Between the Cry and Silence

The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.

-G. K. Chesterton

Image: Salvador Dalí, The portrait of Federico García Lorca 
Title: From Octavio Paz, “André Breton or the Quest of the Beginning. Alternating Current” 

I understand the language of waves

"Everything begins with a story."

-Joseph Campbell

Image: Erich Hartmann, Pair of shoes on deck, Carribbean, 1984
Title: Thanks to Le Testament d’Orphée (Testament of Orpheus)

Some of the Fragments of the Afternoon

 

“ A wind has blown the rain away and blown the sky away and all the leaves away, and the trees stand. I think, I too, have known autumn too long.”

-e. e. cummings 

Image: Sumach in Autumn (Pittsfield, Mass.) 

Title: Nod to T. S. Eliot, from "Hysteria"

A Stranger on the Riverbank

"My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it."

-Ursula Le Guin, "Winged: the Creatures on my Mind," in Harper's, 1990

Image: Found
Title: Nod to Mahmoud Darwish, from “Who Am I, Without Exile?” from The Butterfly’s Burden

Today I feel the whole world is a door

What is art? Trying to find the door.

-Adam Fuss

Image: Hannah Höch, Portait of Gerhard Hauptmann, 1919
Title: Nod to Dennis Silk, “The Marionette Theatre”

They Dream That They Have Eyes

-Jean-Pierre Boulé, Hervé Guibert: voices of the self

Like a flag, I am surrounded by distances

The map is more interesting than the territory.

-Attributed, in a roundabout way, to Michel Houellebecq



Image: A chart of the Canarie and Madera Islands, ca. 1702-1707, NYPL Digitial Gallery
Title: Rilke, from Book of Images

Projects working to restore sight and prevent eye disease

Through thee, thy flaming self, my scorched eyes do dimly see…

-Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

Image: Raoul Hausmann, Untitled, February, 1931.
Title: Thanks to Banksy

The astonished places you inhabited and left

That the sun can do this to us, every one of us
that the sun can do this to everything inside
the broken light refracted through leaves.

-Peter Gizzi, “Vincent, Homesick for the Land of Pictures”


Image: Francesca Woodman, Untitled, MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, New Hampshire, 1980
Title: Rilke, from Uncollected Poems

The song that is the bird unseen

In India they tell the future from the flight of birds.

-Eliot Weinberger, “The Dream of India”

Image: Joaquim Pla Janini, Mariposas de le Caridad 

Title: Nod to William Carlos Williams, excerpt from “To All Gentleness” 

What do I make of all this texture?

“‘Some days I feel like playing it smooth,’ I said, ‘and some days I feel like playing it like a waffle iron.’” 

-Raymond Chandler, Trouble is My Business

Image: Found

Title: Nod to Annie Dillard

The Tall Sky of Hope

And at dawn, armed with ardent patience, we shall enter the splendid cities.

-Arthur Rimbaud

Image: Taddeo di Bartolo, San Gimignano, detail, c. 1391 
Title: Marin Sorescu, from “Fountains in the sea”