Eyes

Other word plays that come to mind :
- "Tirer un trait sur mes années" could mean both "strike them off" (with a pen) and "shoot an arrow at them" (which would cause them to flee)
- coche/coche (a notch on a stick or a tick on a list/a horse carriage)
Probably not helpful but who knows!

It seems you made a play on the double meaning of "ticked off", so there's a chance that the original line had word play in it too.
Something like: j'ai barré (crossed out) les années et elles se sont barrées (took off)
Obviously not that, but remembering the pun might help you remember the line.

The original French:

Et, puisque tes lentes cadences
Rythment le pouls des soirs d'été,
Fais-nous croire que les cieux dansent
Parce qu'un aveugle a chanté.

A teenage boy with long curly hair, wearing a simple white tunic and a blue cape, holding a pipe in his right hand. Oil on canvas, circa 1515.

I tried to translate Yourcenar's "Cantilène pour un Flûtiste Aveugle", with no success, except maybe (???) with the last stanza:

"And, since your steady cadences
Guide the heartbeat of summer nights,
Make us believe the sky dances
Because a blind man sang just right"

🖼️ Titian? (disputed)

L'Avenir du Prolétariat was a pension fund, created in the 1890s. The buildings housed bourgeois families, but they belonged to the workers through the fund. Forty such buildings were enough to provide revenues to tens of thousands of retired workers.

A head of sorts, checkered in different hues of pink. The face seems to be upside down. The nose resembles that of a cat. There is no mouth. From a work in watercolor and ink on cardboard.

"My eyes are like telescopes
I see it all backwards, but who wants hope?
If I ever catch that ventriloquist
I'll squeeze his head right into my fist"

Tom Verlaine, "Friction"

🖼️ Paul Klee, "Ventriloquist and Crier in the Moor"

The entrance of the stairway.

A view of the stairway from the upper steps. The light at the end is made blue by the sea.

Getting closer to the end, the ceiling disappears, offering a more open view of the sea, the sky and the land.

A glass pane prevents the visitors from going further, but the stairway goes on.

I'm in the town where the author of Das Passagen-Werk, fearing the Spanish authorities would not grant him passage into Spain, requested passage from Charon instead.
The Walter Benjamin memorial monument, aptly titled "Passages" is an underground stairway leading to the sea.

A transmission tower in Spain, with a stork nest on top.

Every transmission tower along the road I'm driving on has a stork nest on top of it. Every single one.

The first rays of sunlight hit a Spanish village. Low mountains in the background, trees in the foreground.

The opposite viewpoint. Another part of the village, and behind it a hill with a medieval defensive wall running along the hillcrest.

Closer view of the wall. Partly cloudy sky.

The remains of a medieval castle, atop a cliff.

Good morning!
Upper-left pic is the view I had for breakfast. The others were taken yesterday in the same place (Albarracín, Spain)

"it would be my duty to shake out of the chemist's little package on to a plate the amount of lime-blossom required for infusion in boiling water. The drying of the stems had twisted them into a fantastic trellis, in the interlacings of which the pale flowers opened, as though a painter had arranged them there, grouping them in the most decorative poses. The leaves, having lost or altered their original appearance, resembled the most disparate things, the transparent wing of a fly, the blank side of a label, the petal of a rose, which had all been piled together, pounded or interwoven like the materials for a nest. A thousand trifling little details—a charming prodigality on the part of the chemist—details which would have been eliminated from an artificial preparation, gave me, like a book in which one reads with astonished delight the name of a person one knows, the pleasure of finding that these were sprigs of real lime-trees, like those I had seen, when coming from the train, in the Avenue de la Gare, altered indeed, precisely because they were not imitations but themselves, and because they had aged. And as each new character is..."

continued : "...merely a metamorphosis from something earlier, in these little grey balls I recognised green buds plucked before their time; but beyond all else the rosy, lunar, tender gleam that lit up the blossoms among the frail forest of stems from which they hung like little golden roses—marking, as the glow upon an old wall still marks the place of a vanished fresco, the difference between those parts of the tree which had and those which had not been "in colour"—showed me that these were indeed petals which, before filling the chemist's bag with their spring fragrance, had perfumed the evening air. That rosy candleglow was still their colour, but half-extinguished and deadened in the diminished life which was now theirs, and which may be called the twilight of a flower. Presently my aunt would dip a little madeleine in the boiling infusion, whose taste of dead leaves or faded blossom she so relished, and hand me a piece when it was sufficiently soft."

Are you familiar with this passage from Proust's "Swann's Way"?

A person wearing mascara, holding a weird abyss-dwelling, hook-shaped fish close to her eye, so that it partly circles it. The fish is small (its head just a little bigger than the person's cornea). The photo is in black and white.

"you fit into me
like a hook into an eye

a fish hook
an open eye"

Margaret Atwood (from "Power Politics")

📷 Arthur Hertz, "untitled photo that became the cover art for Mr Bungle's second album Disco Volante

A naked woman lies sensually under the keyboard of an organ. The previously described head belongs to the organ. The caption suggests that the organ is a manifestation of the Holy Ghost, hence the eery, disembodied, hairless, oversize head.

