growing-orbits-blog

[growing-orbits-blog]

There are hidden shores within us. Places we will never reach, places that will reach us instead.

[growing-orbits-blog]

A goodbye

I need to move on from growing orbits, to somewhere new, unscathed. 

Perhaps we will find each other there.

[growing-orbits-blog]

by Elger Esser

[growing-orbits-blog]

To stand in the shadow of the scar up in the air. To stand-for-no-one-and-nothing. Unrecognized, for you alone. With all there is room for in that, even without language.

Paul Celan, "To stand", translated by Michael Hamburger

[growing-orbits-blog]

How weightless words are when nothing will do.

Philip Levine, from "Gospel"

Favourite final sentences

[growing-orbits-blog]

I don't mean to sound so gloomy, but this space has been getting to me. I find it increasingly fleeting, anonymous and irritating. At the moment I am trying to find reasons to stay and it's not coming easy.

Life is stressful, work is hard and my heart is receiving some form of life support. I have been trying to lift myself, with good company, healthy food, lots of exercise, and as always, books, films and music.

Forgive me if I'm not following your posts as much as I would like, but I can't keep up with this hundred miles an hour dashboard (I don't think I was ever quite able to do so).

I would like to say, meet me for coffee, but you are all so very far away. Or write to me, though I might never reply.

I will stay, for now. Or perhaps I have already gone.

[growing-orbits-blog]

Regarding myself as a mere echo, Cave-like, unintelligible, nocturnal... May 27, 1956 Hospital Moscow

Anna Akhmatova, from The Complete Poems, translated by Judith Hemschemeyer

[growing-orbits-blog]

You tell me it's summer, you tell me that there are skies so blue it hurts to look at them. Here it seems like winter still, despite all the annoying blossoms. I feel out of place, I want to rip whatever beat there is left out of my chest. Take it, I don't need it no more.

[growing-orbits-blog]

selander

[growing-orbits-blog]

Absence

See also: the state of being away, absent-minded, leave of absence, perhaps I was never really here and I don’t know how to return.

[growing-orbits-blog]

i In view of the fading animals the proliferation of sewers and fears the sea clogging, the air nearing extinction we should be kind, we should take warning, we should forgive each other Instead we are opposite, we touch as though attacking, the gifts we bring even in good faith maybe warp in our hands to implements, to manoeuvres ii Put down the target of me you guard inside your binoculars, in turn I will surrender this aerial photograph (your vulnerable sections marked in red) I have found so useful See, we are alone in the dormant field, the snow that cannot be eaten or captured iii Here there are no armies here there is no money It is cold and getting colder, We need each others’ breathing, warmth, surviving is the only war we can afford, stay walking with me, there is almost time / if we can only make it as far as the (possibly) last summer

Margaret Atwood, "They are hostile nations"

[growing-orbits-blog]

Philippe Rousseau, A Valley (detail), ca. 1860

[growing-orbits-blog]

I wish I could grow outside my skin sometimes, pack bags, spread wings.

I equally yearn for the metaphorical and the literal.

[growing-orbits-blog]

That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it.

Joan Didion, from Slouching Towards Bethlehem

[growing-orbits-blog]

I wish I wrote the way I thought Obsessively Incessantly With maddening hunger I’d write to the point of suffocation I’d write myself into nervous breakdowns Manuscripts spiralling out like tentacles into abysmal nothing And I’d write about you a lot more than I should

Benedict Smith, “I Wish I Wrote The Way I Thought” 

[growing-orbits-blog]

Every day the sun rises out of low word-clouds into burning silence.

Rumi, from “Secret Places”, translated by Coleman Barks

Posted on the-final-sentence

[growing-orbits-blog]

Lovers find secret places inside this violent world where they make transactions with beauty.

Rumi, opening lines to “Secret Places”, in Bridge to the Soul, translated by Coleman Barks