whisperthatruns

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Blood is not at all a sealed biological element, strictly belonging to this or that person who posesses his blood as he might possess arms and legs. It is a cosmic element, a unique and homogenous substance which traverses all bodies, without losing, in this accidental individuation, anything of its universality. Itself a transformation of the earth (of bread and of the fruits that we eat), it has the immensity of an element.

- Roland Barthes, Michelet (trans. Richard Howard) [quoted in Christopher Craft, Another Kind of Love]

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'The Star Money or Star Talers' illustrated by Pauli Ebner.

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OBIT [voice mail] by Victoria Chang

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Rosanna Warren, So Forth (W. W. Norton & Company, 2020)

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A serene sense of the slow inevitability of the gradual changes in the earth's crust comes over me; a consuming love, not of a god, but of the clean unbroken sense that the rocks, which are nameless, the waves which are nameless, the ragged grass, which is nameless, are all defined momentarily through the consciousness of the being who observes them. With the sun burning into rock and flesh, and the wind ruffling grass and hair, there is an awareness that the blind immense unconscious impersonal and neutral forces will endure, and that the fragile, miraculously knit organism which interprets them, endows them with meaning, will move about for a little, then falter, fail, and decompose at last into the anonomous soil, voiceless, faceless, without identity.

Sylvia Plath, summer 1951, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, ed. Karen V. Kukil (Anchor Books, 2000)

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A Walk on June 13

A walk in which entirely nothing happens or all so homogeneously except for the light gradually becoming the lack of it, the weird white that the sky goes when it's almost dark and the lamps in the public park come on all at once. The term "nothing happens" expresses not a lack of change but the inevitability of it, making it ingrained, ingraining it, imperceptible. Night not falling but gliding sideways, daylight slipping into glass, the glass of the conservatory at the far end of the park that, because of the white sky, becomes itself a lamp, making the sky the same color as the sand of the paths or the sky on the ground.

Cole Swensen, On Walking On (Nightboat Books, 2017)

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James Schuyler, Freely Espousing (Doubleday & Company/Paris Review Editions, 1969; 1979 reprint)

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Rosanna Warren, So Forth (W. W. Norton & Company, 2020)

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Rosanna Warren, from “Graffiti,” So Forth (W. W. Norton & Company, 2020)

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Rosanna Warren, from “As If,” So Forth (W. W. Norton & Company, 2020)

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Rosanna Warren, from “Legende of Good Women,” So Forth (W. W. Norton & Company, 2020)

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Wendell Berry, from Window Poems (Shoemaker & Hoard, 2007) (wood engraving by Wesley Bates)

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The window is a form of consciousness, pattern of formed sense through which to look into the wild that is a pattern too, but dark and flowing, bearing along the little shapes of the mind as the river bears a sash of some blinded house.

Wendell Berry, from Window Poems (Shoemaker & Hoard, 2007)

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[The birds] come into his vision, unafraid. He keeps a certain distance and quietness in tribute to them. That they ignore him he takes in tribute to himself. But they stay cautious of each other, half afraid, unwilling to be too close. They snatch what they can carry and fly into the trees. They flirt out with tail or beak and waste more sometimes than they eat. And the man, knowing the price of seed, wishes they would take more care. But they understand only what is free, and he can give only as they will take. Thus they have enlightened him. He buys the seed, to make it free.

Wendell Berry, from Window Poems (Shoemaker & Hoard, 2007)

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The world is greater than its words. To speak of it the mind must bend.

Wendell Berry, from Window Poems (Shoemaker & Hoard, 2007)

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“ANTIGONE: The fields were wet. They were waiting for something to happen. The whole world was breathless, waiting. I can’t tell you what a roaring noise I seemed to make alone on the road. It bothered me that whatever was waiting, wasn’t waiting for me.”

— Antigone, Jean Anouilh (trans Lewis Galantiere)

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Here is a thing, flesh of his flesh, that he hates. He would like a little assurance that no one will destroy the world for some good cause. Until he dies, he would like his life to pertain to the earth. But there is something in him that will wait, even while he protests, for things turn out as they will. Out his window this morning he saw nine ducks in flight, and a hawk dive at his mate in delight. The day stands apart from the calendar. There is a will that receives it as enough. He is given a fragment of time in this fragment of the world. He likes it pretty well.

Wendell Berry, from Window Poems (Shoemaker & Hoard, 2007)