RIP Ray Bradbury

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you."
-Ray Bradbury

Image: Samuel Clemens (yes, the one)

 

RIP Ray Bradbury: August 22, 1920 - June 5, 2012, age 91)

The repository of unlived things

Our true face never speaks.

Somewhere there must be storehouses
where all these lives are laid away
like suits of armor or old carriages
or clothes hanging limply on the walls.

Maybe all paths lead there,
to the repository of unlived things. 

-Rainer Maria Rilke, from The Book of Pilgrimage in Rilke’s Book of Hours

Image: Found

Ceci n’est pas un blog

A summary:

• This is not a blog.
• Blog is a four-letter-word.
• Don't comment. (the trail)
• Don't allow comments. (the time)
• Don't feed the trolls.
• Blogs are not platforms or pedestals. (Platforms are for shoes. Pedestals are for plants.)
• Blogs are not novels.
• Blogs cannot replace the novel you meant to write but didn't.

Title: thanks to René Magritte 

Art:  René Magritte, The Human Condition, 1933

Delirium perhaps

I pause to record that I feel in extraordinary form. Delirium perhaps.

-Samuel Beckett

Image: Emmet Gowin, Pivot Agriculture, Washington, 1987

Symphonies without movements, operas without words

We speak in (rich) monotones. Our poetry is haunted by the music it has left behind.

-George Steiner, Errata: An Examined Life

Image: The Musarithmetic Ark, attributed to Athanasius Kircher, 1650

Title thanks to: Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

Incomprehensible

Incomprehensible 
Incomprehensible
Incomprehensible
Incomprehensible
Incomprehensible
Incomprehensible
Incomprehensible
Incomprehensible


[beauty].      
 
Photo: © Massimo Listri, Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli, Italy, 2002

A renaissance of wonder

I am awaiting perpetually and forever a renaissance of wonder.
—Ferlinghetti
 

Image: The Virgin of Guadalupe, inscribed: VERA EFFIGIES/B.[Beatae]V.[Virginis] MARIA...

Everything is

Everything is gestation and then bringing forth.

-Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, p. 23 [translated by M.D. Herter Norton]

Photo: Inge Morath, Courtyard and portal, Masjid-e Shah, Isfahan, Iran, 1956

My house was a house of winds

 

“The world's continual breathing is what we hear and call silence.”

―Clarice Lispector, Passion according to G.H. 

[Title thanks to Dana Levin's poem,"The Weatherman"]

Acclivity (n):

acclivity (n): an ascending slope
Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. 2010.

Photo: Found

Spring at Night

the news arrived that this time we would only see the spring at night and that a spider crawls across the paper where I’m writing that the gift is here

-Pablo Picasso, The Burial Of The Count Of Orgaz & Other Poems

Photo: Adam Putnam, Untitled (wisp) (2007)

A rush of friendship for stones and grasses

Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us. To gallop intemperately; fall on the sand tired out; to feel the earth spin; to have — positively — a rush of friendship for stones and grasses, as if humanity were over, and as for men and women, let them go hang — there is no getting over the fact that this desire seizes us pretty often.
 

—Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room

Image: Arab manuscript, ca. 1766, Traité d’hippiatrie