the sourcerer: Heaven is a place.

Monday, May 25, 2015

Heaven is a place.

While Tannie Sylvie has a bathroom built in the old house, we have to stay elsewhere. My first thought was - how will the birds find us? I needn't have worried.

They were there in under a minute.

For several days, behind the boat shed, a coppery mole snake lay in the sun digesting his dinner.

I surprised an eland one night when I went to toss an avocado pip into the bushes. We shone a torch and there he was, rising out of the mist. He regarded us solemnly, small puffs of warm breath escaping as he chewed. Then he turned and slowly walked away. Beyond him stood four more. It made me smile lying in bed and hearing their hooves on the concrete floor of the veranda.

The squeals and whistles of francolins, the honking of the flamingoes on the lagoon.

Just before we left I put out a ripe guava and a gang of speckled mousebirds landed for the feast.

A rorschach test, just for us.

It was hard to leave.

2 comments:

Marie said...: Dit is te mooi.; May 26, 2015 at 1:33 AM
the sourcerer said...: That place makes my heart swell...; May 26, 2015 at 10:02 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.