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[proximoception]

Youth and middle age are squabbling over me lately. I liken them to the two visual layers of Bugs Bunny cartoons, the painted background and moving objects. You'd always know which things were going to be picked up or otherwise involved in the action because they had a black outline and solid color; they lived in the same world as the characters, bright and simple shapes though infinitely malleable. You could feel how their cellophane sheets must have shone from neighboring angles. The backgrounds, in comparison, were quite detailed, with colors fading into one another to indicate dimensionality. They were lavish and complex but utterly static and slightly washed-out, an ancient world where everything was clear and still and hopeless.

Much more offensive than the Mary Poppins-level gnosticizings of "What Dreams May Come" was its attempt at animating paintings. It was heartbreaking, really: there was just enough success, here and there among the scrambled-eggs-with-mango-jelly visuals, to wake your yearning. And then maim it by showing computer cartoons may take us little further. To know the world in its complexity without freezing it or being frozen oneself, the old dream of art, is still a discipline only certain books teach, and those imperfectly, uncertainly.

Also I have the flu.

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[proximoception.livejournal.com]

I don't speak German either. What was being said in the Elytis poem reminded me of Holderlin translations (which are entirely unlike any Greek lyrics I've been exposed to, though rather like some early poems by Goethe--all, again, in translation), especially this one:

When I was a boy
A god often rescued me
From the shouts and the rods of men
And I played among trees and flowers
Secure in their kindness
And the breezes of heaven
Were playing there too.

And as you delight
The hearts of plants
When they stretch towards you
With little strength

So you delighted the heart in me
Father Helios, and like Endymion
I was your favourite,
Moon. 0 all

You friendly
And faithful gods
I wish you could know
How my soul has loved you.

Even though when I called to you then
It was not yet with names, and you
Never named me as people do
As though they knew one another

I knew you better
Than I have ever known them.
I understood the stillness above the sky
But never the words of men.

Trees were my teachers
Melodious trees
And I learned to love
Among flowers.

I grew up in the arms of the gods.

(tr. David Constantine)