January 2011
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“For last year’s words belong to last year’s language and next year’s words await...”
– T.S. Eliot
(via livinontheotherside)
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“My encounter with another world and another culture and the beginnings of an...”
– Andrei Tarkovsky, from Sculpting in Time: Tarkovsky The Great Russian Filmaker Discusses His Art
December 2010
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Andrei Tarkovsky on Metaphors
“We can express our feelings regarding the world around us either by poetic or by descriptive means. I prefer to express myself metaphorically. Let me stress: metaphorically, not symbolically. A symbol contains within itself a definite meaning, certain intellectual formula, while metaphor is an image. An image possessing the same distinguishing features as the world it represents. An...
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“…We are never real historians, but always near poets, and our evolution is...”
– Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (via oranswell)
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Temples are No Longer Known by Rainer Maria Rilke
Temples are no longer known. In our hearts these can be secretly saved. Where one survives— a Thing once prayed to, worshipped, knelt before— its true nature seems already to have passed into the Invisible. Many no longer take it for real, and do not seize the chance to build it inwardly, and yet more vividly, with all its pillars and statues.
~Rainer Maria Rilke, excerpt from The Interior...
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“Your heart, that place
you don’t even think of cleaning out.
That closet...”
– Louise Erdrich, “Advice to Myself” from Original Fire: New and Selected Poems, page 149
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Grief by Louise Erdrich
Sometimes you have to take your own hand as though you were a lost child and bring yourself stumbling home over twisted ice. Whiteness drifts over your house. A page of warm light falls steady from the open door. Here is your bed, folded open. Lie down, lie down, let the blue snow cover you.
Louise Erdrich, “Grief”
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“Tierra, cielo vacío, carne degradada y delirio, con el sol arriba, pasando,...”
– Juan José Saer
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Monuments to Death and the Collection of Time
I couldn’t miss Highgate cemetery on account of the weather, so I didn’t; I crossed London one day in late November to find it.
The snow didn’t discourage me, in fact, like writing and most things, the more difficult it became, the more insistent I grew. I had already alighted multiple subway lines and a bus, greeted a hill, walked it, dismissed it, passed a hospital, a ...
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“I came to the puddle. I could not cross it. Identity failed me. We are nothing,...”
– The Waves, Virginia Woolf
(via sketchofthepast)
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“Being or nothing, that is the question. Ascending, descending, coming, going, a...”
– Raymond Queneau, Zazie in the Metro
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“Tierra, cielo vacío, carne degradada y delirio, con el sol arriba, pasando,...”
– Juan José Saer
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“We speak in (rich) monotones. Our poetry is haunted by the music it has left...”
– George Steiner, Errata: An Examined Life
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“The poet’s expression of joy conceals his despair at not having found the...”
– Max Jacob
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“Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it.”
– Michel de Montaigne
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“What is art? Trying to find the door.”
– Adam Fuss
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“We are only lightly covered with buttoned cloth; and beneath these pavements are...”
– Virginia Woolf, The Waves
(via birdsandbones, pinpricks)
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“I am he that aches with amorous love; Does the earth gravitate? Does not all...”
– Walt Whitman
(via oceanofmind)
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“Perhaps I am doomed to retrace my steps under the illusion that I am exploring,...”
– André Breton
(via invisiblestories, bedfellows)
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“We cannot measure or define space with solid masses, we can only define space...”
– Naum Gabo
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“A map of the true part of you, reader, would show every place where you have...”
– Gerald Murnane, Inland
(gracias, invisiblestories)
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“I’d like, about now, a little small talk,
the grown-up kind between long agons...”
– Philip White, “All that time” (via aubade)
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You Were my Death by Celan
You were my death:
you I could hold
when all fell away from me
-Paul Celan
(thumbswithhands)
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“He carries within himself what is needed to disorient and to surprise, that is...”
– Andre Gide on Michelangelo Antonioni
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“I’d like, about now, a little small talk,
the grown-up kind between long agons...”
– Philip White, “All that time” (via aubade)
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“I hold the river’s wave like a violin.”
– Paul Eluard, The Open Book
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“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”
– Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922)
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“Make voyages. Attempt them. There’s nothing else.”
– Tennessee Williams
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Cabin
fever