Nine love songs for red.

The Great Fire. Turner dashes off with some students(?). Works frantically, mind and hand reliving some ancient harmony, the quick of his mind, the flash of silver senses alert, tuned in, a window of opportunity. A few lines, that's all he has to get to the heart of things, to say what is essential, what he's always known. Nine sketches, with such speed that impulse and memory fuse into one another. Indistinction: the line when land and sea can barely be distinguished, one falling into the other. There are no more distances, no 'East' or 'West', only North. Familiar landscapes and people dissolve under the lightness of his stroke. The fragmentary is all we've got. Let it pass. Water is like existence. Everywhere and always flowing away.

There is no constant self, no sense of immortality, only the shifting shapes aglow, the flames on the edges of the conflagration fluttering like butterflies into the night, like a swarm of stars in her eyes. Later, Whistler would try to repeat the attempt to capture the experience but each man or woman who sees, sees it for themselves, and no-one can explain it to anyone else.

Observe: observe it all breaking apart, crackling furiously under the weight of heat and acrid smoke, the verticals warping, bending, becoming softer, he thinks. See it from every angle, register every particular disclosure.

The memory palace: in an age when everyone forgets everything what is there, the one thing, he should remember? He strains his mind, trying to imagine what's there in the cold shadows, and how long before it, too, is made visible and engulfed and made invisible again. Fana, the Saracens say...

The flames, lapping up the solid beams, licking them like a whip, kicking, spitting, reducing the solid world of compromise, ideals, considered opinion, and back-handers to rubble and ashes. He is speechless, has no name for the way he's feeling. The thick sooty dust, swirling in the air, the chance conglomeration of atoms unloosened.

Red, red is at the centre of everything. For how much longer? He doesn't ask himself this question. There is only now, only this moment when a bright red glass burns in all this darkness. 

"One of the ruby spots of the eastern manuscript would give colour enough for all the red that is in turner's entire drawings."
---Ruskin on Turner 

(other quotations: Derek Raymond, Updike)