Icarus over Edinburgh # 1

Blue eyed and legless

I spent around 36 hours back in Edinburgh, where I managed a lot of quality time with my Dad and even met up with some good friends and took in the Peter Doig exhibition (which was superb). And it is good to do this from time to time, break away, get away, take time away from everything else that occupies our time. At the moment I am making work for myself, applying for grants and suchlike so later I can make more work for myself - daft logic I know. Will anyone mind if I don't and instead I sit down to write something I really want to write, like 'Seven Sightings of Icarus' which is little more than a floating idea at the moment? In his poem, 'An Ageing Artist Reviews His Work' Paul Hetherington  

Dunbar Harbour

has an artist looking at one of his early pieces of work and asking, 'Did I do this?' Goodness I know how he feels. Of course the poem addresses so much more, the sentiment of which we can address for ourselves, but the 'Did I do this?' sentiment manifests itself in a, 'Can I still do this...' at least it does for me. Is that partly why I went back to Edinburgh? Nostalgia? I wish I knew because the present is so unsettling: that which I thought I knew I know not. This song was one of my mother's favourites and we, my Dad and me, listened to it leaking from a wee mackerel boat in Dunbar harbour and I helped him to wipe away a wee tear and he helped me, and the things we thought we knew we know not, except that we like Puccini...

Icarus pondering # 20

This week my Abbi returned to Oklahoma and today my boy got his University entry grades, 

oh yay, is all I need to say, 

I am losing them both,

they're both going away,

but they're still my little 'pride and joy'

Come on Stevie Ray, tell us how it goes:

Icarus pondering # 19

In the English Patient Michael Ondaatje describes the experience of reading in a way which the film never could:

She entered the story knowing she would emerge from it feeling she had been immersed in the lives of others, in plots that stretched back twenty years, her body full of sentences and moments, as if awakening from sleep with a heaviness caused by unremembered dreams.

And in a way that's not just about books but art with a  capital 'A' which of course is about film too. But in some ways its remarkable that this kind of self-referential insertion, describing the experience, is usually reserved for the written word in Art. Of course, Delueze saw the movie as an event which raised the idea that film doesn't just represent ideas but creates them with a capacity to generate concepts rather than simply reflecting them, it is a different kind of narrative (unless you have the kind of authorial intervention that Woody Allen used so playfully). Thoughtfully thinking, musing thoughtfully, here's Joni: