Are
not civilizations: J. Hillman, "Wars, Arms, Rams, Mars--On the Love
of War." (Andrews, et al.,1987).
Duchamp's
urinal: In April 1917 the urinal was sent by Marcel
Duchamp to the first exhibition of the American Society of Independent
Artists, in New York, with the only requirements for showing being "the
initiation fee of one dollar and the annual dues of five dollars." As
the urinal was manufactured by the J.L. Mott Iron Works (except
for the stand), Duchamp entered it under the pseudonym, "R.
Mutt." Many years later the artist said: "Mott was too
close so I altered it to Mutt, after the daily strip cartoon 'Mutt
and Jeff' which appeared at the time, and with which everyone was
familiar. Thus, from the start there was an interplay of Mutt:
a fat little funny man, and Jeff: a tall thin man...And I added
Richard [French slang for money-bags]. That's not a bad name for
a 'pissotière.'" M. Duchamp. (Hahn, 1966).
"Two days before the Exhibition opened, there was a glistening
white object in the storeroom getting readied to be put on the floor. I can remember
Walter Arensberg and George Bellows standing in front of it, arguing. Bellows
was facing Walter, his body on a menacing slant, his fists doubled, striking
at the air in anger. Out of curiosity, I approached.
'We cannot exhibit it,' Bellows said hotly, taking out a handkerchief
and wiping his forehead.
'We cannot refuse it, the entrance fee has been paid,' gently
answered Walter.
'It is indecent!' roared Bellows.
'That depends upon the point of view,' added Walter, suppressing
a grin.
'Someone must have sent it as a joke. It is signed R. Mutt;
sounds fishy to me,' grumbled Bellows with disgust. Walter approached the object
in question and touched its glossy white surface. Then with the dignity of a
don addressing men at Harvard, he expounded: 'A lovely form has been revealed,
freed from its functional purpose, therefore a man clearly has made an aesthetic
contribution.' B. Wood. Quoted by W.A. Camfield, "Marcel Duchamp's Fountain:
Its History and Aesthetics in the Context of 19l7." (Kuenzli and Naumann,1989).
I'm an
old symbolist: R.B.Kitaj. (Darnton, 1994).
Water
Lilies: "They had heard rumors of 'an immense
and mysterious decoration' on which
Monet was working in secret. To their surprise he willingly led
them through the garden to the mural studio. On entering the glass-roofed
interior they found themselves before a strange artistic spectacle:
a dozen canvases placed in a circle on the floor, one beside the
other...a panorama made up of water and lilies, of light and sky.
In that infinitude, water and sky have neither beginning nor end." (Sietz,1960)
Vivienne
Hermann: At the age of eight, she was sent to Nazi
concentration camps in Czechoslovakia and Poland. ("This whole
family, all of them dead,. My father and I were the only survivors.")
She became an artist and teacher, in New York, her work in several
distinguished collections. Much of, but not all of, Hermann's art
reveals the horrors of the Holocaust. ("My mother is the
holocaust. She's the holocaust for me." -Jason Hermann. See, Is
There Poetry After Auschwitz? Videotape. The National Center
for Jewish Film, New York. Vivienne Hermann died of cancer, in
Albuquerque, NM.
Is it open: "When
the dead are brought to the towers, they are carried inside by the
corpse- bearers. At the top of each structure there is a stone or iron
platform, and a hollow well descends to the bottom of the tower. On
this platform are special places for men, women, and children. There
the bodies are left naked with their faces to the sky and their heads
to the south--never to the north, where the demons dwell. Then the vultures
come and dispose of the body. In less than an hour, all that is left
are the bones. When these are dry, they're put into the central well
of the tower to turn to dust. All the Parsis in Bombay--the rich and
the poor, the good and the selfish, the old and the young--mix together
in the towers." (Turner,1976)
nothing
further: "Cracow, in southern Poland, has become
a tourist center mostly because of its location: it is only a thirty-minute
taxi ride from the most famous death camp of them all, which attracts
some half a million visitors a year. When tourists get off the
train from Warsaw they are greeted at the platform by eager taxi
drivers offering, 'Taxi? Hotel? Auschwitz?' When a driver gets
an Auschwitz fare he merrily informs the others at the stand, 'I'm
off to Auschwitz!'" (Kurlansky,1994)
like
a banker: A strange remark in view of Einstein's notorious
ineptness with financial matters. One example: "Einstein had
been offered a position at the Institute for Advanced Studies (at
Princeton University) by Dr. Abraham Flexner, the director, who
gave Einstein virtually a blank check to write his own salary.
