My mind today -and in recent days flocking behind me-
has been fixated on and simultaneously carried away
by the words of the Polish writer Bruno Schulz.
Schulz was an artist, painter and illustrator whose work combined an evocative, poetic
mix of autobiographical and fantastical elements bursting with life and imagination even in the dampened, lifeless grayness of the shadows and the typically mundane.
“Can you understand,' asked my father, 'the deep meaning of that weakness, that passion for colored tissue, for papier-mache, for distemper, for oakum and sawdust? This is,' he continued with a pained smile, 'the proof of our love for matter as such, for its fluffiness or porosity, for its unique mystical consistency. Demiurge, that great master and artist, made matter invisible, made it disappear under the surface of life. We, on the contrary, love its creaking, its resistance, its clumsiness. We like to see behind each gesture, behind each move, its inertia, its heavy effort, its bearlike awkwardness.”
I have officially fallen prey to the entrancement of his brood,
still lingering in precious printed nests and digital dens.
