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Anselm Kiefer at La Ribaute, Barjac
I am cycling from Vallon-Pont-D’Arc, the village at the head of the Ardèche Gorge, remembering the Ardèche trout I ate last night, accompanied by a pichet of too much/just the right amount of white wine, outdoors, in the excellent company of a cosmopolitan Austrian couple, retired, who come here each year, towards the village of…
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Swans on the River.
I don’t know where they came from.I saw the last one arrive, descending with an easy parachute grace, its great wings cupping the air as its splayed feet touched the water, entered it, so that it landed with barely a splash. It folded its wings, settled with the others, afloat.There are twelve, dazzling as light,…
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The Chauvet Cave : Into Prehistory.
Cycling up the tree-clad Ardeche valley, as the motor-cyclists speed past around the many curves (this is a tourist road, opened in 1960), canted over, hanging their lives out over hundred-metre drops, depending on the adhesion of a few square inches of rubber, I am imagining the painters of the Chauvet Cave watching the passing…
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William Blake & The Art School Ball, 1966.
p40 Dionysos’ Island. ‘On the day of the Arts Ball I read The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.It is impossible to convey the effect of reading that firework-box of statement and contradiction, directness and ambiguity, celebration and subversion, all carried along on a juggernaut of certainty. Line after incandescent line of it could be the…
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Jacks, Bob Dylan, and ‘One Song Jukebox Number 1.’ 1971.
p78. Dionysos’ Island. ‘On the overnight train down the length of Italy we take down the luggage and Simon and I use the netting racks as hammocks, leaving more sleeping space for the others. I look down at Jacks sleeping, sprawled and open-mouthed, then I’m rocked to sleep. I wake to a red dawn, the…
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Australia
Claude Levi-Strauss and approaching the Red Centre I “Exploration is not so much a covering of surface distance as a study in depth: a fleeting episode, a fragment of landscape, or a remark overheard may provide the only means of understanding and interpreting areas which would otherwise remain barren of meaning.” Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, p56…
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Leaving Naxos, 1970. Pages from ‘Dionysos’ Island’.
p379I plunged inside the vibrating drum of music, the thudding rhythmic bass shaking the floor, screaming guitar notes bending the walls, the drum kit smashing the air into glittering fragments. Sensory overload in which my bones, emptied by leaping, now filled with pulsing, coloured mercury, my body, hollowed out by activity and strung with resonant…
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