friendship

Such love I cannot analyse;
It does not rest in lips or eyes,
Neither in kisses nor caress.
Partly, I know, it's gentleness

And understanding in one word
Or in brief letters. It's preserved
By trust and by respect and awe.
These are the words I'm feeling for.

Two people, yes, two lasting friends.
The giving comes, the taking ends.
There is no measure for such things.
For this all Nature slows and sings.

-- Elizabeth Jennings

Elizabeth Jennings

hoover dam

the hardest thing in the world

I demanded a realm in which I should be both master and slave at the same time: the world of art is the only such realm. I entered it without any apparent talent, a thorough novice, incapable, awkward, tongue-tied, almost paralyzed by fear and apprehensiveness. I had to lay one brick on another, set millions of words to paper before writing one real, authentic word dragged up from my own guts. The facility of speech which I possessed was a handicap; I had all the vices of the educated man. I had to learn to think, feel and see in a totally new fashion, in an uneducated way, in my own way, which is the hardest thing in the world. I had to throw myself into the current, knowing that I would probably sink. The great majority of artists are throwing themselves in with life-preservers around their necks, and more often than not it is the life-preserver which sinks them.

-- Henry Miller, "Reflections on Writing" The Wisdom of the Heart

baker creek 4

the veil

I will sing for the veil that never lifts.
I will sing for the veil that begins, once in a lifetime, maybe, to lift.
I will sing for the rent in the veil.
I will sing for what is in front of the veil, the floating light.
I will sing for what is behind the veil—light, light, and more light.

This is the world, and this is the work of the world.

-- Mary Oliver, The Leaf and the Cloud

baker creek 3

wandering

I ran away, hands stuck in pockets that seemed
All holes; my jacket was a holey ghost as well.
I followed you, Muse! Beneath your spell,
Oh, la, la, what glorious loves I dreamed!

I tore my shirt; I threw away my tie.
Dreamy Hop o' my Thumb, I made rhymes
As I ran. I slept out most of the time.
The stars above me rustled through the sky.

I heard them on the roadsides where I stopped
Those fine September nights, when the dew dropped
On my face and I licked it to get drunk.

I made up rhymes in dark and scary places,
And like a lyre I plucked the tired laces
Of my worn-out shoes, one foot beneath my heart.

-- Arthur Rimbaud
Translated by Paul Schmidt

baker creek 2

echo

Everything in the Universe is an echo. If the birds, in the opinion of certain dreaming linguists, are the first creators of sound who inspired men, they themselves imitated nature's voices. Quinet, who listened for so long to the voice of Bourgogne and Bresse, discovers "the lapping on the shores in the nasal cry of aquatic birds, the frog's croaking in the brook ouzel, the whistling of the reed in the bullfind, the cry of the tempest in the frigate bird." Where did the night birds borrow the trembling, thrilling sounds which seem the repercussion of a subterranean echo in old ruins? "Thus all the sounds of natural scenes—still life or animated—have their echo and their counterpart in living nature."

-- Gaston Bachelard Water and Dreams
Translated by Edith R. Farrell

baker creek 1

like the diamond

The art which only gilds the surface and demands merely a superficial polish, without reaching to the core, is but varnish and filigree. But the work of genius is rough-hewn from the first, because it anticipates the lapse of time and has an ingrained polish, which still appears when fragments are broken off, an essential quality of its substance. Its beauty is its strength. It breaks with a lustre, and splits in cubes and diamonds. Like the diamond, it has only to be cut to be polished, and its surface is a window to its interior splendors.

-- Henry David Thoreau, journal entry dated Aug 28, 1841

The Blog of Henry David Thoreau

Una Furtiva Lagrima

Una furtiva lagrima
Negl'occhi suoi spunto:
Quelle festose giovani
Invidiar sembro.
Che piu cercando io vo?
Che piu cercando io vo?
M'ama, si m'ama, lo vedo, lo vedo.
Un solo instante i palpiti
Del suo bel cor sentir!
I miei sospir, confondere
Per poco a' suoi sospir!
I palpiti, i palpiti sentir,
Confondere i miei coi suoi sospir
Cielo, si puo morir!
Di piu non chiedo, non chiedo.
Ah! Cielo, si puo, si puo morir,
Di piu non chiedo, non chiedo.
Si puo morir, si puo morir d'amor.

