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"Black crows were entering our country, and they pointed to me"
(from Different Trains).
Europe lurches to the right again. The light in the late afternoon is old and frail. These pathways could have been here for a thousand years, as could the trees and the shade, all of them older really than the mountains. Ancient hatreds re-emerge and on the black seas, disease and impurity await.
England is gone, faith, too, petering out to a whisper. Brick by brick, we are informed, buildings are being stolen and in time nature will reclaim what was taken, restoring in a broad, horizontal dash a time in which nothing happens.
Yesterday in the long grass outside my house I found a ten of spades, its corners moth eaten. Little r collected flowers and acorns in her hat. It's amazing how many things can be found in a small space: feathers and light cigar-shaped sticks, buttercups and leaves of various shades, wild berries that we are careful to handle in case we stain our hands. We gather these things to ourselves, but we know in our hearts it is too late. Our hands want to cup these things, hold these moments against our chest, but they also want to release them back into their own quiet time or leave them untouched.
'The rain, the sometime summer
rain on a memory of roses
will fall lightly and come a-
mong them as it erases
summers so long ago.'
--Barker.
6 comments:
this blog seems to flourish everyday, just when it had proudly announced its demise :-P
(wonderful lines about the summer garden and its cosmos)
Thank you, roxana!
Have your holidays begun yet?
i think you will find this interesting:
"But technology alone cannot explain what has happened to the fine arts in the past few generations.
The same period has witnessed a catastrophic breakdown of the belief systems that sustained Western civilization. The belief in its goodness and fundamental virtue, once the unspoken premise on which society operated, is something that any high school student, properly instructed, knows how to debunk. The word civilization is endangered, as shown by Google’s Ngram, which tracks the frequency of word usage in print. After 1961, civilization began to be used less and less; by the mid-1980s, its usage had dropped by half. At that very moment, the ironic usage of the word “civilization” started to rise sharply. As Sontag predicted, everything could be put into quotation marks. As goes the word, so goes the concept.
Without a sincere concept of the meaning of civilization, one cannot explain why a masterpiece of Egyptian New Kingdom art counts for more than a creation of 1960s industrial design (other than in dollar value). If one cannot do even that, it is hard to see how one might set out to make serious and lasting art. To make such art—art that refracts the world back to people in some meaningful way, and that illuminates human nature with sympathy and insight—it is not necessary to be a religious believer. Michelangelo certainly was; Leonardo da Vinci certainly was not. But it is necessary to have some sort of larger system of belief, a larger structure of continuity that permits works of art to speak across time. Without such a belief system, all that one can hope for is short-term gain, in the coin of celebrity or notoriety, if not actual coins.
If art is merely the expression of a structure of power, then to dislodge it from its traditional position of prestige in the public square would be a liberation. It would be a similar liberation to dispense with the whole trove of traditional culture—public rituals, folk songs, patriotic fables and myths, true holidays (as opposed to days off from work)—that from the vantage of Foucault might be viewed as oppressive instruments. And indeed they have been largely swept away. But their place has been taken by the institutions of mass media, commerce, and advertising, which exist for the present, are unable to speak across time, and are now occupying much of the terrain formerly held by traditional culture and fine art."
a great article, you can find it here:
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/how-art-became-irrelevant/
Thanks, Roxana! That does sound fascinating. Reminds me of a great little book by Peter Fuller called Images of God, Lost Consolations.
Yes, I don't think anyone could write a book (or make a t.v. series) called 'Civilisation' again.
Will have a look at this article now. Danke, danke!
:-)
b.
and this just to illustrate his point about the demise of art:
http://www.dezeen.com/2015/06/09/carsten-holler-decision-london-south-bank-hayward-gallery-playground-slides/
this totally blew me away, this is the curator speaking, mind you:
"When you walk into the gallery you are on a journey into darkness," said Rugoff. "You are filled with uncertainty and doubt. That is a very important beginning to an exhibition that is exploring the idea of decision-making."
I walked past this last week and thought: more entertainment!
I think there is a serious point here, though. Have you read Robert Hughes's book, 'The Shock of the New'? I think there's an element of that here..a kind of showmanship, provocation and spectacle that is at least a century old. Everything's a decision nowadays..pure will without the intellect or any relation to a determinate idea of the good.
Iris has a lovely line somewhere...the idea of decision is reduced to that of shopping (so it involves no continuity, no relation to other people, no judgement or norms). The pure, isolated will is precisely what can be manipulated by the corporations (that is, incidentally, one of the themes in Crawford's new book..link on previous post).
Wow! That was a shocking statement, though.
Keep sending such stuff? No more photos?
:-(
K.
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