painting by Pavel Tchelitchew
Fremder: “More and more I find that life is a series of disappearances followed usually but not always by reappearances; you disappear from your morning self and reappear as your afternoon self; you disappear from feeling good and reappear feeling bad. And people, even face to face and clasped in each other's arms, disappear from each other.”
Gaston Bachelard: “The poetic image exists apart from causality.” ‘…the increased intimacy of a house when it is besieged by winter’. . . Bachelard also says that “all corners are haunted.” Are there corners in nature? “These trees are magnificent, but even more magnificent is the sublime and moving space between them, as though with their growth it too increased.” (Rilke).
I have come to learn that there is a genuine truth in certain voices, whether it is someone speaking to you about a particular subject, or a stranger saying Hello, or someone singing a song from their heart, like Adele, but when someone doesn’t have a genuinity about them, it makes me curious as to their intent. Their walls are built before speaking; their voices are shattered by a lack of compassion; a voice becomes a mere sound, only a sound, habitual, to reflect their sense of hubris that makes me think of fungus growing from out of no where, in a strange place, and discovering that there had been a kind of secret depth in that place all-along, like unseen dew drops, mocking the naked eye. The initial unseen subject disguising, in a sense, what was to come, until the physical dimension revealed the invisible build-up. The invisible, eternal; the physical, temporal. From there, faith becomes profitable. Faith that most people are indeed full of love.
Aeschylus: “It is a profitable thing, if one is wise, to seem foolish.”
Robert Kelly: “A word comes to mind. I write it down and see what happens. When you do this every day for 50 years, you learn how to wait.”
Are you warm? said the winter ground to the hibernating animals. No answer. No sound, except those of the crisp rustling leaves.
Stan Brakhage: “‘Polis is’ said Charles Olson, having found the archeological root of the word-end (thus beginning) of, say, ‘metropolis,’ etc. 'Police is a clear etymological derivative of ‘polis.’” ... The Police, then, are the public eyes; and they are, thus, expected to be Specialists of that ability-to-respond which most of the rest of the society has lost all Metro sense-of.” [Ha, too bad Stan didn’t live to see what's going on in this day-and-age.]
I read a quote wrong, and from that sprouted a new thing. I love it when this occurs. This is what came out of it: “I've bruised the carpet again,” but that wasn’t my first thought. My first thought was, “I’m bruising the walls,” but I realized that bruising the carpet sounded much better, since carpet is designed for pressing. The word “bruising” came out of skimming over “brushing” too quickly. Am I the only one who thinks of random questions? For instance, a question like the following came to mind just this morning: “After Francesca Woodman committed suicide, who took in her cat?” Her parents? A friend? Did the cat know--at the moment Francesca’s body pulverized the ground, death’s shadows surrounding the scene--that she had died that very moment? One would be surprised at what animals know; how, in some strange way, their emotions are attached to ours, like unending veins, nerves, brain stems. My uncle tells a story about his sister (my aunt, of course) who was living in Germany with her then husband who was stationed in Berlin back in the ’80s. Their dog wasn’t taken with them to Germany, so it was left for various family members to take care of while they were away. While my aunt was in the hospital, about to have the baby, my uncle said that one late night, as their dog stayed in his room that night (and most every night), he was awoken by the dog’s sudden, random howling. Turns out, the EXACT time that the dog started howling was when my aunt was giving birth in a hospital, some 4600 miles away.
The self, lost in selves, distracted,
leaving a piece of the Unreal You
with someone that sees the Real.
painting by Pavel Tchelitchew
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