One tear that falls so furtively
from her sweet eyes has just sprung,
as if she envied all the youths
who laughingly passed her right by.
What could I want more than this?
She loves me! I see it.
One moment just to hear her heart,
beating so close next to mine,
to hear my sighs like they were hers,
her sighings as if they were mine!
Heavens, please take me now:
All that I wanted is mine now!

-- from Gaetano Donizetti's L'elisir d'amore (libretto by Felice Romani)

Youtube Pavarotti via the concert

also:
Ionarts: "An enormous man, an enormous voice -- literally the voice of a half-century -- and an enormous ego, which goes right along with the territory."
Alex Ross: "...the beauty of the sound envelops you, but you’re not conscious of the artifice of art. It’s as if someone were making conversation in a dialect of dreams."
Una furtiva lagrima mp3 (4.3MB) via La Cieca (San Francisco 1969)

a blessing

May the blessing of light be on you,
light without and light within
and light inside the darkness within.
May the blessed sunlight shine upon you
and warm your heart till it glows,
like a great peat fire, so that strangers may come
and warm themselves; and that friends may come.
And may the light shine out of the eyes of you,
like a candle set in the windows of a house,
bidding the wanderer to come in out of the storm.
And may the blessing of the rain be on you—
the soft, sweet rain.
May it fall upon your spirit so that the seedlings of light
in your shadow may spring up,
and shed their sweetness on the air.
And may the blessing of the great rains be on you,
that they beat upon your spirit and wash it fair and clean,
and leave there many a shining pool,
and sometimes a star.
And may the blessing for the earth be on you—
the great round earth
who carries all; the great round earth
whose suffering has already become radiant.
May you ever have a kindly greeting for people
you pass as you are going along the roads.
And now may the Lord bless you, and bless you kindly,
your kin and all creatures.

-- adapted from a Scottish prayer by Robert Jonas, in Knitting into the Mystery by Susan S. Jorgensen and Susan S. Izard

blue

The Sphere

Oh the happy ending, the happy ending
That the fugue promised, that love believed in,
That perfect star, that bright transfiguration,

Where has it vanished, now that the music is over,
The certainty of being, the heart in flower,
Ourselves, perfect at last, affirmed as what we are?

The world, the changing world stands still while lovers kiss,
And then moves on—what was our fugitive bliss,
The dancer's ecstasy, the vision, and the rose?

There is no ending—steps of a dance, petals of flowers,
Phrases of music, rays of the sun, the hours
Succeed each other, and the perfect sphere
Turns in our hearts the past and future, near and far,
Our single soul, atom, and universe.

-- Kathleen Raine

Kathleen Raine

lotus 3

flux

Something still eluded him, though now, with time running out, he thought he had almost got it. Soon dawn would come, and with it would go this hush, this cool luminosity coming through stillness. It was like sitting in the calm centre of the world, he thought, this total balance between the world and its mirror image, water and sky. He was conscious of fragility, as though he was sitting in the middle of an aquamarine bubble. That's it, he thought, as his intent eye caught a line of dark blue shadow where the river met, not sky, but its own reflected shadow.

But the light was changing now, and it was time to give up on this particular canvas. A faint streak of rose flushed the sky beyond the trees. Everything would change now, touches of pink would show in the water which would begin to shine, glinting with rose and gold, the skin of the water would become a living thing, running with fragments of the world, washing them downstream into the following night. The sky grew paler as the sun rose, light had begun to touch the trees, which broke into a thousand surfaces, leaves and branches throwing off light and colour. He could not look at his canvas now, because of what was happening on the river. Though the banks were still in shadow the surface of the water in mid-stream shone like shot silk, bright pink and gold, the colour of fire between the prow of his boat and the horizon where the trees came down low and water almost touched the burning sky. Everything was always in flux, he thought, noticing a dark reddish hue close to the banks where the high trees overshadowed the water. It was both his overriding difficulty, and essential to him.

He put down his brushes, knowing it was finished for now. A sense of fatigue came over him, as he dropped tubes of colour into the box. He leaned over the side to call Auguste, and saw he had dropped off to sleep in the skiff...

-- Eva Figes Light

Eva Figes

lotus 2

I have noticed that when one paints one should think of nothing: everything then comes better.

