Same Stove

Interested in what was billed as a sort of festival of art and books, poetry and stage on the Antwerpen boekenstad site, I went down to Haeken en Ooghen for a look... Curious because we too consider such an endeavor at the depinterdep... Bookstore gallery literary salon type of crossover activities... 

Sure enough, a central table with books, one bookcase and art surrounding the space... Quite a few déjà vu's, sind it was Constant Aline who had arranged it all... Some of which hung in his Godot on the Kammenstraat years ago... Ah where is the time gone to... We even had a fifty-fifty session there then... Anyway I found a water-damaged copy of Empty Bed Blues, which I bought after negotiating a signature by Aline, giving it that extra cachet... But what I really came for was a reading by Douglas Park... 

He stood at the door, neither really in or out, and proceeded to take us on that incredible journey of his string along intermittent style like a necklace of plastic pearls and bits of shiny standardised formulations being thrown into the air and expanding into a universal milky-way among the clouds before shrinking back to earth slowly.... His deliberate elocution, running staccato silences interspersed with accelerations and monotone accentuations along what seems a well beaten path of scintillating platitudes, only to juxtapose them is such a constellation to make the necklace of synthetic beading and bits of nonchalance become a glittering spiral in the void... Turning slowly on its axis to reveal colourful inclusions and eye-piercing reflections that only strike the mind for a second before dropping it into the hum-drum universe of repetitive folly which is our daily life...

A sense of recognition returns when he re-reads his initial piece "Sunbite and Frostburn" which, having this inkling to having heard it before ( before the repetition, that is)... Came across a reading of it on Oriana's FB as a new years greeting... What I had not noticed at the time was the fact that het is standing in front of my stove, or rather the same stove I have, or rather the same make and model of stove which stands in my studio... Bringing not only that impression but also this story to a conclusion more or less unexpected.

Very nice evening indeed... Standing there on the street being transported to other that other places while the younger generation loses stamina and let their minds wander into conversations while the poet is still in mid-flight and the passing cyclist lifts up his bike as to not disturb the reading with the sharp tictictic of his elaborate gear changing system... The afternoon falls into evening and I had no lights on my bike so I pedalled away into the dusk notwithstanding.