Shanghai shock

China is still on my skin, which itches, a little sore still from the sharp, salt sweat that trailed in the sudden heat. My eyes, which opened wide and stared and stared, are still slow to focus. Back home, the shock of travelling so far, so fast, for such a little time remains - shock therapy.

Normal life, and normal blogging, will be resumed some time soon, I hope.

Changing light

Marching band

A few messages for the G-20.

We used to do this a lot when I was young. It's all achingly familiar, as very little any longer is familiar. As I pause to let much of the march pass me and photograph the proudly brandished slogans, a wave of emotion... just for a moment I feel as if a nightmare is over and I'm being allowed to go home. Has this any meaning? Surely the huge marches against war in Iraq were the apotheosis, and the ultimate failure, of peaceful street protest in this country? But, oh well, I'm still glad some of us care enough to come out and say so.

Dark clarity

Sickert in Venice at Dulwich Picture Gallery. Unexpectedly wonderful, these paintings are the closest representations I've seen to the pictures of Venice I hold in my mind. Sickert's substantial, gentle, subtle, mostly dark pictures, a mixture of portraits and architectural views, painted between 1895 and 1905, surprised and moved me. Walking through the long, narrow exhibition galleries was like reading a long, lyrical, studiedly vernacular poem.

Many of these paintings demonstrate the intense, contained power of a limited palette. My thoughts flew to a film I saw recently, Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Three Monkeys, suffused with a similar power by a similarly limited palette, now achieved by digital film technology. "I increased the contrast and desaturated the colours and then selected one colour, generally red, and pushed it a bit after desaturation", Ceylan, who is also an outstanding still photographer, said in a recent interview. This precisely describes many of Sickert's paintings. The interviewer asks if his films are expressionist. Some seem to think so, Ceylan responds, but he'd say more impressionist. This also seems pertinent.

My perception of the paintings, I suppose, was somewhat heightened. I'm pushing myself to work on this challenging translation project, regular hours several days a week on top of the usual busy day job. This work of translating scholarly French prose is at the very limits of my mental capacities. It's hard, rewarding... and confusing. The intense intellectual exercise arouses my thought process, fills my mind with new life, no doubt about it, but not my emotions - thinking harder doesn't make me less sad and lonely. It's a kind of rebirth, but a partial one. And, oh, I'm dead tired, shivering and nauseous some mornings with it.

Perhaps at another time I'd find these paintings too dark. Just now, they are very compelling.

Issues

So, well, there are all sorts of issues right now - computer issues, camera issues, work issues - which are not conducive to blogging. In particular, I've taken on a substantial translation project which is going to keep me very busy, outside the very busy day job, for the next three months or so. A good thing, I think. Stretching my mind in an area where it's competent is a positive feeling I don't often get. So this space is probably going to be silent for quite a while, but something else will no doubt issue forth in due course.

On Thursday I saw the Byzantium exhibition, and today the Rothko. The ultimate in bright, shiny, intricate, infinitely various complexity and the ultimate in subtle simplicity. And the opposites, of course, meet and meld. No simplicity more complex than Rothko's.

That the Rothko has been on since September and ends tomorrow well indicates the level of energy I've been mustering in recent months beyond what's required to do the essential, hold together something that looks like a functioning person. I wish I'd gone earlier, because I took such comfort in his canvases, especially the Black-Form paintings.

Reducing Rothko to a single narrative or metaphor would be a sorry and impoverished view. I didn't, don't. Every moment they are something else. But still, hard not to see the black paintings, especially, as depicting sadness or depression; such a beautiful and heartening depiction, since they are as full of movement, complexity and life as his reds and oranges, a powerful reassurance that the dark too is life, not static, not nothing. This is meditation on pain: the more you look right into it, the more it moves and ebbs and flows and suddenly, momentarily, lets in light.

canal-side statues at King's Place

Time for a blog break. I have no juice.

Happy Inauguration Day!

Barred, blue

Sunlight's dance

When you sit and sit, breathe out, let go and sit for days and sit, breathe out, let go the flat greyness in your heart, let go the flat greyness of the fields and of the sky and sit and breathe, let go, let go, and at noon on the fourth day, the fourth dull day of breathing greyly here amid the landscape drained of all warmth and colour, you start seeing sparks through your lowered eyelids and on the millionth out-breath warmth pours over your shoulders and the sun dances in your lap, you know you didn't do it, that this is not what is meant by dependent origination, and you've been reading Fritjof Capra and thinking yes, he makes sense, there is no fundamental equation, only infinitely complex and surprising patterns, only Shiva's dance, still it feels as though on the millionth out-breath you let go of grey and let the sunlight in. You are absurd, and glad of it. And then the sunlight dances across the floor and is gone, grey, grey again.

Postal poem

I have been here while I was gone (but did not know till I got back).

Happy New Year! Currently so bitterly cold in London, I don't think even a Bach cello suite would make me linger anywhere outside.

Solstice Greetings

Barge Collage
Grand Union Canal, London, Summer 2008

The Winter Solstice feels like what I want to celebrate this year. Retreat and symbolic rebirth badly needed.

Fondest greetings, warmest thanks and my best wishes to all who read here and all whose online words and pictures delight me, feed me, keep me company.

Back sometime soon.