Some is Poetry Which I am not Sure I Understand Yet

“…I longed to know the world’s name.” —Robert Penn Warren, from “American Portrait: Old Style”

Image:  Fludd, Utriusque Cosmi, Maioris scilicet et Minoris, metaphysica, physica, atque technica Historia

A Place

“Each moment is a place you've never been.”
―Mark Strand, New Selected Poems 

Photo: found

The Not Said

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

…Oppen found value in the not said, in the incomplete phrase, in the bare noun. His silence was political in that it represented the inability of art to provide an adequate image of human suffering.

-Michael Davidson on George Oppen

Image: Lava Flow Engulfing a Village to the West of Vesuvius, 1944

You come back home to find yourself there

"And the day goes by, but time stands still."
— Knut Hamsun, Pan

Image: Cypraea tigris Linnaeus, 1758

Title: Attributed to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Unmapped

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You do not have to leave to arrive.
— Andrea Gibson

[image: August Natterer]

The Blind Astronomer

 

His head is made of stars, but not yet arranged into constellations.
—Elias Canetti

[Image: Found]

What I Count On

what I count on
is a white birch
that stands
where no human language
is ever heard.


-Yosano Akiko, "What I Count On"

Photo: Álvaro Sánchez-Montañés

 

Valéry on Dictionaries and Ghosts

It’s most instructive when you can’t find the right word — it can prove that you’re truly envisaging a mental fact, and not a ghost from a dictionary.

— Paul Valéry, Cahiers/Notebooks (1900)


Image:

The Failure of Language

…you know
that language failed me
early with you: in my mouth you found
a hidden stammer. In all
the days since, what have I said
that was right? So little.
But know: when we stood on one side
of thick glass to watch
a world of water ignore our entire lives,
I kissed your fingers
and each one in that light was blue.

—Paul Guest, from Water

[image via Agence Eureka]

On Swimming and Seas

“Joyce consulted Jung, who diagnosed his poor daughter as incurably schizophrenic partly on the evidence of her brilliant, obsessive punning. Joyce remarked that he too was a punner. “You are a deep-sea diver,” said Jung. “She is drowning.” 

-Edward Hoagland, Learning to Eat Soup

Photo: Todd Jordan, Sidescape, Albierto Portugal. July 2010.

Immaculate Silence

My silences are immaculate.

-Roberto Bolaño, By Night in Chile

Photo: ILona Olkonen

Space Undefined

“I don’t know what the word “space” means…I keep using it. But I’m not quite sure what it means.”  

– Gordon Matta-Clark

Image: Gordon Matta-Clark, Conical Intersect, 1975

Our True Face Never Speaks

 

 

[Title by Rilke]

Art: Augustus Vincent Tack, Evening, between 1934 and 1936

The Heart of Another is a Dark Forest

Photo:  Jane Evelyn Atwood, Blind Twins

The Unsaid

I used to put words here
(1,095 days worth);
I still do, only now
they are rarely mine.

Image: Michaël Borremans, Various ways of avoiding visual contact with the outside world using yellow isolating tape, 1998

Immediately Far

 The journey is so immediately far.

-Tu Fu

Image: Masao Yamamoto

Fields Engraved in the Soul

"Each one of us, then, should speak of his roads, his crossroads, his roadside benches; each one of us should make a surveyor’s map of his lost fields and meadows. Thoreau said that he had a map of his fields engraved in his soul. And Jean Wahl once wrote …The frothing of the hedges / I keep deep inside me… Thus we cover the universe with drawings we have lived."

—Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

Image:  Sam Winston

Calvino on Classics

"A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say."
— Italo Calvino

Image: Alejandra Laviada, Before the Fall

Something Quite Surreal

When a local Maine library was destroyed in a fire, artist Elizabeth Awalt drove over and saw something quite surreal: Hundreds of scorched pages flying around. Only the edges were burned resembling pieces of toast or even tombstones but the center of the pages were intact. She started picking up the pages, from Jean de Brunoff’s Babar, Edward Gorey, and more. She was deeply moved by these pages and remarked on how much a part of her own life these books had been. Elizabeth thought she might paint on some of them or give some to other Maine artists to paint. These pages turned into a benefit auction of works from the pages she’d recovered that day.

Rather Than Words

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

—Philip Larkin, “High Windows”

Image: Karl Friedrich Schinkel, The arrival of the Queen of the Night, production for Mozart’s Magic Flute, 1815

The Path

"The path to my fixed purpose is hid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run." 

-Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

Image: 美撒guo

Ruminations on Home

"Home is where somebody notices when you are no longer there."
-Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project 

Image: Tethering and training equipment used in falconry, H Schlegel and AH Verster de Wulverhorst, from Traité de Fauconnerie  

The Sadness of Geography

"Do you understand the sadness of geography?"

—Michael Ondaatje

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Lands, a List (Mythological and Otherwise)

• Avalon
• Buyan, an island with the ability to appear and disappear in Russian mythology
• Shambhala
• Shangri-La, a fictitious valley in Tibet the idea of which may have been inspired by the myth of Shambhala
• Quivira and Cíbola, also known as the Seven Cities of Gold. These were suspected somewhere in America by the conquistadors.
• El Dorado, mythic city of gold.
• Atlantis
• Lemuria (continent)
• Mu (lost continent)
• Ys; a mythical city built on the coast of Brittany, and later swallowed by the ocean. Most versions of the legend place the city in the Douarnenez Bay.
• Cantre’r Gwaelod is the legendary ancient sunken realm said to have occupied a tract of fertile land lying between Ramsey Island and Bardsey Island in what is now Cardigan Bay to the west of Wales.

