exposure

Just as a movie unfolds in real time, so I build the image by exposing one part of the person after another with my tiny light. If I add more light, it emphasizes that body part; conversely, not enough light and that area never becomes visible... In all of the portraits there is an interesting shift in the gaze, from the right eye looking outward, to the left eye looking inward. This is a result of the long interval between exposing the two eyes.

What happens during the session remains private, an intimate act between me and the subject. There is an enormous amount of information collected during the session, both emotional and physical. The accumulation of all this information is impossible to interpret simply or decisively.

-- Gary Schneider Gary Schneider: Nudes

enigma

"There is no accounting for tastes," the old saying goes; the same is true of love. There are no rules. Attraction is a composite whose nature is subtle and different in every case. It is made up of animal humors and spiritual archetypes, of childhood experiences and the phantoms that people our dreams. Love is not a desire for beauty; it is a yearning for completion. Potions and spells have been a traditional explanation of the strange, involuntary nature of amorous attraction. All peoples have legends about this kind of magic... Although the idea that love is a magic lasso that literally captures the will of the lover goes very far back in time, it is an idea that still lives: love is a magic spell, and the attraction that unites the lovers is a bewitchment. What is extraordinary is that this belief coexists with its opposite: love is born of a free decision, the voluntary acceptance of fate.

-- Octavio Paz The Double Flame
Translated by Helen Lane

it's beyond reasoning

A great work of art is like a dream; for all its apparent obviousness it does not explain itself and is never unequivocal. A dream never says: "You ought," or: "This is the truth." It presents an image in much the same way as nature allows a plant to grow, and we must draw our own conclusions...

This is why every great work of art is objective and impersonal, but none the less profoundly moves us each and all. And this is also why the personal life of the poet cannot be held essential to his art -- but at most a help or a hindrance to his creative task... His personal career may be inevitable and interesting, but it does not explain the poet.

-- Carl Gustav Jung Modern Man in Search of a Soul
Translated by W.S. Dell and Cary F. Baynes

ice cream

'Ice cream!' Sun. Light airy cakes.
A clear glass tumbler of water, icy cold.
Our dreams take flight, into a chocolate world
Of rosy dawns on milky Alpine peaks.

But as the teaspoon tinkles, it is sweet
In some little summerhouse amid the dry acacias,
To gaze, then take gratefully from tearoom Graces,
Little whorled cups with crumbly things to eat...

The street-organ's playmate suddenly appears,
The ice-cream cart, with multicolored covering --
The chest is full of lovely frozen things;
With greedy attentiveness, a small boy peers.

And what will he choose? The gods themselves can't say:
A diamond tart? A wafer filled with cream?
But under his slender spoon the divine ice,
Glittering in the sun, will soon melt away.

-- Osip Mandelstam
Translated by Robert Tracy

congestion of the soul

We wonder if, at their best, all artistic expressions may not find their ultimate meaning as therapeutic agents for human beings weighted down by the overburden of their own institutions. If this is so, then the best of the cowboy songs may do service for a time as purges for congestion of the soul.

-- Austin and Alta S. Fife Cowboy and Western Songs

Abstract Painting by Ad Reinhardt

A square (neutral, shapeless) canvas, five feet wide, five feet high, as high as a man, as wide as a man's outstretched arms (not large, not small, sizeless), trisected (no composition), one horizontal form negating one vertical form (formless, no top, no bottom, directionless), three (more or less) dark (lightless) no-contrasting (colorless) colors, brushwork brushed out to remove brushwork, a matte, flat, free-hand painted surface (glossless, textureless, non-linear, no hard edge, no soft edge) which does not reflect its surroundings -- a pure, abstract, non-objective, timeless, spaceless, changeless, relationless, disinterested painting -- an object that is self-conscious (no unconsciousness) ideal, transcendent, aware of no thing but art (absolutely no anti-art).

-- Ad Reinhardt Art-As-Art

creation

Creation is not based on experiences we've had, but on things we've imagined, woven, and finished; experiences we have not had.

-- Ned Rorem Paris Diary

Writing in the Dark

It's not difficult.
Anyway, it's necessary.

Wait till morning, and you'll forget.
And who knows if morning will come.

Fumble for the light, and you'll be
stark awake, but the vision
will be fading, slipping
out of reach.

You must have paper at hand,
a felt-tip pen, ballpoints don't always flow,
pencil points tend to break. There's nothing
shameful in that much prudence: those are our tools.

Never mind about crossing your t's, dotting your i's--
but take care not to cover
one word with the next. Practice will reveal
how one hand instinctively comes to the aid of the other
to keep each line
clear of the next.

Keep writing in the dark:
a record of the night, or
words that pulled you from depths of unknowing,
words that flew through your mind, strange birds
crying their urgency with human voices,

or opened
as flowers of a tree that blooms
only once in a lifetime:

words that may have the power
to make the sun rise again.

-- Denise Levertov

intermittency

Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what it was in nostalgia, nor forward to what it might be in dread or anticipation, but living in the present relationship and accepting it as it is now. For relationships, too, must be like islands. One must accept them for what they are here and now, within their limits -- islands, surrounded and interrupted by the sea, continually visited and abandoned by the tides. One must accept the security of the winged life, of ebb and flow, of intermittency.

-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh Gift From the Sea

a slow tenderness

Ce ne sont pas des souvenirs
qui, en moi, t'entretiennent;
tu n'es pas non plus mienne
par la force d'un beau désir.

You don't survive in me
because of memories;
nor are you mine because
of a lovely longing's strength.

Ce qui te rend presénte,
c'est le détour ardent
qu'une tendresse lente
décrit dans mon propre sang.

What does make you present
is the ardent detour
that a slow tenderness
traces in my blood.

Je suis sans besoin
de te voir apparaître;
il m'a suffi de naître
pour te perdre un peu moins.

I do not need
to see you appear;
being born sufficed for me
to lose you a little less.

-- Rainer Maria Rilke, from "Portrait Intérieur"
Translated by A. Poulin, Jr.

the lake at twilight

Here and there, close against the faint water, and at the far end of the lake, where the water lay milky in the last whiteness of the sky, and there was no shadow, solitary, frail flames of lanterns floated from the unseen boats. There was a sound of oars, and a boat passed from the pallor into the darkness under the wood, where her lanterns seemed to kindle into fire, hanging in ruddy lovely globes. And again, in the lake, shadowy red gleams hovered in reflection about the boat. Everywhere were these noiseless ruddy creatures of fire drifting near the surface of the water, caught at by rarest, scarce visible reflections.

