Note to self

The Abundance. Time is a gift. Accept it gratefully. At all times the world is open. Life is full of tragedy but also so much dazzling wonder, beauty & truth. The ‘song of joy and sorrow’ is with us. Walk lightly, listen carefully, remember the colours.

I’ve always lived in the 1970s.

  

There are many pathways in life.

The structure finds the light.

Lockdown Blues

I imagine this veil
shall be lifted again and something like a face in a mirror
appear. And it will be me. Will be a room as rooms used to be to us.
And us in them.
As a family or as lovers. We shall be lifted and we shall touch
in the old way. Just a hand on another. Not meaning that
much but still a small weight. With
meaning. A feeling of a harbouring inside which reminds one of having a
mind. A feeling that one could
die for instance.
So there was
mystery, hope, fear, loneliness.
A sudden alarm from not-knowing and being startled by an in-
comprehensible terror or some other reaction
to change. There was
change. A person could be-
come. You could look into a face &
not know. There was rain & you would hardly notice.
It could rain for hours. The face would be there inside
its otherness, the way its body, which you could not imagine the in-
wardness of, moved, each one
moved,
differently, completely
differently. Why is it now you summon
streets. How they ran everywhere away. You could be in a strange
place and not know. You could be
lost. You could be as if
thrown away from the real. A trembling thing. A
journey. Lost yes – but not wrong in being. And from there you
could see a face which was a stranger. And it
would have a look which you had to wait for.

--J.Graham.

Realism

   Capitalist realism:
Emptiness filled with delusions (Empire, purity, abundance).The endless desire for more, bloated self-importance. Mechanical thinking. The only realities left: bodily and virtual ones.

Soviet realism:

“..the spirit of a people released; of a people free, at length, to warm itself at the hearth of human peace and comradeship and simple, spontaneous happiness.”

Realism: “Tranquility is a principle of inner order. Piero understood that excess movement and expression both destroy the visual painted space and compress the painting’s time to a momentary scene, a flash of existence. His stoic heroes are constrained and impassive. The stilled leaves, the hue of the first earthly dawn, the unstruck hour, give the things Piero created an ontological indestructibility."

—Z. Herbert.