Image: La Sphere du Monde, 1549, by Oronce Fine

Hysterical Blindness

 

"Hysterical blindness is not real blindness at all."

-William James, The principles of psychology, Volume 1

Image: Francesco del Cossa, Detail of St. Lucy (St. Lucia), National Gallery of Art, Washington 

[NOTE: Click through to see larger image]

Acclivity (n)

acclivity (n): an ascending slope

Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, 2010.

Image: Scala della torre di Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, circa 1900-05

The Unknown

"The unknown must remain unknown or the novel ends."

— Anne Carson, from Eros The Bittersweet

Image: Raphaelle Peale, Venus Rising from the Sea - A Deception

Irregular Planets

"They are trying to make me into a fixed star. I am an irregular planet."

—Martin Luther, c. 1530

[Image: Found]

A Little Space

And we are put on earth a little space,
That we may learn to bear the beams of love.

-William Blake, Songs of Innocence

Photo: Lesley Dill, Flower Hands, 1997

Eternity and it is Just as Flat and Wide

I see the world is flat and the map flat
that records it, and both page and world
speak each other forever. Put a fold
in eternity and it is just as flat and wide.
Take the map of the world and fold it
into a boat and the boat becomes the world.

-Dan Beachy-Quick from Spell 

[image: Johann Ruysch world map, 1507-1508]

Nota Bene

[Footnotes, subtext are everything.]

Photo: Random, found

The Markawasi Stone Forest of Peru

"The river that flows nowhere, like a sea…"

-Wallace Stevens

Art: The Markawasi Stone Forest of Peru

Everything is written in the sky

"Dorrego revealed the other sky, the boundless dome that sends you rushing to a dictionary for synonyms for ‘infinite’; stars that clustered, not into constellations, but into galaxies; stars like swarms of bees which suggested not stillness or permanence but movement, the trail of something, of someone that passed just now, a moment ago, when you weren’t looking. A sky that seemed to suddenly reveal the meaning of all things: Man’s need to create language to describe it, geography to explain his place within it, biology to remind him that he is a newcomer in this universe, and history, because everything is written in the sky above Dorrego."

-Marcelo Figueras, Kamchatka 





photo: James Henkel, 2 Hands Sunspots

Winter

How like a winter hath my absence been.

-William Shakespeare, from “Sonnet XCVII: How like a Winter hath my Absence been” +

[Photo via]

Roussel on Light

“Whatever I wrote was surrounded by rays of light,” a young Raymond Roussel told his psychoanalyst, Pierre Janet. “I used to close the curtains, for I was afraid that the shining rays emanating from my pen might escape into the outside world through even the smallest chink; I wanted suddenly to throw back the screen and light up the world.”

-Alice Gregory, from “New Impressions: Raymond Roussel and the upside of crazy” +

Art: Joseph Beuys, Untitled, 1965

It Was As If

I was lying
under a low
sky breathing
through the eye
of a needle

-W.G. Sebald

Art: Franck André Jamme, Tantra Song, Sigilio Press.

Epiphany

Today was Epiphany.

What can one add to an ineffable day?

Nothing.

January

January: it was the most beautiful of words, she’d always felt, evoking leafless trees, eared grebes, and regret.

(Text: mostly mine, with a nod to Alexander Theroux)

Photo: Dennis Hopper, Billboard, Los Angeles

How to Begin Again

"All the words are not enough to get anything said."

-Yannis Ritsos

Art: Agostino Arrivabene

I am Still Alive

Art: On Kawara from the series, I Am Still Alive

My Flight

My flight is not away, not to or from.
Rome, though in the distance, is no farther
than the dresser.
-Rod McKuen, excerpt from “Rome Itself”


Photo: via Google images

I am Tormented

"I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote."

-Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

Map: Martin Waldseemüller, South America, detail +

Salvation

Flung, my heart unflames.

-T. © 2011. All rights reserved

Photo: Sir Arthur Eddington, Solar Eclipse, 1919

I am Constantly Writing

"The novel I am constantly writing is always the same one, and it might be described as a variously sliced-up or torn-apart book of myself."

-Robert Walser

Art: Ernst Fuchs

Mountain Redux

“Between one tree and another, there is all the thirst of the earth.”
-Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions, translated by Rosmarie Waldrop


Tell me.
Have you ever seen woods so.
Deep so.
Every tree a word does your heart stop?
-Anne Carson, excerpt from “Town on the Way through God's Woods"

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I am in the forest. Nine thousand feet high, I'm a cloud, swathed in white; I see everything. A field of purple flowers blooms only at the apex, awaying before I utter, “Ahh.” The sun rises speckled through pines, nouns and verbs shake themselves out, rearrange: the doe's hooves, the hummingbird's sip, the black ant's crawl. Has the winding mountain pass altered them? Or the air around them changed?

No where else have I seen black mountain ants like Goliath; I imagine them gracing Dillard’s Tinker Creek, Thoreau’s Walden. They march as big as my thumb and would carry off my lunch, suitcase, cabin if allowed. Did they migrate from la selva Brazilera or the Uruguayan pampas? We sweep them off the porch and they fall back into nature's hem, unaware.

Mountains smell differently. Just as my own bed, cupboards, closets exude a musk that is me, the mountains – these Cedar ones anyway – bleed pine. Pine that registers in the nose before the brain; before the brain labels it pine it is not. It is emerald unfurling, closing over my mind's mouth. And I find, strangely, I don't seek air, only to be sucked green.

-T. @ The Chocolate Chip Waffle © 2011. All rights reserved.

Photo: Man Ray