The Failure of Language

…you know
that language failed me
early with you: in my mouth you found
a hidden stammer. In all
the days since, what have I said
that was right? So little.
But know: when we stood on one side
of thick glass to watch
a world of water ignore our entire lives,
I kissed your fingers
and each one in that light was blue.

—Paul Guest, from Water

[image via Agence Eureka]

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.

Immaculate Silence

My silences are immaculate.

-Roberto Bolaño, By Night in Chile

Photo: ILona Olkonen

Space Undefined

“I don’t know what the word “space” means…I keep using it. But I’m not quite sure what it means.”  

– Gordon Matta-Clark

Image: Gordon Matta-Clark, Conical Intersect, 1975

Our True Face Never Speaks

 

 

[Title by Rilke]

Art: Augustus Vincent Tack, Evening, between 1934 and 1936

The Heart of Another is a Dark Forest

Photo:  Jane Evelyn Atwood, Blind Twins

The Unsaid

I used to put words here
(1,095 days worth);
I still do, only now
they are rarely mine.

Image: Michaël Borremans, Various ways of avoiding visual contact with the outside world using yellow isolating tape, 1998

Immediately Far

 The journey is so immediately far.

-Tu Fu

Image: Masao Yamamoto

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

Calvino on Classics

"A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say."
— Italo Calvino

Image: Alejandra Laviada, Before the Fall

Something Quite Surreal

When a local Maine library was destroyed in a fire, artist Elizabeth Awalt drove over and saw something quite surreal: Hundreds of scorched pages flying around. Only the edges were burned resembling pieces of toast or even tombstones but the center of the pages were intact. She started picking up the pages, from Jean de Brunoff’s Babar, Edward Gorey, and more. She was deeply moved by these pages and remarked on how much a part of her own life these books had been. Elizabeth thought she might paint on some of them or give some to other Maine artists to paint. These pages turned into a benefit auction of works from the pages she’d recovered that day.

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