Still Life (2024)
Inkjet and Watercolor on Hanji Paper.
♥ ♥ ♥

Casa de Lava, house of lava, I remember watching it, but I didn't remember it, it was anew again. Mariana is so beautiful, she doesn't belong there, but there is no one one waiting for her in Lisbon. The black sand, the black soil, make you all the more aware of her white flesh. I remember loving the film - it's an easy film to love, every shot is perfect, every cut is perfect, the bits of music are perfect, you are transported somewhere utterly Other, and you see beauty in a world of pain, but it is also a world of love, but it is also a world of death, but it is also a world of life.

"We ought to die as children and be born old," says an old man. He plays a fiddle. His sons call music a cruel master. They say they're leaving for Lisbon to labor, to be laborers. At the end they leave. The old man says Mariana's heart is wounded, that it speaks with sadness. They speak Creole on the island. Lovers speak their own language, it's foreign to everyone else. I thought about when I had this. I thought about many other things during the moments of the film that dissipated into past instants forgotten. I remembered watching it, but I didn't remember it. How long had it been?

I write in my own life — sitting in the front row for New York premiere of Vitalina Varela, camera in hand, to tape the Q&A that followed. It was the applause and the standing ovation that bothered me deeply, the mediation of pain that we sat through, that nobody in the crowd could really understand, the same way I can't understand war and the shelling of Gaza, there is this pain that is deeply human, not just the experience of it, but the infliction of it. I thought about institutions and realized the festival wouldn't give me what I want, the people who'd see it wouldn't be the ones I want to see it. And now? It's been years. I can still make. I must make, and then it doesn't matter where it shows, what matters is that it's been made, that it can be seen.

It's all falling apart. It's heartbreaking. Soon the sun will rise and tonight I won't sleep. There is a day tomorrow, it's a day I will have. Although now I think twice before writing about the future, and assuming that I know it.

Writing as a means to transform reality — what is transforming to manipulation? And now, I'm ever aware of how we're always writing, of how that word has opened up in meaning, writing has blossomed here, it has nothing to do with the text.

Writing has blossomed here. This is a site of blossoming. Blossom: the flower of a seed plant; the state of bearing flowers; to bloom.

Blue bloom is on the.
Goldpinnacled hair.
A jumping rose on satiny breasts of satin, rose of Castile.
Trilling, trilling

A sample. This cascade is confining, yet we work within confines. We grow within confines. We live within confines. This is a site of blossoming. A blossom of heartbeats.

Still, there remains this urge of ending. Leão, Black Orpheus, Back From The Dead. Suleiman, the name of a prophet, not an apostle. There is a post within apostle.

Muted heartbreak. I remember that I left the Casa de Lava notebook at Z's. I'll look through it again soon. Again I assume the future. Or I attempt to write the future. Sometimes it works, sometimes it blossoms. I remember, there is truth in it: I get to write what's next