In the dark

Illustration to go with last post (vaguely).

A friend of mine once confessed to flashing a camera into his eyes for the pleasure of it. As we head towards shorter days I find myself trying to get as much sunshine into my eyes as possible. I love squinting through almost shut eyes and seeing rainbows sparkling on my eyelashes.

Goethe asking for mehr licht! on his deathbed comes to mind. Light as consciousness. A torch shining on a blackboard. Is it coincidence that PJ Harvey’s latest album is called White Chalk?

We only shine the torch when we feel like it because “human kind cannot bear very much reality”.

I was translating a speech containing the French equivalent of "Homo sum, humani nil a me alienum puto", or "I am human, nothing that is human is alien to me" from Publius Terentius Afer (now there’s a name!).

The French source read “as the philosopher said” and I felt this was inadequate so I looked up the precise source. But the idea of letting the grass grow in order to be able to write (paint, sing…) I attributed to Walt Whitman without being able to give the source. I was 'sure' it was he but couldn’t pinpoint it – no wonder, I probably “pinched” it from one of the sites of our friendly commentor adfero affero (“bearer of news”).

Thinking about light reminded me of dialogue 8. I decided to put it online. While I was working on that, a small book fell on my head out of a cupboard – it was not a place I keep books normally. Beckett. Soubresauts (Stirrings still).

The inside cover says Paris Dec 4th 1989 in my writing. I don’t remember anything about it. I flick it open and read the first page.

“Car éteinte sa lumière à lui il ne restait pas pour autant dans le noir. Il lui venait alors de l’unique haute fenêtre un semblant de lumière”.

“semblant de lumière” is “kind of light” in the English version. Laura Cerrato suggests that when he translated his own text from one language to the other he was actually getting closer to the original.