All the ladders in the world

 

Ars Poetica

For a while I climbed the ladder,
not realizing I’d placed it
against the wrong house. The window
I tried to look into was a mirror.
I fell backward into the world.

-Stephen Dunn

 

Image: Lukas Schnitzer, Vöstung Sadtwar, Hungary 1665

Title: adapted from Richard Garcia, “Ladders”

My Own Desert Places

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

  -Jean Baudrillard

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   "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

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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”

The rattling of a mirror not quite firmly fastened to the wall

   I have rarely lost sight of myself; I have detested and adored myself — and so, we have grown old together.

-Paul Valéry, Selected Writings of Paul Valéry
Image: via
Title: Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks

A small spot on the astronomer’s retina

   When the child was a child, it didn’t know that it was a child, everything was soulful, and all souls were one.

-Peter Handke

Image: Vivian Maier, Untitled (Boy in Mirror), 1950s
Title: adapted from Ted Kooser from "After Years"