More/Less
Today, the day of less sun. I watch the sun crawl up the white walls smudged grey out my window, walls whose outer coating crumbles off more or less each year. I watch the sun breach the roof of light green speckled lichen terra-cotta tiles, until the sun volunteers no more proof and is evident as only more shadow. In summer the sun brandishes itself complete over the whole white wall; it creeps no where, it floods, its zenith is the living bright proof. Those are days of limitless benevolence.
The sky of winter is more blue. As Italo Calvino wrote on the first page of Il Sentiero dei Nidi di Ragno : la striscia di cielo azurro carico. Loaded blue sky. Blue of Tunisian key hole doors, a blue both dark and light, pure blue, the blue children color when they paint the sky. In Seville the blue was endless and edged by the white foam which was the buildings. It is the blue of less light, light sun, more blue.
The blue of summer is less and washed out. It’s like looking at blue through dirty glasses, through cast off haze, where it is almost tan-white out at the horizon. The sky tired, the sky hot. It is a pathetic blue and provides almost zero inspiration. But it is more warm and I’m a sucker for more warmth on bare skin.
I was reading two books of less interest and gave them up for a book of more. I tried to write about them unfinished and came to the conclusion that I was being ridiculous. Not that Simone Weil’s philosophy was uninteresting or uninspiring—far from it!—and not that the short stories in Down to a Sunless Sea were not compelling, I was simply given an option for more. More is the constant flame in my imagination since last year, more: John Cowper Powys. His biography arrived and drew me in like only a man of thaumaturgic urges can do. To read his life is as confounding as reading his words.
John Cowper Powys has more power to stop any insane-sane man. His eccentricities have the unusual strength of a man completely convinced of their upmost reality, apart, and solely his own.
It’s a funny picture I play at commanding, in these days of more organized eccentricities, every “alternative” community has its name, has a group and an identification, has lost every ounce of what was individuality; it is funny to picture this man standing amongst them all. There will be no genius of pages born out of this sterile environment, only more follow-the-leader “artists” and academic “creators”, more people to repeat the same thing in the same way.
More questions, less answers, more individuality, less collectivity, more mental freedom, less title calling, more more more life-illusions!
We live in world drowning in people and yet we can’t agree that life is the most important principle. This baffles me. It’s like staring at the sky of more blue and imagining the sky of less; I know that what I see is “real” and I also know that what I don’t see is as “real”. The reality of what we see and the reality of what is possible in every single human has been confused. That this world is completely out of whack is self-evident. All our hands are dirty unless you’re a saint and I doubt it. It is only individuals who can counter that stench, individuals who can dare to see that what can’t be seen and what can be seen have equally important realities.
All human beings are absolutely identical in so far as they can be thought of as consisting of a centre, which is an unquenchable desire for good, surrounded by an accretion of physical and bodily matter. —Simone Weil, An Anthology
On this day of less sun and more blue, more shadows, more low-blinding light, I’m going to make brownies and eat them while they’re hot. I’m going to go for a drive down the Braccianese to Formello. My mind is going to wander through those open spaces without and within. Less sun is as god-given as more.
· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·