Memory insists with its sea voice

 

There is really nothing more to say except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.

- Toni Morrison

 

 Image: Graciela Iturbide

Title: Anne Michaels, The Weight of Oranges

Words Hazard All

              I’ve never thought of counting words. I’d rather not

              know.
-Iris Murdoch

      Title: Ronald Johnson

A Word

I used to think when I turned thirty I would become a writer.

Thirty passed.

I wrote here then, daily. Poems. Essays. Words like leaves on a page curling, turning over in the wind.

I wrote before that, too. Decades before: shelves, walls, boxes of words.

I didn't know what blogger meant. Monetize, followers, trolls.

And then erasure happened.

It swept.

My knees became my feet, my eyes like the closing flowers, unseen.

I have dwelt in caves dripping.

Time has passed. The sun is higher.

I write.
I want you to know I am still writing.

Yes, my answer will always be yes,

I am writing.

Image: John Bridges, Embrace
Text: Terresa Wellborn

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

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”

Naked and dressed in stars

     I was a great many far cries from myself. 

     -Gary Lutz

     Image: Lisette Model, First Reflection, New York

     Title:  Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions: Volume I, trans. by Rosmarie Waldrop 

A silence approaching bees of the invisible

Know this as well: We no longer have our words. They have withdrawn. In truth, they live, they wander among us. The face with the lost mouth.

-Henri Michaux

Image: Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorsky
Title: Carolyn Forché

This forest of letters

   You speak, and suddenly you are a thousand words standing up.

-Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions: Volume I [The Book of Yukel, Return to the Book], translated by Rosmarie Waldrop

Image: Found
Title: Susan Howe, “Personal Narrative” (Souls of the Labadie Tract, 2007)

A sharp-edged throne, a great arsenic lobster

Language is not transparent.

Image: Mel Bochner
Title: García Lorca, from Theory and Play of the Duende (obviously)

Come, young rain of tears

All my life I’ve looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.
-Ernest Hemingway


Image: Alexis Arnold, Crystalized books
Title:  Rolf Jacobsen

What Geomancy

"For words are clumsy mountaineers and clumsy miners. Not for them to bring down treasures from the mountains’ peaks, or up from the mountains’ bowels."

-Franz Kafka, in a letter written to Selma Kohn 
[Source: Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors, trans. by Richard and Clara Winston]

[Image: Thomas Moglu]

Scaffolding for Meaning

Strings of language extend in every direction to bind the world into a rushing, ribald whole.

-Donald Barthelme

Image: Anders Beer Wilse, Norway, Hardangerjöklen, ca 1908.
Title: Nod to Diego Marani (phrase from New Finnish Grammar)

Abeille, Arbre, Bois, Jardin

"And though recently all his living with books had put his head rather in the clouds and made him less and less interested in the world around him, now on the other hand reading the Encyclopedia, and beautiful words like Abeille, Arbre, Bois, Jardin, made him rediscover everything around him as if seeing it for the first time."

-Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees

Image: Isaac Eddy and James Wilson, history from 4000 BC - 1813 AD

Writing: An Infinite Question

A “journey of profundity and solitude across measureless oceans.”
-Giorgio de Chirico

Image: Mark Tansey, Wheel of Language

It is commonly thought

It is commonly thought that everything that is can be put into words.
-Agnes Martin

Image: matchbook

Valéry on Dictionaries and Ghosts

It’s most instructive when you can’t find the right word — it can prove that you’re truly envisaging a mental fact, and not a ghost from a dictionary.

— Paul Valéry, Cahiers/Notebooks (1900)


Image:

Fields Engraved in the Soul

"Each one of us, then, should speak of his roads, his crossroads, his roadside benches; each one of us should make a surveyor’s map of his lost fields and meadows. Thoreau said that he had a map of his fields engraved in his soul. And Jean Wahl once wrote …The frothing of the hedges / I keep deep inside me… Thus we cover the universe with drawings we have lived."

—Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

Image:  Sam Winston

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