Finally, Freedom! [13 Jan 25]

Sonnet of the Sweet Complaint

“ Never let me lose the marvel of your statue-like eyes, or the accent the solitary rose of your breath places on my cheek at night.   I am afraid of being, on this shore, a branchless trunk, and what I most regret is having no flower, pulp, or clay for the worm of my despair.   If you are my hidden treasure, if you are my cross, my dampened pain, if I am a dog, and you alone my master,   never let me lose what I have gained, and adorn the branches of your river with leaves of my estranged Autumn.” Federico García Lorca

Takashi Kawashima

“In terms of a writerly ontology, I don’t even believe “story” exists — except as a convenient way to talk about an effect of writing; whereas readers and writers who are comfortable in that discourse are content with a concept of “writing” that makes it one with a notion of “style,” which they see as a variable aspect, like color, of a solid, visible, and locatable entity called a story. Whereas for me, words are the solid and locatable elements in a text, and meaning, story, style, and tone are all shifting and flickering aspects to various combinations of words that are, all of them, equally evanescent and intangible, intricately interrelated and inextricable — analyzable yes, but never simple or exhaustible.”

— Samuel R. Delany, “Zelazny/Varley/Gibson — and Quality”

So it turns out that we’re not the answer to the dreams of centuries. Lope of the hunter from field to forest. “We have adapted wheat to grow on clouds and grain to fall like rain.” Laughed, then died, and the living guess at the joke. Mark Weiss

The Passions

Narrow paths my passions tread: Laughter rings there, sorrow cries; Sick and sad, with half-shut eyes, Thro' the leaves the woods have shed,         My sins like yellow mongrels slink; Uncouth hyenas, my hates complain, And on the pale and listless plain Couching low, love's lion's blink.

        Maurice Maeterlinck

Sacrifice

‘me’, I exist—suspended in a realized void—suspended from my own dread— different from all other being and such that the various events can reach all other beings and not 'me’ cruelly throw this 'me’ out of total existence. But, at the same time, I consider my coming into the world—which depended on the birth and on the conjunction of a given man and woman, then on the moment of their conjunction. There exists, in fact, a unique moment in relation to the possibility of me—and thus the infinite improbability of this coming into the world appears.

•Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess Selected Writings, 1927-1939

                   Anneè Olofsson (Swedish) ,  Unfamiliar 3, 2001 Olofsson’s an iconography that carnally and directly comments on the tension between detachment and affinity, time and aging, she works primarily with analog photography and video, occasionally even sculpture. Olofsson returns repeatedly to her own body as an unrestricted artistic tool.

Aquarium

“And I know it must die, for its hour is o'er; Folding its impotent hands at last, Hands too weary to pluck any more The flowers of the past!”                         

Maurice Maeterlinck

Edvard Munch, 1885, Asta Nørregaard