gemma thorpe

michael and lenka, mysterious letters

taken in Grunn.'s Vismarkt
* matt lipp

"To cover the world, to cross it in every direction, will only ever be to know a few square metres of it, a few acres, tiny incursions into disembodied vestiges, small, incidental excitements, improbable quests congealed in a mawkish haze a few details of which will remain in our memory: out beyond the railway stations and the roads, and the gleaming runways of airports, and the narrow strips of land illuminated for a brief moment by an overnight express, out beyond the panoramas too long anticipated and discovered too late, and the accumulations of stones and the accumulations of works of art, it will be three children perhaps running along a bright white road, or else a small house on the way out of A., with a wooden lattice door once painted green, the silhouetted outline of trees on top of a hill near S., four uproarious fat men on the terrace of a cafe in the outskirts of N., the main street ..


And with these , the sense of the world's concreteness, irreducible, immediate, tangible, of something clear and closer to us of the world, no longer as a journey having constantly to be remade, not as a race without end , a challenge having constantly to be met, not as the one pretext for a despairing acquisitiveness, nor as the illusion of a conquest, but as the rediscovery of a meaning, the perceiving that the earth is a form of writing, (a geography of which we had forgotten that we ourselves are the authors)."

Georges Perec, Species of Spaces, The World