Einstein carefully figured out how much money he would require
to live in his new country. Translating his knowledge of German
currency into American dollars, Einstein computed that he would
require $3,000 a year, and it was this figure that he suggested
to Dr. Flexner.
"Fortunately for Einstein, the Institute did not accept
his suggestion. Einstein, perplexed by their refusal, and assuming that he had
asked too much, quickly asked Dr. Flexner, 'Could I live on less?' Flexner, astutely
sizing up the situation, suggested that the matter be arranged by Mrs. Einstein,
who was more adept at business affairs." (Bucky,1992)
palimpsests: "When
he enters the territory of which Eutropia is the capital, the traveler
sees not one city but many, of equal size and not unlike one another,
scattered over a vast, rolling plateau. Eutropia is not one, but all
these cities together; only one is inhabited at a time, the others
are empty; and this process is carried out in rotation. Now I shall
tell you how this process is carried out. On the day when Eutropia's
inhabitants feel the grip of weariness and no one can bear any longer
his job, his relatives, his house and his life, debts, the people he
must greet or who greet him, then the whole citizenry decides to move
to the next city, which is waiting for them, empty and good as new..." (Calvino,1974)
cement
food: J. Weishaus, "Cat."
I'm in college. It's finals
week. I'm depressed & panicking as I miss final exams, one
after another. I call home in distress. Mother comes to college
to help me but she's all upset, too. I'm driving her around (the)
student ghetto when she turns into a cat. I pet & stroke her, & try
to get her to turn back into a person. She jumps out of my arms & runs
away. (Blaire's dream, May 1994.)
yellow
eye: "Eros is often thought of in yellow terms.
The Yellow Cat was a well-known brothel in the Strand in London.
(The term 'cat house' goes back to the 15th century in which a
'cat' was a prostitute. Related to the French le chat,
or 'pussy,' for a woman's genitals.) Yellow is often the color
of debauchery, impure love, trashiness." (Theroux,1994)
One of
the large: (Kelher,1994)
steel
bars: "'The electric train with two cars approached
the bus slowly. It hit the bus in the middle. Slowly the train
pushed the bus. The bus had a strange elasticity. It bent more
and more, but for a time it did not break....When the bus reached
its maximal flexibility it burst into a thousand pieces, and the
train kept moving. It ran over many people. I remained under the
train. Not Frida. But among the iron rods of the train, the handrail
broke and went through Frida from one side to the other at the
level of the pelvis.'...Her spinal column was broken in three places
in the lumbar region. Her collarbone was broken, and her third
and forth ribs. Her right leg had eleven fractures and her right
foot was dislocated and crushed. Her left shoulder was out of joint,
her pelvis broken in three places. The steel handrail had literally
skewered her body at the level of the abdomen; entering on the
left side, it had come out through the vagina. 'I lost my virginity,'
she said." A.G. Arias. (Herrera,1983).
appreciation
for trees: "we may note at once that the tree
represents--whether ritually and concretely, or in mythology and
cosmology, or simply symbolically--the living cosmos, endlessly
renewing itself. Since inexhaustible life is the equivalent of
immortality, the tree-cosmos may therefore become, at a different
level, the tree of 'life undying'. And as this inexhaustible life
was, in primitive ontology, an expression of the notion of absolute
reality, the tree becomes for it a symbol of that reality ('the
centre of the world')." (Eliade,1958)
Sweeney's
memorable video: Skip Sweeney's "My Father Sold
Studebakers." R. Beck, et al., "Selections From
the EAI Archive." (Zippay 1991). My father spent the
last decades of his working life selling Pontiacs.
