Place as shell

This weekend I found what I think is a striking description of place. 

In a letter to Paul Celan the German-Swiss  poet Nelly Sachs writes:

"When great weariness besets me I think of Paris and Dresden, both shells for the most beloved of people"

(Celan lived in Paris while her great friend Gudrun, who had saved the lives of Nelly and her mother, lived in Dresden)  

from Paul Celan Nelly Sachs Correspondence

Sheep Meadow Press, 1995

Thinking of place as a shell has so many reverberations for me: something that grows on one, a membrane one pulls around one, something that precipitates and binds..thank you Nelly.

moving home

I have been away from here for awhile, moving home.

Sorting, discarding and giving away things, then packing 

everything up and moving it all to another place. 

I wish I was more like a snail.

the missing painting

‘The Death of Lepeletier de Saint-Fargeau’ (1793) by David

being at a loss

In 'The Infinite Conversation' (Theory and History of Literature). Blanchot writes: "The book: a ruse by which writing goest toward the absence of the book." (p. 424) Why is this idea, the idea of absence, loss, something missing, so attractive? . Because it propels desire in all the ways of desire, because it has the shape of something of some of us. Is it a beautiful envelope of an idea?  I could say no more about it: I was at a loss. It worked as an aporia.

For some reason then I thought about the painting by David (1748-1825) 'The Death of Marat' (1793).

This was a painting of his friend Marat who had just been murdered in the French Revolution. 

Imagine painting the death scene of a friend, it is quite an act of love. 

I wondered if someone had commissioned the painting or if David had painted it off his own back. This is when I found something interesting.

David was commissioned to paint the portrait of his friend by a patron who requested that the painting remain faithful to David’s style in ‘The Death of Lepeletier de Saint-Fargeau’. In January 1793 Saint-Fargeau was murdered and soon after, David painted a representation of a moment of his death, placing him as the first martyr of the French Revolution. 

The two paintings, Saint-Fargau and Marat (the two men) were to remain together as an informal diptych and were always displayed together until David's death when they were separated. ‘The Death of Lepeletier de Saint-Fargeau’ has in fact gone missing or has been destroyed - there are contrary reports.

So, the painting of Marat has a missing piece, it is a painting that moves me towards and away from an absence. It is at a loss. It is not at home and by it neither am I.

making bread

Peppino Gino Mangravite's "Tomorrow''s Bread," 1939

Yesterday I kneaded two batches of pizza dough, but I need to make bread. I need to fill the house with the scent of making, as if we will stay here forever, as if everything is safe and solid and momentary and warm.

uncanny microscopic flowers

 

Seven miles I walk 

until your tracks are gone

there is no one to follow

and no reason to fall down

in the still place

of the ellipse

in the desert place

of the integer

in the exiled place

it howls

all clean bones

and uncanny

microscopic flowers

EOSnap of Murray-Sunset and Wyperfeld National Parks from Chelys

"The shortest distance between two points is often unbearable."

Charles Bukowski

('Landscape with Orpheus and Eurydice' from here)

there's a track winding back

The Murrumbidgee river

I've had the last few lines of the chorus of this old Australian folk song in mind this morning.

Does anyone remember it?

The Road to Gundagai 

by Jack O'Hagan, 1922

There's a scene that lingers in my memory,

Of an old bush home and friends I long to see;

That's why I am yearning

Just to be returning

Along the road to Gundagai.

Chorus:

There's a track winding back

To an old-fashioned shack,

Along the road to Gundagai;

Where the blue gums are growing,

And the Murrumbidgee's flowing

Beneath that sunny sky,

Where my Daddy and Mummy are waiting for me

And the pals of my childhood once more I will see;

Then no more will I roam,

When I'm heading straight for home,

Along the road to Gundagai.

To come and be a child again,

To leave behind the sorrow on my way,

That's where I am playing,

Where those gums are swaying

Along the road to Gundagai.

Chorus.

improvising

My camera: the ZENIT QUARZ SUPER 8 

Yesterday I made a super 8 film.

I had half a day free as my son had gone 

to the city with some friends to see the Leonardo

exhibition (disappointing by all accounts).

A few weeks ago I'd given a page of extracts

from poems (some of which I'd collected on this blog)

to a friend who's a musician. She said she'd circled

her favorites and  kept them in mind during a week at

the beach. Upon returning home she'd spent a few

hours one morning weaving them together into

a really beautiful piece of music which

she emailed to me earlier in the week.

I listened to it twice  and was quite overwhelmed.

How could I make anything that could equal this

(potential) soundtrack?

I had a coffee and went down to buy some film. 

When I was setting up a clip broke on the tripod 

and I had to go and buy gaffa tape to secure the leg. 

Half an hour lost. Next the globe in the light 

blew - another half an hour gone. The light meter

was playing up so I had to keep

remembering to add 2.5 (which I forgot

to do half the time).

I had trouble with turning the film and the camera

was making funny noises. When I got it to the nano lab

the developer told me that I hadn't shot half of it

(90 seconds). So I asked him to re-thread it

for me and went home to re-shoot it. He was doing a 

batch of B/W developing in the next half hour and 

our screening is next week. 

I was spending more time mucking around and driving 

than I was actually shooting and now I had a deadline.

By this time I had forgotten what I'd shot in the first

and second halves, so I improvised and I don't know 

what I've got.

It's been developed and I could have picked it up

today but I didn't. I've been wondering why. Maybe  

I'm pushing the anticipation factor. 

Maybe it will be completely unexposed, totally

dark or just rubbish. But maybe there'll be something I like

and something that works with the soundtrack.

I've been thinking about something that

students used to sometimes say to me when I taught drawing

a hundred years ago: 'It's not like how it was in my head'

Whatever is there when I get it onto the projector

I know one thing for sure: it will

be nothing like anything I had 'in my head' because 

I had nothing 'in my head'. There was no pre-planned

path through yesterday except the one I made as I went

and I can't wait to see what's there tomorrow.

making a nuclear disaster zone your home

Photo of Cooling tower of the unfinished Chernobyl reactors 5 and 6 (2009)by Timm Suess

Since the human evacuation of the area around the nuclear power station following the Chernobyl disaster of 26/4/1986 it seems that birds and animals that had been absent for many years have resettled. These include wolves, black storks, frogs and moose. You can listen to some powerful and moving sound recordings from the Chernobyl area of frogs and birds by sound artist Peter Cusack, part of a series of works entitled 'Sounds from Dangerous Places, Chernobyl'

at home in your skin?

When I first saw the image of this beautiful sculpture (© Huang Yong Ping) I felt like I wanted to do the same, shed the skin of my year and awake more sensitive and slightly smaller.

L'ombre blanche, 23 October - 19 December 2009 www.galeriemennour.com

 

homes and lunatic asylums

painting of Virginia Woolf by Roger Fry.

In an essay originally entitled 'Behind the Bars' Virginia Woolf describes "those comfortably padded lunatic asylums, which are known, euphemistically, as the stately homes of England”