[Image: “Umbrella Bag (Northern California, June 2023),” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]
From whiskey river’s commonplace book:
Sometimes one sees the world in a way one is not aware of at other times. We’re never really seeing the world, we’re only seeing a moment’s take on the world. This is true of images. Images are a way of seeing the world which you didn’t notice before, and something you cannot make by an act of will; it’s something that is suddenly revealed to you. The world has layers, and you start seeing that these layers happen all at once; they’re all together. I think that’s what is startling about images. At the moment of seeing, they seem so obvious. Why didn’t I see that before? Mandelstam wrote wonderfully about images. He said that an image is not an act of will. A real image is something that occurs to you. He said an image is like running across a river on a bridge of boats, and when you get to the other side, you look back and see that all the boats have moved or drifted and are in different places, and you realize it would be impossible to do all over again. That’s always seemed like a great image right there.
(W.S. Merwin [source])
…and:
Adrift on the Lake
Autumn sky illuminates itself all empty
distances away toward far human realms,cranes off horizons of sand tracing its
clarity into mountains beyond clouds.Crystalline waters quiet settling night.
Moonlight leaving idleness everywhereablaze, I trust myself to this lone paddle,
this calm on and on, no return in sight.
(Wang Wei [source])
…and (italicized portion):
There was also another reason why it was now possible to paint. It was because there was one central fact that made it seem worthwhile going on, whatever the objective value of the pictures to other people. It was that I had discovered in the painting a bit of experience that made all other occupations unimportant by comparison. It was the discovery that, when painting, something from nature there occurred, at least sometimes, a fusion into a never-before-know wholeness; not only were the object and oneself no longer felt to be separate, but neither were thought and sensation and feeling and action towards it, the movement of one’s hand together with the feeling of delight in the “thusness” of the thing, they all seemed fused into a wholeness of being which was different than anything else that had ever happened to me. It was different because thought was not drowned in feeling, they were somehow all there together. Moreover, when this state of concentration was really achieved one was no longer aware of oneself doing it, one no longer acted from a centre to an object as remote; in fact, something quite special happened to one’s sense of self. And when the bit of painting was finished there was before one’s eyes a permanent record of the experience, giving a constant sense of immense surprise at how it had ever happened: it did not seem something that oneself had done at all, certainly not the ordinary everyday self and way of being.
(Marion Milner [source])
Not from whiskey river:
Meeting the Light Completely
Even the long-beloved
was once
an unrecognized stranger.Just so,
the chipped lip
of a blue-glazed cup,
blown field
of a yellow curtain,
might also,
flooding and falling,
ruin your heart.A table painted with roses.
An empty clothesline.Each time,
the found world surprises—
that is its nature.And then
what is said by all lovers:
“What fools we were, not to have seen.”
(Jane Hirshfield [source])
…and:
I Find Myself Defending Pigeons
I love how you never find their bodies, how they never rest their eyes. I love how their breasts are comforters unfolding by their breath. I love that pigeons live in the city, that underestimation never stopped a pigeon from unlatching itself or being old. I want them all unspooling in the air, and bridges that are half sigh and half pigeon. I want to harbor their coo and utilize it for energy. I want to learn to use them the way they want to be used. I want to pigeontail into a quiet night, to let their oddness sit in our hands. You can never know a language until you quiet your own. I want people to write about them. Their leaving ships for land, or standing on their own on a marble statue in the shimmer of a field. I want to talk about the term rock dove, argue over whether or not it’s imperialist. I want the media to implicate us in the pigeon problem, for a couple to sit with their asparagus and kids and realize none of this is far from them, whatever we think. I want oils and watercolors and inks. I want still life with pigeons, since not a one has ever been portrayed with a soul: a flight of them around old bread. And how they’re all the same. How all the world is here with them in hate, since they are rats adorned with angel wings, and the children down the street are free to chase their drag: they want to see a pigeon’s rouge entirely. Let the pigeon have her pigment. Consider the pigeon’s brown and green and everything, the brandishing of his nakedness to the sun, as if nothing is absolute. I love the pigeons’ shoulders, tongues, and wedding nights. I love the pigeon’s place in history, their obsession with living in the letters of our signs. I love their minds, or what I’ve come to believe is their theology. Who knows? Let the pigeons speak. Ask the closest pigeon for his number, for her middle name, if they are ready to die, if the sky gets crowded enough to consider war, if their stores are closed on Sundays. I want to be ready for them to be just like us, but more ready for them to be completely different. I don’t want to waste any time tracing a pigeon’s god to Abraham. I want to get started. Some of us feed pigeons. I love, sometimes, our care. I love, I think, the park bench. I love apples, but I do not love pears. The weather. I love the pigeons, the revolution of wheel to sky. I love the newspaper graying in a different air.
(Keith S. Wilson [source])
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