fragmentary glimpses

2011-11-25T11:32:00.000-08:00

Fragmentary Glimpses has been moved to my own website. All posts past and future can be found at Pensum.ca.

2011-08-18T17:03:00.001-07:00

the curtains breathe with the light

2011-08-15T07:26:00.000-07:00

...there is no salvation even in considering oneself a small animal.

Takashi Hiraide

2011-08-13T06:32:00.001-07:00

three words on a brick wall
the world breaking
through the concrete below

2011-08-12T04:28:00.000-07:00

The unnamable
held you
at a distance, in reverence.

Pura López-Colomé

2011-08-11T06:46:00.000-07:00

not to make the weak strong
but rather to find the strength of the weak

2011-08-02T19:00:00.000-07:00

There needs to be more poems written based on the very fear of human existence itself.

Tamura Ryuichi

2011-07-23T11:36:00.001-07:00

Colour is the place where the mind and the universe meet.

Paul Cezanne

2011-07-15T05:44:00.000-07:00

The minute one says one is happy, one isn't anymore.

Pierre Bonnard

2011-06-26T13:00:00.000-07:00

Anything in any way beautiful derives its beauty from itself and asks nothing beyond itself. Praise is no part of it, for nothing is made worse or better by praise.

Marcus Aurelius

2011-06-24T12:46:00.000-07:00

Nothing one sees is not a flower, nothing one imagines is not the moon.

Basho
tr. David Barnhill

2011-06-16T14:20:00.000-07:00

As machines become more and more efficient and perfect, so it will become clear that imperfection is the greatness of man.

Ernst Fischer

2011-06-01T11:58:00.000-07:00

The sun and your heart are made of the same material.

Pierre Reverdy
tr. Kenneth Rexroth

2011-05-20T06:47:00.000-07:00

Strip oneself of the imaginary royalty of the world.

Simone Weil

2011-05-18T13:37:00.001-07:00

another being a specific direction

2011-05-17T20:38:00.000-07:00

that things
are merely places
within the space
stretching between

2011-05-13T15:58:00.000-07:00

poetry is not a literary activity directed toward the production of texts, but the most fundamental form of human relations. (la poésie n’est pas une activité littéraire orientée vers la production de textes, mais la forme la plus fondamentale des rapports interhumains)

Yves Bonnefoy

2011-04-29T14:35:00.001-07:00

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.

Marcel Proust

2011-04-12T15:26:00.001-07:00

suspending rope bridges from one cloud to another

2011-04-08T17:33:00.001-07:00

Intelligence is a moral category.

Adorno

2011-04-08T15:36:00.000-07:00

Disease is a vital expression of the human organism.

One must not forget that recovery is brought about not by the physician, but by the sick man himself.

Georg Groddeck

2011-04-03T10:06:00.001-07:00

the significance of the small and insignificant

2011-04-02T12:03:00.001-07:00

An eye that simplifies to the point of desolation.

Franz Kafka

2011-03-31T05:22:00.000-07:00

opening the tombs we would discover that all the dead have fled

2011-03-26T10:49:00.001-07:00

a past as close
or as distant
as any present

2011-03-26T05:48:00.001-07:00

Would technology exist if we weren't riddled with fear?

2011-03-15T16:56:00.000-07:00

I was in hospital once. There was a man in another ward, dying of throat cancer. In the silences I could hear his screams continually. That's the only kind of form my work has.

Samuel Beckett

2011-02-25T17:11:00.001-08:00

There is a goal in all things. To arrive there you must remove yourself from yourself.

Brancusi

2011-02-20T13:39:00.000-08:00

A great dancer is not one who makes a difficult step look easy, but one who makes an easy step look interesting.

Rudolf Nureyev

2011-02-16T13:42:00.000-08:00

When you listen to yourself, it's not literature you hear.

Samuel Beckett

2011-02-14T09:02:00.000-08:00

Thinking is perhaps, after all, an unavoidable path, which refuses to be a path of salvation and brings no new wisdom.

