the sourcerer: Things that take us back.

Sunday, October 31, 2010

Things that take us back.

These are lights!

Something in the world feels right when you wake up after dreaming of the water lilies in the Okavango Delta. On top of that, it's the first really, really hot day of Summer and there's left-over apple crumble for breakfast, with Greek yoghurt. My friend Madame Fi recently went to Botswana and Zambia and her pictures came to life in my dreams. Also read what she said upon return.

I've only been there in my dream, but I feel nostalgia for that place.

"A sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations."

As I watered the garden this morning, an old Mercedes drove by and the sound of it threw me back to my childhood and thoughts of my father. A true gentleman he was. This Summer I will make his Pimms no.1 Cup and sip it with my feet dangling in the pool.

I bought six of these plates at the boot sale yesterday. They remind me of my Grandmother's kitchen. Then, in the afternoon, T. brought me a bunch of sweet peas from her mother's garden. One sniff of their wonderful scent and I was back in Ouma and Great Aunt Lil's garden in the Eastern Cape.

It's a glorious and searing thing, this squeezing of the heart.

❤

2 comments:

Unknown said...: Hi Lily, Thank you for the mention! :)i love that picture of the waterlilies, it looks like a wonderful art installation.
Your writing is truly captivating. Pls keep it coming! i now have a severe craving for Yelowtail ;) thx for the wonderful conversation and apple crumble Xx; November 8, 2010 at 10:19 AM
the sourcerer said...: such a pleasure!; November 8, 2010 at 10:29 AM

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You could tend a garden at night, only at night, pouring dark water onto leaves, and into the earth, like pouring midnight onto midnight. You could hold your soil-stained hands up to the moon. The stars would gleam on the bottom of the shovel. It would smell the same as a daytime garden - it would smell green, violet, red, white. But come back, in daylight. Come back, to see the colours without closing your eyes.
- Sean Michaels. Accompaniment to the song "Immune" by LOW. Said the Gramophone

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don't bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: "It's not where you take things from - it's where you take them to."
Jim Jarmusch (1953- )

You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris because all the bakery shops had such good things in the windows and people ate outside at tables on the sidewalk so that you saw and smelled the food. When you had given up journalism and were writing nothing that anyone in America would buy, explaining at home that you were lunching out with someone, the best place to go was the Luxembourg gardens where you smelled and saw nothing to eat all the way from the Place de l'Observatoire to the rue de Vaugirard. There you could always go into the Luxembourg museum and all the paintings were sharpened and clearer and more beautiful if you were belly-empty, hollow-hungry. I learned to understand Cézanne much better and to see truly how he made landscapes when I was hungry. I used to wonder if he were hungry too when he painted; but I thought possibly it was only that he had forgotten to eat. It was one of those unsound but illuminating thoughts you have when you have been sleepless or hungry. Later I thought that Cézanne was probably hungry in a different way.
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) - from A Moveable Feast.