the sourcerer: The birds and the bees.

Wednesday, February 1, 2012

The birds and the bees.

An unexpected bonus of shooting at a farm: you become involved with the inner workings of the place itself. Yesterday was a big day: it started with the Collie and about eight men rounding up the ewes.

460 of them. The traveling vet set up his ultrasound and spent the best part of the day dividing the ewes into groups: pregnant or not, pregnant with one lamb or twins. The ewes with twins are separated and given extra grazing. The ewes that aren't pregnant will be given one more chance next year and failing that, will be slaughtered.

It seemed like an undignified affair, but hardly a bleat was heard from these docile animals. On his screen, the vet showed me small skulls, tiny rows of ribs. He told me that he would be busy with sheep until the end of March and that he spent the rest of the year working with cows - "a much more complicated business".

1 comment:

arcadia said...: Damn. Ek is mal oor skape. Hul is so aesthetically pleasing.; February 1, 2012 at 6:57 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.