Jonah acutely remarks that I'm running out of things to say and increasingly turning to images and music for my/the blogs (or whatever they're called). But I've always been running out of being. Given the amount of yakking going on I constantly ask myself: why add to the noise! I feel like Rothko..the need to walk through the portals of a silent black square once, and for all.
Couldn't but help think that in this late age we're all scavengers of sorts: some use google and wikipedia, others rely on literary quotes, trying desperately to cut and paste the scraps of a story together.
'And men loved darkness rather than the light’
---John, III:19
Content with deserts:here on the arid slope of Vesuvius,
that formidable mountain, the destroyer,
that no tree or flower adorns.
I’ve seen before
how you beautify empty places,
and it seems that with your grave,
silent, aspect you bear witness,
reminding the passer-by
of that lost empire.
Now I see you again on this land,
a lover of sad places abandoned by the world.
(Leopardi and C, forgive me!)
At Postman's Park
The small square of green, surrounded by infinite grey, hemmed in by monumental stone. A desert oasis, a gem amidst tightly packed crystals, a point in the heart of the (k)capital. Only an interior realm can speak of death and dissolution and the untellable. All around the clinking of gold, the world of high finance drowning out this other place. It is as if a place of remembrance always runs the risk of being forgotten, overlooked, is always on the verge of fading from the picture, disappearing, vanishing like the words my mother once taught me...
This unremarkable place is all that is left of England now. A witness to the lives of unknown people and their heroic acts. A reminder of the lives that never had a future, only a past; lives that nevertheless live on, like a slow-burning blue flame, or faces that we can't get out of our head and that stare at us as if from the depths of a green sea. And yet, and yet, there is something theatrical, absurd even, in these sentimental retellings. To render death familiar, bring it 'home,' to name and date it when all that can be done is testify to the rupture of consciousness that is the death of other people, that is death itself. There is something child-like, innocent, in the simple plaques that commemorate these deaths.
The words and thoughts of other people's lives are written on my soul. The substitution of a life for a life, a death for a death. A manic collector of fragments, of lives we have not lived and never could have. Even my smile isn't mine. My fingers smudge the blank page with a foreign ink. We speak. We repeat words uninspired, not knowing why. As if all we could do was to caress meaning from a dumb monument, or interpret a dream: analyse, decipher, remember. Until we open our hands and gaze intensely out at outstretched palms, noting the marks of time. In our heart of heart's the truth doesn't blink. We had but a fool's wisdom.
Couldn't but help think that in this late age we're all scavengers of sorts: some use google and wikipedia, others rely on literary quotes, trying desperately to cut and paste the scraps of a story together.
'And men loved darkness rather than the light’
---John, III:19
Content with deserts:here on the arid slope of Vesuvius,
that formidable mountain, the destroyer,
that no tree or flower adorns.
I’ve seen before
how you beautify empty places,
and it seems that with your grave,
silent, aspect you bear witness,
reminding the passer-by
of that lost empire.
Now I see you again on this land,
a lover of sad places abandoned by the world.
(Leopardi and C, forgive me!)
At Postman's Park
The small square of green, surrounded by infinite grey, hemmed in by monumental stone. A desert oasis, a gem amidst tightly packed crystals, a point in the heart of the (k)capital. Only an interior realm can speak of death and dissolution and the untellable. All around the clinking of gold, the world of high finance drowning out this other place. It is as if a place of remembrance always runs the risk of being forgotten, overlooked, is always on the verge of fading from the picture, disappearing, vanishing like the words my mother once taught me...
This unremarkable place is all that is left of England now. A witness to the lives of unknown people and their heroic acts. A reminder of the lives that never had a future, only a past; lives that nevertheless live on, like a slow-burning blue flame, or faces that we can't get out of our head and that stare at us as if from the depths of a green sea. And yet, and yet, there is something theatrical, absurd even, in these sentimental retellings. To render death familiar, bring it 'home,' to name and date it when all that can be done is testify to the rupture of consciousness that is the death of other people, that is death itself. There is something child-like, innocent, in the simple plaques that commemorate these deaths.
The words and thoughts of other people's lives are written on my soul. The substitution of a life for a life, a death for a death. A manic collector of fragments, of lives we have not lived and never could have. Even my smile isn't mine. My fingers smudge the blank page with a foreign ink. We speak. We repeat words uninspired, not knowing why. As if all we could do was to caress meaning from a dumb monument, or interpret a dream: analyse, decipher, remember. Until we open our hands and gaze intensely out at outstretched palms, noting the marks of time. In our heart of heart's the truth doesn't blink. We had but a fool's wisdom.
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