a long
tress: "Hair, as time and custom testify, is
a symbol for the soul because it grows out of the head--the place
of consciousness. It grows again after it is cut and even continues
growing after a person dies. Initiation rites usually include some
form of hair cutting or alteration to symbolize a new orientation
of the psyche. Rapunzel's hair had grown so long that it must have
been time to change--time to start another phase of life." (Hall,1980)
superhero: "Why
then was there a need for the costume and often a mask? I propose that
their major function was to symbolically dramatize the split between
the egalitarian common man and the individualistic, self-reliant, achievement-motivated
superhero. The costume and deeds draw attention to his superiority
while the mask hides his true identity. In other words, by attempting
to resolve the contradiction, the superhero becomes a split personality.
For if a person by dint of personal endowment, hard work, and perseverance
raises himself to the point of superiority, how can he then retain
the equal of his compatriots and remain within the community? The only
answer, of course, is that he must mask his superiority." (Connor,1980)
When I'm
with you: L. Cohen. From, "The Reason I Write." "The
artist, as man, is subject to the physical scars of aging, deterioration,
and finally death. More painful are the psychological scars, as
childhood innocence, wonder, and belief in magic give way to the
experience of guilt, suffering, and a dull acceptance of surface
reality and social conventions. Aging thus becomes a kind of dying,
another scar." P.A.Morley, "'The Knowledge of Strangerhood;'
'The Monuments Were Made of Worms.'" (Gnarowsiki,1976).
through
the use of blood: (Lewis-Williams,1989)
he showed
a dozen: (Moholy-Nagy,1947). This passage refers to
Picasso's painting, "Guernica."
distinctive
personalities: "The structure of the film is
even more rudimentary than its theology. In the book, the identity
of Jekyll and Hyde is a surprise; the author saves it for the end
of the ninth chapter. The allegorical narration feigns to be a
detective story. No reader guesses that Hyde and Jekyll are the
same person; even the title makes us postulate that they are two.
Nothing would be easier than transforming this approach into the
cinema. Let us imagine a case for the police: two actors, recognizable
to the public, will figure in the plot (let us say, George Raft
and Spencer Tracy). They can use analogous words; they can mention
facts that presuppose a common past; when the problem becomes undecipherable,
one of them imbibes the magic drug and changes into the other.
(Of course, the satisfactory execution of this plan would involve
two or three phonetic readjustments: the modification of the names
of the protagonists.) More civilized than I, Victor Flaming manages
to avoid all surprise and all mystery. In the opening scenes of
the film, Spenser Tracy fearlessly downs the versatile potion and
is transformed into Spencer Tracy with a different wig and negroid
features." J.L. Borges, "Dr. Jekyll and Edward Hyde,
Transformed." (Monegal and Reid,1981).
On the original Tonight Show
(NBC-TV), its host, Steve Allen, was interviewing Dr. Jekyll in his
laboratory, with its bubbling flasks and steaming alembics.
The good doctor downed the famous morphing potion, and lights began
flashing, shadows dancing, Jekyll's face and demeanor apparently going
through a profound transformation. Then Allen said, "That's
amazing!. How did you do it?" "Do what Steve?" the
actor replied. And the audience realized that nothing had changed!
It was all "smoke and mirrors."
X-rays: "The
X-ray style is without doubt an expression of the shamanistic view
current among the early hunters that animals could be brought back
to life from certain vitally important parts of the body. The mere portrayal of these vitally important parts or
of the lifeline brought about the resuscitation or increase of animals.
