Saturday, July 29, 2006

Painting Time

Let go of the stability of knowing how to see, the molecules are dancing, big bundles of energy like rivers of colour and the jostling of air, where you can see wind currents by watching the way they move, and how the air sweeps back from the leaves and branches and the knotted woody bark of the tree that is a current too, one thicker than the other, both humming with motion.

What does a still world look like?

Always the humming, buzzing, jostling from inside things; I've never seen it flat still like a photograph.

Everything is singing, transforming at different rates with different densities, and I don't know what separates anything from anything else.

Spiritus Mundi, perhaps. It's all animated all the time: vibrating; singing.

Our words mapping the design of ourselves
in the world in frail gaps.

I reach for you
without
solidity.

---

with thanks to Robert Preuss for his ekphrastic writing on Van Gogh

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4 comments:

  1. Oh, I like this very much.

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  2. Oh, yes: "let go of the stability of knowing how to see" and see again. What we're always trying to do, isn't it?

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  3. Anonymous12:42 PM

    "Always the humming, buzzing, jostling from inside things; I've never seen it flat still like a photograph."

    I've seen that.. it involved drugs I'm afraid. But is was amazing! I had a brief glimpse of the world without depth and it touched me so. Made everything beautiful and new for a time. It was during the early stages of a hurricane coming ashore.. and the sky was a reproduction of Starry Night. I wanted to capture it for all to see, so I got my sketch pad and pencil. But the substance that had blessed me with the ability to see the world through Van Goghs eyes had also cursed me with the inability to put pencil to paper.. I couldn't draw stick figure to save my life.

    Thus was the beginning and end of my drug expirmentation.

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  4. MB, as ever, thank you... (o)

    Patry, beginner's mind, yes, the freshness of the view that's not created by habit, habits that tend to make us cynical I think, sort of the 'been there/done that,' when we might not have at all.

    Anonymous, that's a beautifully written vision of a storm, drug-induced or not. Sometimes we are only meant to remember profound moments so they can continue to inspire us, perhaps. Though not being able to draw it at the time, yes I can see that that would cast an unfavourable light on the drug experimentation.

    During my teens, when lots of those I knew were doing drugs, I wanted to to, but no-one would let me... probably just as well. But I do enjoy hearing stories of drug trips like yours.

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A Pulsing Imagination - Ray Clews' Paintings

A video of some of my late brother Ray's paintings and poems I wrote for them. Direct link: https://youtu.be/V8iZyORoU9E ___