To Drown in Honey

Now the leaves rush, greening, back. Back now,
the leaves push greenward.—Some such song, or
close to. I forget the most of it. His voice, and
the words pooling inside it. And the light for once
not sexual, just light. The light, as it should be . . .

You can build for yourself a tower to signal from.
Can become a still life. A slow ruin. You can
walk away. They all say that. Sir, I see no way

out of it. I have put my spade to the black loam
that the mind at one moment lets pass for truth,
at the next, oblivion. I have considered. I know
what's buried there: emptiness and renunciation and
ash, and ash . . . Why, then, so suddenly—overnight
almost—all the leaves again? Why now, rushing back?

-- Carl Phillips

Watching the Milk Cows

It's probably vain
we watch them
thinking how much
we're needed, how little
our houses mean when compared
to warm straw and lantern light.
We remember our rural beginnings:
how streets were graveled—not paved
how the errant cow—routed by flood waters—
carries with it into daybreak some secret country
we once called home. How long into the
night we'll dream them, soft and full
of milk, cooing to us, chewing their cuds,
so much trust in their eyes
it makes us squirm.

-- Sandra Adelmund

flying

Those feathers . . . farthest away from their points of attachment will be the most flexible.

-- Leonardo da Vinci The Notebooks of Leonardo do Vinci
Translated by Edward MacCurdy

Repetition makes us feel secure and variation makes us feel free.

-- Robert Hass Twentieth Century Pleasures

throbs

First, there is silence. Then we think we hear something, music. It is one note, E above middle C, played by the solo cello alone. This entrance, Ligeti writes, should be inaudible, "as though coming out of nothingness." To make sure, he writes pppppppp, has the cello muted, and directs that there be no vibrato and that the bow be over the fingerboard (sul tasto), which further veils the sound. For nearly two minutes, we hear only this E. Gradually, though, it seems to step forward, to take on flesh: The orchestral strings join in (ppppp at first), then a flute, then a clarinet, then another clarinet. The while, the string color has changed: the players begin to use vibrato, which gradually becomes more intense; the bows move away from the fingerboard toward the bridge (sul ponticello), which produces a creepily glassy, sometimes raspy sound; and the violins, violas, and orchestral cellos start to play dense tremolandos. And even within the confines of this single note, the pitch becomes more complicated: When the cello plays E as a harmonic on the C-string and the bass plays E as a harmonic on the A-string, the two notes are not perfectly in tune with each other, but Ligeti asks that the players not correct the discrepancy, even though those clearly audible vibrations or throbs called "beats" may result.

-- Michael Steinberg, on György Ligeti's Concerto for Cello and Orchestra, in The Concerto

György Ligeti

Cello Concerto (BBC review with RealAudio)

RealAudio is one of many things these days that crashes my ailing computer (it's happening a lot, alas). If you can't listen to BBC's RealAudio, a Windows Media sample is available on Amazon with Siegfried Palm's emerging E.

Other Ligeti samples (mp3s) can be found here.

alternatively

In front of this fire which teaches the dreamer the archaic and the intemporal, the soul is no longer stuck in a corner of the world. It is at the center of the world, at the center of its world. The simplest hearth encloses a universe. At least, that expanding movement is one of two metaphysical movements of reverie before fire. There is another which brings us back to ourselves. And thus it is that before the hearth, the dreamer is alternatively soul and body, body and soul.

--Gaston Bachelard The Poetics of Reverie

transcending limitations

St. Thomas Aquinas says that art does not require rectitude of the appetite, that it is wholly concerned with the good of that which is made. He says that a work of art is a good in itself, and this is a truth that the modern world has largely forgotten. We are not content to stay within our limitations and make something that is simply a good in and by itself. Now we want to make something that will have some utilitarian value. Yet what is good in itself glorifies God because it reflects God. The artist has his hands full and does his duty if he attends to his art. He can safely leave evangelizing to the evangelists. He must first of all be aware of his limitations as an artist—for art transcends its limitations only by staying within them.

-- Flannery O'Connor Mystery and Manners

Nocturn

Night comes, an angel stands
Measuring out the time of stars,
Still are the winds, and still the hours.

It would be peace to lie
Still in the still hours at the angel's feet,
Upon a star hung in a starry sky,
But hearts another measure beat.

Each body, wingless as it lies,
Sends out its butterfly of night
With delicate wings and jewelled eyes.

And some upon day's shores are cast,
And some in darkness lost
In waves beyond the world, where float
Somewhere the islands of the blest.

-- Kathleen Raine

pop art

What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking.

-- Andy Warhol The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975)

Andy Warhol's Green Coca-Cola Bottles

I use naïve imitation. This is not because I have no imagination or because I wish to say something about the everyday world. I imitate 1. objects and 2. created objects, for example, signs, objects made without the intention of making 'art' and which naïvely contain a functional contemporary magic. I try to carry these even further through my own naïveté, which is not artificial.

-- Claes Oldenburg, in "Claes Oldenburg, or the things of this world" Art International 7:9 (1963)

Claes Oldenburg's 7-Up Sign

Everybody has called Pop Art "American " painting, but it's actually industrial painting. America was hit by industrialism and capitalism harder and sooner and its values seem more askew . . . . I think the meaning of my work is that it's industrial, it's what all the world will soon become. Europe will be the same way, soon, so it won't be American; it will be universal.

-- Roy Lichtenstein, in "What is Pop Art? Interviews with Eight Painters" Art News 62:7 (1963)

The Roy Lichtenstein Foundation

waiting for the train

A station platform at night, the 'Underground-Overground' Steam Railway.
Housman, aged twenty-three, and Jackson, aged twenty-four, dressed as for 'the office', are waiting for the train. Housman has a Journal of Philology, Jackson an evening paper.

Jackson Wasn't it magnificent? A landmark, Hous!

Housman I thought it was . . . quite jolly . . .

Jackson Quite jolly? It was a watershed! D'Oyly Carte has made the theatre modern.

Housman (surprised) You mean Gilbert and Sullivan?

Jackson What? No. No, the theatre.

Housman (Oh, I see.)

Jackson The first theatre lit entirely by electricity!

Housman Dear old Mo . . .

Jackson D'Oyly Carte's new Savoy is a triumph.

Housman . . . you're the only London theatre critic worthy of the name. 'The new electrified Savoy is a triumph. The contemptible flickering gas-lit St James's –"

Jackson (overlapping) Oh, I know you're ragging me . . .

Housman '. . . the murky malodorous Haymarket . . . the unscientific Adelphi . . .'

Jackson But it was exciting, wasn't it, Hous? Every age thinks it's the modern age, but this one really is.
Electricity is going to change everything. Everything! We had an electric corset sent in today.

Housman One that lights up?

Jackson I've never thought of it before, but in a way the Patent Office is the gatekeeper of the new age.

Housman An Examiner of Electrical Specifications may be, but it's not the same with us toiling down in Trade Marks. I had sore throat lozenges today, an application to register a wonderfully woebegone giraffe – raised rather a subtle point in Trade Marks regulation, actually: it seems there is already a giraffe at large, wearing twelve styles of celluloid collar, but, and here's the nub, a happy giraffe, in fact a preening self-satisfied giraffe. The question arises – is the registered giraffe Platonic?, are all God's giraffes in esse et in posse to be rendered unto the Houndsditch Novelty Collar Company?

Jackson It's true, then – a classical education fits a fellow for anything.

Housman Well, I consulted my colleague Chamberlain – he's compiling the new Index – I don't think he's altogether sound, Chamberlain, he put John the Baptist under Mythological characters –

Jackson Do you know what someone said?

Housman – and a monk holding a tankard under Biblical Subjects.

Jackson Will you tell me what happened?

Housman Oh, we found for the lozenges.

Jackson Someone said you ploughed yourself on purpose.

Housman Pollard?

Jackson No. But they had him in to ask about you.

Housman I saw Pollard in the Reading Room.

Jackson What did he have to say?

Housman Nothing. It was the Reading Room. We adjusted our expressions briefly.

-- Tom Stoppard, from The Invention of Love

about Tom Stoppard

 another story

There's nothing out there but light,
                                                            the would-be artist said,
As usual just half right:
There's also a touch of darkness, everyone knows, on both sides of both horizons,
Prescribed and unpaintable,
Touching our fingertips whichever way we decide to jump.
His small palette, however, won't hold that color,
                                            though some have, and some still do.

