what should we do

with the old communist buildings
which we have grown to call
home?



come -
let's paint them in the colours
of our pain,
in the dimness of what they call
history
but we simply call
our lives.










































(the doorway of my block of flats)

simple, old truths

a man walks slowly in the fields of autumn. he sees tall grass swaying in the cold breeze, here and there a tree. the sinking sun, the sky suddenly yellow. at some point a dog comes along and rubs against the man's legs. he bends down and strokes its head. every now and then he thinks of himself as a child, he thinks of lost loves. fleeting images, no more substantial than the meeting of a fallen leaf and a branch reflected on the water's surface. perhaps even less trembling of his heart. but most of all, he remembers voices, a certain music which had always seemed to punctuate the quiet unfolding of what others had called his life. for no reason at all, two fragments of poems return now and then:

Yet he says much who utters "evenings,"

A word from which grave thought and sadness flow

Like rich dark honey from the hollow combs.

and

this was “absolution”
we turned the words in our fingers

like coloured pebbles
smiling vaguely, shy,

wondering what they meant,
wondering what we had been.

reaching the top of a small hill, he stops for a moment, leans against a tree and lets his eyes roam over the horizon and what slowly begins to take the shape of distances.
"if i die now", he says to himself, "then everything which is held inside the word evening as i am uttering it exactly this moment, is lost. no clinging to memory, no dream of absolution. this precise and stunningly clear configuration of the universe, as it is right this moment, the shape of these fields, the cotton-like grasses i passed by, the warmth of the dog fur lingering in my fingers, my shadow as it is stretching now across the path, these glowing colours of autumn and i myself, my body heavy with the world that i carry inside, not simply mirroring the one outside but lending it the clarity of a soul, the singleness of a purpose, will be lost. as if they had never existed. countless mouths will still open to say evening all over the earth, yet this particular weaving of time and space and soul, which now seems to be, as i feel it, essential, perhaps indispensable to the universe, will be no longer."

while his lips are still rounded, once again giving birth to the same order of seemingly meaningless sounds which compose the same word, "evening", all over again, he notices that this thought has ceased to fill him with the absolute horror he had so often felt in his younger days. instead, he smiles quietly at the way the sun, suddenly bright yellow, seems to be caught in the black telegraph lines cutting through the red of the sky. the colours hurt for a moment, though this too might have only been a fleeting impression. then he sees a flock of crows flying low over the disappearing fields.

the man lies down in the grass. the light falls obliquely upon his chest, briefly, as if splintered. in a bush nearby, leaves rustle, for just one moment.
the crows, no longer held in sight by a gaze, fly low through the darkness.

will i cease to be,
or will i remember
beyond the world,
our last meeting together?

Izumi Shikibu

like the rustling leaves

His heart, grown cold,
has become my body’s autumn.
Many sorrowful words
may yet fall
like the rustling leaves.


Ono no Komachi
(tr. Hirshfield & Aratani)

degrees of burning and exhortation

Like a buoyant thrush
In the happy wind above young meadows,
My arms know you are light, come.

We will forget this world,
Its ills and curses and the sky,
And my blood that is quick to war,
Forget those passes mindful of shadow
In the flush of new mornings.

Where the light no longer moves a leaf,
Our dreams and troubles gone to other shores,
Where evening rests,
Come I will lead you
To the hills of gold.

Free from age, time being still,
In its lost halo
Will our sheet be.



Giuseppe Ungaretti, Where the Light
(tr. by Patrick Creagh)

degrees of absolution

experimenting: first attempt at video

View on ExposureRoom

i have played with my new Nikon D90 and now you get to suffer the consequences :-)

if you'd like to watch in high-definition, please follow the link to Exposure Room. unfortunately there are some technical problems with this upload that i haven't been able to solve, but if i don't post it today i will never decide to post it at all :-)
i and some of my friends get to see fractured lines during a couple of sequences while it appears that others have no problem whatsoever. i still haven't any explanation or solution for this, so i would like to hear what you see (except my shaky and blurred shooting, of course :-)

oh, and if you happen to be in the unlucky category (my pessimism says that this will most probably be the case) but you are also in the "stubborn"-one and still want to take a proper look at it, you can download the original from the Exposure Room site, that works perfectly.