-- D.H. Lawrence Women in Love

silence

The voice you hear is not my speaking voice, but my mind's voice. I have not spoken since I was six years old. No one knows why, not even me. My father says it is a dark talent and the day I take it into my head to stop breathing will be my last. Today he married me to a man I've not yet met. Soon my daughter and I shall join him in his own country. My husband said my muteness does not bother him. He writes and hark this: God loves dumb creatures, so why not he! Were good he had God's patience for silence affects everyone in the end. The strange thing is I don't think myself silent, that is, because of my piano. I shall miss it on the journey.

-- Jane Campion, screenplay for The Piano

de la beauté intériure

Both arts [dancing and painting] must learn from music that every harmony and every discord which springs from the inner spirit is beautiful, but that it is essential that they should spring from the inner spirit and from that alone.

The artist must have something to say, for mastery over form is not his goal but rather the adapting of form to its inner meaning.

That is beautiful which is produced by the inner need, which springs from the soul.

-- Wassily Kandinsky Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1914)
Translated by M.T.H. Sadler

Modesties

Words as plain as hen-birds' wings
Do not lie,
Do not over-broider things --
Are too shy.

Thoughts that shuffle round like pence
Through each reign,
Wear down to their simplest sense,
Yet remain.

Weeds are not supposed to grow,
But by degrees
Some achieve a flower, although
No one sees.

-- Philip Larkin

the changing view

On the mountaintop gilded by the peaceful rays of the setting sun, I see myself surrounded by a chain of hills covered by undulating wheat, and the olive trees and the elms are richly festooned with swaying vines: the distant crags and ridges grow steadily upward as if one were piled upon the other. Below me the mountainsides are furrowed by barren ravines among which the evening shadows gather as they gradually rise up; the dark and horrible background looks like the mouth of an abyss. On the southern slope the view is dominated by the wood that overhangs and obscures the valley where the sheep graze in the open and scattered goats cling to the steep crags. The birds sing feebly as if weeping for the dying day, the heifers low, and the wind seems to enjoy murmuring among the foliage. But to the north the hills divide, and a boundless plain opens out before the eye: in the nearby fields you can descry the oxen returning home: the weary farmer accompanies them leaning on his staff... Meanwhile the view is fading away, and after a long series of trees and fields it ends at the horizon where all dwindles and merges into one. The setting sun throws out a few rays, as if they were its last farewell to nature; the clouds glow pink, then slowly languish into pallor before they darken: then the plain is lost and the shadows spread out over the face of the earth, and I, as if in the middle of the ocean, can find only the sky.

-- Ugo Foscolo The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis
Translated by Alastair McEwen

painting motions

Painting is scratching, waving, jabbing, pushing, and dragging. At times the hand moves as if it were writing, but in paint; and other times it moves as if the linen canvas were a linen shirt, and the paint was a stain that had to be rubbed under running water. Some painting motions are like conversations, where the hands keep turning in the air to make a point. Others are slow careful gestures, like touching someone's eye to remove a fleck of dirt.

-- James Elkins What Painting Is

the reason

Ultimately, there is only one reason for love. That grand reason, which was seen so clearly by the ancients but has gotten lost in the modern stress on individual autonomy, is "because we bring out the best in each other."

-- Robert C. Solomon About Love

From the Back of the Room

From the back of the room,
the bed,
only a pallor spread,
the starry window
surrendering to the greedy window
announcing the day.
But here comes the one who hurries,
who leans, and stays:
After night's abandonment,
it's this new and heavenly
girl's turn to say yes!

At nothing else in the morning sky,
the tender lover stares.
at nothing
but the enormous example of the sky himself:
the heights and depths!
Only doves making round arenas in the air,
where their flight flashing in soft arcs parades
a return of gentleness.

-- Rainer Maria Rilke
Translated by A. Poulin Jr.

Captain Nemo's pearl

The shells were a little open; the captain came near, and put his dagger between to prevent them from closing; then with his hand he raised the membrane with its fringed edges, which formed a cloak for the creature. There, between the folded plaits, I saw a loose pearl, whose size equaled that of a coconut. Its globular shape, perfect clearness, and admirable luster made it altogether a jewel of inestimable value. Carried away by my curiosity, I stretched out my hand to seize it, weigh it, and touch it; but the captain stopped me, made a sign of refusal, and quickly withdrew his dagger, and the two shells closed suddenly. I then understood Captain Nemo's intention. In leaving this pearl hidden in the mantle of the tridacne, he was allowing it to grow slowly. Each year the secretions of the mollusk would add new concentric circles.

-- Jules Verne Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

for then

However much I have blotted our
Waking love, its memory is still
There. And I know the web, the net,
The blind and crippled bird. For then, for
One brief instant it was not blind, nor
Trapped, nor crippled. For one heartbeat the
Heart was free and moved itself. O love,
I who am lost and damned with words,
Whose words are a business and an art,
I have no words. These words, this poem, this
Is all confusion and ignorance.
But I know that coached by your sweet heart,
My heart beat one free beat and sent
Through all my flesh the blood of truth.

-- Kenneth Rexroth, from 'She Is Away'

poetic justice

We cannot write the order of the variable winds. How can we penetrate the law of our shifting moods and susceptibility? Yet they differ as all and nothing. Instead of the firmament of yesterday, which our eyes require, it is to-day an eggshell which coops us in; we cannot even see what or where our stars of destiny are. From day to day, the capital facts of human life are hidden from our eyes. Suddenly the mist rolls up, and reveals them, and we think how much good time is gone, that might have been saved, had any hint of these things been shown. A sudden rise in the road shows us the system of mountains, and all the summits, which have been just as near us all the year, but quite out of mind. But these alterations are not without their order, and we are parties to our various fortunes. If life seems a succession of dreams, yet poetic justice is done in dreams also.

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson The Conduct of Life

truth

The small truth has words that are clear; the great truth has great silence.

-- Rabindranath Tagore Stray Birds

woods

On the way there a couple of startled wings fluttered, and that was all. One goes there alone. It is a lofty building made entirely of open spaces, a building which sways all the time, but is never able to fall. The sun, changed into a thousand suns, drifts in through the open slivers. And an inverse law of gravity takes hold in the play of light: this house floats anchored in the sky, and what falls falls upward. It makes you turn around. In the woods it is all right to grieve. It's all right to see the old truths, which we usually keep packed away in the luggage... [There is a] childlike light around the terrifying trophies. Woods are mild that way.

-- Tomas Tranströmer, from "A Place in the Woods"
Translated by Robert Bly

on being shaped

Artists are controlled by the life that beats in them, like the ocean beats in on the shore. They're almost pursued; there's something constantly acting upon them from the outside world that shapes their existence.

-- Dorothea Lange

To My Mountain

Since I must love your north
of darkness, cold and pain,
the snow, the lovely glen,
let me love true worth,

the strength of the hard rock,
the deafening stream of wind
that carries sense away
swifter than flowing blood.

