Une ange a vingt-cinq ans

Someone, someday is going to account for the persistent derivation of some of our sublimest sights and readings, from the southernmost parts of France. 

Such delicacy of concen-tration, acuity of dis-cretion. Limpid, lambent, eloquent. Some modern-day Henry Miller, navigating his way down the Dordogne to embark for an appoint-ment with a colossus, will weigh up, delivered from his hurry by descent of silence. 

Last week we learned that Fanny Cavin was celebrat-ing her 25th birthday with the online opening of her atelier of hand-wrought porcelains.

Good news for the spirit was good news for the table. Especially sweet for apples. Why would it not be called, Halo?

Logotypes & table©
Les contours du silence

One degree of latitude divides San Francisco

from Charlottesville, Virginia

This beach will remain empty

for more slate-coloured dawns

of lines the surf continually

erases with its sponge,

and someone else will come
from the still-sleeping house,
a coffee-mug warming his palm
as my body once cupped yours,






to memorise this passage
of a salt-sipping tern,
like when some line on a page
is loved, and it's hard to turn.

Derek Walcott
To Norline
  The Arkansas Testament
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1987©


Les contours du silence


Garrett Neff

Foraging, I sometimes pause

As Homer more than anticipated, sometimes the chronicle of mortal destruction, brooking no reluctance, encounters a caesura as the thread is milled from the mind, and we know this pause within his original acoustic, or on the apostolic page, as an experience of texture. We have recalled his efficiency, of going in above the clavicle, without addressing his dialogues at spear's point. Intimate, implacably more moving than the lamentations which pile up in their wake, they are macro-photographs of acute cognition of depth, the greatest burden recital has ever had to bear. 

 






























Macrophotograph
Fanny, Les contours du silence

Stairs I'd climb any day

running the stadium steps -

bloggers on their birthday

get to choose their field

Daniel's

His

David's

Fanny's

with JJr

Ours

Shoju's

PGT's

Ivan's

BL's

Tassos'

Theirs

Valéry's

"Jour cotonneux"

I have quoted from this blog entry from mid-October, before, with a photograph of a kitchen whisk. This address presents a page of the most sustained textural sense known to me in works of this kind. That focus or disposition naturally extends to colour and contrast as textural variables in imagery, often macro-photographic. These variables are given the imaginative name, "les contours," and are consistently selected for their evocation of "silence." 

I read in French haltingly now, so long estranged from phrases overheard in the kitchen in childhood and sung in Christmas carols, before several years of academic study. To this day I naïvely associate the sounds of this language with agreable textures, almost of reticence, scintillatingly acute as its rhetoric becomes at any moment. These disabilities of mine inevitably attach me to the blog in yet another illegitimate way, of arousing expectations. But they are met.

This extraordinary blog conserves, by inhabiting, a perfectly marvelously distinctive place - a mode beyond style, an almost pristine antipode to vanity. As Advent looms, its many lurid windows to expose, we'll take some shelter here for certain. We'll listen through our language, and own its debt to France.

i-iii, Les contours du silence
iv, Thibault Oberlin


JS Bach
Capriccio, Arioso, BWV 992
Wilhelm Kempff
Deutsche Grammophon, 1993©

Illuminations

The fishmonger exults that his day is done, the runoff from his stall already percolating to ground, reflections in the stucco walls behind him lending luminance to grime and weightlessness to cascades of escape. Only the photographer's infamous indulgence of sepia and multiple lights mediates against empathy for the sight.

Extravagance of sepia emerges as a coincidence of endless urban illumination in a Terestchenko photograph from today, highlights of the cauldron drawing us in rather than repelling, the upward gaze engulfed by narratives particularised by fenestration and commingled in the sky. 

The purity of cream in the calyx of a whisk at ease.










Apartments, Ivan Terestchenko
Whisk, Les contours du silence