Category: Awareness
-
The Gap
[This was written some days ago, in a dark mood… a mood partly generated by some of my experiences this last trip to Zürich; not because anything bad actually happened, but instead because of the combination of wrestling with certain concepts, and also working my way through unexpectly painful exercises where I wrote about things…
-
Late; sleepy
As we veer away from the full moon… and the weather returns to the dim gray rainy quality it's had so much for the past weeks. A sense of impending complication, entanglement, or loss; of ventures foundering, of things not going… well, as planned. As though the entire idea of planning things, of trying to…
-
Light
Is it Vermeer, or perhaps Caravaggio, who is called the best painter of faces glowing from candlelight?… Candles are rarely used at night these days… but as I walk across the darkened apartment on a moonless night, an iPad shines up, showing me the way, illuminating the room. And Montaigne is on the page facing…
-
Dislocation
I have had about a day and a half of being really enraged – by an e-mail that felt like a dismissive insult, and from someone that matters to me… and at the same time still getting work done: finishing off that paper on figures of death and transcendence. Today we met for our usual…
-
… double vision…
It is years since I've seen this… A few days ago I got the DVD of the 1993 film Fearless, with its brilliant combination of the easy-going, handsome yet immensely skilled Jeff Bridges, and endlessly eerie/existentialist Australian director Peter Weir… and of course Rosie Perez and Isabella Rossellini, who also become very important to you…
-
Sturgeon’s Law
Various versions of this law appear in different places, including different final words… Ted Sturgeon's version was something like, "nine-tenths of everything is crap". Or crud, or inessential, or… well you pick. Having lately bought some books online, without seeing them first, I am feeling the sting of this tragically universal law. And if you…
-
Balance
Almost too faint, too evanescent, to write about – You know how it is, when you go through a day, or more, on what seems a different pattern: today was busy, one thing after another. Up early for the delivery man to pick up my passport renewal, rapidly reworking lists of compositions for an article…
-
Moon
On this night after the full moon… I didn't do much that was useful today; papers and needed actions were before me on the table, but I hardly touched them. Instead I read vaguely, drifted past screens… glowing electronic screens of course, not the rice paper screens of Heian-kyo, but the effect is not dissimilar.…
-
Retrospect
I continue to be slightly… what? – unclear, disoriented, mildly frustrated? – about my previous post, about my feelings on Christmas night. There was a lucid sense of time and the year, of eternity and life and death, of change as perfect and inevitable. And, quite honestly – and this is rare for me –…
-
This Christmas night
A quiet night. Before Christmas, there was a pleasant trip up to Morpeth to see Merrie and Bennett – my gift from them turned out to be not only their own elderberry jelly, but one of Bennett's newly turned bowls, a beautiful and sensual piece of work in greens and golds. He hasn't been doing…
Paul Attinello 