Linger Later
this project grew out of my notes, it grew out of everything else I do, the walks, the misunderstandings, the strange insights and reflections. it is a peculiar, personal place, filled with scenes and moments of continuity. a place of possibility. it is ongoing, continuous and self affirming.
I am interested in the particulars. The old tap shoes that I found on the street, my grandmother's shirt stained with blue green paint, the same color of the scarf that belonged to Julian. And who is Julian and did I know him, simply because we both liked to paint. Is it indulgent to imagine people’s character? Or are you extending, to see yourself again in them.
I liked that scarf because it felt like Tahiti to me, and I could picture him there painting the palm tress on a scrap of chiffon, the palms swaying in the humid air. I don't need to know the details. It is irrelevant where they went to eat, or what clothes she was wearing, or what the weather is like in Polynesia. What matters is the scarf with the painting, and the fact that it travelled now twice across the ocean and was packed and unpacked when they moved houses and I found it in Cape Town and took it home with me.
The old chair is gone. The new chair is softly orange, across the passage. It is distant, like candlelight.
You have almost forgotten what the old chair looks like. It is strange, this loosing of physical shape, how you cannot recall the appearance of his face, just his posture and his faraway eyes, a distant record, what his voice sounded like. You know it happened, only now you are trying to recall, and and morning air is harsh and bright.
The new chair has almost wiped out the memory of what was there. You can’t miss what you don’t remember, which is why I'm writing about it.
Coherency is the ultimate contradiction.
Notes on love & Serendipity
When you first discover it there is an intense joy as though everything you’ve ever wanted has become this one thing, and the white noise subside, and everything is still, vibrating. You experience your life from the outside, like a picture, framed and yet extending past you. Everything is simple, joyful. There is nothing to be done, you are just there, existing together In time.
This is luck like love. The sea in the summer lapping at the docks, the air heavy with the smell of water, the shadows draping the storefronts, walking aimlessly. The mist that comes in the morning, when you have woken early and are not expecting it. your hands open out the window, catching rain.
Venus in Cancer
For the last year I have been dreaming about seashells. It started with a box in my grandparents house in the Southern Peninsula, South of Cape Town. Small silver talismans which I began, and never finished, painting. Useless, but for a personal fascination. A friend recently did my vedic astrology, and it comes up again, venus in cancer. Lunatic, moody, always tied to place.
In January, I dreamed of seashells. Alabaster, rose toned. We were filling them with scented oils, preparing for a ritual. In April a friend shared a text with me, with an extensive list of forms of divination:
Onimancy: divination using olive oil to let objects slip through the fingers.
Lecanomancy: divination by looking at oil or jewels in water.
Perhaps the dream was a prelude to divination, a preparation for insight. Who´s to say. I have come to believe that dreams do not mean anything, or rather that they mean what you believe them to mean. In the words of Thomas Moore, ´I like to treat dreams as if they were paintings, and paintings as if they were dreams´.