A struggle between roots, ciphers, and shades of light

Just as music leaves itself behind, and words have to be spoken in order to effect their disappearance, one can catch a glimmer of a life itself being a glad renunciation of itself. 

-Fanny Howe

Image: Eric Marrian, Saint Germain en laye, 2009
Title: Tomas Tranströmer, "The Open"

The word within a word, unable to speak a word

Perhaps the music Schopenhauer had in mind is music eliminated to non-music. A whisper would suffice. Perhaps a sigh of fatigue or resignation, perhaps a moan of despair or sorrow. Perhaps a sound just articulate enough that it could be heard to dissipate.

-Eugene Thacker, Cosmic Pessimism 

Image: Arnold Newman, Violin shop : patterns on table, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1941
Title: T.S. Eliot from the poem, “Gerontion”

An inevitable locomotive

We must admit there will be music despite everything.*

-Jack Gilbert, "A Brief for the Defense"

*"Poetry, for me," he declares in a 1965 essay, "is a witnessing to magnitude." In poems he sings of a "magnitude of pain, of being that much alive," and "a magnitude of beauty that allows me no peace." +

Yes. And yes.

[R.I.P., Jack. 11.11.12]

Image: Etienne Martin, Le Manteau, 1962