My first nice tradition shock upon arriving in America was that concrete playgrounds, basketball courts, and tiny triangles of grass between busy streets all bore plaques that referred to as them “parks.” The place I got here from, a park was a spot of birdsong and rustling leaves, a spot to ramble, to get misplaced in, to dream in; a patch of surprise in the midst of the town; a pocket wilderness. It was in a park that I took my first steps, had my first kiss, puzzled for the primary time why we’re alive.
The park — the correct park — as a spot of contemplation, illumination, and discovery comes alive with nice soulfulness in We Go to the Park (public library) — the product of an uncommon collaboration between Swedish creator and playwright Sara Stridsberg and Italian artist Beatrice Alemagna.
On the daybreak of the pandemic, amid the maddening captivity of lockdown and the tempest of uncertainty, Alemagna entered a sort of trance of portray — an outpouring of shade and feeling channeling her hopes and fears, desires and remembrances. (Each artist’s artwork is their coping mechanism — we make what we make to save lots of ourselves, to remain sane, to search out the slender wire of grace between us and the world.)
When Stridsberg acquired a choice of these impressionistic unstoried photographs, she was moved to reply along with her personal artwork. Her spare, lyrical phrases gave the photographs coherence, making of them one thing uncommonly pretty: half story, half poem, half prayer.
Some say we come from the celebs,
that we’re manufactured from stardust,
that we as soon as swirled into the world
from nowhere.We don’t know.
So we go to the park.
Although spoken by kids taking part in within the park, the collective pronoun appears to increase in widening circles because the vignettes unfurl till it turns into the voice of humanity, making the park — this “land past” — a miniature of our stressed seek for that means, an antidote to the unusual world the place “all the pieces is so huge there’s no room for it within us.”
There amid the thousand-year-old timber that “stretch their branches towards the sky like outdated arms,” we encounter minute creatures and large flowers as huge as heads, “birdlike outdated girls on benches” and a lady “in a yellow raincoat with wild hair, who smells like lightning and isn’t afraid of something”; we encounter ourselves in all our craving, all our incompleteness.
Typically it feels as if all of life
is made up of longing.A dizzying lack of somebody
to swing and swoosh beside.
When Stridsberg writes that “there aren’t any guidelines within the universe” — a universe we all know to be ruled by immutable legal guidelines exact as clockwork — she appears to be intimating that there aren’t any guidelines for easy methods to be human, for easy methods to make that means. (There are infinitely many sorts of lovely lives.) There are solely invites — to be current with the wind that appears like “the breath of a dragon,” with the tiny ants, with the beautiful fragility of life and the scale of time.
In only a second,
all the pieces we love is perhaps gone.
We Go to the Park is a part of impartial kids’s guide powerhouse Enchanted Lion’s impressed Unruly imprint of picture-books for grownups — or, relatively, splendidly category-defying books emanating Maurice Sendak’s insistence that an genuine life is a matter of “having your little one self intact and alive and one thing to be happy with.”
For different Enchanted Lion treasures that feed the kid self with out shying away from the deepest dimensions of maturity, savor Earlier than I Grew Up, Huge Wolf & Little Wolf, and this illustrated reimagining of Neruda’s Guide of Questions.
Illustrations courtesy of Enchanted Lion Books. Pictures by Maria Popova.
