*

'Neither in environment nor heredity can I find the exact instrument that fashioned me, the anonymous roller that pressed upon my life a certain intricate watermark whose unique design becomes visible when the lamp of art is made to shine through life's foolscap.' -- Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Emily Dickinson from "Time and Eternity"


One need not be a chamber to be haunted;
One need not be a house;
The brain has corridors surpassing
Material place.
~Emily Dickinson

Sunday, July 22, 2012

Singing Up the Bones - a poem


Today I found a poem with the same title as the first draft of my manuscript:

Singing Up the Bones

I wander;
searching, lost.

I see the light
flowing from the sand of life.
I reach down and push,
the sand falling

Revealing the bones.
I sing them up and see my soul.
There, glowing within
Suddenly, I am found.
 

Friday, July 20, 2012

Shinto by Jorge Luis Borges



When misfortune confounds us

in an instant we are saved

by the humblest actions

of memory or attention:

the taste of fruit, the taste of water,

that face returned to us in dream,

the first jasmine flowers of November,

the infinite yearning of the compass,

a book we thought forever lost,

the pulsing of a hexameter,

the little key that opens a house,

the smell of sandalwood or library,

the ancient name of a street,

the colourations of a map,

an unforeseen etymology,

the smoothness of a filed fingernail,

the date that we were searching for,

counting the twelve dark bell-strokes,

a sudden physical pain.



Eight million the deities of Shinto

who travel the earth, secretly.

Those modest divinities touch us,

touch us, and pass on by.


From
http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Spanish/Borges.htm#_Toc192667918


Wednesday, July 18, 2012

A Thousand Plateaus

'Sometimes chaos is an immense black hole in which one endeavors to fix a fragile point as a center. Sometimes one organizes around that point a calm and stable “pace” (rather than a form): the black hole has become a home. Sometimes one grafts onto that pace a breakaway from the black hole. ... Finally, the point launches out of itself, impelled by wandering centrifugal forces that fan out to the sphere of the cosmos: one “tries convulsively to fly from the earth, but at the following level one actually rises above it … powered by centrifugal forces that triumph over gravity.”' (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 312)

Need to read paper - A Thousand Plateaus: a visual metaphor for the liminal space
Dr Jens Kabo, Chemical Engineering, Queens University, Canada
Prof Caroline Baillie, Engineering Education, University Western Australia, Australia
Dr John Reader, Research associate, The William Temple Foundation, UK