Heather is harsh to tears
and the rough moors
give the buried face no peace
but make me rise,

and oh, the sweet scent, and purple skies!

-- Kathleen Raine

hotel

The Leroy Hotel is an okay place. It has a particular smell which I find hard to identify, but it is a smell that seems to be appropriate to a seaside hotel and indeed reminds me of some hotel I have stayed in sometime and somewhere. I can't remember which one.

Venetian blinds, stone floors, coconut palms making a green shade in the room: the smell is a sort of musty smell of the inside of a wooden and stucco building cooler inside than out. It is a smell that has something of the beach about it too, a wet and salty bathing-suit smell, a smell of dry palm leaves, suntan oil, rum, cigarettes. It has something of the mustiness which that immense and shabby place in Bermuda, the Hotel Hamilton, had: the salt air had got into the wood and the walls of that place. It smells also like the Savoy Hotel in Bournemouth, which stood at the top of a cliff overlooking a white beach on the English Channel. It had fancy iron balconies, and even when the dining room was full you could feel the blight of winter coming back upon it and knew very well how it would look all empty with all the chairs stacked.

-- Thomas Merton Run to the Mountain

the little tune

My Pastorale was developed in the following way: I came into my studio one day and sank down with a feeling of complete relaxation. Out of a sense of deepest peace and quietude I began slowly to move my arms and body. Calling to my assistants I said, "I do not know if anything will come of this feeling, but I should like a reed instrument that would play over and over again a simple little tune, not at all important, always the same one." Then with the monotonous sound of the little tune, with its gentle lyric suggestion, the whole dance took form. Afterwards we found that it was built on six-eighths time, neither myself nor the musician being conscious of the rhythm until we came to the end.

-- Mary Wigman, "Composition in Pure Movement" in Modern Music (1946)

place

The Elizabethan stage was like the attic I was describing in Hamburg, it was a neutral open platform – just a place with some doors – and so it enabled the dramatist effortlessly to whip the spectator through an unlimited succession of illusions, covering, if he chose, the entire physical world. It has also been pointed out that the nature of the permanent structure of the Elizabethan playhouse, with its flat open arena and its large balcony and its second smaller gallery, was a diagram of the universe as seen by the sixteenth-century audience and playwright – the gods, the court and the people – three levels, separate and yet often intermingling – a stage that was a perfect philosopher's machine... The primary fact is that this theatre not only allowed the playwright to roam the world, it also allowed him free passage from the world of action to the world of inner impressions.

-- Peter Brook The Empty Space

Love's Coming

Quietly as rosebuds
Talk to thin air,
Love came so lightly
I knew not he was there.

Quietly as lovers
Creep at the middle noon,
Softly as players tremble
In the tears of a tune;

Quietly as lilies
Their faint vows declare,
Came the shy pilgrim:
I knew not he was there.

Quietly as tears fall
On a warm sin,
Softly as griefs call
In a violin;

Without hail or tempest,
Blue sword or flame,
Love came so lightly
I knew not that he came.

-- John Shaw Neilson

iceberg (or phew, it's hot)

Where the walls entered the water, the surf pounded them, creating caverns, grottoes, and ice bridges, strengthening an impression of sea cliffs. At the waterline the ice gleamed aquamarine against its own gray-white walls above. Where meltwater had filled cracks or made ponds, the pools and veins were milk-blue, or shaded to brighter marine blues, depending on the thickness of the ice. If the iceberg had recently fractured, its new face glistened greenish blue -- the greens in the older, weathered faces were grayer. In twilight the ice took on the colors of the sun: rose, reddish yellows, watered purples, soft pinks. The ice both reflected the light and trapped it within its crystalline corners and edges, where it intensified.

-- Barry Lopez Arctic Dreams

receptivity

The receptivity of the artist must never be confused with passivity. Receptivity is the artist's holding him- or herself alive and open to hear what being may speak. Such receptivity requires a nimbleness, a fine-honed sensitivity in order to let one's self be the vehicle of whatever vision may emerge. It is the opposite of the authoritarian demands impelled by 'will power.' ...It requires a high degree of attention, as when a diver is poised on the end of the springboard, not jumping, but holding his or her muscles in sensitive balance for the right second. It is an active listening, keyed to hear the answer, alert to see whatever can be glimpsed when the vision or the words do come. It is a waiting for the birthing process to begin to move in its own organic time. It is necessary that the artist have this sense of timing, that he or she respect these periods of receptivity as part of the mystery of creativity and creation.

-- Rollo May The Courage to Create

open

I have taken up residency in an egg broken open. Life is a process of being broken open. A silk moth emerges from her heat-resistant cocoon with gunpowdered wings. Let the fires roar.

-- Terry Tempest Williams Leap

Summer Doorway

I come down from the gold mountains
each of them the light of many years
high up the soughing of cold pines among stones
the whole way home dry grass seething
to these sounds I think of you already there
in the house all my steps lead to

you have the table set to surprise me
you are lighting the two candles

-- W.S. Merwin

inspiration

The present remarkable public demand for poetry keeps pace with the growing affluence of life throughout the Western world and the gradual shrinking of the work week. Never before have such efforts been made to satisfy the demand, yet never have there been fewer original poets. "This is a critical, not a poetic age." I am told. "Inspiration is out. Contemporary poems must reflect the prevailing analytic spirit." But I am old-fashioned enough to demand bâraka*, an inspirational gift not yet extinct, which defies critical analysis.

-- Robert Graves, b. 24 July 1895 Oxford Addresses on Poetry (1962)

*bâraka: (Arabic) to bless

The Confirmation

Yes, yours, my love, is the right human face.
I in my mind had waited for this long,
Seeing the false and searching for the true,
Then found you as a traveller finds a place
Of welcome suddenly amid the wrong
Valleys and rocks and twisting roads. But you,
What shall I call you? A fountain in a waste,
A well of water in a country dry,
Or anything that's honest and good, an eye
That makes the whole world bright. Your open heart,
Simple with giving, gives the primal deed,
The first good world, the blossom, the blowing seed,
The hearth, the steadfast land, the wandering sea,
Not beautiful or rare in every part,
But like yourself, as they were meant to be.

-- Edwin Muir

on Godard

In a dozen films Godard has never made any allusion to the past, even in his dialogue. Think about that: not a single Godard character has talked about their parents or their childhood -- extraordinary. What's more, a study of what is not in Godard's films would be just as intriguing as a study of what he does put in them. He's an intensely modern person, and the fact that he's Swiss is important. One day someone ought to look at the Swiss aspect of Godard's films -- the Switzerland which is the liking for lay-out, watches, modern gadgets, secret bank accounts and all that.

