Jerrine Verkaik

General inspiration

“Let your life speak.” Quaker saying

“Do I dare disturb the universe?”, T..S. Eliot

“If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”, Thoreau



On the environment

Thoreau, seeing the forests falling cried: "Thank God they cannot cut down the clouds!" quoted by Nancy Newhall

“And to what shabby hells of our own making do we rush? A poisoned gutted planet, rolling through dark noxious air?”, Nancy Newhall



On vision and perception

Monet refuses the operation
(I don’t know who the poet is)

Doctor, you say there are no haloes
Around the street lights in Paris
And what I see is an aberration
Caused by old age, an affliction .....
I tell you it has taken me all my life
To arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
To soften and blur and finally vanish
the edges you regret I don't see,
To learn that the line I call the horizon
Does not exist and sky and water,
So long apart, are the same state of being,
Fifty-two years before I could see
Rouen Cathedral is built
Of parallel shafts of sun,
And now you want to restore
My youthful errors: fixed notions
Of top and bottom;
The illusion of three dimensional space,
Wisteria separate
From the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
The houses of parliament dissolve
Night after night to become
The fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
Of objects that do not know each other,
As if islands were not the lost children
Of one great continent. The world
Is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
Becomes, water, lilies on water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps.
Small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and change our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls Earth to its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapour without end.