Vanishing Portrait

 

Vanishing Portrait, 2022

wood, mirror, acrylic 

I See a Baguette in a Handbag

I See a Baguette in a Handbag 

It sizzles, fizzles and bubbles,

in a stainless steel coffee maker.

The coffee grounds are getting colder, are getting stiff, on the white wall of the ceramic cup. 

I see an elephant.
In case of a raised trunk, and the trunk is raised in your case, 

wisdom comes your way. And it will come all of a sudden. I see an eye. 

I see that the eye is squinting at a cloud of dots. The more dots, the more money you get.
I see a lizard.
I see a crab. 

I see the lizard and the crab in company with a parrot.
The lizard warns you: Beware of false friends.
The crab says: Embrace your sorrow and you won’t lose your strength.
The parrot presages a scandal you will hear about, or gossip in which you will be involved. I see a net. A net of oranges.
I see an arm with a hand reaching downwards. It reaches to a V. 

You will get in touch with a person for whom V is the first letter of their name, or a Virgo. I see an A in front of a portal.
A is you and portal means potential. You are going to encounter new opportunities.
I see a baby tooth. 

I see a bikini top. I see a horizon. 

One side of the cup is completely dark. The other side is only covered halfway. Above this there are only some fine brownish lines.
Like the moment when a wave splashes on the beach, the water runs back into the ocean, and the foam produced by the wave still exists before it sinks slowly into the sand. 

In the ocean, in the dark part of the cup, I see a jellyfish with a dot in its belly. A person close to you will bring you the message that they will have a baby.
I see a spiral. A vortex.
Trap / energy booster. 

Yacht means you will go bankrupt. I see a ferry.
I see some lemons.
Envy gnaws at you. 

I see a lightbulb.
Your intuition is strengthened. Believe in it.
I see a hammer.
The smashed lightbulb will bring you a great portion of luck.
I see a mermaid.
I see scissors.
I see an e-scooter.
Tomato means love is around the corner.
I see a keyhole.
I see a very long nail.
I see a dragon.
I see a baguette. I see a baguette in a handbag.
Baguette is bread, and bread is an important experience you’ve had, now coming to an end. I see a bus. Bus 69.
I see you riding this bus to a place starting with P.
P like Panorama. 

Lucia Graf , 2022

Things

What happened is, we grew lonely

living among the things,

so we gave the clock a face,

the chair a back,

the table four stout legs

which will never suffer fatigue.

We fitted our shoes with tongues

as smooth as our own

and hung tongues inside bells

so we could listen

to their emotional language,

and because we loved graceful profiles

the pitcher received a lip,

the bottle a long, slender neck.

Even what was beyond us

was recast in our image;

we gave the country a heart,

the storm an eye,

the cave a mouth

so we could pass into safety.

Lisel Mueller, 1996

You say you want a revolution…

Edward Ludlam’s name didn’t do the decent thing and die with its owner in the summer of 1776. Instead it emerged rudely triumphant more than 30 years after Edward – or Ned – was laid to rest at St Mary’s Church in Anstey.

If the name rings a bell, it’s because Ned Ludd was once used as a signatory by smash-happy men and women across Leicestershire, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire. Men and women who were out of work because new knitting and stocking machines had taken their jobs.

During five years of hardship and strife, many a wooden frame was chopped to bits. Who dunnit? Ned Ludd dunnit officer. Duh.

Dead Ned’s name was to plague those technology-savvy industrialists who had brought poverty to thousands of families across the East Midlands. Threatening letters were sent to factory owners signed Ned Ludd, General Ludd and King Ludd.

The Luddites, as they now called themselves, destroyed 200 new stocking frames in one three-week period in early 1811. In the East Midlands, the heart of the country’s textile industry, the fighting spread from Nottinghamshire and then to Leicestershire and Derbyshire.

Parliament, as it is wont to do, cruelly rounded on the starving and desperate, passing legislation which made damaging machines punishable by death. At this time, almost 90 per cent of the 20,000 stocking frames in use in the country were located in the region, with records showing almost 12,000 were in Leicestershire.

Lord Byron, quite possibly the sexiest person who ever lived, was one of the few MPs to speak in defence of the starving people in his native Midlands. Byron, FYI, was a Nottinghamshire lad.

And factory owners, we know, had good cause to worry about their safety.

In 2006, underground passages and a chamber were found beneath a house in Loughborough that once belonged to lace magnate John Heathcote.

Heathcote had good reason to fear the Luddites – they had already destroyed a lace mill of his in Loughborough in 1816. But with all this, the mystery still remains – why did the Luddites take Ned Ludlam’s name?

“It was a cover name, the same as Robin Hood,” local history enthusiast Brian Kibble told the Mercury in 2006.

“They used it to protect their real names. The Luddites supposedly got their name by the actions of Ned Lud, or Edward Ludlam, from Anstey.

“Ned, well, he wasn’t quite all there, and that is one of the stories that has come down.

“There’s a story that he’d been teased by local children, and he chased them and he lost them. And, apparently, in his frustration, in one of the cottages, he smashed up this knitter’s frame.

“The other legend was that he was the son of a knitting frame worker and his father had chastised him one day and, in revenge, he smashed up the frame.

“Whatever the truth,” says Brian, “somewhere along the line he seems to have been responsible for smashing up machinery.”

Ned’s name lived on in the village down the years.

“Apparently,” chortles Brian, “it used to be a saying in the village that if something was broken or damaged it had been Ned Ludded.”

Ever since, “Luddite” has been a Leicestershire-inspired entry in the Oxford English Dictionary. One, as a word for the English workers who fought for their jobs between 1811 and 1816, and now, more commonly, a disparaging word used for those opposed to or uneasy with new technology.

https://leicestershirelalala.com/you-say-you-want-a-revolution-the-luddites-were-chissits-too/