Der grüne Zaun

“The old Kent Road was very crowded on Thursday, the eleventh of October 1928. People spilt off the pavement. There were women with shopping bags. Children ran out. There were sales at drapers’ shops. Streets widened and narrowed. Long vistas steadily shrunk together. Here was a market. Here a funeral. Here a procession with banners upon which was written “Ra – Un”, but what else? Meat was very red. Butchers stood at the door. Women almost had their heels sliced off. Amor Vin- that was over a porch. A woman looked out of a bedroom window, profoundly contemplative, and very still. Applejohn and Applebed, Undert-. Nothing could be seen whole or read from start to finish. What was seen begun – like two friends starting to meet each other across the street – was never seen ended. After twenty minutes the body and mind were like scraps of torn paper tumbling from a sack and, indeed, the process of motoring fast out of London so much resembles the chopping up small of identity which precedes unconsciousness and perhaps death itself that it is an open question in what sense Orlando can be said to have existed at the present moment. Indeed we should have given her over for a person entirely disassembled were it not that here, at last, one green screen was held out on the right, against which the little bits of paper fell more slowly; and then another was held out on the left so that one could see the separate scraps now turning over by themselves in the air; and then green screens were held continuously on either side, so that her mind regained the illusion of holding things within itself and she saw a cottage, a farmyard and four cows, all precisely life-size.”

Orlando, Virginia Woolf. Pg. 151-152, Wordsworth Classics.

ort

 

Alles (Asturias)

 

“When you travel a lot, and when you love to just wander around and get lost, you can end up in the strangest spots. . . . I don’t know, it must be some sort of built-in radar that often directs me to places that are strangely quiet, or quietly strange.”

Wim Wenders, Places, strange and quiet.

Alles (Asturias)

 

Alles (Asturias)

 

La modernidad es lo transitorio, lo fugitivo, lo contingente, la mitad del arte, cuya otra mitad es lo eterno y lo inmutable. Ha habido una modernidad para cada pintor antiguo; la mayor parte de los hermosos retratos que nos quedan de tiempos anteriores están vestidos con trajes de su época. Son perfectamente armoniosos, porque el traje, el peinado e incluso el gesto, la mirada y la sonrisa (cada época tiene su porte, su mirada y su sonrisa) forman un todo de una completa vitalidad. Este elemento transitorio, fugitivo, cuyas metamorfosis son tan frecuentes, no tienen el derecho de despreciado o de prescindir de él. Suprimiéndolo, caen forzosamente en el vacío de una belleza abstracta e indefinible, como la de la única mujer antes del primer pecado.

Charles Baudelaire, El pintor de la vida moderna.

 

Alles (Asturias)

 

Alles (Asturias)

 

Sobre Alles escribió José Saro y Rojas en 1886: “Es Alles de lo más delicioso de Peñamellera Alta; frondosos castañedos, extensos praderíos, maizales vigorosos, acusan un suelo rico y feraz y deleitan la vista con la belleza inimitable del paisaje. Sorprende al viajero en aquellas soledades su hermosa iglesia, acaso la más bella de la zona oriental de Asturias, con una torre tan ligera y gallarda que es el encanto de cuantos la contemplan”.