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

Shakespeare Insult Kit

A World Without Water

"Is it easier for a man to live his life again as a fish, than to accept the wonder of being human? So alone, so frightened, so wanting for what we are afraid to give tongue to.”
-Richard Flanagan

Images:

(1) Pierre Belon, Monk Fish from Harvard University Library’s copy of ‘De Aquatilibus’

(2) Ajā’ib al-makhlūqāt wa-gharā’ib al-mawjūdāt - كتاب عجائب المخلوقات وغرائب الموجودات) by Zakarīyā’ ibn Muḥammad al-Qazwīnī, originally published in 1283. 

Writing: An Infinite Question

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

Image: Mark Tansey, Wheel of Language

I am the arrow shaft

 

I am the arrow shaft, carved along my length by unexpected lights and gashes from the very sky, and this book is the straying trail of blood. 

-Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Photo: courtesy of NASA

The language of birds

What is imagination but a reflection of our yearning to belong to eternity as well as to time?

-Stanley Kunitz

Title: Thanks to Rene Guenon, The Language of Birds


Photo: Gertrude Käsebier

A story is not compulsory

"What am I doing, talking, having my figments talk, it can only be me. Spells of silence too, when I listen, and hear the local sounds, the world sounds, see what an effort I make, to be reasonable. There’s my life, why not, it is one, if you like, if you must, I don’t say no, this evening. There has to be one, it seems, once there is speech, no need of a story, a story is not compulsory, just a life, that’s the mistake I made, one of the mistakes, to have wanted a story for myself, whereas life alone is enough…"

-Beckett, Texts for Nothing #4

Art: Alighiero Boetti Mettere, (1978) ballpoint pen on paper

The fundamental impermanence of things

…as if I were only a flower after all and not the map of the country in which it grows.

-John Ashbery, Three Poems 

Image: Ann Hamilton, untitled (from Body Object series, 1984-88

Title: Maggie Nelson, Bluets

The ecstatic love of a young writer

Poetry is what happens when nothing else can.

—Charles Bukowski

Image: Dirk Nijland, Angler on the river Maas, Rotterdam

Title: Nod to Vladimir Nabokov

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

I have no face

 

 

 

 

 

“But here I am nobody. I have no face. (…)
‘That is my face,’ said Rhoda, ‘in the looking-glass behind Susan’s shoulder - that face is my face.
But I will duck behind her to hide it, for I am not here. I have no face…’”

-Virginia Woolf, The Waves, 1931

[Image found here]