"Where shall the weary rest? When shall the lonely of heart come home? What doors are open for the wanderer? And which of us shall find his father, know his face, and in what place, and in what time, and in what land? Where? Where the weary of heart can abide for ever, where the weary of wandering can find peace, where the tumult, the fever, and the fret shall be for ever stilled.
Who owns the earth? Did we want the earth that we should wander on it? Did we need the earth that we were never still upon it? Whoever needs the earth shall have the earth: he shall be still upon it, he shall rest within a little place, he shall dwell in one small room for ever. Did he feel the need of a thousand tongues that he sought thus through the moil and horror of a thousand furious streets? He shall need a tongue no longer, he shall need no tongue for silence and the earth: he shall speak no word through the rooted lips, the snake's cold eye will peer for him through sockets of the brain, there will be no cry out of the heart where wells the wine …The dead tongue withers and the dead heart rots, blind mouths crawl tunnels through the buried flesh, but the earth will endure for ever; hair grows like April on the buried breast and from the sockets of the brain the death flowers grow and will not perish, O flower of love whose strong lips drink downward into death, in all things far and fleeting, enchantress of our twenty thousand days, the brain will madden and the heart be twisted, broken by her kiss, but glory, glory, glory, she remains: Immortal love, alone and aching in the wilderness, we cried to you: You were not absent from our loneliness."
Thomas Wolfe, Of Time And The River
SoHotRightNow (May):
Charlotte Gainsbourg / The Operation
Star You Star Me / Sweet Thing
The Shins / One By One All Day
Bloc Party / Like Eating Glass
Christel Alsos / Still
The Whitest Boy Alive / Burning
Van She / Kelly
Cornelius / Omstart
Jori Hulkkonen feat. Jerry Valuri / Lo-Fiction
Peter, Björn & John / Young Folks
Teddybears STHLM / Little Stereo
The Hives / Main Offender
The Strokes / 12:51
I Want You So Hard (Boys Bad News) / Eagles of Death Metal
READ:
Richard Dawkins / The God Delusion
Umberto Eco / The Island Of The Day Before
Tom Wolfe / The Bonfire Of The Vanities
Aldous Huxley / Brave New World
Edgar Allan Poe / Selected Writings
Thomas Wolfe / Of Time And The River
---Curse Of The Meridian---
It seems ceaseless sometimes, this Australian escapade. Comparable to an exhaling breath in slow motion, all I have to report is that we are still here, still up-rooted, still fixed upon this subcontinent as the hemispheres revolve and the seasons turn to favour northern shores once more. How fitting then, as we here in Melbourne have enjoyed a frivolous and vivacious summer, now watch it flutter across the seas eastward over the meridian and then north, how fitting to imagine that it now tiptoes into glacier-moulded inlets, whisks across thawing fields, warrens through bourgeoning valleys until it finally vapors under your doors, still with dew on its eyelashes, carried transversely from where its was waved goodbye priorly, suppressing a giggle as it slowly slinks into your beds as you lay dormant on the verge of a new day and lies impatiently next to your ears, lingering to announce that spring, finally, is coming.
These words are carefully chosen, almost forced; willed keystrokes that have been suppressed by hazy days now are being penned, because, as I will testify to you my friends, it is not laziness that has provoked a sustained drought in my correspondence, au contraire! It is much more so the other way around. Summer entices above all the visual senses, and as zenith approaches circa mid-day, this desire to express one's self through prose, through recorded thought upon paper (or indeed in digitized form), is constricted. Try if you will, on the commencing of a bluebird giorno, as the breeze beckons you to seek relief among the waves, the sand, the bottled water bottle lying in wait in the freezer, to sit down and articulate, to fix and fasten your thoughts in structured outline when the very fleeting and ephemeral nature of the season, the very splendour of the day in conjunction with your other senses, manipulates your attentiveness towards a more hedonistic and effervescent use of the remaining hours that by now is whizzing past your temples. Couldn't I, you may ask, have written this sooner? Well, in a way I did.
My phrasing, as a matter of fact, is the result of a recent purchase. Melbourne and its' surrounds is blessed by a number of establishments that deal in secondary goods, one of which is literature. And so, our modest household is now home to a number of new inhabitants that, although corporeally deceased, are alive through the legacy of their written word. And now, as my esteemed company stares back at me from the bookshelf, I should hasten to disclose that my wording, although antiquated of styling, is far from lacking in its' motifs. "Being modern is just being old-fashioned, but quicker." Oscar Wilde had a way of saying things. But I digress.
Had you all, as I have far from moderately insinuated (through a link to my digitised photo-album in every electronic update that tickles your in-box now and again), followed the pictures that I have been steadfastly and devotedly been uploading, you would have followed the events as they have unfolded on this remote continent. Hundreds and hundreds of frames, frozen moments that singularly or accumulatively tell our story, of my darling and I, stylised through the careful and intricate, sometimes impulsive, harmony of aperture and shutter-speed, and expressing beyond any mediocre prose I can conjure up in electronic correspondence (and more economically and more poetically) the Zeitgeist, the very essence of our existence as the days accrue down under.
It is only now, when the pangs of summer are but a reminiscence, that the words - dormant under the sheets of the conscience - spring to life. As a consequence, I have saved you from the vile and crude jabber of my premature rambling. As one wouldn't dream to open a bottle of vintage wine before its prime, nor shall my words be ejaculated upon the screen before the words are ready, so that no notes are left sour and the contrasts are there to be nuanced upon the palates of your thoughts.
There have been events, mind you. My girth and beard are not growing because I am a human tree. But, for now I will rest my correspondence with the notion that we are in sound mind and spirit, overstretched at times and nostalgic at times, but harmonious.
Piacere
Jon-Eric
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