timely reminder

It can be triggered by the most trivial of episodes, but the message you get is crystal clear. A timely reminder of the fickleness of human bonds, loyalties and affections, despite your best efforts to go against the grain. Lest you sustain any illusions about them (I ceased to, anyway, a long time ago).

Again, Camus phrased it most crudely in his Carnets when he wrote that "it is only your will that keeps [most] people attached to us (not that they wish you ill but because they don't care) [and that] the others are always able to be interested in something else". They are always able to be more interested in themselves, I should add, in this increasingly and appallingly self-absorbed age we live in.

Disheartening, but sadly true.

Note taken of, for future reference.

Chagall

Marc Chagall, Mounting the Ebony Horse

What can you say about him that hasn't already been said thousands of times before...? Yet it's never enough to repeat it, because it doesn't cease to amaze: how the work of someone whose life spanned the whole of the twentieth century and witnessed its unspeakable atrocities, preserved throughout such a childlike outlook on life, on memory, on the world. Such a sense of wonder, despite all the tragedies and losses.

An unmissable opportunity to revisit it at the University Art Museum, Tokyo University of the Arts, in Ueno. Till October 11th.
 

Marc Chagall et l'avant-garde russe dans les collections du Centre Pompidou

our own private ocean (2)

I am interested in establishing as many dialogues between form and theme as possible. As with natural form, [...] this may imply a simple plan, the details of which continually open onto other details. Not so much an onion as a bush, with a readily apprehensible outline, its finer divisions going in every direction. I don't expect the reader to sit with a magnifying glass and geometrical instruments plotting every tangent. But they're there. And they happen naturally enough. Writing is not entirely conscious. Very few activities of any interest are. A technique like this is an act of faith in the magnificence of the human brain, anyone's brain. Perception is a creative act, far outpacing the capabilities of camera, microphone and other sensors. How can one not be poetic with minds so nimble and vast?

Randolph Healy, from 'The Wandering Wood' in Vectors: New Poetics, ed. Robert Archambeau (San Jose: Writers Club Press, 2001), p. 92 [emphasis mine]

our own private ocean (1)

Steven Rose estimates the activity of the conscious mind as 100 bits per second. The comparison of this to the sensory flux and mental processing is even more striking, something along the lines of thimble, cathedral and ocean. Which brings me back to the question [...]: how is communication possible? Given the amount of processing which so vastly outstrips the senses, what is there to stop us disappearing into our own private ocean? Indeed, what is there to stop us abandoning any semblance of reality for a private fantasy? Clearly this is an option. But what prevents it from being obligatory?
[...]
Given the grandeur of the human mind [...], one might ask why consciousness is so relatively puny. Why a bubble floating in all that cognitive space? Perhaps we need to reduce out interior awareness, to avoid complete paralysis in the face of the simplest decisions. A highly filtered subset of the sense flux is prioritised, disproportionately in terms of magnitude, but not in terms of survival. In positive terms it is a lifeline, ensuring we have some connection with 'reality'. Obviously, it is important not to be lost in one's own innards if there are tigers on the prowl. But as with pain, sometimes nature overdoes things. Our insensitivity to our own vastness causes us to persistently underestimate people, especially other people.


Randolph Healy, from 'The Wandering Wood' in Vectors: New Poetics, ed. Robert Archambeau (San Jose: Writers Club Press, 2001), pp. 88-89. [emphasis mine]

a bit concerned, or: signs of the times...

he got
a bit concerned
when she
insisted on him
having a barcode
tattooed on
his male member
and worse
when she insisted
on scanning him
each time
before they
made love.


Pmcmanus
Raynesparkuk
N671

from snapshots 119
source: http://www.wildhoneypress.com/snaps_06_05/119.htm
(Randolph Healy's Wild Honey Press web site)

scottish landscapes (5)

Horses, horses, horses... & other friends we visited on the way.

Scottish Highlands

From west to east coast (and somewhere in the middle)

August 2010

(Photos by EK)

scottish landscapes (4)

From a distance, you take them for rocks on the beach. Yet, as you slowly approach, step by step, their agitation becomes visible.

Half-curious, half-fearful, our mutual presence has to be carefully negotiated. They oblige and tolerate us - everything goes well.

Their countenance is so kind and, at the same time, so sharp and inquisitive. No wonder that Scottish, Irish and Icelandic folkore traditions are populated by their legends.

Selkies. They do question indeed the animal/human boundary. Where does it end, where does it begin...?

Brora / Brùra

Sutherland, Scottish Highlands
August 2010
(Photos by EK)

scottish landscapes (3)

Travelling from the west to the east coast is like entering a different country. The topography much less inhospitable, plainer, yet the same ballet of the weather, of light and shadow. A sense of impermanence, change - despite the stones. Everywhere.

Brora / Brùra
Sutherland, Scottish Highlands
August 2010

scottish landscapes (2)

Today on this shingle shelf
I understand this pensive reluctance so well
This not discommendable obstinacy,
These contrivances of an inexpressive critical feeling,
These stones with their resolve that Creation shall not be
Injured by iconoclasts and quacks . . .

Hugh MacDiarmid, from 'On a Raised Beach'.

Northwest Highlands
Scotland
August 2010

scottish landscapes (1)

The inward gates of a bird are always open.
It does not know how to shut them.
That is the secret of its song.
But whether any man's are ajar is doubtful.
I look at these stones and know little about them,
But I know their gates are open too,
Always open, far longer open, than any bird's can be,
That every one of them has had its gates wide open far longer
Than all birds put together, let alone humanity,
Though through them no man can see,
No man nor anything more recently born than themselves
And that is everything else on Earth.

Hugh MacDiarmid, from 'On a Raised Beach'.

There are many kinds of revelation. But the most powerful is the vision which transcends the mental boundary between life and non-life, and Scotland is a place where this sort of revelation often approaches. Staring into a Scottish landscape, I have often asked myself why - in spite of all appearances - bracken, rocks, man and sea are at some level one. Sometimes this secret seems about to open, like a light moving briefly behind a closed door. In writing about birds and stones whose 'inward gates' are open, MacDiarmid came as near as one can to finding the answer.

Neal Ascherson, from Stone Voices: In Search for Scotland (London: Granta, 2002), p. 26.

This summer, once again, I too went in search for Scotland, its birds, bracken, sea - and especially the rocks. The stones.

There is something about the Scottish landscape, in its barrenness and inhospitality, in its constant play between light and shadow, that deeply touches the heart. Your perception of time undergoes a radical change: 'a lesson in the unimaginable forces and lapses of time which have gone to shape the world', as Ascherson magisterially puts it.

You feel closer to the beginning and ending of things, part of the lichen which tenaciously holds to the less exposed crevices and surfaces of the land. Precarious, barely surviving under the harsh weather, the ruthless geology.

There is nowhere else I would like to live. Yet, I couldn't possibly live there.

It lives only in the imagination, my landscape of dreams.

Lake Torridon / Loch Thoirbheartan
West Coast, Northwest Highlands
Scotland
August 2010