The Seeming, by Muriel Rukeyser

February 1, 2013

Between the illuminations of great mornings
there comes the dailiness of doing and being
and the hand as it makes as it brightens    burnishes
the surfaces    seemings       mirrors of the world

We do not know the springs of these colored and loving
acts     or what triggers birth     what sleep is
but name them as we name bird-wakened morning
having our verbs of the world
to which all action seems
to resolve, being

to go, to grow, to flow, to shine, to sound, to glow,
to give and to take, to bind and to separate,
to injure      and to defend

we do not even     not even know why we wake

but some of us showing the others
a kind of welcoming
bringing a form to morning
as a woman who recognizes
may offer us a moment and the names
turning all shame into a declaration
immediately to be followed by
an act of truth
until all seemings are
illumination
we see in a man a theme
a dream taking over
or in this woman going today who has shown us
fear, and form, and storm turned into light
the dailiness of our being and doing
morning and every time the way to naming
and we see more now coming into being
see in her goings as in her arrivings
the opening of a door

— Muriel Rukeyser ”The Seeming” in The Speed of Darkness

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One off: Jean-Siméon Chardin

February 1, 2013

 

Portrait of Madame Chardin, 1775 by Jean-Siméon Chardin

“Chardin’s genre paintings, like Vermeer’s before him, go much further than that. By a technical feat which virtually defies analysis — though one writer has remarked helpfully on Chardin’s characteristic choice of “a natural pause in the action which, we feel, will recommence a moment later” — they come close to translating literal duration, the actual passage of time as one stands before the canvas, into a purely pictorial effect: as if the very stability and unchangingness of the painted image are perceived by the beholder not as material properties that could not be otherwise, but as manifestations of an absorptive state — the image’s absorption in itself, so to speak —that only happens to subsist.”

— Michael Fried “The Primacy of Absorption” in Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot.

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From “Hotel Lautreamont” by John Ashberry

February 1, 2013

It remains for us to come to terms with our commonality.

Small wonder that those at home sit nervous by the unlit grate.
It was their choice, after all, that spurred us to feats of the imagination.
It remains for us to come to terms with our commonality
and in so doing deprive time of further hostages.

4.
It was their choice, after all, that spurred us to feats of the imagination.
Now, silently as one mounts a stair we emerge into the open
and in so doing deprive time of further hostages,
to end the standoff that history long ago began.”

— John Ashberry ”Hotel Lautreamont” from Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems

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Beckett on Language

February 1, 2013

“It is indeed becoming more and more difficult, even senseless, for me to write an official English. And more and more my own language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at the things (or the Nothingness) behind it. Grammar and Style. To me they seem to have become as irrelevant as a Victorian bathing suit or the imperturbability of a true gentleman. A mask. Let us hope the time will come…when language is most efficiently used where it is being most efficiently misused. As we cannot eliminate language all at once, we should at least leave nothing undone that might contribute to its falling into disrepute. To bore one hole after another in it, until what lurks behind it—be it something or nothing—begins to seep through; I cannot imagine a higher goal for a writer today.”

— Samuel Beckett

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Barthelme on not knowing

February 1, 2013

“What is magical about the object is that it at once invites and resists interpretation”

— from “On Writing” in Not-Knowing by Donald Barthelme.

Photograph by Eva Vermandel, from Splinter.

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Cavell on Photography

February 1, 2013

“To say that photographs lie implies that they might tell the truth; but the beauty of their nature is exactly to say nothing, neither to lie nor not to. Then what purpose may be served, or disguised, in attempting to deny so obvious a fact, in attempting instead to mean that emptiness? If the purpose is to counter those, real or imagined, who bluntly claim photographs never lie, then the counter only replaces the Village Idiot by the Village Explainer. There must be some more attractive purpose. I believe the motto serves to cover an impressive range of anxieties centred on, or symptomatized by, our sense of how little we know about what the photograph reveals: that we do not know what our relation to reality is, our complicity in it; that we do not know how or what to feel about those events; that we do not understand the specific transformative powers of the camera, what I have called its original violence; that we cannot anticipate what it will know of us or show of us.”

— Stanley Cavell What Photography Calls Thinking in Raritan Reading

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From “Hurtland” by Kevin Mertens

February 1, 2013

 

From Hurtland, by Kevin Mertens.

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Sante on photography

December 29, 2012

“Sometimes, looking at these cards, you come upon a picture that makes you feel as if its maker had just discovered photography, had made it up by himself from scratch. The American real photo postcard is a laboratory for the social uses of photography. If you could somehow assemble all the cards that were taken between 1905 and 1920, you would have a true mirror reflection, almost a one to one scale map of the non-urban United States then, in all its splendour and misery.”

From an excellent lecture by Luc Sante delivered at the School of Visual Arts MFA program in Art Writing and Criticism: “The Genius of the System“

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Adams on Form

December 29, 2012

“Why is Form beautiful? Because, I think, it helps us to meet our worst fear, the suspicion that life may be chaos and that therefore our suffering is without meaning. James Dickey was right when he asked, rhetorically, “What is Heaven, anyway, but the power of dwelling among objects and actions of consequence.” “Objects of consequence” cannot be created by man alone, nor can “actions of consequence” happen in a void; they can only be found within a framework that is larger than we are, an encompassing totality invulnerable to our worst behavior and most corrosive anxieties.”

— Robert Adams, from “Beauty in Photography”

Photograph: Berthoud, Colorado, 1976. From Summer Nights © Robert Adams.

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One off: Tim Carpenter

November 27, 2012

From Illinois Traction, by Tim Carpenter.

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