House, coffeehouses, neighborhood: setting
that I see and where I walk; year after year.
I crafted you amid joy and amid sorrows:
out of so much that happened, out of so many things.
And you’ve been wholly remade into feeling; for me.
(C. P. Cavafy, trans. Daniel Mendelsohn.)
“During the war, Pound tried to persuade a number of bureaucrats in Italy that the cultivation of peanuts would solve Italy’s food shortages – just as he later had syrup-producing American maples planted near Brunnenburg Castle in the South Tyrol, but in the process only managed to introduce poison ivy into the region.”
(note to Canto 74.812 (“and the wops do not use maple syrup”) in Richard Sieburth’s edition of Ezra Pound’s The Pisan Cantos, p. 130.)
“In tangerine-orange subtle differences between red and yellow are so difficult to perceive as a single color that one eye seems to see red while the other sees yellow. A person walking for too long on a tangerine hued carpet eventually begins to stagger because his eyes can’t any longer decide where to put his feet.”
(Malcolm de Chazal, Sens-plastique, trans. Irving Weiss, p. 247.)
(Arshile Gorky, Staten Island, 1927, collection of Rita & Vartkess Balian. On show in the PMA’s “Cézanne & Beyond”.)
(Busby Berkeley, from Gold Diggers of 1933.)
Books
Exhibits
(Mira Schendel, Ondas paradas de probabilidade, 1969. Nylon thread and wall text on acrylic sheet, installation, variable dimensions.)
It is written in the Book of Usable Minutes
That all things have their center in their dying,
That each is discrete and diaphanous and
Has pointed its prow away from the sand for the next trillion years.
After that we may be friends,
Recognizing in each other the precedents that make us truly social.
Do you hear the wind? It’s not dying,
It’s singing, weaving a song about the president saluting the trust,
The past in each of us, until so much memory becomes an institution,
Through sheer weight, the persistence of it, no,
Not the persistence: that makes it seem a deliberate act
Of duration, much too deliberate for this ingenious being
Like an era that refuses to come to an end or be born again.
We need more night for the sky, more blue for the daylight
That inundates our remarks before we can make them
Taking away a little bit of us each time
To be deposited elsewhere
In the place of our involvement
With the core that brought excessive flowering this year
Of enormous sunsets and big breezes
That left you feeling too simple
Like an island just off the shore, one of many, that no one
Notices, though it has a certain function, though an abstract one
Built to prevent you from being towed to shore.
(John Ashbery, from As We Know.)
We two—how long we were fool’d!
Now transmuted, we swiftly escape, as Nature escapes;
We are Nature—long have we been absent, but now we return;
We become plants, leaves, foliage, roots, bark;
We are bedded in the ground—we are rocks;
We are oaks—we grow in the openings side by side;
We browse—we are two among the wild herds, spontaneous as any;
We are two fishes swimming in the sea together;
We are what the locust blossoms are—we drop scent around the lanes, mornings and evenings;
We are also the coarse smut of beasts, vegetables, minerals;
We are two predatory hawks—we soar above, and look down;
We are two resplendent suns—we it is who balance ourselves, orbic and stellar—we are as two comets;
We prowl fang’d and four-footed in the woods—we spring on prey;
We are two clouds, forenoons and afternoons, driving overhead;
We are seas mingling—we are two of those cheerful waves, rolling over each other, and interwetting each other;
We are what the atmosphere is, transparent, receptive, pervious, impervious:
We are snow, rain, cold, darkness—we are each product and influence of the globe;
We have circled and circled till we have arrived home again—we two have;
We have voided all but freedom, and all but our own joy.
(Walt Whitman, from Leaves of Grass.)
