- The creative act is not formed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act. (Marcel Duchamp)

You're on earth. There's no cure for that.

- Samuel Beckett

My pain is

When I do not believe

Myself in harmony.

- from Rivers by Rivers Giuseppe Ungaretti

Because

"Because it is occasionally possible, just for brief moments, to find the words that will unlock the doors of all those many mansions inside the head and express something - perhaps not much, just something - of the crush of information that presses in on us from the way a crow flies over and the way a man walks and the look of a street and from what we did one day a dozen years ago. Words that will express something of the deep complexity that makes us precisely the way we are, from the momentary effect of the barometer to the force that created men distinct from trees. Something of the inaudible music that moves us along in our bodies from moment to moment like water in a river. Something of the spirit of the snowflake in the water of the river. Something of the duplicity and the relativity and the merely fleeting quality of all this. Something of the almighty importance of it and something of the utter meaninglessness. And when words can manage something of this, and manage it in a moment, of time, and in that same moment, make out of it all the vital signature of a human being - not of an atom, or of a geometrical diagram, or of a heap of lenses - but a human being, we call it poetry."

- Ted Hughes

via whiskeyriver

I don’t believe in maturity. There is always room for the next mistake. -

FRANCESCO CLEMENTE

the road

"Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains.
You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of
their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand.
Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patters that
were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes.
Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens
where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery."

— Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

The Road

"There is no God and we are his prophets."

— Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

Ecrire

"Écrire. Je ne peux pas.

Personne ne peut.

Il faut le dire, on ne peut pas.

Et on écrit.

C’est l’inconnu qu’on porte en soi écrire, c’est ça qui est atteint. C’est ça ou

rien.

On peut parler d’une maladie de l’écrit.

Ce n’est pas simple ce que j’essaie de dire là, mais je crois qu’on peut s’y

retrouver,

camarades de tous les pays.

Il y a une folie d’écrire qui est en soi-même, une folie d’écrire furieuse mais ce n’est pas

pour cela qu’on est dans la folie. Au contraire.

L’écriture c’est l’inconnu. Avant d’écrire, on ne sait rien de ce qu’on va écrire. Et en toute lucidité.

C’est l’inconnu de soi, de sa tête, de son corps. Ce n’est même pas une réflexion, écrire,

c’est une sorte de faculté qu’on a à côté de sa personne, parallèlement à elle-même, d’une autre personne qui apparaît et qui avance, invisible,douée de pensée, de colère, et

qui quelquefois, de son propre fait, est en danger d’en perdre la vie.

Si on savait quelque chose de ce qu’on va écrire, avant de le faire, avant d’écrire,

on n’écrirait jamais. Ce ne serait pas la peine.

Écrire, c’est tenter de savoir ce qu’on écrirait si on écrivait — on ne le sait

qu’après — avant, c’est la question la plus dangereuse que l’on puisse se poser. Mais c’est la plus courante aussi.

L’écrit ça arrive comme le vent, c’est nu, c’est de l’encre, c’est l’écrit et ça passe comme rien d’autre ne passe dans la vie, rien de plus, sauf elle, la vie." M.D. Neauphle-le-Château, 1993.

Texte de Marguerite Duras Collection folio, Editions Gallimard, 1993.

"If our titles recall the known myths of antiquity, we have used them again because they are the eternal symbols upon which we must fall back to express basic psychological ideas."

- Mark Rothko

Happy New Year

What we call the beginning is often the end And to make and end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.

'Little Gidding' by by T. S. Eliot Poems, "The Four Quartets"

Mark Rothko, Hierarchical Birds,1944

......

if you have time to chatter

read books

if you have time to read

walk into mountain, desert and ocean

if you have time to walk

sing songs and dance

if you have time to dance

sit quietly, you happy lucky idiot

- Nanao Sakai What Book!?: Buddha Poems from Beat to Hiphop

via whiskey river

Man Carrying Thing

The poem must resist the intelligence

Almost successfully. Illustration:

A brune figure in winter evening resists

Identity. The thing he carries resists

The most necessitous sense. Accept them, then,

As secondary (parts not quite perceived

Of the obvious whole, uncertain particles

Of the certain solid, the primary free from doubt,

Things floating like the first hundred flakes of snow

Out of a storm we must endure all night,

Out of a storm of secondary things),

A horror of thoughts that suddenly are real.

We must endure our thoughts all night, until

The bright obvious stands motionless in cold.

“Man Carrying Thing” by Wallace Stevens

the mystic privacy one can be so proud of has no alphabet of noise or meaning to the people outside.

by michael ondaatje "coming through slaughter". via airform archives

Stare!

"Stare. It is the way to educate your eye, and more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long."

- Walker Evans {via whiskey rivers }

"If you say the painting is not real, then the material phenomenal world is not real, the Dharma is not real. Unsurpassed enlightenment is a painting. The entire phenomenal universe and the empty sky are nothing but a painting. Since this is so, there is no remedy for satisfying hunger other than a painted rice cake." - Dogen

via

Jenifer Bar Lev BECKETT/BUDDHA, 2004 acrylic, plastic gems, glitter on canvas, 100 x 100 cm

!

"It's hard to remember that this day will never come again. That the time is now and the place is here and that there are no second chances at a single moment."

- Jeanette Winterson

via whiskeyriver

comfort

"When we think about our human lives, there are, as you know, people who live long, like those Sun-faced Buddhas, and there are people whose lives are short, like those Moon-faced Buddhas. It's useless to worry." - Baso

The Blue Cliff Records

via

whiskeyriver

'It is only through art that we can escape from ourselves and know how another person sees a universe which is not the same as our own and whose landscapes would otherwise have remained as unknown as any there may be on the moon'

Marcel Proust

via moonbeams8

Fuel your imagination

via http://kathrynrodrigues.blogspot.com/

A Brief and easy History of Urban form

(partly from notes on the Urban Development as Counterinsurgency lecture by John Duda of the Baltimore Free School)

Grids as a simple way to control the landscape – Stars as a spiky outer shell – Cracks as the fabric within the shell is compressed and densified – Networks as this dense fabric is reopened and ventilated – Flows for the density to drain further – Softness of the regulatory and fiscal pressures that continue to drive the flow – Holes open up as the fabric is vacated …

and now, the dominant formal strategy seems to be all about the infilling or refilling of those holes, along with the repurposing of the scrap left behind.

this text was taken from sevensixfive .

images by Matthew Daren Shlian

pen, 19 x 25 inches (each) 2008

images via interesting site but does it float