Or I could call it a longing

 Cianalas: homesickness, longing, loneliness, melancholy

A’ dol dhachaigh: going home(wards)

Image: Found
Title: Mary Oliver

The language of the road

"The ocean ends, like life and vision, at a horizon that is the fault of the curvature of eye and earth, with no proof of true end at all." -Dan Beachy-Quick, A Whaler’s Dictionary

Image: Found, Marble paper 
Title: from Mohammed Bennis’s Seven Birds

A strange melancholy pervades me

     The tides are in our veins.

-Robinson Jeffers

Image: Ray K. Metzker, Pictus Interruptus

Title: Françoise Sagan, Bonjour Tristesse

Liquefaction

    I blame the twilight for coming too soon,
not allowing enough time for you
to drown without dying. And now
the water boatmen skate on the skin
of water, we should have practiced
how to breathe. Instead we undressed
each other slowly: middle names, first
loves, spiders, toads and newts. Taking our
time to visit every corner, all the while
knowing we would soon run out of self.
I want to ignore the silver scar
on your left retina: the imprint of an iceberg.
Those places you were yearning for: Bermuda,
Pacific, Icelandic waters. Confident diver
that you are, land was never your best side.
What remains is the space around
your hands, their quietness, and at the tips
of fingers the fain hum of blue.

-Saradha Soobrayen, “On the water meadows

Image 1: Max Ernst, Air washed in water (L’air lavé à l’eau), 1973

Image 2: Map: The Grand Circle

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

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

A story is not compulsory

"What am I doing, talking, having my figments talk, it can only be me. Spells of silence too, when I listen, and hear the local sounds, the world sounds, see what an effort I make, to be reasonable. There’s my life, why not, it is one, if you like, if you must, I don’t say no, this evening. There has to be one, it seems, once there is speech, no need of a story, a story is not compulsory, just a life, that’s the mistake I made, one of the mistakes, to have wanted a story for myself, whereas life alone is enough…"

-Beckett, Texts for Nothing #4

Art: Alighiero Boetti Mettere, (1978) ballpoint pen on paper

My house was a house of winds

 

“The world's continual breathing is what we hear and call silence.”

―Clarice Lispector, Passion according to G.H. 

[Title thanks to Dana Levin's poem,"The Weatherman"]

Getting Lost(er)

Blue is the color of longing for the distances you never arrive in… in this world we actually live in, distance ceases to be distance and to be blue when we arrive in it.

—Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, 2005




Image: Paul Harbutt, At world’s End II, 2007

The Failure of Language

…you know
that language failed me
early with you: in my mouth you found
a hidden stammer. In all
the days since, what have I said
that was right? So little.
But know: when we stood on one side
of thick glass to watch
a world of water ignore our entire lives,
I kissed your fingers
and each one in that light was blue.

—Paul Guest, from Water

[image via Agence Eureka]

Rather Than Words

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

—Philip Larkin, “High Windows”

Image: Karl Friedrich Schinkel, The arrival of the Queen of the Night, production for Mozart’s Magic Flute, 1815

How to Begin Again

"All the words are not enough to get anything said."

-Yannis Ritsos

Art: Agostino Arrivabene