( via / via )

"The truth is that we are all potential fossils still carrying within our bodies the crudities of former existences, the marks of a world in which living creatures flow with little more consistency than clouds from age to age. (via @evecastle.bsky.social)

"When we are exiled from the order and unities of culture, language, ethnicity that make up the great smooth national narratives of history, we are cast out into a multicultural, multi-lingual, multiethnic 'non-nation', an empire that frustrates our need to narrate a descent from origins and forces us to confront the lyrical unevenness of our lives. This is a confrontation that from time to time, for good or for ill, we try hard to avoid. ...the medieval [is not] a moment of past time since transcended but [] a metaphor for a kind of [artistic] practice that defies the national culture paradigm." --Walter G Andrews. introductory essay to Ottoman Lyric Poetry (1997)

"He doesn't say the Renaissance is a golden age. He says, we must try to make a golden age in contrast with this bad age we are in now by trying to imitate the arts and methods of the ancients and their golden age."

“AN ISLAND IN THE HARBOR

My own country my countrymen the exchanges
Yes this is the place

The flag of the blank wall the birds of money

Prisoners in the watch towers
And the motto
The hopes of others our
Guardians

Even here
Spring passes looking for the cradles

The beating on the bars of the cages
Is caught and parceled out to the bells

It is twelve the prisoners’ own hour

The mouse bones in the plaster
Prepare for the resurrection”

—WS Merwin, The Moving Target (1963)

It's great that we even have a name for the whale.