“It is sometimes said that scientists are unromantic, that their passion to figure out robs the world of beauty and mystery. But is it not stirring to understand how the world actually works — that white light is made of colors, that color is the way we perceive the wavelengths of light, that transparent air reflects light, that in so doing it discriminates among the waves, and that the sky is blue for the same reason that the sunset is red? It does no harm to the romance of the sunset to know a little bit about it.”
—Carl Sagan
August 2011
July 2011
“Conceivable:
up there, in the cosmic network of rails,
like stars,
the red of two mouths.
Audible (before dawn?): a stone
that made the other its target.” —Paul Celan, from “Night,” trans. Michael Hamburger (via proustitute)
up there, in the cosmic network of rails,
like stars,
the red of two mouths.
Audible (before dawn?): a stone
that made the other its target.” —Paul Celan, from “Night,” trans. Michael Hamburger (via proustitute)
“I must be a mermaid, I have no fear of depths.”
—Anais Nin
“Darkness as well as light. Or do I mean darkness, another kind of light? Lucifer would say so, and I have a weakness for fallen angels.”
—Jeanette Winterson, (Art and Lies)
I prefer someone who stands out from the crowd, not someone who thinks like everyone I’ve encountered.
“My soul is impatient with itself, as with a bothersome child; its restlessness keeps growing and is forever the same. Everything interests me, but nothing holds me. I attend to everything, dreaming all the while…”
—Fernando Pessoa (The Book of Disquiet)
“I’ve always rejected being understood. To be understood is to prostitute oneself. I prefer to be taken seriously for what I’m not, remaining humanly unknown, with naturalness and all due respect.”
—Fernando Pessoa (The Book of Disquiet)
“May I kiss you then? On this miserable paper? I might as well open the window and kiss the night air.”
—Franz Kafka (via lastwaltzinvienna)
“
I have tried to write paradise
Do not move
Let the wind speak
that is paradise.
SKR-03-324
Saturn
Aurora on Saturn
Jupiter, you look beautiful tonight.
I miss my telescope. The fact that it is 1300 miles away and being neglected drives me mad.
“I was born in rain and I will die in rain.”
—Frida Kahlo
Watching storm clouds surrounded by stars light up with lightening; the rain feels so nice tonight.
If you could be happy, really happy, for just a while, but you knew from the start that it would end in sadness, and bring pain afterwards, would you choose to have that happiness or would you avoid it?
Ahh, I would choose happiness, although, it’s always fleeting..
I tend to find happiness in the infinite. Science, mathematics, music and poetry makes me happy. Nature, snow, light, dark, silence, the ocean: that’s happiness to me.
you are beautiful and your blog is perfection.
Thank you, oh so much.
“
You can go blind, waiting
Unbelievable quiet
except for their
soundings
Moving the sea around
Unbelievable quiet inside you, as they change
the face of water
The only other time I felt this still was watching Leif shoot up when
we were twelve
Sunlight all over his face
breaking
the surface of something
I couldn’t see
You can wait your
whole life
*
The Himalayas are on the move, appearing and disappearing in the snow in the Himalayas
Mahler
begins to fill
the half-dead auditorium
giant step by
giant step
The Colorado
The Snake
The Salmon
My grandfather walks across the front porch
spotted with cancer, smoking
a black cigar
The whales fold themselves back and back inside the long hallways of
salt
You have to stare back at the salt
the sliding mirrors
all day
just to see something
maybe
for the last time
*
By now they are asleep
some are asleep
on the bottom of the world
sucking the world in
and blowing it out
in wave-
lengths
Radiant ghosts
Leif laid his head back on a pillow and waiting for all the blood inside him
to flush down
a hole
After seeing whales what do you see?
The hills behind the freeway
power lines
green, green
grass
the green sea.
” —Michael Dickman, Seeing Whales
“
In the beginning the sound of holes, and the weight of treason and light paper streamers. and a hundred-fold, and below; and the girls with thickening braids, wet paper maps, brought round at last to see the slick animal caught in the rain. and the deluge; and the dark; and the story past the window..
and the window
and the stutter
and the thought was insubstantial, and stained; and the hands were limpid, and sought; and the children scattered in front of the wagon like increasing wind. and the pen that drew your name, and the one that would not; and a child with a small box of crayons, not yet opened; and the positioning of fingers and wrists..
and my hand was a token of yours
and the trees, pulled backwards.
“It is scribbled along the body
Impossible even to say a word
An alphabet has been stored beneath the ground
It is a practice alphabet, work of the hand
Yet not, not marks inside a box
For example, this is a mirror box
Spinoza designed such a box
and called it the Eighth Sky
called it the Nevercadabra House
as a joke
Yet not, not so much a joke
not Notes for Electronic Harp
on a day free of sounds
(but I meant to write “clouds”)
At night these same boulevards fill with snow
Lancers and dancers pass a poisoned syringe,
as you wrote, writing of death in the snow,
Patroclus and a Pharoah on Rue Ravignan
It is scribbled across each body
Impossible even to name a word
Look, you would say, how the sky falls
at first gently, then not at all
Two chemicals within the firefly are the cause,
twin ships, twin nemeses
preparing to metamorphose
into an alphabet in stone.” —Michael Palmer, Eighth Sky
Impossible even to say a word
An alphabet has been stored beneath the ground
It is a practice alphabet, work of the hand
Yet not, not marks inside a box
For example, this is a mirror box
Spinoza designed such a box
and called it the Eighth Sky
called it the Nevercadabra House
as a joke
Yet not, not so much a joke
not Notes for Electronic Harp
on a day free of sounds
(but I meant to write “clouds”)
At night these same boulevards fill with snow
Lancers and dancers pass a poisoned syringe,
as you wrote, writing of death in the snow,
Patroclus and a Pharoah on Rue Ravignan
It is scribbled across each body
Impossible even to name a word
Look, you would say, how the sky falls
at first gently, then not at all
Two chemicals within the firefly are the cause,
twin ships, twin nemeses
preparing to metamorphose
into an alphabet in stone.” —Michael Palmer, Eighth Sky
“
Make a list
of everything that’s
ever been
on fire –
Abandoned cars
Trees
The sea
Your mother burned down to the skeleton
so she could come back, born back from her bed, and walk around the
house again, exhausted
in slippers
What else?
