memories of sky and earth

I wanted to re-visit the old, familiar places..the hallowed ground of the British Library or the National. Poussin, with those clear spaces in which one can breathe, some wonderfully geometric mind at work (I don't know why I think of Bach when I see this image). But more than that: the slight curve of the backs is repeated, and the light isn't the deeply piercing light of the north.

Instead, what strikes one -apart from the whole system of glances and eye contact- is just how gentle, tender, relaxed and light everyone's hands are. Every hand is giving...

Painting is the result of receptivity of ink. The ink is open to the brush: the brush is open to the hand:the hand is open to the heart:all this is in the same way as the sky engenders what the earth produces: everything is the result of receptivity.

And then Rembrandt's 'eldery man' with such incredibly thoughtful, wistful eyes and those locked hands. I don't know, someone (Schama, probably) once said that his paintings represented all that was most delicate in European humanism. The light, coming to rest on one specific object, a button....

Its meandering, hallucinatory quality that suddenly comes to focus on one particular object, one item within the field of vision capable of absorbing attention and momentarily freeing the body from pain and breathlesness.

On the way back, stopped off to see Richter's wonderful, wonderful painting (its shimmering, trance-like quality has to be seen, taken in). It's like a dream, or memories, or layers of dreams superimposed on one another. Sky becomes water, clouds become reflections of the sun but are more real than the land. Take a step back. Look at the parts and then look, look again. To see the whole. No, not see...

It immediately reminded me of Monet's water-lilies (which I haven't seen). But there we are opened to vast swirls of ever-new vistas. I don't know what's going on here..it's mysterious and silent. The mind has to be stilled.
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They are a long inspection of a drowned, reflected world, in which no sky is visible except by reflection; the water fills the whole frame. ..In these paintings, emptiness matters as much as fullness, and reflections have the weight of things. ..to conjure up the negated object, with the help of allusive and always indirect words, which constantly effeace themselves in a complementary silence, which involves an undertaking which comes close to the act of creation.
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What showed on its surface, the clouds and lilypads and cat's-paws of wind, the dark patches of reflected foliage.the abysses of dark blue and the opaline shimmer of light from the sky, were all compressed together in a shallow space, a skin, like the space of painting . The willows touched it like brushes . No foreground, no background.; instead, a web of conenctions
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The same. The same.
then once, in a flash,
fresh ground,...
black, grey, green, and blue
water, stone, grass and sky
and each unique set stone!

---August 11th, 2008.

(K. Clark? and J. Berger, Shape of a Pocket)

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Was going to write on Rothko and qualities of darkness, but there are also qualities of lightness: light days, light years-distant, weightless; the light by which we see ourselves, by which we are seen; the light we remember from childhood, that illuminates hidden possibilities: second thoughts, re-vision: to see another in the light of new understandings. The order of light. Light-compulsion. Light as a metaphor (Iris M, anton): lucidity, clarity. To see things in the right light. Light that travels, overcomes time, that splinters, refracts. Things that come to light. The fading light of sunset that falls softly across your face, the first light of morning that introduces colour to the world..light that transforms useless things into glimmering, dazzling objects of affection.

Today: Athens; tomorrow: Jerusalem

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by the sense of light

you grasp the soul