{"id":138,"date":"2004-06-27T15:45:39","date_gmt":"2004-06-27T15:45:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/idiolect.truth.posiweb.net\/notes\/?p=138"},"modified":"2004-06-27T15:45:39","modified_gmt":"2004-06-27T15:45:39","slug":"unquiet-emptiness-in-image-and-words","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/2004\/06\/27\/unquiet-emptiness-in-image-and-words\/","title":{"rendered":"Unquiet emptiness (in image and words)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I went to the Edward Hopper exhibition at the Tate Modern on saturday. The unquiet emptiness of his paintings reminded me of this poem by Leonard Cohen<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><b>What I am doing here<\/b><\/p>\n<p>I do not know if the world has lied<br \/>\nI have lied<br \/>\nI do not know if the world has conspired against love<br \/>\nI have conspired against love<br \/>\nThe atmosphere of torture is no comfort<br \/>\nI have tortured<br \/>\nEven without the mushroom cloud<br \/>\nstill I would have hated<br \/>\nListen<br \/>\nI would have done the same things<br \/>\neven if there were no death<br \/>\nI will not be held up like a drunkard<br \/>\nunder the cold tap of facts<br \/>\nI refuse the universal alibi<\/p>\n<p>Like an empty telephone booth passed at night<br \/>\nand remembered<br \/>\nlike mirrors in a movie palace lobby consulted<br \/>\nonly on the way out<br \/>\nlike a nymphomaniac who binds a thousand<br \/>\ninto strange brotherhood<br \/>\nI wait<br \/>\nfor each of you to confess.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I went to the Edward Hopper exhibition at the Tate Modern on saturday. The unquiet emptiness of his paintings reminded me of this poem by Leonard Cohen What I am doing here I do not know if the world has lied I have lied I do not know if the world has conspired against love [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-138","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5KQtW-2e","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=138"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=138"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=138"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=138"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}