-- Raphael to Leonardo, in The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci by Dmitry Sergeyevich Merezhkovsky
Translated by Bernard Guilbert Guerbey

waterfall 4

Love merely as the best
There is, and one would make the best of that
By saying how it grows and in what climates . . .
To say at the end, however we find it, good,
Bad, or indifferent, it helps us, and the air
Is sweetest there. The air is very sweet.

-- James Merrill, from "Variations: The Air is Sweetest that a Thistle Guards"

James Merrill

waterfall 3

She let the river willow her, red silt
Green glacier, loose robe of water drifting
Over stone, rush her over beds of algae,
Fossil mud, slick and salty, a woman's
Bones dissolving easy, riffled and sucked
Like marrow down seeps and gorges toward
Sea level—the longest river in the world.

-- Sandra Alcosser, from "Glyphs" Parabola 31:2

Sandra Alcosser

waterfall 2

Love, like music, lives in the imagination, but it is no less real for that.

-- Robert C. Solomon About Love

Even in Darkness

Even in darkness, love
shows the circumference
of the world, lightning
quivering on horizons
in the summer night.

-- Wendell Berry

waterfall 1

Song of a Man Who Has Come Through

Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me!
A fine wind is blowing the new direction of Time.
If only I let it bear me, carry me, if only it carry me!
If only I am sensitive, subtle, oh, delicate, a winged gift!
If only, most lovely of all, I yield myself and am borrowed
By the fine, fine wind that takes its course through the chaos of the world
Like a fine, an exquisite chisel, a wedge blade inserted;
If only I am keen and hard like the sheer tip of a wedge
Driven by invisible blows,
The rock will split, we shall come at the wonder, we shall find the Hesperides.

Oh, for the wonder that bubbles into my soul,
I would be a good fountain, a good well-head,
Would blur no whisper, spoil no expression.

What is the knocking?
What is the knocking at the door in the night?
It is somebody wants to do us harm.

No, no, it is the three strange angels.
Admit them, admit them.

-- D.H. Lawrence

lotus 1

The key to the hidden lands beyond those veils lies in the letting go of all hope, fear and expectation. The portal opens when one realizes that one no longer needs to seek it and must simply open to that which is already fully present. In that vastness in which nothing is hidden and nothing needs to be revealed, all is transparent, clear, and the doors, in response, open everywhere.

-- Ian Baker The Heart of the World

the trollers

Photo by Mark Barry

Mark Barry's The Trollers lithographic process on Flickr



ionarts: Making a Litho

twilight shore

And this is a universal law: a living thing can be healthy, strong and fruitful only when bounded by a horizon.

-- Friedrich Nietzsche Untimely Meditations
Translated by R.J. Hollingdale

sandcastle

I lifted the curtain,
                    looked out ―
and was looking within me.
A sandbox I saw,
                    a spade,
                                        a castle
and a boy building it;
                                        he is building it still.
The game was
                    and is:
it began
                    and is still in its beginning.
The boy sat down,
                    looked behind him ―
and gave a start;
                    at the window stood a man,
familiar,
                    with a strange look on his face.
What happened there?
Past and future
                    gazed into a COMMON PRESENT.
The boy went on with his play,
                    I let the curtain fall.
No window anymore,
                    no view ―
no within.
Only the body I was given,
                    reflecting on its surface
                                        the distance between me and the boy.
Each holding in his yesterday the line engraved,
                                        the anteroom of tomorrow
                    from which every now is born.
Man and boy ― me ―
                                        all in one;
                    from somewhere towards something new.
                    In that same window,
                                        staring each at each.

-- Matti Itkonen, from "Does What Has Been Survive?" in Analecta Husserliana LXXXII
Translated by Robert MacGilleon

the beach

there angels flew

As for me, I am inclined to believe that flight is a warm wind before being a wing. I do not reject the teachings of a dreamer who believes that a sylph will teach him what a bird is. In dynamic imagination, the first flying creature in a dream is the dreamer himself. If someone or something accompanies him in flight, it is a sylph, a cloud, a shadow; it is a veil, an aerial form, enveloped and enveloping, happy to be undefined and to live at the edge of the visible and the invisible. To see birds of flesh and feathers fly, the dreamer must climb back up toward day and assume once more his human, clear, logical thoughts. But if the clarity is too great, the spirits of sleep will disappear. It is for poetry to find them again, as though they were reminiscences of a beyond. A person who does not forget can make no mistake on this point: the dream, like Toussenel's God, creates the soaring spirit before creating the bird.