The two plum trees know nothing of that,
Having come to their green grief,
                                                    their terrestrial touch-and-go,
Out of grace and radiance,
Their altered bodies alteration transmogrified.
Mine is a brief voice, a still, brief voice
Unsubject to change or the will to change—
                                            might it be restrung and rearranged.

But that is another story.

-- Charles Wright, from 'Lives of the Artists'

Charles Wright 

surfaces of light

That summer I looked and looked as I had not done for years at the green of the chestnut trees and the ochre of walls, broken by patches of blue and cold grey. I was fascinated by the contrast between opaque surfaces of light, where sunlight is clotted on leaves or flesh, and the transparent darkness of shadows like brown and green glass pools, through whose coldness I could look deeply on to still darker shadows like rocks—the foundations and anchors of the opaque surfaces of light flying like kites in the sun.

-- Stephen Spender World Within World

always the same

The outcome of my days is always the same; an infinite desire for what one never gets; a void one cannot fill; an utter yearning to produce in all ways, to battle as much as possible against time that drags us along, and the distractions that throw a veil over our soul . . .

-- Eugène Delacroix The Journal of Eugène Delacroix (19 August 1858)
Translated by Walter Pach

about Eugène Delacroix

one day

One August day I was coming down from the hard, bitter region of whiteness, where gusts of sleet were swirling and storms were building up. I knew that all too soon various things would keep me from returning to that celestial country of jagged ridges dancing in the open sky; to the illusion of high and low places in the white cornices that were etched against the blue-black abyss overhead and slowly crumbled in the mid-afternoon silence; and to the slopes carved with ridges and glistening with ice where grapeshot suddenly explodes with the smell of sulphur. Once again I had wanted to sniff the greenish breath of a crevasse, explore a boulder's surface, slip between crumbling rocks, secure a rope, test the rise and fall of an uncertain wind, listen to the sound of steel on ice and the little crystalline clumps tumbling towards the pitfall of a hidden crevasse—a death trap powdered and draped with gems. I wanted to make a track in the diamonds and the flour, entrust myself to two strands of hemp, and eat prunes in the centre of space. Climbing down through a blanket of clouds, I had stopped level with the first saxifrage before a huge ice slide, a gigantic scarf with pearly folds that spiralled downward to the great desert of stones at the bottom.

-- René Daumal Mount Analogue
Translated by Roger Shattuck

Kilimanjaro 2006 Blog

(Simon Winnall and Ian Winstanley are raising money for ME research by climbing Mount Kilimanjaro in September)

visible current

Whither he was going he knew not; yet it seemed as if motion gave him the power of enduring what he could not bear at rest; and he continued to traverse street after street, till, quitting the city, he had reached Ponte Molle, where, exhausted by heat and fatigue, he was at length compelled to stop . . . A desolate vacancy now spread over him, and, leaning over the bridge, he seemed to lose himself in the deepening gloom of the scene, till the black river that moved beneath him appeared almost a part of his mind, and its imageless waters but the visible current of his own dark thoughts.

-- Washington Allston Monaldi: A Tale

Washington Allston at Poets of Cambridge

Monaldi: A Tale

some nights

Some nights, stay up till dawn.
As the moon sometimes does for the sun.
Be a full bucket pulled up the dark way
of a well, then lifted out into light.

Something opens our wings. Something
makes boredom and hurt disappear.
Someone fills the cup in front of us.
We taste only sacredness.

-- Rumi
Translated by John Moyne and Coleman Barks

under every deep

Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on midnoon, and under every deep a lower deep opens.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson, from 'Circles'

Circles

everything is said

There exists what we might call a sublime form of what is drawn, sublime because stripped of any scribbling, any lesion: the drawing instrument (brush, crayon, or pencil) descends on the sheet, makes contact—or hardens—there, that is all: there is not even the shadow of an incision, simply a touch: to the quasi-Oriental rarefaction of the slightly soiled surface (this is what the object is) corresponds the extenuation of the movement: it grasps nothing, it deposits, and everything is said.

-- Roland Barthes, on Cy Twombly, in The Responsibility of Forms
Translated by Richard Howard

Roland Barthes

Cy Twombly's Wilder Shores of Love

a ripple of wind

A ripple of wind comes down from the woods and across the clearing toward us. We see a wave of shadow and gloss where the short grass bends and the cottage eaves tremble. It hits us in the back. It is a single gust, a sport, a rogue breeze out of the north, as if some reckless, impatient wind has bumped the north door open on its hinges and let out this acre of scent familiar and forgotten, this cool scent of tundra, and of November. Fall! Who authorized this intrusion? Stop or I'll shoot. It is an entirely misplaced air—fall, that I have utterly forgotten, that could be here again, another fall, and here it is only July. I thought I was younger, and would have more time. The gust crosses the river and blackens the water where it passes, like a finger closing slats.

-- Annie Dillard Teaching a Stone to Talk

effect

And here is something of how we understand ourselves, in the last century's twilight, our pleasures and our ambitions. And we understand then, perhaps without saying it to ourselves, that our moment's just as fleeting, just as certain to seem antique and quaintly lit; that we become, in time, one of those figures on the shore, not very detailed, not particularly individual, a representative of our era, when seen from such a distancing perspective. Oddly paradoxical, and oddly moving—to be reminded that we stand at the center of our own lives, and that those lives are historical, and fleeting. What could the effect be, then, but tenderness?

Now we stand on the wet street, Paul and I, in the center of a realm of light and shadow—reflections off wet cars, a "walk" sign distorted in a puddle over cobblestone—and anyway we step that world shifts around us, an optical paradox. Already I seem to be recognizing that the Panorama is better in memory—less quaint, more profound, more troubling, not a large bad painting but an accomplished chamber of recollection, a parable, something to keep. We're walking back toward the train station, carrying our souvenirs. Our shoulders keep touching as we walk along the sidewalk. I'm aware of our paired steps, this cool late afternoon, the physical fact of us, his body, mine, how even in motion we seem to stand in the center of circle after circle. Having been in a Panorama once, it seems we never entirely leave.

-- Mark Doty "The Panorama Mesdag"

Mesdag Panorama Website

Mark Doty

the letters of your name

In the middle of this century we turned to each other.
I saw your body, casting the shadow, waiting for me.
The leather straps of a long journey
had long since been tightened crisscross on my chest.
I spoke in praise of your mortal loins,
you spoke in praise of my transient face,
I stroked your hair in the direction of your journey,
I touched the tidings of your last day,
I touched your hand that has never slept,
I touched your mouth that now, perhaps, will sing.

Desert dust covered the table
we hadn't eaten from.
But with my finger I wrote in it the letters of your name.

-- Yehuda Amichai, from 'In the Middle of This Century'
Translated by Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell

The Untranslatable Amichai

repetition and difference

The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze has said that perception is based on repetition and difference. And that's why I think it's necessary to have a certain form of repetition, because perception requires articulation fields to let you know where you are. And you can know where you are only when you can recognize similarities. But some things should only seem similar, because if they're too much alike then they'll repeat themselves, and the fourth time will be exactly the same as the third, and the third like the second. And if you can foresee this, the work is dead. Immediately. Because as soon as you can predict the combinations, it's superfluous for the composer to proceed with them. So why do it? For me what's interesting is to present material that is evolving and then, from time to time, to bring back the model . . . but not in exactly the same way. So that a listener has to wonder, "Do I recognize it? Don't I recognize it? I'm not sure anymore. But I know that it has something to do with it." And in this sense I like ambiguity . . . But the kind of ambiguity that's simply a matter of games and style doesn't interest me at all.

This, for me, is the difference between, for instance, the late Picasso and say, Jackson Pollock. You look at one of Picasso's later paintings for two minutes, and you know very well how it's been done, you've understood everything. But if you observe the best works of Pollock, you're puzzled and you try to see and explore his labyrinth; and that makes the work interesting and sustains your attention. Of course, you can be lost at first, but after a kind of acquaintance with the painting, you've lived with it and it changes. But the simplistic works, in their relationships with you, don't change. And that's their death.

