the sourcerer: Stofbergsfontein

Showing posts with label Stofbergsfontein. Show all posts

Friday, July 17, 2015

Magpie.

Apothecary jars sit on the windowsills, full of porcelain shards and other bits and pieces collected over the past two years.

Marbles, buttons, glass stoppers and lost limbs.

Last time we were at Churchaven, we met a man on Boerplein who took us back to his tiny house and showed us some of his finds. He gave me the piece with the temple on it, and wanted me to take more.

I didn't have the heart to tell him that half of the joy was in the finding. So I told him the story of the Willow pattern.

We dream of living there, but I could see that he was very lonely.

Walking above Pottebakkerij, we met some flower children and were rewarded with a tune on the didgeridoo. The instrument was so long that it rested on the ground, and he tapped a small round shaker against the cylinder as he blew...

even the birds stopped to listen.

Wednesday, July 8, 2015

Lichen Love.

Years ago, in an old National Geographic, I read about a man and his wife who travel the world researching and photographing lichens. I can think of no job more enticing.

Did you know that before WW2, in Scotland and Ireland, all the good tweeds were dyed using lichens? In huge pots over turf fires. Apparently they imparted brilliant colour and a distinctive earthy aroma. Gives me ALL sorts of ideas...

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.