La Chambre Bleue, Provence

La chambre bleue, provence

🎨 Zarina Situmorang

“It’s just that I belong in the quietest quiet, that’s what’s right for me.”

— Franz Kafka, in a letter to Milena Jesenská, from Letters to Milena

Firsts storms always bring me this feeling.

im not even joking rn this fucking painting made me start uncontrollably sobbing. Do you know how long it took to paint? How expensive it was? The cat was content for hours and so loved that the girl held him there and paid for him to be painted with her. Imagine having such a bond… imagine being so loved and loving so much back…

keep thinking about that richard siken interview where he's talking about simplifying the metaphor, by removing the "is" — and the moon, terrible. the distance between the object and the thing to which it is likened to falls away, it feels [it reads], smoother, unhindered by simplified vocabulary. and so, it becomes alive, breathing.

its the same way sally rooney has removed quotation marks, and her writing feels smoother from it, subtler, a more coherent story where there is no stepping in our out of characters. everything falls in line, the veil draws back: the distance between character/reader is removed and instead of having the feeling be cut up by speech marks – there is a greater intimacy. the boundary is gone. the feelings of the character no longer at a distance to yourself, the reader is immersed in the skin of the character. no longer a book away.

i see the same thing in the internets refusal to Capitalise. (realise how you just read that word differently? your internal tone of voice heightening at that C?) thats again, removing the distance [!], keeping a hold of that intimacy with the reader. cherishing that tender bond.

its interesting, because siken says he needs to rely on the reader to make the associative leap when the "is" is left out. the same is true for rooney, i think. the lack of quotation marks demands attention. with an unfocused an divided mind, the lack of speech marks can easily be more annoying than smooth, stopping the flow of which the text invites the reader into. the capitalization of words is a stop too, a poem with uneven syllables: an irregular heartbeat ruining the pulse of the rhythm.

comparative words, quotation marks, and capitalized words – they all stop the blood-flow of the text. disrupt the rhythm. cut the flow short. maybe im simply very sensitive to these things, maybe i think too much about literary devices, but i love this style of writing. this stripping down – this removal of boundary and convention. the moon, terrible [how incredible!!] more please <3