Selections from the Notebooks of Edward Bond by Bond Edward;

Author:Bond, Edward;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2013-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

People hurry in the crowded shopping streets: in this city no one starves

If a man stands still for half an hour with an empty face he is

taken to an asylum and rested

There those in convulsions are not chained but given toys to juggle

Children stoop over their work books: they study the structure of flowers

The headline says there will be bigger prisons: not all criminals

are illiterate

In an abandoned house a comatose junkie lies at the foot of a wall:

he is middleclass and his mother a social visitor at the hospice

No rickets no tuberculosis: in the accident reception area the equipment is of

more use than texts of philosophy

Yet in this city no one may be human

It is guarded by the nuclear site

Those who threaten death with each act and purchase through the day

Cannot be human

Here the good serve evil

It is a city of executioners

How can such a city be human?

The people no longer think of the silos outside the city

I repeat how can such people be human?

Yet I would like to be human

And walk in the human city

And not see the half buried faces of children staring up at me from the broken pavement

River Wissey above Hilgay

23 July 1984

The only reconciliation that is durable – more than a legality or a mood – is solidarity: a shared understanding and a shared aim.

Cld call midsec[tion] The Sheet and the Garden Party

The sheet cld function for fullness/emptiness – for fulfilment and frustration, for the human and rational dedication of the individual even in the inhuman world, for the human aspiration. The W cd take it from newcom with her in thirdsec – she knows its no longer a child but doesn’t want to be parted from it: its a human rag. At the end it cld either be left on stage, or if W dies it cld be used as her shroud. However, this seems a bit like pattern-making.

It seems that with my characters the price is often far less than the cost: the labour greater than the reward – but it has to be understood that my characters live for others as well as for themselves. Their moral energy defies the utilitarian accountant.

The epic-lyrical should be sketched. But, then, sculpture is a form of sketching. It can’t be reworked as can oil by brush (I mean sculpting with mallet and chisel). The sculptor is always conscious of hacking into nothingness – chopping away and leaving a space in between, one side of which is the sculpted object. The commitment in the blows is irretrievable. This seems to involve chance, which is an element in the sketch. In fact the finished work is as studied and complete as oil painting. Yet it is not so heavy, even when on a colossal scale.

Every part of a canvas painting has the same embodiment. But the hands, feet, edges of a sculpture have different embodiments. Because of the way the paper is incorporated into the colour – either as spaces or a presence seen throughout the colour.

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