Bewilderment

"I want the muddled middle to be filled with the gristle of the living.”

-Dorianne Laux +

Image: Bill Brandt, Jean Dubuffet, 1960

We live submerged

    Words carry oceans on their small backs.
 
    -Lidia Yuknavitch, The Chronology of Water
 
Image: Graciela Iturbide, Eyes to Fly With?, Coyoacan, Mexico, 1991
Title: Evangelista Torricelli

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

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

Looking from outside into an open window

“I think that poems that have direct meanings—that’s a very dull poet, an extremely dull poet, and a person who is writing like he or she sees. That isn’t what you’re ever writing. You never write what you see. You see it, you just don’t write it. You write something else. And there’s always something else.”

-Barbara Guest
Image: Cristian Schloe, Portrait of a Heart
Title: Charles Baudelaire, Windows

Blind as we are to Seeing

     All words are masks and the lovelier they are, the more they are meant to conceal.

  -Steven Millhauser


Image: Claudia Drake, Moira, 2007
 

Title: Miguel Hernández

An archer in cover

“The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is 

 

nothing that does not require his attention.” 

-Flannery O'Connor

Picture: Flor Garduno, La pavo real (2008)
Title: Dorothy Dunnett

Out of sheer wonderment

“Our hands full or not:
 

The same abundance.
 

Our eyes open or shut:
 

The same light.” 
 

-Yves Bonnefoy, The Curved Planks: Poems


Image: Kim Høltermand, Grundtvigs Church, 2009
Title: W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn

Sight

Elsewhere unseen.

Image: Molly Taylor sorts through a pile of eyes, London, 1933

Your eyes, he said, are a train.

       

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I want to go inside your eyes, and dwell. 
 

-Sharon Olds, excerpt from the poem, “The Hour After” from The Unswept Room

 

Image: Piero del Pollaiuolo, Portrait of a Young Man, Head and Shoulders, Wearing a Cap, detail
Title: Micheline Aharonian Marcom, The Mirror in the Well

New Year's Resolution 2013

Image: Laurence Demaison
Quote: Rilke, from The Inner Sky: Poems, Notes, Dreams, trans. by Damion Searls

Writing with my eyes instead of my hands

In a dark time, the eye begins to see.

-Theodore Roethke

Image: James Renwick, First principles of natural philosophy 

Title: Mary Ruefle 

Trying to Find the Door

    A map of the true part of you, reader, would show every place where you have been from your birthplace to the place where you sit now reading this page… And when every place where you have ever been on every day of your life has been marked on the map of the true part of you, why then, reader, the map has been barely marked. There are still to mark all those places you have dreamed of yourself seeing or remembering or dreaming about.

-Gerald Murnane, Inland

Image: Chad Wys, from the series The Critique of Gesture
Title: Nod to Adam Fuss

They Dream That They Have Eyes

-Jean-Pierre Boulé, Hervé Guibert: voices of the self

Projects working to restore sight and prevent eye disease

Through thee, thy flaming self, my scorched eyes do dimly see…

-Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

Image: Raoul Hausmann, Untitled, February, 1931.
Title: Thanks to Banksy

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

One Livid Flame

Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves.

—James Joyce, Ulysses

Image: Tomoko Yoneda, Joyce’s Glasses - Viewing a letter to Sylvia Beach, the first publisher of Ulysses, 1998 
Title: Nod to James Joyce, Ulysses

Kinds of light unlike any other

 It is not down in any map; true places never are.
-Herman Melville 

And:

The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple
As false dawn.
-Richard Wilbur, excerpt from the poem, “Love Calls us to the Things of This World”

Image: found

Title: Nod to Anne Carson

The Heart of Another is a Dark Forest

Photo:  Jane Evelyn Atwood, Blind Twins

Hysterical Blindness

 

"Hysterical blindness is not real blindness at all."

-William James, The principles of psychology, Volume 1

Image: Francesco del Cossa, Detail of St. Lucy (St. Lucia), National Gallery of Art, Washington 

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