Paul Nash, Landscape of the Moon's Last Phase
Came across this perfectly-formed single-subject website, how life should be like this more often.
]]>Can you eat bitter herbs with no salt
for an evening meal she said to me,
And then lie down?
I can, I said to her.
Can you lie down she said
without weeping with cold
on the frozen mud?
I can, I said to her.
And on that mud she said to me
can you set fire to my body
and burn it up to ash?
And that too if I can, I said to her.
Can you throw my ashes
into your wine she said to me
and get yourself so drunk you forget me?
No, I cannot do that, I said to her.
You will not make a gypsy, she told me.
- Georgis Pavlopoulos, trans. Peter Levi
]]>To analyse the pleasures received from Gates, in corners of Fields, at twilight /
Insects by their smallness, the Mammoth by its hugeness, terrible.
- ibid., 1803]]>
Dec. 6 1803. - Adam travelling in his old age - came to a set of the descendants of Cain, ignorant of the origin of the world; & treating him as a Madman killed him. A sort of Dream, which I had this Night.
- ibid.]]>
one of those thoughtful men whose plate of pudding often swims before their eyes while they are eating
Mind, shipwrecked by storms of doubt, now mastless, rudderless, shattered, - pulling in the dead swell of a dark and windless Sea.
He is always doing
something else
- ibid, 1800]]>
- ibid, 1797]]>
In a distempered dream things & forms in themselves common & harmless inflict a terror of anguish.-
Doing nothing ends in being nothing.-
- ibid, 1794-7]]>
- Coleridge, Notebooks 1815]]>
- Fabre, The Life of the Fly
* he's echoing Horace, Satire II.vi, but Fabre's ideas of an earthly paradise are rather different from Horace's and much closer to mine.
]]>- Keats, letter to Benjamin Bailey, 1817
]]>The conductor’s hands were black with money:
Hold on to your ticket, he said, the inspector’s
Mind is black with suspicion, and hold on to
That dissolving map. We moved through London,
We could see the pigeons through the glass but failed
To hear their rumours of wars, we could see
The lost dog barking but never knew
That his bark was as shrill as a cock crowing,
We just jogged on, at each request
Stop there was a crowd of aggressively vacant
Faces, we just jogged on, eternity
Gave itself airs in revolving lights
And then we came to the Thames and all
The bridges were down, the further shore
Was lost in fog, so we asked the conductor
What we should do. He said: Take the ferry
Faute de mieux. We flicked the flashlight
And there was the ferryman just as Virgil
And Dante had seen him. He looked at us coldly
And his eyes were dead and his hands on the oar
Were black with obols and varicose veins
Marbled his calves and he said to us coldly:
If you want to die you will have to pay for it.
- Louis MacNeice
]]>Came across this perfectly-formed single-subject website, how life should be like this more often.
]]>
That in a hundred years the wind will lift my dust
And join it in marriage with yours.
O Death, now I fear you no more!
- Anon., Persian 12th cent.
]]>
from The Country Walk, John Dyer
Says I to myself, this might be the motto for this journal.]]>