-- François Truffaut, 'Evolution of the New Wave' in Cahiers du Cinema 190 (1967)
Translated by David Wilson

the jug

In the spring the rock dwells, and in the rock dwells the dark slumber of the earth, which receives the rain and dew of the sky. In the water of the spring dwells the marriage of sky and earth. It stays in the wine given by the fruit of the vine, the fruit in which the earth's nourishment and the sky's sun are betrothed to one another. In the gift of water, in the gift of wine, sky and earth dwell. But the gift of the outpouring is what makes the jug a jug. In the jugness of the jug, sky and earth dwell.

-- Martin Heidegger Poetry, Language, Thought
Translated by Albert Hofstadter

Take, O Take Those Lips Away

Take, O take those lips away
That so sweetly were foresworn,
And those eyes, the break of day,
Lights that do mislead the morn;
But my kisses bring again,
bring again,
Seals of love, but seal'd in vain,
seal'd in vain.

--William Shakespeare Measure for Measure

treasure

The bed of the river lay largely in the shadows cast by the great trees that grew along its sides. Slowly the two children wandered downstream, jumping from rock to rock. Now and then they startled a vulture, which rose at their approach like a huge cinder, swaying clumsily in the air while they walked by, to realight in the same spot a moment later. There was a particular place that he wanted to show her, where the river widened and had sandy shores, but it lay a good way downstream, so that it took them a long time to get there. When they arrived, the sun's light was golden and the insects had begun to call. On the hill, invisible behind the thick wall of trees, the soldiers were having machine-gun practice: the blunt little berries of sound came in clusters at irregular intervals. Nicho rolled his trouser legs up high above his knees and waded well out into the shallow stream. "Wait!" he called to her. Bending, he scooped up a handful of sand from the river bed. His attitude as he brought it back for her to see was so triumphant that she caught her breath, craned her neck to see it before he arrived. "What is it?" she asked.

"Look! Silver!" he said, dropping the wet sand reverently into her outstretched palm. The tiny grains of mica glistened in the late sunlight.

"Qué precioso!" she cried in delight. They sat on some roots by the water. When the sand was drier, she poured it carefully into the pocket of her dress.

"What are you going to do with it?" he asked her.

"Give it to my grandfather."

"No, no!" he exclaimed. "You don't give away silver. You hide it. Don't you have a place where you hide things?"

Luz was silent; she never had thought of hiding anything. "No," she said presently, and she looked at him with admiration.

He took her hand. "I'll give you a special place in my garden where you can hide anything you want. But you must never tell anyone."

-- Paul Bowles, "Señor Ong and Señor Ha" from Collected Stories of Paul Bowles

yugen

It means 'what lies beneath the surface': the subtle, as opposed to the obvious; the hint, as opposed to the statement. It is applied to the natural grace of a boy's movements, to the gentle restraint of a noble man's speech and bearing. 'When notes fall sweetly and flutter delicately to the ear' that is the yugen of music. The symbol of yugen is 'a white bird with a flower in its beak.' 'To watch the sun sink behind a flower-clad hill, to wander on and on in a huge forest with no thought of return, to stand upon the shore and gaze after a boat that goes hid by far-off islands, to ponder on the journey of wild geese seen and lost among the clouds [Zeami Motokiyo, tr. Whaley]' -- such are the gates of yugen.

-- Arthur Whaley More Translations from the Chinese

meaning beyond meaning

The more a work of art is freighted and fraught with meaning beyond meaning, the more secure its immortality, the more powerful its appeal. For enjoyment, it is not necessary that all these meanings should be fathomed, it is only necessary that they should be felt.

-- Claude Bragdon The Beautiful Necessity

sueño

Tocas
mi pecho
mientras duermo
y los árboles brotan
de mi sueño.
Despierto, abro los ojos,
y has plantado
dentro de mí
asombradas estrellas
que suben
con mi canto.

(Touching
my heart
while I sleep
trees bloom
on my dream.
I waken and widen my eyes,
and you plant
in my flesh
the darkening stars
that rise
in my song.)

-- Pablo Neruda, b. 12 July 1904, from "Oda a la jardinera"
Translated by Ben Belitt 

beauty

I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of Imagination - What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth - whether it existed before or not - for I have the same idea of all our passions as of Love: they are all, in their sublime, creative of essential beauty.

-- John Keats Letter to Benjamin Bailey 22 November 1817

scenes

I worked with zest, composing mentally every morning from eight to noon while butterfly hunting in the hot hills, which, except for some remarkably skittish individuals of a little-known Wood Nymph, produced nothing noteworthy, but per contra teemed with rattlers whose hysterical performance in the undergrowth or in the middle of the trail was more comical than alarming. After a leisurely lunch, prepared by the German cook who came with the house, I would spend another four-hour span in a lawn chair, among the roses and mockingbirds, using lined index cards and a Blackwing pencil, for copying and recopying, rubbing out and writing anew, the scenes I had imagined in the morning.

-- Vladimir Nabokov, in the Foreword to Lolita: A Screenplay

on borders

For me, it is musically interesting that paintings exist on a canvas with borders. A piece of music unfolds in time and ends in silence. A painting is continually in the present, unaffected by time, yet it is always in the process of ending at each edge of the canvas. A painting, if rectangular, has four endings. It may have a frame around it, which further complicates the concept of endings. Certainly the wall around the frame is an overwhelming irrelevance that must be blocked out by the viewer, like extraneous sounds during a concert. Endings in the visual arts and music can suggest varying degrees of completeness: a smooth sculpture that leaves some part of stone in its natural confusion; a painting that allows drips and patches of naked canvas; or a piece of music that vanishes without a conclusive cadence, fades out while repeating or slides into silence.

-- Bruce Adolphe Of Mozart, Parrots and Cherry Blossoms in the Wind

Dreams

All night
the dark buds of dreams
open
richly.

In the center
of every petal
is a letter,
and you imagine

if you could only remember
and string them all together
they would spell the answer.
It is a long night,

and not an easy one --
you have so many branches,
and there are diversions --
birds that come and go,

the black fox that lies down
to sleep beneath you,
the moon staring
with her bone-white eye.

Finally, you have spent
all the energy you can
and you drag from the ground
the muddy skirts of your roots

and leap awake
with two or three syllables
like water in your mouth
and a sense

of loss -- a memory
not yet of a word,
certainly not yet the answer --
only how it feels

when deep in the tree
all the locks click open,
and the fire surges through the wood,
and the blossoms blossom.

