the sourcerer: Snow-blind.

Monday, June 3, 2013

Snow-blind.

Photograph by Bianca Haarhoff, via WhatsUpCapeTown.

I can't believe, that while I was out carousing on the southern peninsula yesterday, this is what was happening in town...

Sure, we had thunder and lightning, hail big as peas. But no snow!

Snow in Africa is confined to far away blue mountain tops, not cities. Double glazing is unheard of, central heating, insulation - what is that? We shiver through two coldish months of winter and that's it.

I remember years ago arriving in small town Canada and being terribly disappointed that there was no snow. So much so, that by the time it fell, the check-out lady at the small supermarket said to me: "So you got your snow dear!" I didn't know her from a bar of soap.

In Germany I once woke the entire household

to alert them:

"It's snowing - it's snowing!!!"

They were pretty decent about it, but immediately went back to bed after a few hmms and ahs.

I stood at the window for a long time, watching it drift down. Because snow is magic.

Photograph by Nicole Attridge, via WhatsUpCapeTown.

I live a short ten minutes walk up this road, to the right. Back in the city today, it's nippy out, but all that remains is a shiny wet broth.

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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.