Oxford in Blue

Everything blue. The blue of that bulky pea coat I picked up at Salvation Army for no apparent reason. The blue-grey weather, the sound of Joni Mitchell’s Blue and Kind of Blue by Miles Davis playing in every cafe I went into at the time. Or all those blue balloons held in an alligator line of field-tripping Japanese children I saw strolling through the park one day. Also the glow of this city’s sky at night, merely a shadow of the day. Also my father’s eyes and that hyponotic blue of the deep blue sea.

Etty

Just a preview of an article I'm writing about my encounter with the diaries of Etty Hillesum:

Readers tend to be either bewildered or deeply moved by her. I've recommended these diaries to many friends who, despite having adored Anne Frank, have come back to me rather exasperated by all the emotional temperature-taking in Hillesum's writing. Others, meanwhile, have found her surreal sexual relationships a little difficult to fathom: Etty wrestling with her therapist on the floor of his office or Etty bedding down with her aged landlord--all while she pines after a personal God and a prayerful life, all while the persecution of Jews escalates outside her window.

For these readers, she must appear to lead a rather mixed-up if not haphazard existence, somewhere between bohemianism and a sort of low-level mysticism.

There are, however, those of us who find in Etty's writing an original and unabashedly human voice. A voice akin to that of her beloved Rilke in the way she struggles to stand apart from history, all while trying to wrangle hold of life in all its earthly feeling. Hers is a difficult balance between trancendent ideals and devotion to the things of this world.



'The trajectory of her journey,' writes Eva Hoffman, 'echoes classical accounts of spiritual transformation; but Etty's pilgrimage grew out of the intimate experience of an intellectual young woman--it was idiosyncratic, individual, and recognisably modern...Her essential existence, she often reminded herself, took place in the privacy of self-reflection, at a desk covered with pinecones, vases of flowers, and books.' [vii, viii]

Hotcoldhotcoldhotcold

Cold autmn weather and fiery indoor radiators. One wall of the room soaked in gold, the other cast in icy shadow. Lying there with you on upon the floor, both of us staring at the skylight, watching the vapour trails of passing planes crisscross the blue. Dreaming up whole continents of warmth.


Photo by Anako

Just a tiny, imaginary thought of peace and love, folded up, and tossed kite-like to the wind.

Blank Pages Before Next Chapters

My computer isn't working at the moment, so this is only a quick post, a passing wave. I'm actually typing this at my friends' while they're away on their honeymoon and as I look after their cat and continue to live out of suitcases...

Early autumn is currently knocking me out, even though I'm currently fighting a head cold and keep having to duck away on street corners to blow my nose. Walking through gold shimmering Oxford this evening, I thought what better way to top off this cinematic, potent beauty than with a film? So I stopped off at the video shop I haven't visited in almost a year and took out Kieslowski's Three Colours: White. When I brought it up to the counter, the twerpy clerk said, 'I've heard this is the worst one of the three.' It was only when I got outside that I realised this was rather like someone saying they'd heard about some parts of heaven where you have to dress more warmly than usual. I mean, who cares if you have to put on a scarf--it's still heaven, right?

Interlude

Just a story my niece told me. She's four.



This is her on the same day as the recording...Actually, I was playing her The Smiths in the car the other day and when it came to Big Mouth Strikes Again, she told me to turn the sound up...

Winged Hearts

I was saving most of these picture-postcards for a celebratory moment, but now I'm just looking for uplift. So here's a little prayer for wings. As it turns out I'll now be needing some serious help taking-off on schedule...





Even though it gets a mention in Paul Auster's Moon Palace (as table-talk before one of his characters faints in the hallway), few people know about Cyrano De Bergerac's voyage to the moon, an adventure he spuriously committed to paper in about 1647, or some twenty odd years before Isaac Newton watched an apple fall from a tree. I think the Moon is a world like this one, Cyrano prophesies before taking flight:

'After many experiments I constructed a flying machine, and, sitting on top of it, I boldly launched myself in the air from the crest of a mountain. I had scarcely risen more than half a mile when something went wrong with my machine, and it shot back to the earth. But, to my astonishment and joy, instead of descending with it, I continued to rise through the calm, moonlight air. For three quarters of an hour I mounted higher and higher. Then suddenly all the weight of my body seemed to fall upon my head. I was no longer rising quietly from the Earth, but tumbling headlong on to the Moon. At last I crashed through a tree, and, breaking my fall among its leafy, yielding boughs, I landed gently on the grass below.



'I found myself in the midst of a wild and beautiful forest, so full of the sweet music of singing birds that it seemed as if every leaf on every tree had the tongue and figure of a nightingale. The ground was covered with unknown, lovely flowers, with a magical scent. As soon as I smelled it I became twenty years younger. My thin grey hairs changed into thick, brown, wavy tresses; my wrinkled face grew fresh and rosy; and my blood flowed through my veins with the speed and vigour of youth.'

Maps for the Melancholy

Photograph by Maurice Denis (1870-1943)
Something I wrote in a letter today: I'm still intrigued by this notion of Freud's, that melancholy is in fact 'mourning without a conscious object.' The ritual of mourning is there, the symbolic drive towards expatiation and catharsis, but the melancholic only wanders in circles because there is no recognition of what has truly been lost. As a result, this loss, this absence, gets spread out shadow-like over everything. This is where I think the work of artists like W.G. Sebald and Chris Marker (not to mention Paul Auster, the later films of Krzysztof Kieslowski, and from what I understand, the Roland Barthes of Camera Lucida) overlaps: in this feeling for the sometimes overwhelming 'poignancy of things'...

An image from the Czech documentary Private Century
Incidentally, one of the chapters in the Wolf Man's Memoir is titled 'Unconscious Mourning.' In it, if I remember right, he finds himself dropping in and out of law school and taking up landscape painting, generally vacillating. He also takes up with a roguish friend of the family and goes on a pan-European expedition in order to finally visit the acreage this man bought long ago and has since talked about as a kind of Eden (it turns out to be little more than a unremarkable meadow).