Life keeps hurtling forward, bursting forth. It’s spring in California, the jasmine’s come in and the streaky roses. It’s been raining hard all morning; just now it stopped abruptly. Lyn writes in My Life, “she observed that detail minutely, as if it were botanical. As if words could unite an ardent intellect with the external material world.” This is Lyn, vitally observing, drawing it all into relation, the mind and the world, botanical, passionate. Making words hold life, making words as life. “Such that art is inseparable from the search for reality,” she writes.
Lorelei: Heine translations from 'Shadowtime'
Henry Hills is in the process of making a film in and around the letter “H” — and for that he is using my homophonic translation of Harry (Heinrich) Heine’s “Die Lorelei,” with images of the The Bronx Lorelei Foundation. I recorded a reading of the poem for him last week, along with the rest of my libretto for “Seven Tableaux Vivants Representing the Angel of History as Melancholia,” Scene 6 of Brian Ferneyough’s opera, Shadowtime.