Every now and again

Every now and again we're tempted to suspend our war on sepia. It's still unnatural and aberrant, it's still not countenanced in Leviticus. It still seems simply to be a perverse choice, one that could be cured if one could learn to make a pretty picture. 


But panic's such an exhausting faith. Suppose there aren't enough of us?

Answer the door

Andrea Palladio, Teatro Olimpico

Much is made, because it has to be,
of the act of proceeding through a
falsely sheltering door. But nothing
is unilateral. A door, a window, are
as much to be answered. Credit the
knock, hear the light.

"Episódios Nacionales"

Although in my conscience I needed no amnesty, for I had done nothing wrong, yet I was forced to think of myself as a criminal in hiding awaiting a pardon.


O España, there is no dissimulation to cover thee, no mask to hide thy face, no ointment to adorn thee, because, wherever thou appearest, thou art recognised; one half of thy face in the mood of a fiesta, the other with misery grinning through it.




His Holiness Benedict XVI has descended upon Spain to consecrate Gaudi's masterpiece-in-progress, denouncing Spanish marital liberty in a stunningly impolitic curse upon the Republic of the 1930s. This is not a world away, it is not half a world away. Mormon bagmen buy plebiscites in California against our human rights, while sectarian hysterics front the corporate take-over of Congressional elections.


This is their evidence for God?

Manuel Cortes to Ronald Fraser,
In Hiding: The Ordeal of Manuel Cortes,
Random House, 1972©


Benito Perez Galdós, cited in
The Spanish Cockpit, Franz Borkenau, 1937©,
Foreword by Gerald Brenan, 
University of Michigan Press, 1963

"If you'll walk a little further"

I was just out with my resident genius, Whit, an English Cocker. We were walking on lead because it's Monday, and with sunrise, time was pressing. In an adjacent field, the herdsman had left his hay tractor in the shade of a stand of maple, casting a paradoxical reflection from its upper frame.

Immediately Whit bounded, bristled, planted his feet squarely in their frosty starting blocks, his nostrils steaming for that leap I've seen this spaniel sentry give our geese, arriving now.

I paused, Whit's alarm shunting tremors through the lead. He barked. I said, Come along, let's walk some more. If you'll walk a little further, you'll see that it's OK. Whit had taught me this, years ago, where parallax or some disturbance in a frame excites confusion, felt as threat.


We did walk on. 
It was OK.
Tell the old. 

Victor Norlander

For a purer extract of Monday

Aroma beyond irony.

Organisation man

The proverbial man-in-the-gray-flanneled-suit,

the pious Marriott novitiate in his white button-down collar,

the hangman discreet in his hood,

bow instinctively to the denizen of the deep in the suppression of affect.




The whole world over, it's Monday.


It's not your fault, Will. 
It's not your fault.


















Script, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon©
Good Will Hunting, a film by Gus van Sant
1997

Customs in common i

After dinner, someone will reliably propose, in the mode of a parrot, declining a cognac, on va au bar. 

This will explain the prevalence of zippered jackets as evening wear. It cannot explain the parrot.

Mathias Lauridsen

Propelled

I'm grateful to this portrait of a gymnast for helping to explain the feeling of flight to be experienced in rowing. The shock of the catch is at its center, and this image foretells that explosive sensation very well, as one demanding concentration, self-control, and readiness.


I am pretty certain that the comparative weightlessness of forward motion in a rowing shell at speed, as the oar is drawn back ("feathered") only centimetres above the water, is not much less than that of the gymnast's rotation above the bar.

  
Time cannot be minced in the mind as this takes place, as the body responds to the ten hundred thousandth time it has performed this lightning cycle. But make no mistake: awareness is never absent of being subject to tremendous power, propelled upon an arc of pure flight, by elemental counterpoint. 






All of one's strength, relaxed for a split second, is quite suddenly engaged against all of one's inertia accelerating in the opposite direction, as the oarsman cuts the surface by no more than a few inches, the shoulders burst, and he rockets in reverse trajectory. The gymnast knows this deflection, and still he comes back for it. He couldn't fly without it.

If you are alone, the complexity of the task is magnified, and its pleasures resemble the virtuosity of the gymnast's pursuit; but in a familiar scale of forces, of other rewards. If you are in a chorus of 4 or 8, nothing will ever allow you to forget the sound you made.
















J.S. Bach, Credo: Patrem omnipotentem
Mass in B Minor, BWV 232
King's Consort, Hyperion, 1997©