the sourcerer: What it feels like to fall.

Wednesday, April 27, 2011

What it feels like to fall.

It's a bipolar world that I find myself in - this film industry. There are moments of elation and unequaled camaraderie and there are times of sheer angst and loneliness. Calms and sudden storms.

Last winter was lean. My heart hurt.

My friends are points of light. They cooked me meals and poured me drinks. We huddled around fires, there were companionable silences, there were hugs. Things got better by small increments and then suddenly in leaps. Now it's a year later and things are good. There's writing and the freedom it brings. Time for long lunches and music and books.

There are nights when I lie awake for hours, not from horrors that gnaw, but a buzzing excitement at being alive. The smell of the rain and the earth as I walk out the door. The crackle of vinyl. My heart in your hand and you play it to the beat.

4 comments:

arcadia said...: Ek voel presies dieselfde. En 'n jaar terug was ek op dieselfde plek as jy. Kom ons drink op die feit dat beter dae gekom het.; April 27, 2011 at 10:39 AM
the sourcerer said...: cheers meisie!; April 27, 2011 at 10:42 AM
ckzero said...: jisses dis mooi Lil; April 28, 2011 at 7:21 PM
the sourcerer said...: dankie! pity oor die crap skype konneksie vandag. :-(; April 28, 2011 at 8:51 PM

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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.