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Three Proofs, Richard Siken

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What can you know about a person? They shift/ in the light. You can't light up all sides at once. Add/ a second light and you get a second darkness, it's only/ fair. He is looking at the wall and I am looking at his/ looking. Difficult thing, to be scrutinized so long.

Richard Siken, War of the Foxes

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And we did not age. The things around us didn't last long enough to grow old, replaced and rehabilitated at lightning speed. Our memory didn't have time to associate them with moments of existence.

The Years, Annie Ernaux

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I leaned against the beauty of the world / And I held the smell of the seasons in my hands

Anna de Noailles, as quoted in Les Années (The Years) by Annie Ernaux

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--when she copies down sentences that tell one how to live, which have the undeniable weight of truth because they come from books. There is no real happiness except that which we are aware of while we are feeling it

The Years, Annie Ernaux

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The panel was set about one and a half metres off the ground. I drew closer, growing more and more astonished by the beauty of the composition, until my face was all but pressed to the surface. It was extraordinary. Two metres wide by three metres high. By candlelight, the colours gained a weight and a depth that made my chest tighten. I felt as if it were the first time I was looking at a real painting, as if I'd never seen anything so beautiful. So many years had passed since I'd worked with my teacher that I'd quite forgotten the feeling of standing face to face with an ancient piece, without museum lighting, without a line to keep me from getting too close and touching the craquelure, smelling the age of the materials, detecting the brushstrokes under the layers of glazing and the patina. It was like pushing past the imposture of sanctity and stepping into the painting itself, taking hold of it, all the genius that lay behind the image and served like a precision mechanism: the gears of a clock that had been hidden for hundreds of years but never stopped ticking.

The Forgery, Ave Barreta

Translated by Ellen Jones and Robin Myers

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Svetlana Alpert says that looking at Dutch paintings is less like looking into a window than at a map or a mirror; these surfaces are intended to stay surfaces; they are the rendered aspect of the world, concerned not so much with the illusion of depth that perspective tries to create as with a scrupulous rendering of the optical surface, things as they are loved by the eye. These rooms are witness to such acts of attention; here is testament to the eye's profound engagement with the splendid look of things.

Mark Doty, Still Life with Oysters and Lemon: On Objects and Intimacy

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More world, just when you think you’ve seen what there is to see. That is how I felt, coming back to life after a period of grief, reentering the world. Well, that phrase is somewhat misleading. Of course I’d never left; it was simply that I was going through the motions of a life in which I no longer had faith, because I had come too close to death. I’d seen through to the other side of the daily, and I could not help myself from focusing on the fact that everything disappears, everything’s brief. I’d see lovers in the street then and think to myself, Don’t they know? Can’t they see where they’re headed? I was possessed by vanitas; I needed no reminder. Desire brings us back. My exuberant, golden new dog, racing down the sand slopes of the Beech Forest toward me, sheer embodiment of eagerness, given over entirely to running, wind streaming his long ears back, his eyes filling with me. The roses, in June, which deck the front of this house in a flaring pink crescendo of bloom, old roses, dense flowerheads packed with petals, with handsome and evocative names: Eden, Constance Spry, Madame Gre´goire Staechelin. The startling quality of presence in Paul’s eyes, when they are suddenly direct, warm blue-brown, catching lamplight. The particular whole-body enthusiasm with which he gives himself over to something he loves, outcries of delight that know no reservations—for Joni Mitchell singing a moody ballad, or the sight of our old retriever, Arden, sitting poised in the falling snow, completely happy, his dense black curls gone arctic. Not that grief vanishes—far from it—but that it begins in time to coexist with pleasure; sorrow sits right beside the rediscovery of what is to be cherished in experience. Just when you think you’re done.

Mark Doty, Still Life with Oysters and Lemon: On Objects and Intimacy

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The heart is a repository of vanished things

Mark Doty, Still Life with Oysters and Lemon: On Objects and Intimacy

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This is what history is: all those centuries of bodies, moving over these canals, twisting and blooming into life in these houses, these streets; all that flesh hungering, coming together, separating, continuing, accumulating, relinquishing, aging and breaking down. Bodies as tulips bent to the demands of light, colored into blossom, spent.

Mark Doty, Still Life with Oysters and Lemon: On Objects and Intimacy

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There is a whole community built around the reassignment and redistribution of things. It pretends to be concerned with value, and of course on one level it is; there are precious objects that escalate in price, and represent concrete forms of wealth. But many things next-to-worthless, or only of ordinary value, like my scarred pitcher, are also there to be dealt with. Things must go somewhere when they are relinquished; orphaned belongings must be placed, settled, in order to keep the world aright.

Mark Doty, Still Life with Oysters and Lemon: On Objects and Intimacy

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She did nothing but love us, and dwell in the world of collapse and delight.

Mark Doty, Still Life with Oysters and Lemon: On Objects and Intimacy

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Painting creates silence. You could examine the objects themselves, the actors in a Dutch still life-- this knobbed beaker, this pewter salver, this knife-- and, lovely as all antique utilitarian objects are, they are not, would not be, poised on the edge these same things inhabit when they are represented. These things exist-- if indeed they are still around at all-- in time. It is the act of painting them that makes them perennially poised, an emergent truth about to be articulated, a word waiting to be spoken. Single word that has been forming all these years in the light on the knife's pearl handle, in the drops of moisture on nearly translucent grapes: At the end of time, will that word be said?

Mark Doty, Still Life with Oysters and Lemon: On Objects and Intimacy

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But the still life resides in absolute silence. Portraits often seem pregnant with speech, or as if their subjects have just finished saying something, or will soon speak the thoughts that inform their faces, the thoughts we’re invited to read. Landscapes are full of presences, visible or unseen; soon nymphs or a stag or a band of hikers will make themselves heard. But no word will ever be spoken here, among the flowers and snails, the solid and dependable apples, this heap of rumpled books, this pewter plate on which a few opened oysters lie, giving up their silver. These are resolutely still, immutable, poised for a forward movement that will never occur. The brink upon which still life rests is the brink of time, the edge of something about to happen. Everything that we know crosses this lip, over and over, like water over the edge of a fall, as what might happen does, as any of the endless variations of what might come true does so, and things fall into being, tumble through the progression of existing in time.

Mark Doty, Still Life with Oysters and Lemon: On Objects and Intimacy

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…I have fallen in love with a painting. Though that phrase doesn’t seem to suffice, not really—rather’s it that I have been drawn into the orbit of a painting, have allowed myself to be pulled into its sphere by casual attraction deepening to something more compelling. I have felt the energy and life of the painting’s will; I have been held there, instructed. And the overall effect, the result of looking and looking into it’s brimming surface as long as I could look, is love, by which I mean a sense of tenderness toward experience, of being held within an intimacy with the things of the world.

Mark Doty, Still Life with Oysters and Lemon: On Objects and Intimacy