René Magritte, 1937
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3.09.2016
2.29.2016
2.18.2016
2.09.2016
1.21.2016
1.17.2016
like flies
Thinking moves in circles and people appear to me like flies which always bump into the window pane when they try to get out into the open. Someone has got to open the window, but much work and leisure is required for that.
from a letter by Count Hans Ludwig Paul Yorck von Wartenburg to Wilhelm Dilthey
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1.13.2016
two poems by li shangyin
NOTE ON A RAINY NIGHT TO A FRIEND IN THE NORTH
You ask me when I am coming. I do not know.
I dream of your mountains and autumn pools brimming all night with the rain.
Oh, when shall we be trimming wicks again, together in your western window?
When shall I be hearing your voice again, all night in the rain?
THE JADE POOL
The Mother of Heaven, in her window by the Jade Pool,
Hears The Yellow Bamboo Song shaking the whole earth.
Where is Emperor Mu, with his eight horses running
Ten thousand miles a day? Why has he never come back?
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12.17.2015
12.01.2015
11.11.2015
11.06.2015
the curtain of obscurity
A vast bitterness seemed to inspire these images, images I understood very well as referring to what had begun to play out before my eyes, the curtain of obscurity now lifted--the spectacle that for many nights now he could not observe without sorrow. The studio windows that opened onto the wall perpendicular to his and the rear windows of the building that faced onto the street all lit up almost simultaneously once the sun had passed, although the shred of sky visible from the well was still light. Many of the windows had no curtains, at least, no one bothered to close any. The astonishing variety of life was displayed there. 'An unacceptable waste of gestures, of words, an incoherent mix of differences and similarities, endless complication, a boiler bursting with screams . . .' I don't know which I found more painful: seeing these vague silhouettes behind windows, some furtive, others immobile for long stretches of time (the studios were so small that empty windows were rare), each making its own gestures, imperfect, fragmentary, discordant, mysterious; or hearing that voice, barely audible and once in a while suddenly hard and almost shrill, commenting on the spectacle which, in truth, was no spectacle since these shadows were in all likelihood alive.
Philippe Jaccottet, Obscurity, pg. 25
tr. Tess Lewis
tr. Tess Lewis
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10.20.2015
the window as bridge, the window as revelation
To say that everything in our world is interrelated to everything else does not mean that everything is directly connected to everything else. In fact, anything we identify as a “thing” has a limited number of direct connections, and even these connections vary according to the way we look at them. The tree outside my window is connected to the soil, to the birds that are perching in it and the insects crawling around its leaves, to the neighboring trees whose branches it touches, and even to me who happens to be looking at it. I was struck by this late one afternoon as the sun was setting and I saw my own faint image in the window pane superimposed on the scene, as if I were suspended in the middle of the tree.
There before me was the fiction of the phantom spectator, the self, that imagines itself looking objectively, when in fact it is no more than a pale haze overlaying and obscuring the real connections I have with the tree. But if I focus on any part of the tree, I see that it is a web of connecting parts that make those first connections indirect. And so on, down to the subatomic level. And if this is so, then the tree is also, in some distant sense, connected to everything else, right down to the last jar of honey in the corner grocery store. No “thing,” at any level, from whatever perspective we look at it, subsists on its own.
from: James W. Heisig, Nothingness and Desire
(for erin)
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