The sun has grown heavy with age and prefers most days now to travel across the sky instead of rising into it. More frequent are its failures to burn through the haze, which it has turned a melancholy shade of violet. In skies swollen with resignation it has become a daytime moon. The ghosts of sailboats hover in thick mists that linger on the sea. And once expectant gazes have hushed to sleepy reveries.
Monday September 25, 2006
What is the horizon? The furthest point visible at which the sky meets the earth or the sea. What is the furthest point when one is inside? What are the limits of the apprehendable from within a room, a house or a city?
That most fragmented space, in flight when one loses sight of the earth and the horizon consists of the sky upon itself, the nowhereness matched by the jerking of time moving forward and backward simultaneously. Yet somehow from this ambiguity one emerges somewhere that is fixed to the earth and to a constant clock. It’s like the non-space of the cinema where one goes to leave their bodies and its horizons behind for a few moments—so completely apart form this world for the sake of another.
I’ve always found the moments just after a film has ended to be some of the most excruciating. The transition is a shock and one is thrust out and back without the chance for a proper good-bye. And then left with the task of reconciling this reality to that one with out the least understanding of how to begin.
Monday September 18, 2006
In America we are collectively so self-conscious that the only acceptable attitude is apathy. Enthusiasm is too risky. It’s like being the only one dressed up on Halloween.
One can photograph Paris in black and white without sacrificing any of its substance and perhaps make an even truer representation of the city. Not so Helsinki. This city of pastel houses under crystal blue skies in the shimmering water begs to be captured in color. She wears grey with the steely solemnity of a diplomat; brooding and serious but always with a luminous horizon. Her sparkling blues and sunny yellows are always crisp and fresh. Her greens are of neither sea nor earth, but of legends read from painted books in wooden rooms by northern light. From the forests come her reds, where sanguine berries grow in brambles under huge and rusty trees. Her white is almost silver descending from the leaves and bark of birches that dance over fecund bogs of earthen black that seem to swallow up the light.
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