What I miss is the sound of her voice – I mean Etel Adnan’s voice. The Otolith Group’s film essay about her for Fabrica was on a loop and you could hear it throughout the building, not just in the auditorium, most of the time. In the film she was reading from her poem Sea and I got used to hearing her slightly gravelly, heavily accented voice which some visitors found difficult to understand and which I found strangely familiar and reassuring. But I popped into Fabrica last week and it was silent, all the blackouts had been taken down. Light was streaming through the stained glass windows; the immense space was empty, waiting. And that felt absolutely right too. Sitting down in front of a blank page is one of my favourite moments when I’m writing. That’s how it felt. I have even started a new poem, I might call it Ocean because I find that a very hard word to say and think about…
A new exhibition is about to open and a new animator will be weaving in and out of Fabrica telling stories. His blog will soon be up loopholestories at http://loopholestories.wordpress.com/
As for me I will continue crossing borders. I have a new book coming out with Waterloo Press in the autumn called At the Library of Memories and you will be able to find out more about what I’m up to on www.mariajastrzebska.wordpress.com later this year. The unquietborder blog will stay up so you can still add to it…
For anyone who has followed this blog all the way through and remembers what I’m talking some important news flashes:
Tracey from Fabrica has uploaded some wonderful videos of young peoples work from the Allsorts workshop. To watch click on: https://unquietborder.wordpress.com/allsorts/allsorts-video/.
My friend from Scotland reports that the young buzzard visiting her is thriving, see it on the fence post below.
And: When I visited the Sea Life Centre in Brighton on a recent family outing I saw many, many seahorses. I couldn’t get a decent picture; perhaps it’s better if you let them glide & unfurl in your imagination.
I don’t believe anything really ends.
I’ll ‘end’ anyway though, with a quote from a poem called The Other Country by Anglo-Dutch poet Astrid Alben whose ace first collection Ai Ai Pianissimo came out last Winter:
“Across the border the river flows through rain
yellow comes after mustard seed
every leaf is a slipper thlupping on summer.
Across the border one foot easily
forgets the other but that’s neither here nor there.
It isn’t one thing or the other.
Remember
B says
the border is just a line”
unquietborder 