light made from nothing

I'll tell you what love of this life is.
It's looking up
through trees newly bare of leaves
and seeing there the oldest road,
a broken line of white stars
stretching out across the sky.

It's thinking,
this could be enough.
- Susan Elbe
Light Made From Nothing

image:here

Happy, Happy New Year 2012 

Still time.

Aren't we enlarged
by the scale of what we're able
to desire? Everything,
. the choir insists,

. might flame;
inside these wrappings
burns another, brighter life,
. quickened, now,

. by song: hear how
it cascades, in overlapping,
lapidary waves of praise? Still time.
. Still time to change.
- Mark Doty
from Messiah (Christmas Portions)
Sweet Machine: Poems

text/here  
image

"Be not inhospitable to strangers / Lest they be angels in disguise."

GEORGE WHITMAN

On Wednesday 14th December, 2011, George Whitman died peacefully at home in the apartment above his bookshop, Shakespeare and Company, in Paris. George suffered a stroke two months ago, but showed incredible strength and determination up to the end, continpany of his daughter, Sylvia, his friends and his cat and dog.  He died two days after his 98th birthday.

Born on Dec. 12, 1913, in East Orange, New Jersey, George moved to Paris in 1948 and opened his bookshop Le Mistral, later renamed Shakespeare and Company, in 1951.  Packed wall-to-wall with books and beds for roaming writers, the store quickly grew to be a haven for book lovers and authors while George became an unusual Paris literary institution. In 2006 he was awarded the Officier des Arts et Lettres by the French Minister of Culture for his lifelong contribution to the arts.

After a life entirely dedicated to books, authors and readers, George will be sorely missed by all his loved ones and by bibliophiles around the world who have read, written and stayed in his bookshop for over 60 years. Nicknamed the Don Quixote of the Latin Quarter, George will be remembered for his free spirit, his eccentricity and his generosity  —  all three summarised in the Yeats verses written on the walls of his open, much-visited library : "Be not inhospitable to strangers / Lest they be angels in disguise." 
here

Everything that Acts Is Actual

From the tawny light
from the rainy nights
from the imagination finding
itself and more than itself
alone and more than alone
at the bottom of the well where the moon lives,
can you pull me

into December? a lowland
of space, perception of space
towering of shadows of clouds blown upon
clouds over
… … … . new ground, new made
under heavy December footsteps? the only
way to live?

The flawed moon
acts on the truth, and makes
an autumn of tentative
silences.
You lived, but somewhere else,
your presence touched others, ring upon ring,
and changed. Did you think
I would not change?

… … … … … . The black moon
turns away, its work done. A tenderness,
unspoken autumn.
We are faithful
only to the imagination. What the
imagination
… … . seizes
as beauty must be truth. What holds you
to what you see of me is
that grasp alone.
- Denise Levertov
Collected Earlier Poems 1940-1960
wood s lot

text~here

image~

(via lolinif)

And in the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. Tim O'Brien

an illusion must intervene

:

"Seduction is never the result of physical attraction, a conjunction of affects or an economy of desire. For seduction to occur an illusion must intervene and mix up the images; a stroke has to bring disconnected things together, as if in a dream, or suddenly disconnect undivided things" (Baudrillard Seduction 103) image: ubqtous: “TangoFeelin’” by roby bon

This is the essence of magic

“It’s entirely conceivable that life’s splendor surrounds us all, and always in its complete fullness, accessible but veiled, beneath the surface, invisible, far away. But there it lies—not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If we call it by the right word, by the right name, then it comes. This is the essence of magic, which doesn’t create but calls.”

—

Kafka

kateoplis:  image: berlin, 1957 - by rené burri

boo forever

Boo, Forever
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

via Whiskey River

image~

912

Michal Rovner  

Leaves are verbs

"Autumn teaches us that fruition is also death; that ripeness is a form of decay. The willows, having stood for so long near water, begin to rust. Leaves are verbs that conjugate the seasons."
- Gretel Ehrlich
The Solace of Open Spaces

text/link 

image 

Steve Jobs:"Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish" via The Whole Earth Catalog

“Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.” -Steve Jobs (1955-2011)

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Steve Jobs/text;here

 image;fuckyeahjean-lucgodard: 

the difference between the size and speed of everything that flashes

"The truth is you already know what it's like. You already know the difference between the size and speed of everything that flashes through you and the tiny inadequate bit of it all you can ever let anyone know. As though inside you is this enormous room full of what seems like everything in the whole universe at one time or another and yet the only parts that get out have to somehow squeeze out through one of those tiny keyholes you see under the knob in older doors. As if we are all trying to see each other through these tiny keyholes.

But it does have a knob, the door can open. But not in the way you think. The truth is you've already heard this. That this is what it's like. That it's what makes room for the universes inside you, all the endless inbent fractals of connection and symphonies of different voices, the infinities you can never show another soul. And you think it makes you a fraud, the tiny fraction anyone else ever sees? Of course you're a fraud, of course what people see is never you. And of course you know this, and of course you try to manage what part they see if you know it's only a part. Who wouldn't? It's called free will, Sherlock. But at the same time it's why it feels so good to break down and cry in front of others, or to laugh, or speak in tongues, or chant in Bengali - it's not English anymore, it's not getting squeezed through any hole.

