2013.12.29
Geoff Dyer Zona p 135-6 "As he's speaking the camera lifts up from the rocks and their emerald-green covering of moss into the glassy grey reflection of the lake. A Sugimoto-esque vision of absolute nothingness, devoid of associations (except, I suppose, associations of Sugimoto), fills the screen until, as the camera continues moving upwards, we see the blurry reflection of the trees that fringe the lake, the still lake, then the trees themselves and the grey sky whose reflection was held by the lake. That glimpse of nothingness unconnected to reality, it turns out, was itself a bit of a reality. And a reminder of how little sky there is in Stalker or in Tarkovsky's films generally. He is the most earth-bound, least Shelly-like, of visionaries, interested only in the sky as it is reflected 'in the river, in the puddles.'"
[stolen from Zona, from Wordsworth's The Prelude :
To every natural form, rock, fruit or flower,
Even the loose stones that cover the highway,
I gave a moral life: I saw them feel,
Or linked them to some feeling: the great mass
Lay bedded in a quickening soul, and all
That I beheld respired with inward meaning.]
2014.01.02
V.W. Orlando p 13-14 "He was describing, as all young poets are for ever describing, nature, and in order to match the shade of green precisely he looked (and here he showed more audacity than most) at the thing itself, which happened to be a laurel bush growing beneath the window. After that, of course, he could write no more. Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces. The shade of green Orlando now saw spoilt his rhyme and split his metre."