The Hammock Papers: This.

27 October 2019

This.

An OCTOBER ASTONISHMENT

When I touched the yellow maple leaves
They entered me
Without my knowing

This morning after I’d picked them
I had their gold sweetness
In my veins

It was after holding them in my hands
Upon my skin
In the slant light dewy morning
Plunging my nose deep in amongst them
Wet and cold, snuffling
The autumn scent
Suffused into air and me

My eyes fixed on their open hands
Veined like mine
My fingers traced their fingers

Crimson stems in my palms
Conduits through which shape
And substance entered —
Mapleness
Only vaguely I sensed
Some ephemeral
Sap entering me

This morning, after
In my own bed I woke
Bathed full and swimming in yellow light
That hovers in and around
Smooth maple branches in late October
On crisp mornings

I’d fondled the seeds, too,
Fuzzy winged pods
Full of imperceptible roots
Bark and limbs
A million invisible leaves
I’d given handfuls to the waiting children
They went twirling
Whirling through the sky
Eager, alive with mapleness
Maybe for this

I woke that morning
Wholly content, pierced through
Astounded in my bed, wrapped
In the warm light
Of maples

Garth Gilchrist

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WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell."

MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."

DAN CAMPBELL