Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies & The Sonnets to Orpheus, Edited and Translated by Stephen Mitchell
The only book I have with me on this trip.
"For there is no place where we can remain."
❤️
A window completely covered in ivy(?) on a textured pink-colored wall
Pink again, and windows...
I found some light in St. Peter's Basilica today. Michelangelo's ghost was there too :) Thank you, Jeremiah 💙
Oil painting "Pink Window of Time" by Rebecca Harp. A dimly lit room. Pink light streaming in through the window highlights a lamp on a small cabinet; a chandelier is reflected on the wall.
Thinking about time and light in this painting by Rebecca Harp, while a sleepless night spent in a hotel threatens to annihilate the coming day in every possible way.
Pink Window of Time by Rebecca Harp
#Music
youtu.be/Tj149G4DKD8?...
"‘Now the Sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their song, namely their silence. And though admittedly such a thing never happened, it is still conceivable that someone might possibly have escaped from their singing; but from their silence certainly never’ (Franz Kafka)."
Fascinating
"‘ ... to *unexpress the expressible*, to kidnap from the world’s language, which is the poor and powerful language of the passions, another speech, an exact speech’ (Roland Barthes)."
Ma Yuan's studies of the properties of water, southern Song Dynasty China, ca. 1190 - 1225 CE
1
We the mortals touch the metals,
the wind, the ocean shores, the stones,
knowing they will go on, inert or burning,
and I was discovering, naming all the these things:
it was my destiny to love and say goodbye.
Pablo Neruda, Still Another Day
"In the end—at our end—there is a pile of residue and memory over which others will visit and bargain and seek and moan. What will they find? What will they see of themselves in the dust of a life?"
Arthur Miller in interview with James Grissom
Beautiful, beautiful poem by Ellen Bass ❤️
Polaroid Decay
Color 600 film
Flower-muscle that slowly opens back the anemone to another meadow-dawn, until her womb can feel the polyphonic light of the sonorous heavens pouring down; muscle of an infinite acceptance, stretched within the silent blossom-star, at times so overpowered with abundance that sunset's signal for response is bare- ly able to return your too far hurled- back petals for the darkness to revive: you, strength and purpose of how many worlds! We violent ones remain a little longer, Ah but when, in which of all our lives, shall we at last be open and receivers? (Second Part, V, The Sonnets to Orpheus)
Rilke in a letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé, June 26, 1914
(in Rainer Maria Rilke: Duino Elegies & The Sonnets to Orpheus, edited and translated by Stephen Mitchell)
"I am like the little anemone I once saw in the garden in Rome: it had opened so wide during the day that it could no longer close at night. It was terrifying to see it in the dark meadow, wide open, still taking everything in, into its calyx, [...] with the much too vast night above it."
what a resplendent image of the sensation of time:
"for what is touch if not the accumulation of second upon second a succession of lullabies another time to which nothing can be given"
@dreamsofbeing.bsky.social, _An Absence of Sea_
Beautiful poems 💙
A body of water with broken ice fragments along the shoreline, birch trees, a cloudy sky, and mountains on the horizon.
Mom sent me a postcard from my favorite place. So many fond memories. Silence, birch trees... Pierre-Jean Jouve echoes from afar, "For we are where we are not." (quoted in Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space)
A cloud in the colors of sunrise: pink on top, ashen on the bottom
and comes April, "mixing memory and desire"
Thank you for sharing 🌸
April is National Poetry Month in the US, so I invite you to visit one of my favorite poetry sites: Harvard's Woodberry Poetry Room, with its unparalleled collection of readings by English-language poets. You can listen to many of their recordings here:
library.harvard.edu/sites/defaul...
A few more of Sam's poems based on the art of Francesca Woodman
www.harpyhybridreview.org/hybrid_works...
Sam Rasnake, from Hands
Acrylic painting: torrential rain, raging waters, and nothing else. A painting from the time when I was first clinically depressed. 15 years ago. There were many paintings like this one. I destroyed them all.
An old one: Deluge
Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room
"..the trees are rustling, the wheels churning yellow, and the tumult of the present seems like an elegy for past youth and past summers, and there rose in her mind a curious sadness, as if time and eternity showed through skirts and waistcoats, and she saw people passing tragically to destruction."
- at first sight here: perhaps moonlight on water under a grey sky - when I first saw it in the street: a piece of old wood left out by a bin
💧 sea dream 💧
💙
Magnolia tree in bloom. The flowers look as if they are talking to one another (maybe they are). B&W
Morning conversation