A poignant weekly interlude... my barefoot Portuguese cleaner has been. She isn't barefoot all the time, you understand - she's a practical girl who arrives in stout boots, then leaves them in the hall to perform her duties. She speaks no English and I am not proud to admit that the only Portuguese I can manage is "welcome" and "thank you". We communicate by smiles, her money left on the kitchen worktop and her breezy "BYE", which breaks the silken silence like a finger popping a soap bubble. There's no story, really. She comes, she cleans, she goes. She cleans the apartment and she does it well. That's all there is to it. Sometimes I want to scamper after her as she goes, tracing her bare footsteps in the carpet, then get them woven in a different colour. But that would make it too permanent, too important. Even writing about it is more than it is.
Permanence... today I\'m working on a piece about Pompeii for an encyclopaedia I'm translating. It was quite a rich and privileged place, at the heart of the richest and most privileged of empires, and then one day it was gone. Everyone in it gassed and then mummified in ash, the buildings submerged in a broth of soot and mud, sunk beneath earth turned to sea and back to virgin earth. And now it's the only place in the Roman world where you can still go and read the graffiti painted on the walls, visit real Romans (if dead, their corpses frozen in paroxysms of terror) in their own homes, wander through the chambers of the local brothel admiring the erotic frescos. So (at least 1,927 years' worth of) permanence was achieved. And the price? Just those last few seconds of gasping for air and realising that there wasn' t any.
I might put permanence in the profile list of things I am not into.
"Wandel und Wechsel liebt, wer lebt\" ("Whoever lives, loves flux, loves change") - Richard Wagner, Das Rheingold
Oh; I started a blog on SuicideGirls today. But you already know that.
Permanence... today I\'m working on a piece about Pompeii for an encyclopaedia I'm translating. It was quite a rich and privileged place, at the heart of the richest and most privileged of empires, and then one day it was gone. Everyone in it gassed and then mummified in ash, the buildings submerged in a broth of soot and mud, sunk beneath earth turned to sea and back to virgin earth. And now it's the only place in the Roman world where you can still go and read the graffiti painted on the walls, visit real Romans (if dead, their corpses frozen in paroxysms of terror) in their own homes, wander through the chambers of the local brothel admiring the erotic frescos. So (at least 1,927 years' worth of) permanence was achieved. And the price? Just those last few seconds of gasping for air and realising that there wasn' t any.
I might put permanence in the profile list of things I am not into.
"Wandel und Wechsel liebt, wer lebt\" ("Whoever lives, loves flux, loves change") - Richard Wagner, Das Rheingold
Oh; I started a blog on SuicideGirls today. But you already know that.
mrginger:
Do you know of any sad and haunting solo violin compositions?
fatality:
So nice to see you back? And I'd like the answer to that ^ question, too!