-- Mary Oliver

wings

Resplendent wings are they, wherein they can shroud themselves from head to foot in a panoply of glistering glory. By these wings alone, it may frequently be judged in what seasons, and under what aspects they were born. From those that came in winter, go great white wings, white as snow; the edge of every feather shining like the sheen of silver, so that they flash and glitter like frost in the sun. But underneath, they are tinged with a faint pink or rose-colour. Those born in spring have wings of a brilliant green, green as grass, and towards the edges the feathers are enamelled like the surface of the grass-blades. These again are white within. Those that are born in summer have wings of a deep rose-colour, lined with pale gold. And those born in autumn have purple wings, with a rich brown on the inside. But these colours are modified and altered in all varieties, corresponding to the mood of the day and hour, as well as the season of the year, and sometimes I found the various colours so intermingled, that I could not determine even the season, though doubtless the hieroglyphic could be deciphered by more experienced eyes. One splendour, in particular, I remember -- wings of deep carmine, with an inner down of warm gray, around a form of brilliant whiteness. She had been found as the sun went down through a low sea-fog, casting crimson along a broad sea-path into a little cave on the shore, where a bathing maiden saw her lying.

-- George MacDonald Phantastes

meaning

The meaning of any beautiful thing is, at least, as in the soul of him who looks at it, as it was in his soul who wrought it.

-- Oscar Wilde The Critic as Artist

ourselves

We forget three fourths of ourselves to be like other people.

-- Arthur Schopenhauer

Moon Night

It was as if the sky
Had quietly kissed the earth,
So that she in her shimmer of blossoms
Would dream of nothing but him.

Breezes blew over the field,
Gently the corn ears swayed,
Soft rustles ran through the forest,
So starry and clear was the night.

And my soul spread
Its wings out wide
And flew through the peaceful country,
As though it were flying home.

-- Joseph von Eichendorff
Translated by John White

tenderness

Tenderness contains an element of sadness. It is not the sadness of feeling sorry for yourself or feeling deprived, but it is a natural situation of fullness. You feel so full and rich, as if you were about to shed tears. Your eyes are full of tears, and the moment you blink, the tears will spill out of your eyes and roll down your cheeks. In order to be a good warrior, one has to feel this sad and tender heart.

-- Chögyam Trungpa Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior

mystery

I like a work to be a labyrinth -- one should be able to lose oneself in it. A work whose course reveals itself completely at one hearing is flat and lacking in mystery. The mystery of a work resides precisely in its being valid at many different levels. Whether it be a book, a picture, or a piece of music, these polyvalent levels of interpretation are fundamental to my conception of the work.

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

silence

In love, we are speechless; in awe, we say, words fail us.

-- Pico Iyer "The Eloquent Sounds of Silence"

at the National Gallery

Dora was always moved by the pictures. Today she was moved, but in a new way. She marvelled, with a kind of gratitude, that they were all still here, and her heart was filled with love for the pictures, their authority, their marvellous generosity, their splendour. It occurred to her that here at last was something real and something perfect. Who had said that, about perfection and reality being in the same place? ...But the pictures were something real outside herself, which spoke to her kindly and yet in sovereign tones, something superior and good whose presence destroyed the dreary trance-like solipsism of her earlier mood. When the world had seemed to be subjective it had seemed to be without interest or value. But now there was something else in it after all.

...She looked at the radiant, sombre, tender, powerful canvas of Gainsborough and felt a sudden desire to go down on her knees before it, embracing it, shedding tears.

-- Iris Murdoch The Bell

blink

It may be that we exist and cease to exist in alternations, like the minute dots in some forms of toned printing or the succession of pictures on a cinema film. It may be that consciousness is an illusion of movement in an eternal, static, multidimensional universe. We may be only a story written on a ground of inconceivable realities, the pattern of a carpet beneath the feet of the incomprehensible.

-- H.G. Wells The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind

Fireworks

There's the whump when they're fired, the rising sigh
they climb, then the stark thump by which they blow
their safes. The fire then shinnies down the sky
like so many dark spiders on glowing
filaments. As thanks for each bright lull, we
loft, not high and not for long, a squadron
of soft, pleased cries. Also we can secede
from this to skulk, to brood sullenly on
the jingo bells, the patriotic gore,
the shattering violence these airy
filibusters flatly mimic on the lake.
Soon we'll unclump and disperse to the dark.
We're home. Lights on. We brush our teeth. Then we
douse the lights and sleep loads its projector.

-- William Matthews

once more

Well dearest, the doors are shut, all is quiet, I am with you once more. How many things does 'to be with you' mean by now? I have not slept all day, and while I duly went about all the afternoon and early evening with a heavy head and a befogged brain, now, as night sets in, I am almost excited, feel within me a tremendous desire to write; the demon inhabiting the writing urge begins to stir at most inopportune moments.

-- Franz Kafka (b. 3 July 1883) Letter to Felice Bauer December 1912
Translated by James Stern and Elizabeth Duckworth

The Diaries of Franz Kafka

everywhere

Sometimes, everywhere I look,
O my love, I see your radiant face.
With you ever present,
how could I close my eyes to anything?

-- Kabir
Translated by Sam Hamill

music

For centuries, poets, lovers, and mystics have been praising one form or another of music as eternal. These paeans were premature since sound lasts only a few seconds. But when the first radio wave music escaped Earth's ionosphere, it literally did become eternal. As it filtered out through Earth's atmosphere, light began a journey into the places between the stars. Music... has been converted from sound into the clarity of pure light.

-- Leonard Shlain Art & Physics

understanding

We really have to understand the person we want to love. If our love is only a will to possess, it is not love. If we only think of ourselves, if we know only our own needs and ignore the needs of the other person, we cannot love. We must look deeply in order to see and understand the needs, aspirations, and suffering of the person we love. This is the ground of real love. You cannot resist loving another person when you really understand him or her.

-- Thich Nhat Hanh

One always loves the person who understands you.

-- Anaïs Nin

hitlahavut*

The purest form -- that in which the whole body serves the aroused soul and in which each of the soul's risings and bendings creates a visible symbol corresponding to it, allowing one image of enraptured meaning to emerge out of a thousand waves of enraptured movement -- is the dance... Or the soul lays hold of the voice of a man and makes it sing what the soul has experienced in the heights, and the voice does not know what it does.

-- Martin Buber Hasidism and Modern Man
Translated by Maurice Friedman

*Hebrew: inner fervor

wall

Good Lord! What have I to do with the laws of Nature, or with arithmetic, when all the time those laws and the formula that twice two make four do not meet with my acceptance! Of course, I am not going to beat my head against a wall if I have not the requisite strength to do so; yet I am not going to accept that wall merely because I have run up against it, and have no means to knock it down.

