Arachne's Myth by Ovid (continues...)

Photos by Sandra Saldanha

Arachne's Myth by Ovid

Arachne

"Minerva, who'd lent an attentive ear to the Muses' narration.

Commended their song and their justified anger against the Pieredes,

Then she said to herself: 'Is praising enough? I also need to be praised in turn. No mortal shall scoff at my power

unpunished.'  She therefore considered how best to dispose of a Lydian

girl called Arachne, who claimed ( so she'd heard) to equal herself

in working with wool.

Arachne's distinction lay not in her birth

or the place that she hailed from but solely her art. Her father , Idmon

of colophon, practised the trade of dyeing wool in Phocaean

purple;her mother was dead but, like her husband had come

 from the people. Their daughter, however had gained a high reputation

throughout the Lydian towns for her work with wool, although

she'd be born in a humble home and lived in a village, Hypaepa.

The nymphs used often to live their haunts, Mount Tmolus' vines

or the banks of the river Pactolus, to gaze on Arachne's amazing

artistry, equally eager to watch her hand in progress

(her skill was so graceful) as much as to look at the finished article.

Perhaps she was forming the first round clumps

 from the wool in its crude state,

shaping the stuff in her fingers  and steadily teasing the cloud-like

fleece into long soft threads. She might have been deftly applying

her thumb to the polished spindle.

Or esle they would watch embroider

 a picture. Whatever she did, you would know Minerva had taught her.

Arachne herself, in indignant pride, denied such a debt.

'Let us hold a contest,' she said. 'If I'm beaten, I'll pay any forfeit.' (...) "

Extract from Metamorphoses by Ovid translated by Denis Feeney

Photos by Sandra Saldanha

Myth and Dream by Joseph Campbell

" (...)  myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation. religions, philosophies, arts, the social forms of  primitive and historic man, prime discoveries in science and technology, the very dreams that blister sleep, boil up from the basic, magic ring of myth. (...) "

Extract from  The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Myth and Dream) by Joseph Campbell

Photo by Sandra Saldanha

"I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas..."

"I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas...."

Photos by Sandra Saldanha

The Dry Salvages by T.S.Elliot

"... And under the oppression of the silent fog

The tolling bell

Measures time not our time, rung by the unhurried

Ground swell, a time

Older than the time chronometers , older

Than time counted by anxious worried women

Lying awake, calculating the future,

Trying to unweave, unwind, unravel

And piece together the past and the future,

Between midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception,

The future futureless, before the morning watch

When time stops and time is never ending;

And the ground swell, that is and was from the beginning,

Clangs

The bell... "

Extract from The Complete Poems and Plays of T.S.Elliot,

Four Quartets, The Dry Salvages

Photo and Installation by Sandra Saldanha

Michael Robartes by W.B.Yeats

"She.                   I have heard said

There is great danger in the body.

He. Did God in portioning wine and bread

Give man His thought or his mere body?

She. My wretched dragon is perplexed..."

Extract from W.B.Yeats Collected Poems,

Michael Robartes and The Dancers

Photo and Installation by Sandra Saldanha

Solomon and The Witch by W.B. Yeats

"And thus declared that Arab lady;

'Last night, where under the wild moon

On grassy mattress I had laid me,

Within my arms great Solomon,

I suddenly cried out in a strange tongue

Not his, not mine.'

Who understood

Whatever has been said, sighed, sung,

Howled, miau-d, barked, brayed, belled, yelled, cried, crowed,..."

Extract from W.B. Yeats Collected Works,

Solomon and The Witch

Photo ( Installation's detail) by Sandra Saldanha