Blue Desert with Dunes of Rain

As if we could scrape the color off the iris and still see.
-Maggie Nelson, Bluets

Image: Gyorgy Kepes, Juliet Kepes with Peacock Feather, 1939 +

Title: Nod to Edmond Jabès, from “After the Deluge” as found in If There Were Anywhere but Desert: The Selected Poems of Edmond Jabès

Every man has a piece of sky in his breast and in it flies a swallow

I actually saw it happen. A bird falling from the roof of a building. The bird let out a little cry as it dropped—one story, two—then, just as if it had hit something solid in the air, it bounced into flight. Hardly back on the roof, it was falling again, and falling, letting out that cry. But were the falls failed attempts at flight? The bird seemed to be throwing itself off the roof—falling on purpose. Out of the plunge perfected, flight pushed up as necessity. There was thrust behind it—the fear of falling. And with each practice fall, the cry lasted longer until the cry became a run of notes, a flutter along the avifaunal scale. Out of the fall, the cry shivered up and down, the natural embodiment of thrill. Suddenly, I understood. The bird wasn’t practicing flight. It knew how to fly. The bird was teaching itself how to sing.

-Susan Mitchell, "Notes Towards a History of Scaffolding"

Images:
1st image: found
2nd image:  Front and back of a page from Aram Saroyan’s Pages
3rd image: Blake Ogden, Bird and the moon
4th image: found
5th image: Etienne-Jules Marey, Analysis of the Flight of a Seagull, 1887
6th image: found

Title: Nod to Fatos Arapi, Sultan Murat and the Albanian

We say forest but this word is made of the unknown

“I tried to discover, in the rumor of forests and waves, words that other men could not hear, and I pricked up my ears to listen to the revelation of their harmony.”
-Gustave Flaubert


Image: Henri Cartier-Bresson, Brie, France, 1968
Title: Nod to Witold Gombrowicz

Forget what country you are in

"His hand an encyclopedia, his hair air..."


Text and image: Roland Penrose, Portrait, 1939

Title: Nod to W.S. Merwin, excerpt from "Exercise"(which could/should be its own post -- forthcoming)

Hesitantly, like scattered islands

"We go forward and backward, and there is no place."
-Rosmarie Waldrop, "Conversation 4: On Place,” from Reluctant Gravities +

Image: Danny Lyon, The Walls: Cell Block Table, 1964
Title: Nod to Rilke (who else?), from The Book of Hours I, 18

A Blue Rinse to the Language

 

 

"From childhood he dreamed of being able to keep with him all the objects in the world lined up on his shelves and bookcases. He denied lack, oblivion or even the likelihood of a missing piece. Order streamed from Noah in blue triangles and as the pure fury of his classifications rose around him, engulfing his life they came to be called waves by others, who drowned, a world of them."
-Anne Carson, Short Talks


Image: Athanasius Kircher, Noah’s Ark, 1675

Title: Nod to John Ashberry

Like Thread Through a Needle

 

“Dreams, memories, the sacred—they are all alike in that they are beyond our grasp. Once we are even marginally separated from what we can touch, the object is sanctified; it acquires the beauty of the unattainable, the quality of the miraculous. Everything, really, has this quality of sacredness, but we can desecrate it at a touch. How strange man is! His touch defiles and yet he contains the source of miracles.”

― Yukio Mishima, Spring Snow 

Image: Thomas J. Abercrombie, Afghan Woman in Chadri, Afghanistan,  1968

Title: Nod to W. S. Merwin

Swans, Amputees

Life itself is an exile. The way home is not the way back.

-Colin Wilson

Image: John Vink, Pomarico, Apulia, Italy, 1983 +

Title: Nod to Erica Baum

One Livid Flame

Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves.

—James Joyce, Ulysses

Image: Tomoko Yoneda, Joyce’s Glasses - Viewing a letter to Sylvia Beach, the first publisher of Ulysses, 1998 
Title: Nod to James Joyce, Ulysses

Why are you here?

[This place is a quiet place, isn't it? I don't mind it.]

Photo: Paris flooded, Historical Library of Paris

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]

The Flair of Great Loneliness There

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