This was a building in my hometown. They demolished it 32 years ago and replaced it with a dull office building. The architect turns 100 years old today.
He was born in NYC in 1923. But his parents took the family to the Soviet Union for most of the 1930s. They returned to the USA just before World War II started and he served in the US Army at Normandy.
He’s probably one of the last Americans alive who voluntarily emigrated to the Soviet Union during the Stalin era. So far he’s outlived the Soviet Union by three decades. He was 5 years old when Eisenstein filmed October.
When I was 23-years-old, my grandmother died. My grandfather, to whom she had been married for over 70 years, quickly lost his mind, and spiraled into mental oblivion. Honestly, back then I didn’t really care. Elderly people, death, losing a spouse of over 70 years, didn’t concern me. I was too busy dreaming of myself as a poet and a writer, anxious to tear myself away from these curiously ancient, not quite humans, and get on with my life. I What I didn’t understand that the inspiration for whatever poetry I thought I would be capable of was right there in my grandfather’s eyes.
Claire Pommet is a 26-year-old singer/song-writer from Lyon France. She’s been writing songs and poetry for over 20-years and has an astonishing maturity for someone so young. Three years ago, she lost her own grandfather to Alzheimer’s, but, unlike me, she knew how to engage the moment. The result was a song called La Lumière. This young woman might be the great romantic poet of our age. The fact that she utterly looks the party only adds to it.
In the end, I would not succeed in becoming a writer. I didn’t have the talent. But had I had the courage to look into my grandfather’s eyes, I might have found the inspiration, my muse, La Lumiere.
The light If I did not find the light in your eyes again It’s because your heart let go of your lungs, a river In the castle of secrets you are the youngest We know secrets about it, you tell them to not forget them, forget your children, and the children of your children Forget your name, and the path of the house The precious things of your past, of your joys, your angers. You cannot remember it, its the wind that always scares you Theres still light in your eyes, We could find it again, in the heat underground.
And forget your children, and the children of your children Forget your name, and the path of the house And forget your children, and the children of your children Forget your name, and the path of the house
Writers Without Money 