art

early morning reading: unease

…first I myself must find the right pattern, my own pattern

“4 July. [1941]. I am full of unease, a strange, infernal agitation, which might be productive if only I knew what to do with it. A ‘creative’ unease. Not of the body – not even a dozen passionate nights of love could assuage it. It is almost a ‘sacred’ unease. ‘Oh God, take me into Your great hands and turn me into Your instrument, let me write.’ This all came about because of red-haired Lenie and philosophical Joop. S. reached straight into their hearts with his analysis, but I still think people can’t be reduced to psychological formulate, that only the artist can render human beings down to their last irrational elements.

“I don’t know how to settle down to my writing. Everything is still much too chaotic and I lack self-confidence, or perhaps the urgent need to speak out. I am still waiting for things to come out and find form of their own accord. But first I myself must find the right pattern, my own pattern.”

cited: Trans: Arno Pomerans, An Interrupted Life The Diary of Etty Hillesum 1941-1943. pg. 26

a shell of a thing came to be

The storm came one night, you see

The thunder came and fell the tree.

Falling, falling became the tree.

And a shell of a thing came to be.

A small shell of a thing, you see

Flying high above the sea.

There is no alighting upon the sea, you see

For a shell of a thing above the sea.

Searching, searching for her tree

That fell the night she became to be.

Weary, tired – flying, flying above the sea

Wishing for all to see.

Oh how brave, how marvelous she is to be!

As she flies so high above the sea!

Blind to their eyes, she is to be.

Wings flying, trying so hard to be,

Above the torment of the sea.

For there is no rest above the sea.

Only the falling, falling tree, you see.

fading vision II

It is an in between time — stepping through the doorway that separates sleep and wakefulness — when one has a sense of self shifting betwixt roles. The observer of and actor within a movie which randomly muses through moments past or re-creates imagined eras. 

abstract street photography

The awareness of self as an observer and/or director, speaks to me of an inner knowing of something that is vague, immense, and has a Will separate from the unconscious actor “me.”  Let us name this in-between time, Chaos.

Chaos manifested in the beginning.  Within her void, time slumbered in undifferentiated fusion with all the elements, potentials, and seeds of sentience.  Yet, some say that Chaos was born from Mist and that Mist was the first to exist.  

Mist is symbolic of things indeterminate, or the fusing together of the elements of air and water, and the inevitable absorbing of the outlines of each aspect and each particular phase of the evolution process.