First day of the Fifth month
Filled with consuming wonder, awe and reverence for life, never able to get enough of sea, air, and sky…All through great literature runs the idea of the circuitous voyage. Whatever man sets out to find, to whatever point in time or space he flings his weary body, in the end he comes home, home to himself…Time is no longer a factor. Time is being rolled up like a carpet.
Henry Miller, The Books In My Life
No sooner endowed with a social attribute (and holidays are one such attribute, a very agreeable one), the man of letters returns straight away to the empyrean which he shares with the professionals of inspiration…What proves the wonderful singularity of the writer, is that during the holiday in question, which he takes alongside factory workers and shop assistants, he unlike them does not stop, if not actually working, at least producing. So that he is a false worker, and a false holiday-maker as well…One then realizes, thanks to this kind of boast, that it is quite ‘natural’ that the writer should write all the time and in all situations.
Roland Barthes, The Writer On Holiday
Begin wholly afresh. Go straight to the sun, the immense forces of the universe, to the Entity unknown…and open a new day.
Richard Jeffries
Safe travels. Don't forget to write!
Second day of the Fifth month
Who knows speaks not; who speaks knows not.
Lao Tzu
An idea in the mind is to a Natural Law as the power of seeing is to light.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
O joy! that in our embers
Is something that doth live,
That nature yet remembers
What was so fugitive!
…
Hence in a season of calm weather
Though inland far we be,
Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither…
—William Wordsworth
Now, ask yourself for what purpose.
Third day of the Fifth month
Twelve thousand years since the Caveman stood at the mouth of his cavern and gazed out at the night and the stars. He looked again and saw the sun rise beyond the sea. He reposed in the noontide heat under the shade of the trees, he closed his eyes and looked into himself. He was face to face with the earth, the sun, the night; face to face with himself. There was nothing between; no wall of written tradition; no built-up system of culture—his naked mind was confronted by naked earth.
Richard Jeffries, The Story of My Heart
Life is pulsing all around us. Here. Now. All of which we are a part.
Leave your handprint on the ceiling.
Fourth day of the Fifth month
Notoriously bearded David Letterman has another show which, like the man himself, needs no introduction. I grew up watching Letterman and these new in depth one on one interviews are a thoughtful searchlight into the lives of the guests complemented by surprisingly soulful confessions from the host. Age in grace. Never stop learning and growing!
In The Iconography of the Abbe Pierre, Roland Barthes writes:
Behind a beard, one belongs a little less to one’s bishop, to the hierarchy, to the Church as a political force; one looks freer, a bit of an independent, more primitive in short, benefiting from the prestige of the first hermits, enjoying the blunt candour of the founders of monastic life, the depositories of the spirit against the letter…
It’s not too late to grow a beard.
The seed has been planted. Ch-ch-ch-chia!
Fifth day of the Fifth month
Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios of sense perceptions. The extension of any one sense alters the way we think and act—the way we perceive the world. When these ratios change, men change.
Marshall McLuhan & Quentin Fiore, The Medium Is The Massage
The eye—it cannot choose but see;
we cannot bid the ear be still;
our bodies feel, where’er they be,
against or with our will.
William Wordsworth
Primitive and pre-alphabet people integrate time and space as one and live in an acoustic, horizonless, boundless, olfactory space, rather than in visual space*.
Marshall McLuhan & Quentin Fiore, The Medium Is The Massage
*Visual space is uniform, continuous, and connected…Rationality and visuality have long been interchangeable terms…
Epic. Epoch. Epic. Epoch. Epic. Any of you boys see a global village around here.
Sixth day of the Fifth month
Our life is short; and our dayes run
As fast away as do’s the Sunne:
And as a vapour, or a drop of raine
Once lost, can ne’er be found againe…
Robert Herrick, Corinna’s going a-Maying
Rather, our examination has carried us further and further into the poem itself in a process of exploration. As we have made this exploration, it has become more and more clear that the poem is not only the linguistic vehicle which conveys the thing communicated most ‘poetically’, but that it is also the sole linguistic vehicle which conveys the thing communicated accurately. In fact, if we are to speak exactly, the poem itself is the onlymedium that communicates the particular ‘what’ that is communicated…But the poet is most truthfully described as a poietes or maker, not as an expositor or communicator.
Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn
What counts here—first and last—is not so-called knowledge of so-called facts, but vision—seeing.
Josef Albers, Interaction of Color
An astronomer looking through a 200-inch telescope exclaimed that it was going to rain. His assistant asked, ‘How can you tell?’ ‘Because my corns hurt.’
