AG2024_1100367a2 or fathom fortitude

AG2024_1100367a2

I seek for rhythmic whisperings
Where noises bandy—
For life I listen wistfully
In footless banter.

I cast wide nets and tentative
In lakes of sorrow.
I go toward final tenderness
By pathways sordid.

I look for dewdrops glistering
In falsehood’s gardens.
I save truth’s globules glistening,
From dust-heaps garnered.

I fain would fathom fortitude
Through years of wormwood—
And pierce the mortal fortalice,
Yet live, a worldling.

My cup, through ways impassable,
To bear, untainted;
By tenebrous bleak passages
To joy attaining.

Zinaida Gippius, translated by Babette Deutsch and Avrahm Yarmolinsky


What must be valued
I’m learning,

in clarity and in error,
are spaces

where
feelings are held.

Spaces, Jenny Johnson

Twombly

Those in the show, beginning in 1954, are flurries of impulsive line in pencil, crayon, or paint—sometimes mostly erased or overlapped with white house paint—which seem barbarically formless, yet are perversely graced with sensitive touch and texture. Like Zen koans, these drawings not only defy comprehension but stop it dead.

[…]

Twombly’s best works are permanently embroiled in the present tense of their making; they would be just as fresh if created today or tomorrow.

Peter Schjeldahl, Drawing Lines, 2005

Mary Jacobus, Tate Papers Autumn 2008.

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