Representations of animals were not merely pictures but contained the
animals' vital substance. An increase in their numbers was brought
about by touching up the pictures or by performing religious and magic
rites in front of them." (Lommel,1967)
the tooth: "The
tooth has always been accorded a special, magical
role among all peoples and at all times, and has stood for power,
and its loss of power. In ancient folk belief, and in our nightmares
today, every tooth that falls, naturally or forcibly extracted, is
a more or less symbolic little death. Even--especially--the mutilation
of teeth for aesthetic, totemistic, apotheopaic and sacrificial purposes,
which is so foreign to the Western tradition, has its roots in the
power of symbolism. Toothache, wrote Ambroise Paré, an ancient authority,
in the sixteenth century, is the greatest and most eternal of all pains,
excepting death. Toothache was the fiery torture of the damned in hell;
toothache was caused by the devil, 'her Dreadfulness Satania Infernals.'" D.
Kunzle, "The Art of Pulling Teeth in the Seventeenth and Nineteenth
Centuries: From Public Martyrdom to Private Nightmare and Political
Struggle?" (Feher, 1989).
Last year
I lost: Han Yü (768-824). "(William) Hague talks
about walking down the street one day and meeting Emerson. I forget
now whether Emerson was just coming out of the dentist's office
or whether Hague was just coming out of the dentist's office. Anyway,
they got talking about teeth and Emerson made the comment that
Thoreau liked his false teeth so much better than his natural ones
Thoreau told Emerson that if he had only known this he would have
gotten rid of the natural ones much earlier." (Aton,1984)
A spool
of canvas: Jim Wald, "Canyon Del Oro (1984)."
dry-mouthed
pallet: 'When I hike the desert on hot days I select
pale clothing, an old faded shirt, a pair of tan khakis tufted
by run-ins with thorny cat-claw acacias, a hat of any color except
black. My fondness for khakis, which extends beyond desert hikes,
has earned me the derision of my fashion-conscious teenaged sons
and amused comments from my colleagues. I suffer these criticisms
calmly, because I know from long experience that I will be comfortable
and relatively cool in a pair of baggy, beat-up khakis. If, however,
khakis were black, I could not imagine wearing them on desert hikes
in May or even April. But there sits a jet black male phainopepla
on an absolutely exposed perch, showing no sign of distress under
the roasting sun." (Alcock,1990
animated
by: "In this glum desert suddenly a specific
photograph reaches me; it animates me and I animate it. So this
is how I must name the attraction which makes it exist: an animation." (Barthes,1981)
peeling
motor home: The mobile home as 'transitional shelter'...means
that it is symbolic of a 'transitional age' in our culture, a period
when values and goals for individuals a groups are in a strong
state of flux. The mobile home with its low coat and ease of maintenance
offers the individual flexibility and adaptability not given by
the permanence of a house and mortgage. It also offers privacy
and limited fund reclamation not possible to apartment users. In
short, transitional rather than transportable. The courtship of
house and car has produced an offspring with a symbolism of its
own. (Neuman,1973)
Like
Scorpio and Orion: Tu Fu. From, "For the Recluse
Weipa." B. Watson translates this as, "like stars at
opposite ends of the sky we move."
Amsterdam
home: In accordance with the "plan of the three
canals," adopted by Amsterdam's city fathers in 1610. "The
upper classes were to be located on three grand grachts (canals):
the Herengracht, the Keizergracht, and the Prinsengracht in that
order of preference, social prestige, and cost. (The Stattman house,
presently occupied by Jacob Stattman's widow, Helene B. Stattman-de
Regt, M.D., and their three children, is located on Keizergracht.) "The
larger houses in Amsterdam had four big rooms on the ground floor--two
in front and two in back--plus entrance hall, corridor, and stairwell.
The entrance hall floor consisted usually of contrasting black
and white tiles. Each floor ordinarily had the same number of rooms
as could be found on the ground floor. No great house was complete
without a rear garden with accompanying pavilion or summerhouse." (Murray,1967)
dead
friends: "To write as Gertrude Stein and Maurice
Blanchot both have said, is to write to a stranger, to a friend.
As we go forward, say on the Net, perhaps we are also going back,
and I am not a great believer in linear models of time, to times
when literature and economics met each other in the region of friendship.