— Marshall McLuhan & Quentin Fiore, The Medium Is The Massage
The medium is being. What is your message?
Seventh day of the Fifth month
The use of clay in molding pitchers
Comes from the hollow of its absence;
Doors, windows, in a house,
Are used for their emptiness;
Thus we are helped by what is not,
To use what is.
Lao Tzu
In visual perception a color is almost never seen as it really is—as it physically is. This fact makes color the most relative medium in art.
Josef Albers, Interaction of Color
The thing of it is, we must live with the living.
Michel de Montaigne
On the stoop and up on the roof.
Eighth day of the Fifth month
Human means must be sought as if there were no divine ones, and divine ones as if there were no human ones.
It is a great art knowing how to enjoy all that is good.
To live a lot and to enjoy life is to live twice: this is the fruit of peace.
Malevolent intention poisons all perfection; aided by knowledge, it harms with greater subtlety.
Baltasar Gracian, The Pocket Oracle and Art of Prudence
…thus with more safety you will undertake the matter, if you say to yourself, I now intend to bathe, and to maintain my will in a manner conformable to nature. And so you will do in every act: for thus if any hindrance to bathing shall happen, let this thought be ready; it was not this only that I intended, but I intended also to maintain my will in a way conformable to nature; but I shall not maintain it so, if I am vexed at what happens.
Epictetus, Enchiridion
Homer nods at the strangest times. Settle your mind. Baby shampoo.
Ninth day of the Fifth month
Furthermore, the universe is without limit. For that which is limited has an outermost edge; the outermost edge will be seen against something else. As a result, the universe, having no outermost edge, has no limit; having no limit it would be boundless and unlimited. Also, the universe is boundless both in the number of the bodies and the magnitude of the void. If the void were limitless and the bodies limited, the bodies would not remain anywhere, but be borne and scattered into the limitless void, having nothing to support them and check them by colliding with them. But if the void were limited, there would not be enough room in it for a limitless number of bodies.
Epicurus, Letter to Herodotus
From The Naming of Cats by T.S. Eliot:
But above and beyond there’s still one name left over,
And that is the name that you never will guess;
The name that no human research can discover—
But the cat himself knows, and will never confess.
When you notice a cat in profound meditation,
The reason, I tell you, is always the same:
His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation
Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:
His ineffable effable
Effanineffable
Deep and inscrutable singular Name.
A rose. Arise.
Tenth day of the Fifth month
The impression of a face on the moon may be the result of a rearrangement of its parts or of something in between us and the moon, or of however many causes may be observed that are all consistent with the evidence of the senses. In respect to all the heavenly bodies, we must not abandon this mode of investigation, for if we dispute the evident facts, we will never be able to partake of genuine peace of mind.
Epicurus, Letter to Pythocles
Jellicle Cats are black and white,
Jellicle Cats are rather small;
Jellicle Cats are merry and bright,
And pleasant to hear when they caterwaul.
Jellicle Cats have cheerful faces,
Jellicle Cats have bright black eyes;
They like to practise their airs and graces
And wait for the Jellicle Moon to rise.
T.S. Eliot, The Song of the Jellicles
The gods must be, as it were, disinfected of belief; the last taint of the sacrifice, and of the urgent practical interest, the selfish prayer, must be washed away from them, before that other divinity can come to light in the imagination. For poetry to spread its wings fully, there must be, besides the believed religion, a marvelous that knows itself as myth.
C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love
Rhapsody of moonlight is moonlight.
Eleventh day of the Fifth month
Our father thou,
And finder-out of truth, and thou to us
Suppliest a father's precepts; and from out
Those scriven leaves of thine, renowned soul
(Like bees that sip of all in flowery wolds),
We feed upon thy golden sayings all—
Golden, and ever worthiest endless life.
For soon as ever thy planning thought that sprang
From god-like mind begins its loud proclaim
Of nature's courses, terrors of the brain
Asunder flee, the ramparts of the world
Dispart away, and through the void entire
I see the movements of the universe.
And finder-out of truth, and thou to us
Suppliest a father's precepts; and from out
Those scriven leaves of thine, renowned soul
(Like bees that sip of all in flowery wolds),
We feed upon thy golden sayings all—
Golden, and ever worthiest endless life.
For soon as ever thy planning thought that sprang
From god-like mind begins its loud proclaim
Of nature's courses, terrors of the brain
Asunder flee, the ramparts of the world
Dispart away, and through the void entire
I see the movements of the universe.
