Empty Rooms
A little while back, maybe weeks ago, maybe months (what is time anymore?), I began collecting images of empty rooms. Read the rest of this entry »
Wait until next year
Putting off what could be done tomorrow, today
May 4, 2020
Everything you really need, and no more
The good hotel room is, in fact, the city’s paradigm: it provides everything you really need, and no more. The rest is out there; your dining room the city’s restaurants, your garden the city’s parks, your transport a bus or taxi or hire-car. It achieves in a positive way what so many societies try to do negatively, through commune or kibbutz: it removes the need for useless possessions. Positive, because it offers you a secret private life as well – for the possessions which really matter. How much do you really – really – need to own, continuously? Love, a sense of humour and the understanding which makes conversation into a genuine meeting instead of a pair of blind projections – they take no room at all. A crucifix, pet teddy-bear, half a dozen books take very little. The rest the city can provide, when you want them. That’s it’s job.
May 1, 2020
Beer Delivers
Lockdown inevitably means changes in habits and routines. I know some people are drinking more, some not at all. I guess it’s all just a bit different. Pubs closed. Trying times. Everything essentially a bit…odd.
Read the rest of this entry »April 29, 2020
Cathedral Et Chartres
So much distance is meant by it:
just as with the backdrop of a scene
the world is meant; and as through that scene
the hero strides, cloaked in his action’s mantle: —so the darkness of this doorway strides acting
onto the tragic theater of its depths,
as boundlessly and seething as God the Father
and just as He transforming wondrouslyinto a Son, who is distributed here
among many small, almost unspeaking roles,
all taken from misery’s repertoire.For it’s only (this we know) from
the blind, the cast-out, and the mad
that, like a great actor, the Saviour emerges.
Excerpt from The Portal, Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Edward Snow
Wait until next year 