You perhaps will not bask unthinking in the sun, privy to an idyllic landscape of gazelles and grass -- or seal yourself in the ice of the north; perhaps the earth is too old, too wearied. The overwrought early-twenty-first-century sentimentality (we'll say, for instance): maybe it's nostalgia, maybe it's fantasy, maybe it's willful delusion like a breath of fresh air. A slow-motion YouTube video of an undefined African scene set to Yanni and a Sufi poem. Sincere thoughts, perhaps. It is curious, this shibbolethic birth.

Wölfe, Haare, die hohlen Männer
Alles wiederholt sich
Ständig
Motive der Woche
Prophetische Nichtigkeiten

Lists of future activities were scattered around, along with the dust from the accumulation of days. The place had not been abandoned, by either time or inhabitants; the space had undergone a dramatic change. Plans still remained plans of things to come (always of things to come) and never saw realisation, were never reigned in and brought forth -- how often we get ahead of ourselves trying to collect our thoughts while we're walking through the dust collecting at our feet.

A tree bereft of perhaps three-quarters of its foliage swayed in the breeze; perhaps its waving was a sort of call of encouragement to the people standing around, or at least a visual distraction from the wandering, staring, and the half-hearted hoping. In this scene there is no crying, although in other places that is common. In this scene there is no speaking, though one would hope to hear a word -- again, as encouragement (always of things to come). The ground beneath had long ached under the strain of contradiction, until it snapped itself in-to joint; but this unexpected adjustment brought a sudden increase of dust.

She recalled the last time she had seen dust like this. There were once streets here: once -- it all seemed so indefinite by this time. There was a house and an old attic full of long-forgotten furniture, boxes, papers and ornaments, all coated in a thick layer of grey. She ran her finger across the top of a dresser as she had seen someone do once in a film, though she had worn no white glove. The trace of her finger, the impression on the dust, was, she thought now, a strange kind of trace --- one that takes away materially rather than leaving behind. But then she looked at her finger and found the reverse; the dust had left a trace on her.

She looked around and took a piece of paper from the rubble: a shopping list: candles, bread, bananas, film.

Some things we do not know how to accept. We may be familiar with our self-inflicted woes, and cherish these simply out of that familiarity. The moment we are handed joy, how do we respond? With disbelief, incomprehension, at best a kind of clumsiness if perhaps we are accustomed to seeing it elsewhere, almost independent of us; but when it approaches, hand reaching out -- it is there we falter; we think: 'You must have the wrong number.'

light

There is a tea light candle on the window sill too small to shine above the wood holding in the pane. From outside it is almost invisible, hidden by the ceiling light, the street lamps, the left-over almost burned-out Christmas lights. But whereas the others shine or glimmer with an unconscious intensity, this small flame glows with intention.

Giacomo Balla (1871-1958)

Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash. 1912.

Noise, speed, movement -- these are words associated with the Futurist artist Giacomo Balla. His work tends to have a strong abstract quality such that the viewer doesn't necessarily recognise in the image any particular familiar object right away -- or if he s/he does, it is brought forth by lines indicating sweeping changes and motion. The painting of motion inevitably seems a bit of a trick, doesn't it? "I shall paint a series of moments within a single frame!" Says the magician. But even film does not do this -- each frame is an individual photo. And yet, isn't this in itself something quite amazing? How do you separate one instant from the moving the river of which it is a part? And then look at the language I've just used -- 'a part'. We partition as often as we can --- of course. We cannot see the whole world in one glance; we see it as a section, or what we perceive to be a section, because the continuity is too blurry, too outstretched to be contained by our eyes; and so we segregate and then try to amalgamate. And thus we pull 'moments' or 'instants' together like a string of pearls and suddenly it's not the movement of a painting that seems so absurd, but its apparent stasis. And yet when we say this, we forget that the painting is not merely a portrayal; it is a record -- not of the thing it represents, but of the motions and strokes that went into its creation. And, of course, it too is constantly changing, some colours perhaps at a greater speed than others.

I wonder if Balla was thinking along these lines as he painted the chain-links on the dachshund's leash four times, along with its (temporal and spatial) matrix. Did he hear it too?

Sometimes it is enough to make a pot of tea. One need not always drink it.