I wanted my films to be like a snail’s trail in the moonlight.

-Stan Brakhage

Ruth Asawa / Untitled (SD.O12, Tied-Wire Sculpture Drawing with Six-Branch Center and Drops at the Ends), ca. 1970s

for Ruth Asawa / 2

In a fairy tale, there are no roads. You start out walking, as if in a straight line, and eventually that line reveals itself to be a labyrinth, a perfect circle, a spiral, or even a star . . .

-Christina Campo
(tr. Alex Andriesse)

Roberto Matta
The Apple Becomes Morning,1951
(detail)

Roberto Matta
The Apple Becomes Morning, 1951
(detail)

for Joseph Newland

Five years ago I cut this video, which is something like a collection of Shimizu's motifs/geometries.

Comings and goings.

vimeo.com/309336732

Ruth Asawa / Untitled, ca.1963

for Ruth Asawa

A’s birthday today. He has a book about him. What next?

'Impersonal confessions of a hidden shadow to anonymous shadows' ~ Roger Caillois (among his last words)

(From the essay, Mineral Mysticism by Stefano Salis included in Written in Stone)

Doesn't matter how many times I read this, it just hits as hard every time. Moving.

I can see how they, the egalitarians and anti-aesthetes, have prepared the way for their brothers, the barbarians of a stupid and plebeian injustice.

Absolute justice is a sowing of dragon's teeth.

— Joseph Roth

The Bargains

Salt. Beans.
Mustard. Matches.

-Merrill Gilfillan

Arthur Waley, at 50 Gordon Square near the British Museum,
translated Chinese poetry, Mongol history, The Tale of Genji
— never journeying more than a few miles from London,
and buried in an unmarked grave …

-Michael Ondaatje,
from “Estuaries”

translating bird names
warblers and finches whistling
their small excitements

H.D. in Egypt,1923 /
from Visions and Ecstasies
(thanks to Basket Books, Houston)

“The sky is within a child’s reach. It escapes the adult. […] I would like my writing to ally my childish hand with the sky and my adult hand with the desert.”

— Edmond Jabès (tr. R. Waldrop)

If I write sometimes it is because certain things do not want to be separated from me any more than I want to be separated from them.

-Cristina Campo
(tr. Alex Andriesse)

in the quiet before dawn reading Michael Ondaatje, A Year of Last Things