things that can’t be explained must be forgotten

“Every day things happen in the world that cannot be explained by any law of things we know. Every day they’re mentioned and forgotten, and the same mystery that brought them takes them away, transforming their secret into oblivion. Such is the law by which things that can’t be explained must be forgotten. The visible world goes on as usual in the broad daylight. Otherness watches us from the shadows.”

—

Fernando Pessoa, from A Factless Autobiography in The Book of Disquiet (via melancholynotes)

image: aurai: Edouard Boubat

That's how you look to me

Source: Richard Brautigan, Revenge of the Lawn 

everywhere

 The world is airtight

yet held together

by what it does not house,

by the vanished. They are everywhere.

from: Die Verschwundenen/The Vanished

Hans Magnus Enzensberger

image:here

source

what came through them was longing

 

"The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust in them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things - the beauty, the memory of our own past - are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have not visited."
- C. S. Lewis
The Weight Of Glory

image

text 

the faded silvery imprints of the bare feet of angels

"There are things that cannot ever occur with any precision. They are too big and too magnificent to be contained in mere facts. They are merely trying to occur, they are checking whether the ground of reality can carry them. And they quickly withdraw, fearing to lose their integrity in the frailty of realization. And if they break into their capital, lose a thing or two in these attempts at incarnation, then soon, jealously, they retrieve their possessions, call them in, reintegrate: as a result, white spots appear in our biography - scented stigmata, the faded silvery imprints of the bare feet of angels, scattered footmarks on our nights and days - while the fullness of life waxes, incessantly supplements itself, and towers over us in wonder after wonder.
And yet, in a certain sense, the fullness is contained wholly and integrally in each of its crippled and fragmentary incarnations. This is the phenomenon of imagination and vicarious being. An event may be small and insignificant in its origins and yet, when drawn close to one's eye, it may open in its center an infinite and radiant perspective because a higher order of being is trying to express itself in it and irradiates it violently."
- Bruno Schultz
Sanatorium Under The Sign Of The Hourglass

:whiskey river 
:image: here

angel

the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death
Howl Festival

the power of the list as bulwark against chaos

1.An illustrated packing list from a notebook by the artist Adolf Konrad, Dec. 16, 1963.

2. Pages from the artist Janice Lowry's sketchbook journal, 2003.

3. Picasso's list of suggested painters for the 1913 Armory Show. 

:here

Sleeping Soldiers

Sleeping Soldiers_single screen (2009) from Tim Hetherington on Vimeo.

Tim Hetherington: Sleeping Soldiers (2009).

Filmed in the Korengal Valley of Eastern Afghanistan in 2007-8 following a platoon of US Airborne Infantry. Single screen version of the original 3-screen installation.


via: even cleveland

the world's worst wound

 

On Passing the New Menin Gate

Who will remember, passing through this Gate,
the unheroic dead who fed the guns?
Who shall absolve the foulness of their fate,-
Those doomed, conscripted, unvictorious ones?

Crudely renewed, the Salient holds its own.
Paid are its dim defenders by this pomp;
Paid, with a pile of peace-complacent stone,
The armies who endured that sullen swamp.

Here was the world's worst wound. And here with pride
'Their name liveth for ever', the Gateway claims.
Was ever an immolation so belied
as these intolerably nameless names?
Well might the Dead who struggled in the slime
Rise and deride this sepulchre of crime. 

Siegfried Sassoon

image: uncertain

an oppression, like the heat

 

This is what he remembered. Heat. A baseball field. Yellow grass, the whirr of insects, himself leaning against a tree as the boys of the neighborhood gather for a pickup game. He looks on as the others argue the relative genius of Mantle and Mays. They have been worrying this subject all summer, and it has become tedious to Anders: an oppression, like the heat.

 "Bullet in the Brain" by Tobias Wolf via Royal Quiet Deluxe
 image:le dans la

She's always smiling

I do not doubt you would have liked
one of those pretty mothers in the ads:
complete with adoring husband and happy children.
She's always smiling, and if she cries at all
it is absent of lights and camera,
makeup washed from her face.