Another example in this respect is Kafka, because he also constructs a kind of labyrinth where the logic is perfect, but it leads you into areas that are completely unexpected, such that you think you're going one way and then you wind up in the other direction. And I've found that when you're composing a work, it's exactly the same—you don't want to know at the onset where you'll be at the end of the score. You have a vague idea, of course, but it's not a matter of going in a straight line, you have all kinds of divagations.

You've spoken about the legendary Chinese landscape painter who disappeared into his canvas. And in many of your works, you seem to create moments of almost Oriental transparency and particularity that are then counterbalanced by moments of chaos--suggesting a movement from hyperconsciousness to the realm of the unconscious.

I myself like this kind of approach, so it's reflected in what I'm doing. And since this is what I like in painting and literature, I also want to express it in music, because it's certainly my personality—to be crystal clear in the sense that sometimes the crystal reflects yourself and other times you can see through the material. So the work suggests a hiding and opening at the same time. And what I want most to create is a kind of deceiving transparency, as if you are looking in very transparent water and can't make an estimation of the depths.

And when you stir things up . . .

That's when you begin to know.

-- Pierre Boulez, interviewed by Jonathan Cott in Visions and Voices

Visions and Voices

aura

What is aura? A strange web of time and space: the unique appearance of a distance, however close at hand. On a summer noon, resting, to follow the line of a mountain range on the horizon or a twig which throws its shadow on the observer, until the moment or hour begins to be a part of its appearance-- that is to breathe the aura of those mountains, that twig.

-- Walter Benjamin, from "A Short History of Photography" in Artforum 15
Translated by Phil Patton

a pure accord

If one starts from the total height of the nave (from the ground to the crown of the vault), the next smaller stretch of the 'golden section' is the height of the nave up to the beginning of the vault, then the above-mentioned height of the wall pillars (from the columns of the arcades to the beginning of the vault), then the height of the columns of the arcades themselves (from the plinth to the springing-stone of the arch), and finally the distance between the springing-stone and the lower cornice. To this harmonic cadence is linked, as in the groundplan, the simple proportion of two to one, emphasized by the upper cornice on the wall pillar . . .

For this is a clarity, a pure accord, which the observer 'sees' or 'hears' rather than reckons. And this explains why people in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, who used the term 'Gothic' to mean 'barbaric', liked to cover the all too widely-spread rhythm of the stone body with neo-classical stucco statues, which they were able to 'understand literally'. But who could tame the upsurge of these arches, which starts already in the wall-pillars, and even in the clustered columns of the arcades? The arches are not merely laid on the pillars, nor are the pillars merely placed in front of the walls. All these things—arches, walls, and pillars—constitute an organic whole, comparable to the calyx of a flower, with its sepals and petals. The lily-like miracle of the high Gothic style can already be seen in the steeply rising divisions of the vaulting, even if in Chartres the basic stone, with its edges and curves, still remains rough; its heaviness is overcome; and wherever the vault-coverings join with the arched ribs, the steeply rising girders, and the stilted arcaded arches, they resemble leaves that have grown a natural growth.

-- Titus Burckhardt Chartres and the Birth of the Cathedral
Translated by William Stoddart

carried away

. . . the snow had almost stopped and the sun was out, glittering on the rivers and thaw-streams, illuminating the land so that what had seemed like grey, monotonous scrub a few minutes before was now full of subtle colour: the rich browns and soft purples of the birch twigs; the pale yellows and greens of Salix lapponica; the soft oranges and blue-greys and reds of the mosses and lichens . . . I wanted to go for a last walk in this sudden theatre of light and colour: just a short hike to carry home the silent chill of the tundra in my bones and my nervous system . . . I struck out, heading along a reindeer track beside a wide, frozen lake, picking my way through the snow, listening to the thaw-streams as they trickled down the gentle slopes . . . I skirted the lake for a while, letting the May sunshine warm my face, then I turned back. The great thing about the sub-Arctic is that a few days, or an hour, or even a couple of minutes can be enough: it is a land full of signs, a land of sudden, local miracles. All you have to do is learn how to find them. That day, I thought I'd had my gift, with the sun and the colours and the sound of the thaw-water; then, a few hundred yards from where I'd left the car, I disturbed a flock of ptarmigan and they flared up out from the snow-covered scrub, white birds in a field of white, their wings whirring, a sound like tiny wheels turning in my flesh—and suddenly, with no sense that anything out of the ordinary was happening, and perhaps for no more than a few seconds, I was rising too, flaring up into the air, just like the birds, wingless, dizzy, my head full of whiteness. I don't want to make of this any more than it was: it lasted less than a minute, and it was in no way mystical or even inexplicable. At the same time, though, I do want to give that moment its due, because I did take to the air, I did fly and, for a few moments, I was one of those birds, attuned to the flock, familiar with the sky. Some miracles are purely personal and may be entirely imaginary, but they are miracles, nonetheless. I'd disturbed ptarmigan like this more than once—it's difficult not to, out on the tundra—but I had never felt this sensation before. For the first time, I had come close enough, and I had been caught up, carried away, offered the gift of a moment's flight.

-- John Burnside, from 'How to Fly' Granta 94

In the Mist

On cool, damp evenings
at the end of July,

you can walk into a mist;
and the mist

seems to disappear—
from the dirt road; from

the hill; from the trees . . .
But in the full moon,

you can begin to see it again—
it gets closer,

leaving a ring of clearness
around you, as you walk down the hill

toward the house with the light
left in the window.

-- Lloyd Schwartz

if there were water

If there were water
And no rock
If there were rock
And also water
And water
A spring
A pool among the rock
If there were the sound of water only
Not the cicada
And dry grass singing
But sound of water over a rock
Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees
Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop
But there is no water

-- T.S. Eliot, in "What the Thunder Said" (from The Waste Land)

The Waste Land

T.S. Eliot reading The Waste Land (audio)

Hermit thrush (including audio file of its song and call)

voices

Adam: There is a voice in the garden that tells me things.

Eve: The garden is full of voices sometimes. They put all sorts of thoughts into my head.

Adam: To me there is only one voice. It is very low; but it is so near that it is like a whisper from within myself. There is no mistaking it for any voice of the birds or beasts, or for your voice.

Eve: It is strange that I should hear voices from all sides and you only one from within. But I have some thoughts that come from within me and not from the voices. The thought that we must not cease to be comes from within.

-- George Bernard Shaw In the Beginning

watery thicket

J’avais beaucoup ramé, d’un grand geste net assoupi, les yeux au-dedans fixés sur l’entier oubli d’aller, comme le rire de l’heure coulait alentour. Tant d’immobilité paressait que frôlé d’un bruit inerte où fila jusqu’à moitié la yole, je ne vérifiai l’arrêt qu’a l’éticellement stable d’initiales sur les avirons mis à nu, qui me rappela à mon identité mondaine.

I had been rowing for a long time with a sweeping, rhythmical, drowsy stroke, my eyes within me fastened upon my utter forgetfulness of motion, while the laughter of the hour flowed round about. Immobility dozed everywhere so quietly that, when I was suddenly brushed by a dull sound which my boat half ran into, I could tell that I had stopped only by the quiet glittering of initials on the lifted oars. Then I was recalled to my place in the world of reality.

Qu’arrivait-il, où étais-je?

What was happening? Where was I?

II fallut, pour voir clair en l’aventure, me rémemore mon départ tôt, ce juillet de flamme, sur l’intervalle entre ses vegetations dormantes d’un toujours étroit et distrait ruisseau, en quête des floraisons d’eau et avec un dessein de reconnaître l’emplacement occupé par propriété de l’amie d’une amie, à qui je devais improvisé un bonjour. Sans que le ruban d’aucune herbe me retînt devant un paysage plus que l’autre chassé avec son reflet en l’onde par le même impartial coup de rame, je venais échouer dans quelque touffe de roseaux, terme mystérieux de ma course, au milieu de la rivière: où tout suite élargie en fluvial bosquet, elle étale un nonchaloir d’étang plissé des hésitations à partir qu’à une source.

