{Juan Ramón Jiménez}
Vija Celmins, Working Photos, 1992
The hand that writes is like the hand panicked by the storm. You have to throw the cargo into the sea when the boat is sinking.
{Pascal Quignard, Roving Shadows}
(Photo)
Does it know me? The whole world knows you, that’s what I wanted to say, the whole world’s waiting for you, but that was wrong, I know there’s no one waiting for us. But aren’t we allowed to lie every now and then, to turn ourselves into fairies, children expect it and it gives them a chance to dream, what’s wrong with that?
{Veronique Olmi, Beside the Sea}
Image: Inga Aistrup, Looking Westward on the Danish island of Fano, 1960
{Unidentified artist, circa 1860}
When she was a child she could spend a whole afternoon playing with a word. So he asked her to invent new ones. “Tell me again what Lalande is,” he begged Joana. “It’s like angel’s tears. Do you know what angel’s tears is? A kind of little narcissus, the slightest breeze will make it bend this way and that. Lalande is also the night sea, when no one has set eyes on the beach yet, when the sun hasn’t risen. Every time I say: Lalande, you should feel the cool, salty sea breeze, you should walk along the still-dark beach, slowly, naked. Soon you will feel Lalande…believe me, I’m one of the people who knows the sea best.”
{Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart }
1. The final page of The Notebooks of Percy Bysshe Shelley
2. Villette (Chapter XLII, Finis)
Somebody opens a window on the last of the chill spring afternoon, and suddenly, in an unexpected instant of quiet, I hear the thundering overspill and ebbing roar of a single giant sea.
{Henry Beston, The Outermost House}
{Vija Celmins}
Even on paper it’s never the same sea twice.
From the keeper’s log, 4.9
A barge departs, looking effortless and ancient, going west. To where? To Asia? When I see this, it feels so primitive and unlikely that we still transport goods by sea. That this has never ceased to be necessary. That it can just be a truth of motion, and of time, that some things go this way.
