[Image: “Circuit Breaker,” by Daniel Friedman. (Found on Flickr, and used here under a Creative Commons license — thank you!) This is the second of Friedman’s creations I’ve used here at RAMH; the first was just this past April. It doesn’t really depict a circuit breaker — it just (apparently, and not implausibly) suggested one to Friedman. Among the quotations he chose to caption the drawing is this, from Montaigne: “Quintessence is no other than a quality which we cannot by our reason find out the cause.”]
From whiskey river:
Mirror Image
Tonight I saw myself in the dark window as
the image of my father, whose life
was spent like this,
thinking of death, to the exclusion
of other sensual matters,
so in the end that life
was easy to give up, since
it contained nothing: even
my mother’s voice couldn’t make him
change or turn back
as he believed
that once you can’t love another human being
you have no place in the world.
(Louise Glück [source])
…and:
History has the cruel reality of a nightmare, and the grandeur of man consists in his making beautiful and lasting works out of the real substance of that nightmare. Or, to put it another way, it consists in transforming the nightmare into vision; in freeing ourselves from the shapeless horror of reality — if only for an instant — by means of creation.
(Octavio Paz [source])
…and:
I loved the quiet places in Kyoto, the places that held the world within a windless moment. Inside the temples, Nature held her breath. All longing was put to sleep in the stillness, and all was distilled into a clean simplicity. The smell of woodsmoke, the drift of incense; a procession of monks in black-and-gold robes, one of them giggling in a voice yet unbroken; a touch of autumn in the air, a sense of gathering rain.
(Pico Iyer [source])
…and, from whiskey river’s commonplace book:
We are born with nothing outside ourselves, and so we leave the world as we proceed to the unknown, yet dimly remembered, realms that lie ahead of us. As we have conducted ourselves here, so will the realm be that awaits us and the souls with whom we can communicate most easily. While we are alive on the earth, we have to encounter much darkness as part of the greater unfolding of our personality, but the end of all this suffering is our identification with the inner lives of our fellow creatures. Our experience of the polarities of darkness and light, of evil and good, is a part of the pageant of universal growth. If there were no temptation of evil, there would be no awareness of goodness. In a society where hatred was not countenanced there would be little love (of the type that will sacrifice itself), but only a safe, detached benevolence that effected no relationship with anything. Out of the terrible events of our tortured century much potential good has emerged.
(Martin Israel [source])
Not from whiskey river:
Sleeping with the Dictionary
I beg to dicker with my silver-tongued companion, whose lips are ready to read my shining gloss. A versatile partner, conversant and well-versed in the verbal art, the dictionary is not averse to the solitary habits of the curiously wide-awake reader. In the dark night’s insomnia, the book is a stimulating sedative, awakening my tired imagination to the hypnagogic trance of language. Retiring to the canopy of the bedroom, turning on the bedside light, taking the big dictionary to bed, clutching the unabridged bulk, heavy with the weight of all the meanings between these covers, smoothing the thin sheets, thick with accented syllables—all are exercises in the conscious regimen of dreamers, who toss words on their tongues while turning illuminated pages. To go through all these motions and procedures, groping in the dark for an alluring word, is the poet’s nocturnal mission. Aroused by myriad possibilities, we try out the most perverse positions in the practice of our nightly act, the penetration of the denotative body of the work. Any exit from the logic of language might be an entry in a symptomatic dictionary. The alphabetical order of this ample block of knowledge might render a dense lexicon of lucid hallucinations. Beside the bed, a pad lies open to record the meandering of migratory words. In the rapid eye movement of the poet’s night vision, this dictum can be decoded, like the secret acrostic of a lover’s name.
(Harryette Mullen [source])
…and:
The Magicians at Work
After Jim Steinmeyer’s book “Hiding the Elephant: How Magicians Invented the Impossible and Learned to Disappear”
Over the years they hunted,
the wayward apprentice watchmakers,
the disappointing sons who transformed
their surnames, hunted over acres
of hinges, cogs, calluses, hidden whiskey,
mustaches a breath from feral,
poured an ocean of fortune
into fabrications of brass and iron,
spent entire seasons strumming
massive harps of wire into perfect
calibrations of invisibility,
prayed to the gods of adjustable mirrors,
cursed the gods of temperamental gaslights,
broke the legs of imitators and thieves,
chewed holes in each other’s pockets,
harnessed nightmares of giant silver hoops
making endless passes over the bodies
of the dead, hoisted high a cenotaph
for hundreds of sacrificed rabbits,
breathed miles of delicate thread
into the lost labyrinths of their lungs,
all to make a woman float
to make a woman float
and none of them ever thought
of simply asking her.
(Nicky Beer [source])
…and:
Then there was music. The Void had always vibrated with the music of my thoughts, but before the existence of time the totality of sounds occurred simultaneously, as if a thousand thousand notes were played all at once. Now we could hear one note following another, cascades of sound, arpeggios and glissades. We could hear melodies. We could hear rhythms and metrical phrases gathering up time in lovely folds of sound. Duples and triples and offbeat syncopations. As we moved through the Void, all of us […] were transfixed by the most exquisite sounds, the tender and melodic and rapturous oscillations of the Void.
…In every place and in every moment, we were wrapped and engulfed in music. At times, the music poured forth in fierce heaving swells. At other times, it advanced in the softest little steps, delicate as a fleeting veil in the Void. Music clung to our beings as parcels of emptiness had in the past. Music went inside us. I had created music, but now music created; it lifted and remade and formed a completeness of being.
(Alan Lightman [source])
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