The light was incredible in my neighborhood today.
Alley light.
Leave a comment
photography
Mine tunnels are capacious, and the snows can enter freely.
via thomasjorion.com
http://www.thomasjorion.com/image/silencio/Ramane?gallery=Silencio2
Beautiful ruins.
This Spring has many faces: Miguel Ángel Sánchez’s portraits from Cairo
via masg.es
http://www.masg.es/index.php?/ongoing/el-alma-del-mundo/#
The assertion that a picture is worth 1,000 words always struck me as the shop-talk of a propagandist. A picture can strike where we are defenseless, and the pictorial media have been deployed so manipulatively in our era that looking can and should be thought of as a critical act, a skeptical one.
That said, these portraits of people from Cairo may well be worth thousands on thousands of words. Even through skepticism and resistance and all the defensive mental prophylactics, sometimes images of human eyes, human faces, human bodies with their scars and particularities, can be arresting, stirring. I love these faces – their ferocity and vulnerability and plaintiveness and strength. The photographer, Miguel Ángel Sánchez, calls the series The Soul of the World.
A perfume, immense and living.
via 128.95.104.14
_________
Te dehojé, como una rosa,
para verte tu alma,
y no la vi.
Mas todo en torno
– horizontes de tierras y de mares –,
todo, hasta el infinito,
se colmó de una esencia
inmensa y viva.
– Juan Ramon Jiminez
_____________
I took off petal after petal, as if you were a rose,
in order to see your soul,
and I didn’t see it.
However, everything around –
horizons of fields and oceans –
everything, even what was infinite,
was filled with a perfume,
immense and living.
– Translation by Robert Bly
______________
| My own attempt at translation:
I stripped you, And I did not see it. But everything around – Mine is a less beautiful way. But I really think there is something specific in the choice of “dehoje” in the first bit. The word is literally ‘to de-leaf,’ maybe best translated as “defoliate.” This seems a very specific choice – the poet is not saying he tore away the PETALS of the rose, but its LEAVES. I like the idea that a rose’s soul is found not in the heart of the flower, but under its leaves….this implies that the soul of the rose is the thorn….That said, I adore the translation on “esencia” as “perfume.” Gorgeous, gorgeous – it could have been “essence,” which is much more abstract and less haunting than perfume. |
____________
Poetry by Juan Ramon Jiminez.
Translation by Robert Bly.
Kindly made public by As It Ought to Be.
http://asitoughttobe.com/2010/03/13/saturday-poetry-series-presents-juan-ramo…
Photo by Kyle Griffith, 2001. Accessed through the Cities and Buildings Database of the University of Washington Digital Collection.
Available light.
via julianross.com
Typewriting.
A collection of photos of writers and their typewriters. Makes me sigh for my old Brother typewriter. Particularly poignant given recent news that no one is manufacturing typewriters anymore, anywhere.
Paintography
‘Double exposed’ paintings by Pakayla Biehn.
http://www.youshouldtakecare.com/index.php?/paintings/double-exposure-series/
People working in kitchens.
via edibleselby.com
There are few things more appealing than the look of rapt concentration on the face of a competent person doing something difficult. I also like looking into kitchens. This is a lovely collection of photographs.
War fetish.
Some photographs of the Afghanistan war by Kevin Frayer. I wish they were not beautiful but they are.
http://blogs.denverpost.com/captured/2011/05/10/on-war-kevin-frayer-in-afghan…
Entangled particles.
Quantum entanglement describes the metaphysics of devotion.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_entanglement
“Two particles can be related, or ‘entangled,’ in such a way that they instantly coordinate their properties regardless of distance in space and time…Eistein found entanglement particularly troubling, denigrating it as ‘spooky action at a distance.'” – Rivka Galchen, “Dream Machine: the Mind-Expanding World of Quantum Computing,” in the New Yorker, May 2nd, 2011.
Einstein could barely bring himself to believe in quantum physics, and resisted their influence until his death. Einstein also resisted love.
“If we are to survive in the environment we have made ourselves, may we have to be monstrous enough to greet our predicament?” – Nicholas Mosley, Hopeful Monsters (Dalkey Archive Press, 1991).
There is something monstrous about our interweavings, the invisible bonds that tangle our fates together, and something monstrous in the moment of reveal, when two particles collide in recognition.
Photograph by Karsten Heller.
via We Find Wildness:
http://www.we-find-wildness.com/2011/05/karsten-heller/heller_iii/
SZERETETT 
