Mute as amber

When we speak of solitaries, we always take too much for granted. We think people know what we are talking about. But they know absolutely nothing. 

-Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

Art: Vilhelm Hammershoi, Baker's Shop, 1888 
Title: James Agee, excerpt from A Death in the Family

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”

Today I feel the whole world is a door

What is art? Trying to find the door.

-Adam Fuss

Image: Hannah Höch, Portait of Gerhard Hauptmann, 1919
Title: Nod to Dennis Silk, “The Marionette Theatre”