The Path

"The path to my fixed purpose is hid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run." 

-Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

Image: 美撒guo

Ruminations on Home

"Home is where somebody notices when you are no longer there."
-Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project 

Image: Tethering and training equipment used in falconry, H Schlegel and AH Verster de Wulverhorst, from Traité de Fauconnerie  

The Sadness of Geography

"Do you understand the sadness of geography?"

—Michael Ondaatje

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ 

Lands, a List (Mythological and Otherwise)

• Avalon
• Buyan, an island with the ability to appear and disappear in Russian mythology
• Shambhala
• Shangri-La, a fictitious valley in Tibet the idea of which may have been inspired by the myth of Shambhala
• Quivira and Cíbola, also known as the Seven Cities of Gold. These were suspected somewhere in America by the conquistadors.
• El Dorado, mythic city of gold.
• Atlantis
• Lemuria (continent)
• Mu (lost continent)
• Ys; a mythical city built on the coast of Brittany, and later swallowed by the ocean. Most versions of the legend place the city in the Douarnenez Bay.
• Cantre’r Gwaelod is the legendary ancient sunken realm said to have occupied a tract of fertile land lying between Ramsey Island and Bardsey Island in what is now Cardigan Bay to the west of Wales.

Image: La Sphere du Monde, 1549, by Oronce Fine

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 

[NOTE: Click through to see larger image]

Acclivity (n)

acclivity (n): an ascending slope

Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, 2010.

Image: Scala della torre di Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, circa 1900-05

The Unknown

"The unknown must remain unknown or the novel ends."

— Anne Carson, from Eros The Bittersweet

Image: Raphaelle Peale, Venus Rising from the Sea - A Deception

Irregular Planets

"They are trying to make me into a fixed star. I am an irregular planet."

—Martin Luther, c. 1530

[Image: Found]

A Little Space

And we are put on earth a little space,
That we may learn to bear the beams of love.

-William Blake, Songs of Innocence

Photo: Lesley Dill, Flower Hands, 1997

Eternity and it is Just as Flat and Wide

I see the world is flat and the map flat
that records it, and both page and world
speak each other forever. Put a fold
in eternity and it is just as flat and wide.
Take the map of the world and fold it
into a boat and the boat becomes the world.

-Dan Beachy-Quick from Spell 

[image: Johann Ruysch world map, 1507-1508]

Nota Bene

[Footnotes, subtext are everything.]

Photo: Random, found

The Markawasi Stone Forest of Peru

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

-Wallace Stevens

Art: The Markawasi Stone Forest of Peru

Everything is written in the sky

"Dorrego revealed the other sky, the boundless dome that sends you rushing to a dictionary for synonyms for ‘infinite’; stars that clustered, not into constellations, but into galaxies; stars like swarms of bees which suggested not stillness or permanence but movement, the trail of something, of someone that passed just now, a moment ago, when you weren’t looking. A sky that seemed to suddenly reveal the meaning of all things: Man’s need to create language to describe it, geography to explain his place within it, biology to remind him that he is a newcomer in this universe, and history, because everything is written in the sky above Dorrego."

-Marcelo Figueras, Kamchatka 





photo: James Henkel, 2 Hands Sunspots