The passes are probably closed.
Birds of dark omen wait for you in the city of stone.
PF took this picture looking out over Goris.
The test included an essay question: ‘write about your fall holidays.’. Although I correctly translated ‘vacation’ into ‘holiday’, I forgot to change ‘fall’ into ‘autumn’. One of the students asked about it. Made me think about what a ‘fall holiday’ would be: bungee-jumping – or Halloween.
And a fog settled over the village.
This people lives on the smell of wild apples that grow there; and if they go far from home, they take some of these apples with them, for as soon as they lose the smell of them they die.
– Travels of Sir John Mandeville (p. 181)
There is something outrageous in a person’s misdirecting a traveller who has lost his way and then leaving him to himself in error, yet what is that compared with causing someone to go astray in himself? The lost traveller, after all, has a consolation that the country around him is constantly changing, and with every change is born a new hope of finding a way out. A person who goes astray inwardly has less room for manoeuvre; he soon finds he is going round in a circle from which he cannot escape.1
– Kierkegaard, Either/Or
(but taken from The Seducer’s Diary, p.6).
Offerings to the deity in the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
Ain’t nobody here.
We move slowly in the fading shadows of the morning, with a lazy, ritual weight of action.
Life is too short for this book which smells of potpourri and afternoons misspent in faded floretry. I cannot tell whether it is the cloying stink or the dullness of the matter (promising to tend where I do not care to follow: to gossip and muddle and the human failing of overestimated importance) that caused me to set this book aside. I will not give its title, because its particularity is not important.
It was foggy this morning; the afternoon’s bread & margarine and coffee helped clear the skies.
Under the window-seat in the back parlor, where wasps die and desiccate, the memories are kept, unlocked, unbidden, and inaccessible – mint-green florilegium, pallor bred under the western sun. The thought makes me sleepy.
NW Thurman St at 24th Ave.
It’s hopeless, I say. But what did you expect? Three square meals a day and a roof over your head. Well I’m going for a walk.
Zigzag, OR, 26 August 2006.
May 2006
Watching the rain on the apartment patio, May 2006
Plants around the house, Portland, OR
Hawthorne bridge, Portland, OR, Fall 2004
Martha’s Vineyard.
The rough brick wall bore in chalk the legend: ‘PROPERTY IS THEFT’; heedless, I read ‘PROPERTIUS IS DEFT’, which seemed a strange idea. Also, apropos of nothing:
He is a small, broad-shouldered man, with the thin, dead-looking fair hair, mild eyes, and bulging, over-heavy forehead of the German vegetarian intellectual. He wears sandals and an open-necked shirt.
June 2004
‘As is’
he she we they you you you I her so pronouns begin the dance called washing whose name derives from an alchemical fact that after a small stillness there is a small stir after great stillness a great stir
Agfa Silette. Agfa Ultra 100, 3.4/30
8 May 2004
locus ille animi nostri stomachus ubi habitabat olim concalluit. privata modo et domestica nos delectent, miram securitatem videbis; cuius plurimae mehercule partes sunt in tuo reditu. nemo enim in terris est mihi tam consentientibus sensibus.1
Incidentally, does it worry anyone else that most of the Greek phrases C. uses in his letters only occur very rarely in the entirety of the extant Greek corpus and usually in authors dating after the second century CE? Far be it from me to insinuate from silence, but it does look a bit odd.
Shackleton Bailey’s translation:
That place in my mental anatomy which used to contain my spleen grew a tough skin long ago. Providing only that my private and domestic circumstances give me pleasure, you will find my equanimity quite remarkable. It largely depends, believe me, on your return. There is no one in the world with whom I hit it off quite so happily.
[↩]
To move away from one thing is not necessarily to approach another, though this may be the unintended consequence; to move towards an object does not require departing from another – but this, too, often happens. Few can observe their impulses with perspicacity.
Beirette BL, Agfa Ultra 100, f2.8/60
14 April 2004
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Springtime along the river, March 2004
College entrance, Oxford UK
The night of the hottest day ever.
Ivories, Ashmolean.
…What makes the man and what
The man within that makes:
Ask whom he serves or not
Serves and what side he takes….
England, 12 November, 7:24 a.m.
When I remember something I would rather forget, or when some unpleasant action or unwitting stupidity of mine forces its way forward into the present from the past, I think I don’t feel well. Oh happy past, which can so disorder the present.
A people that grows accustomed to sloppy writing is a people in process of losing grip on its empire and on itself. And this looseness and blowsiness is not anything as simple and scandalous as abrupt and disordered syntax. It concerns the relation of expression to meaning. Abrupt and disordered syntax can be at times very honest, and an elaborately constructed sentence can be at times merely an elaborate camouflage.
::
ego hoc feci mm–mmx
© 2000–10 M.F.C.