D.C. In terms of mind and body, I suppose Imaginative Reading and between shades of display, for me, very much the imposition of the female body upon mind, emotion, artistic sensibility, intellect ... and daily life. And they both speak of displacements of time and space. And I know we've left the discussion of medium versus content, but in both these pieces you brought to the surface an array of signifying possibilities surrounding the words and images. Those possibilities were always there, but by pushing them forward, you made the resultant NEW texts shimmer.Playing with the texts foregrounded the NEWness of textual presentation able to be made with new media, but it was not the NEWness that was important for me. Literature has always leapt about the page in my mind: it has always inspired fires and waterfalls, sound and smell. That is why I've always loved it. I suppose it's the same for images: whether digital, painted, or any other medium, including what can be called the "real world". The sea, trees and fires.
R.P. It's interesting that you talk of fires, the word "flames" comes from the latin for fascination. It's that feeling of looking into flames that I'm starting to search for in those recent video pieces.
D.C. What is the Latin for "flames"? I really like the video pieces. I'll not write into them until I've done some more work on current projects. And I think you may want those pieces for your own work. Songs of Chaos was very "flamey" for me. I could write about flames there, perhaps. I think I will.
R.P. Re: the Latin for "flames", I'm trying to find the quote again: I should take notes as I'm reading things on the first read. I think the Songs Chaos was actually a collage of flames. The image is a bit old, I've sort of left that type of image making behind me. I like the title more than the image.
D.C. Yes, but if I play with it a bit, you may find something that leads to something else. It's interesting for the collaborative process anyway. I think "& you" was amazing in terms of personal geography. The initial poem began as an attempt to find a safe place in the Universe of imagination. I would visit that place many times in meditation and dreams before writing about it. And now it's lead to another fictive space: "the tea-story" which is a new short story I've written. And after all my playing with what you'd done, you came up with a sublime piece. Your sublime piece might have arrived anyway, but who knows? Maybe those arid environs: ie. those which didn't seem to be working, needed to be visited in order to arrive at the "finished" "&you". And the bits of the old "& you" may go somewhere later, who knows?
R.P. Yes it might. But please don't be to attached to the image in Songs of Chaos, or the flames. What I'm thinking about is more about the act of watching flames. The way that your mind and body because part of the heat and movement.
D.C. Okay. I'll light a fire and contemplate! Your block with image-making was I think particularly linked to the text of "& you" because the sequence of the poem is so intensely personal. I don't think you owned it. Perhaps you couldn't, in a way. Maybe you just needed to give me a few images and say do something with these: weave them into "& you". The images could be quite disparate.
R:P Yes you are right, it's sort of interesting. I see the blue image and circle almost as what you are talking about, but you then personally travel off to a different place, it's a place that I can't go. I can't visualize it because it's not part of my feelings of peace and harmony.
D.C. Can you write about your perception of peace and harmony. Or can you give me some images and some keywords?
R.P.
That's a moving target. Sorry, But things like
D.C.
Walking, wind, blue. Ahhh. This is from The Vivisectorby Patrick
White, a book about a painter, based loosely on Francis Bacon, Sidney Nolan
and others, but with a main character: Hurtle Duffield, an artist ...
"All his life he had been reaching towards
this vertiginous blue without truly visualizing, till lying on the pavement
he was dazzled not so much by a colour as a longstanding secret relationship."
And from our favourite: Rimbaud:
At last, O happiness, O reason, I removed
from the sky the blue that is black, and I lived like a spark of gold
of pure light. From joy I took an expression as buffoonish and strange
as possible: It is found again! What? Eternity. It is the sea mixed With
the sun.
And from White's _Riders in the Chariot_ :
[t]here was that old jacaranda, which
they had lopped back before its season of blue, perhaps for the very purpose
of preventing it. But, although deformed and angular in its present state,
the painter was made to visualize the divine tree in its intensity of
blue, wrapped in shawls of it, standing in pools of it ... Then Blue reached
down, and yanked the Jew up ... So, in his mind, [Alf] loaded with panegyric
blue the tree from which the women, and the young man His disciple, were
lowering their Lord. And the flowers of the tree lay at its roots in pools
of deepening blue.
Another blue?
["blue" was the first name
given to "between shades of"]
R.P. Oh God. I'm not quite sure where to start. I'll do some drawings soon. Another blue would be great. The one that even explores the different types of blues that exist.
D.C. They're your input: they make the piece more Robin. Travels Towards, had stuff you were working on to begin with. It was your Tempest stuff combined with my poetry. "& you" is too tilted my way, perhaps.
R:P: Travel into the stick or fish piece if you want to. I would be interested to hear what your words about them are. I've just spent a few days writing about them.
D.C. Okay. Now that I've seen them on a large screen, in darkness, I have started on Tension Lullaby. It visits various geographies of emotion.
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