Nell – Holding onto Gravity

01_Coin Seller
02_White Night_백야
03_Holding Onto Gravity
04_Blue

Pages: 1 2 3

Cliffe Parade, Berger, and Home Building

Without a home at the center of the real, one was not only shelterless, but also lost in non-being, in unreality. Without a home everything was fragmentation.

Home was the center of the world because it was the place where a vertical line crossed with a horizontal one. The vertical line was the path leading upwards to the sky and downwards to the underworld. The horizontal line represented the traffic of the world, all the possible roads leading across the earth to other places. Thus at home, one was nearest to the gods in the sky and to the dead in the underworld. This nearness promised access to both. And at the same time, one was at the starting point and, hopefully, the returning point of all terrestrial journeys. (56)

-John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos

Cliff Parade is a peculiar object that sums up Berger’s thoughts on home with neatness and precision of pillow settings: “Home was the center of the world because it was the place where a vertical line crossed with a horizontal one.” The lyricism and the title of the song, as well as the video footage used for the Lines concert, work in tandem to create a world where horizontal lines and vertical lines alternate rapidly and bathe in blinding redness to extrude the painful illusion of home. The rapid succession of vertical and horizontal lines never quite appear on screen simultaneously; in other words, they never bisect each other to create a cross, a point of return, a home. or rather it seems as if they never create a home.