Sightings in a Fractal Mirror

[Image: “Self Described and Self Defined (1965) – Joseph Kosuth (1947)”; photograph by Pedro Ribeiro Simões of the work so titled. (Found the photo at Flickr, and use it here via a Creative Commons license — thank you!) Kosuth‘s contribution to this photo is the neon “sign” spelling out its own title; the photographer’s, as nearly as I can tell, is the double, not-quite-self-referential layer of photograph superimposed on it: it’s one of those “pictures of someone taking a picture of someone else.” This would be such a dull photo if the wall behind the woman were blank — or displayed almost any other work of art!]

From whiskey river (italicized passage):

What gets called “the sixties” left a mixed legacy and a lot of divides. But it opened everything to question, and what seems most fundamental and most pervasive about all the ensuing changes is a loss of faith in authority: the authority of government, of patriarchy, of progress, of capitalism,of violence, of whiteness. The answers—the alternatives—haven’t always been clear or easy, but the questions and the questioning are nevertheless significant. What’s most important here is to feel the profundity of the changes, to feel how far we have come from that moment of Cold War summer. We inhabit, in ordinary daylight, a future that was unimaginably dark a few decades ago, when people found the end of the world easier to envision than the impending changes in everyday roles, thoughts, practices that not even the wildest science fiction anticipated. Perhaps we should not have adjusted to it so easily. It would be better if we were astonished every day.

(Rebecca Solnit [source])

…and:

The Layers

I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
“Live in the layers,
not on the litter.”
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.

(Stanley Kunitz [source])

…and (from whiskey river’s commonplace book):

The trick is to keep exploring and not bail out, even when you find out that something is not what you thought. Nothing is what we thought. Emptiness is not what we thought. Neither is mindfulness or fear. Compassion. Love. Courage. These are code words for things we don’t know in our minds, but any of us could experience. These words point to what life really is when we let things fall apart and let ourselves be nailed to the present moment.

(Pema Chödrön [source])

Not from whiskey river:

Young Man Lighting Up

The young man paused
just long enough
to cup his hand lovingly
around the cigarette
lighting it before stepping out
into the clench of four-lane traffic
weaving his way
among us as I watched him
slim and confident, bent
on reaching the store across
the street, careless with the surety
of youth, and I can only assume
he reached his destination
as I didn’t hear the screech of brakes
or bray of horns as the light
turned.
The following
day I recalled him
with longing,
something connate,
and he grew
in significance because
it was so insignificant—precisely why
I kept seeing him
doing what we all do
cupping our hands
around the thin flame of something
we nurture for good or ill
as we step into the world’s
thrash—confident, fully believing
we will reach
the other side.

(Raphael Kosek [source])

…and:

It is not possible that this unity of knowledge, feeling and choice which you call your own should have sprung into being from nothingness at a given moment not so long ago; rather this knowledge, feeling and choice are essentially eternal and unchangeable and numerically one in all men, nay in all sensitive beings. But not in this sense—that you are a part, a piece, of an eternal, infinite being, an aspect or modification of it, as in Spinoza’s pantheism. For we should have the same baffling question: which part, which aspect are you? What, objectively, differentiates it from the others? No, but inconceivable as it seems to ordinary reason, you—and all other conscious beings as such—are all in all. Hence this life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is in a certain sense the whole; only this whole is not so constituted that it can be surveyed in one single glance…

Thus you can throw yourself flat on the ground, stretched out upon Mother Earth, with the certain conviction that you are one with her and she with you. You are as firmly established, as invulnerable as she, indeed a thousand times firmer and more invulnerable. As surely as she will engulf you tomorrow, so surely will she bring you forth anew to new striving and suffering. And not merely ‘some day’: now, today, every day she is bringing you forth, not once but thousands upon thousands of times, just as every day she engulfs you a thousand times over. For eternally and always there is only now, one and the same now; the present is the only thing that has no end.

(Erwin Schrodinger [source])

…and:

Apple Blossoms

One evening in winter
when nothing has been enough,
when the days are too short,

the nights too long
and cheerless, the secret
and docile buds of the apple

blossoms begin their quick
ascent to light. Night
after interminable night

the sugars pucker and swell
into green slips, green
silks. And just as you find

yourself at the end
of winter’s long, cold
rope, the blossoms open

like pink thimbles
and that black dollop
of shine called

bumblebee stumbles in.

(Susan Kelly-DeWitt [source])