A sharp-edged throne, a great arsenic lobster

Language is not transparent.

Image: Mel Bochner
Title: García Lorca, from Theory and Play of the Duende (obviously)

I have a sort of sea-feeling

   I saw, the sea was boundless, I saw no shore.

-Inscription on a Carthaginian funerary urn
Image: Found
Title: Herman Melville

Opacity

  Tristram Shandy does not want to be born, because he does not want to die. Every means and every weapon is valid to save oneself from death and time. If a straight line is the shortest distance between two fated and inevitable points, digressions will lengthen it; and if these digressions become so complex, so tangled and tortuous, so rapid as to hide their own tracks, who knows - perhaps death may not find us, perhaps time will lose its way, and perhaps we ourselves can remain concealed in our shifting hiding places.

-Carlo Levi

Images: Sigurdur Gudmundsson, Gottfried Wiegand, Compagnie Willi Dorner

In the vast world or in the immense past

… the silence
Holds with its gloved hand
The wild hawk of the mind.

— R. S. Thomas, excerpt from “The Untamed” 

Images: Found; Edward Curtis
Title: Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

A swarm of voluptuous moths

    Amazingly,
I am too the memory of a sword
and of a solitary, falling sun,
turning itself to gold, then gray, then nothing.
I am the one who sees the approaching ships
from harbor. And I am the dwindled books,
the rare engravings worn away by time;
the one who envies those already dead.
Stranger to be the woman who interlaces
such words as these, in some room in a house.

-adapted from Jorge Luis Borges, “I” 

Image: Christo and Jeanne Claude, Wrapped Trees, Fondation Beyeler and Berower Park, Riehen, Switzerland, 1997-98
Photo: Wolfgang Volz
Title: Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions: Volume I [The Book of Yukel, Return to the Book], translated by Rosmarie Waldrop

Come, young rain of tears

All my life I’ve looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.
-Ernest Hemingway


Image: Alexis Arnold, Crystalized books
Title:  Rolf Jacobsen

New Year's Resolution 2013

Image: Laurence Demaison
Quote: Rilke, from The Inner Sky: Poems, Notes, Dreams, trans. by Damion Searls

The Veins that used to run

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“My soul is in the sky.”

-Shakespeare, 
 

A Midsummer Night's Dream

 

Image: Erich Buchwald Zinnwald
Title: Emily Dickinson, excerpt from I’ve dropped my Brain — My Soul is numb, (#1046)

A Grotesque and Magnificent Inferno

Estimated number of fireflies it would take to generate the visible brightness of the sun: 14,286,000,000.

-Professor Cole Gilbert, Cornell University

Title: Alexander Blok
Image: Robert Rausschenberg, Mother of God, 1950 

Which I is I?

How can it be described? How can any of it be described? The trip and the story of the trip are always two different things. The narrator is the one who has stayed home, but then, afterward, presses her mouth upon the traveler’s mouth, in order to make the mouth work, to make the mouth say, say, say. One cannot go to a place and speak of it; one cannot both see and say, not really. One can go, and upon returning make a lot of hand motions and indications with the arms. The mouth itself, working at the speed of light, at the eye’s instructions, is necessarily struck still; so fast, so much to report, it hangs open and dumb as a gutted bell. 

-Lorrie Moore, “People Like That Are the Only People Here”
Image: Flickr / francyvieste
Title: Theodore Roethke, from “In A Dark Time”

An orgy of loose ends

   "…There is some line running through her body like a wick....I’m trying to understand what it means to have had a life."

-Mary Gordon

Title: Via Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Death on the Installment Plan

Image: Sebastião Salgado, Full View of the Serra Pelada Gold Mine, Brazil, 1986

The untrimmable light of the world

    The ‘second sight’ possessed by the Highlanders in Scotland is actually a foreknowledge of future events. I believe they possess this gift because they don’t wear trousers. That is also why in all countries women are more prone to utter prophecies.

-Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books

Image: Fergus Feehily
Title: Mary Oliver, from the poem "Mindful"