Patina
it grows on you
“What we lose in authority, we gain in patina.”
1. Somehow i didn’t expect to see in Europe so much of that characteristic pale turquoise tint of verdigris on bronzed roof panels.
2. I learned that the brown goop tone of “Old Masters” was the result of
rotten Victorian varnishing practices. On the one hand, megilp; on the other, painted marble statuary & Classical columns turning white in time.
3. Background noise on vinyl records, added to CD skeuomorphically.
Smoked foods, single-malt Scotch, flavors from the back of the mouth.
Using words whose meaning has changed, in the old sense.
Songs that mean something different after they’ve been used in a movie.
You know the Elizabethan spellings have been modernized. Vowel creep you hardly entertain at all.
"Milton appears to suspect that souls partake of the general degeneracy, and is not without some fear that his book is to be written in an age too late for heroick poesy."
--Samuel Johnson“The gold of authority is bright/ with the glitter of attrition.” —Servasius (tr Rexroth) Writing in the 4th century, one wonders which emperor prompted this reflection. Looking for the original, i find “splendet attrito…auro".
Kintsugi (worth an essay in itself). Upcycling. The sabi of wabisabi. Leftovers. Twice-told tales.
The Ur-text: Finnegans Wake.
Patina as a mode of knowledge.
Glimflash, or one thing cast in the style of another. Dread Zeppelin. Generalize as Veil Theory.
River gorge shows you all the layers. Everything is an onion.
One kind of reference, two kinds of reference, three kinds of reference. Three points define a plane.
Our shed skin cells accumulate in our dwelling-places. I live where used to be the bottom of a shallow ocean. A plesiosaur was unearthed when they dug the airport. Every mountain is a growth & eroding. Time is not a flow but our substance. Our monuments & our small habits are alike its ripples. But to acknowledge this—to work with this—takes more than parataxis. That’s where patina comes in.
Pound said somewhere that epic is where history enters poetry. One might analyze this as hyperobject plus a sense of the sublime. The sublime can involve scale (large, small) but also texture (complexity or disorder—& even emptiness).
The sublime as insight (Shelley’s “intellectual beauty”).
“After weeks of watching the roof leak
I fixed it tonight
by moving a single board”—Gary Snyder, from “Hitch Haiku” in The Back Country, 1967
This comes only by holding a space open in time.
Insight is the other patina.