And then an even better one.
He now has two cameras, both which he has named. He calls his still camera “Betsy” and his video camera is “Diana”.
“I like naming things,” he says. “My bike is named Patrick.”
The youngest in a family, with four siblings ,he gives his older sister Nell credit for helping with some of the ideas for the images he creates. She suggested the idea of images of little folk and he came up with the name of Fiddle Oak as his Flickr name, a play on the words.
Fiddle Oak on Flickr: Flight of the Imagination
“My sister is more of a writer, but she is sort of my partner in crime,” he says. “I do the actual work with the camera and edit the picture, but she helps with a lot of the concepts.”
He describes the process of creating the images:
“I shoot what I call the background — the scene, without props, first. Often it’s a collage of multiple pictures. Then I try to match the lighting of that picture and take pictures of people in the right position to be in the pictures, then I shrink them in Photoshop and change the colors so they match the background a little bit better, then I do overall color editing to make them match. It takes a long time.”
Thanks to Sail for sharing this story .
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Rebirth of Gaea: A Visual Love Letter
Artist Jesse Michael Newman calls the “REBIRTH of GAEA” “A visual love letter for my daughter.”
“This video provides a layer-by-layer deconstruction of “Flowing Meditation,” a small part of REBIRTH of GAEA.”
See an excerpt from the video on vimeo.com/36092192
“REBIRTH of GAEA is an epic visual tapestry delicately interweaving reflections on the environment and spirituality through the rich imagery of Greek Mythology. My daughter Emma has had a deep connection to the environment for as long as I can remember. As she grew older and became enchanted with Greek Mythology, I decided to show my support for her interests by creating REBIRTH of GAEA, depicting her as the Goddess of Earth.”
As Newman immersed himself in Greek Mythology, his eyes were opened to a seemingly endless supply of wonderfully vivid inspiration. The scope of the project slowly evolved from a few-week-exploration into an all-encompassing creative undertaking spanning six years so far. Since the project began, Emma welcomed two younger siblings who dovetailed perfectly as other figures in the piece: her brother as EROS (The God of Love) and her sister as the NEBULAIC EMBRYO (the Birth of the Universe).
Newman hadn’t originally considered that Rebirth of Gaea would be seen outside of his daughter’s bedroom and was caught off-guard when some close friends wanted to purchase a print. They encouraged him to show it publicly, which he did for the first time in 2012. Ultimately, he aims to continue transforming the passion he has for his children into a way of life, with his artistic expressions allowing his love for them to echo long after he is gone.
The incredible music, “You’re Too Late Satan” by Worm Is Green, is available on iTunes and Amazon.
Above Artwork: “Chaos” by Jesse Newman
“Before all things came CHAOS, the vacant and infinite spacewhich existed previous to the creation of the world and from which all gods and men arose Anthropomorphized by Newman using his wife as a model, the universal energy forms the mind of the cosmos.”
Some of the highlights of his career that he notes on his website are:
—– Accepted into permanent collections of the MOMA and Whitney Museums
—– Academy Award short list, Best of Show at SIGGRAPH, Official selection for Cannes, Sundance and LA Film Festivals (ONE RAT SHORT – lead flame artist)
—– Best Visual Effects by AICP (MMs Kaleidoscope – lead flame artist)
—– BDA Gold for SciFi “If” and Paramount’s “Unexplained Mysteries”
—– Feature Film work includes FLUBBER and ARMAGEDDON — nominated for an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects
—– BFA in DESIGN, UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME
New York-based artist JESSE MICHAEL NEWMAN has built a career as a visual effects artist on award-winning projects including many films. Since turning his focus to his personal art and premiering at the International Art Expo in March 2012, he has been recognized by Art Business News as a Top 50 Emerging Artist and his art is now in private collections on four continents.
Location: New York, NY
http://www.jessenewman.com/gaea/
Website: http://www.facebook.com/Rebirth.of.Gaea
http://www.whoscreative.com/jessenewman
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One Billion Rising: Join V-Day on Valentines Day 2013
What does ONE BILLION look like? On 14 February 2013, it will look like a REVOLUTION.
One In Three Women On The Planet Will Be Raped Or Beaten In Her Lifetime.
One Billion Women Violated Is An Atrocity.
One Billion Women Dancing Is A Revolution.
Join V-Day on
02.14.13
STRIKE, DANCE, RISE
in your community &
Demand an
end to violence
On V-Day’s 15th Anniversary, 14 February 2013, we are inviting ONE BILLION women and those who love them to WALK OUT, DANCE, RISE UP, and DEMAND an end to this violence. ONE BILLION RISING will move the earth, activating women and men across every country. V-Day wants the world to see our collective strength, our numbers, our solidarity across borders.
What does ONE BILLION look like? On 14 February 2013, it will look like a REVOLUTION.