But since you were born of my womb, I should tell you:

ever since I was small like you
I wanted to be myself -- and for a woman that's hard --
(even my Guardian Angel refused to watch over me
when she heard).

I cannot tell you that I know the road.
Often I lose my way
and my life has been a painful crossing
navigating reefs, in and out of storms,
refusing to listen to the ghostly sirens
who invite me into the past,
neither compass nor binnacle to show me the way.

But I advance,
go forward holding to the hope
of some distant port
where you, my children -- I'm sure --
will pull in one day
after I've been lost at sea.

Daisy Zamora

Clean Slate, trans. by Margaret Randall and Elinor Randall


banupluie:

We are only the idea

“… we are only fiction. We are only the idea we have of ourselves.”

—	Edmond Jabès, from Cut of Time (via proustitute)

artspotting:

Alice Leach, The Space in Between

You cannot say

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

T. S. Eliot’s manuscript of The Waste Land with corrections by Ezra Pound.
via catherinewillis: (source)

Source: proustitute

Trees are poems

 


"Trees are poems that earth writes upon the sky. We fell them down and turn them into paper, that we may record our emptiness."

— Khalil Gibran (via aurai)

invisiblestories:

Ki Yoong

(via occidio)

 

Not till it is held in your renouncing

What birds plunge through is not the intimate space

in which you see all forms intensified.
(Out in the Open, you would be denied
your self, would disappear into that vastness.)

Space reaches from us and translates the world:
to know a tree, in its true element,
throw inner space around it, from that pure
abundance in you. Surround it with restraint.
It has no limits. Not till it is held
in your renouncing is it truly there.

 booksvscigarettes:

 Piero Roi. Ophelia, 2008

image:

undr:

Louis Stettner
Avenue de Chatillon, 14th Arrond., Paris, ca. 1949

I’m haunted by all the space

Spinning like a ghost
on the bottom of a
top,
I’m haunted by all
the space that I
will live without
you.

Richard Brautigan, "Boo, Forever"

text: sharingpoetry:

image here: anhelos via vintague

I knew them once

“I’ve forgotten the words with which to tell you. I knew them once, but I’ve forgotten them, and now I’m talking to you without them.”

—

Marguerite Duras, Emilie L.

text: proustitute:

image: anhelos

I’m haunted by all the space

Spinning like a ghost
on the bottom of a
top,
I’m haunted by all
the space that I
will live without
you.

Richard Brautigan, "Boo, Forever"

text: sharingpoetry:

image here: anhelos via vintague

I can well understand why children love sand.

 

Epigraphs to David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress

text via the amazing: invisiblestories

 image:here

our partial belief

I do not believe in ghosts unless I see them. I forget them. When I read, I need to find the necessary volume for the space. Books in quantity manifest our partial belief that nothing in the world passes away. Nothing has disappeared. We apprehend very little. Ghosts emerge in our peripheral vision. Today (meaningless) I could not see anybody.

from The Library Inferno, by Martin Corless-Smith

text here:∞

image~ here(via booklover)

It is there

 

“ …All the same, without being morbid, and giving way to - to memories and so on, I must confess that there does seem to me something sad in life. It is hard to say what it is. I don’t mean the sorrow that we all know, like illness and poverty and death. No, it is something different. It is there, deep down, deep down, part of one, like one’s breathing. However hard I work and tire myself I have only to stop to know it is there, waiting. I often wonder if everybody feels the same. One can never know. But isn’t it extraordinary that under his sweet, joyful little singing it was this - sadness? - Ah, what is it? - that I heard.

— The Canary, Katherine Mansfield (via brrrig)(via katherine-mansfield)

Your first parent was a star

 

 

“What is it that you contain? The dead. Time. Light patterns of millennia opening in your gut. Every minute, in each of you, a few million potassium atoms succumb to radioactive decay. The energy that powers these tiny atomic events has been locked inside potassium atoms ever since a star-sized bomb exploded nothing into being. Potassium, like uranium and radium, is a long-lived radioactive nuclear waste of the supernova bang that accounts for you.

Your first parent was a star.”

