Meditations: The Dark Rose
The wind the sun the hum
The drip the drop the distraction
Finding aether in the everyday
We each have access to it, the ethereal element that makes life radiant. The secret and pervasive teachings of the sky-keepers seek to leave us in doubt of this, to keep humanity in their chains and mind-forged manacles. They have kept individuals, enterprises, and whole cities tethered to destructive and self-destructive habits. How can we find our way back to our own reserves of aether?
Whatever you're doing, compassion helps
Ideas can be inspiring and dangerous, amusing and alienating. They move from head to head, from individual to individual. But sometimes they lose the leash and become stray. Ideas begin floating, collapsing into each other, mutating. We inhale them. They intoxicate us.
The fifth flavour: The hunt for umami
“Umami” is a wonderful, mystery-shrouded word that roughly translates as “delicious savoury taste”. Now recognised as the fifth flavour, alongside salt, sweet, bitter and sour, Umami’s entrance into our culinary consciousness has been curious and treacherous.
The fifth element(s): Time, space and consciousness
The fifth element is the most mysterious of all the elements. It is the missing link that crowns and completes our earthly knowledge.
Strings in blue
This composition has less to do with the blues than the blue of an abstract painting. Written specifically for electric guitar, with determined (modest) effects of reverb and occasional chorus pedal.
Meditations: Air
As the borough and bankside start to receive an influx of 200 skyscrapers, the trees are dwarfed. Can they survive?
The thin place
In Gaelic, the “thin place” translates as “closest place to heaven on Earth”. The cloud appears to touch the water. As you gaze on the iron clad surface, the peaty mud between your toes, a deafening silence surrounds your ears.
Air and food: How smoking made a comeback
Smoking food has been part of our culinary culture since Prometheus came hurtling down from Olympus bearing his gift of fire. There is a perfectly good reason for this. Smoke contains chemicals that act as preserving agents. Before the days of mass refrigeration, drying and smoking were critical for human survival, as meat and other foods could be preserved throughout winter.
Air: the double magic of words
Words themselves are empty: hollow draughts of spit encasing air. In Tarot cards, the element of air is defined by swords that cut both ways. Words foster clarity or wreak havoc and self-harm. We should be careful how we use them.
La gaviota (the seagull)
La gaviota (the seagull) by Ariadna. Presented to the public for the first time by Mercurius Magazine.
Being a body
Ser un cuerpo (Being a body), C-print on paper, 60 x 65 cm, 2020. Victor Manzanal.
Riding the first wave: Lockdown in Paris
Lockdown can feel like prison. No long walks, nor catching up with friends. Everyone you know is scattered across the city, out of physical reach. Policemen patrol the streets. You sit alone in your room, grim and anxious, perhaps even depressed.
Food and flames: BBQ revolution
Everything makes a difference on a barbecue. From the choice of wood, charcoal or briquettes to the quality of seal around the rim (for steaming and smoking) to the use and type of wood chips.
Fire
As the yearly heat begins again, the city comes to life. With lockdown eased, the roads pulsate with cars, and the terraces of bars are brimming with drinkers and diners. Those eerie days of March, of emptiness and birdsong-haunted avenues, have started to recede. Perhaps all this will be a memory soon. How much normality will be restored, if any?
Meditations: Fire
Given that everyone can now make very passable images with their handsets, to reach another level it is a matter of nuance: how to trick the machine to show the perceived but otherwise unseen.
Light without shadows
An interpretation of Welsh poet R. S. Thomas' poem 'A land' for mezzo-soprano, clarinet, guitar and piano. Performed and recorded by The Braid Ensemble with guest mezzo Emily Gray.
What the living do
I discovered Marie Howe through her book "What the Living Do" published in Caracas. A book that follows the threads of the illness and death of a loved one (her brother) and subtly connects us to the birth and transparency of all shadows.
Mercuries #1: Sculptural poetry
I'm interested in three dimensions and poetry, and what we might term sculptural poetry. Why is language two-dimensional when it is objective material? Why does this bleed into what we take the social engagement of reading, and speaking, to be? The head, the mouth, the tongue, the ears: objects in the world.
Earth
The month of May belongs to Aphrodite, the mother goddess, famed for love and beauty. This year the city seems to bless her more than other years. The shops, silent behind their steel shutters, announce a different kind of place: all sense of being in a hurry gone; nothing to buy, just days to live, without the noise and fuss of all those small invented worlds, the markets, schools, and mausoleums, competing for space with Mother Earth.
The never-ending quest…
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