Unfathomable Cities

The deep parts of my life pour onward,
as if the river shores were opening out.
It seems that things are more like me now,
that I can see farther into paintings.
I feel closer to what language can’t reach.
With my sense, as with birds, I climb
into the windy heaven, out of the oak,
and in the ponds broken off from the sky
my feeling sinks, as if standing on fishes.

-Rilke

Image: Irene Suchocki

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

Willing to Sail

Only a shipwrecked person who has just escaped drowning could understand the psychology of someone who breaks out in laughter just because he is able to breathe.
-Kōbō Abe, The Woman in the Dunes

Image: Caspar David Friedrich, Seashore with Shipwreck by Moonlight, 1825-30 
Title: from John Macdonald's, A Naval, Military and Political Telegraphic Dictionary, Numerically Arranged on a Very Comprehensive Scale, 1817

A strange melancholy pervades me

     The tides are in our veins.

-Robinson Jeffers

Image: Ray K. Metzker, Pictus Interruptus

Title: Françoise Sagan, Bonjour Tristesse

Anaesthetizing the sky

Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.

-C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

   Image: Ingvar Kenne from the series Landscapes Deconstructed 
Title: Samantha Wynne Rhydderch, from “Understanding the Echo”

I have a sort of sea-feeling

   I saw, the sea was boundless, I saw no shore.

-Inscription on a Carthaginian funerary urn
Image: Found
Title: Herman Melville

Furrow and Word

Joseph Conrad, landlocked but reliving the sea, wrote much of his work with a favorite pen.

-Joshua Cohen, “The Font of the Hand”

Image: Bianca Brunner, Split, 2010

Title: Nod to Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions (Rosmarie Waldrop, translator)

A psychic state achievable through geography

    Ancient exiles,
 Tell me about your seas…

   -Arthur Rimbaud, from “Comedy of Thirst”

 Image: Found
 Title: Nod to Rebecca Solnit from A Field Guide to Getting Lost

I understand the language of waves

"Everything begins with a story."

-Joseph Campbell

Image: Erich Hartmann, Pair of shoes on deck, Carribbean, 1984
Title: Thanks to Le Testament d’Orphée (Testament of Orpheus)

The Endless Immensity of the Sea

"If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea."

-Antoine de Saint-Exupery 

Image: Akos Major

I am Not Resigned

I saw, the sea was boundless, I saw no shore.

—Inscription on a Carthaginian funerary urn

Image: Eduard Bezembinder

Title: Nod to Edna St. Vincent Millay, excerpt from “Dirge Without Music”  

I have no face

 

 

 

 

 

“But here I am nobody. I have no face. (…)
‘That is my face,’ said Rhoda, ‘in the looking-glass behind Susan’s shoulder - that face is my face.
But I will duck behind her to hide it, for I am not here. I have no face…’”

-Virginia Woolf, The Waves, 1931

[Image found here]

On Swimming and Seas

“Joyce consulted Jung, who diagnosed his poor daughter as incurably schizophrenic partly on the evidence of her brilliant, obsessive punning. Joyce remarked that he too was a punner. “You are a deep-sea diver,” said Jung. “She is drowning.” 

-Edward Hoagland, Learning to Eat Soup

Photo: Todd Jordan, Sidescape, Albierto Portugal. July 2010.

The Markawasi Stone Forest of Peru

"The river that flows nowhere, like a sea…"

-Wallace Stevens

Art: The Markawasi Stone Forest of Peru