—Jeanette Winterson

text via:  Whiskey River

image :here

there’s always doubt

“Everything stated or expressed by man is a note in the margin of a completely
 erased text. From what’s in the note we can extract the gist of what must have
 been in the text, but there’s always doubt, and the possible meanings are many.

- Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa
seurat's sketchbooks

the terrestrial sphere

“His thoughts were hemmed in. One can only draw curved lines on the terrestrial sphere which, as they extend, forever meet with themselves. At such intersections we always encounter what we have already seen.” - 

text: Queneau (invisiblestoriesvia Frenchtwist)

image: Paul den Hollander from Moments in Time, 1972-79. Thank you, aperfectcommotion.

once it leaves the dream

 

But water spreads down the windows

like moss:

it doesn’t know that everything is altered once it leaves the dream.

Jose’ Emilio Pacheco

Translated by Ernesto Trejo

image: birazdenizbirazuyku

I am a ghost

“I am a writer of books. I am a ghost. While I was writing I died and became a ghost.” - Gerald Murnane, Inland text: here image:here Anton Bragaglia, photography of the invisible

Now a quiet part

The Magic Mountain
A book opens. People come out, bend
this way and talk, ponder, love, wander around
while pages turn. Where did the plot go?
Why did someone sing just as the train
went by? Here come chapters with landscape all over
whatever happens when people meet. Now
a quiet part: a hospital glows in the dark.
I don't think that woman with the sad gray eyes
will ever come back. And what does it mean when
the Italian has so many ideas? Maybe
a war is coming. The book is ending. Everyone
has a little tremolo in them; all
are going to die and it's cold and the snow, and the
clear air. They took someone away. It's ending,
the book is ending. But I thought – never mind. It
closes.
- William Stafford
The Way It Is

whiskey river 

image:

crashinglybeautiful:

Luc Dietrich, Alsace (Overhead View), 1930s Silver print. From arsvitaest

And I stood there, lost

“It happened one day, at a crossroads, in the middle of a crowd, people coming and going.

I stopped, blinked; I understood nothing. Nothing, nothing about anything; I didn’t understand the reasons for things or for people, it was all senseless, absurd. And I started to laugh.

What I found strange at the time was that I’d never realized before. That up until then I had accepted everything: traffic lights, cars, posters, uniforms, monuments, things completely detached from any sense of the world, accepted them as if there were some necessity, some chain of cause and effect that bound them together.

Then the laugh died in my throat, I blushed, ashamed. I waved to get people’s attention and “Stop a second!” I shouted, “there’s something wrong! Everything’s wrong! We’re doing the absurdist things! This can’t be the right way! Where will it end?”

People stopped around me, sized me up, curious. I stood there in the middle of them, waving my arms, desperate to explain myself, to have them share the flash of insight that had suddenly enlightened me: and I said nothing. I said nothing because the moment I raised my arms and opened my mouth, my great revelation had been as it were swallowed up again and the words had come out any old how, on impulse.

“So?” people asked, “what do you mean? Everything’s in its place. All is as it should be. Everything is the result of something else. Everything fits in with everything else. We can’t see anything absurd or wrong!”

And I stood there, lost, because as I saw it now everything had fallen into place again and everything seemed natural, traffic lights, monuments, uniforms, towerblocks, tramlines, beggars, processions; yet this didn’t calm me down, it tormented me.

“I’m sorry,” I answered. “Perhaps it was me that was wrong. It seemed that way. But everything’s fine. I’m sorry,” and I made off amid their angry glares.

Yet, even now, every time (often) that I find I don’t understand something, then, instinctively, I’m filled with the hope that perhaps this will be my moment again, perhaps once again I shall understand nothing, I shall grasp that other knowledge, found and lost in an instant.”

