stellardrift

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“Do you think the universe fights for souls to be together? Some things are too strange and strong to be coincidences.”

— Emery Allen

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how nolan intended it

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"One third, more or less, of all the sorrow that the person I think I am must endure is unavoidable. It is the sorrow inherent in the human condition, the price we must pay for being sentient and self-conscious organisms, aspirants to liberation, but subject to the laws of nature and under orders to keep on marching, through irreversible time, through a world wholly indifferent to our well-being, toward decrepitude and the certainty of death. The remaining two thirds of all sorrow is homemade and, so far as the universe is concerned, unnecessary."

Aldous Huxley, Island

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Embroideries works by Tran Hung

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See the world as your self. Have faith in the way things are.

Love the world as your self; then you can care for all things.

-Lao Tzu

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The Seed Song

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Impressions

“The truth is not always beautiful, nor beautiful words the truth.”- Lao Tzu I thought it would be good to write. I don’t sit like I used to, don’t feel the need to as much as I used to. The writer’s block that came up around 2012/13, never really seemed to let go of me and so I didn’t feel the sense of hammering ot words that meant little to me.  This can be about impressions. I caught myself thinking about how riverbeds form and how innumerable impressions need to be made in the earth to carry a river forward. These are mostly invisible lines, indentations that matter but appear outwith our experience. One would have to be the river, step inside its flow to understand that every fissure, every cavity and silted bottom is part of the flow. I keep reading texts which undermine the things I had took for granted, things that were never  my own in any case. The purported European “enlightenment”; enlightenment for whom? Theories about past civilisations that project contemporary experiences on historic time. Another case of seeing the shimmering surface, glistening, glistering, without appreciating the myriad flows beneath.  To think we have a language speckled with Latin, rough, vulgar possessive terms. There is romance but there is also violence. A knotted and pulsing left over from a cruel Empire, aching to start its striations, its indentations once more. I am reminded of the bombed out German cities after the European wars, factories all still intact, still ready to go. Our machines clamber to get on top of us, and even our language is a little machine, driving our impulses against our deeper will. Heraclitus famously wrote that you can’t step in the same river twice. And plenty of other not so famous people probably said otherwise. A word is powerful, a name perhaps more so. Back to the river. To properly embody the river, to truly step inside the river is not just to place your feet in it but to experience it as flows, depth, indentation, silt and sand, flora, fauna, deep pulverizing eddies. I’m not done yet. To be made aware that the only constant is change. The sort of non linear experiences that derive from a deep feeling or empathic connection derive very different answers. To see that our own two feet are limitations upon ourselves, that when we sense only peripherally we see only the appearance of flow, bit when we get a little deeper, even allowing ourselves to step inside the flow, we experience a continuity, a deep sense of stability that we cannot feel without dropping our initial impressions. It is rather us who need to be worries about ourselves, about our discontinuity of experience, how language shifts us, tells us we are machines, even tells us that the world is a machine. When we dredge rivers we  lose the ephemeral, but quite nuanced language of flow, of a river’s soul. And we also lean more and more into that notion that nothing persists, when the truth couldn’t be more different. 

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“Freedom isn’t enough. What I desire doesn’t have a name yet.”

— Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart

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Kodak Ektar 100

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“I dreamt you, and when I awoke I was sure your spirit had just fluttered from the room. I have yanked you from your sleep before–into the dream I was dreaming. Twisted you like a spiral of hair around a finger. Love, you arrived with your heart full of birds.”

— Sandra Cisneros, from “Eyes of Zapata,” Daughters of the Fifth Sun: A Collection of Latina Fiction and Poetry (eds. Bryce Milligan, Mary Guerrero Milligan, and Angela de Hoyos (Riverhead Books, 1995)

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“God has not been trying an experiment on my faith or love in order to find out their quality. He knew it already. It was I who didn’t.”

— C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

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The sea with its perpetual oscillation, that obstinate swell sweeping up to the cliffs twice a day, exasperated him: it was senseless force, indifferent to his grief, wearing down the same rocks for centuries while never mourning the death of a single human being. it was too vast, too cold; and he would hurry home and shut himself indoors, to feel less insignificant, less crushed between the dual infinities of sea and sky.

Émile Zola, The Bright Side of Life, 1883

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As long as we’re sharing our favorite moments from the comics: snufkin introducing himself because he hates banks and loves fruit

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There are no bad words for the coast today

Who owns my writing now? It is good that it is tidal and that it’s contours never remain the same. I am occasionally a writer as in an occasional tide that comes up and covers the land. I once lived nearby such a place which look drastically different when the tide was way out. I couldn’t help but get caught up in this idea of tides, of being softened and hard edges become pebbles through sheer force of time and tide. But then we humans are not attuned to these flows and even out ships are designed to sit atop them rather than immerse within them. To catch yourself in oceanic time you are certainly losing yourself. Our old animosity toward the sea, seen most glaringly in how we dredge it, hunt over it, all counter to these dramatic flows which we know can destroy us so easily. But we are not born to be tidal. We are strange, alien creatures that have flung ourselves high over all, and even those inhospitable salty depths become a new frontier. Where are we going? What will be the very thing I write that takes me right out of these abysmal depths and fluttering into sky. What wildernesses, what new things are beyond the nature that we have fought so unrelentingly, and is there a space for something utterly out with our frame of reference now. What invisible things, what loneliness will dissipate as we begin to see ourselves in the microcosmos, in the very origins of ourselves which grow from minerals, shells, and the speaking of matter.

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The fantastic thing about war was that it was fought about nothing–literally nothing. Frontiers were imaginary lines. There was no visible line between Scotland and England, although Flodden and Bannockburn had been fought about it. It was geography which was the cause–political geography. It was nothing else. Nations did not need to have the same kind of civilization, nor the same kind of leader, any more than the puffins and the guillemots did. They could keep their own civilizations, like Esquimaux and Hottentots, if they would give each other freedom of trade and free passage and access to the world. Countries would have to become counties–but counties which could keep their own culture and local laws. The imaginary lines on the earth’s surface only needed to be unimagined. The airborne birds skipped them by nature. How mad the frontiers had seemed to Lyo-lyok, and would to Man if he could learn to fly.

T.H. White, “The Candle in the Wind” (via quietflorilegium)

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Some of my favorite pieces by Trevor Stubley from the 1977 Shaftesbury Publishing Company edition of T. H. White’s The Book of Merlyn.

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“Over time, each melancholy mineral surface forms the negative shape of some estranged, ciliated body. We turned, to questioner hands, our legs, our feet, our backs, dotted and threaded with indecipherable shapes.”

— A Natural History of Seaweed Dreams. Rasu-Yong Tugen, Baroness de Tristieombre. gnOme 2016.