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To Say Before Going to Sleep

I would like to sing someone to sleep, to sit beside someone and be there. I would like to rock you and sing softly and go with you to and from sleep. I would like to be the one in the house who knew: The night was cold. And I would like to listen in and listen out into you, into the world, into the woods.

The clocks shout to one another striking, and one sees to the bottom of time. And down below one last, strange man walks by and rouses a strange dog. And after that comes silence.

I have laid my eyes upon you wide; and they hold you gently and let you go when something stirs in the dark.” 

― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Images

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Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be?…Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory…that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others. ~from A Return to Love, by Marianne Williamson.

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[He] picked up stones, and he threw down stones; but he could find the Shiny-Bright Stone anywhere. 

All at once the hill of grey stones lit up with light; and every stone was a Shiny-Bright Stone. 

[He] grabbed the nearest, but it was not his stone, for all the shiny-brightness went out of it. He threw it down again, and went on picking up and throwing down. But he could not find [what he was looking for].

Fairy Stories for Tiny Folk, 1929

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[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in

my heart)i am never without it(anywhere

i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done

by only me is your doing,my darling)

                                                      i fear

no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want

no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)

and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant

and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows

(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud

and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows

higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)

and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

-e.e. cummings

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The Dark Night

One dark night, fired with love's urgent longings - ah, the sheer grace! -  I went out unseen, my house being now all stilled. In darkness, and secure, by the secret ladder, disguised, - ah, the sheer grace! -  in darkness and concealment, my house being now all stilled.  On that glad night in secret, for no one saw me, nor did I look at anything with no other light or guide than the One that burned in my heart.  This guided me more surely than the light of noon to where he was awaiting me - him I knew so well -  there in a place where no one appeared.  O guiding night! O night more lovely than the dawn! O night that has united  the Lover with his beloved, transforming the Beloved into his Lover. Upon my flowering breast,  which I kept wholly for him alone,  there he lay sleeping, and I caressing him there in a breeze from the fanning cedars. When the breeze blew from the turret, as I parted his hair, it wounded my neck with its gentle hand, suspending all my senses.  I abandoned and forgot myself, laying my face on my Beloved; all things ceased; I went out from myself, leaving my cares forgotten among the lilies.

-Saint John of the Cross

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on Morandi

The objects, processing away from the viewer, seem to blend together in a deliberate ambiguity that draws attention to the phenomenological experiences of seeing and being in space.

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In this volume attention is called to various peculiarities found on the photographs, such as thin, dark lanes of uniform width among the stars, curves and straight lines of small stars, often of equal magnitude. I am aware of the fact that these singular features are believed by many to be fortuitous and that strikingly similar figures can be reproduced by artificial means. While it is possible that they have no meaning in reality, there is a probability that many of them are real and are due to some law that forces such alignments upon the stars. Attention has been called to the most striking of these features so that should it ever be desirable to investigate them, there will be ample material to work on. It is probable that some are due purely to chance, and that others are real and are due to some law that will reveal itself in the course of time.

EE Barnard A Photographic Atlas of Selected Regions of the Milky Way. E.E. Barnard was the last of the great visual observers and the first of the long line of photographic atlas makers with wide–angle telescopes. “To me the views of the galaxy were the most fascinating part of comet–seeking, and more than paid me for the many nights of unsuccessful work. It was these views of the great structures in the Sagittarius region of the Milky Way that inspired me with the desire to photograph these extraordinary features.”

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I think you first like looking at it. If you don’t like looking at it, it’s not going to awaken anything in you,” he says. “That’s why you can learn so much from people like Cézanne and Walker Evans, who were so interested in the picture, the making and the being of the picture. Never mind the subject—the subject is carried by the picture. And without the pictureness of the picture, the subject’s dead. It’s just information.....I photographed a lot of events, and even made them happen, so I have a relationship to event,” Wall says. “But slowly, I started thinking more about the absence of event. And I became more interested in that.

j wall https://canadianart.ca/features/jeff-wall-2/

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There is always water in my films. I like water, especially brooks. The sea is too vast. I don't fear it; it is just monotonous. In nature I like smaller things. Microcosm, not macrocosm; limited surfaces. I love the Japanese attitude to nature. They concentrate on a confined space reflecting the infinite. Water is a mysterious element -- because of its structure. And it is very cinegenic; it transmits movement, depth, changes. Nothing is more beautiful than water.

Tarkovsky

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Your pier-glass or extensive surface of polished steel made to be rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination, and lo! The scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round the little sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially, and it is only your candle which produces the flattering illusion of a concentric arrangement, its light falling with an exclusive optical selection.