   
 Numbers in the Dark, a collection of short-short stories by Italo Calvino.

from INTENSE CITY by Luke Storms

image: here

How to Paint Sunlight

Into the Interior

I am your whispered voice
your inside voice
your interior voice
your unheard voice
your unspoken voice
your unvoiced voice
your unspeakable voice
I am your heart’s voice and your heartless voice
your deepest voice
under layers of living & speaking
the voice of your buried life
your invisible life
your silent life
your unknown life
your unopened life
your unrealized life
the undiscovered life that no one sees
not even your lover
not even yourself

If you will listen to me
if you will lend me the ear
of your mind
and of your bent heart
if you will heed my whisperings…
heed my whisperings…
heed my whisperings…
heed my whisperings…

—Lawrence Ferlinghetti: How to Paint Sunlight: Lyric Poems & Others (1997-2000) New York: New Directions

text: crashinglybeautiful:

image: here

a rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for my case to come up   

and I am waiting

for a rebirth of wonder

 Lawrence Ferlinghetti

choices

“To browse in a bookstore… is to explore a highly selective and thoughtful collection of the world—thoughtful because hundreds of years of thinkers, writers, critics, teachers, and readers have established the worth of the choices. Their collective wisdom seems superior, for these purposes, to the Web’s ‘neutrality,’ its know-nothing know-everythingness.”  

Nicole Krauss

image:  petit-bookworm

text here: ∞

You saw nothing in Hiroshima.

"...when I'll have forgotten you...I'll remember you as the symbol of love's forgetfulness.  I'll think of this...as the horror of oblivion."

Hiroshima Mon Amour, Marguerite Duras

image~ mianoti:via Thea Curtis > (merci

if you only walk long enough

 suzannespage via theduchesss:

Source: kevesia

"It's not provocative, its Gertrude Stein."

 Warm Broad Glow,” in a 2005 installation, is being reconfigured for the Whitney show. 

:Glenn Ligon

 ~videos 

Interactive Feature

Glenn Ligon: Art Out of Words

   

The way it stops and starts

 

 Sometimes I’m terrified of my heart; of its constant hunger for whatever it is it wants. The way it stops and starts.

E.A. Poe

image:here

text:here

ghostly heart

There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams--not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.

 

repost because...

F. Scott Fitzgerald

image © All rights reserved. : tom palumbo 

ripples of consequence

"All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity. Haunted by wrong turns and roads not taken, we pursue images perceived as new but whose providence dates to the dim dramas of childhood, which are themselves but ripples of consequence echoing down the generations."

— William Faulkner (via saturnrising &  dreaminginthedeepsouth)

image:

yesbutwillitfly:

(via vial)

You think you will never forget any of this

"You think you will never forget any of this, you will remember it always just the way it was. But you can’t remember it the way it was. To know it, you have to be living in the presence of it right as it is happening. It can return only by surprise. Speaking of these things tells you that there are no words for them that are equal to them or that can restore them to your mind. And so you have a life that you are living only now, now and now and now, gone before you can speak of it, and you must be thankful for living day by day, moment by moment, in this presence.

But you have a life too that you remember. It stays with you. You have lived a life in the breath and pulse and living light of the present, and your memories of it, remember now, are of a different life in a different world and time. When you remember the past, you are not remembering it as it was. You are remembering it as it is. It is a vision or a dream, present with you in the present, alive with you in the only time you are alive."

— Wendell Berry,

 :here

and here:  the beauty we love and whiskey river.

image: camerasinthesky via here

all we write is erased, even as you write it

“WIDE, the margin between carte blanche and the white page. Nevertheless it is not in the margin that you can find me, but in the yet whiter one that separates the word-strewn sheet from the transparent, the written page from the one to be written in the infinite space where the eye turns back to the eye, and the hand to the pen, where all we write is erased, even as you write it. For the book imperceptibly takes shape within the book we will never finish.

There is my desert.”

— Edmond Jabès

text: a perfect commotion

image:invisiblestories:

Ariana Boussard-Reifel, Between the Lines

(via: suicide-by-star) (thanks, M.)

there is only you

In the first kingdom
of the stars,
everything is always
half-beautiful.

…In the second
kingdom of the stars
there is only

you

-Richard Brautigan, an excerpt from “The Second Kingdom” 

text: aperfectcommotion:
(adapted from caffeineandnicotine)

image:invisiblestories:

Sean Kernan, Stars (from The Secret Books)