Too much sun makes you forget. I wondered around for five minutes looking for my sun glasses before realizing that I was actually wearing them! Too much light obliterates your sense of space or depth-everything seems two-dimensional. The light is a horizon. It makes objects seem less real, less solid, the desert in them making them ghost-like. At least you don't notice them as much; all you care about is the shade they afford...You start to think a bout the quality of shadows, the depth of coolness to be found in them.You want to walk in a perpetual shadow, alone. Even the car casts a thin shadow, that takes the temperature down a notch. You start to think in terms of degrees, angles, moments of respite, distances from oasis to oasis. What's left of your frazzled mind thinks in terms of equations, energy.
The heat and light is relentless. 47, 48 Celsius for the last week. You walk into a wall of fire. You wake up the morning light burns your skin, stings it. The bark of a tree has peeled off, blistered by the heat into long flaky shavings, leaving the tree bare, nude, like an uncovered white arm.
You went to a presentation. A very fetching woman, sleeveless top, her hair wild and uncombed, like a Red-Indian, her eyes and body posture all dreamy.
The heat saps you, makes you slightly drunk, the words you speak slung out in a slow drawl. By five o'clock the brightness is less of a problem; the heat is radiating from the walls, the floor, any horizontal or vertical plane. It surrounds you, is up to your neck. Bottles of water lie strewn across the table; you've put up thick covers over the window to block the light's late entry.
In the middle of the night, the darkest twenty minutes, that small arc of inner peace, you know the sun is out there, burning, stoking the furnace, like a mindless stalker, an army getting ready to leave camp, or the first stunted notes of an orchestra before a performance. Even the high moon seems to be bathed in warmth tonight. Sun, time out of mind.
In the north there is much longing, a sense of absence; here there is only the sense of an all-pervading presence. The sun is like a god, a southern god. Van-G would have understood that. Chain of being. No-one is an individual here, no-one can be. The dream-like quality of our walking, the bare-minimal pulse of meaning.
A socialist manifesto: electricity, water. The basic conditions that at least give us a chance of being human. Perhaps we shouldn't ask for more. For a good state of mind things need to work (Keynes, more or less). You have some sympathy for poor people. You feel like a Russian aristocrat in a novel who has suddenly realized that his country is fucked and that he will drown along with everyone else, a horrible meaningless death.
The heat and light is relentless. 47, 48 Celsius for the last week. You walk into a wall of fire. You wake up the morning light burns your skin, stings it. The bark of a tree has peeled off, blistered by the heat into long flaky shavings, leaving the tree bare, nude, like an uncovered white arm.
You went to a presentation. A very fetching woman, sleeveless top, her hair wild and uncombed, like a Red-Indian, her eyes and body posture all dreamy.
The heat saps you, makes you slightly drunk, the words you speak slung out in a slow drawl. By five o'clock the brightness is less of a problem; the heat is radiating from the walls, the floor, any horizontal or vertical plane. It surrounds you, is up to your neck. Bottles of water lie strewn across the table; you've put up thick covers over the window to block the light's late entry.
In the middle of the night, the darkest twenty minutes, that small arc of inner peace, you know the sun is out there, burning, stoking the furnace, like a mindless stalker, an army getting ready to leave camp, or the first stunted notes of an orchestra before a performance. Even the high moon seems to be bathed in warmth tonight. Sun, time out of mind.
In the north there is much longing, a sense of absence; here there is only the sense of an all-pervading presence. The sun is like a god, a southern god. Van-G would have understood that. Chain of being. No-one is an individual here, no-one can be. The dream-like quality of our walking, the bare-minimal pulse of meaning.
A socialist manifesto: electricity, water. The basic conditions that at least give us a chance of being human. Perhaps we shouldn't ask for more. For a good state of mind things need to work (Keynes, more or less). You have some sympathy for poor people. You feel like a Russian aristocrat in a novel who has suddenly realized that his country is fucked and that he will drown along with everyone else, a horrible meaningless death.
2 comments:
a wonderfully shimmering evocation of light & shade & heat, K.
Heartwarming for one who's shivering here in damp greyness, with temperatures at barely 9°C. ( but still, even without fiery southern gods around, and no Van G in sight, yesterday I was basking in the deep yellow of gleaming paint on a small sunny 'summer landscape' painting by Kandinsky)
temperatures of 9...Arggh [he says, chopping off his ear].
:-)
Ah, yes, greyness. The idea of north...
Hope you're up and about now, fff?
Take care,
K.
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