the sourcerer: Whose woods these are I think I know.

Wednesday, June 24, 2015

Whose woods these are I think I know.

It's poetry. So rich in metaphor that I have to stop after each paragraph to reflect.

A single nightjar wing, and the imprint it left upon a muddy track in Ethiopia.

At Babylonstoren, in one of the walled gardens, there is a weeping mulberry and thickets of Leonotus Leonurus. Lion's Tails - minty and furry. Wilde Dagga.

Amongst the hanging trails of mulberry leaves are two man-made weaver's nests. To get inside, you climb a little iron ladder. I could stay there for hours, with a blanket and a book. The weavers are in the tree around you, busy with their particular hullabaloo.

Tiny red leaves fiddled their way to the floor, floating slowly, pellucid and pretty, while gravity seemed to push them back up to the sky.

Afterwards, the consolation of fresh pressed juice without having to wash the many parts of the juicer.

And a beetroot cupcake, made with the pulp.

The fowl are shiny and fat and the donkeys are fed sweet chopped herbs.

Back at home, a robin hovers over the mirror of the old Land Rover on the grass. He pecks and flutters, scaring intruders away day after day. For this garden belongs to him and his mate

and that is good to know.

Tomorrow there will be fresh bread,

with the promise of a crumb or two.

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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.