ONE BILLION RISING IS:
A global strike
An invitation to dance
A call to men and women to refuse to participate in the status quo until rape and rape culture ends
An act of solidarity, demonstrating to women the commonality of their struggles and their power in numbers
A refusal to accept violence against women and girls as a given
A new time and a new way of being
START A RISING
OR FIND ONE NEAR YOU TO JOIN
Eve Ensler is the founder of One Billion Rising
Eve Ensler, Tony Award winning playwright, performer, and activist, is the author of The Vagina Monologues, which has been translated into over 48 languages, performed in over 140 countries, including sold-out runs at both Off-Broadway’s Westside Theater and on London’s West End (2002 Olivier Award nomination, Best Entertainment), and has run for 10 years in Mexico City and Paris. http://www.eveensler.org/about-eve/
Over It
By Eve Ensler
I am over rape.
I am over rape culture, rape mentality, rape pages on Facebook.
I am over the thousands of people who signed those pages with their real names without shame.
I am over people demanding their right to rape pages, and calling it freedom of speech or justifying it as a joke.
I am over people not understanding that rape is not a joke and I am over being told I don’t have a sense of humor, and women don’t have a sense of humor, when most women I know (and I know a lot) are really fucking funny. We just don’t think that uninvited penises up our anus, or our vagina is a laugh riot.
I am over how long it seems to take anyone to ever respond to rape.
I am over Facebook taking weeks to take down rape pages.
I am over the hundreds of thousands of women in Congo still waiting for the rapes to end and the rapists to be held accountable.
I am over the thousands of women in Bosnia, Burma, Pakistan, South Africa, Guatemala, Sierra Leone, Haiti, Afghanistan, Libya, you name a place, still waiting for justice.
I am over rape happening in broad daylight.
I am over the 207 clinics in Ecuador supported by the government that are capturing, raping, and torturing lesbians to make them straight.
I am over one in three women in the U.S military (Happy Veterans Day!) getting raped by their so-called “comrades.”
I am over the forces that deny women who have been raped the right to have an abortion.
I am over the fact that after four women came forward with allegations that Herman Cain groped them and grabbed them and humiliated them, he is still running for the President of the United States.
And I’m over CNBC debate host Maria Bartiromo getting booed when she asked him about it. She was booed, not Herman Cain.
Which reminds me, I am so over the students at Penn State who protested the justice system instead of the rapist pedophile of at least 8 boys, or his boss Joe Paterno, who did nothing to protect those children after knowing what was happening to them.
I am over rape victims becoming re-raped when they go public.
I am over starving Somali women being raped at the Dadaab in Kenya, and I am over women getting raped at Occupy Wall Street and being quiet about it because they were protecting a movement which is fighting to end the pillaging and raping of the economy and the earth, as if the rape of their bodies was something separate.
I am over women still being silent about rape, because they are made to believe it’s their fault or they did something to make it happen.
I am over violence against women not being a #1 international priority when one out of three women will be raped or beaten in her lifetime – the destruction and muting and undermining of women is the destruction of life itself.
No women, no future, duh.
I am over this rape culture where the privileged with political and physical and economic might, take what and who they want, when they want it, as much as they want, any time they want it.
I am over the endless resurrection of the careers of rapists and sexual exploiters – film directors, world leaders, corporate executives, movie stars, athletes – while the lives of the women they violated are permanently destroyed, often forcing them to live in social and emotional exile.
I am over the passivity of good men. Where the hell are you?
You live with us, make love with us, father us, befriend us, brother us, get nurtured and mothered and eternally supported by us, so why aren’t you standing with us? Why aren’t you driven to the point of madness and action by the rape and humiliation of us?
I am over years and years of being over rape.
And thinking about rape every day of my life since I was 5 years old.
And getting sick from rape, and depressed from rape, and enraged by rape.
And reading my insanely crowded inbox of rape horror stories every hour of every single day.
I am over being polite about rape. It’s been too long now, we have been too understanding.
We need to OCCUPYRAPE in every school, park, radio, TV station, household, office, factory, refugee camp, military base, back room, night club, alleyway, courtroom, UN office. We need people to truly try and imagine – once and for all – what it feels like to have your body invaded, your mind splintered, your soul shattered. We need you to let our rage and our compassion connect us together so we can change the paradigm of global rape.
There are approximately one billion women on the planet who have been violated.
ONE BILLION WOMEN.
The time is now. Prepare for the escalation.
Today it begins, moving toward 14 February 2013, when one billion women will rise to end rape.
Because we are over it.
Read Eve Ensler’s open letter to Todd Akin in The Huffington Post
“Mr. Akin, your words have kept me awake.
As a rape survivor, I am reeling from your recent statement where you said you misspoke when you said that women do not get pregnant from legitimate rape, and that you were speaking “off the cuff.”
Clarification. You didn’t make some glib throw away remark. You made a very specific ignorant statement clearly indicating you have no awareness of what it means to be raped. And not a casual statement, but one made with the intention of legislating the experience of women who have been raped. Perhaps more terrifying: it was a window into the psyche of the GOP.
You used the expression “legitimate” rape as if to imply there were such a thing as “illegitimate” rape. Let me try to explain to you what that does to the minds, hearts and souls of the millions of women on this planet who experience rape. It is a form of re-rape. The underlying assumption of your statement is that women and their experiences are not to be trusted. That their understanding of rape must be qualified by some higher, wiser authority. It delegitimizes and undermines and belittles the horror, invasion, desecration they experienced. It makes them feel as alone and powerless as they did at the moment of rape.”
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