'The ancients,' comments (Hannah) Arendt, 'throught friends indispensable
to human life, indeed that a life without friends was not really
worth living.'" -K. Acker, "Writing, Indentity, and Copyright
in the Net Age."
climbing
a high mountain: (Jung,1934)
On top of
a long high shelf: "There, where the world is
turned inside out, a heavy fabric embroidered with stars and beasts,
you stroll, inspecting the trustworthy seams." (C. Milosz.
From, "On Angels")
Korean
teacher: "One winter afternoon, during Yong Maeng
Jong Jin at the Providence Zen Center, Seung Sahn Soen-sa went
for a walk with some of his students. It had snowed the day before.
Soen-sa asked one student, 'What color is the snow?' The student
said, 'White.' Soen-sa said, 'You have attachment to color.' (Mitchell,1976)
or if ever: "Travel:
a word repeated a thousand times in the streets, in advertising; it
is seduction itself. It draws us to travel agencies. But, by this very
fact, its popular meaning has become considerably restricted. We have
the impression that there is only one type of travel, the 'round trip.'
Given the fundamental metaphorical function of travel in all reading
(and, correlatively, writing) and, in consequence, in our knowledge
of the real and our action upon it, it is certain that the above-mentioned
reduction will develop mythological powers all the more deceitful the
less we notice it. It is easy to see that many human movements are
one-way trips." (Butor,19764)
Moon sinks: Tu
Fu. From, "Dreaming of Li Po." J. Weishaus, trans. After
being involved in a minor rebellion, Li Po was banished to a wasteland
in the southwest--an exile few survived.
you almost
appear: "When someone departs, the security of
being there together, in the network of paths which always have
the possibility of crossing--ends. But another time begins, made
of other sorts of excursions--more secret, more abstract or 'intellectual'
as one might say. These are traces of the things which we learn
to seek through rational and 'academic' paths, but in fact they
cannot be separated from chance, from fortuitous encounters, from
a kind of knowing astonishment. This second movement always begins
sometime before someone leaves. But through the uncanny urgency
of real departure, the situation exits the realm of metaphor. So
it is that through this very departure things continue--with no
other ties than these forests of signs, these symbols of absence
and, as the Kabbalah puts it, these letters, initiating other encounters
and other spaces. These are the icons of what one begins to understand
might still be said--resembling the 'angels' which have become
nothing more than a manner of speaking." M.
de Certeau (Terdiman,1992).
spoken
here: "The original settlers who came here to
New Mexico in 1598--to the Nueba Mexico, as the land was called
at that time--brought with them a sixteenth-century Spanish that
was fundamentally rural--Astilian, mixed with the speech of Andalusians,
Asturians, Basques, and Galicians..."As the Spanish language
spread throughout central New Spain during the course of the sixteenth
century, it adopted many words from the Indian dialect, particularly
from the Nahuatl. Most of this vocabulary referred to items related
to the culture of the Aztecs and for which the Spaniards had no
equivalents in their tongue." Unlike in Mexico, however, where
these terms have undergone changes, in New Mexico most of the words "are
still pronounced very much as they were spoken by the early seventeenth-century
settlers." During the next three centuries, although some
indigenous Indian words were acquired, the vocabulary remained
basically the same. During these times, however, at the end of
the twentieth century, "the dialect is losing its struggle
for existence because English is the official language of the area." (Cobos,1983)
macular
degeneration: "The macular is the central area
of the retina directly behind the pupil. It receives the most critically
focused central light rays and thus provides the central portion
of the visual field. It has the highest concentration of the keenest
receptor cells (cones), arranged in a perfectly regular fashion.
