Autumn means Easter to Me ...

I’m not sure my unconscious will ever adjust to this upside-down life in the northern-hemisphere.

The leaves are changing colour and we’re waiting for our first frost which means ... it’s almost Easter.  But no, that was a New Zealand thing.  Here it’s already mid-October. although Belgium had been enjoying high temperatures as late as last week. 

I took the bike out this afternoon, needing to stretch. I took myself and my camera into the park on our beautiful day.  We’re blessed with this city park, and mostly I love it even while struggling to forget the massively busy European motorway right next door, the motorway that, if I wake in the night, sounds like a Spring tide at Tautuku, on the lower East Coast of New Zealand.

Anyway, today it was pretty.  There was a blue heron down at one of the many ponds, hanging out with the big white geese and the ducks.  The moles hills were there mocking mans efforts to tame nature too.  I love those moles ... there to remind us, surely, that we’re not quite able to tame and maintain everything out there in the natural world.

Cees Nooteboom, photography

Photography is a more intense way of “looking”. No photographer simply travels. He cannot allow himself the luxury of just looking around. He does not see landscapes; he sees photographs, images of reality as it might appear in a photograph.
Cees Nooteboom in 1982 in the Holland Herald, KLM’s in-flight magazine.

Eugenio Montale, Christy Moore and Pasta Hippo ...

I woke this morning, with ideas for my book demanding I note them down ... I gave in at 5.30am, grateful I hadn’t lost them to laziness.

This book will be full of images but I need text too.  This morning the images came marching into my mind so I got up and wrote the words for them.

Yesterday was a day spent going through all of my notes; a day spent working out the structure of the workshops I plan on offering soon ... the workshops where I see if you want to come spend time in my worlds, either via the chair where you read this, or physically come wandering.

As I do these things, new ideas come knocking on my door. 
What about this idea for a book?
Hey, where’s that manuscript ... that story you put down and forgot to pick up in your mad rush to live?
Don’t you wish you could draw ... imagine, then we could do this with that idea?.

Wednesday was a stunning day.  I had no idea it was going to be. 

It was enough when the postman delivered a parcel and I opened it to find a book titled Eugenio Montale, Collected Poems 1920-1954, a revised bilingual edition, translated and annotated by Jonathan Galasi.

I had wanted that book for research.  And it arrived unexpectedly.  Thank you, Gert.

But that wasn’t enough.  That night we had dinner at my favourite Antwerpen restaurant, Pasta Hippo.  The food was glorious, as always.  I remember I stopped going for a while.  I believe I may have run into the owner one time, if not, a staff member who was so rude, I remained offended for months however ... the food is that good. And the slightly expensive glass of Chianti I had while waiting for Gert ... it was divine.

Then to the concert of an Irish singer I had been loving forever.  I remember gifting a copy of his cd to my ex-mother-in-law, more than a few years ago.  On our recent trip from Dublin to Connemara, my first time driving in 7 years, I stopped enroute, stating that we simple MUST have a Christy Moore cd playing, as we wandered in Ireland.  It was grand.

Christy, at 60-something, is one of those musicians I could listen to for a very long time.  He’s a story-teller gifted with the loveliest voice. Individual political songs he has performed throughout his career include Mick Hanly’s ‘On the Blanket’ about the protests of republican prisoners, his own ‘Viva la Quinta Brigada’ about Irish volunteers in the Spanish Civil War and his own ‘Minds Locked Shut’ about Bloody Sunday in Derry.

Moore has endorsed a long list of left wing support causes, ranging from El Salvador to Mary Robinson in the 1990 Presidential Election.[2] At Glastonbury Festival in 2005 he sang about the Palestinian solidarity activist Rachel Corrie.

I loved his courage.  I loved his voice. It was a grand evening out, with Gert and the lovely Stephanie.  You know, if a fortune-teller had told me the story of where and when and with whom I would see Christy Moore perform live, back in those New Zealand days, I would have known that she was a charlatan ...

One never quite knows where life might take them, does one.

Wednesday was the loveliest day.  Thursday was spent hunched over my desk, I worked through into the night after dinner.

Friday ... let’s see how plays out.  There’s a plan that involves a private art viewing, a castle, and lovely friends tonight.
Note on the editing and re-editing: I started writing this about 5.30am.  Errors were made.  Now I must go and find coffee.
Have a lovely day and tot straks!

Tamim Al-Barghouti, Poet

To many the poem marked the beginning of a shift in Egypt’s political climate: it reflected much of what Al-Barghouti calls “the collective consciousness” of a new and unusually politically engaged generation. Ironically, on his deportation, the poem sealed his claim to fame.
Excerpt from an interview with poet, Tamim Al-Barghouti.

I have loved the writing of Mourid Barghouti since I first discovered his book, I Saw Ramallah. 

He is a Palestinian, a man who spent 30 years in exile, locked out of Palestine after the 1967 Six Day war ... he was studying in Egypt at the time. 

He married and had a child but was, once again, thrown into exile via deportation.  That happened the year his only son was born and so it was that for 15 years the small family could only meet on holidays.  I knew Mourid had recently published a second book, I knew it was about a return to Palestine with the son who had to grow up largely without him… today it occured to me to search for his son.

Mourid’s son has become a poet of reknown.  I found an interview with the rather stunningly talented Tamim Al-Barghouti in Ahram Weekly back in May 2005.  You might enjoy it ...

Extracted from the interview: When he wrote They asked me do you love Egypt, he explains, the poet was “in a state of terror, anger and sadness—all at the same time”. All through his life he had taken his life in Egypt “for granted”. It was “my country and I’m staying here. It is the safe place. Part of what I feel towards Palestine is identical to the way I feel about Egypt—this very romantic sentiment. But Palestine was always far, I never seen it before 1998. Palestine is the home I struggle to have, but Egypt was the home I did have. So when I was deported, I felt my relationship with Egypt was jeopardized, threatened. My presence was threatened. It was no longer the safe place, no longer a home I had.

“And I tried to capture an image of that, like taking a photo of someone you love before parting. I was taking a photo of Egypt before leaving, not knowing whether or not I would ever return. My father couldn’t return for 17 years.” A replay of that nightmare haunted him as he wrote, which also tells the love story of his West Bank-born father and Cairo-born mother. The more popular part of the poem was written during his first week “in exile”. He continued writing, he says, until the length had almost tripled, and only stopped on 9 April 2003, the day of the fall of Baghdad....

 

Uncertainty, Innovation, and the Alchemy of Fear, by Jonathan Fields

The ability to live in the question long enough for genius to emerge is a touchstone of creative success. In fact, a 2008 study published in the Journal of Creative Behavior revealed tolerance for ambiguity to be “significantly and positively related” to creativity.

I had to smile.  I believe I might just have that tolerance for ambiguity.  It’s been so much of my life ... the uncertainty of what’s next and how to go forward.  It might even be said that doing things like moving alone to Istanbul, in 2003, had a degree of seeking out that uncertainty-washed place.  Mostly it’s without realising it.  It seems to be me. 

Jonathan Fields has written an interesting article you might enjoy if you’re working as a creative person: There may, in fact, be a very thin slice of creators who arrive on the planet more able to go to and even seek out that uncertainty-washed place that destroys so many others. But, for a far greater number of high-level creators, across all fields, the ability to be okay and even invite uncertainty in the name of creating bigger, better, cooler things is trained. Sometimes with great intention, other times without even realizing it.