riverbird

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Semjon Prosjak

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“Method for understanding images, symbols, etc. Not to try to interpret them, but to look at them till the light suddenly dawns.  Generally speaking, a method for the exercise of the intelligence, which consists of looking.” Simone Weil, Attention and Will “When we first begin to believe anything, what we believe is not a single proposition, it is a whole system of propositions. (Light dawns gradually over the whole.)” Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty 

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"The world cannot be translated; It can only be dreamed of and touched." Dejan Stojanovic, The Creator, “World II"

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Edvard Munch, Summer Night by the Beach, 1902/03

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"I am writing to you from the end of the world. You must realize this. The trees often tremble. We collected the leaves. They have a ridiculous number of veins. But what for? There’s nothing between them and the trees any more, and we go off troubled.  Could not life continue on earth without wind? Or must everything tremble, always, always?" Henri Michaux, from I Am Writing to You from a Far-off Country

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“In the war film, a soldier can hold his buddy—as long as his buddy is dying on the battlefield. In the western, Butch Cassidy can wash the Sundance Kid’s naked flesh—as long as it is wounded. In the boxing film, a trainer can rub the well-developed torso and sinewy back of his protege—as long as it is bruised. In the crime film, a mob lieutenant can embrace his boss like a lover—as long as he is riddled with bullets. 

Violence makes the homo-eroticism of many “male” genres invisible; it is a structural mechanism of plausible deniability.”

–Tarantino’s Incarnational Theology: Reservoir Dogs, Crucifixions, and Spectacular Violence. Kent L. Brintnall.

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"I have been trying, for some time now, to find dignity in my loneliness. I have been finding this hard to do." Maggie Nelson, Bluets "Have I endured loneliness with grace?" Mary Oliver, The Gardener

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"I have been walking a while  on the frozen Swedish fields and I have seen no one. In other parts of the world people are born, live, and die in a constant human crush. To be visible all the time—to live in a swarm of eyes— surely that leaves its mark on the face."

Tomas Tranströmer, from “Solitude,” in The Half-Finished Heaven, trans. Robert Bly

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"I would leave everything here: the valleys, the hills, the paths, and the jaybirds from the gardens, I would leave here the petcocks and the padres, heaven and earth, spring and fall, I would leave here the exit routes, the evenings in the kitchen, the last amorous gaze, and all of the city-bound directions that make you shudder, I would leave here the thick twilight falling upon the land, gravity, hope, enchantment, and tranquility, I would leave here those beloved and those close to me, everything that touched me, everything that shocked me, fascinated and uplifted me, I would leave here the noble, the benevolent, the pleasant, and the demonically beautiful, I would leave here the budding sprout, every birth and existence, I would leave here incantation, enigma, distances, inexhaustibility, and the intoxication of eternity; for here I would leave this earth and these stars, because I would take nothing with me from here, because I’ve looked into what’s coming, and I don’t need anything from here." László Krasznahorkai, I Don’t Need Anything from Here

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"How much patience it takes to bear the slow duration of life. The small eternities in which we bathe like sparrows in puddles do not add up. Someone drinks cocoa from a porcelain cup, and two hundred yards away an innocent man perishes." Adam Zagajewski, Two Cities: On Exile, History, and the Imagination

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"Simone Weil writes: "The poet produces the beautiful by fixing attention on something real. The same with the act of love. To know that that man, who is hungry and thirsty, truly exists as much as I do — that is enough, the rest follows of itself." Love, awareness, and the desire to respond: these are distinguishable but inseparable aspects of genuine intelligence." Jan Zwicky, Robert Bringhurst, Learning to Die: Wisdom in the Age of Climate Crisis

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"The slow overture of rain,  each drop breaking Without breaking into the next, describes the unrelenting, syncopated mind. Not unlike the hummingbirds imagining their wings to be their heart, and swallows believing the horizon to be a line they lift and drop." Jorie Graham, from Mind

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Andrew Wyeth

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“It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things.”

— Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness

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“Once you start to speak of things that are precious, you are immediately anxious about how people will react to what you have said, and you want to protect these things, to defend them against incomprehension.“”

— Andrei Tarkovsky, from “Scenario and shooting script,” Sculpting in Time, trans. Kitty Hunter-Blair (University of Texas Press, 1987)

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"If I could not have made this garden beautiful I wouldn’t understand your suffering, nor care for each the same, inflamed way. I would have to stay only like the bees, beyond consciousness, beyond self-reproach, fingers dug down hard into stone, and growing nothing. There is no end to ego, with its museum of disappointments. I want to take my neighbors into the garden and show them: Here is consolation. Here is your pity. Look how much seed it drops around the sparrows as they fight. It lives alongside their misery. It glows each evening with a violent light."

Paisley Rekdal, from Happiness

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"You do not arrive at a name or a home. Look at a meadow long enough and your bearings vanish. The world seen deeply eludes all names; it is not like anything; it is not the sign of something else. It is itself. It is a towering strangeness. Even when it seems to expose itself by staring directly at you, you do not know it. To go into it is to leave the place where you live with your names for things and your sense of centrality. It is to go into a darkness and to feel small." Tim Lilburn, Living In The World As If It Were Home