A quiet place.
I sometimes work in various people’s homes as a tutor, so I can’t show you those places. But most of the time I work at home. I run a household and I translate. At the table on the deck out the back I translate passages by hand, and then at the desk at the front of the house, I type it up. In the first stage, I need four items: a French novel, a French-English dictionary, a pad and a pen. When I’m working at the outside table, this is what it looks like:
Rodin’s Burghers of Calais (Les Bourgeois de Calais, Auguste Rodin, 1889) in the Sculpture Garden at the National Gallery of Australia here in Canberra is my absolute all-time favourite sculpture. For me, the burghers can make a bad day better. And a good day ticklish.
I sometimes come to the sculpture garden just to sit and write. Behind these gum trees there’s a lake and beneath them are bushes where blue fairy wrens jump and scrummage on the ground around the benches. Magic. I stop at Rodin’s burghers on every visit and think about the action and life he sculpted into inanimate rock. This is not ‘still life’ like most sculpture. I love that about the French.
This photo was taken a few winters ago.
I remember the moment I saw this verse in a calligrapher’s studio. Some friends were, at that period, busy making money, buying possessions and reading books about getting rich. The verse made complete sense and I bought a framed version immediately. Recently, a German calligrapher, a pen friend, asked me to send him a handwritten verse, so I picked this one to write out for him. Here’s my practice version of what I sent:
I have over the years tried to teach myself to read music, play the guitar and the piano. I can never remember what the written musical notes mean, I hate hitting wrong keys or plucking the wrong string, I hate my incompetency. Neither my brain nor my fingers want to do it and I refuse to try again. Yet, blessed beyond my dreams, I have sons who can play pieces like Beethoven’s Sonata Quasi una Fantasia, which I more easily remember as Moonlight Sonata.
Here’s Luke at his piano yesterday:
I received a few gifts on the weekend. One of them was this candle holder from one of my sons. The candle is also new. I took several shots of it burning: lights on, lights off, flash on, flash off, a compact digital camera, a larger DSLR. This photo is with the latter, lights on, flash off. I couldn’t hold the small camera steady enough and ended up with blurry candles. The DSLR shutter was quicker so the image isn’t bad.
The candle was about twice this height when I began shooting it…
8th Feb – A neighbour working on an old Jag removed the muffler and took it for a test drive. He roared it round a corner where a woman was pushing a pram. She jumped back a few feet.
9th Feb – I drove in a storm today for the first time in years. Doesn’t rain much here.
10th Feb – A friend who does no gardening, not even pot plants, showed me four full buckets of peaches from trees in her back yard.
11th Feb – Driving from Queanbeyan to the coast, there’s a strip of several kilometres where people nail teddy bears and other stuffed toys to trees. It’s hard to stop for photos because it’s a highway, but I did capture one crucified teddy:
12th Feb – My son who has no cameras who is engaged to a photographer with many cameras gave me for my birthday a disposable camera.
So many of the photos we took on the weekend are studies in blue. This one shows that blue does not always mean down. When you’re beside blue water, under a blue sky, in front of a blue lamp post, and it’s your birthday, blue means up.
Today’s theme is a curious one for me. We don’t use the word closet in Australia except to speak of someone with secret habits. We store our clothes in a wardrobe. Since I’m at the beach for the weekend and I have no access to mine, I thought of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and that magical piece of furniture that one can step through to find a land of dreams and terrors. If I could step through my clothes and the back of my wardrobe, I would come out into this land:
I was walking here this afternoon. It was about 5 pm and the sun had finally shone for the first time today. The water clarity and temperature, the warmth of the sun after yet another cool summer day (global cooling), the absence of people, the eternal rolling of the waves; all of it is perfect. These beaches on the south coast of New South Wales make me VERY happy.
3rd Feb: My son and his fiancée just ordered their wedding rings from a country in the other hemisphere. The new way of shopping. I’m still getting my head around this.
4th Feb: When leaving to walk the dog, the couple in the Housing flats called out: ‘How are ya?’ This is the first time any of the tenants have voluntarily spoken to me.
5th Feb: Bought an antique chair for my son’s fiancée. I saw swirls etched into the seat, but she showed me they were hearts.
6th Feb: I just bought fabric from a country in the other hemisphere. Never say never.
7th Feb: Translating a passage about a dying abbot, I paused for a moment to search for a song online for background music, and found several covers done by Amy Winehouse. I wouldn’t have let her into my personal space, but when I played her version of Billie Holiday’s ‘There is no greater love’ all the grimness of the abbot’s death was forgotten. I never learn to never say never.