If purity, light, and the sky's splendor summon up pure and winged creatures; if, through an inversion that is only possible in the realm of values, the purity of a creature gives purity to the world in which it lives, we can easily understand that the imaginary wing takes on the colors of the sky and that the sky is a world of wings. We will murmur like the sleeping Boaz, with the soul's voice:

There angels flew, but darkly, of course,
For at times there was seen, going by in the night,
Something blue, that might be a wing.

-- Gaston Bachelard Air and Dreams
Translated by Edith R. Farrell and C. Frederick Farrell

the little world

My only talent, if you can call it that in my case, is that I love this little world inside the thick walls of this playhouse, and I'm fond of the people who work in this little world. Outside is the big world, and sometimes the little world succeeds in reflecting the big one so that we understand it better. Or perhaps, we give the people who come here a chance to forget for a while, for a few short moments, the harsh world outside. Our theater is a little room of orderliness, routine, care and love. I don't know why I feel so comically solemn this evening. I can't explain how I feel, so I'd best be brief.

-- Oscar Ekdahl, in Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander

Rick Moody on Fanny and Alexander

waterdrop

The Island

You pillars of light mournful and beautiful,
sowing the ocean with statues and necklaces,
calcareous eye, eidolon of opening water, cry
of petrel's bereavement, sea tooth, Oceanic
bride of the wind―O separate rose cut
from the rose tree, stripped petal by petal
till a sea change was wrought and all was
archipelago, green diadem, natural star,
alone in your dynasty's solitude
inapprehensible to the last, elusive, abandoned,
like a waterdrop falling, like a grape, like a sea.

-- Pablo Neruda
Translated by Ben Belitt

Element It Has

It may not be the same, what we appear
to thrive or slow or fade in, though across
its white expanses steadily we stare;

the only common element it has
is loss, and it may differ in the terms
it gives it. And it thickens with the days,

thins in the night as if it more than seems
a carbon thing, afflicted, prone to what?
To us, as if obscurely hopes or harms

can come to it, as if it walks the street
in love, abashed, abused, as if it, too,
expands to wonder at the point of it,

contracts to desperation in the blue
morning, helplessly expands anew.

-- Glyn Maxwell

via The New Yorker

Glyn Maxwell

sea oats

It seems to me that almost every artist finds some subdivision of nature or experience more congenial to his temperament than any other. To me it has been the sea―or rather those regions adjacent to the sea―beaches, dunes, swampy coasts . . .

There is another aspect of an artist's choice of his subject matter which I think could be profitably explored. It is that I believe he is affectively related to certain forms and designs. I believe his choice is channeled by the compulsion to find an objective vehicle for inward plastic images. I certainly do not know why, but I am stirred by certain geometrical relationships, certain rectangular forms and arabesques out of which grow particular harmonies and rhythms. In deciding what subject I shall paint I am irresistibly drawn to objects which contain the skeleton of this type of plastic structure. Whether I am spending the summer on Barnegat Bay or on Cape Cod or merely sketching along the Harlem River, I somehow contrive to find the exact set of lines and contours which this inner appetite demands.

-- Julian Levi, from "Before Paris and After" in Magazine of Art December 1940

Love is the last element of form which takes us to the formless, a quality of the mind which reflects the nature of the heart and is the essential connection between the two. When love fills the mind, it opens into the heart.

-- Stephen Levine Healing into Life and Death

golden girls

However you paint the larger picture, you are in it. It isn't something you command.

-- Mark Rothko, quoted in Abstract Expressionism by David Anfam

fishing

In the mountains of Wyoming
A trout looks up through the roof
Water makes. Feathers, fur, a fine
Thread of invisible chord skirt
The surface, and the trout's mind
Makes the sign for fly. Who knows
How this is done? Whether the trout
Sees the flit, the flicker on water
And recalls the brief satisfaction
Of air, the knot of legs,
Wings that collapse? And so
It leaps with its whole body.
Inveterate. And your biceps
Tighten, don't they? For a moment
You become the fish―pure muscle,
Desire tethered to desire. A stone
Skipped across this same river.
You tug back, sink the hook.

