Year’s end,
all corners
of this floating world, swept.
Matsuo Basho (English version by Lucien Stryk and Takashi Ikemoto). With thanks to The Mark on the Wall.
Edward Heim, New York, April Snow. From Pictorial Photography in America 1920 with thank to liquidnight.
The National | “Think You Can Wait” from the amazing film Win Win
Vivian Maier, Self-Portrait (Shadow on Wood) ca. 1960s, Steven Kasher Gallery with thanks to Woods Lot.
What makes Maier unique is that her pictures were made for no one, not even herself. They weren’t printed at all. They are pure witness. She records but never plays back. Her pictures have no intention but to represent what her curiosity and her feelings demand. That demand must have been pressing indeed, to generate so much meticulous work.
There comes a time when one asks, even of Shakespeare, even of Beethoven, is this all?
Aldous Huxley
Soon the child learns that there are strangers, and ceases to be a child.
“There’s a skin or hide between ourselves and our inner being. And in the West that skin is very thick. Inside us there’s a sea and that sea is your inner life, your spiritual life, and your sexual impulses - everything you’ve gotten from the memory stores of evolution. Then there’s the outside world made of buildings and automobiles. And these two worlds can’t rub against each other. It’s too painful. Therefore you develop a hide exactly like a cow develops a hide. You don’t want her guts to rub against the barn.”
—Robert Bly spoken to Lewis Hyde in an interview taken from Robert Bly In This World.
Photo by Luke Storms taken somewhere in India when I was there in 2005. Text courtesy of the exceptional curator at The Beauty We Love.
Some People Wake Up
“Again and again in history some people wake up. They have no ground in the crowd and move to broader deeper laws. They carry strange customs with them and demand room for bold and audacious action. The future speaks ruthlessly through them. They change the world. “
~Rainer Maria Rilke
Submitted by my good friend, Kirsten Liske. Thank you, and Happy New Year!
Submitted by the exceptional photographer, Todd Hido who currently has an exhibition at the Stephen Wirtz Gallery in San Francisco.
In speaking of this desire for our own faroff country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence … Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself … for they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.
C. S. Lewis (Thank you, veareflejos)