Cones are scattered about the retina in other areas, but it is
only in the tiny macular area that their number and arrangement
is sufficient to allow good visual acuity....Loss of central vision
is the main symptom of macular disease. The patient with advanced
macular degeneration must look off to the side in order to bring
an object into view." (Michelson,1980)
in the
mirror: "it must be remembered that one of the
attributes of the Great Mother Goddess, whose cult was widespread
in the Near East, was a mirror which she held in her hand. From
this arose the proposition, which we share, that mirrors symbolized
fertility." (Martynov,1991)
Whenever
you see a mirror: (Eco,1989)
deposited
his shit: "You set a problem--for example, eliminating
dog shit from the sidewalks of Paris. This is, by the way, a massive
problem. I recall reading somewhere that four hundred tons appear
on the streets each day, which seems a lot, but perhaps not if
you remember that no French family or shop is complete without
a dog--and some of those dogs are big. Little children in Paris
are taught not only to look both ways before crossing the street,
but also to look down before walking on the sidewalk." (Watson,1995)
plastic
rings: "The 8 offers no half-way measures. It
is either persona; limitation or spiritual freedom, splendor or
degradation, the casket or the rainbow, the terrestrial or the
celestial." (Helive,1977)
a persistent
wind: "In South Africa, a Xhosa priest-diviner
would lead a large number of people up a convenient hill, and fill
his mouth with a special potion which he spat right into the eye
of the wind, while directing a mass demonstration of communal rage.
In parts of southern India, the priest confronted a storm entirely
on his own, armed with just a sword, a club and a flaming torch." (Bloomfield,1897)
demonic
jest: "'These are the things I've written,' James
Hillman says, sweeping a hand across a long shelf of books in the
office of his Connecticut house. There are nearly 20 books that
he wrote or co-wrote...It seems an ironic monument to someone intent
on dismantling the ego, hero and self. After all, what is such
a shelf if not a tribute to an ego-driven, heroic self-image? His
answer is typically Hillmanesque, mixing metaphor and myth: He
gets possessed by demons. 'The demonic is something that is a taskmaster
to do these things or say these things or produce these things,'
he explains. 'It's the slave driver. You spend your life making
it, then it tortures you...'" (Yoffe,1995)
West Wind: "West
has persistently symbolized satanic darkness, grief, and death for
the Christians. Christ on the cross faced west. The expression 'to
go west,' meaning to die, still occurs in popular usage. The early
Christian attitude toward west is expressed as follows in a forth-century
sermon to newly baptized converts: 'You stretched forth your hand and
with this gesture you renounced Satan as thought he were actually present..." (Gordon,1971)
East Wind: "The
'Apostolical Constitutions,' which were probably written towards the
end of the third century, state 'let us rise up with one consent, and
looking towards the east...pray to God eastward, who is ascending up
to the heaven of heavens to the east; remembering also the ancient
situation of paradise in the east.'" (Ibid.)
spoke: "The
speech that bursts forth from the Biblical prophet is already stamped
into words; it is rhythmically articulated, 'objective' speech. And
yet it is not a discourse from the speaker, which he merely utters:
it embraces the whole person, the whole speaking human body, alive
in itself and now inspired...it embraces the whole existence of this
man: the whole man is mouth." M. Buber, "Symbolic and Sacramental
Existence in Judaism." (Campbell, 1985).
exemplary
love: "I believe that what we become depends
on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren't trying
to teach us." (Eco,1988)
to trek
further: "When he was not working in his studio
at the Jas, he wandered off alone into the countryside, to dream
by the Infernets dam, or at the foot of Mont Sainte-Victorire.
Sometimes, by nightfall, he would find himself far from Aix, and
would ask hospitality from a peasant for the night and sleep on
the straw." (Perruchot,1961)
paths
zigzagging: "when Katz asked !Kung shamans to
draw themselves as they conceived of themselves, they produced
various forms derived, by synaesthesia, from entopic phenomena.
One man drew zigzag legs and a zigzag spine. The rest of his body
was, he said, represented by detached zigzags." (Lewis-Williams,1989)
I am
discussing: "We arrived at (Andy) Clausen's to
find Corso wild eyed and red faced. He paced up and down the living
room, disappearing once in awhile, returning with renewed energy.
