Inside the Combinatorium

"Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined?"
"Each life is an encyclopedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles, and everything can be constantly shuffled and reordered in every way conceivable."
Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, 1993

The Venetian Stain

San Marco, Venice (2009) JBowring

Venice (1953)

long wait
from blackness
to the blue
anticipation
of dawn
morning breeze
through
dark windows
chalk white
waters
frozen moss
voices
bird and man

John Hejduk

Dawn, Lake Hawea (2009), JBowring

The Venetian stain had remained for months now. A certain moment held in the mind, encountered again, in parallel, elsewhere. Dawn's pale light, Hejduk's crossing from black to blue, the chill, the water, the waiting for light. Doppelganger landscapes, experience doubled, and looping around, so that here in the high country is Venice, the stain, the taste, an essence, a homeopathic drop. Like Henry James's Spencer Brydon, one encounters one's self again, yet somehow removed, "He had that feeling that here, at last, was something to see, to touch, to take, to know -- something all unnatural and dreadful. The dense penumbra literally screened a figure which stood still in it. It loomed gloomily in the dark, it was something, it was somebody, the prodigy of a personal presence ... He was standing before someone who converted his I into another personality." The schizophrenic sense of place, here as there, is unsettling, disturbing, yet also delicious. Beyond the limits of sensibility, it enters the domain of the sublime, the rush of feeling out of place, ungrounded, out of this world. The Venetian dawn carried in the mind, then released in small doses, a contamination, a scintilla, a susurration, of else where.

"Water equals time and provides beauty with its double." Joseph Brodsky, Watermark, 1992

The Mysterious Depth

Dawn Service, April 25, 2009, JBowring

"A melancholy man discovers in spite of everything that our existence is fragile and that thus there exists in the world some mysterious depth ... and this discovery is immediately dissolved in a reverie isolating him from despair or dread." Wojciech Balus, 1998

The world brings coincidences of almost chilling resonance, and the return to studying Balus's article, in the early morning, immediately following the Dawn Service, was one such breathtakingly uncanny moment. The small crowd gathered on the dam for readings, wreath laying and the bugle call of the Last Post. Above the high mountain ranges the first rays of sun coloured the few feathery clouds, while at lake level the mist swirled in haunted swathes, concealing, revealing, re-inventing the sublime topography for a fleeting moment ... The sounds, the chill of the dawn, the pause, silence, looking backwards to loss, moist eyes behold the luminous, numinous, enveloping mise-en-scene...

Light on the edge of Darkness

Lake Hawea, April 2009, JBowring

Gloom, Not Doom

Ian Pindar in The Guardian

This thoughtful and sensitive book remains a survey of the scene rather than a definitive study. However, Bowring has succeeded in her aspiration to create something like an Observer's Guide to melancholy. Melancholy assumes many guises, she explains, each anatomised here: religious melancholy, love melancholy, the melancholy of nostalgia or of boredom (acedia), and a whole tradition of "heroic melancholy" of which Batman is a recent exemplar. There is even what Walter Benjamin called "Left melancholy", whereby a leftist with a mournful attachment to a dead idea becomes an in-activist.

Read the full review here

On Seeing Our Not Seeing

Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist Composition: White on White, 1918

''Why did we become blind, I don't know, perhaps one day we'll find out, Do you want me to tell you what I think, Yes, do, I don't think we did go blind, I think we are blind, Blind but seeing, Blind people who can see, but do not see.''

Such is the denouement of Jose Saramago's Blindness, a parable of sorts perhaps, of the not seeing which is part of our 'sightedness'. The 'blindness' of Saramago's characters manifests as an engulfing whiteness, rather than a blackness which one might anticipate, and in that a sense of emptiness, rather than a plunging depth. So very different is the not seeing that comes from staring at what is in front of us, of an inability or unwillingness to discern the small beauties, to comment on them, bring them forward - so very different to staring into an infinite blackness, and seeing in that a universe ...

Kazimir Malevich, Black Square, 1913

The Dust of Time

The Dust of Time, Theo Angelopolous, 2009, music Eleni Karaindrou