-- Tracy K. Smith, lines from "Astral" in duende

Tracy K. Smith

the leaf

Time exists in order that everything doesn't happen all at once . . . and space exists so that it doesn't all happen to you.

-- Susan Sontag At the Same Time

whitewater

That everything is transitory is merely a simile. Everything we see is a proposal, a possibility, an expedient. The real truth, to begin with, remains invisible beneath the surface. The colors that captivate us are not lighting, but light. The graphic universe consists of light and shadow. The diffused clarity of slightly overcast weather is richer in phenomena than a sunny day. A thin stratum of cloud just before the stars break through. It is difficult to catch and represent this, because the moment is so fleeting. It has to penetrate into our soul. The formal has to fuse with the Weltanschauung ...

We investigate the formal for the sake of expression and of the insights into our soul which are thereby provided. Philosophy, so they say, has a taste for art; at the beginning I was amazed at how much they saw. For I had only been thinking about form, the rest of it had followed by itself. An awakened awareness of "the rest of it" has helped me greatly since then and provided me with greater variability in creation. I was even able to become an illustrator of ideas again, now that I had fought my way through formal problems. And now I no longer saw any abstract art. Only abstraction from the transitory remained. The world was my subject, even though it was not the visible world.

-- Paul Klee The Diaries of Paul Klee ed. Felix Klee

Weltanschauung

rhododendron

Wake now, my love, awake; for it is time.
The Rosy Morne long since left Tithones bed,
All ready to her silver coche to clyme,
And Phoebus gins to shew his glorious hed.
Hark how the cheerefull birds do chaunt theyr laies
And carroll of loves praise.
The merry Larke hir mattins sings aloft,
The thrush replyes, the Mavis descant playes,
The Ouzell shrills, the Ruddock warbles soft,
So goodly all agree with sweet consent,
To this dayes merriment.
Ah my deere love, why doe ye sleepe thus long,
When meeter were that ye should now awake,
T'awayt the comming of your joyous make,
And hearken to the birds lovelearned song,
The deawy leaves among.
For they of joy and pleasance to you sing,
That all the woods them answer and theyr eccho ring.

-- Edmund Spenser, from Epithalamion

The Southern Room over the River

The room is prepared, the incense burned.
I close the shutters before I close my eyelids.
The patterns of the quilt repeat the waves of the river.
The gauze curtain is like a mist.
Then a dream comes to me and when I awake
I no longer know where I am.
I open the western window and watch the waves
Stretching on and on to the horizon.

-- Su Dongpu
Translated by Kenneth Rexroth

The Royal Courts of Justice

shifting weights

How one walks through the world, the endless small adjustments of balance, is affected by the shifting weights of beautiful things.

-- Elaine Scarry On Beauty and Being Just

iris in the afternoon

We are great fools. "He has spent his life in idleness," we say; "I have done nothing today." What, have you not lived? That is not only the most fundamental but the most illustrious of your occupations . . . To compose our character is our duty, not to compose books, and to win, not battles and provinces, but order and tranquility in our conduct. Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately.

-- Michel de Montaigne Essays
Translated by Donald Frame

Poetry, like music, is to be heard. It deals in sound - long sounds and short sounds, heavy beats and light beats, the tone relations of vowels, the relations of consonants to one another . . . Reading in silence is the source of half the misconceptions that have caused the public to distrust poetry.

-- Basil Bunting, quoted by Richard Caddel in "Minor Poet, Not Conspicuously Dishonest" Jacket 10

more

Nag's Head

Love is a vapour, we're soon through it.

Flying fish follow the boat,
delicate wings blue, grace
on flick of a tissue tail,
the water's surface between
appetite and attainment.
Flexible, unrepetitive line
to sing, not paint; sing, sing,
laying the tune on the air,
nimble and easy as a lizard,
still and sudden as a gecko,
to humiliate love, remember
nothing.

It tastes good, garlic and salt in it,
with the half-sweet white wine of Orvieto
on scanty grass under great trees
where the ramparts cuddle Lucca.

It sounds right, spoken on the ridge
between marine olives and hillside
blue figs, under the breeze fresh
with pollen of Apennine sage.

It feels soft, weed thick in the cave
and the smooth wet riddance of Antonietta's
bathing suit, mouth ajar for
submarine Amalfitan kisses.

