Cinematic Writing XII

my own | cam llwch, Brecon

Midwinter spring is its own season

Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown, 

Suspended in time, between pole and tropic. 

When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire -

Now the hedgerow

Is blanched for an hour with transitory blossom 

Of snow, a bloom more sudden 

Than that of summer, neither budding nor fading, 

Not in the scheme of generation.

Where is the summer, the unimaginable Zero summer?

- T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding

Cinematic Writing XI

my own | quentin de briey

Poetry is made in a bed like love. Its rumpled sheets are the dawn of things...

- André Breton

Cinematic Writing X

Brian W. Ferry

And still the mad magnificent herald Spring

assembles beauty from forgetfulness

with the wild trump of April: witchery

of sound and odour drives the wingless thing

man forth into bright air,for now the red

leaps in the maple's cheek,and suddenly

by shining hordes in sweet unserious dress

ascends the golden crocus from the dead.

- e.e. cummings

Cinematic Writing IX

szamil

APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

...

She turns and looks a moment in the glass,

Hardly aware of her departed lover;

Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass:

“Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over.”

When lovely woman stoops to folly and

Paces about her room again, alone,

She smoothes her hair with automatic hand,

And puts a record on the gramophone.

- T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land

Cinematic Writing VIII

Maggi Hambling

I suppose like others

I have come through fire and sword,

love gone wrong,

head-on crashes, drunk at sea,

and I have listened to the simple sound of water running

in tubs

and wished to drown

- Charles Bukowski

Cinematic Writing VII

Mantled in grey, the dusk steals slowly in,

Crossing the dead, dull fields with footsteps cold.

The rain drips drearily; night's fingers spin

A web of drifting mist o'er wood and wold,

As quiet as death. The sky is silent too,

Hard as granite and as fixed as fate.

The pale pond stands; ringed round with rushes few

But for the coming of the winter night

Of deep December; blowing o'er the graves

Of faded summers, swift the wind in flight

Ripples its silent face with lapping waves.

The rain falls still: bowing, the woods bemoan;

Dark night creeps in, and leaves the world alone.

- Philip Larkin, Winter Nocturne

Cinematic Writing VI

"Do you still play as beautifully as you used to?"

"I still enjoy it."

"Please play, Elizabeth."

Elizabeth arose immediately. Her readiness to perform when asked had always been one of her amiabilities; she never hung back, apologized. Now as she approached the piano there was the added readiness of relief.

She began with a Bach prelude and fugue. The prelude was as gaily iridescent as a prism in a morning room. The first voice of the fugue, an announcement pure and solitary, was repeated intermingling with a second voice, and again repeated within an elaborated frame, the multiple music, horizontal and serene, flowed with unhurried majesty. The principal melody was woven with two other voices, embellished with countless ingenuities -- now dominant, again submerged, it had the sublimity of a single thing that does not fear surrender to the whole. Toward the end, the density of the material gathered for the last enriched insistence on the dominant first motif and with a chorded final statement the fugue ended. Ferris rested his head on the chair back and closed his eyes. In the following silence a clear, high voice came from the room down the hall.

"Daddy, how could Mama and Mr. Ferris--" A door was closed.

The piano began again -- what was this music? Unplaced, familiar, the limpid melody had lain a long while dormant in his heart. Now it spoke to him of another time, another place -- it was the music Elizabeth used to play. The delicate air summoned a wilderness of memory. Ferris was lost in the riot of past longings, conflicts, ambivalent desires. Strange that the music, catalyst for this tumultuous anarchy, was so serene and clear. The singing melody was broken off by the appearance of the maid.

"Miz Bailey, dinner is out on the table now."

Even after Ferris was seated at the table between his host and hostess, the unfinished music still overcast his mood. He was a little drunk.