Martin Heidegger
The Thing, in Poetry, Language, Thought pg. 57

2011-02-04T14:21:00.000-08:00

In principle nothingness remains inaccessible to science.

Martin Heidegger

2011-01-18T05:56:00.000-08:00

to see death
is to see another, never oneself.

Shinkichi Takahashi
tr. Lucien Stryk

2011-01-17T10:15:00.000-08:00

Because I am not silent, the poems are bad.

George Oppen

2010-12-31T18:33:00.001-08:00

feeling broken,

and that this
is a good thing.

2010-12-27T16:52:00.001-08:00

what i have seen
i have not seen

2010-12-12T09:07:00.000-08:00

I don't look at a man and think: man.
Nor, for that matter,
Do I think him ox or pig.
He is I. And as meaningless.

Shinkichi Takahashi
tr. Lucien Stryk

2010-12-11T15:17:00.000-08:00

The poem is lonely. Lonely and en route. Its author remains added to it.

Paul Celan
tr. Pierre Joris

2010-12-07T07:06:00.000-08:00

To prattle on,
complaining about the woes
of one's situation
is to betray the heart
that cast the world aside.

to ni kaku ni / ukimi o nao no / nageku koso /
suteshi ni tagau / kokoro narikere

Tonna

2010-12-04T10:56:00.000-08:00

each leaf
whether of tree
or speech
is but a withered sun

(NB. kotoba, the japanese kanji for "word," translates literally as "leaves of speech")

2010-12-04T07:41:00.001-08:00

the difficulty lies in overcoming intention

2010-11-28T15:30:00.000-08:00

Working from life would mean surrendering to the object.

Pierre Bonnard

2010-11-28T08:20:00.000-08:00

In the state of delusion, both right and wrong are wrong.

Jūjūshin'in Shinkei

2010-11-24T13:43:00.000-08:00

You don’t paint the way someone, by observing his life, thinks you have to paint, you paint the way you have to, in order to give. That’s life itself, and someone will look and say it is the product of knowing, but it has nothing to do with knowing, it has to do with giving. The question about knowing will naturally be wrong. When you’ve finished giving, the look surprises you as much as anyone else.

Franz Kline

2010-11-23T14:32:00.001-08:00

If I speak of having a subject to paint, I mean there is a forgotten place of beings and things, which I need to remember. I want to see this place.
I paint what I want to see.

Philip Guston

2010-11-23T12:40:00.001-08:00

poetry: the eternal unborn

2010-11-22T03:29:00.000-08:00

The humane are sure to be courageous; the courageous are not necessarily humane.

Confucius

2010-11-10T15:32:00.000-08:00

my spirit is nearing affliction's
peak and i don't know how
to christen the suffering

Pura López-Colomé

2010-11-08T13:33:00.001-08:00

the body hurtling
through the tunnel
its stillness

2010-11-07T07:10:00.000-08:00

To see now only
The light, the simulation of that disturbing
Thing that would have to be disposed of

Henri Deluy

2010-11-06T17:40:00.000-07:00

one only needs to know where to look,
or perhaps how to look,
or maybe it's a case of not looking at all
but simply seeing.
yet it might not be even that,
rather just accepting.

2010-11-04T15:09:00.000-07:00

Man
Tests the earth
Before assuming his place

Then begins
His obscure course between silence
And Babel
Toward the enigma of things.

Andrée Chedid

2010-10-30T09:00:00.000-07:00

Chaos is the basis for the individual.

Markus Lüpertz

2010-10-29T08:08:00.000-07:00

Why be human if being human
is so difficult? Become the lamp
by the roadside that quietly sheds
its light on man.
Be as it is, for as it is
he will always have a human face.
Be good to him, this man,
and impartial like a lamp
that quietly illuminates the faces
of drunkards, vagabonds and students
along the solitary road.

Be a lamp
if you can't be human,
for being human is difficult.
A human has just two hands
but he should help thousands.
So be a lamp by the roadside
shining on a thousand happy faces,
shining for the lonely, the aimless.
Be a lamp with a single light,
man in a magic square
signaling with a green arm.
Be a lamp, a lamp,
a lamp.

