#stephen watts

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Schiele

* * * *

« You are not a documentary film. You are a painting. No events are happening here so don’t expect anything. Inside the painting there is another painting and a faint ray of light passes through that frame to fall on a solitary book whose letters are tiny and wide open as your lungs. The same ray lights the knitting needle inserted by a woman into a skein of wool. A spider’s thread shines on a potted cactus; there’s no escaping fragility. There must be a breeze for you to see such tenderness […].

Very slowly the painting moves from screen to screen. The changes are slight. […] Had you slowed down you would have seen all of this. Don’t rush things. Don’t be the one on whom slowness is forced, don’t be the convalescent or the old man. Slow down exactly when you might be hurrying off. Put on your clothes without haste. Do everything in slowness. Perhaps you will find some sort of solution or hope. »

— Golan Haji, from “A light in water”, trans. from Arabic by Stephen Watts

[exhaled-spirals]

[alwaysalreadyangry]

Stephen Watts, found in Journeys Across Breath

[alwaysalreadyangry]

Stephen Watts, from Journeys Across Breath. This is only the first page of a longer poem.

[akiraofthefour]

"When an actress gives a performance, even though it may be terrible, her friends consider it good form to greet her at the opening night with some gracious comment that does not entirely demolish the hopeful heart. To do otherwise would be like entering a maternity hospital and telling a mother how awful her first-born looked. If the child is three or four years, however, and a guest spends several week-ends at the home, it might be possible to mention that the brat is a brat without necessarily starting a domestic war."

Howard Dietz, Behind the Screen

[akiraofthefour]

"The fact that we always succeed in what we try to do does not mean that we never come near to failure."

Cedric Gibbons, Behind the Screen

[akiraofthefour]

"Films, unlike pork and beans, are not standardized."

Stephen Watts, Behind the Screen

[beguines]

Winter Afternoon

(In homage to Marguerite Duras)

When a god comes too close the cormorant flies straight at the sun the yellow bloodied egg of the winter sun that injects its light into cages of dark & stuns the land with its golden splash & stains of bloody yellowish mauves. Invertebrate that pillar of dark bone that is my back when I feel it bite. It’s not enough to simply write words, so supervising the activities of madness, the sombre exultation of lives within, barren regimes of love & cages of air, dispassionate aviary where meanings are, little fascisms of honey, exampled anger. None of that is enough. Nor this rage. The cormorant flies straight at the sun & burning is not burnt but comes black & uncharred to the ether side of light, pushing its beak toward the pulverised      winter islands where we are.

Stephen Watts, Journeys Across Breath

[beguines]

Stephen Watts, Journeys Across Breath