Hello again! Welcome to the second edition of ‘Zenrei’s Zone’, a newsletter dedicated to creation and contemplation. This time, I’ll be sharing two pieces of project news and a recent interest of mine.
Polaroid
Sunday 12th February will mark the release of a new music project with @tahramok, which explores our coming together romantically. There’s some new stuff here - my first recorded poem release, a joint mixing French and English, and a generally more joint enterprise. The first single ‘Lipstick’ came out a few days ago!
Big ups to @mosaiqueproject recording in Paris, @leopold.arlo.wilde on executive production duties. Also big ups to @eliz_mus on Polaroid production, @mosaiqueproject on ‘Storm’ and Alex and Rafa for Rouge à lèvres.
It will be available on all streaming services. Support on Bandcamp is especially appreciated!
Empathy & Eternity
As I alluded to in the first newsletter, I have been working on a book. I’d like to share a few details with you about it. It is called ‘Empathy and eternity’, and charts the course of my father George Evans’ experience of evacuation during WWII. Alongside 3 million children, he was taken from his home (Liverpool) to the Shropshire countryside to evade Nazi bombing.
The book combines local museum visual archives, family archives and personal photography, as well as poetry inspired by my own pilgrimage to the village in September and excerpts of my father’s writing. I have been crafting these into a compelling story to honour the decade anniversary of his passing in 2013, and I intend on self-publishing it in coming months. I’m really excited about it.
Gestures & gifts
Brass rubbing
On my pilgrimage to Tenbury Wells, where my father was evacuated, I came across a curious sign giving instructions on ‘brass rubbing’ in a very rural church. Having no idea what it was, I looked it up weeks later and fell into an amazing rabbit hole.
Brass rubbing is a pastime that was common in Britain during the Victorian period and had a slight resurgence in the 1970s. It involves making rubbings of commemorative brass plaques (actually latten, an alloy of copper and zinc) found in churches, usually originally on the floor, from between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. Most of these plaques commemorated knights, clergy and prosperous merchants, and became popular as protruding coffins with representative figures, which represented a state of waiting between death and resurrection, began to take up too much space. They often have a beautiful style that reminds me very much of linographs, and they form part of one of my upcoming projects.
The rubbing method is as follows - you use craft paper (often called butcher’s paper) and cobbler’s wax, otherwise known as heelball, trace the outlines and fill in. It is interesting to think that many of those commemorated wished to live on eternally, and have managed to survive a while longer in this niche pastime. If you happen to live in London, you can rub replicas at St-Martin-in-the-Fields church on Trafalgar Square.
Reason and romance
I just finished reading Herman Hesse’s Narziss and Goldmund, a brilliant novel exploring the conflict and resolution of reason and creativity. Its exploration of these opposites mirrors recent conversations I have had about the compatability of the two; the philosopher’s systemisation of the world through ideas and the poet’s systematisation through images. My understanding of the world is moulded through the search to convey thoughts and experiences in the most apt and sonorous ways. Narziss, the ascetic monk in the book, puts it thus:
‘Men of dreams, the lovers and the poets, are better in most things than the men of my sort; the men of intellect. You take your being from your mothers. You live to the full: it is given you to love with your whole strength, to know and taste the whole of life. We thinkers, though often we seem to rule you, cannot live with half your joy and full reality. Ours is a thin and arid life, but the fullness of being is yours; yours the sap of the fruit, the garden of lovers, the joyous pleasaunces of beauty. Your home is the earth, ours the idea of it.’
AOB
I hope you found this newsletter interesting. It’s nice to use it to delve into historical topics, books and my writing, and expand from music. Any interest and support is appreciated, from likes to sharing and subscribing.
Love,
Zenrei