Captain Williams and three of his men arrive on Mars and walk into the closest town, knocking on doors and announcing their arrival but are surprised and saddened to discover that no one seems impressed at what they believe to be a momentous event, travelling from Earth to Mars by rocket
My memory of Hitchcock dates back to the 60s, when I was a schoolboy in Lagos. We had taken possession of our first TV, a Sanyo, in a mahogany box. Everyone else that we knew had a Grundig TV, a box with a walnut finish. That was a time when American series were taking over from British fare on Nigerian TV. We watched the likes of Hitchcock Hour, The Twilight Zone, and incomprehensible comedies such as Sergeant Bilko, Lucille Ball Show and so on. The American accents seemed more normal, somehow more euphonious compared to what we heard on Z cars, and Steptoe & Son.
He was born born Emil Cioran in 1911, in a small Transylvanian village, Rasinari. He moved to Paris in 1937 and died there in 1995. He was a Romanian philosopher and essayist who was known for his pessimistic and nihilistic perspectives.
My boredom resembles a repeated and mysterious interruption of the electric current inside a house: at one moment everything is clear and obvious- here are armchairs, over there are sofas, beyond our cupboards, side tables, pictures, curtains, carpets, windows, doors; a moment later there is nothing but darkness and an empty void.
In Marguerite Yourcenar’s (1903-1987) Oriental Tales, there is a story “Aphrodissia, The Widow” which deals with the problem of secret grief, that is secret because the source, the relationship with the lost object is a secret but also forbidden.
‘…In that Empire, the craft of Cartography attained such Perfection that the Map of a Single province covered the space of an entire City, and the Map of the Empire itself an entire Province’
Always to be attentive to the mundane and ordinary and to question what silence and style are denoting. It is the attentiveness, that initially is exhausting, that eventually comes to be automatic and constantly switched on.
Reading Alejandra Pizarnick (1936-1972) is like standing by the drystone wall leading towards Hardcastle Craggs from Hebden Bridge in the darkening evening, just before Crimsworth Terrace. And looking up the valley, a valley draped in mist, a subdued greyness like a gauze hanging there with the surreal shadows of the hills, just about visible. And then, looking at oneself, a dense pith of darkness, there and not there, again just barely visible. That is what her poetry is like, all mist and shadows, slippery yet sharp as a knife edge, grazing against the sky, sometimes brushing the sky and at other times kissing it.
At this time of the year, usually, I would join J in Hebden Bridge. The walk from the station would take me up the hill towards Hardcastle Craggs winding upwards, skirting past the bowl of Hebden Bridge and then snaking towards Peckett Well, before turning to the slip road aiming for Midgehole. In late April…
The Via Dolorosa, the way of suffering, runs 600 metres from the Antonia Fortress to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and is believed to be the route that Jesus walked on the way to his crucifixion. There are today, nine Stations of the Cross. I am thinking of this today as we approach Easter,…
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