the sourcerer: Anthophilous.

Wednesday, September 9, 2015

Anthophilous.

I'm thoroughly enjoying this book. A bouquet of sundry characters merge in an organic way, peppered with plenty of swearing and permeated with wonderful fragrances : lapsang souchong, black cardomom, moss... There's the eighty year old great-grandmother, who discovers internet porn by misspelling "clocks" on Google. The documentary maker who films - over ten years - the fifteen metre journey of the walking palm Socratea Exhorrhiza. The philandering botanist and his questionable escapades. There are interiors overlaid in Liberty fabrics, mysterious seedpods and a frankincense tree.

There is even a bit of robin chat:

"It has woodness, but also intense fertee."

Spring is here now, in all of her finery. I have loved being at home this winter - living and breathing our garden. Seeing the light in emerging things, the painterly patterns deep inside flower petals.

In October I will be back at work for a very long time.

I will think of these days with much longing.

4 comments:

dinahmow said...: There is something about the broad bean's flower that speaks to me...perhaps the black-and-white..; September 10, 2015 at 7:45 AM
the sourcerer said...: Indeed! And the fragrance, I think, is better than that of the sweet pea.; September 10, 2015 at 9:05 PM
Marie said...: Lovely post, Lily.; September 24, 2015 at 9:20 PM
the sourcerer said...: Thank you M. xx; September 26, 2015 at 8:28 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.