-- Fyodor Dostoevsky Letters from the Underworld
Translated by C.J. Hogarth

A Plain Song for Comadre

Though the unseen may vanish, though insight fails
And doubter and downcast saint
Join in the same complaint,
What holy things were ever frightened off
By a fly's buzz, or itches, or a cough?
Harder than nails

They are, more warmly constant than the sun,
At whose continual sign
The dimly prompted vine
Upbraids itself to a green excellence.
What evening, when the slow and forced expense
Of sweat is done,

Does not the dark come flooding the straight furrow
Or filling the well-made bowl?
What night will not the whole
Sky with its clear studs and steady spheres
Turn on a sound chimney? It is seventeen years
Come tomorrow

That Bruna Sandoval has kept the church
Of San Ysidro, sweeping
And scrubbing the aisles, keeping
The candlesticks and the plaster faces bright,
And seen no visions but the thing done right
From the clay porch

To the white altar. For love and in all weathers
This is what she has done.
Sometimes the early sun
Shines as she flings the scrubwater out, with a crash
Of grimy rainbows, and the stained suds flash
Like angel-feathers.

-- Richard Wilbur

polarities

The unlike is joined together, and from differences results the most beautiful harmony...

-- Heraclitus
Translated by G.T.W. Patrick

essence

I did not
have to ask my heart what it wanted,
because of all the desires I have ever known just one did I cling to
for it was the essence of
all desire:

to hold beauty in
my soul's
arms.

-- St. John of the Cross
Translated by Daniel Ladinsky

clapboard

For a director, each work he completes is like a whole lifetime. I have lived many whole lifetimes with the films I have made, and I have experienced a different life-style with each one as well. Within each film I have become one with many different kinds of people, and I have lived their lives. For this reason, in order to prepare for the making of a new film, it requires a tremendous effort to forget the people in the film that went before.

-- Akira Kurosawa Something Like an Autobiography
Translated by Audie E. Bock

on reproduction

Since the ordinary photographic plate is sensitive to a larger range of shades than can be recorded in color, the best black-and-white reproduction of a Titian, Veronese or Renoir is comparable to a conscientious piano transcription of an orchestral score, whereas the color print, with some exceptions, is like a reduced orchestra with all the instruments out of tune.

-- Edgar Wind Art and Anarchy

summer verse

The Blue Hour by Tom Myron

now

Knowing is not enough; we must act. Willing is not enough; we must do.

-- Goethe

river

You had this little river, Charity, that scalloped round your hem like a taffeta ruffle. It glided through your bottomlands... winking with minnows and riverflies and waterbugs. It was ornamented with big, drowsy snap-turtles sitting like figurines on rocks; had little jeweled perch in it and thick purple catfish shining in it and sliding cottonmouth watermoccasins. It crawled, croaking with bullfrogs and ticking and sucking and clucking and shining, round through meadows of bottomland palmettos..., between muscadine vines that plashed up like fretted fountains (and trailed and curled and twined over the ground and crept over old stony logs and ancient saffron-golden rotted wood festered with the decoration of pink and white and azure fungusflowers, and climbed up trees and coiled round their branches and then were flung down again in tassels and sprays and thick swags over the river), under purple hangings of moss and under bridges of many little towns until, somewhere far away from you, Charity, in a place you did not know but only imagined, it swam into a bay.

-- William Goyen The House of Breath

the candles

Oh! thou clear spirit of clear fire, whom on these seas I as Persian once did worship, till in the sacramental act so burned by thee, that to this hour I bear the scar; I now know thee, thou clear spirit, and I now know that thy right worship is defiance. To neither love nor reverence wilt thou be kind; and e'en for hate thou canst but kill; and all are killed. No fearless fool now fronts thee. I own thy speechless, placeless power; but to the last gasp of my earthquake life will dispute its unconditional, unintegral mastery in me. In the midst of the personified impersonal, a personality stands here. Though but a point at best; whencesoe'er I came; wheresoe'er I go; yet while I earthly live, the queenly personality lives in me, and feels her royal rights. But war is pain, and hate is woe. Come in thy lowest form of love, and I will kneel and kiss thee; but at thy highest, come as mere supernal power; and though thou launchest navies of full-freighted worlds, there's that in here that still remains indifferent. Oh, thou clear spirit, of thy fire thou madest me, and like a true child of fire, I breathe it back to thee. [Sudden, repeated flashes of lightning, the nine flames leap length-wise thrice their previous height; Ahab, with the rest, closes his eyes, his right hand pressed hard upon them.]

-- Herman Melville Moby-Dick

fruit

There is another remark to be made about the conditions of this unconscious work: it is possible, and of a certainty it is only fruitful, if it is on the one hand preceded and on the other hand followed by a period of conscious work. These sudden inspirations... never happen except after some days of voluntary effort which has appeared absolutely fruitless and whence nothing good seems to have come, where the way taken seems totally astray. These efforts then have not been as sterile as one thinks; they have set agoing the unconscious machine and without them it would not have moved and would have produced nothing.

-- Henri Poincaré The Creative Process, ed. Brewster Ghiselin
Translated by George Bruce Halsted

Reredos

Not symbols,
ecclesiastical decor,
but a clear pane of glass,
that was the reredos,
and there was the risk
of drawing the celebrating's focus
away
from the properties of the communion table,

because there,
in the transparence,
the greenery of earth was
flourishing in the sight of morning,
the river's spate blossoming,
the air a flight of joy,
and the sunshine setting
the clouds on fire,

and I observed
the eyes of the priest
as if unawares
placing his hand
upon these gifts
as though
they
were the bread and wine.

-- Euros Bowen
Translated by Joseph Clancy

synergy

Apples and Biscuits by Paul Cézanne

Newton discovered his laws of gravity because of a falling apple; Cézanne in Apples and Biscuits introduced the possibility that Newton's conception was incomplete by painting apples that should fall but did not. More than any other artist, Cézanne exhaustively studied the essence of "apple." It has been said that he painted more apples than he could ever have consumed in a lifetime. Cézanne's representations of apples surreptitiously repealed Newton's laws of gravity. Many of his still lifes contain a table full of apples, the fruit precariously perched on a surface that is obviously tilted. Why don't the apples roll off? By insinuating into his canvases mountains that lose mass and apples that do not fall, Cézanne undermined the classical concepts of mass and space. And he did so a full generation before the scientific community discovered that the paradigm of mass, space, and gravity had to be revised.

Cézanne can be credited with changing the way the artist envisioned the relationship of space and mass. His accumulated insights departed radically from the precepts of the academic tradition. Space, no longer an empty stage upon which an artist merely presented objects, was now affected by the mass of those objects, which in turn were altered by the space in their vicinity. Many of Cézanne's works do not sharply delineate a boundary between space and mass because the boundary is an interactive tensile interface.

