"Heine tells us somewhere, how, driven by the roar of
street-fighting, into the calm cool galleries of the Louvre,
sick and exhausted in mind and body, he fell down at the
feet of the Goddess of Beauty there, standing, as she still
stands, at the end of that corridor of mute witnesses, and
as he looked to her for help, he knew that she could never
bend down to him, or lift him up out of his weariness, for
they had broken her long ago, and she had no arms!"
--John Cowper Powys, Visions and Revisions (1915)

'If she only knew that all his poems had been written to her
and to no one else, every single one, even the one to Night,
even the one to the Spirit of the Swamp. But that was something
she should never know.' --Knut Hamsun, Victoria tr O.
Stallybrass

"This must be what I wanted to be doing,
Walking at night between the two deserts,
Singing." --Merwin

"...the migration is itself a ritual performance, a 'religious'
catharsis... nomadism must satisfy some basic human aspiration
which settlement does not. It is paradoxical, but not surprising,
that the great religions--Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Zoroastrian
and Buddhist--were preached among settled peoples who had
been nomads." --Bruce Chatwin, What Am I Doing Here?
(1989)

"Das tier kennt nicht die scham der mensch nicht dank." ('The
beast is void of shame, the man of thanks.') --S. George

A Colombian drug lord is offering to surrender [1991] on
condition that he be allowed to build his own prison...
  What a metaphor.

"Our ways our sole high deeds, our roads our destinations."
--Hollander, Powers of Thirteen (1983)

"For even the alligator dies in his mail, and the swordfish
never surrenders." --Melville, Mardi (1849)

"Wisdom had come from the wizening of Christendom..."
--Hollander, op cit

  I dream of the beauty of Alzheimer's
  in a world that has lasted so long...

  to forget how i got there,
  to have lost these days.

06 03 91

Shocking. I cleaned my yellow sink with dutch cleanser
and it turned white!

Listening to: The Mills Brothers.

Practicing for Year Zero. (via Wood_s Hole)