Homesick for the Earth

What times we live in. 

Books to look out for:

T.J. Clark on Bruegel;
Bernofsky on Walser;
and Larissa M on goodness

~

Kelman: ye nee kanna fuckin rite. 

Don't get it (not for the first time). James Wood is usually so perceptive but the stories here are dull, pounded so flat that any break in the monotony seems like a ridge. Keep to plainwords, tell it like it is, and run down things to the bare minimum, a single breath. True to life, but a kind of life that is windowless, without any second spaces. That is how people in the tenements speak and he's got the ear for it. The down-to-earth language isn't terse, knotted (Breece) but neither does the presentation (is there a re-presentation here?) of the simple, ordinary words lead on to the extraordinary, as they might.

~

Penelope Fitzgerald's canvas is a small, detailed one-and that is probably why the books will always appear to be somehow second-rate, or lightweight, not quite there. Not marginal lives, but low-key, unsuccessful ones (the whole thing turning on the meaning of the word 'success'). Not some great refusal to accommodate oneself to the world and the times one lives in, but a small step to the side, a life lived in the half-light, the counter-light (to use a term picked up from fff).

~

Dwelling. Ivan Illich:

The things we love are specific, irreplaceable, incommensurable. If something is lost over time will there be new ways of looking?

A way of looking, speaking, the gestures of the hand, have been lost (and it ain't the fault of the refugees or asylum seekers!). 

But what is a work of art if not an 'open work' (Eco), something that is taken up again, lovingly, in a different context (T.S. Eliot). Some hitherto unseen strands lay revealed, a movement unfolds from beneath the wings. For centuries the cross was not a central image in western consciousness but only becomes so later on-and yet it was always there,latent, implicit, at the very heart of things. Beauty is always a reflection of jalal.

Don't tell me, what you always knew.
---INXS.

You'll find bridges inside yourself
[None lead to you]
---Supervielle.

In the hallway the thickly woven tapestry depicting the familiar scene, the greatness of soul, the fierceness of the heart. And now, only a few grey outlines, the inner structure of the action, the long- worn gestures, the oblique way in which a poet finds an accidental truth.

Now the in- dwelling, a life without form, only blind seasons. The asylum worlds in which we find ourselves, lost again. You've brought the wrong papers and cannot prove who you are.

Our face, older now, seen through a glass darkly. But do you remember the first days, when we set out, the fullness of words, the light clear and bright?Here, the boundary world of finders, keepers. What was borrowed must be returned. The whirl of life congeals on these contracts.

The hunters return unsuccessful, with darkened faces, hands burned under the sun. Some ancient ritual forgotten. Quiet. This is how they speak, true to life. Lives continues under their eyes, distant. November fires fragment and nothing is forgiven. The search, all these years: a few footsteps in the snow, the traces of absences. There are no more journeys, just the shadows that measure the distances from the invisible axis, around which our true life turns. 


(black mountain: monbiot)