A shell on a table

*

 A shell on a table

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A blue bouncing ball; a mug's game

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A blue bouncing ball

 

This was bought a few days back in from a vending machine at the ice cream parlour (perhaps to use the word parlour to describe this humble shop is to engage in flattery rather, but it is so evocative that couldn't resist it). 

You put in a 1 Real coin in a little slot, then turn a handle, and a ball, the specifics of which you have no choice over, gently tumbles down a spiral chute to a little shuttered container where you pick it up.

I had rather hoped for a marbled one, but I can't complain: that blue is the purest deepest most delectable Matisse. The ball had, and still has to a lesser degree, an exquisite smell, utterly intoxicating. It also bounces incredibly well.

 I did offer J. one, but he refused, somewhat churlishly, I felt.

*

I began to mess with this in the photo-editor but in the end left it more or less as it came out of the camera. Part of me feels uncomfortable about editing, as if photography should have some rules relating to truthfulness. 

For me, in part, this means that if editing is done that should be apparent, plainly declared in the final piece. There is a responsibility in the artist to be honest. This idea is analogous to that in western theatre design, which eschews illusionism and magic trickery.

This idea derives somewhere from the notion that: truth + goodness +beauty = art. 

But I happily accept that finding proof of these qualities in specific artworks is a mug's game.

*

Inspiration, concision

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Flowers

 

 Mostly when I write best I write quite fast, about a thing. Or I tell a story with a very A to Z narrative. Or I just describe things or places or experiences.

 I think the weaker stuff I do involves analysis of  a culture or history and indeed that is why I do very little of it. I am not much of a researcher as I'm too easily distracted.

And I don't care enough about facts anyway. I had, as a child, when relating an event to my parents the tendency to exaggerate incidents at school, and my parents would cross-examine me to discover that really I was melodramatising for sympathy or attention. Getting a reaction was more important than truth. It probably still is, which is why it is best that I focus on trivia or fiction.

My mode of writing is based largely on inspiration, a sudden electrical charge. Or a sense of fun. It's a commonplace that a lot of ideas come when the mind is relaxed and one is engaged in some other, usually undemanding, activity such as bathing, walking to a shop, or driving on a quiet road, and this is often the case for me. 

The ideas that come in those moments are rich or curious, and its always a good idea to note them down. 

I usually write in two stages. The first is exhalation  -brainstorming- when I write down with a minimum of equivocation  the things I want to say. Then usually I wait a few days to return to this with another mental set and greater objectivity for the second stage. This is a sifting and/or embellishment stage. Occasionally there are additional digressive thoughts which I add to the main narrative.

I find having an image to anchor the piece very useful and I like the possibility that the image sets up alternative narrative chains in the readers mind which they can contrast to mine.

I try to write short pieces. Concision is a virtue in art. 

 I'm suspicious of big works of art in all forms. It's rare that they have been properly edited and thus usually contain repetitions, verbosity and sloppy craftsmanship. 

Moreover, bigness in art implies and suggest megalomania on the part of their makers or patrons. Double albums almost always contain filler tracks. Proust needs editing. Let's  not talk about Wagner.

 The cathedrals of England are fabulous exceptions to this rule. 

*

Pink spoon on a blue background

*

Pink spoon on a blue background

The pink spoon was in a rack in one of the local ice cream places, which I went to with J. 

We agreed that it was the best ice-cream place so far that we had been to, because of the ice-cream itself, although the flavour range is more limited as is the choice of weird sweets, condiments and syrups.

I had a forest fruit ice-cream scoop and one with mint and chocolate in a cone. The forest fruits flavours are glorious- a little sweet but a little acidic too. Wow! The mint chocolate is utterly amazing, the taste sophisticated like an discreet corner of Kensington, and the colour is divine, a visual victory. 

However, the combination was not ideal, the mint chocolate rather overwhelming the forest fruits. I think the solution is either to choose more complementary flavours or to add at least a mini scoop of vanilla as this might act as neutral bridge between contrasting flavours.

J., in the meantime, had found a plastic bowl and in it built a chocolate ice-cream hill from a phenomenal number of scoops. He said he had to try all the different chocolate flavours. He bent over the bowl and, shovelling , ate uninterrupted for thirty minutes to finish.

Anyway, this spoon is one of a sort you can take from a  rack- it`s in a little cellophane envelope, which also contains a serviette, folded very neatly and almost useless. 

Next time I`ll get a spoon in another colour- there are yellows and blues, and maybe even a green. I very much liked the bubble-gum pink, it seemed so fifties, so utterly unselfconscious.

*

Butterfly

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Butterfly

*

 

Sleeping dog

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Sleeping dog, Canasvieiras

 *

Temos sorvete

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Temos sorvete, Canasvieieras

"We have icecream..."

* 

Fallen flower

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Fallen flower

*

 

The broken pipe

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The broken pipe

Once I was travelling in a distant place where you hear rustling sounds in the trees at night, or occasionally a weird knocking or a cackle. 

