flying

On the BBC podcast "Best of Natural History Radio," I heard David Attenborough say

Flying is a very energetic business, much more so than walking or running, and birds don't fly unless they have to. Indeed, they stop doing so if it's safe to do that. The process has happened in recent time on islands where there are no ground predators. So cormorants on the Galapagos and rails on Central Pacific islands have stunted wings that are no longer big enough to get the bird into the air.

But I would tweak the perspective on that and say, not that you don't fly unless you have to, but that you can't fly, unless you have to. I like that juxtaposition of wretched necessity and flying.

decorate the frame

Saw a painting at the Blanton yesterday, now I don't even remember whose, where the frame was strangely carved and painted to complement the piece. It is a small (or sometimes large) thrill to me when the frame is made and finished this way, not just in painting.

thanks

From The Gift, by Lewis Hyde:

I would like to speak of gratitude as a labor undertaken by the soul to effect the transformation after a gift has been received. Between the time a gift comes to us and the time we pass it on, we suffer gratitude. Moreover, with gifts that are an agent of change, it is only when the gift has worked in us, only when we have come up to its level, as it were, that we can give it away again. Passing the gift along is the act of gratitude that finishes the labor.

finnish loveliness

Ze Frank points to this gorgeous collection of photos of Finnish site-specific environmental art. Want to fly to Finland immediately. (Bonus: it is not 79 degrees there in damn November).

Ze liked the colored-pencil logs the most but I can't decide. The shirt seascape? The firebird? The parasol? Maybe the white suits climbing out of the sea.

Why is art that lives in the natural world so thrilling.

cold hell

Was listening to a podcast I'm intermittently fond of, BBC Radio 4's In Our Time. Don't know why it's called that as they are never talking about Our Time, but anyway this week they discussed Dante's Inferno. The host asked one of the scholars why--once Dante and Virgil make it past various lakes of boiling blood and pitch etc--why, at the very center of hell, the ninth and lowest circle is frozen over. This is the circle of traitors, where a three-headed Satan eats Cassius and Brutus in two mouths, and Judas with the third mouth. So I typed up what the guy said.

It is stillness--there is no life, and no movement, and no dynamism.

Now we come to something of infinite sadness there at the bottom of the pit--we come to something of infinite sadness, because everything is still, every possibility, every spiritual possibility, every--every possibility of establishing a love link--Dante speaks about a [??] vinco d'amore, a chain of love, which binds men rationally together--that has all now evaporated and been destroyed. So the first thing to say certainly about the pit there is that that horrific image of stillness -- the only movement is Satan's wings, that ensures that Hell is frozen over -- there is man's ultimate response to the creativity of God himself, and man's own energy--man's response to that, that tragic response, is caught there by Dante in nothingness, in stillness, in deadness.

John Took, Professor of Dante Studies at University College London

So is the idea that where trust is broken, where that human link is broken, all creativity and life stops? If so I really like that. In case Refraction Arts ever revives The North Project, which we should, I wonder if we could work this in.

feeling blakeish

Don't know where I've been not to know it, but this made me happy of Blake's:

Prayer is the study of Art.
Praise is the Practice of Art.
Fasting &c., all relate to Art.
The outward Ceremony is Antichrist.

Got so pleased about this I started reading Peter Ackroyd's Blake biography and it is excellent. Great stories about him being sent as a teen apprentice to spend day after day drawing the tombs in Westminster Abbey. The statues were painted then, and Ackroyd thinks this (plus stained glass etc) influenced Blake as a colorist. Someone needs to film this I feel, the late 18th c Abbey with all the painted stones. Anyway I need to see it.

BTW for the 1.25 people who read this: I was quite wrong about Don Paterson's Orpheus not being available in the US -- it is, and I'm getting it. Here is another piece.

Consider the flowers: true only to the earth
yet we lend them a fate, from the borders of fate,
and supervise their fadings, their little deaths.
How right that we should author their regret:

everything rises -- and yet we trudge along
laying our heavy selves upon the world.

time maps

So thinking a lot about maps, which I love of course (who doesn't); but also about calendars and clocks, which are maps of time not space, and which I am obsessed with, maybe in bad way.

(A clock I guess is not so much a map as a GPS guidance system -- "you're HERE now; no wait now you're HERE; now HERE; look out, you're almost THERE" etc. God SHUT UP people must want to say to their GPS things. But I don't want to say that to my clock, I always look at it with gratitude and sometimes longing: make me not here any more, take me there, where it will be better.)

But a calendar lays it right out, where you can review it any time: where you've been, what you've come from or been launched out of or escaped; plus all the pleasures that await you. That's the part I like, the all the pleasures that await me. Am not much for reviewing the past.

It would probably be good for me to delete every appointment from my calendar, and take off all the lines from all the squares, and all the numbers and names of months. Just a long unravelling blankness for a map.

omniscient

I hate omniscient narrators, I really do. It's always false, as boring as a false god w/beard, opinions, etc. The commandment against false gods is because they are BORING; not that that has stopped us. And we make stories boring when the narrator can blah blah on and on without a voice or point of view. Stories need a voice. I like the potential for lying and mistakes in a real voice.

(I say all this and I am sure there are about 8 million books I love with omniscient narrators. Will have to notice more and figure out how they work--I think mostly via intersubjectivity rather than real omniscience. Maybe.)

solved v resolved

The serious problems of life are never fully solved but some states can be resolved rhythmically.
- Roethke

a good rhythmic sentence too. That's what I need; more rhythm.

okay this must be north

Choosing how to orient a map is a big moment--you commit yourself to one view of the world.