Category: landscape

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Popova on John O’Donohue’s thoughts on beginnings–

Perhaps the art of harvesting the secret riches of our lives is best achieved when we place profound trust in the act of beginning. Risk might be our greatest ally. To live a truly creative life, we always need to cast a critical look at where we presently are, attempting always to discern where we have become stagnant and where new beginning might be ripening. There can be no growth if we do not remain open and vulnerable to what is new and different. I have never seen anyone take a risk for growth that was not rewarded a thousand times over.

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Also, O’Donohue on friendship :

In this love, you are understood as you are without mask or pretension. The superficial and functional lies and half-truths of social acquaintance fall away, you can be as you really are. Love allows understanding to dawn, and understanding is precious. Where you are understood, you are at home. Understanding nourishes belonging. When you really feel understood, you feel free to release yourself into the trust and shelter of the other person’s soul… This art of love discloses the special and sacred identity of the other person. Love is the only light that can truly read the secret signature of the other person’s individuality and soul. Love alone is literate in the world of origin; it can decipher identity and destiny.

The Inner Landscape of Beauty, On Being (02808).

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“… It’s the 29^?? […], a cicada droning

on the sill and a plague on TV and the kid going on and on,

but it feels good to sit here buzzing inside myself watching

TV at the odd end of Florida, […] a cicada moaning

on the sill and a plague on, and the kid going on and on,

so I go on debating with myself whether it’d be better

to die of the plague or to die of anything other than

the plague during a plague”

The Plague on TV, Jaswinder Bolina

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“It takes more time than I expected

for death to be over,
I tell my brother. And he, a hunter, says, Yeah
in the tone that means, Of course.

The Night Before I Leave Home, Elisa Gonzalez

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“… I racked up habitual sins. I desired, desire

such knowledge from this world that if age one day empties my mind
I sometimes think I’d be grateful. Imagination, too,

is old habit, assiduously maintained
despite consequences.

[…]

I learned you can separate pleasure from disgrace, though
it’s hard to make a habit of pure happiness, when there’s so much to know.

“Epistemology of the Shower,” Elisa Gonzalez, American Chordata, Fall 2021.

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Anahid Nersessian, in NYR, always write astutely on forms.

“I asked him recently if he finds it difficult to teach undergraduates. “Yes,” he said, “because photography doesn’t have to be art.” Unlike easel painting or classical ballet, photography is a fixture of the everyday world.”

[…]

“It is, after all, these same qualities—condensation, obliquity, an emphasis on affect, a posture of confiding—that define the poetry generally called “lyric.” Lyric poetry is what most people think of when they think of poetry, if they think about it at all. It’s poetry that allows the reader into the private consciousness of another person, often the poet herself.”

[…]

““Neither inside nor outside the image,” Chion says, the acousmêtre is neither a detached narrator-spectator of the film’s action nor a mysterious presence hovering in the wings, waiting to be revealed. It is rather “a kind of talking and acting shadow” that seems to be “wandering along the surface” of things, “seeking a place to settle.””

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“Although the most powerful art, it sometimes seems to me, is an experience and a going-through; it is love comprehended by, expressed and enacted through the artwork itself, and for this reason has perhaps been more frequently created by people who feel themselves to be completely alone in this world—and therefore wholly focused on the task at hand—than by those surrounded by “loved ones.” Zadie Smith, Intimations

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https://www.tumblr.com/birdbird/737992882380832768/black-dance-history-blackdancehistory-a-fave

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“… & I place blushed

                         begonias newly-potted on my windowsill—

sad replica of my childhood garden. still, I wept

             when my grandmother’s tree returned—

                         replanted messy by surreptitious hands.”

Native Title by Ina Cariño

“un hasard n’est jamais qu’un destin qu’on ignore”
“… vouée aux gémonies”
“la piste de son fantôme”
“les solitudes jonchent le sol de prisons sans geôliers”

Sarr, La Plus Secrète Mémoire des hommes

The Most Secret Memory of Men by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, translated from the French by Lara Vergnaud. Other Press. Dedicated to Yambo Ouologuem.

via NYR

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“the self is not a fixity but a perpetual fluidity, reshaped by every experience we have: every love and every loss, every person we meet, every place we visit, and every book we read. And so it must be: “A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living,” Virginia Woolf wrote” via Popova.

We must exercise and train in order to continue to progress, stay limber, exceed our limits, grow, reflect, and learn how to be fluid.

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“… Now, under surveillance,

he needed to listen for words I couldn’t vocalize,
being a shade—to intuit what I could visualize

but not describe, and have faith I was there.”

Eurydice, Adrienne Su