- Carson McCullers, excerpt from The Sojourner

Cinematic Writing V

'. . . The car slowed down. It had to take its place in the long line of cars that moved at a foot’s pace, now stopping dead, now jerking on, down the narrow street, blocked by market carts, that led to the Opera House. Men and women in full evening dress were walking along the pavement. They looked uncomfortable and self-conscious as they dodged between costers’ barrows, with their high piled hair and their evening cloaks; with their button-holes and their white waistcoats, in the glare of the afternoon sun. The ladies tripped uncomfortably on their high-heeled shoes; now and then they put their hands to their heads. The gentlemen kept close beside them as though protecting them. It’s absurd, Kitty thought; it’s ridiculous to come out in full evening dress at this time of day. She leant back in her corner. Covent Garden porters, dingy little clerks in their ordinary working clothes, coarse-looking women in aprons stared in at her. The air smelt strongly of oranges and bananas. But the car was coming to a standstill. It drew up under the archway; she pushed through the glass doors and went in.

She felt at once a sense of relief. Now that the daylight was extinguished and the air glowed yellow and crimson, she no longer felt absurd. On the contrary, she felt appropriate. The ladies and gentlemen who were mounting the stairs were dressed exactly as she was. The smell of oranges and bananas had been replaced by another smell — a subtle mixture of clothes and gloves and flowers that affected her pleasantly. The carpet was thick beneath her feet.'

- Virginia Woolf, excerpt from The Years

Cinematic Writing IV

'For having lived in Westminster - how many years now? over twenty, - one feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense (but that might be her heart, affected, that said, by influenza) before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; the the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. Such fools we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. For Heaven only knows why one lives it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh; but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same; can't be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for that very reason: they love life. In people's eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.'

- Viriginia Woolf, excerpt from Mrs Dalloway

Quietude

Helene Rydén

I do work on it in the evening when the gramophone is playing late Beethoven sonatas. (The windows fidget at their fastenings as if we were at sea.)

- Virginia Woolf

Cinematic Writing III

'New York was an inexhaustible space, a labyrinth of endless steps, and no matter how far he walked, no matter how well he came to know its neighborhoods and streets, it always left him with the feeling of being lost. Lost, not only in the city, but within himself as well. Each time he took a walk, he felt as though he were leaving himself behind, and by giving himself up to the movement of the streets, by reducing himself to a seeing eye, he was able to escape the obligation to think, and this, salutary emptiness within. The world was outside of him, around him, before him, and the speed with which it kept changing made it impossible for him to dwell on any one thing for very long. Motion was of the essence, the act of putting one foot in front of the other and allowing himself to follow the drift of his own body. By wandering aimlessly, all places became equal, and it no longer mattered where he was. On his best walks, he was able to feel that he was nowhere. And this, finally, was all he ever asked of things: to be nowhere. New York was the nowhere he had built around himself, and he realized that he has no intention of ever leaving it again.'

- Paul Auster, City of Glass (New York Trilogy)

Cinematic Writing II

'It was a warm evening, nearly summer, and she wore a slim cool black dress, black sandals, a pearl choker. For all her chic thinness, she had an almost breakfast-cereal air of health, a soap and lemon cleanness, a rough pink darkening in the cheeks.'

'...Guided by a compact mirror, she powdered, painted every vestige of twelve-year-old out of her face. She shaped her lips with one tube, coloured her cheeks from another. She pencilled the rims of her eyes, blued the lids, sprinkled her neck with 4711; attached pearls to her ears and donnered her dark glasses; thus armoured, and after a displeased appraisal of her manicure's shabby condition, she ripped open the letter and let her eyes race through it while her stony small smile grew smaller and harder.'

- Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany's

Cinematic Writing

'Pain, that was not yet the pain of love, fretted his heart. Silently, in a dream she had come to him after her death, her wasted body within its loose brown graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath, that had bent upon him, mute, reproachful, a faint odour of wetted ashes.'

Cinematic Writing 0

Lina Scheynius

Of all four floors, in, out, the love-struggle

In all its acts and scenes, a snakes and ladders

Of intertangling and disentangling

Limbs and loves and lives. Nobody was Old.

- Ted Hughes, 18 Rugby Street from the Birthday Letters