Cartography

Three thoughts from my personal cartographer Roberto Bolaño​ to guide me through the wilderness.

One. 

“While we are looking for the antidote or the medicine to cure us, that is, the 'new', which can only be found by plunging deep into the Unknown, we have to go on exploring sex, books, and travel, although we know that they lead us to the abyss, which, as it happens, is the only place where the antidote can be found.” 

Two.

“Probably all of us, writers and readers alike, set out into exile, or at least into a certain kind of exile, when we leave childhood behind...The immigrant, the nomad, the traveler, the sleepwalker all exist, but not the exile, since every writer becomes an exile simply by venturing into literature, and every reader becomes an exile simply by opening a book.” 

Three.

“What a sad paradox, though Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze the path into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.” 

Connections

 "You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive."

James Baldwin

 image: Stephen Somerstein 

Selma to Montgomery March, 1965

Five Views

A couple of weeks back I was invited to attend the Etonnants Voyageurs Literature Festival in Saint-Malo, a small and insanely beautiful town in the north west of France. A fortress town, once overrun by the corsairs, now overrun by awkward European tourists, was staggering and startling in the cinematic immensity of it's horizons and coastline. Here's five different perspectives from shots that I took of the spring sunsets that descended around 10pm as lovers walked off dinner and killed time before disappearing into the bedroom, as drunken friends ran around the ramparts before heading to another bar, and as photographers stalked and lingered for the light to leave its final traces.

Reality

"A week later, López Azcárate hanged himself from a tree and the news ran through the university like a terrified, fleet-footed animal. And when I heard the news it left me shrunken and shivering, but also amazed, because although it was bad news, without a doubt, the worst, it was also, in a way, exhilarating, as if reality were whispering in your ear: I can still do great things; I can still take you by surprise, you silly girl, you and everyone else; I can still move heaven and earth for love."

Roberto Bolaño, Amuleto