George Eliot Middlemarch (1871) 

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Robert Boyle's wish-list, ca.1660-1665 :

The Prolongation of Life. The Recovery of Youth, or at least some of the Marks of it, as new Teeth, new Hair colour’d as in youth. The Art of Flying. The Art of Continuing long under water, and exercising functions freely there. The Cure of Wounds at a Distance. The Cure of Diseases at a distance or at least by Transplantation. The Attaining Gigantick Dimensions. The Emulating of Fish without Engines by Custome and Education only. The Acceleration of the Production of things out of Seed. The Transmutation of Metalls. The makeing of Glass Malleable. The Transmutation of Species in Mineralls, Animals, and Vegetables. The Liquid Alkaest and Other dissolving Menstruums. The making of Parabolicall and Hyperbolicall Glasses. The making Armor light and extremely hard. The practicable and certain way of finding Longitudes. The use of Pendulums at Sea and in Journeys, and the Application of it to watches. Potent Druggs to alter or Exalt Imagination, Waking, Memory, and other functions, and appease pain, procure innocent sleep, harmless dreams, etc. A Ship to saile with All Winds, and A Ship not to be Sunk. Freedom from Necessity of much Sleeping exemplify’d by the Operations of Tea and what happens in Mad-Men. Pleasing Dreams and physicall Exercises exemplify’d by the Egyptian Electuary and by the Fungus mentioned by the French Author. Great Strength and Agility of Body exemplify’d by that of Frantick Epileptick and Hystericall persons. A perpetuall Light. Varnishes perfumable by Rubbing

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The Emerald Tablet of Hermes

2) That which is above is from that which is below, and that which is below is from that which is above, working the miracles of one.

2) It attests: The above from the below, and the below from the above -the work of the miracle of the One.

2) What is above is like what is below, and what is below is like that which is above. To make the miracle of the one thing.

2) Whatever is below is similar to that which is above. Through this the marvels of the work of one thing are procured and perfected.

2) That wch is below is like that wch is above & that wch is above is like yt wch is below to do ye miracles of one only thing.

2) These things below with those above and those with these join forces again so that they produce a single thing the most wonderful of all.

2) the superior agrees with the inferior, and the inferior agrees with the superior, to effect that one truly wonderful work.

2) What is below is like that which is above, and what is above is similar to that which is below to accomplish the wonders of the one thing.

2) As below, so above; and as above so below. With this knowledge alone you may work miracles.

2) that which is below is like that which is on high, and that which is on high is like that which is below; by these things are made the miracles of one thing.

2 )What is above is like what is below. What is below is like what is above. The miracle of unity is to be attained.

2) See, the highest comes from the lowest, and the lowest from the highest; indeed a marvelous work of the tao.

2) that the lover is to the heigher, and the heigher to the lower aunsweren. The worcher forsoth of all myracles is the one and sool God, of and fro Whom Cometh all meruelous operacions.

2) that lower thyngis to hyer thyng, and hyer to lower be correspondent. But the Werker of myraclis is on Godde alone, fro Home descendyth euiry meruulus werk.

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By repeating a reproduction – a repetition – of the “Last Supper,” Warhol helped to show how drained of aura it really was, in a world in which photography levels all differences between the objects it presents.

gopnik

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Crossing half of China to sleep with you

YU XIUHUA

To spend or to be spent, what’s the difference if there is any?

Two bodies collide

— the force, the flower opened by the force, and the virtual Spring brought by the flower — nothing more than this,

and this we mistake as life restarting.

In half of China, things are happening:

volcanoes erupt, rivers run dry,

political prisoners and displaced workers are abandoned,

elk deer and red-crowned cranes get shot.

I cross the hail of bullets to sleep with you.

I press many nights into one morning to sleep with you.

I run across many of me and many of me run into one to sleep with you.

Of course I can be misguided by butterflies and mistake praise as Spring, and a village similar to Hengdian as home.

But all these are absolute

reasons that I spend a night with you.

(Translation by: Mind Di)

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Roland Barthes’ ‘cinematic condition’—the urge to disappear into an ‘anonymous, indifferent cube of darkness’

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Photographed on location or composed from specimens collected on walks through the woods, my images collectively describe a sense of place, while capturing myriad cycles of growth and decay. I am especially interested in the quiet moments that seem to hover between fragility and regeneration, where life feels suspended and uncertainty reigns. To help capture this, I shoot through sheets of Plexiglass filters that need to be illuminated or activated by the sunlight.  I first treat these with various painting mediums and then leave them outside to be weathered by the natural elements. They are rained on, bleached out by the sun, and often become embedded with bugs, leaves, spider webs, and dirt. A relationship between content and form emerges as nature serves as both my subject and my collaborator.  Light and shadow, transparent layering, and the element of chance also play a critical role in suggesting a type of passage or an illusionary window where the physical and nonphysical have the potential to meet. In essence, I see these photos as unsolved puzzles where the process of distorting the camera’s seemingly objective gaze yields more questions than answers and perception itself can easily slip to one side of the “road” or the other.

Krista Steinke on series Purgatory Road