Srecko Kosovel

2010-10-28T14:38:00.000-07:00

even the light
bows to the pebbles
and their silence

2010-10-27T14:36:00.000-07:00

I had no life, had to find whether one was possible. If so, whether it was worth keeping.

Shinkichi Takahashi

2010-10-24T18:18:00.000-07:00

Clarity, too, has it mirages.

Yves Bonnefoy
tr. Richard Pevear

2010-10-20T15:28:00.001-07:00

various kinds
of wonders
have lost their wonder
wonderland is headed
for its own destruction

Tada Chimako
tr. Jeffrey Angles

2010-10-16T12:13:00.002-07:00

I again learned to speak and I wept
when a word escaped me.

Ingeborg Bachmann
tr. Peter Filkins

2010-10-16T12:13:00.000-07:00

Between a word and a thing
you only encounter yourself,
lying between each as if next to someone ill,
never able to get to either.

Ingeborg Bachmann
tr. Peter Filkins

2010-10-16T08:52:00.001-07:00

At the risk of appearing self-contradictory, I do not believe art is understood through intellectual operations, but rather that we intercept the outline of a certain manner of treating (being in) the world.

Mel Bochner

2010-10-13T16:54:00.001-07:00

art is perhaps the most glorious of failures

2010-10-07T05:22:00.000-07:00

DISGUST IS THE APPROPRIATE RESPONSE TO MOST SITUATIONS

Jenny Holzer

2010-10-03T07:46:00.000-07:00

The there of things, the auroral there, is not inert. It shifts constantly, imperceptibly.
(Le là des choses, là auroral, n’est pas inerte. Remue sans cesse, imperceptiblement.)

Roger Munier

L'aube

2010-09-28T10:48:00.000-07:00

We can know with a reassuring certainty what is beautiful or ugly, right or wrong, good or bad, why it is so and how far it is so [...] And yet! Notwithstanding this, men have been turning about for thousands of years in the same circle of follies, errors and abuse, neither their own experiences nor those of others have made them any more sensible.

from Dark Mirrors

by Arno Schmidt

2010-09-27T14:47:00.000-07:00

not about
—from

2010-09-25T14:03:00.001-07:00

perhaps the real issue for humanity is the impossibility to not care

2010-09-24T17:16:00.001-07:00

Your sense of unity, only perceptible to you, is a sheen on the surface, not a deeper layer of reality.

David Weisman

2010-09-22T13:21:00.000-07:00

that in addition to those familiar dark shadows
there are those luminous as well

2010-09-21T12:31:00.000-07:00

If man is once again to come into the vicinity of Being, he must first learn to exist in namelessness. He must recognize equally the seduction of the public and the powerlessness of the private. Before he speaks, he must allow himself again to be spoken to by Being and risk the danger that in being spoken to he will have little or rarely anything to say.

Martin Heidegger

2010-09-16T09:08:00.000-07:00

Art is the persistence of illusion in a disillusioned world.

Theodor Lipps

2010-09-15T17:57:00.001-07:00

The social body is occupied merely with safeguarding itself and could not care less about a life that has been damaged.

Jean Améry

2010-09-15T11:22:00.000-07:00

Regard every man first and foremost as a being who exists only as a consequence of his culpability and whose life is an expiation of the crime of being born.

Arthur Schopenhauer

2010-09-14T04:33:00.000-07:00

Man is hungry for beauty. There is a void.

Oscar Wilde

Somewhere, free of joy, there is nothing.

Bram van Velde

2010-09-10T10:45:00.001-07:00

thing not as object
but as revelation

2010-09-09T18:27:00.001-07:00

to elevate the gaze
even when looking down

2010-09-09T18:24:00.001-07:00

The blindness that opens the eye is not the one that darkens vision. Tears and not sight are the essence of the eye.

Jacques Derrida

2010-09-09T05:50:00.000-07:00

The foundation is not something obscure, neither is it light which becomes perceivable only when it shines upon the thing which bathes in its light, nor is it the thing itself as a “transcendent phenomenon”, but it is an immanent revelation which is a presence to itself, even though such a presence remains “invisible.”

