I was taking some photographs in the front of the office after work on Tuesday when the wind came up, the front door slammed, and I was locked outside with no keys. I had to go next door and jump the back fence. I landed awkwardly, jarred and bruised my heel badly. I can only walk with difficulty.

Since I can but hobble around, all I can can do is take photos around the Kingston office.This photo is from the little garden in backyard, taken sitting in a chair:

rose, Gosse St, originally uploaded by poodly.

It was taken in the backyard of the office in Kingston just before the storm came through and shredded most of the roses. A pity. I had planned to take shots of the roses just as they were beginning to decay.

It was to be a way of exploring the aesthetic as a mode of experience and a way of relating to the world. It is a way of contesting this position of Nonie Sharp in The Artistic and the Literary Imagination in Australia and Beyond in Colloquy Issue 12:

Poetry and painting are sisters in the evocation of feeling: ut pictura poesis, in the words of Horace. Poetry addresses the subjective. It is the expression of the poet’s feelings, and its power to touch the heart is a power to deepen and expand feeling as it gathers meaning. A poetry of place – poetry, lyric prose, music – could only thrive when people’s hearts were with Australian places in something of the way Aboriginal people feel about their place.

Sharp continues by exploring the difference between painting and poetry:

Poetry about the experience of the landscape and nature can only be poetry if it can capture the spirit of the place. It may call out feelings that create and foster spiritual values, at times in exalted form. Here we are entering a realm where an aesthetic comes into being in a profound way, often resting at the edge of awareness.Painting concentrates on direct experience of the natural world; poetry and prose, especially lyric prose, as in nature writing, speak to and recreate the subjective. In this important sense, poetry – and the literary endeavour as a whole – and painting are reversals of each other. Importantly, they are also complementary to one another. In the first, nature talks back, or does the talking; in the second, she is (mainly) silent.

Sharp argues that a contemporary literature of place (lyrical writing includes the novel) is a response to a new revolution symbolised in the nowhereness of cyberspace and a tendency toward the dissolution of embodied grassroots existence.The celebration of place today, particularly lyricism, is a sign of an awareness that nature exists within humanly created categories, not as an unmediated Other.

Referring to Australia, Changing Places: Reimagining Australia, a book of essays on changing places and their meanings edited by John Cameron Sharp says that Cameron introduces the site of a major paradox:

A sense of place presumes embodiment; it is local, the home of stories of persons tied by quite immediate but often invisible threads to one another and to locale. Yet, “cyberspace is a disembodied space that is no place at all.”

Comments

Posted by: Gary Sauer-Thompson | October 19, 2008 8:28 AM