R.J > Recent Status Updates

"She endures, and collates, and begins to understand."

"I can't hold enough of you in my hands"

"I had to return to the darkness, I couldn't stand the sun, I was desperate, really like a stray animal, I began to run as fast as I could, and always the thought: 'If only I could take her with me!' And the counter-thought: 'Is there any darkness where she is?' You ask how I live: this is how I live."

"Narrators need to distinguish the emotional hues and textures rendered by particular linguistic forms - those that debilitate and those that empower.The apprentice teller learns how to apply these symbolic materials in varied combinations, with different strokes, to craft a phrase, an episode, a story, a life."

"I went outside and found the landscape
which had eaten my heart."

"It was like this: my face misted up from inside
And I came and went at will..."

"There is delight to be found in esoteric connections. We can watch the long straggles of wool on sheep to confirm the wind direction, as the sheep themselves follow the shade of great oaks round the tree on a hot summer's day, like a clock and a compass."

"I was holding a small clump of reindeer moss in one hand, a little piece of that branching, pale green-grey lichen that can survive just about anything the world throws at it. It is patience made manifest. Keep reindeer moss in the dark, freeze it, dry it to a crisp, it won't die. It goes dormant and waits for things to improve."

"she heard the silence, spinning its soft endless web. How lightly she breathed;she scarcely had to breathe at all. Yes,everything had come alive down to the minutest,tiniest particle,and she did not feel her bed -she floated,held up in the air. Only she seemed to be listening with her wide-open watchful eyes,waiting for someone to come who just did not come,watching for something to happen that just did not happen."

"She did not know where to put her bag or herself. She had to lie down or remain standing, and in either case to keep shivering. She remained standing, her bag in her hand, staring at a kind of narrow window near the ceiling open onto the sky. She waited but without knowing why. She felt only her solitude and the penetrating cold, and a heavy weight around her heart."

Even a tree, which we think of as a fixed point, rooted as anything can be to a single place on Earth, can be imagined into a drifting nomad, nibbled by fish, wandering the oceans, ending up anywhere

"I first observed it in the window of a florist's shop, neatly rising out of a gilt basket tied with pink ribbons. No more repellant presentation could be imagined, or anything more likely to put one against the flower for ever, yet somehow this poor ill-treated flower struck me instantly as a lovely thing, so lovely that I suffered on its behalf to see it so misunderstood."

I love ruins because they are always doing what everything really wants to do all the time: returning themselves to the earth, melting back into the landscape.