It looks well on the page, but never
well enough. Something is lost
when wind, sun, sea upbraid
justly an unconvinced deserter.

-- Basil Bunting, lines from Briggflatts

boys

Childhood was a dream, some day all would be accomplished. The period of learning, a time for searching into everything, into the smallest, into the most hidden, into the good and the bad. Then a light is lit somewhere, and a single direction is followed ...

-- Paul Klee The Diaries of Paul Klee ed. Felix Klee

4th of july

rose

The padlock always makes a great noise. The door swings back on swearing hinges, and the night wind, hot and gusty, comes swirling down out of the loft with a smell of ancient rafters and old, hidden, dusty things. You have to watch the third step or your feet go through the boards. From here on the building has no substance left, but you have to mind your head and bow beneath the beams on which you can see the marks of axes with which our French Fathers hewed them out a hundred years ago.

And now the hollowness that rings under my feet measures some sixty feet to the floor of the church. I am over the transept crossing. If I climb around the corner of the dome, I can find a hole once opened by the photographers and peer down into the abyss and flash the light far down upon my stall in choir.

I climb the trembling, twisted stair into the belfry. The darkness stirs with a flurry of wings high above me in the gloomy engineering that holds the steeple together. Nearer at hand the old clock ticks in the tower. I flash the light into the mystery that keeps it going and gaze upon the ancient bells . . . Now my whole being breathes the wind that blows through the belfy and my hand is on the door through which I see the heavens. The door swings out upon a vast sea of darkness and of prayer . . . The roof glistens under my feet, this long metal roof facing the forest and the hills, where I stand higher than the treetops and walk upon shining air.

Mists of damp heat rise up out of the field around the sleeping abbey. The whole valley is flooded with moonlight, and I can count the southern hills beyond the water tank and almost number the trees of the forest to the north. Now the huge chorus of living beings rises up out of the world beneath my feet: life singing in the watercourses, throbbing in the creeks and the fields and the trees, choirs of millions and millions of jumping and flying and creeping things. And far above me the cool sky opens upon the frozen distance of the stars.

-- Thomas Merton, journal entry 4 July 1952, from Entering the Silence

sunrise

God's Grandeur

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
   It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
   It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
   And all is seared with trade; Bleared, smeared with toil;
   And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
   There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
   Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs--
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
   World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

-- Gerard Manley Hopkins

petunias

Dictated by objects, we tend to see art from the vantage point of the finish line. In the same way that we date a work according to its moment of completion and place it into the generational time frame of when it caught our attention, we accept the sum of a creative endeavor as an indivisible totality unto itself, never quite accounting for the amorphous gestation period and perverse puddle of "inspirations" at its source...

-- Carlo McCormick, in "A Crack in Time" from The Downtown Book, ed. Marvin J. Taylor

piranhas

stopped in your tracks

An authentic work of art embodies intense energy. It demands response. You can either avoid it, shut it out, or meet it and tussle. It contains attractive and complicated energy fields and a logic all its own. It does not create desire or movement in the receiver, rather it engenders what James Joyce labelled 'aesthetic arrest'. You are stopped in your tracks. You cannot easily walk by it and go on with your life. You find yourself in relation to something that you cannot readily dismiss.

-- Anne Bogart A Director Prepares

rocks

phosphorescence

It grew darker with the westing of the moon. There was light on the western tops of the dunes, a fainter light on the lower beach and the breakers; the face of the dunes was a unity of dusk.

The tide had ebbed in the pools, and their edges were wet and dark. There was a strange contrast between the still levels of the pool and the seethe of the sea. I kept close to the land edge of the lagoons, and as I advanced my boots kicked wet spatters of sand ahead as they might have kicked particles of snow. Every spatter was a crumb of phosphorescence; I walked in a dust of stars. Behind me, in my footprints, luminous patches burned. With the double-ebb moonlight and tide, the deepening brims of the pools took shape in smouldering, wet fire. So strangely did the luminous speckles smoulder and die and glow that it seemed as if some wind were passing, by whose breath they were kindled and extinguished. Occasional whole breakers of phosphorescence rolled in out of the vague sea—the whole wave one ghostly motion, one creamy light—and, breaking against the bar, flung up pale sprays of fire.

