The Hammock Papers: Spice.

29 October 2023

Spice.

Kurt remembers ...

There have always been so many leaves that you can push them aside for a while but never hope to eliminate the crunchy walk to the house. Down the drive or across the wooden pathway dad built years ago.

The walnuts on the ground are mostly open and add a spice to the air. A walnut tree came down in the summer and I’ve been grabbing bits of it to burn in the fireplace.

The front door makes the exact sound it made 40 years ago when I would try to sneak in or out. No chance of stealth with the squeak of the brass handle and release from the cedar jam.

I remember, too.

The winding road to the top of the hill, though the house sat just below its crest. Trees were everywhere. Indoors, outdoors, the smell was the same ... the scent of woods. Sweet balsam on nearly imperceptible breezes that carried a perfume that I've always searched for and tried to artificially replicate. Impossible.

Bachelard wrote of infinity in The Poetics of Space ...

These trees are magnificent, but even more magnificent is the sublime and moving space between them, as though with their growth it too increased. Daydream transports the dreamer outside the immediate world to a world that bears the mark of infinity.

1 comment:

Ray Visotski said...: Unlike so many in today’s society, Kurt has not squandered his inheritance. He learned the lessons his father taught him and he continues to teach his children and is now planting seeds for his grandchildren. The world needs more men like Kurt Harden.; October 30, 2023 at 5:59 AM

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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