Lucretius, On the Nature of Things
For as the botanist plucks one single flower from the endless abundance of the plant world and then analyses it so as to demonstrate to us the nature of the plant in general, so the poet selects a single scene, indeed sometimes no more than a single mood or sensation, from the endless confusion of ceaselessly active human life, in order to show us what the life and nature of man is.
Arthur Schopenhauer, On Aesthetics
A finger pointing at the moon.
Twelfth day of the Fifth month
In the first broad outlines of the Greek system of gods one can glimpse an allegorical representation of the highest ontological and cosmological principles. Uranus is space, the first condition for all existence, thus the first begetter. Cronus is time…time annihilates all generative power…Zeus, who is rescued from the voraciousness of his father, is matter: it alone escapes the power of time, which destroys everything else: it persists. From matter, however, all other things proceed…
Arthur Schopenhauer
In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace. And what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.
Harry Lime, The Third Man
The animal voice serves only to express excitement and agitation of the will; the human, however, serves also to express knowledge; this is consistent with the fact that the former almost always makes an unpleasant impression on us, the voices of a few birds alone excepted.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Themost annoying sound in the world emitted by anti-hero hero Lloyd Christmas in Dumb and Dumber. We humans benefit from examples, especially examples worthy of imitation.
Thirteenth day of the Fifth month
In Eudoxia, which spreads both upward and down, with winding alleys, steps, dead ends, hovels, a carpet is preserved in which you can observe the city’s true form. At first sight nothing seems to resemble Eudoxia less than the design of that carpet, laid out in symmetrical motives whose patterns are repeated along straight and circular lines, interwoven with brilliantly colored spires, in a repetition that can be followed throughout the whole woof. But if you pause and examine it carefully, you become convinced that each place in the carpet corresponds to a place in the city and all the things contained in the city are included in the design, arranged according to their true relationship, which escapes your eye distracted by the bustle, the throngs, the shoving. All of Eudoxia’s confusion, the mules’ braying, the lampblack stains, the fish smell is what is evident in the incomplete perspective you grasp; but the carpet proves that there is a point from which the city shows its true proportions, the geometrical scheme implicit in its every, tiniest detail…But you could, similarly, come to the opposite conclusion: that the true map of the universe is the city of Eudoxia, just as it is, a stain that spreads out shapelessly, with crooked streets, houses that crumble one upon the other amid clouds of dust, fires, screams in the darkness.
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
From A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe:
But there was still another madness beyond all this, which may serve to give an idea of the distracted humour of the poor people at that time…and this was in wearing charms, philtres, exorcisms, amulets, and I know not what preparations, to fortify the body with them against the plague…and that it was to be kept off with crossings, signs of the zodiac, papers tied up with so many knots, and certain words or figures written on them, as particularly the word Abracadabra, formed in triangle or pyramid, thus:
ABRACADABRA
ABRACADABR
ABRACADAB
ABRACADA
ABRACAD
ABRACA
ABRAC
ABRA
ABR
AB
A
Indeed, the poor people were to be pitied in one particular thing in which they had little or no relief…namely, that whereas death now began not, as we may say, to hover over every one’s head only, but to look into their houses and chambers and stare in their faces…Many consciences were awakened; many hard hearts melted into tears; many a penitent confession was made of crimes long concealed.
Invidia. The Evil Eye. In Roman times a fascinus or phallic symbol was used as protection against evil gazes. A penis literally puts an eye out—the symbol of fertility interchangeable with life itself.
Disease and cure. Reflection. Living well.
Fourteenth day of the Fifth month
Although the Typification of Moral truths and Doctrines by Symbolical Images and Devices had its origin in remote antiquity, and subsequently became a favourite method of imparting counsel and instruction with the Greeks and Romans, it was not until the middle of the sixteenth century that it began to assume (first in Italy) the character of a distinct kind of literature. Towards the end of that century, the poetic genius of the erudite Andrea Alciati, of Milan, imparted so pleasing an impress to this new style of literature, as to direct thereto the attention of men of letters, with whom it soon became a favourite medium for the diffusion and popularization of moral maxims applicable to all the phases and circumstances of human life…In the seventeenth century, Printing, and its sister art Engraving, had attained in Holland to a higher grade of perfection than in any other country of Europe; and, favoured by circumstances so auxiliary to the artistic illustration of works in the then not inaptly termed Picture Language, the poetic genius of a Jacob Cats found, in the pencils of Jan and Adrian Van De Venne, and the burins of Matham, Pet de Jode, Verstralen, Van Bremden, and others, artistic exponents worthy of his muse…
John Leighton
Emblem books as they are known paired pictures with wise sayings so that a moral may be gleaned from viewing alone with the various captioned wisdom serving to enrich and to edify, much like earlier illustrated bestiaries that depicted both real and imagined animals together with a moral lesson.