To see to the bottom of my adventure I had to go back to my early departure, in that flaming July, through the rapid opening and sleeping vegetation of an ever narrow and absent-minded stream, my search for aquatic flowers, and my intention of reconnoitering an estate belonging to the friend of a friend, to whom I would pay my respects as best I could. No ribbon of grass had held me near any special landscape; all were left behind, along with their reflections in the water, by the same impartial stroke of my oars; and I had just now run aground on a tuft of reeds, the mysterious end of my travels, in the middle of the river. There, the river broadens out into a watery thicket and quietly displays the elegance of a pool, rippling like the hesitation of a spring before it gushes forth.

-- Stéphane Mallarmé, from 'Le Nénuphar Blanc,' ('The White Water-Lily')
Translated by Bradford Cook and Kevin Regalbuto

'The White Water-Lily' in Janus Literary Journal

the art of paths

 
tell me, is it the fog or is it me?

show a country, speak of a culture, in whatever way,
and you'll enter into fiction while yearning for invisibility


Rituals

                            and the formation of identity

the skill of behaviour, the craft of framing time, the art of paths


why travel, I would say, if not to be in touch with the ordinary in non-ordinary ways; to feel and think ordinarily while experiencing what can later become the extra-ordinary in an ordinary frame


                         start in a room sealed with darkness
and a door or a window immediately etches itself onto the viewer's mind
            

            again, it's that unbearable fellow
            traveller who won't stay behind,
            whom one cannot get rid of


            opening at dawn, closing at dusk


            sorrows forming and falling away
            heavy
            like drops of water from a lotus leaf


            every day from a blossoming lotus
            something's emerging
            every day from deep in the mud
            someone's being reborn


nothing is natural, for the natural in its most natural is carefully created

    in the matted room
    a solitary painting
    barely line, barely shape
    that frail shadow
    of a bodhisattva
    shading its human frame


-- Trinh T. Minh-ha, excerpts from The Fourth Dimension

Trinh T. Minh-ha

about The Fourth Dimension 

only a trace

Art is, after all, only a trace -- like a footprint which shows that one has walked bravely and in great happiness.

-- Robert Henri The Art Spirit

through the boiling rush

I like to stand on my beach, watching a long wave start breaking in many places, and see the curling water run north and south from the several beginnings, and collide in furious white pyramids built of the opposing energies. Splendid fountains often delight the eye. A towering and deep-bellied wave, toppling, encloses in its volute a quantity of air, and a few seconds after the spill this prisoned and compressed vapour bursts up through the boiling rush in feathery, foamy jets and geyser plumes.

-- Henry Beston The Outermost House

Victor

At two, Victor did not make little spiral scribbles to express buttons or portholes, as a million tots do, why not you? Lovingly he made his circles perfectly round and perfectly closed. A three-year-old child, when asked to copy a square, shapes one recognizable corner and then is content to render the rest of the outline as wavy or circular; but Victor at three not only copied the researcher's (Dr. Liza Wind's) far from ideal square with contemptuous accuracy but added a smaller one beside the copy. He never went through that initial stage of graphic activity when infants draw Kopffüsslers (tadpole people), or humpty dumpties with L-like legs, and arms ending in rake prongs; in fact, he avoided the human form altogether and when pressed by Papa (Dr. Eric Wind) to draw Mama (Dr. Liza Wind), responded with a lovely undulation, which he said was her shadow on the new refrigerator. At four, he evolved an individual stipple. At five, he began to draw objects in perspective -- a side wall nicely foreshortened, a tree dwarfed by distance, one object half masking another. And at six, Victor already distinguished what so many adults never learn to see -- the colors of shadows, the difference in tint between the shadow of an orange and that of a plum or of an avocado pear.

To the Winds, Victor was a problem child insofar as he refused to be one . . .

-- Vladimir Nabokov Pnin

some other way

We went to Laguna with the children and that night, Saturday, took a basket of food and piles of old coats to the cove north of Emerald Bay, where there is a deserted camp. Cliffward from a beached log, we made a little pit, and Dave threw down jagged stones for Al to line it with. Later, one stone exploded three times, showing its scar very white in the coals and blackness. Noni and I picked up wood, which lay untidily against the rocks under the point of land near our log and our fire. When we had deep coals, we broiled steak and put it into buttered round buns. I liked mine better in my fingers, hot and dripping and tasting delicately of wood and smoke as only broiled beef can. Just before the steaks were done, there was that still moment of no color, when all the things and the sky and all the hills seem to exist in some other way than the one we suppose. Then we saw Venus, and then two others -- stars they were, though . . .

-- M.F.K. Fisher Stay Me, Oh Comfort Me

the song

Remember what it was like to be sung to sleep. If you are fortunate, the memory will be more recent than childhood. The repeated lines of words and music are like paths. These paths are circular and the rings they make are linked together like those of a chain. You walk along these paths and are led by them in circles which lead from one to the other, further and further away. The field upon which you walk and upon which the chain is laid is the song.

-- John Berger About Looking

 Maximus, to himself

                                      I
I have had to learn the simplest things
last.  Which made for difficulties.
Even at sea I was slow, to get the hand out, or to cross
a wet deck.
                  The sea was not, finally, my trade.
But even my trade, at it, I stood estranged
from that which was most familiar.  Was delayed,
and not content with the man's argument
that such postponement
is now the nature of
obedience,
                  that we are all late
                  in a slow time,
                  that we grow up many    
                  And the single
                  is not easily
                  known
It could be, though the sharpness (the achiote)
I note in others,
makes more sense
than my own distances.  The agilities
                  they show daily
                  who do the world's
                  businesses
                  And who do nature's
                  as I have no sense
                  I have done either
I have made dialogues,
have discussed ancient texts,
have thrown what light I could, offered
what pleasures
doceat allows
                  But the known?
This, I have had to be given,
a life, love, and from one man
the world.
                  Tokens.
                  But sitting here
                  I look out as a wind
                  and water man, testing
                  And missing
                  some proof
I know the quarters
of the weather, where it comes from,
where it goes.  But the stem of me,
this I took from their welcome,
or their rejection, of me
                  And my arrogance
                  was neither diminished
                  nor increased,
                  by the communication

                  II
It is undone business
I speak of, this morning,
with the sea
stretching out
from my feet

-- Charles Olson

Charles Olson Home Page
OlsonNow Blog 

light

I was not light myself, I knew that, but I bathed in it as an element which blindness had suddenly brought much closer. I could feel light rising, spreading, resting on objects, giving them form, then leaving them.

-- Jacques Lusseyran And There Was Light
Translated by Elizabeth R. Cameron

love one another

Love one another,
but make not a bond of love:
Let it rather be a moving sea between
the shores of
your souls.

-- Kahlil Gibran Love Letters in the Sand

To You

What is more beautiful than night
and someone in your arms
that's what we love about art
it seems to prefer us and stays

if the moon or a gasping candle
sheds a little light or even dark
you become a landscape in a landscape
with rocks and craggy mountains

and valleys full of sweaty ferns
breathing and lifting into the clouds
which have actually come low
as a blanket of aspirations' blue

for once not a melancholy color
because it is looking back at us
there's no need for vistas we are one
in the complicated foreground of space

the architects are most courageous
because it stands for all to see
and for a long time just as
the words "I'll always love you"

impulsively appear in the dark sky
and we are happy and stick by them
like a couple of painters in neon allowing
the light to glow there over the river

-- Frank O'Hara

A Frank O'Hara Exhibit

first images

An excess of childhood is the germ of a poem . . . From poetic reverie, inspired by some great spectacle of the world to childhood reverie, there is a commerce of grandeur. And that is why childhood is at the origin of the greatest landscapes. Our childhood solitudes have given us the primitive immensities . . . The child sees everything big and beautiful. The reverie toward childhood returns us to the beauty of the first images.

-- Gaston Bachelard The Poetics of Reverie
Translated by Daniel Russell

form

Forms seek their own form, form seeks its own dissolution.