So cry all you want, I won't tell anybody."
- David Foster Wallace
Oblivion

from whiskey river by whiskey

from whiskey river by whiskey

an altered space

Those walls of yours are shadows of walls,

And your light disappeared forever.

Not the world's monument anymore, an oeuvre of your own

Stands beneath the sun in an altered space.

A Treatise on Poetry: IV Natura   

Czeslaw Milosz 1911–2004 Czeslaw Milosz 

 Translated By Robert Hass

 

image:  lived:

chance has favored me

1. 
   
   

   This web of time—the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect or ignore each other through the centuries—embraces every possibility. We do not exist in most of them. In some you exist and not I, while in others I do, and you do not, and yet in others both of us exist. In this one, in which chance has favored me, you have come to my gate. In another, you, crossing the garden, have found me dead. In yet another, I say these very same words but am in error, a phantom…Time is forever dividing itself toward innumerable futures…”     
   text:Jorge Luis Borges (1899 - 1986) Garden of Forking Paths, Ficciones. From the Tao of Photography. via: crashinglybeautiful:
   

   
   
   image:

   regardintemporel:

   Eugen Wiskovsky - Portrait, 1935

All of This is a Dream

 

 "Schopenhauer, in his splendid essay called "On an Apparent Intention in the Fate of the Individual," points out that when you reach an advanced age and look back over your lifetime, it can seem to have had a consistent order and plan, as though composed by some novelist. Events that when they occurred had seemed accidental and of little moment turn out to have been indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot. So who composed that plot? Schopenhauer suggests that just as your dreams are composed by an aspect of yourself of which your consciousness is unaware, so, too, your whole life is composed by the will within you. And just as people whom you will have met apparently by mere chance became leading agents in the structuring of your life, so, too, will you have served unknowingly as an agent, giving meaning to the lives of others. The whole thing gears together like one big symphony, with everything unconsciously structuring everything else. And Schopenhauer concludes that it is as though our lives were the features of the one great dream of a single dreamer in which all the dream characters dream, too; so that everything links to everything else, moved by the one will to life which is the universal will in nature."
- Joseph Campbell
The Power of Myth

return to the center

 title/image:here

i forget the rest

“We were together. I forget the rest.”
— Walt Whitman (via proustitute) proustitute:

Günther Uecker, Zum Schweigen der Schrift, 1994
(via workman; ralf-bohnenkamp; magnificentruin)

Source: magnificentruin

un nuage

Je l’invente, mes mains dessinent un nuage

I invent it, my hands draw a cloud 

from: The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard

aurai:

Alexis Perevoschikov

requiem

 IX
Madness with its wings
Has covered half my soul
It feeds me fiery wine
And lures me into the abyss.

That's when I understood
While listening to my alien delirium
That I must hand the victory
To it.

However much I nag
However much I beg
It will not let me take
One single thing away:

Not my son's frightening eyes -
A suffering set in stone,
Or prison visiting hours
Or days that end in storms

Nor the sweet coolness of a hand
The anxious shade of lime trees
Nor the light distant sound
Of final comforting words.
 

[14 May 1940. Fontannyi Dom]

Anna Akhmatova 

George Krause - Angels, Philadelphia, 1961

image: regardintemporel:

for Norway 

Queen-Anne’s Lace

Her body is not so white as

anemony petals nor so smooth—nor

so remote a thing. It is a field

of the wild carrot taking

the field by force; the grass

does not raise above it.

Here is no question of whiteness,

white as can be, with a purple mole

at the center of each flower.

Each flower is a hand’s span

of her whiteness. Wherever

his hand has lain there is

a tiny purple blemish. Each part

is a blossom under his touch

to which the fibres of her being

stem one by one, each to its end,

until the whole field is a

white desire, empty, a single stem,

a cluster, flower by flower,

a pious wish to whiteness gone over—

or nothing.

William Carlos Williams, “Queen-Anne’s Lace” from The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Volume I, 1909-1939, edited by Christopher MacGowan. Copyright 1938, 1944, 1945 by William Carlos Williams. Reprinted with the permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.via sketchofthepast
image:melancholynotes:

Tbilisi, Georgia by Mariam Sitchinava

(via growing-orbits)

Something.

I believe that most people have some degree of talent for something - forms, colors, words, sounds. Talent lies around in us like kindling waiting for a match, but some people, just as gifted as others, are less lucky. Fate never drops a match on them. The times are wrong, or their health is poor, or their energy low, or their obligations too many. Something.

Wallace Stegner, Crossing

here

a last door

Édouard Boubat, Paris, France, 1970. From Édouard Boubat: A Gentle Eye.

“I was running, as the silks rustled, through room after room without stopping, for I believed in the existence of a last door.”

—	Czeslaw Milosz, from “City Without a Name” in New and Collected Poems, trans. Milosz, Robert Haas, Robert Pinsky, and Renata Gorczynski (via proustitute)  image: here

You will need a bottle of cloud

:
“You will need a bottle of cloud
for anesthesia.
Like the flight of a crane
through colorless dreams.” — 

Carolyn Forché, Poetry Magazine March 2011, “The Ghost of Heaven” (via orioninacobweb) 

  image: middlechildcomplex

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