Nothing Ginsberg said seemed right. I tried to imagine what it
must have been like--their first meeting in a Manhattan bar back
in 1950, Allen twenty-four and Gregory twenty, Gregory just out
of prison and Allen already steeping in the wise madness of William
Burroughs and Jack Kerouac.
There was no literary talk at Clausen's that night, no reminiscing on long-gone
times. Ginsberg and I made sandwiches in the kitchen, devouring them just as
Corso bounded back into sight. He screamed: 'WHAT DID YOU TELL THIS MAN? THIS
MAN THINKS HE'S A POET. BUT HE'S GOING TO DIE, SEE? AND HIS POETRY WON'T BE
REMEMBERED.'
"'I didn't say anything, Gregory, ' I replied.
"'Oh yeh! he exclaimed, backing up several steps and
jumping into the air. 'YOU'RE BOTH JEWISH YENTAS. ALL YOU CAN DO IS PRY INTO
OTHER PEOPLE'S BUSINESS.' Then, he broke out laughing." (Cherovski,1988)
We set out: "They
danced down the streets like dingle-dodies. and I shambled after as
I've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the
only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live..." (Kerouac,1957)
which
is always possible: (Hugo,1900?)
this shallow identity: "The
genome is incredibly resourceful, and when posed with the question,
'How do I achieve the development and evolution of this new structure?'
there's more and more evidence that it just goes back to itself and
says, 'let's rearrange these genes in a different way in a different
place to come up with what would appear to be something completely
novel.'" M. McFall-Ngal. (Yoon, 1994).
shell-strewn
beach: "In risky habitats full of light and life
and predators, (Geerat Vermeiji) documented evidence of architectural
innovations in more modern shells, changes what helped to protect
a shell's inhabitant. Over time shells appeared more tightly coiled,
with greater buttressing, showing more teeth lining increasing
smaller openings in heavily guarded entryways.
"Meanwhile, the fossil record showed crabs, fish and others
who would dine on these shelled delicacies diversifying and becoming better at
cracking, popping, drilling and peeling their victims open--all mounting evidence
in favor of an hypothesis that predicts that life on earth will only get more
and more difficult." (Yoon,1995)
sniffing
its spindrift: "You can only feign that you love
the ocean by caressing it; the ocean would demand as an act of
love that you drown in it." C. Frentes. (Lundkuist,1991).
outside
the City Limits: "it is from the beginning of
the nineteenth century that everyone has a right to her or his
own little box for her or his own little personal decay; but on
the other hand, it is only from that start of the nineteenth century
that cemeteries began to be located at the border of cities. In
correlation with the individualization of death as an 'illness.'
The dead, it is supposed, bring illness to the living, and it is
the presence and proximity of the dead right beside the houses,
next to the church, almost in the middle of the street, it is the
proximity that propagates death itself. This major theme of illness
spread by the contagion in the cemeteries persisted until the end
of the eighteenth century, until, during the nineteenth century,
the shift of cemeteries toward the suburbs was initiated. The cemeteries
then came to constitute, no longer the sacred and immortal heart
of the city, but 'the other city,' where each family possesses
its dark resting place." (Foucault,1986)
ominous
incompletion: "Yesterday, the anniversary of
my father's death. Rarely have I been more emotionally dejected.
Tendency toward individuality; generality calls me, but I am a
dead end. Thus, during these twelve months, I have experienced
a constant thrust toward the outside; and inside, I remain empty.
Seek strength from art (Rembrandt), from humanity (Mickiewicz),
from nature itself (Serres), from living, suffering nature." (Michelet,1984)
of the
Other:
In the archaeology review,
the skeleton
of a superb Neanderthal man--
I wonder where the woman lies,
why weren't they buried together.
Nor is Novalis beside his
beloved Sophie....
(G. Tartler. From, "Why Do You Care For Eminescu's Woman?")
Note: My mother's name is Sophie.
It's only
to net: R. Juarroz. From, "Seventh Vertical Poetry." W.S.
Merwin, translator.
BIBLIOGRAPHY