It is not for us to follow the trail of truth too far, since by doing so we entirely loses the directing compass of our mind

 

 

 

 

 

"Men go abroad to admire the heights of mountains, the mighty billows of the sea, the broad tides of rivers, the compass of the ocean, and the circuits of the stars, and pass themselves by."

-St. Augustine, from Confessions

 

Image: Georgia O’Keeffe, Road - Mesa with Mist, 1961

Title: adapted from Herman Melville, Pierre

Deep down and deep inland

"You think I’ll be happy?" 
“Yeah, you just won’t know it.”

-	Alec Baldwin & Kevin Bacon, from the movie, She's having a baby

Image: Argyle Plaids, Left in her Wake

Title: Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, chapter 87

I have a sort of sea-feeling

   I saw, the sea was boundless, I saw no shore.

-Inscription on a Carthaginian funerary urn
Image: Found
Title: Herman Melville

Projects working to restore sight and prevent eye disease

Through thee, thy flaming self, my scorched eyes do dimly see…

-Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

Image: Raoul Hausmann, Untitled, February, 1931.
Title: Thanks to Banksy

The Map or the Territory

"While ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy."
-Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, chapter 87

Image: Paul Nougé, The Juggler, c. 1929-1930
Title: Nod to Michel Houellebecq

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 Path

"The path to my fixed purpose is hid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run." 

-Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

Image: 美撒guo

I am Tormented

"I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote."

-Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

Map: Martin Waldseemüller, South America, detail +

I Begin Everywhere at Once

"I begin, everywhere at once, as if I had a century ahead of me." —Elias Canetti

Have I said this before? Most likely. 

I've arrived, remained, left, only to leave again and return. Which is coming and which is going? I tend to confuse the two. A decision, then. Instead of mourning the time, the oddities, the surrounding infinite of things, I will write. 

Photo: Zion National Park, Utah. Cross-bedded Navajo Sandstone on Checkerboard Mountain along the Zion-Mount Carmel road. Circa 1946.