-- Henry Beston The Outermost House

day lily

A Way to Look at Things

We have not yet made shoes that fit like sand
Nor clothes that fit like water
Nor thoughts that fit like air.
There is much to be done—
Works of nature are abstract.
They do not lean on other things for meanings.
The sea-gull is not like the sea
Nor the sun like the moon.
The sun draws water from the sea.
The clouds are not like either one—
They do not keep one form forever.
That the mountainside looks like a face is accidental.

-- Arthur Dove

Arthur Dove

shadows and light

About Such Stuff

Such Stuff is not a personal journal. It is a photoblog and commonplace book. The quotes are from my library or from the internet, always with an eye to Fair use. Anyone who needs to explore them further is encouraged to turn to the source. The photographs are original studies unless otherwise attributed. They are copyrighted with all rights reserved. Please contact me if you want to use them.

rose of sharon

magnolia

Snow

Late December: my father and I
are going to New York, to the circus.
He holds me
on his shoulders in the bitter wind:
scraps of white paper
blow over the railroad ties.

My father liked
to stand like this, to hold me
so he couldn't see me.
I remember
staring straight ahead
into the world my father saw;
I was learning
to absorb its emptiness,
the heavy snow
not falling, whirling around us.

-- Louise Glück

a bat flew forth

How moving the scene there in the gathering twilight, the last glimpse of Erin, the touching chime of those evening bells and at the same time a bat flew forth from the ivied belfry through the dusk, hither, thither, with a tiny lost cry. And she could see far away the lights of the lighthouses so picturesque she would have loved to do with a box of paints because it was easier than to make a man and soon the lamplighter would be going his rounds past the presbyterian church grounds and along by shady Tritonville avenue where the couples walked and lighting the lamp near her window where Reggy Wylie used to turn his freewheel like she read in that book The Lamplighter by Miss Cummins, author of Mabel Vaughan and other tales. For Gerty had her dreams that no-one knew of. She loved to read poetry and when she got a keepsake from Bertha Supple of that lovely confession album with the coralpink cover to write her thoughts in she laid it in the drawer of her toilettable which, though it did not err on the side of luxury, was scrupulously neat and clean. It was there she kept her girlish treasure trove, the tortoiseshell combs, her child of Mary badge, the whiterose scent, the eyebrowleine, her alabaster pouncetbox and the ribbons to change when her things came home from the wash and there were some beautiful thoughts written in it in violet ink that she bought in Hely's of Dame Street for she felt that she too could write poetry if she could only express herself like that poem that appealed to her so deeply that she had copied out of the newspaper she found one evening round the potherbs. Art thou real, my ideal? it was called by Louis J Walsh, Magherafelt, and after there was something about twilight, wilt thou ever? and ofttimes the beauty of poetry, so sad in its transient loveliness, had misted her eyes with silent tears for she felt that the years were slipping by for her, one by one...

-- James Joyce Ulysses

Happy Bloomsday!

Bloomsday (Wikipedia)

James Joyce and Bloomsday links at wood s lot

the qualitative difference

Style for the writer, no less than colour for the painter, is a question not of technique but of vision: it is the revelation, which by direct and conscious means would be impossible, of the qualitative difference, the uniqueness of the fashion in which the world appears to each one of us, a difference which, if there were no art, would remain the secret of every individual.

-- Marcel Proust In Search of Lost Time
Translated by Ian Patterson

scaffolding

blue fish

sea lions

whale shark

Perhaps the hand in dreaming
of being a star sower
made forgotten music echo

Tal vez la mano, en sueño,
del sembrador de estrellas,
hizo sonar la música olvidada

like a note from an enormous lyre,
and to our lips a tiny wave
came with a few true words.

como una nota de la lira inmensa,
y la ola humillde a nuestros labios vino
de unas pocas palabras verdaderas.

-- Antonio Machado
Translated by Willis Barnstone

in what that beauty consisted

I have often tried to determine in what that beauty consisted, and how it would be possible for me to describe it if I wished to disclose the secret to another mind. "What!" someone will say, "do you mean that external objects, without color or shape, in disorder and unlighted, can take on an aspect that appeals to the eyes and the mind?" None but a painter could ever say to me: "Yes, I understand." He would recall Rembrandt's Philosopher in His Study: that enormous room, three-fourths in darkness, those endless stairways which wind no one knows how; those vague lights (which blaze up and go out, you know not why, in different parts) of the picture; that whole scene, indefinite yet clear; that powerful coloring, which after all is only light brown and dark brown; that magical use of chiaroscuro, that play of light and shadow on the most trivial objects, a chair, a jug, a copper urn; and lo! those objects which do not deserve to be glanced at, much less to be painted, become so interesting, so beautiful after their manner, that you cannot take your eyes from them. They have received the breath of life, they exist.

