The night before flying ... madness

There’s this check-list that automatically unfurls like a kite in the wind on the day before flying ... my to-do list arrives at DEFCON1 and I find myself achieving at an extraordinarily high level, writes this wanderer at 23.49 on ‘the night before leaving’.

Today I unexpectedly babysat Little Miss 5, chose paint for two rooms in the new house, had 100 business cards printed for the new site, had a print made for the guy who hosted my exhibition in his brasserie, dropped it off, bought a couple of light shirts because Genova will be warm, and then returned home to some work for the NGO and yes, packing.

My packing technique has changed over time and these days everything I don’t want to lose goes into my photography backpack and is carried as hand luggage which means I usually arrive at my destination slightly broken by the weight of it all.

Camera, lenses, flash, battery charger, card reader, voice recorder, phone, charger, at least one usb cable, laptop, laptop power cable, book, wallet, glasses, comb, business cards, pen ... will the journal with the important notes and interviews fit in too?

Suitcases have been a huge learning curve during this year of intensive wandering.  I arrived in Belgium with a backpackand a big black hand luggage bag for my laptop and camera gear. Time passed without much travel however eventually I was wandering again, having updated to a wheeled suitcase, making the mistake of not having any kind of external pocket for my book, passport and wallet with the first one.  I bought a small pilot’s wheeled suitcase with outer pocket but then bought the big camera ... although last time I was in Genova, I lived out of that bag and half the available space was taken up by my equipment.  I think my Genovese neighbours might not recognise me if I’m not wearing the red or the green striped shirts with my jeans this time.

Finally a good job came along, one where they wanted to pay a photographer, I had money and found a real suitcase, one that allows me to fit in my favourite feather pillow if I want.
Oh yes, a feather pillow princess ... you didn’t guess?

So anyway, it’s ciao from this Belgian-based me who has just agreed that a 4.40am alarm would be the best idea ...

 

Orhan Pamuk, Nobel Lecture, 2006

Some extracts: A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is: when I speak of writing, what comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or literary tradition, it is a person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and alone, turns inward; amid its shadows, he builds a new world with words.

He can write poems, plays, or novels, as I do. All these differences come after the crucial task of sitting down at the table and patiently turning inwards. To write is to turn this inward gaze into words, to study the world into which that person passes when he retires into himself, and to do so with patience, obstinacy, and joy.

As I sit at my table, for days, months, years, slowly adding new words to the empty page, I feel as if I am creating a new world, as if I am bringing into being that other person inside me, in the same way someone might build a bridge or a dome, stone by stone.

The stones we writers use are words. As we hold them in our hands, sensing the ways in which each of them is connected to the others, looking at them sometimes from afar, sometimes almost caressing them with our fingers and the tips of our pens, weighing them, moving them around, year in and year out, patiently and hopefully, we create new worlds.

The writer's secret is not inspiration – for it is never clear where it comes from – it is his stubbornness, his patience. That lovely Turkish saying – to dig a well with a needle – seems to me to have been said with writers in mind.

...I believe literature to be the most valuable hoard that humanity has gathered in its quest to understand itself. Societies, tribes, and peoples grow more intelligent, richer, and more advanced as they pay attention to the troubled words of their authors, and, as we all know, the burning of books and the denigration of writers are both signals that dark and improvident times are upon us.

But literature is never just a national concern. The writer who shuts himself up in a room and first goes on a journey inside himself will, over the years, discover literature's eternal rule: he must have the artistry to tell his own stories as if they are other people's stories, and to tell other people's stories as if they were his own, for this is what literature is. But we must first travel through other peoples' stories and books.

On the way home ... in Belgium

Nina’s Ornamental blog is the place I wander to when I’m in need of that feeling I found in New Zealand.

I used to live in this funny little cottage with huge windows on the edge of a harbour, and I had a beach for each mood back in Dunedin.  And there was a creek my Labrador and I ran away to when we lived in the mountains beside Fiordland National Park.  Lake Te Anau did just as well. 

There was a tiny road that twisted and turned, taking us to a small bay in Marlborough Sounds while we lived on the Airforce Base in Blenheim, and there once was a place where the mighty Clutha River flowed into a smaller quieter side-stream and that became ‘our place’ while we were living in Cromwell ... although some days we’d throw off our responsibilities and race through the Kawara Gorge to visit the Arrow River in Arrowtown. 

My dog was a wanderer too and travelled all over New Zealand with us.  She died at 16.

I always had a special place and a dog in New Zealand.  Here, in Belgium, I miss the wild peace of home.  Just ‘being’ in Nature is far more difficult, perhaps because Nature is much less powerful by virtue of so many centuries of ‘civilisation’. 

I’m looking for a golden labrador crossbred with some kind of sheepdog because I’ve had labradors since I was 9 and the best was a crossbreed.

Meanwhile I couldn’t resist parking my bike and taking this photograph because the scenery on the way from the new house to the old apartment is nothing to sneeze at ...
Tot straks from Belgium.

Genova, Bach and I

These last few days, I’ve been trying to capture the Genova I fell in love with while staying in Italy last year ...

There was a paragraph where I tried to describe the quietly sublime beauty of a Sunday morning spent alone in that city I love.

I wrote: Sunday, my first day alone and the city is emptied for football.  Slipping and tripping through the air comes the sound of the most exquisite violin ... drifting from some open window.  Delicate notes that create this perfect sound for an afternoon spent lying on a bed, behind closed shutters, reading. I am lazy on this first day spent as a solitary creature, alone in a strange city where I know no one.

I wanted that music but stopped short of shouting from my open window to whichever neighbour was playing the music. 

I came home and forgot it about mostly, just pulling the memory out in moments peace.

Yesterday I was in FNAC, thinking I might like one book to celebrate this month’s pay cheque when I had this idea about making a fool of myself and asking about a delicate solo violin ...

The shop assistant listened and then said ‘Bach!’.

She took me over to a listening post and she was right.  If this isn’t the music I heard then it’s close enough to delight and carry me back into that place in time.

Below you can hear something of the music on the cd titled Bach 6 Solo Sonatas & Partitas, Viktoria Mullova.