the sourcerer: The best laid plans.

Friday, June 14, 2013

The best laid plans.

The night before we were to leave:

New batteries in Maglite.

Swiss Army knife honed.

Wooly socks all in a row.

Camera battery charged... lens error.

In it's eagerness, it hums and beeps and won't retract.

I wish for a life more organic. For machinery that is self healing. After a smear of something, a kind word, some rest, all is well again. Or for the days when machinery was simpler. The days when our gardener, Samuel, kept the lawn mower going with a piece of wire.

When spit was an ingredient that worked.

When pantyhose could stand in for a fan belt.

A time when enterprising men made cameras out of cardboard and cotton reels.

Photograph via http://www.messynessychic.com

Sometimes it only takes one small thing to unzipper the teeth of God. Take my good friend Mr Owl's fishing trip. Everything was going swimmingly until the starboard motor's throttle broke. As they drifted, Mr Owl and his friend heard the other fishermen bragging about their wonderful catches.

They finally made it back to shore, only to find a baboon in the front seat of the car, eating their lunch. Mr Owl's friend grabbed a stick to hit the baboon. The baboon got such a big fright that he shat all over the seat. The stick shattered without maiming anyone - it was riddled with fire ants. And so Mr Owl and his friend sat in rush hour traffic, itching and scratching. No fish for the pan.

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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.