28 April 2008

ET IN ARCADIA EGO

TB Macaulay, the 19th century poet, historian and politician, described a future where a ‘New Zealander’ (i.e. a Maori),  a visitor from an Arcadian paradise, would witness London in ruins.  In 1840 he wrote of imagining the melancholy day when “some traveller from New Zealand shall in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul’s.”  Gustave Doré made an engraving called The New Zealander in 1873, which appears to illustrate Macaulay’s vision.  The ‘wizard-like’ figure, the New Zealander in his cloak, holds a sketchbook, and is drawing the ruins of St Paul’s.  This seems an intriguing inversion of the tradition of death in paradise, a convention expressed in 19th century images of explorers in the New World, where images of death - skulls, coffins, and such - are shown amidst the untrammelled Arcadian landscapes. 

 


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27 April 2008

Over stubble-field and path
A black silence lurks in fear
Purest sky amid the branches
Only the brook runs silent and still

Fish and game soon slip away
Blue soul, darksome wandering
Soon severed us from loved ones, others.
Evening alters sense and image

From George Trakl's Autumn Soul


Across the Valley, Christchurch, April 2008



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26 April 2008

REMEMBERING NOT TO FORGET

“There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting. Consider this utterly commonplace situation: a man is walking down the street. At a certain moment, he tries to recall something, but the recollection escapes him. Automatically, he slows down. Meanwhile, a person who wants to forget a disagreeable incident he has just lived through starts unconsciously to speed up his pace, as if he were trying to distance himself from a thing still too close to him in time.

In existential mathematics, that experience takes the form of two basic equations: the degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting.”
Milan Kundera, Slowness (1995)


Cockatoo Island, Sydney, April 2008, jb

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21 April 2008

THE CELESTIAL CEILING

Sitting at this desk, far away in other lands, it is easy to drift.  The eye traces over the unfamiliar terrain, a vast apartment, tidy, clean, and spare.  Xavier de Maistre is here, recounting the Voyage around my Room.  He'd been kept in his room for 42 days as a punishment for duelling, and during this time carefully negotiated all of the domestic topography that surrounded him.  Everything is carefully plotted, a whole chapter on the folds of his coat, a circumnavigation of his writing desk, his chair, his bed, and to his library which is beyond compare as uncharted terrain, "Cook's voyages, and the observations of his travelling companions, doctors Banks and Solander, are nothing compared to my adventures in this single region."  And at one stage he peeks out the window, beholding the vastness of the night sky above, the empyrean sublimity.  Looking up, I notice that right here on the ceiling is a planetary system, the water planets of sprinklers, the vast planetary bodies of light, some with rings around them, others attended by small moons of their own ... an entire universe of infrastructure.


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19 April 2008



Recording battlefield sites, the interior of the Sydney War Memorial in Hyde Park offers a kind of cataclysmic catechism, a series of answers for which there is no question. 
This lamentation, this litany, invites recitation. 
Whether aloud, if that is allowed within the hallowed hall. 
Or in one's head, a silent internal navigation through places far away.  
A poem without rhyme, or reason.   
An ubi sunt prayer, the 'where are?' question echoing through the years.


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12 April 2008

WINDOW BOXES

Opposite this hotel apartment complex here in Sydney is an apartment building.  With a facade of glass it is like a large vitrine, with lives exhibited.  A distant echo of  the small cabinets that would travel to the country school I went to as a child, magical boxes containing microcosmic exhibits from the museum in the city far away.  Like the Wardian cases that the plant hunters packed New Zealand's plants into to take them back to the Mother Land as exotic curiosities.  And, echoes too, of Joseph Cornell's constructions, shadow boxes containing surreal collections of elements, evoking a somehow forlorn air. 

And these window boxes are most definitely forlorn.  On display are not the exalted moments of life.  These are not trophy cabinets, more like atrophy cabinets.  Places where things go to waste away.  Life's detritus packed into these spaces, marginal zones, out of sight for the residents perhaps, but exhibited for the world beyond.  Life as Readymade.

Wardian Case


Joseph Cornell, Planet Set, Tête Etoilée, Giuditta Pasta (dédicace), 1950
Joseph Cornell, Planet Set, Tête Etoilée, Giuditta Pasta (dédicace) 1950

Window / Box, Sydney, 2008




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10 April 2008



Cockatoo Island, Sydney, April 2008
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08 April 2008


Islands, Marlborough, April 2008, JBowring

And now, silence for awhile, flying away to other shores, and head in the clouds ...




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06 April 2008

IN PASSING



Marlborough Sounds, 4 April 2008, JBowring

The clouds' play -- nature's essential poetic game.
Novalis, Fragments (in Bachelard, Air and Dreams)

Clouds are numbered amongst the most oneiric of "poetic things".
Gaston Bachelard, Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement


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03 April 2008

"Beauty in its relationship to nature can be defined as that which remains true to its essential nature only when veiled… "
Walter Benjamin


The Secret Life of Plants, April 2008, JBowring


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