Places

 Posted by at 9:47 am  IN Conversation, OVER and BEYOND  Comments Off
Oct 262007
 

Places on the face of the earth. Places in our being. Symbolic places. Mythical places. Emblamatic places. Places of thought. Places of spirit.

Three places:

Britain, this misty isle we live on.

Mitteleuropa.

The borderlands with Asia, what we call the Middle East.

Hybrid Brokenness

 Posted by at 7:44 pm  Atelier, IN Conversation  Comments Off
Oct 182007
 

He’s right about super…vision, especially for the two of us who walk mostly with our eyes fixed firmly on the ground. – "Watch out there!" one of us says to the other.

The other day we were walking in the city together not far from those dead spaces that surround railway stations, you know,  fireweeds bursting out of heaps of rubbish, boarded up and decaying Victorian buildings, that kind of thing. – "Georg Baselitz", I said, "and his paintings of men with unzipped flies and their penises showing. He said he was first inspired by one of Brendan Behan’s more drunken performances of his poetry".

My fingers  began trying out my trouser zip. – "Watch out there!" the other one says.

Baselitz changed his name to that of his home which he had left behind in East Germany. That would make me Max Overton, which I somehow prefer as a writer’s name to my own, also being the name of the home I left behind in The East Midlands. For a life of wandering, in literature somewhere between the life of an artist and that of a pilgrim. But mostly a clown’s. Wasn’t there once a clown called Max Overton? – I am sure there was – Who one day when he was about the age of seven ran off to join the circus.

mmj

Super . . . vision

 Posted by at 9:12 pm  Atelier, IN Conversation, OVER and BEYOND  Comments Off
Oct 112007
 

There’s a need I can identify as a need to be watched over. It might be similar to being looked after but it is significantly different. The difference between being a child and being an adult. And, of course, there are all the spaces in between those two states.

Some of the time I can’t see what I’m doing. It’s like writing, I’m writing and I can’t quite see what it is I’m getting at or I know what I’m getting at (at least I believe that I do) but later discover, either when somebody points it out to me or I see it for myself, what else I was saying through a piece of writing.

To some degree I have to be able to watch over myself bu nobody is to be trusted absolutely; we are all flawed, partial sorts of creatures. We need watching.

Of course, I might well resent this surveillance. I might well hope that this surveillance has my best interests at heart and won’t be used to persecute me.

Like being looked after, being watched over is a species of being loved. But with more space. More freedom.

And some of the time I’ll be looking in the wrong direction.

Reason Number 15 ak

 Posted by at 7:39 pm  Atelier  Comments Off
Oct 042007
 

We are given, as a foundation, a dynamic integrity. Any sense of security may only be a passing illusion. Self trembles in the face of Reality or Truth. We know we are on to something when we start trembling.