the sourcerer: December 2014

Sunday, December 21, 2014

While we were out.

The past few weeks have been relentless. Long hours and constant demands, with every day bringing it's particular problems. Coming home - sometimes in the dark, to a moody valley.

Noticing that others had visited, I watered when I could.

Every week six days of sweating and swearing and heavy lifting.

Trucks full of furniture, smoke and mirrors.

Schools, churches, bars and hospitals.

We had very little time to ourselves.

A quick ginger gimlet, the stroke of a paw, trying to keep up with a glut of tomatoes - sharing them with the starlings. Glimpses of lives very different from mine.

I had to remind myself, sometimes, that I am very lucky.

While we were out, a beet grew and grew and grew.

A fairy tale beet, a show bull of a beet weighing in at 940 grams.

Head and shoulders pushing out of the soil.

Once slaughtered, yielding a slice of moreish cake.

The beetroot is there in every bite, dark and earthy.
Cinnamon and poppy seed.

It's good to be home.

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.