 I arrived in a frontier town of whitewashed buildings. They held a market in a small square beside the bus station, where they sold foodstuffs on one side and used car parts, household items or toys on the other. 

There was a boy in the town and he had a pipe which he blew. When he blew, there came music that weaved in and out like a deer running between trees or sometimes like a kite soaring above and sometimes like a child giggling helplessly. When you heard the music at first you felt very still and then you might sway to the melody and you felt very kind and humble. 

The boy stood on a stool in the market near the sellers and played and people gathered.

They were first very still then they swayed with the melody and then some began a low humming. When the boy stopped and came down from the stool the people went and helped each other mainly with rather banal tasks like fixing dripping taps and sewing on missing buttons or sweeping kitchens.

I approached the boy. "That is quite incredible". He looked squarely at me, holding out the pipe. "Do you want it?" I said, "It is astonishing, I would love it." "Take it", said the boy." "But how much do I pay you?" I asked.  He said, "Don't pay me. Tomorrow take the train across the border and play in in the village on the other side."

 I said, "Is that all?"

 "That's all." he said, "Good luck.".

 I didn't know what he meant by that, but instead of finding out I replied, "And what about, you will you never play again?"  He said " I'll find another pipe." 

 --------------

Later, I went out on my hotel balcony to test the pipe and down below people in the night filled square were sweetened and began to embrace. 

-----

The following day, as the boy had instructed, I took the train from a collapsing station to the next country. I hadn't thought much about the next country.

After trundling at a walking pace for a few hours through woodland,  the train  stopped at a clearing where there was just a platform with a trestle table and a hut. A group of customs offers dressed in khaki with serious faces came on board the train.  There was an apprehensive atmosphere in the compartment.

An officer approached me. "Passport," he said. He carefully examined each page. Still with the passport, he said, "Come with me. Take your bag". I followed him to a table on the platform where another officer now waited. I put my bag on the table as they requested. "Open your bag," said one. I  opened it: at the top was the pipe, wrapped in a t-shirt. 

 He took the bundle and unwrapped it. He put the pipe to one side. He took the others things from the bag: clothes, toiletries, a novel, and some trinkets, and placed them in another pile.

 "You can enter the country but you can't  bring this", he told me quietly, almost indifferently." Why is that?" I asked. "Music is not permitted", he said, sternly this time. I said, "Can't I play in my hotel?" He replied," We have rules in our country. Music is not permitted."

 Then he took a walkie talkie form his belt and presently a senior officer appeared from the hut and came across: the two officers turned from the table to greet him. The first officer gave him my passport and they began an exchange.

 I sensed my moment and reached down and took the pipe and began to blow. The officers  span round.

 I had managed to get a few notes out but the music hadn't changed their stern expressions and they did not sway or embrace or sweeten or set off to perform mundane domestic tasks for their neighbours.

 The senior officer stepped forward, grabbing the pipe from my hands. He broke it across his knee. He put the pieces smartly on the table. 

"We have rules in this country," he said. 

He handed me back my passport and I continued, pointlessly, to the village.

*

Read to the River Writers` Group in February, 2021

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Empty place, Canasvieiras

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Empty place, Canasvieiras

Again, I like the squareness and spareness of everything. It`s all is so exact,  as if transcribed directly from a drawing board: hard edges,  no mediation.

You could never escape. I wonder if, at prescribed hours, men in orange circulate in that yard smoking cigarettes., forming huddles.

But is there even anyone inside? I feel lonely just looking at it. 

However, I feel the loneliness is good for me. It's  unsentimental and improving like so many uncomfortable things: I  grew up in Scotland, land of unsweetened porridge.

*

 

Fish

*

Fish

The fish  hurtle forwards, furiously.

They follow the contours of the bowl  and within moments are back where they started. Round and round they go. 

"This is madness", you cry, but the other fish hear only the sound of the water rushing past their ears as they move ever forwards in never-ending circles.

*

Peg; monuments

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Peg

This is one of a few wooden items that sits on my desk, ostensibly to perform a function (usually clamping surfaces being glued) but really to play with. 

The agreeable aspects of this peg are:

 The dry texture of the wood.  The way the surface is smooth but almost threatens not to be. The peg is pale, still clean, vulnerable to tarnish.

The way the peg is slightly larger than usual pegs. It is more solid. It declares itself.

The way the spring holds the two parts together. Its asymmetry.

The open and closing action. This uncomplex action is sufficient to keep me occupied, idiotically, for minutes at a time, mainly with testing the pressure of the spring on my thumb. 

Its unfussy, utterly practical, design.

 There is an monumental Claes Oldenburg peg, (Clothespin, 1976) in Philadelphia . But I feel it is in the close physical connection with a clothes peg that understanding of peggishness is better conveyed.

 I have a lot of issues with monuments and monumental sculpture. My main objection being to the way they impose meanings with so little equivocation, so crudely.  