-- Leonard Shlain Art & Physics

the unattended

... But to apprehend
The point of intersection of the timeless
With time, is an occupation for the saint—
No occupation either, but something given
And taken, in a lifetime's death in love,
Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.
For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.
The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.
Here the impossible union
Of spheres of existence is actual,
Here the past and future
Are conquered, and reconciled...

-- T.S. Eliot, from "The Dry Salvages" Four Quartets

continuation of the lamentation

Are there no connoisseurs?

No lovers of love?

Is this the way the world is going to end, -- in indifference? Where are the serious, consequential, undeniable true fires? Where are the old prophets and scriveners of the Scriptures? Where is the Lamb? Where are the little ones? What has happened to parable? -- to the Word? -- even to mere tales and seriousness?

What's all this frivolous science?

Why do people wander around in unseriousness and forget even that?

Where is the serious child?

...This is why I can't fish deep now. O come to me, love, hurry up for Christ's sake -- the Muse is not enough, and there are no laurel wreaths.

I want a soul.
I want a soul.
I want a soul.
I want my little girl.

I insist that life is holy, and that we must be reverent of one another, always. This is the only truth: it has been said so, a thousand million times.

-- Jack Kerouac 1949 Journals 29 August

directly

We poets struggle with Non-being to force it to yield Being;
We knock upon silence for an answering music.
We enclose boundless space in a square foot of paper;
We pour out deluge from the inch space of the heart.

-- Lu Chi

Consider what this means. The 'Being' which the poem is to contain derives from 'Non-being,' not from the poet. And the 'music' which the poem is to own comes not from us who make the poem but from the silence; comes in answer to our knock. The verbs are eloquent: 'struggle,' 'force,' 'knock.' The poet's labor is to struggle with the meaningless and silence of the world until he can force it to mean; until he can make the silence answer and the Non-being be. It is a labor which undertakes to 'know' the world not by exegesis or demonstration or proofs but directly, as a man knows apple in the mouth.

-- Archibald MacLeish Poetry and Experience

Singing Image of Fire

A hand moves, and the fire's whirling takes different shapes:
All things change when we do.
The first word, "Ah," blossoms into all others.
Each of them is true.

-- Kukai
Translated by Jane Hirshfield

just in case

My dear Mr. Heifetz,

My wife and I were overwhelmed by your concert. If you continue to play with such beauty, you will certainly die young. No one can play with such perfection without provoking the jealousy of the gods. I earnestly implore you to play something badly every night before going to bed...

-- George Bernard Shaw Letter to Jascha Heifetz

marble dreams

To sense the meanings that marble gives to any sculpture, a viewer needs to know how the work of pushing, chipping, dusting, and gouging can occupy the mind. Marble is something that sculptors work on, but it is also something they think about. Marble has a specific kind of hardness. It is woody, meaning it can sometimes be pushed back or "peeled" in slivers. A chisel can dig down, curve, and come back out like a sharp knife in wood. But marble is also dry and friable, and it powders like chalk. Sculptors are constantly preoccupied with the feeling that marble is like wood, perhaps because it is seldom true: it is more like a dream, a kind of half-way version of the Pygmalion story where the artist dreams that the marble turns into wood instead of flesh. People also say that marble is like skin, but that is also a bit of a dream since marble outshines skin: it is glossier and smoother than any skin could be. It is notions like these, and not stories about technical excellence, that make marble an absorbing subject for a life's work. It is cold stone that dreams of being wood, and even skin. A sculpture might conjure thoughts of hard chiseling with a heavy mallet, or whittling, as if it were wood, or caressing, as if it were skin. Any viewer can appreciate the accomplishment of making stone into fingers and leaves, but in a more important, bodily way, marble is about the different motions and emotions that go with stone, wood, and skin.

-- James Elkins What Painting Is

happy bloomsday

Beauty: it curves: curves are beauty.

-- James Joyce Ulysses

unsuspected deeps

Probably to most of us there have come exceptional, unworldly moments, like unsuspected deeps in a stream, when we fell through appearances -- fell through ourselves -- into an intuition of majesty and wonder. Perhaps we rounded a corner at sunset and saw the landscape charged with a rare light, or whirled away from company into a dark street where snow swooped down in a hush...

-- Bhikkhu Nyanasobhano Landscapes of Wonder

the dance

Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul.
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

-- William Butler Yeats, from "Among School Children"

focus

For nothing contributes so much to tranquilize the mind as a steady purpose, -- a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye.

-- Mary Shelley Frankenstein

Love Poem

Yours is the face that the earth turns to me.
Continuous beyond its human features lie
The mountain forms that rest against the sky.
With your eyes, the reflecting rainbow, the sun's light
Sees me; forest and flowers, bird and beast
Know and hold me forever in the world's thought,
Creation's deep untroubled retrospect.

When your hand touches mine, it is the earth
That takes me -- the deep grass,
And rocks and rivers; the green graves,
And children still unborn, and ancestors,
In love passed down from hand to hand from God.
Your love comes from the creation of the world,
From those paternal fingers, streaming through the clouds
That break with light the surface of the sea.

Here, where I trace your body with my hand,
Love's presence has no end;
For these, your arms that hold me, are the world's.
In us, the continents, clouds and oceans meet
Our arbitrary selves, extensive with the night,
Lost, in the heart's worship, and the body's sleep.

-- Kathleen Raine

awen

In truth we do not go to Faery, we become Faery, and in the beating of a pulse we may live for a year or a thousand years. But when we return the memory is quickly clouded, and we seem to have had a dream or even seen a vision, although we have verily been in Faery. It is wonderful, then, that Fionn should have remembered all that happened to him in that wide-spun moment…

-- James Stephens, on Fionn McCumhaill (or Finn McCool), as quoted by Mara Freeman here

part of it

I remember I was struck by the harmony of color in the forest, shades of yellow and green deepening to the browns and purples. And the way the vines curled up through the trees, clinging to twigs and branches, twined around each other. I noticed where they embraced an old dead limb and dressed it again with life and color. The midday chorus of the cicadas was loud and strident, breaking out into the forest air in waves as different groups of the insects started up, then dropped out, like shrill choristers singing endless round songs without words.

One of the tasks that I had found most difficult... was the suppression of circling thought, the first step on the road to experiencing true awareness. There was a time when I had practiced often; then, in the press of life, I had lost the art. But on this day I felt the old mystery steal over me -- the cessation of noise from within. It was like getting back into a beautiful dream.

I lay there, part of the forest, and experienced again that magical enhancement of sound, that added richness of perception. I was keenly aware of secret movements in the trees. A small striped squirrel climbed, spiral fashion in the way of squirrels, poking into crevices in the bark, bright eyes and rounded ears alert. A great velvet black bumblebee visited tiny purple flowers, the end section of his abdomen glowing rich orange red each time he flew through one of the patches of sunlight that dappled the forest. It is all but impossible to describe the new awareness that comes when words are abandoned. One is transported back, perhaps, to the world of early childhood when everything is fresh and so much of it is wonderful...

