the sourcerer: Half way.

Thursday, February 23, 2012

Half way.

I have come to hate the N7. The desperation, the screaming mad cowboy drivers. Burning cars. Policemen poking around in ditches. Neon paint squiggles marking the scenes of untold horrors.

Then I get to the farm and the knot in my stomach unravels. At 6h30 the sky looks like something from the children's bible. The dogs run up to greet me and the farmer always has a story. Did you know that pigs gestate for exactly 3 months, 3 weeks and 3 days? Groot Wit and Landras. You can set your watch by them, he says.

Soon my life will take other turns,
but I'll never forget this place.

3 comments:

Marie said...: I hate the N7, too - but I have never seen all that.

Farm sounds like a story.; February 24, 2012 at 1:20 AM
ckzero said...: The N7 is long, very long. And it has some real highlights.

The way the landscape opens up when one hits the Knersvlakte, those meandering curves leading up to Kamieskroon, and the completely surreal descent down to the Orange River.

That first bit out to the Melkbos turn-off is a bit of a drag, I agree.

Bizarrely, there is a sign to Potsdam, right there where it is at it's worst.; February 24, 2012 at 1:41 PM
the sourcerer said...: Jy's reg. ek bedoel die stukkie wat elke dag ry, tot net na die Swartland 1-Stop. ek ken hom nie veel verder as dit nie.; February 25, 2012 at 5:34 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.