PASSAGES

Mining for melancholy is a trait more beloved of some cultures than others.  Film endings are like cultural litmus paper.  They give a kind of reading of the acidity levels.  Americans are extremely alkaline, needing things to be happily resolved.  The Hollywood formula has so often neutered ideas imported from elsewhere, so they became saccharine and safe.  At the other extreme is the acidic Russian ending, where everything must be left in a state of tragic suspense, or calamity.  The Russians like their wounds kept open, resisting the slide into the numbing niceness, and alternative endings were added to films to accomodate this. 

Cioran’s wings of melancholy in the previous post brought to mind sculptor Ilya Kabakov’s angel project.  Under the advice of ‘how to change oneself’ the prescription is as follows:
You need to make two wings from white tulle fabric, using the same sketch that is appended to the project, and also leather straps for attaching these wings on your back and fixing them in place. After this, having stayed alone in your room (this condition is fairly important, for both the productivity of the impending activity, as well as for the avoiding undesirable reactions on the part of other people in the family) you should put on the wings, and sit completely without anything to do and in silence for 5-10 minutes, after which you should turn to your usual endeavors without leaving the room. After 2 hours you should repeat the initial pause again. After 2-3 weeks of daily procedures, the affect of the white wings will begin to manifest itself with greater and greater force. 

At times like this I wander.  Just in my mind, mind you.  But very far afield.  So there I was suddenly amongst the brooding structures of the astronomical observatories at Jantar Mantar in India.  Their forms evidently a colloquy with the cosmos.  Massive sun dials, achingly beautiful arches, dishes that gather in the metaphysical signals.  Somehow impossible.  Or improbable.

And amidst this reverie, the oneiric echo.  The brooding Indian forms somehow elide with the streetscapes of de Chirico and the wandering picks up pace.   De Chirico’s inhabitation of the memory plays games, since these are scenes that sit on the edge of my consciousness.  They are fragments of the surreal part of a real journey - the tour as mentioned previously in writing on arcade-ian beauty.  But no, not India.  I have never been there.  Yet the structures are as fully palpable in the dreams … enough to live on, for now, but fuel for a yearning to visit … a pilgrimage …

Browsing through the old scientific journals of the Royal Society of New Zealand, reawakens the urge to become a natural history artist, the dream of previous years to be a botanical artist, a recorder of detail, of enigmas … curiosities.  Perhaps it is becoming a lost art … and all the more reason to take up the fine task of, in this case, drawing teeth …

And even more beautiful …

Solitude falls like rain in that grey doubtful hour
when the streets all turn into dawn

When those who are hopeless and forlorn and sorrowfully alone,
When all men, who hate each other, creep
together into a common bed for sleep
while solitude flows onwards with the rivers

The arcade is one of those neither/nor spaces, a space of threshold, of liminality.  Neither buidling nor not-building, the arcade hovers as an interstitial no-man’s land, between things.  A kind of twlight domain.  Beloved of the flaneurs, it became the emblem for Walter Benjamin’s never completed project, the Passagenwerk.  The arcades of Paris resisted both time and place.   They endured amidst the change all around, and persisted as what Benjamin thought of as fairy grottos.  And spatially they resisted the inexorable drive of modernity, to maximise space, to commodify every square inch.

“The landscape, admirable as a picture, rarely makes a comfortable bed .”
Fernando Pessoa,  The Book of Disquiet, p 200

And yet …

Guillermo Kuitca Untitled  1992

Lindis Pass, March 2008, J Bowring