i saw this quote from artist Frank Stella at the Fort Worth Modern the other day…
then i was read this passage from Helen Macdonald’s extraordinary H is for hawk…
“Chalk landscapes do this to me; bring an exhilarating, on-tiptoe sense that some deep revelation is at hand. This makes me feel guilty. There’s a long vein of chalk-mysticism buried in English nature-culture, and I know that what I’m feeling, standing here, partakes of it. I’m guilty because I know that loving landscapes like this involves a kind of history that concerns itself with purity, a sense of deep time and blood-belonging… [T]he chalk-cult rested on a presumption of organic connections to a landscape, a sense of belonging sanctified through an appeal to your own imagined lineage. That chalk downlands held their national, as well as natural, histories. And it was much later, too, that I realised these myths hurt. That they work to wipe away other cultures, other histories, other ways of loving, working and being in a landscape. How they tiptoe towards darkness.”
then this happened: Jo Cox, Member of British Parliament, Is Killed in Attack