-- Octavio Paz Alternating Current
Translated by Helen R. Lane

the pole

In Haitian voodoo, all you need to begin a ceremony is a pole and people. You begin to beat the drums and far away in Africa the gods hear your call. They decide to come to you, and as voodoo is a very practical religion, it takes into account the time that a god needs to cross the Atlantic. So you go on beating your drum, chanting and drinking rum. In this way, you prepare yourself. Then five or six hours pass and the gods fly in -- they circle above your heads, but it is not worth looking up as naturally they are invisible. This is where the pole becomes so vital. Without the pole nothing can link the visible and invisible worlds. The pole, like the cross, is the junction. Through the wood, earthed, the spirits slide, and now they are ready for the second step in their metamorphosis. Now they need a human vehicle, and they choose one of the participants. A kick, a moan or two, a short paroxysm on the ground and a man is possessed. He gets to his feet, no longer himself, but filled with the god. The god now has form. He is someone who can joke, get drunk and listen to everyone's complaints. The first thing that the priest, the Houngan, does when the god arrives is to shake him by the hand and ask him about his trip. He's a god all right, but he is no longer unreal: he is there, on our level, attainable. The ordinary man or woman now can talk to him, pump his hand, argue, curse him, go to bed with him -- and so nightly, the Haitian is in contact with the great powers and mysteries that rule his day.

In the theatre, the tendency for centuries has been to put the actor at a remote distance, on a platform, framed, decorated, lit, painted, in high shoes -- so as to help to persuade the ignorant that he is holy, that his art is sacred. Did this express reverence? Or was there behind it a fear that something would be exposed if the light were too bright, the meeting too near? Today, we have exposed the sham. But we are rediscovering that a holy theatre is still what we need. So where should we look for it? In the clouds or on the ground?

-- Peter Brook The Empty Space

careering on the utmost verge

I write diligently, but not so rapidly as I had hoped. I find the book requires more care and thought than the "Scarlet Letter"; -- also, I have to wait oftener for a mood. The Scarlet Letter being all in one tone, I had only to get my pitch, and could then go on interminably. Many passages of this book ought to be finished with the minuteness of a Dutch picture, in order to give them their proper effect. Sometimes, when tired of it, it strikes me that the whole is an absurdity, from beginning to end; but the fact is, in writing a romance, a man is always -- or always ought to be -- careering on the utmost verge of a precipitous absurdity, and the skill lies in coming as close as possible, without actually tumbling over.

-- Nathaniel Hawthorne, on the writing of The House of the Seven Gables, Letter to James T. Fields (3 November 1850)

and still I gaze

And still I gaze -- and with how blank an eye!
And those thin clouds above, in flakes and bars,
That give away their motion to the stars;
Those stars, that glide behind them or between,
Now sparkling, now bedimmed, but always seen:
Yon crescent Moon, as fixed as if it grew
In its cloudless, starless lake of blue;
I see them all so excellently fair,
I see, not feel, how beautiful they are!
My genial spirits fail;
And what can these avail
To lift the smothering weight from off my breast?
It were a vain endeavour,
Though I should gaze for ever
On that green light that lingers in the west:
I may not hope from outward forms to win
The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.

-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge, from "Dejection: An Ode"

flow

So it is with life, and especially with love. There is no point. There is nothing you can cut out, except falsity, which isn't love or life. But the love itself is a flow, two little streams of feeling, one from the woman, one from the man, that flow and flow and never stop, and sometimes they twinkle with stars, sometimes they chafe, but still they flow on, intermingling; and if they rise to a floweriness like a daisy, that is part of the flow; and they will inevitably die down again, which is also part of a flow. And one relationship may produce many flowerinesses, as a daisy plant produces many daisies; but they will all die down again as the summer passes, though the green plant itself need not die. If flowers didn't fade they wouldn't be flowers, they'd be artificial things. But there are roots to faded flowers and in the root the flow continues and continues. And only the flow matters; live and let live, love and let love.

-- D.H. Lawrence Phoenix II

this

This is what it means to be an artist — to seize this essence brooding everywhere in everything, just behind aspect.

-- Frank Lloyd Wright

like so many uncaged birds

The one great glory of the film is this language. The greatest credit I can assign to those who made the film is that they have loved and served the language so well. I don't feel that much of the delivery is inspired; it is merely so good, so right, that the words set loose in the graciously designed world of the screen, like so many uncaged birds, fully enjoy and take care of themselves.

-- James Agee, on Laurence Olivier's Henry V, in Agee on Film

we

... we
are morning wind in the leaves that

makes the branches move. Silence
turning now into this, now that.

-- Rumi, from "We Prescribe a Friend"
Translated by Coleman Barks

when I was a child

...it seems to me that the boy I was, was aware of the dangers I have fallen into now — for didn't I read in many legends of purposes forgotten, of forests full of thorns, of grails unnoticed? My mistake was to think that my own nature would make everything easy. Perhaps I was less a child when the purpose was clearer, and now that I am old I am encumbered by many childish things. Yet the fact remains that I am and was the same person: when I was a child there were moments when I stood up within my whole life, as though it were a burning room, or as though I were rowing alone on a sea whose waves were filled with many small tongues of fire...

-- Stephen Spender World Within World

nothingness

For Love to be fully satisfied,
it must lower itself even unto nothingness,
and transform this nothingness into fire.

-- Thérèse of Lisieux

lament

Speechlessness: that is the great sorrow of nature (and for the sake of her redemption the life and language of man -- not only, as is supposed, of the poet -- are in nature) ... Lament, however, is the most undifferentiated, impotent expression of language; it contains scarcely more than the sensuous breath; and even where there is only a rustling of plants, in it there is always a lament. Because she is mute, she mourns.

-- Walter Benjamin Illuminations

poetry

For poetry is not revelation and has no need to pretend it is. Poetry is art and does what art can do -- which is, as Lu Chi said, to trap heaven and earth in the cage of form.

-- Archibald MacLeish Poetry and Experience

each glimpse

Each glimpse is not just a repeat performance; it is a fresh new experience.

-- Paul Brunton The Notebooks of Paul Brunton

the willing

The pure willing, the current that runs through this matter, communicating life to it, is a thing which we hardly feel, which at most we brush lightly as it passes.

-- Henri Bergson Creative Evolution
Translated by Arthur Mitchell

the gift

This sense of being suspended over nothingness and yet in life, of being a fragile thing, a flame that may blow out and yet burns brightly, adds an inexpressible sweetness to the gift of life, for one sees it entirely and purely as a gift.

-- Thomas Merton Dancing in the Water of Life

relativity

Time does not pass
Words pass.

-- Jasper Johns, quoted in Jasper Johns by Michael Crichton

Down the gullies of the eras we may catch ourselves looking forward to what will in no time be staring you larrikins on the post-face in that multimirror megaron of returning-ties, whirled without end to end.

-- James Joyce Finnegan's Wake

journey

In the case of the flower, the plastic journey is up and down the crags of petals, down its curving sides, passing through the crevice between the petals, and climbing up the curved inclines of the next. The sum total of that journey is the metal flower, yet it cannot be perceived without having taken that journey. One has gained knowledge of the flower by taking a topographical tour.

-- Mark Rothko The Artist's Reality

In Our Souls

In our souls everything
moves guided by a mysterious hand.
We know nothing of our own souls
that are ununderstandable and say nothing.

The deepest words
of the wise man teach us
the same as the whistle of the wind when it blows
or the sound of the water when it is flowing.

-- Antonio Machado
Translated by Robert Bly

The single flower contains more brightness than a hundred flowers.

-- Yasunari Kawabata Japan, the Beautiful and Myself (Nobel Lecture 1968)
Translated by Edward Seidensticker

Yasunari Kawabata

sometimes

At night David can fly.

In the daytime he can't. In the daytime he doesn't even remember that he can. But at night, after his mother has put him to bed, he wakes up, sometimes.

-- Randall Jarrell Fly By Night

Randall Jarrell

mysteries of temperament

It has sometimes crossed my mind that James wanted to be a poet and an artist, and that there lay in him, beneath the ocean of metaphysics, a lost Atlantis of the fine arts; that he really hated philosophy and all its works, and pursued them only as Hercules might spin, or as a prince in a fairy tale might sort seeds for an evil dragon, or as anyone might patiently do some careful work for which he had no aptitude. It would seem most natural, if this were the case between James and the metaphorical sciences; for what is there in these studies that can drench and satisfy a tingling mercurial being who loves to live on the surface, as well as in the depths of life? Thus we reason, forgetting that the mysteries of temperament are deeper than the mysteries of occupation.

-- John Jay Chapman, in "William James" from The Selected Writings of John Jay Chapman ed. Jacques Barzun

William James

What Survives

Who says that all must vanish?
Who knows, perhaps the flight
of the bird you wound remains,
and perhaps the flowers survive
caresses in us, in their ground.

