More Complex Than You Imagine

Everything is simpler than you think and at the same time more complex than you imagine.

Goethe



Artist/Henri Matisse

Thanks Kim

Of course, you will be delighted to know that this morning you have been demonstrating a perfect example of epenthesis. That is, the insertion of a sound in the middle of a word eg. filum. Thankyou, I love it!

Artist/Pierre Bonnard

Open Wide

Such slugishness of mind. Where has poetry gone? Where introspection? Retrospection? Anything. A door, once permanently open, has slowly closed. Not fully. I am aware of a draught. All that’s left for it is to fling the door open. Provide an invitation. Stanch the flow of creativity seeping away.

Artist/Claude Monet

Year of the Cat

On a morning from a Bogart movie
In a country where they turn back time
You go strolling through the crowd like Peter Lorre
Contemplating a crime

She comes out of the sun in a silk dress running
Like a watercolour in the rain
Don't bother asking for explanations
She'll just tell you that she came
In the year of the cat

She doesn't give you time for questions
As she locks up your arm in hers
And you follow 'till your sense of which direction
Completely disappears

By the blue tiled walls near the market stalls
There's a hidden door she leads you to
These days, she says, I feel my life
Just like a river running through
The year of the cat

Well, she looks at you so cooly
And her eyes shine like the moon in the sea
She comes in incense and patchouli
So you take her, to find what's waiting inside
The year of the cat

Well, morning comes and you're still with her
And the bus and the tourists are gone
And you've thrown away the choice and lost your ticket
So you have to stay on

But the drum-beat strains of the night remain
In the rhythm of the new-born day
You know sometime you're bound to leave her
But for now you're going to stay
In the year of the cat

Al Stewart

Photographer/Liz March

Silence

We all arrive by different streets, by unequal languages, at Silence.

Pablo Neruda (from Still Another Day:XVII/Men)

Dilemma

It’s Friday
And the subject
Rears its head
As it does
Every Friday
And not without
The customary
Dilemma.

August 2001



Artist/Mary McIntyre

Carpe diem

Seize the moment.

View From the Seaward Deck

A situation perfectly designed for windless summer mornings, coffee with bread and cheeses. Late afternoon sunshine, oysters and white wine. Alternatively, a chill winter afternoon, duffel coat, olives, good beer and good company.

Artist/Tyl von Randow

From Beethoven to Ronnie Barker

Mostly revisitations:

A Fish Called Wanda
Immortal Beloved
Les Miserables
Open All Hours
Life is beautiful

Artist/Rita Angus

Time and Again

Time and again,
however well we know the landscape of love
and the little churchyard with lamenting names
and the frightfully silent ravine wherein all the others end;
time and again we go out two together,
under the old trees,
lie down again and again
between the flowers,
face to face with the sky.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Artist/Jeffrey Harris

Housekeeping

The rising of the spring stirred a serious, mystical excitement in him and made him forgetful of her. He would pick up eggshells, a bird’s wing, a jawbone, the ashy fragment of a wasp’s nest. He would peer at each of them with the most absolute attention and then put them in his pockets where he kept his jack knife and his loose change. He would peer at them as if he could read them and pocket them as if he could own them. This is death in my hand, this is ruin in my breast pocket where I keep my reading glasses. At such times he was as forgetful of her as he was of his suspenders and his Methodism. But all the same, it was then that she loved him best, as a soul all unaccompanied, like her own.

Marilynne Robinson Housekeeping

Artist/Peter Siddell

Nowhere in Africa

What a marvellous find. Nowhere in Africa is a film that stays with the viewer long after it has ended. Rich with myriad subtexts, it's main theme is the story of an upper middle class Jewish family who flee the gathering storm of Hitler's agenda. They make a new home in Kenya. Unsurprisingly, the geographical relocation results in other major shifts, both personal and relational. Based on a true story, by Stefanie Zweig, Nowhere in Africa is marked by superb performances and sensitive direction. It is a film that honestly explores the complexities of human nature and does so with an exquisite and rare delicacy.

Overwhelmed, again

Such a typical human characteristic. Directing our own frustration onto others. Especially those whose lives intersect with ours most often. And no matter how conscious we may be of this tendency it overwhelms better judgement. I simply do not believe I am alone in this. I refuse to hit myself over the head with it.

Artist/Peter Siddell (Karekare)

No Going Back

One year ago. Yet, almost like yesterday. No inkling of the path ahead. From then on in. Better not to know. So much lost. But no going back. Despite every desire to. No going back. Choice does not enter into the equation.

Artist/Jeffrey Harris

Kenya, goodbye

In those fraught moments
between staying and leaving,
breathing in that last air,
committing to heart forever
noises, smells, colours, faces,
life dares me to let go.

2006

Artist/Vyacheslav Zabelin