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”