AG2026_1530270a or richesse left, not got with pain


Martial, the things that do attain
  The happy life be these, I find:—
The richesse left, not got with pain,
   The fruitful ground; the quiet mind;

The equal friend; no grudge, no strife;
   No charge of rule nor governance;
Without disease the healthful life;
   The household of continuance;

The mean diet, no delicate fare;
   True wisdom join’d with simpleness;
The night dischargèd of all care,
   Where wine the wit may not oppress;

The faithful wife, without debate;
   Such sleeps as may beguile the night:
Contented with thine own estate,
   Ne wish for death, ne fear his might.

The Means to Attain Happy Life, Martial, born Marcus Valerius Martialis, translated from the Latin by Henry Howard

Go through this sad non-identity


                            1

Wilt thou go with me sweet maid
Say maiden wilt thou go with me
Through the valley-depths of shade,
Of night and dark obscurity
,
Where the path has lost its way
Where the sun forgets the day
Where there’s nor life nor light to see
Sweet maiden, wilt thou go with me?

                            2

Where stones will turn to flooding streams
Where plains will rise like ocean waves
Where life will fade like visioned dreams
And mountains darken into caves
Say maiden wilt thou go with me
Through this sad non-identity
Where parents live and are forgot
And sisters live and know us not?

                            3

Say maiden wilt thou go with me
In this strange death of life to be
To live in death and be the same
Without this life, or home, or name
At once to be, and not to be
That was, and is not—yet to see
Things pass like shadows—and the sky
Above, below, around us lie? 

                            4

The land of shadows wilt thou trace
And look—nor know each other’s face,
The present mixed with reasons gone
And past, and present all as one.

Say, maiden can thy life be led
To join the living to the dead?
Then trace thy footsteps on with me
We’re wed to one eternity.

An Invite to Eternity, John Clare

From the shores of oval oceans


Constance Debré was in conversation about her work with writer and critic Alice Blackhurst. (LRB, 2024)


Also, her website.


A flock of dreams
browse on Necropolis

From the shores
of oval oceans
in the oxidized Orient

Onyx-eyed Odalisques
and ornithologists
observe
the flight
of Eros obsolete

And “Immortality”
mildews …
in the museums of the moon

Lunar Baedeker, Mina Loy

AG2023_1023157a feels true


Tatiana Trouvé, 6 juillet – 12 octobre 2008. Frac des Pays de la Loire, Carquefou. Text by Eva Prouteau.

“Les Modules « sont des lieux de travail et de concentration dont on ne sait précisément si la fonction consiste à recenser ou à produire les pensées ou les traces de l’activité de l’artiste – comme si la genèse en constituait également l’horizon.»

[…]

Eléments enfouis de la mémoire qui font surface, à l’image des polders des Pays-Bas, zones côtières endiguées pour dérober les terres à la mer, « ces espaces en réduction restent énigmatiques parce que composés d’éléments faisant référence à des univers hétéroclites : de plus, leur changement d’échelle, optique, s’accompagne systématiquement de la redéfinition d’une logique d’espace. »


Belief in a novel is, for me, a by-product of a certain kind of sentence.

[…]

The sort of sentence that makes me feel – against all empirical evidence to the contrary – that what I am reading is, fictionally speaking, true. (ZS)