And *my yes to all that, Alison

Fellini gets very well that one moment among many, and therefore
potentially all moments among their many, as being NOW - in Satyricon, at
the end, when the speaker becomes a mosaic seen from another time, that's
the most wonderful imaginative transition

I felt myself getting spotty with time as the ferry pulled into the quay at
St Mary's Scilly last March - dustbin smells, diesel, a mass of flies... and
noise and foulmouth chatter... all after a few calm hours on the Atlantic;
it was shocking, but something else worked within me

There was only smashed beauty there if beauty is held to be untramelled
nature; but what I took to it in my head tilted the angle of my perception,
a tendency that one can refine by practice so I was half way up the main
street before I separated the phenomenal for realtime processing

I am taken with the idea of reverse transcendance. I was thinking of it
just now as sonic feedback which can seem to generate sound from nowhere, as
we can feel sometimes that we are in touch with something outside ourselves
when we are highly organising what we have within us

L

----- Original Message -----
From: "Alison Croggon" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: 28 May 2002 02:59
Subject: Re: Poetry


| Yes...
|
| Coincidentally, I am rereading AL Rowse's _A Cornish Childhood_,
| which I haven't read since I was about 15. Tregonissy is where I
| lived as a child between four and six years old (and was the name of
| our house), and my first school was Carclaze primary school, so it's
| all very evocative for me; and more, it's forcing me to reflect what
| a typically Cornish life pattern I have had, being the daughter of a
| miner, born when he was working on the gold mines in South Africa,
| and how even born as late as I was, I am a displaced and forgetful
| member of that diaspora of Cousin Jacks, as my father, good graduate
| of the Camborne School of Mines as he is, still calls his Cornish
| mining friends. But to return to the point, I like Rowse's
| description of his first sense of aesthetic experience as a child:
|
| "I remember well the peculiar purity of the blue sky seen through the
| white clusters of apple-blossom in spring. I remember being
| moon-struck looking at it one morning early on my way to school. It
| meant something for me; what, I couldn't say. It gave me an unease
| of heart...
|
| "In that very moment it seemed that time stood still, that for a
| moment time was held up and one saw experience as through a rift
| across the flow of it, a shaft into the universe. But what gave such
| poignancy to the experience was that, in the very same moment as one
| felt time standing still, one knew at the back of one's mind, or with
| another part of it, that it was moving inexorably on, carrying onself
| and life with it. So that the acuity of the experience, the reason
| why it moved one so profoundly, was that at bottom it was a protest
| of the personality against the realisation of its final extinction."
|
| I guess the sentimentality occurs when this acute sense of mortality
| blurs into mere nostalgia. I agree with Nietzsche that nostalgia is
| a deathly thing. These sorts of experiences for me have always been
| so intensely about the present; in a way, the total reverse of
| transcendent (I am open to the idea that might end up being the same
| thing): a realisation of my physical actuality in time and place; and
| they have so often occurred to me in unlikely places. The glitter of
| moonlight on a most unromantic tarmacadam bridge across the Merri
| Creek, where the trees trail plastic bags as souvenirs from the
| previous winter's floodline, is one; or the view across the
| industrial Western suburbs from its few vantage points in certain
| light (it is always about light for me) have done that. And art that
| does it for me has often been attacked by others for its ugliness.
|
| Best
|
| Alison
| --
|
| "The only real revolt is the revolt against war."
| Albert Camus
|
| Alison Croggon
| Home page
| http://www.users.bigpond.com/acroggon/
|
| Masthead Online
| http://au.geocities.com/masthead_2/
|