Violets and Conundrums - 13 March, 2011
13th March, Provence.
Here, re the letting go of the Cape house, is a relationship conundrum:
I dread the long goodbye
that Joel longs for.
Then I realize that:
Relationship IS conundrum!
Today was the big day of the Festival des Violettes. Freezing. Soggy with rain. The Umbrellas of Tourettes-Sur-Loup. A glimpse of the floats behind a partial open warehouse door. One can only imagine what will happen to the thousands of handmade paper violets decorating them once they enter the street. I mean we’re talking relentless downpour here. It’s too wet to take a photograph. Can you imagine? Oh, but the violet chocolate truffles!
We have found 2 things we don’t like today and changed them for the better. One of them is the television that sits in the corner of the living room, a room which is otherwise filled with consciousness. (I have an abhorence of TV sets sitting in “living” rooms.) We've had a fire going all day and I had put the firescreen down in the corner to allow the hearth to throw out more warmth on this best of Sundays.
When we finally come together in the early evening we begin again to wander through our individual thoughts fascinated by the way in which they weave in and out of each other adding to the tapestry of 20 years of excited conversation. Then suddenly I see the fire screen by the TV. I open it up and it becomes the TV screen. Perfect.
Joel just clicked the shutter of his Leica. It’s him, the tripod and the Leica and the feeling of him absorbing the image of the TV screen.
We will of course turn it on once in a while to remind ourselves that while we are living the privilege of this book commission, there is another world out there. When we flew into Nice yesterday, the Mediterranean was crashing at the edge of the airfield and I thought of Japan, where they are living in a chaos of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear leakage.
Still Sunday. Still raining. Reading "Justine" by the fire I find a sentence that could be the mission of this book:
“For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art
with all that wounded us or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny,
but to fulfill it in its true potential – the imagination”