Lady Anne Bacon Drury, patroness of John Donne, had a series of illustrated panels for the walls of her private closet, adjacent to her bedroom, for her personal meditation. In form the panels seem to be a hybrid of bestiary and emblem books, a combination of images and text in architecture—an architext. Only Lady Drury gathered the true spiritual meaning, the secret significance of the panels.
Every house worth considering as a work of art must have a grammar of its own…Everything has a related articulation in relation to the whole and all belong together; look well together because all together are speaking the same language…Thus, when you do adopt the ‘grammar’ of your house—it will be the way the house is to be ‘spoken’, ‘uttered’.
Frank Lloyd Wright, The Natural House
Fifteenth day of the Fifth month
The documentary The Underwater Forest details the discovery of a 50,000 year old tidewater cypress forest found off the coast of Gulf Shores, Alabama. Due to Ice Age thawing, the forest was flooded but well preserved by mud pack which was stripped away by massive hurricane activity revealing the remains of stumps 30 feet in circumference that now host a reef-like ecosystem. In our own age of weather disasters and climate change, catastrophic sea-level rise may find beachfront condos in similar conditions unless something is done to curb carbon emissions.
When I built the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, Japan…I was now faced with the problem of how to build a modern building earthquake-proof…The seismograph in Japan is never still. At night you have the feeling that the bed is going down under you and you are lost. You never get rid of that nice feeling.
Frank Lloyd Wright, The Natural House
There is a statue of Godzilla just down from the Imperial Hotel. Wright didn’t see that coming, but compared to Fukushima and Katrina, Godzilla is nothing.
Sixteenth day of the Fifth month
I suppose it is true that when we speak of organic architecture, we are speaking of something that is more Oriental than Western. The answer is: my work is, in that deeper philosophic sense, Oriental…The idea of organic architecture that the reality of the building lies in the space within to be lived in, the feeling that we must not enclose ourselves in an envelope which is the building…For a long time, I thought I had “discovered” it, only to find…a little book by Okakura Kakuzo, entitled The Book of Tea, sent to me by the ambassador from Japan to the United States. Reading it, I came across this sentence: ‘The reality of a room was to be found in the space enclosed by the roof and walls, not in the roof and walls themselves’.
Frank Lloyd Wright, The Natural House
A CUP OF TEA | Short Zen Story
Organic is what we are—arising naturally out of the continuum of existence, connected to all life.
Seventeenth day of the Fifth month
Searching For The Hermit In Vain
I asked the boy beneath the pines.
He said, ‘The master’s gone alone
Herb-picking somewhere on the mount,
Cloud-hidden, whereabouts unknown.’
—Chia Tao
Having disciplined mind and body to quiescence, I must discipline them also to activity. The senses must be used. For the ear, the most vital thing that can be listened to here is silence…Bird song, and the noises birds make that are not singing, and the small sounds of their movements, are for the ear to catch…Each of the senses is a way in to what the mountain has to give. The palate can taste the wild berries, blaeberry, ‘wild free-born cranberry’ and, most subtle and sweet of all, the avern or cloudberry, a name like a dream…So with the scents. All the aromatic and heady fragrances—pine and birch, bog myrtle, the spicy juniper, heather and the honey-sweet orchis, and the clean smell of wild thyme—mean nothing at all in words. They are there, to be smelled…The earthy smell of moss, and the soil itself, is best savoured by grubbing. Sometimes the rank smell of deer assails one’s nostril, and in the spring the sharp scent of fire…It is the eye that discovers the mystery of light, not only the moon and the stars and the vast splendours of the Aurora, but the endless changes the earth itself undergoes under changing lights. And that again, I perceive, is the mountain’s own doing, for its own atmosphere alters the light. Now scaur and gully take on a gloss, now they shimmer, now they are stark—like a painting without perspective, in which objects are depicted all on one plane and of the same size, they fill the canvas and there is neither foreground nor background. Now there are sky-blue curves on the water as it slides over stones, now an impenetrable tarry blackness, slightly silvered like tar. The naked birches, if I face the sun, look black, a shining black, fine carved ebony. But if the sun is behind me it penetrates a red cloud of twigs and picks out vividly the white trunks, as though the cloud of red were behind the trunks.
Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain
The mountain giveth, so too the stream.
Eighteenth day of the Fifth month
This journal is not a history. It is a chronicle, a record of days that can be read in any order. Meaning is where you find it.
From The Book Of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges with Peter Sis:
And there is all: the Virgin with the Child; beside,
walks Joseph (some are giv’n the good fortune
to see his staff); then the gentle burro, white,
that trots through the landscape of the moon.
[Lugones, Lunario sentimental]
The Chinese, on the other hand, see in the moon a Hare. “Buddha,” we are told, “in one of his former lives, was fed with the flesh of a Hare which leapt into a fire for that purpose, and he rewarded the animal by sending it to the moon.” There, under an acacia tree, in a magic mortar, the Hare pounds the drugs that go into the elixir of life.
In Chinese, the character for mountain + the character for waters = landscape. Mountain dwelling Taoists foraged Lingzhi mushrooms and cinnabar for potions of immortality. Meaning is where you find it.
Nineteenth day of the Fifth month
Futurist, engineer, and thinker Buckminster Fuller expounded on pattern integrity, defining it by the example of throwing a stone from the beach into the ocean, where a typical outward swelling circle pattern is observed undisrupted despite the ebb and flow of the tide—the integrity of the pattern remains, the wave passes through.
Hawaiian surfers sought this same kind of synergy—mingling energy, passing through peacefully flowing with the waves.
Transfer these reflections to still greater things. We are all patterns. We are all surfing. We are mostly water. Keep it loose, keep it tight.
Twentieth day of the Fifth month
If indigenous people lose their land, it means the end of everything, especially our lives, starting with the culture…and we are saying to the government of Brasil we want to still live in our lands, we want to have our forest protected because forest means life, forest means our body, forest means our everything and we live because we have the forest.
Rainforest activist Nixiwaka Yawanawa
Well, destiny wanted it
Pues lo quiso el destino
But my heart
Pero mi corazón
I stay in front of the sea
Se quedo frente al mar
In my old San Juan
En mi viejo San Juan
Pues lo quiso el destino
But my heart
Pero mi corazón
I stay in front of the sea
Se quedo frente al mar
In my old San Juan
En mi viejo San Juan
Goodbye goodbye
Adiós adiós
Borinquen dear (land of my love)
Borinquen querida (tierra de mi amor)
Goodbye goodbye
Adios adios
My goddess of the sea (my queen of the palms)
Mi diosa del mar (mi reina del palmar)
I'm leaving, I'm leaving
Me voy ya me voy
But one day I will return
Pero un dia volveré
To find my love
A buscar mi querer
To dream again
A soñar otra vez
In my old San Juan
En mi viejo San Juan
Adiós adiós
Borinquen dear (land of my love)
Borinquen querida (tierra de mi amor)
Goodbye goodbye
Adios adios
My goddess of the sea (my queen of the palms)
Mi diosa del mar (mi reina del palmar)
I'm leaving, I'm leaving
Me voy ya me voy
But one day I will return
Pero un dia volveré
To find my love
A buscar mi querer
To dream again
A soñar otra vez
In my old San Juan
En mi viejo San Juan
—Javier Solis
Home in the forest and in front of the sea…connection and longing…the feeling is mutual.
Twenty-first day of the Fifth month
Peace is every step.
The shining red sun is my heart.
Each flower smiles with me.
How green, how fresh all that grows.
How cool the wind blows.
Peace is every step.
It turns the endless path to joy.
Thich Nhat Hanh
Turn into your skid.
Jimmie Wyatt
On the road, sometimes a little correction is needed. Keep going.
Twenty-second day of the Fifth month
I remember a number of years ago, when Jim and I were first traveling together in the United States, we sat under a tree and shared a tangerine…He popped a section of tangerine in his mouth and, before he had begun chewing it, had another slice ready to pop into his mouth again. He was hardly aware he was eating a tangerine. All I had to say was, “You ought to eat the tangerine section you’ve already taken”…It was as if he hadn’t been eating the tangerine at all…A tangerine has sections. If you can eat just one section, you can probably eat the tangerine. But if you can’t eat a single section, you cannot eat the tangerine. Jim understood.
Thich Nhat Hahn, The Miracle of Mindfulness
The seed and the fruit. Like the tangerine, we are stored light and mostly water. Mindfulness.
