trees

track talk

'. . . But I'll tell you, Luśnia — here Wawera lowered his voice as if about to part with a secret — 'that there is also another thing that keeps me here. That it exists, I am sure, I can feel it deep in my breast. I just can't express it, can't put a name to it. But it's here, that thing, that strange reason.'

Luśnia was now looking at his friend with eyes wide open, his curiosity stirred.

'You mean now that it's not just this yearning-like for the trains?'

'No, no, that's something else. It's something that connects in me with that yearning but it exists beyond me, and without me, out of itself.'

'What's that, Wawera?'

'Shush. It's a secret. The secret of the dead run.'

They both fell silent, suddenly struck by a strange intangible fear, their eyes following the line into the already darkening mouth of the gully. In that bottomless silence of an August evening quiet but clear rustlings and murmurings began to waft towards them from the tracks: muffled lisps, fearful whispers, hollow knocks and clangs . . .

'Hear that?' the lineman broke the silence. 'Track talk . . .'

'Sure they often do of a summer evening. They shrink from the cold and so they clang.'

'Track talk,' repeated Wawera, ignoring the blacksmith's explanation. 'They talk in the evening, after the day's toil.'

'Track talk . . .' Luśnia echoed.

'Oh aye,' continued the lineman dreamily. 'Do you think they don't live like we humans do, like animals or trees?'

The blacksmith glanced at him quickly, surprised by the question.

'They do, Luśnia. They do. But they live their own lives, different to all the other creatures.'

That was a little too much for Luśnia's imagination. He looked at Wawera as at someone deranged, shook his head, spat from the corner of his mouth and moved a little to the right.

'And this line, do you think it doesn't live?' Wawera pressed on, goaded by Luśnia's passive resistance. 'And this gully, this station with the signal-box, this whole run?'

'It's a dead run,' dropped in Luśnia in a half-voice.

-- Stefan Grabiński "The Dead Run" (from In Sarah's House)
Tr. Wiesek Powaga

Stefan Grabiński

pond|reflection

under a shine

Bottomless water, heart's glass.
Each year the autumn comes that was not supposed to be
Back in the garden without language,
Each year, dead leaves like words
                                                            falling about our shoulders,
Each year, same words, same flash and gold guise.
So be it. The Angel of the Serpent That Never Arrives
Never arrives, the gates stay shut
                                                   under a shine and a timelessness.

-- Charles Wright, lines from "Via Negativa"

pond|ferns

becoming

Let us begin with what we now call water. We see it, as we suppose, solidifying into stones and earth, and again dissolving and evaporating into wind and air; air by combustion becomes fire, and fire in turn when extinguished and condenses takes the form of air again; air contracts and condenses into cloud and mist, and these when still more closely compacted become running water, which again turns into earth and stones. There is in fact a process of cyclical transformation.

-- Plato Timaeus and Critias
Tr. Henry Desmond Pritchard Lee

Timaeus and Critias

Oh Earth, Wait for Me

Return me, oh sun,
to my wild destiny,
rain of the ancient wood
bring me back the aroma and the swords
that fall from the sky,
the solitary peace of pasture and rock,
the damp at the river-margins,
the smell of the larch tree,
the wind alive like a heart
beating in the crowded reslessness
of the towering araucaria.

Earth, give me back your pure gifts,
the towers of silence which rose
from the solemnity of their roots.
I want to go back to being what I have not been,
and learn to go back from such deeps
that amongst all natural things
I could live or not live; it does not matter
to be one stone more, the dark stone,
the pure stone which the river bears away.

-- Pablo Neruda

untitled

two paths

Because the digging of the swimming hole was moving so fast and changes would be expensive, Maggie concentrated on shaping the water while I designed the Snail Mound. I had to give it this common name in order to communicate an unambiguous shape to Hastings' men, and to distinguish it from other shapes on which I would soon be working. The "Snail" drawings and models showed a double-curved ascent, two paths that only meet at the top and that lie at an angle.

In my mind were several different ideas . . . I thought of the most important shape behind life, the double helix of DNA. This has two spirals of ascent and they reminded me in turn of a utopian design of 1919 that had a diminishing spiral: Tatlin's tower. A wonderful quality of this is the way it illustrates the dance of history's surprising dialectic; it often proceeds in a counter rhythm, as two steps forward one step back, a progress in fits and starts, an ascent that has descent built into it. Another idea in the back of my mind was the 16th-century spiral stairway at Chambord which the French king, François I, had designed so that if he saw an unwelcome guest coming up one way, he could escape down the other. I would not understand the beauty of this until much later, when the mound was used in a way I had not foreseen: during a memorial service it separated those going up with flowers from those coming down empty handed.

