Little horse

Three photos by Jonas Bendiksen

I'm reading Zona by Geoff Dyer, which is packed with quotes and references to other people's work, a bit like a David Shields book (Shields did mention Dyer in his reading at Booksmith earlier this year, something about Dyer being the more handsome of the two, which isn't true, incidentally).  The book is a must-read for fans of Stalker, delightful anyway, even if you haven't seen the film, clever, funny, and studded with lovely phrases like 'the permadepths of the present' (where the still-happening past operates in Tarkovsky's Zone-time, as in Aboriginal Dreamtime).  I'm enjoying it a lot.  Here's three images from a photographer Dyer mentions on page 75, Jonas Bendiksen.  The first is apparently Bendiksen's most famous, shot in a place I had never heard of till now, the so-called spacecraft crash zone in Kazakhstan, where space debris comes crashing to earth on a regular basis, and the bits of white fluff are apparently butterflies, though they look more like anemone seeds or dandelion clocks to me ...

 

 

 

 

Quote: Kafka

"Beyond a certain point there's no return.  That's the point that must be reached."

Quote: Albert Camus

"... a man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover through the detours of art those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened."

Quote: Pascal

"Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness."

From 'Pensees'

A reading by Frank Bidart

I've just finished reading 'Watching the Spring Festival', again.  I always go to Frank Bidart when all else fails.  How can Frank Bidart know these states of mind and still live, I ask myself?  But he does.  Maybe he wouldn't if he couldn't write them.  I feel much gratitude.

Excerpt from a poem by Frank Bidart

"You have spent your life writing tragedies for a world that does not believe in tragedy.  What is tragedy?  Everyone is born somewhere: into this body, this family, this place.  Into the mystery of your own predilections that change as you become conscious of what governs choice, but change little.  Into, in short, particularity inseparable from existence.  Each particularity, inseparable from its history, offers and denies.  There is a war between each offer you embrace and what each embrace precludes, what its acceptance denies you.  Most of us blunt and mute this war in order to survive.  In tragedy the war is lived out.  The radical given cannot be evaded or erased.  No act of intelligence or prowess or cunning or goodwill can reconcile the patrimony of the earth.

from 'Ulanova at forty-six at last dances before a camera Giselle'

Feeling