The Living Infinite

A man faced with his own immensity
Wakes all the waves, all their loose wandering fire.

Theodore Roethke, excerpt from “The Far Field”

Image: Latefa Wiersch
Title: Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

Which I is I?

How can it be described? How can any of it be described? The trip and the story of the trip are always two different things. The narrator is the one who has stayed home, but then, afterward, presses her mouth upon the traveler’s mouth, in order to make the mouth work, to make the mouth say, say, say. One cannot go to a place and speak of it; one cannot both see and say, not really. One can go, and upon returning make a lot of hand motions and indications with the arms. The mouth itself, working at the speed of light, at the eye’s instructions, is necessarily struck still; so fast, so much to report, it hangs open and dumb as a gutted bell. 

-Lorrie Moore, “People Like That Are the Only People Here”
Image: Flickr / francyvieste
Title: Theodore Roethke, from “In A Dark Time”

Writing with my eyes instead of my hands

In a dark time, the eye begins to see.

-Theodore Roethke

Image: James Renwick, First principles of natural philosophy 

Title: Mary Ruefle