Suspended Solutions

[Image: photograph by Saul Leiter. I know very little about this photo, although its title might be “Riding the Surface.” (Leiter didn’t title his photographs enigmatically, as a rule; this one might even be called “Bus.”) It was taken sometime in the 1960s, probably in New York City. Found widely around the Web, it seems — as best as I can tell — to have been among the photos in Leiter’s collection called Early Color (2006).]

From whiskey river (italicized lines):

Poem on a Line by Anne Sexton, ‘We are All Writing God’s Poem’

Today, the sky’s the soft blue of a work shirt washed
a thousand times. The journey of a thousand miles
begins with a single step. On the interstate listening
to NPR, I heard a Hubble scientist
say, “The universe is not only stranger than we
think, it’s stranger than we can think.” I think
I’ve driven into spring, as the woods revive
with a loud shout, redbud trees, their gaudy
scarves flung over bark’s bare limbs. Barely doing
sixty, I pass a tractor trailer called Glory Bound,
and aren’t we just? Just yesterday,
I read Li Po: “There is no end of things
in the heart,” but it seems like things
are always ending — vacation or childhood,
relationships, stores going out of business,
like the one that sold jeans that really fit —
And where do we fit in? How can we get up
in the morning, knowing what we do? But we do,
put one foot after the other, open the window,
make coffee, watch the steam curl up
and disappear. At night, the scent of phlox curls
in the open window, while the sky turns red violet,
lavender, thistle, a box of spilled crayons.

(Barbara Crooker [source])

…and:

I see the mountains in the sky; the great clouds; and the moon; I have a great and astonishing sense of something there, which is “it” — it is not exactly beauty that I mean… A sense of my own strangeness, walking on the earth is there too: of the infinite oddity of the human position; with the moon up there and those mountain clouds. Who am I, what am I, and so on: these questions are always floating about in me.

(Virginia Woolf [source])

…and (italicized lines):

Saga

Everything that ever happened to me
is just hanging — crushed
and sparkling — in the air,
waiting to happen to you.
Everything that ever happened to me
happened to somebody else first.
I would give you an example
but they are all invisible.
Or off gallivanting around the globe.
Not here when I need them
now that I need them
if I ever did which I doubt.
Being particular has its problems.
In particular there is a rift through everything.
There is a rift running the length of Iceland
and so a rift runs through every family
and between families a feud.
It’s called a saga. Rifts and sagas
fill the air, and beautiful old women
sing of them, so the air is filled with
music and the smell of berries and apples
and shouting when a gun goes off
and crying in closed rooms.
Faces, who needs them?
Eating the blood of oranges
I in my alcove could use one.
Abbas and ammas!
come out of your huts, travel
halfway around the world,
inspect my secret bank account of joy!
My face is a jar of honey
you can look through,
you can see everything
is muted, so terribly muted,
who could ever speak of it,
sealed and held up for all?

(Mary Ruefle [source])

Not from whiskey river:

But the overriding emotion in [photographer Saul Leiter’s] work is a stillness, tenderness, and grace that is at odds with the mad rush of New York street life. “In No Great Hurry,” the understated film made about Leiter last year by the filmmaker Tomas Leach, contains an exchange that gets to the core of Leiter’s practice. Late in the film, Leiter said, “There are the things that are out in the open and then there are the things that are hidden, and life has more to do, the real world has more to do with what is hidden, maybe. You think?”…

The content of Saul Leiter’s photographs arrives on a sort of delay: it takes a moment after the first glance to know what the picture is about. You don’t so much see the image as let it dissolve into your consciousness, like a tablet in a glass of water. One of the difficulties of photography is that it is much better at being explicit than at being reticent. Precisely how the hypnotic and dreamlike feeling is achieved in Leiter’s work is a mystery, even to their creator. As he said in “In No Great Hurry,” laughing, “If I’d only known which ones would be very good and liked, I wouldn’t have had to do all the thousands of others.”

(Teju Cole [source])

…and:

God Particles

I could almost hear their soft collisions
on the cold air today, but when I came in,

shed my layers and stood alone by the fire,
I felt them float toward me like spores

flung far from their source, having crossed
miles of oceans and fields unknown to most

just to keep my body fixed to its place
on the earth. Call them God if you must,

these messengers that bring hard evidence
of what I once was and where I have been—

filling me with bits of stardust, whaleskin,
goosedown from the pillow where Einstein

once slept, tucked in his cottage in New Jersey,
dreaming of things I know I’ll never see.

(James Crews [source])

…and:

Come to me here from Crete

Come to me here from Crete,

To this holy temple, where
Your lovely apple grove stands,
And your altars that flicker
With incense.

And below the apple branches, cold
Clear water sounds, everything shadowed
By roses, and sleep that falls from
Bright shaking leaves.

And a pasture for horses blossoms
With the flowers of spring, and breezes
Are flowing here like honey:
Come to me here,

Here, Cyprian, delicately taking
Nectar in golden cups
Mixed with a festive joy,
And pour.

(Sappho [source])

…and:

Suppose a person breaks a billion-world universe into tiny dust-motes, and another person does the same, and so on [up to ten persons]. Then one of them takes all the tiny dust-motes [from one billion-world universe] and goes toward the east, dropping one dust-mote after he passes through worlds as numerous as all the dust-motes he carries. After he passes through the same number of worlds, he drops another dust-mote. He does so until he has dropped all the tiny dust-motes. Another person [of the ten] walks toward the south [and does the same]. This continues until the same is done in the west, the north, each of the four intermediate directions, the zenith, and the nadir. Good man, can anyone know the number of these worlds that have been thus traversed?

([source])