The Wasteland

"Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidiin ampulla pendere,  

et cum illi pueri dicerent:Σιβυλλα τι θελεις; respondebat illa: αποθανειν θελω.
(...)

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

         (...)"

   - T.S Eliot -The Wasteland -

Pencil on Paper

*

  For the full poem read by Eliot himself:

                                            

*

"...at noon at the edge of the field"

" 'Down from our heads veils fell,' said Rhoda, ' We clasped the flowers with their green leaves rustling in garlands.'
' We changed, we became unrecognisable,' said Louis. 'Exposed to all these different lights, what we had in us (for we are all so different) came intermittently. in violent patches, spaced by blank voids, to the surface as if some acid had dropped unequally on the plate'"

The Waves - Virginia Woolf  

Pencil on paper

*

"It is an illusion that we were ever alive,
Lived in the houses of mothers, arranged ourselves
By our own motions in a freedom of air.

Regard the freedom of seventy years ago.
It is no longer air. The houses still stand,
Though they are rigid in rigid emptiness.

Even our shadows, their shadows, no longer remain.
The lives these lived in the mind are at an end.
They never were…..The sounds of the guitar"

I. Seventy Years Later - Wallace Stevens

                   

Check out Erased Tapes Label, this is their wonderful new contribution. 

On paper it leaves

"Recalling a piercing voice in old dreams
And ghostly images of black trains
Now seeing every page is turned away
I wanted to own your portrait
Wanted to have it

You and your scribbled paper makes me shiver so"

Little Dragon - Scribbled paper

Pencil on paper. Image inspired by Shaun Tan's "Eric"

                                        



                                           

********

More to come

*

Trails

“So that’s how we live our lives. No matter how deep and fatal the loss, no matter how important the thing that's stolen from us - that's snatched right out of our hands - even if we are left completely changed, with only the outer layer of skin from before, we continue to play out our lives this way, in silence. We draw ever nearer to the end of our allotted span of time, bidding it farewell as it trails off behind. Repeating, often adroitly, the endless deeds of the everyday. Leaving behind a feeling of insurmountable emptiness...


Maybe, in some distant place, everything is already, quietly, lost.
Or at least there exists a silent place where everything can disappear, melting together in a single, overlapping figure. And as we live our lives we discover - drawing toward us the thin threads attached to each - what has been lost. I closed my eyes and tried to bring to mind as many beautiful lost things as I could. Drawing them closer, holding on to them. Knowing all the while that their lives are fleeting.”

― Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart

Medium - pencil and GIMP

     

"I did not mean to shout, Just drive,
Just get us out, dead or alive.
The road's too long to mention —
Lord, it's something to see! —
laid down by the
Good Intentions Paving Company,
all the way to the thing
we've been playing at, darling.
I can see that you're wearing
your staying-hat, darling.

For the time being, all is well.
Won't you love me a spell?
This is blindness, beyond all conceiving,
while behind us, the road is leaving,
and leaving, and falling back
like a rope gone slack."

- Joanna Newsom - 

*

BERLINO Wants YOU to...

"How enduring, how we need durability.

The sky before sunrise is soaked with light.

Rosy color tints buildings, bridges, and the Seine.

I was here when she, with whom I walk, wasn’t born yet

And the cities on a distant plan stood intact

Before they rose in the air with the dust of sepulchral brick

And the people who live there didn’t know.

Only this moment at dawn is real to me.

The bygone lives are like my own past life, uncertain.

I cast a spell on the city asking it to last." 

At Dawn - Czeslaw Milosz

Pencil on paper

*

1. 
   

Deep is the web of the city. ("when I came into this land, I did not understand...")

Fusion Dancer

""The sky is blue" he said "the grass is green". Looking up, he saw that, on the contrary, the sky is like the veils which a thousand Madonnas have let fall from their hair; and the grass fleets and darkens like a flight of girls fleeing the embraces of hairy satyrs from enchanted woods."

WOOLF , VIRGINIA - Orlando

(Medium: Colored pencil, charcoal pencil and gimp. Form inspired by Man Ray's Chevelures)

Lizzara&Tatsch - Trompa (Alle Farben Remix) by Alle Farben

*

Anything We Want

*

In Memoriam Calculus

Poetry in the cracks, in the abysmal crevices

that stitched up the hours of those days

(My father is dying)

Let me make you some tea!

6 minutes to boil the water

3 to brew the leaves 

10 sips per cup

5 cups per pot

These things I could count

The crystals loosening in

the longest lake of the North

Each water molecule can have

4 hydrogen bonds by

delocalized electrons

I can hear them click together

As they tumble and sink in

to the petroleum dark water

their 104º angles hum at 

liquid 4ºC density

These things I could measure

The polar sun smearing

its long caress of blue

and gold along the horizon

I know the secrets when Light 

holds 590nm at the side of 474

and don't knead the dough too hard! 

Saccharomyces happily swimming 

in a little squeeze of syrup 

3 cups of flour to 

1 cup of water

These things I could weigh

But recounting, I couldn’t escape the elongated hours

The tea leaves disintegrate

The bonds paused

The light froze 

The Infinitesimal Integration of my Grief

The tangent endlessly bending

To the dictatorship of O

My love, my ambiguity infinitely bowing

To the totalitarianism of death

(The nurses report solidifying on the receiver. The wooden dock plunging out into the lake, the chains heavy on the planks. The tin foil holding samples in the lab as I looked at the phone lying on the table.

Waiting, waiting for the call that would give an answer to my Integral) 

Oil on canvas, GIMP

The Boats - The Days We Didn't Spend by Fluid Radio


O! (I do feel like Mr Bloom)

Ben Woods Taking Small Steps Pt.1 by nidhalskywalker

*

(A tribute to the days I know must have been between the 4th and 8th of May 2011 - And a thank-you to those faces that kept me sane, Maria, Anna, Beni and Ulrich among others)


*