Together the chimpanzees and the baboons and monkeys, the birds and insects, the teeming life of the vibrant forest, the stirrings of the never still waters of the great lake, and the uncountable stars and planets of the solar system formed one whole. All one, all part of the great mystery. And I was part of it too.

-- Jane Goodall Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey

only so much as is demanded

The co-operation of the beholder, ...as demanded for the enjoyment of a work of art, depends partly upon the fact that every work of art can only produce its effect through the medium of the fancy; therefore it must excite this, and can never allow it to be left out of the play and remain inactive. This is a condition of the aesthetic effect, and therefore a fundamental law of all fine arts. But it follows from this that, through the work of art, everything must not be directly given to the senses, but rather only so much as is demanded to lead the fancy on to the right path; something, and indeed the ultimate thing, must always be left over for the fancy to do. Even the author must always leave something over for the reader to think; for Voltaire has very rightly said, "Le secret d'être ennuyeux, c'est de tout dire."

-- Arthur Schopenhauer The World as Will and Idea
Translated by R.B. Haldane and J. Kemp

The Buds Now Stretch

The buds now stretch into the light,
The warm air stirs the fertile bough,
The sap runs free, and in the night
The young emergent leaf is cast;
The leaf is cast, and garish now,
And drunk with mellow gold, the green
Shapes to the accurate wind, though fast
Upon the branch are laggard leaves,
Their shade not finger-dies, but soon
Their patterns swing into the light
And broaden in the blaze of noon.
The substance of the tree is hung,
And all its loveliness unbound,
Its emerald leaves to sky are flung;
But that sweet vertical, the sun,
Repeats those leaves upon the ground
To deepen half a summer field.
And still as dreams that lovely yield
Of shadows bound like garnered sheaves,
A harvest of immobile shade:
But when those shadows move, a sound,
The full and level noise of leaves.

-- Theodore Roethke

grace

It cannot be looked for and cannot be held; in every moment it is creation from nothingness as pure present, independent of the past as well as the future. The artist who turns and is transformed is a medium through which the divine passes and thus becomes its interpreter of symbols and expressions.

-- Erich Neumann Art and the Creative Unconsciousness

When, With You Asleep

When, with you asleep, I plunge into your soul,
and I listen, with my ear
on your naked breast,
to your tranquil heart, it seems to me
that, in its deep throbbing, I surprise
the secret of the center
of the world.

It seems to me
that legions of angels
on celestial steeds
— as when, in the height
of the night we listen, without a breath
and our ears to the earth,
to distant hoofbeats that never arrive —,
that legions of angels
are coming through you, from afar
— like the Three Kings
to the eternal birth
of our love —,
they are coming through you, from afar,
to bring me, in your dreams,
the secret of the center
of the heavens.

-- Juan Ramón Jiménez
Translated by Perry Higman

the heart

Art does not come from ideas. Art does not come from the mind. Art comes from the place where you dream. Art comes from your unconscious; it comes from the white hot center of you...

We look at the landscape and what we see out there is our deepest emotional inner selves. This is at the heart of a work of art.

-- Robert Olen Butler, from "Boot Camp" Five Points 9:1

fire

There is, all around us,
this country
of original fire.

You know what I mean.

The sky, after all, stops at nothing, so something
has to be holding
our bodies
in its rich and timeless stables or else
we would fly away...

Listen, whatever it is you try
to do with your life, nothing will ever dazzle you
like the dreams of your body,

its spirit
longing to fly while the dead-weight bones

toss their dark mane and hurry
back into the fields of glittering fire

where everything,
even the great whale,
throbs with song.

-- Mary Oliver, from "Humpbacks"

an appeal

Having this occasion of troubling you with a letter, I cannot forbear to tell you the earnestness of my wishes, that, as you have made such steps towards it, already, you would let us owe to your inimitable genius, the establishment of musick, upon a foundation of good poetry; where the excellence of the sound should be no longer dishonour'd, by the poorness of the sense it is chain'd to.

My meaning is, that you would be resolute enough, to deliver us from our Italian bondage; and demonstrate, that English is soft enough for Opera, when compos'd by poets, who know how to distinguish the sweetness of our tongue, from the strength of it, where the last is necessary.

I am of the opinion, that male and female voices may be found in this kingdom, capable of every thing, that is requisite; and, I am sure, a species of dramatic Opera might be invented, that, by reconciling reason and dignity, with musick and fine machinery, would charm the ear, and hold fast the heart, together.

Such an improvement must, at once, be lasting, and profitable, to a very great degree; and would, infallibly, attract an universal regard, and encouragement.

-- Aaron Hill Letter to George Frideric Handel 5 December 1732

this afternoon

It is a bright afternoon: what am I going to do? I am going to work with my mind and with my pen, while the sky is clear and while the soft white clouds are small and sharply defined in it. I am not going to bury myself in books and note taking. I am not going to lose myself in this jungle and come out drunk and bewildered, feeling that bewilderment is a sign that I have done something. I am not going to write as one driven by compulsions but freely, because I am a writer, because for me to write is to think and to live and also in some degree even to pray.

-- Thomas Merton The Search For Solitude

Before the Sun Goes Down

I'll lay my wildflower hand
in your hand's white wicker basket

and bold-tender-shy I'll encircle you
as day and night would encircle
the trees of day and night

and my kisses will live like birds on your shoulder.

-- Astrid Hjertenæs Andersen
Translated by Nadia Christensen

source

This is the essential point: the world speaks to us; it comes and lets itself be caught in the snare of words; the words that these grand images wrench from us are full of its presence. And here perhaps we are at the very source that we sought to regain, at that point where the world reveals itself to us, where what is spoken is itself speaking.

-- Mikel Dufrenne Language and Philosophy

truth

Love is not a mere impulse, it must contain truth, which is law. It accepts limitations from truth because of its own inner wealth. The child willingly exercises restraint to correct its bodily balance, because it has true pleasure in the freedom of its movements; and love also counts no cost as too great to realize its truth.

-- Rabindranath Tagore A Tagore Reader

struck

For a long time, I remained motionless, letting myself be penetrated gently by this unspeakable ensemble, by the serenity of the sky and the melancholy of the moment. I do not know what was going on in my mind, and I could not express it; it was one of those ineffable moments when one feels something in himself which is going to sleep and something which is awakening.

-- Victor Hugo En Voyage. France et Belgique
Translated by Daniel Russell

the dance

Time and Space are Real Beings, a Male & a Female. Time is a Man, Space is a Woman.

-- William Blake