These fragments I have shored against my ruins. -T.S. Eliot

These fragments I have shored against my ruins.  -T.S. Eliot
Showing posts with label Edmond Jabès. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Edmond Jabès. Show all posts

Saturday, April 19, 2014

My Own Desert Places




















     "For the desert is simply that:… an ecstatic form of disappearance."
  -Jean Baudrillard

   ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::



   "You don’t need me. What you really need is a mirror. Because any stranger is for you simply a mirror in which to reflect yourself. I don’t ever again want to return to such a desert of mirrors."
-Kōbō Abe

    ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::


You are there
for an instant Blue desert
with dunes of rain Thirst is granted
Space is a breach You burn in the night
whose walls are down I see by your oil
by the wick in the middle where a flame blossoms
-Edmond Jabès, excerpt from “After the Deluge,” If There Were Anywhere but Desert: The Selected Poems of Edmond Jabès
Image: Max Scheler, Art Class for Retired Ctizens, Sun Valley, Arizona, 1962
Title: Robert Frost, “Desert Places”

Thursday, April 25, 2013

Naked and dressed in stars























     I was a great many far cries from myself. 
     -Gary Lutz
     Image: Lisette Model, First Reflection, New York
     Title:  Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions: Volume I, trans. by Rosmarie Waldrop 

Saturday, February 16, 2013

This forest of letters
























   You speak, and suddenly you are a thousand words standing up.
-Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions: Volume I [The Book of Yukel, Return to the Book], translated by Rosmarie Waldrop

Image: Found
Title: Susan Howe, “Personal Narrative” (Souls of the Labadie Tract, 2007)

Monday, January 14, 2013

A swarm of voluptuous moths

























    Amazingly,
I am too the memory of a sword
and of a solitary, falling sun,
turning itself to gold, then gray, then nothing.
I am the one who sees the approaching ships
from harbor. And I am the dwindled books,
the rare engravings worn away by time;
the one who envies those already dead.
Stranger to be the woman who interlaces
such words as these, in some room in a house.
-adapted from Jorge Luis Borges, “I” 

Image: Christo and Jeanne Claude, Wrapped Trees, Fondation Beyeler and Berower Park, Riehen, Switzerland, 1997-98
Photo: Wolfgang Volz
Title: Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions: Volume I [The Book of Yukel, Return to the Book], translated by Rosmarie Waldrop

Monday, November 19, 2012

Furrow and Word

















Joseph Conrad, landlocked but reliving the sea, wrote much of his work with a favorite pen.

-Joshua CohenThe Font of the Hand

Image: Bianca Brunner, Split, 2010

Title: Nod to Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions (Rosmarie Waldrop, translator)

Monday, October 1, 2012

Blue Desert with Dunes of Rain






















As if we could scrape the color off the iris and still see.
-Maggie Nelson, Bluets


Image: Gyorgy Kepes, Juliet Kepes with Peacock Feather, 1939 +


Title: Nod to Edmond Jabès, from “After the Deluge” as found in If There Were Anywhere but Desert: The Selected Poems of Edmond Jabès

Thursday, April 12, 2012

The Physicality of Writing




I discovered the tongue and the lips of my heart. Since then I have not had a mouth.
—Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions: Volume I [The Book of Yukel, Return to the Book], translated by Rosmarie Waldrop



Photo:  Edward S. Curtis