Your brain
Your eyes
Your lungs
*
When you look down
inside yourself
what is there?
You are a walking bag of surgical instruments
shining from the inside out
and that’s just
today
Tomorrow it could be different
When I think of the childhood inside me I think of sunlight dying on
a windowsill
The voices of my friends
in the sunlight
All of us running around
outside our
deaths„.
“
The numbing of love lost hums blackbirds into hypnosis.
I tucked my teeth into the creases of your hand,
Asked you to hide them until I was ready to eat again.
In the sockets of our eyes, we hide gold wedding bands.
We stuff our mouths with chocolate as we cross the border.
In Morocco, women carry hot coals in their bare hands.
Searching for water, they make fires along the way.
Loving a boy at seventeen is different.
I loved him so hard my spine slid through my back.
“
Who will remember your fingers?
Their winged life? They flew
With the light in your look.
At the piano, stomping out hits from the forties,
They performed an incidental clowning
Routine of their own, deadpan puppets.
You were only concerned to get them to the keys.
But as you talked, as your eyes signalled
The strobes of your elation,
They flared, flicked balletic aerobatics.
I thought of birds in some tropical sexual
Play of display, leaping and somersaulting,
Doing strange things in the air, and dropping to the dust.
Those dancers of your excess!
With such deft, practical touches—-so accurate.
Thinking their own thoughts caressed like lightning
The lipstick into your mouth corners.
Trim conductors of your expertise,
Cavorting at your typewriter,
Possessed by infant spirit, puckish,
Who, whatever they did, danced or mimed it
In a weightless largesse of espressivo.
I remember your fingers. And your daughter’s
Fingers remember your fingers
In everything they do.
Her fingers obey and honour your fingers,
The Lares and Penates of our house.
“She is our moon, our tidal pull. She is the rich deep beneath the sea, the buried treasure, the expression in the owl’s eye, the perfume in the wild rose. She is what the water says when it moves.”
—Patricia A. McKillip
“I also painted a study of a seascape, nothing but a bit of sand, sea, sky, grey and lonely — sometime[s] I feel a need for that silence — where there’s nothing but the grey sea — with an occasional seabird. But otherwise, no other voice than the murmur of the waves.”
—Vincent van Gogh, from a letter to his brother Theo, 17 September 1882 (source)
“Crowding, like a fluttering bird, one sentence crosses the empty space between us.”
—Virginia Woolf, The Waves, (1931)
“Poems crystallize from the substance of time. A cluster of moments, like bees dangling from the hive’s mouth.”
—Anna Kamienska
“Somewhere a convict sobs into a book of poems
from the prison library, and I know why
his hands are careful not to break the brittle pages.” —Martín Espada
from the prison library, and I know why
his hands are careful not to break the brittle pages.” —Martín Espada
“dark waters and deep oceans. water pachyderms and deep resounding bellies. otherworldly songs and echoes. if you find the heartbeat of a whale you will hear it sigh. thunderous longing. consumed universes, spit and hanged in the sky. look at them turn turn turn and get swallowed again. lie here in cavernous darkness, let the waves cover you. sleep, dear, sleep, there is much to learn in the abdomen of the world.”
—(via silentsouls)
“During the winter, much of Yakutia experiences a temperature inversion which results in an unusual phenomena. When the temperature dips below minus 53° Celsius, you can often hear a soft whooshing noise like the sound of grain being poured. It is caused by vapour in one’s own breath turning to ice crystals in the cold, dry air. The local Yakut people call this sound ‘The Whisper of the Stars.’”
—Jonathan Safran Foer
“You don’t know it, but I often wake up at night,
I lie for a long time in the dark,
and I listen to you sleeping next to me, as a dog does,
on the shore of slow water from which shadows
and reflections rise, silent butterflies.
Last night you spoke in your sleep,
almost whining, talking of a wall
too high to climb down, towards the sea
seen only by you, distant and gleaming.
Playfully I whispered, Just calm down,
it isn’t all that high, we could make it.
You asked
whether down below there was sand to land on,
or black rock.
Sand, I answered, sand. And in your dream
maybe we dove together.” —Fabio Pusterla
I lie for a long time in the dark,
and I listen to you sleeping next to me, as a dog does,
on the shore of slow water from which shadows
and reflections rise, silent butterflies.
Last night you spoke in your sleep,
almost whining, talking of a wall
too high to climb down, towards the sea
seen only by you, distant and gleaming.
Playfully I whispered, Just calm down,
it isn’t all that high, we could make it.
You asked
whether down below there was sand to land on,
or black rock.
Sand, I answered, sand. And in your dream
maybe we dove together.” —Fabio Pusterla
