Heterotopia (La rencontre des artistes, des poètes, et des sages)

Monet, Voilier au Petit-Gennevilliers
huile sur toile, 1874
(vue du bassin d'Argenteuil en direction de l'aval - Daniel Wildenstein)
shared from the Facebook page of Deborah Shafer-v
no copyright infringement intended

Michel Foucault: Brothels and colonies are two extreme types of heterotopia, and if we think, after all, that the boat is a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea and that, from port to port, from tack to tack, from brothel to brothel, it goes as far as the colonies in search of the most precious treasures they conceal in their gardens, you will understand why the boat has not only been for our civilization, from the sixteenth century until the present, the great instrument of economic development (I have not been speaking of that today), but has been simultaneously the greatest reserve of the imagination. The ship is the heterotopia par excellence. In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates.


Walter Russell Mead: Utopia is a place where everything is good; dystopia is a place where everything is bad; heterotopia is where things are different — that is, a collection whose members have few or no intelligible connections with one another.


Ле́рмонтов: Парус (The Sail)

Белеет парус одинокий
В тумане моря голубом!..
Что ищет он в стране далекой?
Что кинул он в краю родном?..

Играют волны - ветер свищет,
И мачта гнется и скрыпит...
Увы, - он счастия не ищет
И не от счастия бежит!

Под ним струя светлей лазури,
Над ним луч солнца золотой...
А он, мятежный, просит бури,
Как будто в бурях есть покой!
(http://www.balticsealibrary.info/index.php?option=com_flexicontent&view=items&cid=88:russian&id=164:parus-)


- a rendering shared from Deborah Shafer-v:

A lone white sail shows for an instant
Where gleams the sea, an azure streak.
What left it in its homeland distant?
In alien parts what does it seek?

The billows play, the mast bends, creaking,
The wind, impatient, moans and sighs...
It is not joy that it is seeking,
Nor is't from happiness it flies.

The blue waves dance, they dance and tremble,
The sun's bright rays caress the seas.
And yet for storm it begs, the rebel,
As if in storm lurked calm and peace!

- and another rendering by A.Z. Foreman:

A sail drifts white and on its own
Amid the light blue ocean haze.
What does it seek in distant country?
What made it leave its native bays?

Great billows play. High winds are whistling
Down at the bending, creaking mast
Oh! This one seeks no happy ending
And does not flee a happy past.

Beneath, a brighter stream than azure.
Above, the golden sunray flows
Yet this one, restive...quests for tempests
As if in tempests were repose.

illustrated with Aivazovsky's paintings
(video by Евгения Николаевна Нефёдова)

(Monet)

(Aivazosky)

(Lermontov)

(Michel Foucault)

(Walter Russell Mead)