TRAVEL DIARY

A weblog regularly updated by Jodi Rose.

Wednesday, August 8, 2007

6:01 PM
Posted by jodi rose

Spent a few hours in my favourite library cafe getting over the not-entirely unexpected shock of rejection number seven. Still stings though. Trying not to take it all personally, this doesn't mean you're a bad artist or unworthwhile person. It's only a matter of faith.

Had to take my own book, as theirs are, reasonably enough - all in Spanish. Yo La Tengo drifting through the background gave a dreamy quality to the otherwise unremarkable afternoon. Reading 'a home at the end of the world' (michael cunningham) writing so starkly intimate and beautiful, it completely immerses you in his world and lends itself to melancholy. The preface poem takes my breath away every time.

'The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain

There it was, word for word,
The poem that took the place of a mountain.

He breathed in its oxygen,
Even when the book lay turned in the dust of his table.

It reminded him how he had needed
A place to go in his own direction,

How he had recomposed the pines,
Shifted the rocks and picked his way among clouds,

For the outlook that would be right,
Where he would be complete in an unexplained completion:

The exact rock where his inexactnesses
Would discover, at last, the view toward which they had edged,

Where he could lie and, gazing down at the sea,
Recognize his unique and solitary home.'

Wallace Stevens

I am receiving fragments from my dislocated various homes,
missives in envelopes wrapped up in pixels, each on another curving hook that tugs at my heart. Pulling me back, but where? Exactly?
The many inexactnesses of having no clear forward motion are slowly catching up with me. I am constantly displaced, negotiating disorientation. Like one of those hyperactive people who can never sit still, need always to be fidgeting, the dust barely settles around their feet before they spring up again, pacing, urgent, unquiet. I was never like that. I could sit in one place and day dream for hours. It's on a macro-scale this has taken hold. In the tiny moments I am still.

This morning I had to leave the house early, for reasons too bourgeois to mention. Found myself wandering up to the nearest cathedral - Santa Lucia - to visit the geese. I love their walled garden in the centre of the ancient hewn stone arches. Strolled down La Ramblas and was drawn into an exhibition by the name 'silencio cartografias' in the barcelona cultural insitute. The empty landscapes had a stark compelling quiet, and it wasn't until halfway through that I read the information and realised they were all the sites of concentration camps during the Franco years. A male voice intoned Spanish names over video of lonely forests and low stone walls, sometimes one or two and other building to a murmured intensity - these are the unmarked mass graves. The visceral horror of scenes in Pan's Labyrinth came to mind, and made a queasy contrast to the brightly coloured produce and throngs of tourists on the other side of the glass in the boqueria market. Following the hill down through el raval district, I passed a mariners bar with curvy working girl checking her makeup on the corner, then an entire street of hookers and rentboys, leaning comfortably against the walls in their morning chatter. A young Pakistani boy tried to befriend me, he was gentle and sweet, but on asking 'so will you be my friend now' after our two minute introduction, I just couldn't leap that gap of culture and convention.

Slept intermittently through an insane thunderstorm last night, the windows rattled and even the walls seemed to be shaking in response to the vibrations across the heavens. Flashes of lucidity about bridges and the architecture of love, notes waiting to be turned and sifted into something luminous, a river stone from raw words.

'The song says let's be happy, so I was happy. It only makes me sad... Where I belong, where I belong' sing Yo La Tengo.