-- Charles Jencks The Garden of Cosmic Speculation

The Garden of Cosmic Speculation

more pictures

Composer Michael Gandolfi on The Garden of Cosmic Speculation (interviewed by conductor Robert Spano)

with a sound but half its own

The everlasting universe of Things
Flows through the Mind, and rolls its rapid waves,
Now dark—now glittering—now reflecting gloom—
Now lending splendour, where from secret springs
The source of human thought its tribute brings
Of waters,—with a sound but half its own,
Such as a feeble brook will oft assume
In the wild woods, among the Mountains lone,
Where waterfalls around it leap for ever,
Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river
Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves.

-- Percy Bysshe Shelley, lines from "Mont Blanc"

Mont Blanc: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni

Every scheme for the analysis of nature has to face these two facts, change and endurance. There is yet a third fact to be placed by it, eternality, I will call it. The mountain endures. But when after ages it has been worn away, it has gone. If a replica arises, it is yet a new mountain. A colour is eternal. It haunts time like a spirit. It comes and it goes. But where it comes, it is the same colour. It neither survives nor does it live. It appears when it is wanted. The mountain has to time and space a different relation from that which colour has.

-- Alfred North Whitehead Science and the Modern World

a certain way

Finding a gentleness in my pictures, that's about the highest compliment I've had. If my pictures help some people to see things in a certain way, it's probably to look at serious things non-seriously. Everything's serious. Everything's not serious.

-- Elliott Erwitt Elliott Erwitt

Elliott Erwitt

glass doorknob

this iron chain

This iron chain,
heavy as it is, seems
light to me, I don't feel it.
There's another chain made
of waves, lands, winds,
smiles, sighs,
that binds me I don't know where . . .

-- Pedro Salinas
Tr. W.S. Merwin

Pedro Salinas

?

All our evenings we have been looking at the death of candles:
we use and are used up. What is the using for?
Light, light . . . how, why, should there be light? And what is it? What is it for?
It travels a hundred and eighty-six thousand miles a second, exists only as it travels.
Could it exist if it had nowhere to travel to? Could we? Do we?

--Peyton Houston XVI Complex Songs at the Borders of Silence

ukulele

hidden in the apparent clarity

Some soldier stopped a moment and spoke. "It's indescribably rich in the dark, isn't it?" Without waiting for an answer he continued, a little unlike a soldier. "This soft mist, the dark outlines of the boats in the convoy make it seem as if the long strong limbs of my woman are what cause the rhythmic heaving of this bloody ship. And the wind is like her hair in my face. And the foam and blue-green glints of light are like her fleeting expressions of smile and seduction. Can you see that faint red gleam on the water like flesh in the moonlight is red from your memory of flesh?"

I could not, so I laid his faulty vision to the hot red blood of him who spoke. He must have been full of the dreams the endless ocean engenders to talk so freely and so expressively of his feelings, instead of using the vulgar language we usually use to hide the tenderness of our passion. I had been dreaming of love myself, I guess, though you were not consciously in my thoughts. The night was too misty, mysterious to be one of yours. It is the clear, sparkling jeweled nights and days that are yours; those times when mystery is so cunningly hidden in the apparent clarity, it is more absolute, more unresolved than any other.

-- Minor White, letter to Isabel Kane, July-August 1943

Minor White

hope

a real new experience

The world doesn't fear a new idea. It can pigeon-hole any idea. But it can't pigeon-hole a real new experience.

--D.H. Lawrence "The Spirit of Place" Studies in Classic American Literature

Studies in Classic American Literature

beach 5

the blind spot of meaning

Photography is a marked art, a spectacle of light marks. A photograph is a touch from the distance that has its own unforeseen time. In photographs nature thinks with light, sometimes almost invisibly, on the threshold of perception. Science seeks the meanings and classifications of things, whereas photographic art examines the limits of its own seeing.

At the junction of these two kinds of vision there operates a world with its own laws, where new and fantastical creatures have a fleeting existence. Gaze seeks out the blind spot of meaning, from which it examines the world through the eyes of a poet. [more]

-- Harri Laakso Grey Matters (Aftercrop)