It isn't the gesture that lasts,
but it dresses you again in gold
armor -- from breast to knees --
and the battle was so pure
an Angel wears it after you.

-- Rainer Maria Rilke
Translated by A. Poulin

a secret delight

There is a second kind of beauty that we find in the several products of art and nature, which does not work in the imagination with that warmth and violence as the beauty that appears in our proper species, but is apt however to raise in us a secret delight ...

-- Joseph Addison, in "The Pleasures of the Imagination" The Spectator

We are alone with everything we love.

-- Novalis

Nature Assigns the Sun

Nature assigns the Sun —
That — is Astronomy —
Nature cannot enact a Friend —
That — is Astrology.

-- Emily Dickinson

on what is difficult

Most people have (with the help of conventions) turned their solutions toward what is easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must trust in what is difficult; everything alive trusts in it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself any way it can and is spontaneously itself, tries to be itself at all costs and against all opposition. We know little, but that we must trust in what is difficult is a certainty that will never abandon us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be one more reason for us to do it.

-- Rainer Maria Rilke Letters to a Young Poet

via Whiskey River

Lingering in Happiness

After rain after many days without rain,
it stays cool, private and cleansed, under the trees,
and the dampness there, married now to gravity,
falls branch to branch, leaf to leaf, down to the ground

where it will disappear -- but not, of course, vanish
except to our eyes. The roots of the oaks will have their share,
and the white threads of the grasses, and the cushion of moss;
a few drops, round as pearls, will enter the mole's tunnel;

and soon so many small stones, buried for a thousand years,
will feel themselves being touched.

-- Mary Oliver

5.

In the back room where a ray of light
has penetrated the vine-covered window
the green curtain that parts
onto the circular garden
you dip your hands into a basin of water
and they blur away
only the lines from your upturned palms remain
floating for an instant
rearranging themselves
a map etched in disappearing ink
to guide you for the rest of your life
or until you leave this address
whichever comes first

-- Nicholas Christopher, from "14 rue Serpentine"

like a spring pouring forth in many cascades

Artists and thinkers are like lyres, infinitely delicate and sonorous, whose vibrations, awakened by the circumstances of each epoch, are prolonged to the ears of all other mortals.

Without a doubt, very fine works of art are appreciated only by a limited number; and even in galleries and public squares they are looked at by only a few. But, nevertheless, the thoughts they embody end by filtering through to the crowd. Below the men of genius there are other artists of less scope, who borrow and popularize the conceptions of the masters: writers are influenced by painters, painters by writers; there is a continual exchange of thought between all the brains of a generation -- the journalists, the popular novelists, the illustrators, the makers of pictures bring within the reach of the multitude the truths discovered by the powerful intellects of the day. It is like a spiritual stream, like a spring pouring forth in many cascades, which finally meet to form the great moving river which represents the mentality of an era.

-- Auguste Rodin Rodin on Art and Artists
Translated by Mrs. Romilly Fedden

The Black Lace Fan My Mother Gave Me

It was the first gift he ever gave her,
buying it for five francs in the Galeries
in prewar Paris. It was stifling.
A starless drought made the nights stormy.

They stayed in the city for the summer.
They met in cafés. She was always early.
He was late. That evening he was later.
They wrapped the fan. He looked at his watch.

She looked down the Boulevard des Capucines.
She ordered more coffee. She stood up.
The streets were emptying. The heat was killing.
She thought the distance smelled of rain and lightning.

These are wild roses, appliquéd in silk
by hand — darkly picked, stitched boldly, quickly.
The rest is tortoiseshell and has the reticent,
clear patience of its element. It is

a worn-out, underwater bullion and it keeps
even now, an inference of its violation.
The lace is overcast, as if the weather
it opened for and offset had entered it.

The past is an empty café terrace.
An airless dusk before thunder. A man running.
And no way now to know what happened then —
none at all — unless, of course, you improvise.

The blackbird on this first sultry morning
in summer, finding buds, worms, fruit,
feels the heat. Suddenly, she puts out her wing —
the whole, full, flirtatious span of it.

-- Eavan Boland

a land not mine

A land not mine, still
forever memorable,
the waters of its ocean
chill and fresh.

Sand on the bottom whiter than chalk,
and the air drunk, like wine,
late sun lays bare
the rosy limbs of the pinetrees.

Sunset in the ethereal waves:
I cannot tell if the day
is ending, or the world, or if
the secret of secrets is inside me again.

-- Anna Akhmatova
Translated by Jane Kenyon

of forms and emotions

All things appear to us in the shape of forms. Even in metaphysics ideas are expressed by forms, well then think how absurd it would be to think of painting without the imagery of forms. A figure, an object, a circle, are forms; they affect us more or less intensely. Some are closer to our feelings and give rise to emotions which concern our affective faculties; others appeal more particularly to the intellect. I must accept all of them, as my mind has as great a need of emotion as my senses ...

The artist is a receptacle for emotions derived from anywhere: from the sky, from the earth, from a piece of paper, from a passing figure, from a spider's web. This is why one must not make a distinction between things. For them there are no aristocratic quarterings. One must take things where one finds them, except in one's own works. I have a horror of copying myself, but when I am shown a folder of old drawings, for example, I do not hesitate to take from them whatever I want.

-- Pablo Picasso, quoted in "Conversation avec Picasso" by Christian Zervos, Cahiers d'Art Vol. X (1935)
Translated by Elspeth A. Evans

kafuffle

My desk and work tables reflect -- are, perhaps, an objective correlative for -- the scramble of my mind and my manuscripts. Every surface is covered by odd scraps of paper, dictionaries for several languages, half-empty cups of cold coffee or tea, computer disks, clips and staplers, long-buried pencils and pens, temporarily abandoned projects, file folders, unmarked calendars. Of course I keep promising that I'll get back to tidy them up; frankly, I must admit that I hope that all this kafuffle never gets cleared up -- not, at least, until the kafuffle on my worksheets produces one or two more sparkles.

-- W.D. Snodgrass, in "In the Studio" from American Poetry Review 35:3

flame

When dreaming a little of the forces that maintain each object's particular form, one can easily imagine that in each vertical being there reigns a flame.

-- Gaston Bachelard The Flame of a Candle
Translated by Joni Caldwell

interpretation

At one time whenever I made drawings for sculpture I tried to give them as much the illusion of real sculpture as I could -- that is, I drew by the method of illusion, of light falling on a solid object. But now I find that carrying a drawing so far that it becomes a substitute for the sculpture either weakens the desire to do the sculpture, or is likely to make the sculpture only a dead realization of the drawing.

I now leave a wider latitude in the interpretation of the drawings I make for sculpture, and draw often in line and flat tones without the light and shade illusion of three dimensions; but this does not mean that the vision behind the drawing in only two-dimensional.

-- Henry Moore, in "Notes on Sculpture" from The Painter's Object, ed. Myfanwy Evans

each day

One should, each day, try to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it is possible, speak a few reasonable words.

-- Goethe

yellow

A pure American tone? The yellow of the kitchen-stool vinyl on which James Stewart climbs to test his acrophobia in Vertigo. It's the yellow of postwar American prosperity that Richard Nixon bragged about to Nikita Khrushchev. Aggressive cheer, boastful self-confidence, strident belief in work and getting ahead: Vertigo's yellow is blazon for these values. The same values that were toyed with, mocked, and exploited to great commercial success by certain Pop artists of the 1960s, who took over the dandy yellow that gleams like chrome but looks saturated with creamy yellow papaya pulp.

-- W.S. Di Piero Shooting the Works

fur

"It's innate," I answered. "I already showed it as a child. Incidentally, fur excites all high-strung people — an effect that is consistent with both universal and natural laws. It is a physical stimulus, which is just as strangely tingling and which no one can entirely resist. Science has recently demonstrated a kinship between electricity and warmth — in any case, their effects on the human organism are related. The tropics produce more passionate people, a heated atmosphere causes excitement. The same holds for electricity. Hence the bewitchingly beneficial influence that cats exert on highly sensitive and intelligent people; this has made these long-tailed graces of the animal kingdom, these sweet, spark-spraying electric batteries the darlings of a Mohammed, a Cardinal Richelieu, a Crébillon, a Rousseau, or a Wieland."

