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Las Cosas Irreparables

Ordeno la casa. Encuentro minúsculos vestigios

de las cosas irreparables. En cada una, la mitad

de una letra de tu nombre. Las junto.

Reaprendo a decirlo de una forma diferente, casi nueva.

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hold, us

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Jenny Holzer, Selection from The Survival Series, Times Square, New York, 1985-1986

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EPITHALAMIUM DURING MATING SEASON

When the testicles of the marsupial mouse

begin to disintegrate, he swells with a panic

that drives him to have sex until he dies.

Tradition dictates that the female black widow

eats her mate, and that practice also exists

among the greater praying mantis community.

Meanwhile, these two humans keep staring

into each other’s eyes, saying, I do, I do,

but what exactly do they do? Do they

fight lions or guard their eggs on the side

of an active volcano? Probably not.

Does this mean their devotion is any less

enduring, any less fervent or profound

than that of the hippopotamus who sprays

its feces into the sky to attract a mate?

No. It means we’re lucky to be human,

capable of thinking this through before falling

dead from the amorous air as is the custom

of the common honeybee. Any wild thing can feel.

Any feeling can propel the animal forward.

Sometimes, the difference between instinct

and love is hesitation. The capacity to stand

at the inception of some passionate wilderness,

understand its magnitude, its peril, then enter,

not because the marionette strings

of compulsion and desire yank us forward,

but because we’re summoned into the immensity

of and by our own free will, and that

is what we want; this is what we choose.

(Matthew Olzmann)

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MOUTH STILL OPEN

Someone’s mouth is still open. He hadn’t finished yawning

when shrapnel

pierced

through his chest,

stung his heart.

No wind

could

stop the

flying pieces of shrapnel. Even

the sparrow on the lemon tree nearby wondered how they

could

move

with

no

wings

(Mosab Abu Toha)

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MASSACRE

Massacre is a dead metaphor that is eating my friends, eating them without salt. They were poets and have become Reporters With Borders; they were already tired and now they’re even more tired. ‘They cross the bridge at daybreak fleet of foot’ and die with no phone coverage. I see them through night vision goggles and follow the heat of their bodies in the darkness; there they are, fleeing from it even as they run towards it, surrendering to this huge massage. Massacre is their true mother, while genocide is no more than a classical poem written by intellectual pensioned-off generals. Genocide isn’t appropriate for my friends, as it’s an organised collective action and organised collective actions remind them of the

Left that let them down. Massacre wakes up early, bathes my friends in cold water and blood, washes their underclothes and makes them bread and tea, then teaches them a little about the hunt. Massacre is more compassionate to my friends than the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Massacre opened the door to them when other doors were closed, and called them by their names when news reports were looking for numbers. Massacre is the only one to grant them asylum regardless of their backgrounds; their economic circumstances don’t bother Massacre, nor does Massacre care whether they are intellectuals or poets, Massacre looks at things from a neutral angle; Massacre has the same dead features as them, the same names as their widowed wives, passes like them through the countryside and the suburbs and appears suddenly like them in breaking news. Massacre resembles my friends, but always arrives before them in faraway villages and children’s schools.

Massacre is a dead metaphor that comes out of the television and eats my friends without a single pinch of salt.

(Ghayath Almadhoun, translated from Arabic by Catherine Cobham)

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Julia Pott

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Anyone who has become entranced by the sound of water drops in the darkness of a ruin can attest to the extraordinary capacity of the ear to carve a volume into the void of darkness. The space traced by the ear becomes a cavity sculpted in the interior of the mind.

Steven Holl, Questions Of Perception: Phenomenology Of Architecture (via house-thestillness)

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you were concrete and i was rust: clouds off antarctica, photographed by nasa’s terra & aqua satellites, november 2015.

coast of george v land and terre adéle.

image credit: nasa/modis. animation: ageofdestruction.

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onsomething

“It would seem theatrical,” Utzon has said of Can Feliz  “if I said that I have a household altar.

But that’s what I have.

This place is my altar.

This is where, with the deepest respect, I face nature, and with the greatest passion, contemplate the sun and the land in front of me.”

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Stairway to Heaven.

Left After Assad Bombing in Aleppo