7 October 2025
20 October 2025
inward necessity
our new materials are houses at murnau,*
built with a kiss, new and obscure; where a wall
becomes a road, people, heads, they
drag to a flutter perspective – no view from inside
and on the outside angular dimples, while
in full spate dynamo lines slide rooftops, fences;
eyes pop for a sun with no restless rhythm
for night to contend with like a topical trapezoid
anything fits a fauve surface with dents by
a glass barbarian; green hills rise – backstory,
with little relief, we remain angled kin, droplets,
we ooze from marshes, wander to ponds of persuasion
at night ancients swim under us,
a dust-bled kleptocracy they don’t believe
it’s for their world we long, like
our thinking on sand is the moon in the sea
cannily unclothed, a compromised curse
a small escutcheon of ice
* ‘our new materials’ alludes to the phrase ‘His dark materials’ by John Milton in book II line 916 of Paradise Lost. Milton’s phrase is also used as the title of Philip Pullman’s celebrated trilogy, completed in 2000.
‘Houses at Murnau’ is a painting by Wassily Kandinsky, 1909. The term ‘inner necessity’ is found on page 36 in his book published a few years later On the Spiritual in Art in one of the Dover English editions – or on page 37 in the other. Although ‘inner necessity’ is a guiding concept for Kandinsky’s approach to all art, there is no direct or explicit connection in the text on those pages to ‘Houses at Murnau’. However, the painting embodies the principle of ‘inner necessity’ through its expressive colour and innovative composition, characteristic of the period when the artist was moving away from representational forms toward expressing what to him were spiritual realities.