February 2012
19 posts
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Sometimes the dead are buried in the air. In plain view. With so much exposure, they decompose. Up there for all to see, they are easier to forget. The more visible, the more accessible, the more easily they are dispensed with. What does a work of art have in common with a corpse?
{Susan Mitchell, Notes Towards a History of Scaffolding}
D’Agata and Fingal, The Lifespan of a Fact
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etc.
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A Manageable Amount
“Maps simplify the world somewhat in the way a heavy snowfall does, give the sense of starting over, clarify for those overstimulated by ordinary confusion. Each path in the snow shows, the ground keeps a record of it but also makes one feel there is a manageable amount going on.”
{Robert Harbison, Eccentric Spaces}
{Robert Walser, having walked to his death.}
I wish for a map...
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1. Concepts are drawers in which knowledge may be classified.
{Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space}
2. Vija Celmins’ collection of chalkboards.
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“Cure of Hypochondriacal or windy melancholy.”
{Robert Berton, The Anatomy of Melancholy}
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Sailing from the island of Aiolos, whose king has given him a bag containing all of the winds, Odysseus dozes on deck and his companions get curious.
So they loosened the bag and the winds rushed out together.
Storm winds seized them and carried them wailing their hearts out,
over the sea away from their homes. But I
awakened from sleep, considered in my excellent heart
whether to drop...
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1. In Greek mythology, Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, is also the mother of the nine muses.
2. Virginia Woolf found nothing with which to identify in Milton’s account of it in Paradise Lost. “Has any great poem ever let in so little light upon one’s own joys and sorrows?” she wrote, saying what we all feel: the guilt of our inability to remember this.
3. But while the fall may appear to be a...
Approaching may be our most profound vocation. Perhaps we do nothing else in our lifetimes but hedge round, surround things and people with greater or lesser precision, more or less conscientiously, swerving or brushing past them, at most grasping them for a moment, never arriving anywhere for good, except, at the very last, in the earth.
{Daniël Robberechts, Arriving in Avignon}
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X. THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA
BLVR: Do you think if you hadn’t written, hadn’t been a writer, could there have been some completely other—
JD: Oh, I wonder. I wanted to be an oceanographer, actually. And when I was out of school and living in New York and working for a magazine, I actually went out to the Scripps Institute, which is now UC San Diego, but then it was just the Scripps Institution of...
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Notes On Attic Dreams
There remains the fact that we once loved a garret, once lived in an attic. We return to them in our night dreams. And when we reach the very end of the labyrinths of sleep, when we attain the regions of deep slumber, we may perhaps experience a type of repose that is pre-human; pre-human, in this case, approaching the immemorial. But in the daydream itself, the recollection of moments of...
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To desire and be desired, what could be simpler? A woman cannot tell a simple story, my father used to say. Well here is what it looks like on the videotape. You see desire go traveling into the total dark country of another soul, to a place where the cliff just breaks off. Cold light like moonlight falling on it.
{Anne Carson, Just for the Thrill, An Essay on the Difference Between Women and...
