That Very Elsewhere

The mad state is, as he emphasizes over and over again, empty.
Teeming with emptiness. Knotted on emptiness. Immodest in its
emptiness. You can pull emptiness out of it by the handful.
“I am not here. I am not here and never will be.”
You can pull it out endlessly.

Anne Carson, from Semaine d’Artaud 

Image: James Kao, Tablescape, 2004
Title: Judith Butler on “the poetics of non-arrival,” excerpt from Who Owns Kafka?

Caught between the tongue and the taste

“Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are 

 

always impossible.” 
-Doris Lessing

Title: Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red
Image: Found

Under the Seams

"When you do something exactly wrong, you always turn up 

 

something."

 

-Andy Warhol

Title: Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

Image: Found

Each hung bell

       If only I could see a landscape as it is when I am not there. But when I am in any place I disturb the silence of heaven by the beating of my heart.

       -Simone Weil, as quoted by Anne Carson

Image: Herve Guibert
Title: Gerard Manley Hopkins, “As Kingfishers Catch Fire” 

Her pockets full of lichens and seeds

   Soul is the place,
stretched like a surface of millstone grit between
body and mind,
where such necessity grinds itself out

-Anne Carson, excerpt from “The Glass Essay”

Image: John B. Greene, Statue fragments
 

 

Title: Mary Oliver, from "Sleeping in the Forest"

Consider incompleteness as a verb

That uncrossable gulf between home and away.

-Steve Himmer, excerpt from The Importance of Unwritten Postcards

Image: Plate photographed through tissue. The frontispiece to The Giant-Killer: or, The Battle Which All Must Fight, by A.L.O.E. (Charlotte Maria Tucker, 1856). Original from Oxford University. Digitized July 12, 2006.
Title: Anne Carson, Plainwater

A Blue Rinse to the Language

 

 

"From childhood he dreamed of being able to keep with him all the objects in the world lined up on his shelves and bookcases. He denied lack, oblivion or even the likelihood of a missing piece. Order streamed from Noah in blue triangles and as the pure fury of his classifications rose around him, engulfing his life they came to be called waves by others, who drowned, a world of them."
-Anne Carson, Short Talks


Image: Athanasius Kircher, Noah’s Ark, 1675

Title: Nod to John Ashberry

Ovid is weeping

In the troubled depths of my memory of myself, a little child is awakening and makes the old man’s mask sob.

-René Daumal, Mount Analogue

 
Image: Josef Sudek
Title: Nod to Anne Carson, from "Short Talk on Ovid" as found in Short Talks

Kinds of light unlike any other

 It is not down in any map; true places never are.
-Herman Melville 

And:

The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple
As false dawn.
-Richard Wilbur, excerpt from the poem, “Love Calls us to the Things of This World”

Image: found

Title: Nod to Anne Carson

The Unknown

"The unknown must remain unknown or the novel ends."

— Anne Carson, from Eros The Bittersweet

Image: Raphaelle Peale, Venus Rising from the Sea - A Deception