David Rivard

[Image: “Plum Blossoms and Moon,” by Katsushika Hokusai; woodblock print, ink and color on paper (1803). Found it at the site of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (MFA). The museum notes that this comes from a Hokusai album called”Fuji in Spring (Haru no Fuji)”; you can browse the album’s pages online at the Internet Archive (courtesy of the Smithsonian Libraries collection). The image shown here is page 17 of the album. Hokusai’s work has made a couple of previous appearances here at RAMH — notably in the site’s banner image (since 2013).]

From whiskey river:

Moon, plum blossoms,
this, that,
and the day goes.

(Kobayashi Issa [source: none canonical, but whiskey river found it here])

…and:

To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient for human beings; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation; we need to see over-all patterns in our lives. We need hope, the sense of a future. And we need freedom (or, at least, the illusion of freedom) to get beyond ourselves, whether with telescopes and microscopes and our ever-burgeoning technology, or in states of mind that allow us to travel to other worlds, to rise above our immediate surroundings.

We may seek, too, a relaxing of inhibitions that makes it easier to bond with each other, or transports that make our consciousness of time and mortality easier to bear. We seek a holiday from our inner and outer restrictions, a more intense sense of the here and now, the beauty and value of the world we live in.

(Oliver Sacks [source])

…and:

Nirvana is this moment seen directly. There is nowhere else than here. The only gate is now. The only doorway is your own body and mind. There’s nowhere to go. There’s nothing else to be. There’s no destination. It’s not something to aim for in the afterlife, it’s simply the quality of this moment.

(Jane Hirshfield [source])

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[Image: “Three Boys at Lake Tanganyika” (full title: Negerknaben in der Brandung des Tahganyikasees, or “Boys in the Surf at Lake Tanganyika”) by Martin Munkácsi (ca. 1930). This picture crystallized for photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson all the elements of what became famous as his insistence that photography capture a “decisive moment.” See Cartier-Bresson’s quote about it, below.]

From whiskey river:

There are such moments in life: one unexpectedly discovers that perfection exists, that it, too, is a tiny sphere traveling in time, empty, transparent, luminous, and which sometimes (rarely) comes in our direction and encircles us for a few brief moments before traveling on to other parts and other people.

(José Saramago [source])

…and:

Horses

From the window I saw the horses.

I was in Berlin, in winter. The light
was without light, the sky without sky.

The air white like wet bread.

And from my window a vacant arena,
bitten by the teeth of winter.

Suddenly led by a man,
ten horses stepped out into the mist.

Hardly had they surged forth, like flame,
than to my eyes they filled the whole world,
empty till then. Perfect, ablaze,
they were like ten gods with pure white hoofs,
with manes like a dream of salt.

Their rumps were worlds and oranges.

Their color was honey, amber, fire.

Their necks were towers
cut from the stone of pride,
and behind their transparent eyes
energy raged, like a prisoner.

And there, in the silence, in the middle
of the day, of the dark, slovenly winter,
the intense horses were the blood
and rhythm, the animating treasure of life.

I looked. I looked and was reborn: without knowing it,
there, was the fountain, the dance of gold, the sky,
the fire that revived in beauty.

I have forgotten that dark Berlin winter.

I will not forget the light of the horses.

(Pablo Neruda [source])

…and:

But being is making; not only large things, a family, a book, a business; but the shape we give this afternoon, a conversation between friends, a meal.

(Frank Bidart [source])

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Omnium-Gatherum Quotidian

Une Moment