Sunday ... drifting ...

Hope Sandoval, Wild Roses (new album out Through the Devil Softly Sept, 2009)

The Repository of the Self

"Days in the past cover up little by little those that preceded them and are themselves buried beneath those that follow them. But each past day has remained deposited in us, as in a vast library where, even of the oldest of books, there is a copy which doubtless nobody will ever ask to see."

Books of the Dead (containing ash), California, 2001, JB

"And yet should this day from the past, traversing the translucency of the intervening epochs, rise to the surface and spread itself inside us until it covers us entirely, then for a moment names resume their former meaning, people their former aspect, we ourselves our state of mind at the time, and we feel, with a vague suffering which however is endurable and will not last for long, the problems which have long ago become insoluble and which caused us such anguish at the time."

Avonhead Park Cemetery, 2002, JB

"Our ego is composed of the super imposition of our successive states. But this superimposition is not unalterable like the stratification of a mountain. Incessant upheavals raise to the surface ancient deposits."

Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time / The Remembrance of Things Past

Melancholia

London, June 2007, JB

"I am melancholic; not depressive, but inclined to view the certainty of decay, loss and death as rather more significant than the prospect of the fun and excitements to be had from life before these things set in. I have experienced as violence the emergence of the culture of compulsory industrialised joy, which is the companion of consumerism."

Jeremy Seabrook

Time Space

Through the Pass, October 2009, JB

"In North Greenland distances are measure in sinik, in 'sleeps', the number of nights that a journey requires. It's not a fixed distance. Depending on the weather and the time of year, the number of sinik can vary. It's not a measurement of time, either. Under the threat of a storm, I've travelled with my mother non-stop from Force Bay to Iita, a distance that should have required two nights.

Sinik is not a distance, not a number of days or hours. It is both a spatial and a temporal phenomenon, a concept of space-time, it describes the union of space and motion and time that is taken for granted by the Inuit but cannot be captured by any European everyday language."

Peter Hoeg, Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow, 1992

Motukiekie, October 2009, JB

"Somewhere a clock strikes four double strikes, four bells, the measure of time at sea, a time that doesn't distinguish between night and day but only the monotone changeover of four-hour watches. These bells reinforce the feeling that we're at a standstill, that we've never left port but have remained stationary in time and space, merely twisting ourselves further down into meaninglessness."

Peter Hoeg, Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow, 1992