-- George Sand Consuelo
Translated by George Burnham Ives

Rembrandt's Philosopher in His Study

dahlia

Their Lonely Betters

As I listened from a beach-chair in the shade
To all the noises that my garden made,
It seemed to me only proper that words
Should be withheld from vegetables and birds.

A robin with no Christian name ran through
The Robin-Anthem which was all it knew,
And rustling flowers for some third party waited
To say which pairs, if any, should get mated.

Not one of them was capable of lying,
There was not one which knew that it was dying
Or could have with a rhythm or a rhyme
Assumed responsibility for time.

Let them leave language to their lonely betters
Who count some days and long for certain letters;
We, too, make noises when we laugh or weep:
Words are for those with promises to keep.

-- W.H. Auden

yellow bearded iris

the form

I conceived of the garden as a poem in stanzas. Each terrace contributes to the garden as a whole in the same way each stanza in a poem has a life of its own, and yet is part of a progressive whole as well.

The form provides some degree of repose, letting our mind rest in the comparatively manageable unit of the stanza, or terrace. Yet there is also a need to move on, to look beyond the stanza, into the poem as a whole.

Often, when you finish reading a poem, the impulse is to revisit the beginning now that you've been all the way through it, and then each subsequent trip through the poem is different and colored by having seen the whole thing.

Once you have perceived the garden as a whole, the individual tiers of the garden take on a different form because you have seen them both as a part and as a whole. One of the mysteries of gardening is that the garden reflects the viewer's own state of being at the time, just as your response to a poem lets you know something about your preoccupations or your susceptibility as you read it.

-- Stanley Kunitz The Wild Braid

bearded iris

[The style of old age] is not always a product of the years; it is a gift implanted along with his other gifts in the artist, ripening, it may be, with time, often blossoming before its season . . . : it is the reaching of a new level of expression, such as the old Titian's discovery of the all-penetrating light which dissolves the human flesh and the human soul to a higher unity; or such as the finding by Rembrandt and Goya, both at the height of their manhood, of the metaphysical surface which underlies the visible in man and thing, and which nevertheless can be painted; or such as The Art of Fugue which Bach in his old age dictated without having a concrete instrument in mind, because what he had to express was either beneath or beyond the audible surface of music.

-- Hermann Broch, in the introduction to On the Iliad by Rachel Bespaloff
Translated by Mary McCarthy

fish 3

another play

While I was sitting one night with a poet friend watching a great opera performed in a tent under arc lights, the poet took my arm and pointed silently. Far up, blundering out of the night, a huge Cecropia moth swept past from light to light over the posturings of the actors. "He doesn't know," my friend whispered excitedly. "He's passing through an alien universe brightly lit but invisible to him. He's in another play; he doesn't see us. He doesn't know. Maybe it's happening right now to us."

-- Loren Eiseley The Invisible Pyramid

Loren Eiseley

fish 2

that fleeting sensation of appearance

The beautiful appearance of the dream-worlds, in creating which every man is a perfect artist, is the prerequisite of all plastic art, and in fact, as we shall see, of an important part of poetry also. In our dreams we delight in the immediate apprehension of form; all forms speak to us; none are unimportant, none are superfluous. But, when this dream-reality is most intense, we also have, glimmering through it, the sensation of its appearance . . . And it is not only the agreeable and friendly pictures that he experiences in himself with such perfect understanding: but the serious, the troubled, the sad, the gloomy, the sudden restraints, the tricks of fate, the uneasy presentiments, in short, the whole Divine Comedy of life, and the Inferno, also pass before him, not like mere shadows on the wall—for in these scenes he lives and suffers—and yet not without that fleeting sensation of appearance. And perhaps many will, like myself, recall that amid the dangers and terrors of dream-life they would at times, cry out in self-encouragement, and not without success: "It is only a dream! I will dream on!"

-- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche The Birth of Tragedy
Translated by Clifton P. Fadiman

about The Birth of Tragedy