Here is the full collage. It is captioned "The Immaculate Conception"

From "La Femme 100 Têtes" (1929) The upper half of a head. A horizontal line is drawn tangentially to the eyebrows, and downward pointing triangles emerge from this line, which accentuate the eerily geometric shape of the head.

"Now I feel plenty
It's only my way of touching
What you cannot see
Only this is mine
Come closer, closer to me
I come from far away
Where you are not
Where are my eyes?
There are rings on my fingers
But where, where
Where are my hands?"

Red Crayola, "Former Reflections, Enduring Doubt"

🖼️ M. Ernst

The eye of a giant creature whose wide open mouth represents the mouth of Hell, from the "Tríptico del Gran Capitán" (Limoges enamel, attributed to the Penicaud brothers, circa 1500)

The eye of a satyr-like figure which ornates one of the large bronze rings embedded in the walls of the Palace of Charles V (I suppose they were used to tie horses)

The eyes of Eloisa Fernández, mother of famed guitarist and composer Ángel Barrios, as painted in 1901 by French painter Charles-Frédéric Lauth.

My own eye, reflected in a mirror. Look I needed four pics.

Eyes of Granada.

The quote by Mallarmé goes:

Souvenir, il disait, alors, si bien : « L’œil, une main.. » que je ressonge.

I will never attempt to translate Mallarmé. Mallarméan is a language of its own, one that I can hear, but not speak.

A figure holding their hand before their seemingly featureless face. The hand has two eyes just above the wrist. When you lool closely, the black hair seen floating in the wind also seem to belong to the hand, rather than the head behind it.

"The eye: a hand"

Attributed to Edouard Manet by Stéphane Mallarmé

🖼️ Victor Brauner, "Composition with a Portrait"

Drop some eyes

Many inflorescences spurting out of large tree branches.

I'd like to have come up with "sirroundins", but I was really just trying to type surroundings. My auto-correct is not set to English.
As for the inflorescence, the tree (a carob tree) grows it itself of course, but you have to admit it looks like a parasitic invasion.
(picture not mine)

Out of William Carlos Williams’s “Prologue to Kora in Hell” (1920): “A poem is tough by no quality it borrows from a logical recital of events nor from the events themselves but solely from that attenuated power which draws perhaps many broken things into a dance giving them thus a full being.”

Forgot the alt text. First pic is two vultures in flight, second pic is one vulture in flight.

The best part of the hike was seeing lots of vultures.
The thing with vultures is, they're not shy, they will fly by you, you will hear the loud woosh of their wings, but by the time you take your phone out of your pocket, they'll be too far to take a good shot.
So all I've got for you is this:

A mountainscape under a blue sky.

The view looking down into a gorge, with a big potato-shaped rocky protuberance standing on the edge.

Some weird flower that seems to grow on trees.

A cricket, perfectly blending with its sirroundins (Shades of grey on a grey stone)

Since I have managed to take an (underwhelming) cricket shot, I feel authorized to do a hike recap.
And no, the cricket pic is not in black and white.

The remains of a butterfly (black and orange wing) in a spider web.

A Tragedy (silk and butterfly wing, 2025)

The quote is from Swann's Way, in C.K. Scott Moncrieff's translation.

Detail from a portrait of the artist's mother, painted in 1912. Only the eyes are visible. The skin is yellowish, with many wrinkles.

"[...] a smile which, unlike those seen on the majority of human faces, had no trace in it of irony, save for herself, while for all of us kisses seemed to spring from her eyes, which could not look upon those she loved without yearning to bestow upon them passionate caresses."

Proust

🖼️ S. Valadon

The sun rising behind the Spanish village of Zahara de la Sierra. The big rock atop which the Torre del Homenaje sits is still a dark mass, as the sun is in its back.

Good morning!

A drimia maritima plant in the foreground. In the background is the Torre del Homenaje overlooking the Spanish village of Zahara de la Sierra.

The same picture, cropped to focus on a small pollinator flying toward the flowers.

Two bees rubbing their blacks against one another inside a prickly pear flower.

The only insect I photographed today, I did by accident. But I have some nice "two bees, one flower" action from a couple of days ago.

You can call it a widening, or a broadening (allargando).
I like how stretto (narrow) is used to indicate an increase in speed, while largo (wide) is synonym with slow pace.

MALLARMÉ: Tout à l’heure, dévot ennemi, pénétrant dans une crypte ou cellier en commun, devant la rangée de l’outil double, cette pelle et cette pioche...
FREUD: Sexuels!
MALLARMÉ: ..sexuels—dont le métal, résumant la...
NIETZCHE: Force pure!
MALLARMÉ: ..la force pure du...
MARX: Travailleur!

Yeah but whoever shopped the photo didn't stop at the topping, they also smoothed over the cream cheese, removed most of the crumbs, etc..