"So a woman wearing fur," cried Wanda, "is nothing but a big cat, a charged electric battery?"

-- Leopold von Sacher-Masoch Venus in Furs
Translated by Joachim Neugroschel

a memory of pictures

Gracing a bent flight of slippery stairs grazed a full dozen identically framed oblong views of cattle. Grim gray tree trunks, brown lank grass, chocolate and mustard cows were anonymously charmless but hand-painted. Above the dining-room sideboard hung an ample, beautiful, and luxurious homage to fruit, flowers, vegetables, fish, conch shells, and a dead rabbit, signed Melchior Hondecoeter. It was an original. Dry, flaking colors exposed fine-grained, pale, dusty linen beneath. Its condition was troubling. After all the labor in presenting an industrious vision of delight, no one seemed to have loved it recently. Pictures, one gathered, were neither impervious nor eternal, despite massive frames, rarity or cost.

-- Lincoln Kirstein, in "Boston: Frames and Outlines," recalling his boyhood home before his mother redecorated it, from By With To & From: A Lincoln Kirstein Reader, ed. Nicholas Jenkins

up into the silence the green

up into the silence the green
silence with a white earth in it

you will(kissme)go

out into the morning the young
morning with a warm world in it

(kiss me)you will go

on into the sunlight the fine
sunlight with a firm day in it

you will go(kiss me

down into your memory and
a memory and memory

i)kissme(will go)

-- e.e. cummings

Little Dog's Rhapsody in the Night (Percy Three)

He puts his cheek against mine
and makes small, expressive sounds.
And when I'm awake, or awake enough

he turns upside down, his four paws
in the air
and his eyes dark and fervent.

Tell me you love me, he says.

Tell me again.

Could there be a sweeter arrangement? Over and over
he gets to ask it.
I get to tell.

-- Mary Oliver

watermark

Neither in environment nor in heredity can I find the exact instrument that fashioned me, the anonymous roller that pressed upon my life a certain intricate watermark whose unique design becomes visible when the lamp of art is made to shine through life's foolscap.

-- Vladimir Nabokov Speak, Memory

interruptions

In traveling to us and through us, waves and rays may bring not just energy but also communicate meaning. Waves that are constant, for example as in the beam of a flashlight, cannot convey any information. But if that beam is interrupted, or if its brightness can be made to change, then it can carry a message. This is how all waveborne communications work. Patterns of energy arrive from energy sources that are high or low, loud or soft, light or dark, one color or another. In this way, sound and light rays bring us music, voices, words on a page and expressions on faces. By converting one kind of wave into another, and also by storing their energy, waves can be made to carry sounds and images around the world and far beyond it -- and to transport them through time.

-- David Macaulay The Way Things Work

form

It is surprising to me how many people separate the objective from the abstract. Objective painting is not good painting unless it is good in the abstract sense. A hill or tree cannot make a good painting just because it is a hill or a tree. It is lines and colors put together so that they say something. For me that is the very basis of painting. The abstraction is often the most definite form for the intangible thing in myself that I can only clarify in paint.

-- Georgia O'Keeffe

Sunday—

I believe that the way to write a good play is to convince yourself that it is easy to do—-then go ahead and do it with ease.

Don't maul, don't suffer, don't groan—till the first draft is finished.

Then Calvary—but not until then.

Doubt—and be lost—until the first draft is finished.

A Play is a Phoenix—it dies a thousand deaths.

Usually at night—In the morning it springs up again from its ashes and crows like a happy rooster.

It is never as bad as you think.

It is never as good as you think.

It is somewhere in between and success or failure depends on which end of your emotional gamut concerning its value it actually approaches more closely.

But it is much more likely to be good if you think it is wonderful while you are writing the first draft.

An artist must believe in himself—Possibly not so passionately as Lawrence—but passionately. Your belief is contagious...

— Tennessee Williams, Notebook entry for October 5, 1941, from The Paris Review 176

The Good Angel

The one I wanted came,
the one I called.

Not the one who sweeps away defenseless skies,
stars without homes,
moons without a country,
snows.
The kind of snows that fall from a hand,
a name,
a dream,
a face.

Not the one who tied death
to his hair.

The one I wanted.

Without scraping air,
without wounding leaves or shaking windowpanes.

The one who tied silence
to his hair.

To scoop out, without hurting me,
a shoreline of sweet light inside my chest
so that my soul could sail.

-- Rafael Alberti
Translated by Mark Strand

Theme

The golden eve is all astir,
And tides of sunset flood on us
-- Incredible, miraculous --
We look with adoration on
Beauty coming, beauty gone,
That waits not any looking on.

Thoughts will bubble up, and break,
Spilling a sea, a limpid lake,
Into the soul; and, as they go
-- Lightning visitors! we know
A lattice opened, and the mind
Poised for all that is behind
The lattice, and the poising mind.

Could the memory but hold!
-- All the sunsets, flushed with gold,
Are streaming in it!

All the store
Of all that ever was before
Is teeming in it!

All the wit
Of holy living, holy writ,

Waiting till we remember it,
Is dreaming in it!

-- James Stephens

worlds of information

The daguerreotype provides a different, but related, experience. When first introduced to it in 1839, astonished onlookers were dumbfounded by its clarity and definition. Commentators at the time noted how, by applying a magnifying lens, one could discover worlds of information otherwise too small to be observed by the naked eye. The ramifications of this innovation were profound: the daguerreotype signified the first instance in history when a means of visual representation was devised that registered more detail than the unaided human eye could extract. Such superfluity of detail had heretofore made no logical sense with reference to handmade pictures; the daguerreotype embodied a new order of picture-making, one oblivious to the generative and receptive limitations of the eye and the brain. By implication, it dispensed with the humanist underpinnings of Renaissance art.

-- Douglas R. Nickel "Chuck Close's Glass Eye," in Chuck Close: Self-Portraits 1967-2005

Flaubert's style

What seems beautiful to me, what I would like to write, is a book about nothing, a book without external links, that could hold itself up by the mere internal strength of its style, just as the world stands in the air without any support ... The most beautiful works are those with the least amount of matter ... I believe the future of art is in that direction ... That is why there are no ugly or beautiful subjects; from the perspective of pure Art, one could almost establish axiomatically that there is no subject at all, style being itself an absolute way of seeing things.

-- Gustave Flaubert Letter to Louise Colet 24 April 1852
Translated by Marina Van Zuylen

For an Absence

When I cannot be with you
I will send my love (so much
is allowed to human lovers)
to watch over you in the dark --
a winged small presence
who never sleeps, however long
the night. Perhaps it cannot
protect or help, I do not know,
but it watches always, and so
you will sleep within my love
within the room within the dark.
And when, restless, you wake
and see the room palely lit
by that watching, you will think,
"It is only dawn," and go
quiet to sleep again.

-- Wendell Berry

Mr. Wendell Berry of Kentucky

Molloy in the ditch

Not to want to say, not to know what you want to say, not to be able to say what you think you want to say, and never to stop saying, or hardly ever, that is the thing to keep in mind, even in the heat of composition. That night was not like the other night, if it had been I would have known. For when I try and think of that night, on the canal-bank, I find nothing, no night properly speaking, nothing but Molloy in the ditch, and perfect silence, and behind my closed lids the little night and its little lights, faint at first, then flaming and extinguished, now ravening, now fed, as fire ... But I find the morning, a morning, and the sun already high, and the little sleep I had then, according to my custom, and space with its sounds again, and the shepherd watching me sleep and under whose eyes I opened my eyes. Beside him a panting dog, watching me too, but less closely than his master, for from time to time he stopped watching me to gnaw at his flesh, furiously, where the ticks were in him I suppose. Did he take me for a black sheep entangled in the brambles and was he waiting for an order from his master to drag me out? I don't think so. I don't smell like a sheep, I wish I smelt like a sheep, or a buck-goat. When I wake I see the first things quite clearly, the first things that offer, and I understand them, when they are not too difficult. Then in my eyes and in my head a fine rain begins to fall, as from a rose, highly important. So I knew at once it was a shepherd and his dog I had before me, above me rather, for they had not left the path. And I identified the bleating too, without any trouble, the anxious bleating of the sheep, missing the dog at their heels. It is then too that the meaning of words is least obscure to me, so that I said, with tranquil assurance, Where are you taking them, to the fields or to the shambles? I must have completely lost my sense of direction, as if direction had anything to do with the matter. For even if he was going towards the town, what prevented him from skirting it, or from leaving it again by another gate, on his way to new pastures, and if he was going away from it that meant nothing either ...

