Portsoy

Oidhche Samhna

Hannibal Lector meets Aleister Crowley

Autumnal dilettantism 2

Autumnal dilettantism

Autumn days, when shabby electric lights look resplendent, when trees look like bonfires in the oblique sun, when fields look like baize in mellow lamplight, we feel the need to pursue challenging aesthetic growth the way we feel a hunger for sugary snacks and creamy coffee and to have cheerful discussions. So we can treasure our new discoveries, like the plural accusative of bird, 'ornithas' was this word formed in the mouth of someone living in a sultry Aegean delta one summer? That is not significant. It can still perfectly describe the beings that flutter in the branches of trees on a crisp Septentrional morning.

Clavan

Sep moon

blue red verdigris

How I feel

How I feel when I ever have the misfortune to come across political commentary from 'the mainstream media': I feel like that bluebottle. We don't consume the MSM it consumes us

Dealan De

Summer 2015

stag in Japanese rowans

july

A tale of two Scotlands

The first photo was taken before the 2014 referendum. The second was taken a few days ago: a boarded up business celebrating 'British' military might, sending our young men to have their arms legs and faces blown off for career politicians to act big in Washington. It rained on their parade. July 4th. Obviously a date chosen to flatter Americans, who celebrate the defeat of Britain, before it set about committing the American Indian genocide and mass slavery.

summer

summer

Deer

Cervids are often reservoirs of malady and savage towards each other, the momentum of their limbs can unsettle me, yet it is difficult not to see the beauty of these creatures as they retire to their glades and glens at sunset
Visage of a deer a melancholy mask for vesperal crags, oxidised rocks at sunset and glades where cool waters breed flies that scorch our skins with their jaws.

Stag

Misc

January Cat

Outside the frost and lethal chill from Siberia, darkness, stars, snow and dead deciduous trees. Yet does not a cat always live partially in summers to come and summers that have gone? My cat who purrs in the darkness when I put the light out and who snuggles on my hand. How much worse a January night without a cat's paw touching my hand in the darkness.

Blue we see in dreams

Lighthouse and Wave

Charles Baudelaire

At the Sea

When we have been in the sea, we feel like we have slept sleep that is more relaxing than any real sleep, we have been wrapped in sheets softer than any silk, we have worn shoes more comfortable than any real shoes and we have dreamt dreams more fantastic than any that come to us at night.

Scottish Spring

Memories of Dead Flowers

The last time I remember seeing this tree blossoming, its cast off petals were swirling around a pink doll's house, which had been smashed and left on the pavement with sharp splinters and rusty nails sticking out of its damaged walls. Like the brain of a utilitarian I'd have said.

Superfluous ecstasies in the summer afternoon

When it is a hot and sunny afternoon a lot of things look so superfluous and perch so precariously on the edge of being ugly and beautiful, I do not try to label them as one or the other, and am resigned to categorising them as superfluous aesthetic ecstasy: dead marine invertebrates, discarded plastic, garish cotton, feathers on a kite, the mouth and eyes of a tropical cat, flames from a bonfire, the taste of fatty hot meat, the taste of fatty hot cheese, the smell of pungent smoke.

When we eat fatty food in December when Orion soars in the sky or when we light a fire in late October evenings and enjoy its heat, it is sustenance: not superfluous ecstasy.

I remember one hot and sunny afternoon I went for a walk and I was in a sordid part of a town and the only people I could see were obviously on drugs and perhaps had reached their own version of superfluous ecstasy as they staggered around in shell suits. I walked through a part of the town where the asphalt was melting but this was little superfluous ecstasy because it was muted by the smell of nicotine on polyester carpets (another superfluous ecstasy- worthy of cancer for some) and I saw a twenty foot tiger and its eyes and mouth tasted of a Mars Bar which had melted in an overheated car and which I remembered eating in the 1980s (my earliest memory of superfluous ecstasy) and its eyes were even more of a superfluous ecstasy because they reflected the tawny twilight rather than the raw summer afternoon.

Perhaps this sounds insane, so I should say that it was a fake tiger, in the sense that it was a photograph advertising a brand of petrol. Those long dead micro-organisms in the depths of the sea, cruelly dug up for cars I can't drive but I also appreciate the superfluous ecstasy of the smell of petrol on a hot summer afternoon.

I felt sick looking at its lean flanks which suggested a kind of energy that I could not have, as if my own abdomen had been plunged into freezing water. But I felt ill looking around the billboard which was on a slope covered with nettles, their chatoyancy in the sun a superfluous ecstasy too far and upset my stomach. I also felt ill looking at the brambles which were withered even on the hot summer, choked by inedible nettles. I even felt my tongue get pained by the splinters on the billboard which had been painted black and the paint was splitting because it had drank up superfluous sunshine.

This memory is of something that has never happened to me and probably never will. But it is more vivid than many memories that I do have.

moon

I went for a walk a few days ago and could not see Sirius for the first time this year (and it had been overcast for some time), the first sign of spring being on its way.

summer on way

Green in the birch tree, sign Summer is coming as is the reticulated stomach moving over dead leaves

wall and cloud

I don't know who decided that this refuge for damaged bodies and minds that sits on a plain of asphalt would be best served by being painted the coloured of damaged flesh. I don't even know if there is film or whatever the digital equivalent is, in the rusting cameras that evidently guard it against people with even more damaged minds who might want to steal medicine because they have decided that their existence is a medical condition (surely saving the world a need for PHDs). But I do know that when it is seen under oblique sunshine in spring time it does have a tone that can be felt in the gut rather than the cornea.

Waves of a past summer

I am so grateful for photography as it would make Winter more unendurable without memories of being in Summer. Without memories of seeing water escape gravity and soar over the dull stones of the cliffs. Of not seeing the sunshine somehow enriched and oneiric and silken by the clouds.

The haven

Looking at the sea in the opposite direction of the sun on a bright summer day, the waves like cetaceans  on the iron shale. My only refuge from ennui.

holly

hollie

This is Hollie saying hello. Some people think she looks scary but I think she looks quite regal. She speaks a lot but a cat's ears are more indicative of its mood than its mouth and you can see she is being friendly because they are raised rather than flat,

waves

I remember the day I took this photograph I waded into the Atlantic up to my stomach and felt the freezing waves hit me; perhaps the onlookers thought I'd lost it… maybe they were right. The waves were very cold though it was the middle of summer.

wave

Spring Rainbow

alsatian