the sourcerer: Keepsake #6.

Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Keepsake #6.

My mother gave me a very special gift today, she gave me my grandmother's engagement ring. Still in it's original box from Ritter's Jewellers and Watchmakers, Port Elizabeth & Grahamstown.

Oupa and Ouma were married in 1932. He was a bookkeeper from Prince Albert, she was secretary to the town lawyer in Humansdorp, Mr. Jones. Oupa walked past Ouma on the street one day and said: "That's the girl I'm going to marry."

He died in 1964, but Ouma wore his ring until the day she died, aged 85. I remember her taking it off in the kitchen and at night before bed.

Peter James Marx and Eva Annie Haskings, my grandparents.

4 comments:

Karen Bekker said...: it's am exquisite ring! x; May 16, 2012 at 5:05 PM
the sourcerer said...: and it fits!
xL; May 16, 2012 at 7:22 PM
Marie said...: A real ring. In every sense.; May 17, 2012 at 5:05 PM
tanjawilmot said...: it's lovely. I'm sure your grandma would be so pleased that it now belongs to you, the treasurer of things exquisite.; May 18, 2012 at 9:36 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.