loudpersonataco - Tumblr blog

[loudpersonataco]

[loudpersonataco]

[loudpersonataco]

@chloeinletters

[loudpersonataco]

“The eye is the organ of distance and separation, whereas touch is the sense of nearness, intimacy and affection. The eye surveys, controls and investigates, whereas touch approaches and caresses. During overpowering emotional experiences, we tend to close off the distancing sense of vision; we close the eyes when dreaming, listening to music, or caressing our beloved ones. Deep shadows and darkness are essential, because they dim the sharpness of vision, make depth and distance ambiguous, and invite unconscious peripheral vision and tactile fantasy. How much more mysterious and inviting is the street of an old town with its alternating realms of darkness and light than are the brightly and evenly lit streets of today! The imagination and daydreaming are stimulated by dim light and shadow. In order to think clearly, the sharpness of vision has to be suppressed, for thoughts travel with an absent-minded and unfocused gaze. Homogenous bright light paralyses the imagination in the same way that homogenisation of space weakens the experience of being, and wipes away the sense of place. The human eye is most perfectly tuned for twilight rather than bright daylight. Mist and twilight awaken the imagination by making visual images unclear and ambiguous; a Chinese painting of a foggy mountain landscape, or the raked sand garden of Ryoan-ji Zen Garden give rise to an unfocused way of looking, evoking a trance-like, meditative state.”

— Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin

[loudpersonataco]

I got to hold a 500,000 year old hand axe at the museum today.

It's right-handed

I am right-handed

There are grooves for the thumb and knuckle to grip that fit my hand perfectly

I have calluses there from holding my stylus and pencils and the gardening tools.

There are sharper and blunter parts of the edge, for different types of cutting, as well as a point for piercing.

I know exactly how to use this to butcher a carcass.

A homo erectus made it

Some ancestor of mine, three species ago, made a tool that fits my hand perfectly, and that I still know how to use.

Who were you

A man? A woman? Did you even use those words?

Did you craft alone or were you with friends? Did you sing while you worked?

Did you find this stone yourself, or did you trade for it? Was it a gift?

Did you make it for yourself, or someone else, or does the distinction of personal property not really apply here?

Who were you?

What would you think today, seeing your descendant hold your tool and sob because it fits her hands as well?

What about your other descendant, the docent and caretaker of your tool, holding her hands under it the way you hold your hands under your baby's head when a stranger holds them.

Is it bizarre to you, that your most utilitarian object is now revered as holy?

Or has it always been divine?

Or is the divine in how I am watching videos on how to knap stone made by your other descendants, learning by example the way you did?

Tomorrow morning I am going to the local riverbed in search of the appropriate stones, and I will follow your example.

The first blood spilled on it will almost certainly be my own, as I learn the textures and rhythm of how it's done.

Did you have cuss words back then? Gods to blaspheme when the rock slips and you almost take your thumbnail off instead? Or did you just scream?

I'm not religious.

But if spilling my own blood to connect with a stranger who shared it isn't partaking in the divine

I don't know what is.

[loudpersonataco]

”The total number of minds in the universe is one. In fact, consciousness is a singularity phasing within all beings." --Erwin Schrödinger

Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes. --Carl Jung. All In Shinya SUZUKI

[loudpersonataco]

The Secret

by Denise Levertov

Two girls discover  the secret of life  in a sudden line of  poetry.

I who don’t know the  secret wrote  the line. They  told me

(through a third person)  they had found it but not what it was  not even

what line it was. No doubt  by now, more than a week  later, they have forgotten  the secret,

the line, the name of  the poem. I love them  for finding what  I can’t find,

and for loving me  for the line I wrote,  and for forgetting it  so that

a thousand times, till death  finds them, they may  discover it again, in other  lines

in other  happenings. And for  wanting to know it,  for

assuming there is  such a secret, yes,  for that  most of all.

[loudpersonataco]

This is my brother, and I need a shovel to love him

Steven Berkoff, The Fall of the House of Usher / Anne Carson, Antigonick / @taohun / Lindsey Drager, The Archive of Alternative Endings / Holly Warburton, Sisters / Jean Anouilh, Antigone (trans. Lewis Galantiere) / Zadie Smith, On Beauty / Emily Horne and Joey Comeau, A Softer World

[loudpersonataco]

— R. D. Laing, The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness

[loudpersonataco]

“Consider that you can see less than 1% of the electromagnetic spectrum and hear less than 1% of the acoustic spectrum. As you read this, you are traveling at 220 km/sec across the galaxy. 90% of the cells in your body carry their own microbial DNA and are not ‘you’. The atoms in your body are 99.9999999999999999% empty space and none of them are the ones you were born with, but they all originated in the belly of a star. Human beings have 46 chromosomes, 2 less than the common potato. The existence of the rainbow depends on the conical photoreceptors in your eyes; to animals without cones, the rainbow does not exist. So you don’t just look at a rainbow, you create it. This is pretty amazing, especially considering that all the beautiful colors you see represent less than 1% of the electromagnetic spectrum.”

— NASA Lunar Science Institute, We Originated in the Belly of a Star (2012)

[loudpersonataco]

I drew a little something for the Hiveworks micro comic summer~

[loudpersonataco]

I've Dreamed of You So Much

by Robert Desnos

I’ve dreamed of you so much that you are losing your reality. Is there still time to touch this living body And to plant on this mouth the birth Of the voice that I hold dear?

