R.L. Swihart's Blog, page 29

New Zealand Fantail

NZ Fantail (I thought "Helicopter Bird" but I guess for the Maori he had several long names, e.g., piwaiwaka, and was a messenger from the gods concerning life or death). This one I shot in heavy shade on Rangitoto (pest free island about a 40 minute ferry ride from Auckland), and if you don't like the flowers I'll try to post one later that I took mid-trip near Hokitika (South Island, West Coast). New Zealand: trip of a lifetime, though I told my wife if we ever go back I want to go all the way to Stewart Island. New Zealand Birds: many "lifers" (seen or "sacked"). But also nice to be back.♥️ 🪶

#rlswihart13 #newzealand #rangitotoisland #pestfree #shoescrub #summithike #newzealandfantail #helicopter #messengerofgods #lifeanddeath #nature #beauty #poetry #readmorepoetry2024♥️

Sebald: Vertigo: The Last Little Abyss

Idly I turned the pages of an India paper edition of Samuel Pepys’s diary, Everyman’s Library, 1913, which I had purchased that afternoon, and read passages at random in this 1,500-page account, until drowsiness overcame me and I found myself going over the same few lines again and again without any notion what they meant. And then I dreamed that I was walking through a mountainous terrain. A white roadway of finely crushed stone stretched far ahead and in endless hairpins went on and up through the woods and finally, at the top of the pass, led through a deep cutting across to the other side of the high range, which I recognised in my dream as the Alps. Everything I saw from up there was of the same chalky colour, a bright, glaring grey in which a myriad of quartz fragments glimmered, as if the rocks, by a force deep inside them, were being dissolved into radiant light. From my vantage-point the road continued downward, and in the distance a second range of mountains at least as lofty as the first one arose, which I feared I would not be able to cross. To my left there was a drop into truly vertiginous depths. I walked to the edge of the road, and knew that I had never gazed down into such chasms before. Not a tree was there to be seen, not a bush, not even a stunted shrub or a tussock of grass: there was nothing but ice-grey shale. The shadows of the clouds scudded across the steep slopes and through the ravines. The silence was absolute, for even the last traces of plant life, the last rustling leaf or strip of bark, were long gone, and only the stones lay unmoved upon on the ground. Into that breathless void, then, words returned to me as an echo that had almost faded away – fragments from the account of the Great Fire of London as recorded by Samuel Pepys. We saw the fire grow. It was not bright, it was a gruesome, evil, bloody flame, sweeping, before the wind, through all the City. Pigeons lay destroyed upon the pavements, in hundreds, their feathers singed and burned. A crowd of looters roams through Lincoln’s Inn. The churches, houses, the woodwork and the building stones, ablaze at once. The churchyard yews ignited, each one a lighted torch, a shower of sparks now tumbling to the ground. And Bishop Braybrook’s grave is opened up, his body disinterred. Is this the end of time? A muffled, fearful, thudding sound, moving, like waves, throughout the air. The powder house exploded. We flee onto the water. The glare around us everywhere, and yonder, before the darkened skies, in one great arc the jagged wall of fire. And, the day after, a silent rain of ashes, westward, as far as Windsor Park.

W G Sebald: Vertigo

Over the years that followed, lengthy shadows fell upon those autumn days at Riva, which, as Dr K. on occasion said to himself, had been so beautiful and so appalling, and from these shadows there gradually emerged the silhouette of a barque with masts of an inconceivable height and sails dark and hanging in folds. Three whole years it takes until the vessel, as if it were being borne across the waters, gently drifts into the little port of Riva. It berths in the early hours of the morning. A man in blue overalls comes ashore and makes fast the ropes. Behind the boatmen, two figures in dark tunics with silver buttons carry a bier upon which lies, under a large floral-patterned cover, what was clearly the body of a human being. It is Gracchus the huntsman.

Hummer from the Emerald Isle

 

Robin (Video): Huntington Central Park

 

W G Sebald: Vertigo

In De l’Amour he describes a journey he claims to have made from Bologna in the company of one Mme Gherardi, whom he sometimes refers to simply as La Ghita. La Ghita, who reappears a number of times on the periphery of Beyle’s later work, is a mysterious, not to say unearthly figure. There is reason to suspect that Beyle used her name as a cipher for various lovers such as Adèle Rebuffel, Angéline Bereyter and not least for Métilde Dembowski, and that Mme Gherardi, whose life would easily furnish a whole novel, as Beyle writes at one point, never really existed, despite all the documentary evidence, and was merely a phantom, albeit one to whom Beyle remained true for decades. It is furthermore unclear at what time in his life Beyle made the journey with Mme Gherardi, always supposing that he made it at all. However, since there is much about Lake Garda in the opening pages of the narrative, it seems probable that some of what Beyle experienced in September 1813, when he was convalescing by the lakes of upper Italy, went into his account of the journey with Mme Gherardi.

W G Sebald: The Rings of Saturn

And Sir Thomas Browne, who was the son of a silk merchant and may well have had an eye for these things, remarks in a passage of the Pseudodoxia Epidemica that I can no longer find that in the Holland of his time it was customary, in a home where there had been a death, to drape black mourning ribbons over all the mirrors and all canvasses depicting landscapes or people or the fruits of the field, so that the soul, as it left the body, would not be distracted on its final journey, either by a reflection of itself or by a last glimpse of the land now being lost for ever.

W G Sebald: The Rings of Saturn

After all, if the Temple is to create the impression of being true to life, I have to make every one of the tiny coffers on the ceilings, every one of the hundreds of columns, and every single one of the many thousands of diminutive stone blocks by hand, and paint them as well. Now, as the edges of my field of vision are beginning to darken, I sometimes wonder if I will ever finish the Temple and whether all I have done so far has not been a wretched waste of time.

W G Sebald: The Rings of Saturn

Does one follow in Hölderlin’s footsteps, simply because one’s birthday happened to fall two days after his? Is that why one is tempted time and again to cast reason aside like an old coat, to sign one’s poems and letter “your humble servant Scardanelli”, and to keep unwelcome guests who come to stare at one at arm’s length by addressing them as Your Excellency or Majesty? Does one begin to translate elegies at the age of fifteen or sixteen because one has been exiled from one’s homeland? Is it possible that later one would settle in this house in Suffolk because a water pump in the garden bears the date 1770, the year of Hölderlin’s birth? For when I heard that one of the near islands was Patmos, I greatly desired there to be lodged, and there to approach the dark grotto. And did Holderlin not dedicate his Patmos hymn to the Landgrave of Homburg, and was not Homburg also the maiden name of Mother? Across what distance in time do the elective affinities and correspondences connect? How is it that one perceives oneself in another human being, or, if not oneself, then one’s own precursor? The fact that I first passed through British customs thirty-three years after Michael, that I am now thinking of giving up reaching as he did, that I am bent over my writing in Norfolk and he in Suffolk, that we both are distrustful of our work and both suffer from an allergy to alcohol – none of these things are particularly strange. But why it was that on my first visit to Michael’s house I instantly felt as if I lived or had once lived there, in every respect precisely as he does, I cannot explain.

W G Sebald: The Rings of Saturn

I suppose it is submerged memories that give to dreams their curious air of hyper-reality. But perhaps there is something else as well, something nebulous, gauze-like, through which everything one sees in a dream seems, paradoxically, much clearer. A pond becomes a lake, a breeze becomes a storm, a handful of dust is a desert, a grain of sulphur in the blood is a volcanic inferno. What manner of theatre is it, in which we are at once playwright, actor, stage manager, scene painter and audience?