-- Samuel Beckett Molloy
Translated by Patrick Bowles

song

Not wooing, no longer shall wooing, voice that has outgrown it,
be the nature of your cry; but instead, you would cry out as purely as a bird
when the quickly ascending season lifts him up, nearly forgetting
that he is a suffering creature and not just a single heart
being flung into brightness, into the intimate skies. Just like him
you would be wooing, not any less purely—, so that, still
unseen, she would sense you, the silent lover in whom a reply
slowly awakens and, as she hears you, grows warm,—
the ardent companion to your own most daring emotion.

Oh and springtime would hold it—, everywhere it would echo
the song of annunciation. First the small
questioning notes intensified all around
by the sheltering silence of a pure, affirmative day.
Then up the stairs, up the stairway of calls, to the dreamed-of
temple of the future—; and then the trill, like a fountain
which, in its rising jet, already anticipates its fall
in a game of promises....And still ahead: summer.
Not only all the dawns of summer—, not only
how they change themselves into day and shine with beginning.
Not only the days, so tender around flowers and, above,
around the patterned treetops, so strong, so intense.
Not only the reverence of all these unfolded powers,
not only the pathways, not only the meadows at sunset,
not only, after a late storm, the deep-breathing freshness,
not only approaching sleep, and a premonition...
but also the nights! But also the lofty summer
nights, and the stars as well, the stars of the earth.

-- Rainer Maria Rilke, from "The Seventh Duino Elegy"
Translated by Stephen Mitchell

remembering and forgetting

Perhaps the two most moving chords that can be struck from the human heart are contained in these four words: I remember, I forget. For the unheard anthem of our whole existence is created out of the antiphonal movements of remembering and forgetting; not only the remembering and forgetting of individuals, but of races and cultures. Perfect balance between this pair of opposites is the mark of maturity...

[I]f remembering is a vital function, so also is forgetting. To forget is essential to sanity ... Even if this were not so, the loss would be immeasurable if all things were clearly remembered. Experience would lack its chiaroscuro, and history's canvas would have the maddening facial iteration of a mammoth end-of-term school photograph ... Man owes more than he guesses to the gray waves of oblivion. Through forgetting comes much beauty into life, much richness and strangeness.

-- Alan McGlashan The Savage and Beautiful Country

Le Paysage

J'avais rêvé d'aimer. J'aime encor mais l'amour
Ce n'est plus ce bouquet de lilas et de roses
Chargeant de leurs parfums la forêt où repose
Une flamme à l'issue de sentiers sans détour.

J'avais rêvé d'aimer. J'aime encor mais l'amour
Ce n'est plus cet orage où l'éclair superpose
Ses bûchers aux châteaux, déroute, décompose,
Illumine en fuyant l'adieu au carrefour.

C'est le silex en feu sous mon pas dans la nuit,
Le mot qu'aucun lexique au monde n'a traduit
L'écume sur la mer, dans le ciel ce nuage.

A vieillir tout devient rigide et lumineux,
Des boulevards sans noms et des cordes sans noeuds.
Je me sens me roidir avec le paysage.

-- Robert Desnos

The Landscape
A Version

I dreamt of loving. The dream remains, but love
is no longer those lilacs and roses whose breath
filled the broad woods, where the sail of a flame
lay at the end of each arrow-straight path.

I dreamt of loving. The dream remains, but love
is no longer that storm whose white nerve sparked
the castle towers, or left the mind unrhymed,
or flared an instant, just where the road forked.

It is the star struck under my heel in the night.
It is the word no book on earth defines.
It is the foam on the wave, the cloud in the sky.

As they age, all things grow rigid and bright.
The streets fall nameless, and the knots untie.
Now, with this landscape, I fix; I shine.

-- Robert Desnos
Translated by Don Paterson

Translation from Poetry Magazine April 2006

chance

Around this time Betsy said that she was amazed at the mess in my watercolor box -- "I don't know how you can work without knowing that all the tubes are in the correct place. Don't you have to know where the reds, the greens, the blues are?" I said, "Ah, but not knowing is my secret."

I like to be surprised when I pick up a tube. It makes the process more exciting, frees it. When I squeeze, I get this revelation of the color that comes out. It's accidental, but it's an accident that I take advantage of. Sometimes you can express the color of something without using the obvious color. For example, once I grabbed a tube of Chinese white when I was looking for blue. I simply found the blue and used some of the Chinese white, too. The mixture produced a quality that was unbelievable.

This is something you could never tell an art student. And it's something I do only with watercolors. You're in the lap of the gods -- almost like painting with your eyes half-closed. Sometimes I don't want to see too clearly. You build up a kind of color that is purely an interpretation of the truth. Anything to get away from the predictable. This applies to the design of a picture too. Painting is all about breaking the rules. Art is chance. It's like making love.

-- Andrew Wyeth Autobiography

cadence

Most of my time as a poet is spent listening into a luminous tumble, a sort of taut cascade. I call it "cadence." If I withdraw from immediate contact with things around me, I can sense it churning, flickering, thrumming, locating things in more shapely relation to one another. It feels continuous, though I may spend days on end without noticing it.

What I hear is initially without words. But when a poem starts to come, the words have to accord with that energy or I can't make a poem at all. (I speak of "hearing" cadence, but the sensation isn't auditory. It's more like sensing a constantly changing tremor with your body: a play of movement and stress, torsion and flex -- as with the kinaesthetic perception of the muscles.) More and more I sense this energy as presence both outside and inside myself, teeming towards words.

-- Dennis Lee Body Music

heavenliness

Real spring weather -- these are the precise days when everything changes. All the trees are fast beginning to be in leaf, and the first green freshness of a new summer is all over the hills. Irreplaceable purity of these few days ...

Mixture of heavenliness and anguish. Seeing "heavenliness" suddenly for instance, in the pure white of the mature dogwood blossoms against the dark evergreens in the cloudy garden. "Heavenliness" too of the song of the unknown bird that is perhaps here only for these days, passing through, a lovely, deep, simple song. Pure -- no pathos, no statement, no desire, pure heavenly sound.

-- Thomas Merton Dancing in the Water of Life

stunned by spring and crazed with light

Jeremy Denk takes us from subway to jury room to Montale to The Well-Tempered Clavier in Think Denk

forest

In the landscape of the mind, whatever is planted early lasts and grows through time. Reality may be a featureless-suburban street; but the mind of the fairy-tale reader holds mountains, oceans, distances, a forest that is haven, shelter, and mystery, some day to be explored, with a pathway that leads to the very edge of the world.

-- Naomi Lewis, in the Introduction to Classic Fairy Tales to Read Out Loud

Likenesses

It comes to mind,
Where there is room enough, that water goes
Between tall mountains and between small toes.

Or, if I like,
When the sun rises, his first light explores
Under high clouds and underneath low doors.

Or (doing it still)
Darkness can hide beside all that it hid
Behind a nightfall and a dropped eyelid.

Why do I add
Such notions up, unless they say what's true
In ways I don't quite see, of me and you?

-- Norman MacCaig

Walking Home on an Early Spring Evening

Every microcosm needs its crow,
something to hang around and comment,
scavenge,
alight on highest branches.

Who hasn't seen the gnats,
the pollen grains that coat the windshield—
who hasn't heard the tree frogs?

In the long march that takes us all our life,
in and out of sleep, sun up, sun gone,
our aging back and forth, smiling and puzzled,
there come these times: you stop and look,

and fix on something unremarkable,
a parking lot or just a patch of sumac,
but it will flare and resonate

and you'll feel part of it for once,
you'll be a goldfinch hanging on a feeder,
you'll be a river system all in silver
etched on a frosty driveway, you'll

say "Folks, I think I made it this time,
I think this is my song." The crow lifts up,
its feathers shine and whisper,

its round black eye surveys indifferently
the world we've made
and then the one we haven't.

-- David Young

Introduction to Six Modernist Moments in Poetry