I’ve dreamed of you so much that my arms accustomed In embracing your shadow to crossing over my chest would not reach Around your body, perhaps. And that, before the real semblance of what has haunted And governed me for days and years, I would become a shadow, doubtless. Oh sentimental hesitations.

I’ve dreamed of you so much that there is Doubtless not time for me to wake up now. I sleep standing up, my body exposed To all semblance of life And love and you, the only one Who matters to me now, I would be less able to touch your forehead And your lips than the first lips And first forehead to come my way.

I’ve dreamed of you so much, walked, spoken, Slept with your ghost so much That all that remains for me to do perhaps, And yet, is to be a ghost Among the ghosts and a hundred times More shadow than the shadow which strolls And will stroll blithely On the sundial of your life.

[loudpersonataco]

Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches?

by Mary Oliver

Have you ever tried to enter the long black branches of other lives– tried to imagine what the crisp fringes, full of honey, hanging from the branches of the young locust trees, in early morning, feel like? Do you think this world was only an entertainment for you? Never to enter the sea and notice how the water divides with perfect courtesy, to let you in! Never to lie down on the grass, as though you were the grass! Never to leap to the air as you open your wings over the dark acorn of your heart! No wonder we hear, in your mournful voice, the complaint that something is missing from your life! Who can open the door who does not reach for the latch? Who can travel the miles who does not put one foot in front of the other, all attentive to what presents itself continually? Who will behold the inner chamber who has not observed with admiration, even with rapture, the outer stone? Well, there is time left– fields everywhere invite you into them. And who will care, who will chide you if you wander away from wherever you are, to look for your soul? Quickly, then, get up, put on your coat, leave your desk! To put one’s foot into the door of the grass, which is the mystery, which is death as well as life, and not be afraid! To set one’s foot in the door of death, and be overcome with amazement! To sit down in front of the weeds, and imagine god the ten-fingered, sailing out of his house of straw, nodding this way and that way, to the flowers of the present hour, to the song falling out of the mockingbird’s pink mouth, to the tippets of the honeysuckle, that have opened in the night To sit down, like a weed among weeds, and rustle in the wind! Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life? While the soul, after all, is only a window, and the opening of the window no more difficult than the wakening from a little sleep. Only last week I went out among the thorns and said to the wild roses: deny me not, but suffer my devotion. Then, all afternoon, I sat among them. Maybe I even heard a curl or two of music, damp and rouge red, hurrying from their stubby buds, from their delicate watery bodies. For how long will you continue to listen to those dark shouters, caution and prudence? Fall in! Fall in! A woman standing in the weeds. A small boat flounders in the deep waves, and what’s coming next is coming with its own heave and grace. Meanwhile, once in a while, I have chanced, among the quick things, upon the immutable. What more could one ask? And I would touch the faces of the daises, and I would bow down to think about it. That was then, which hasn’t ended yet. Now the sun begins to swing down. Under the peach-light, I cross the fields and the dunes, I follow the ocean’s edge. I climb, I backtrack. I float. I ramble my way home.

[loudpersonataco]

Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches?

by Mary Oliver

Have you ever tried to enter the long black branches of other lives– tried to imagine what the crisp fringes, full of honey, hanging from the branches of the young locust trees, in early morning, feel like? Do you think this world was only an entertainment for you? Never to enter the sea and notice how the water divides with perfect courtesy, to let you in! Never to lie down on the grass, as though you were the grass! Never to leap to the air as you open your wings over the dark acorn of your heart! No wonder we hear, in your mournful voice, the complaint that something is missing from your life! Who can open the door who does not reach for the latch? Who can travel the miles who does not put one foot in front of the other, all attentive to what presents itself continually? Who will behold the inner chamber who has not observed with admiration, even with rapture, the outer stone? Well, there is time left– fields everywhere invite you into them. And who will care, who will chide you if you wander away from wherever you are, to look for your soul? Quickly, then, get up, put on your coat, leave your desk! To put one’s foot into the door of the grass, which is the mystery, which is death as well as life, and not be afraid! To set one’s foot in the door of death, and be overcome with amazement! To sit down in front of the weeds, and imagine god the ten-fingered, sailing out of his house of straw, nodding this way and that way, to the flowers of the present hour, to the song falling out of the mockingbird’s pink mouth, to the tippets of the honeysuckle, that have opened in the night To sit down, like a weed among weeds, and rustle in the wind! Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life? While the soul, after all, is only a window, and the opening of the window no more difficult than the wakening from a little sleep. Only last week I went out among the thorns and said to the wild roses: deny me not, but suffer my devotion. Then, all afternoon, I sat among them. Maybe I even heard a curl or two of music, damp and rouge red, hurrying from their stubby buds, from their delicate watery bodies. For how long will you continue to listen to those dark shouters, caution and prudence? Fall in! Fall in! A woman standing in the weeds. A small boat flounders in the deep waves, and what’s coming next is coming with its own heave and grace. Meanwhile, once in a while, I have chanced, among the quick things, upon the immutable. What more could one ask? And I would touch the faces of the daises, and I would bow down to think about it. That was then, which hasn’t ended yet. Now the sun begins to swing down. Under the peach-light, I cross the fields and the dunes, I follow the ocean’s edge. I climb, I backtrack. I float. I ramble my way home.

[loudpersonataco]

yilfa snorgelsson // on earth we're briefly gorgeous

[loudpersonataco]

yilfa snorgelsson // on earth we're briefly gorgeous

[loudpersonataco]

neverafter // wild geese by mary oliver