Twenty-third day of the Fifth month
On a Wednesday in June, the morning still in the pines, I awoke to the news that a newborn baby had been found in a plastic bag left in the woods along a stretch of quiet road in Georgia. Police body camera footage showed the crying baby being torn out of the plastic bag as if being born a second time. The baby was given the name India.
I do not know the surrounding circumstances that led to such an act, but I now know that Georgia has a “safe-haven” law which allows for a baby to be dropped at designated medical facilities or public agencies within 30 days of birth without fear of prosecution. This is the kind of information that needs to be disseminated widely—women and teen girls need to know what options are available to them in the event of unplanned pregnancy. Lives depend on it.
Twenty-fourth day of the Fifth month
The sunflower is the great child of the sun. So much so that it knows how to turn its enormous corolla toward the one who made it. It doesn’t matter if its father or mother.
Clarice Lispector, Agua Viva
Gesamtkunstwerk is the word for an integrated work of artistic design. In architecture it refers to both the exterior and the interior aspects of the building. A whole, a unity. Sunflower and sun.
Twenty-fifth day of the Fifth month
Between 1919 and 1920 a group of German architects clandestinely circulated an anonymous correspondence, the Glass Chain letters, wherein each contributor detailed plans of inspiring spaces, glass structures for a utopian society of the future. A dream of light, a community in harmony.
The words, the sentences, the letters themselves objects immutable and indeterminate, semblance and symbols recalling the dream.
And yet, even here, writing you, the physical fact of your body resists my moving it. Even in these sentences, I place my hands on your back and see how dark they are as they lie against the unchangeable white backdrop of your skin. Even now, I see the folds of your waist and hips as I knead out the tensions, the small bones along your spine, a row of ellipses no silence translates. Even after all these years, the contrast between our skin surprises me—the way a blank page does when my hand, gripping a pen, begins to move through its spatial field, trying to act upon its life without marring it. But by writing, I mar it. I change, embellish, and preserve you all at once.
Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
Twenty-sixth day of the Fifth month
There must be a kind of painting totally free of the dependence on the figure—or object—which, like music, illustrates nothing, tells no story, and launches no myth. Such painting would simply evoke the incommunicable kingdoms of the spirit, where dream becomes thought, where line becomes existence.
Michel Seuphor
The beauty of the haiku is in its brevity less like a poem more like the logic of a painting. A brushstroke, an image communicating beyond words existence.
Yellow roses
On the fence
One in your hair
Twenty-seventh day of the Fifth month
The full-moon aura of the body. Parambolic—whatever that word means. Parambolic as I am. I can’t sum myself up because you can’t add a chair and two apples. I am a chair and two apples. And I cannot be added up.
Clarice Lispector, Agua Viva
I did once sit in the chair of Roberto Bolano when visiting his families’ home in the seacoast town of Blanes in Northeast Spain. I immediately regretted it. I had taken four pictures of it. A simple chair that he superstitiously carried with him from one dwelling place to another. It was his writing chair. Did I think that sitting in it would make me a better writer?
Patti Smith, M Train
Is that what art is? To be touched thinking what we feel is ours when, in the end, it was someone else, in longing, who finds us?
Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
A chair. A seat. A place to sit.
Twenty-eighth day of the Fifth month
I’m thinking now of Duchamp, his infamous “sculpture.” How by turning a urinal, an object of stable and permanent utility, upside down, he radicalized its reception. By further naming it Fountain, he divested the object of its intended identity, rendering it with an unrecognizable new form.
I hate him for this.
I hate how he proved that the entire existence of a thing could be changed simply by flipping it over, revealing a new angle to its name, an act completed by nothing else but gravity, the very force that traps us on this earth.
Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
A sentence. A period. A life. Transcending the parataxis of gravity.
Every word is optional until it proves to be essential…
Verlyn Klinkenborg, Several short sentences about writing
Last day of the Fifth month
In South Korea greeting someone by asking ‘Did you eat?’ is just as common as saying hello. It is a way of showing concern for the well-being of another. It is a way of showing a willingness to feed a person who might be hungry, a willingness to help a person who might need help.
‘To feed’ is the most basic verb, the most fundamental, the most rooted. It expresses the primordial activity, the primary, basic function, the act ‘I’ engage in even before I am born or begin breathing…I posit two planes or segments, and at the same time I assume some ‘kinship’ (sungeneia) between them…Why must we plunge ourselves immediately into this alternative: to feed the body or (metaphorically) to feed the mind (feeling, spirit, aspiration)?
Francois Jullien, Vital Nourishment
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