Venice is the dream of winter; Venice is the perfume of the east drifting deep into the forest. Turner, sitting at home, dreams of a white landscape drained of all the faint and weak colours just a moment before he paints it. Turner's anti-intellectual love of white. The blank spaces in our hearts. He speaks kindly by pluralizing...
Venice, 1819. The web of colour, refracted, reflected, filling out the space. From now on in the western mind the sensation of colour, the last, collapsing note of music, is the door to perception. Fine colour must reflect our sense of values...The state of ecstasy...of a fine colourist is something on the borderline between dream and reality.
A man in his last year of life works to find the perfect blue. This man from Murano, who is forbidden to leave the island, dreams of Venice for a second and finds a bridge. The steps I walk in are the only time I've got; left my heart a long time ago.
~~~
Where am I when I think of you? He walks diagonally, bounded by trees and the library, old parchment a text between past and future. By the time he looks up he has arrived. In the time that has passed it is as if he has not walked at all, as if life itself were only two moments, a beginning and an end, a Yes and a No.
Rainwater has filled the flower beds and creates the perfect balance, like an equation. Sunken leaves lie darkly on its floor. Birds sense it is safe to return to the drying trees. He walks in a drowned world, a world glowing with bright reflections.
~~~
There is a sense of liberty, old England's old word for the forest, which is a 'freedom from'. To be free from the definitions laid out by church, mullah, a govt. official. To pin no colours to your flag, to be without title:
"Where are we, little r?"
"Nowhere"
"And who lives here?"
"Nobody".
There is a lonely type of freedom of gazing under the stars, unsure of the directions, a soul that has worn itself thin by resisting much, by uttering 'No' whenever it could, like a teenager or an ascetic.
Is there another kind, that follows from 'being with'? A freedom that does not set up a "mine" and "thine", that is not foundational for rights and the law and property...a liberty that derives from, or co-exists with, a mutual gaze of recognition, a sense of obligation? And this is the realm of courtesy and custom, city and court. Who, today, will teach the heart to say "Yes"?
~~~
One can know a person by the way they approach a door
---a Buddhist? saying..via Bob.
The intellectual stops to examine the doorknob.
The mullah imagines houris on the other side.
The atheist looks at the wall.
The Christian imagines only he can walk through it.
The clown trips and stumbles through it.
The beggar sits on the floor by it.
The lover opens the letterbox.
The accountant weighs up the costs and benefits.
The poet puts his hand on the doorknob and takes the pulse of the house.
The Hindu discovers another god to revere.
The sensualist objects to its colour.
The ascetic regrets there is a door.
The old man remembers a door from his youth.
God says: Thank God for the door!
The addict craves other doors.
The racist paints the door a different colour
My father, ever the pragmatist, musters what strength he has, and opens it for me.
(lines from K. Clark on Turner...and a line from Transtromer)
Venice, 1819. The web of colour, refracted, reflected, filling out the space. From now on in the western mind the sensation of colour, the last, collapsing note of music, is the door to perception. Fine colour must reflect our sense of values...The state of ecstasy...of a fine colourist is something on the borderline between dream and reality.
A man in his last year of life works to find the perfect blue. This man from Murano, who is forbidden to leave the island, dreams of Venice for a second and finds a bridge. The steps I walk in are the only time I've got; left my heart a long time ago.
~~~
Where am I when I think of you? He walks diagonally, bounded by trees and the library, old parchment a text between past and future. By the time he looks up he has arrived. In the time that has passed it is as if he has not walked at all, as if life itself were only two moments, a beginning and an end, a Yes and a No.
Rainwater has filled the flower beds and creates the perfect balance, like an equation. Sunken leaves lie darkly on its floor. Birds sense it is safe to return to the drying trees. He walks in a drowned world, a world glowing with bright reflections.
~~~
There is a sense of liberty, old England's old word for the forest, which is a 'freedom from'. To be free from the definitions laid out by church, mullah, a govt. official. To pin no colours to your flag, to be without title:
"Where are we, little r?"
"Nowhere"
"And who lives here?"
"Nobody".
There is a lonely type of freedom of gazing under the stars, unsure of the directions, a soul that has worn itself thin by resisting much, by uttering 'No' whenever it could, like a teenager or an ascetic.
Is there another kind, that follows from 'being with'? A freedom that does not set up a "mine" and "thine", that is not foundational for rights and the law and property...a liberty that derives from, or co-exists with, a mutual gaze of recognition, a sense of obligation? And this is the realm of courtesy and custom, city and court. Who, today, will teach the heart to say "Yes"?
~~~
One can know a person by the way they approach a door
---a Buddhist? saying..via Bob.
The intellectual stops to examine the doorknob.
The mullah imagines houris on the other side.
The atheist looks at the wall.
The Christian imagines only he can walk through it.
The clown trips and stumbles through it.
The beggar sits on the floor by it.
The lover opens the letterbox.
The accountant weighs up the costs and benefits.
The poet puts his hand on the doorknob and takes the pulse of the house.
The Hindu discovers another god to revere.
The sensualist objects to its colour.
The ascetic regrets there is a door.
The old man remembers a door from his youth.
God says: Thank God for the door!
The addict craves other doors.
The racist paints the door a different colour
My father, ever the pragmatist, musters what strength he has, and opens it for me.
(lines from K. Clark on Turner...and a line from Transtromer)
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