You can respond, saying that Oldenburg is playing with this, attempting to subvert the traditional subject narratives of public monuments., with their grand historical themes and cast of important characters.  Nonetheless, however the argumentation, his work remains is a big object which viewers have no control over, and cannot ignore.

*

Canasvieiras, lodging house

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Canasvieiras, lodging house

What attracts me about this, and many of the buildings in its vicinity, is its uncompromising rectangularity. This accords so satisfactorily with the grid plan of the streets around it. Was it built by the military?

In addition, I like, despite the blank square practicality of it all, how lives led here have left their traces, mysteriously floating  in the air. 

The wretched, Tom Waitsian mood fascinates me. I`ve always been drawn to slummy, collapsing places.

In despair lies a story, and with a story comes a moral, or at least a punchline...never could stand that dog*

That green colour is very nice too.

*Tom Waits, Franks Wild Years, 1987

*

Pyramid

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Pyramid

These enchanting gems were bought in Beiramar mall at a stall near the bookshop. I bought them , furtively: they seemed such a wanton luxury, and I didn't permit myself to open the bag in the street but waited until I had made to my car thence all the way back to Trindade and up my stairs and through the door to open the bag and deliriously pop the sweetie into its rightful home... 

And I can declare without equivocation  that they are magnificent, their platonic geometry so pleasingly contradictory in the rounded wet cushioned cavern of the mouth. It's a huge pleasure to feel their edges soften, and the rough sugar surface  melt into smooth salival syrup: intoxicating. 

 The sugar encrusting, so blatant, so bling, suggests the most decadent moments of the 1920s- very Gatsby- as are those wonderful Deco colours.

They are surely the most jewel-like of our sweets so far, and the most suggestive of mystical transportation. 

*

Shadow on a bedroom wall

*

Shadow in a bedroom, Canasvieiras

I sleep in this room. I've slept here now for two weeks. But I've yet to recall any dream. 

Do you think the dreams you have are connected to the former inhabitants of the places in which you are sleeping? 

Perhaps I do. The idea needn't be mystical. It could be that the changes they made to the place impart an atmosphere or make suggestions to your unconscious mind. So, for instance, the marks on a door, the wear on a floor or how a window has a tiny crack tell a story of how they lived, and this story might unconsciously influence you and your dreams.

When, for the first time,  I entered this place with the estate agent I immediately felt a neutrality about it, as if there was nothing to be cleared away: a spiritual blandness, which would make it easy for me to own and occupy. i thought, I can live here. Other places had a density, history.

 In previous lives, I wanted a sense of a past in the places I live. But now I seem to be in another phase and I want newness, lightness, ease.  I feel this place, this new place is some how free from, or even bereft of, ghosts. I dream less than I used to.

Nowadays I want to die into sleep with no moment to think on the pillow. So I stay up and listen to music until I am certain to be tired. I listen to jazz and sometimes classical but nothing too pompous or neurotic. I often go for simple melancholy singers like Bryan Ferry or Nat King Cole.

 I do nothing but listen, with low lighting. 

I am very keen on experiencing single sense activities, so my concentration is as much as possible on one thing. Partly this idea is relates to avoiding wastefulness, and because of respect for the music. It seems wasteful to play music and not listen. Yes, I know that`s an eccentric, even foolish notion, but I can`t escape it. And partly, single sense listening is just about  more complete immersion in the sounds.

*

 

Cortes 20.00

*

Cortes 20.00, Canasvieiras

 I like the black and white photographs of the barbered. The effect is rather punk: there is indeed a mohican in the top right corner. But I do wonder if the punk aesthetic is intentional. I rather doubt it. Punk and Florianopolis really don't combine. Punk is too engaged. Everything here is so laid back.

 I haven`t been to this barber`s and I don`t know if I dare.

 I passed a barber shop here which has just one chair, as if it should really be in a huge city like New York, beside a subway station, to serve hurried commuters.

*

My coming to live here did not seem willed. It was more as if I were waved by a giant invisible hand, or pulled by a gigantic magnet. 

Coming here to live was my Covid 19 thing: a response to the sense Covid 19 gave me that I 'd be in Brazil for the rest of my life, and should find a place of my own and settle my my differences with the country. It made me accept the idea of having a home- something which I had always resisted. 

*

Broken chair, Canasvieiras

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Broken chair, Canasvieiras

This chair and table have been here for at least two weeks. 

The last time I passed the chair had toppled over entirely but, perhaps as a drunk will carefully be returned to his seat by his drinking companions having fallen over, it has since been righted -so far as is possible given its strange, lopsided condition.

Exactly how two of the chair`s legs ended up shorter than the others is a puzzle. The sitter would have to be remarkably obese to achieve this, and skillful besides, given the how the two legs snapped to the same length.

Canasvieiras is full of things like this. I am not sure why. But as this is where I now live they are likely to feature here with some frequency.

*