Michel Henry

2010-09-08T16:14:00.000-07:00

Yes . . . I like . . . I like their . . . their illogicality . . . their burning illogicality – the flame . . . the flame . . . Which consumes all our filthy logic . . .

Samuel Beckett to Charles Juliet

2010-09-04T17:44:00.001-07:00

Just 'cause you feel it, doesn't mean it's there.

Thom Yorke

2010-09-04T12:30:00.000-07:00

One is only ever exiled from oneself
and personal pain is of little concern.
After all to wail within is not
to wail for everyone.

But if living is such
then marching enraged
under the windows of past contempt
will allow one to say
"us", "all of us."

Pierre Lepori
translated by Michael Twed

2010-09-03T07:09:00.001-07:00

that which is closest
often seems most distant

2010-08-31T13:16:00.001-07:00

I cannot be pinned down here and now
because I live as well with the dead
as with the unborn
somewhat closer to the heart of creation than usual
but still not close enough.

(inscription on Paul Klee's tomb)

2010-08-31T07:30:00.000-07:00

It was when I found out I could make mistakes that I knew I was on to something.

Ornette Coleman

2010-08-30T11:48:00.000-07:00

If man is once again to come into the vicinity of Being [die Nahe des Seins], he must first learn to exist in namelessness [Namenlosen]. He must recognize equally the seduction of the public and the powerlessness of the private. Before he speaks, he must allow himself again to be spoken to by Being and risk the danger that in being spoken to he will have little or rarely anything to say.

Martin Heidegger

2010-08-29T07:36:00.000-07:00

The self and things are mutually responsive to each other; things do not move the self nor vice versa. There is only one world, one scene.

Nishida Kitaro, An Inquiry into the Good, pg. 32

2010-08-28T05:20:00.001-07:00

Study self-pity seriously -- it finds us out in our most puerile parts.

Jane Heap

2010-08-27T06:18:00.000-07:00

Under every deep, another deep opens.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

2010-08-26T16:01:00.001-07:00

Everywhere we encounter things,
yet we only ever find the absolute.

2010-08-25T15:36:00.000-07:00

Searching is everything – going beyond what you know. And the test of the search is really in the things themselves, the things you seek to understand. What is important is not what you think about them, but how they enlarge you.

Wynn Bullock

2010-08-23T12:53:00.001-07:00

One doesn't enter Nothingness, one becomes it.

Roger Munier

2010-08-22T17:00:00.001-07:00

the water's void
takes shape as a fish

2010-08-22T16:59:00.000-07:00

Do not believe that the person who is trying to offer you solace lives his life effortlessly among the simple and quiet words that might occasionally comfort you. His life is filled with much hardship and sadness, and it remains far behind yours. But if it were otherwise, he could never have found these words.

Rilke, Letters on Life, pg. 3

2010-08-21T14:39:00.000-07:00

In time there is no present, there never has been one, and there never will be one.

Michel Henry, I Am the Truth, pg. 19

2010-08-20T06:46:00.000-07:00

Givenness can be understood [...] as the yielding of the self to the allure and turning toward it attentively.

Daniel J. Dwyer

2010-08-20T05:16:00.001-07:00

to let the world

2010-08-19T10:00:00.000-07:00

each thing
its infinity

2010-08-19T09:29:00.000-07:00

To be in this world is to be ever entering a material space of radiance.

Andrew J. Mitchell, Heidegger Among the Sculptors, pg. 1

2010-08-19T05:44:00.000-07:00

The present, while being determined, is something whose determination should be denied. What is made, while being something that has gone by, goes to make what makes. Here we find the continuity of discontinuity, the self-limitation of nothingness. . . . The individual formation of the self is not a continuity from act to act but, rather, should be a continuity from what is made to what makes. In other words, it must be a historical continuity.

Nishida Kitaro

2010-08-18T17:42:00.000-07:00

Somewhere, there must be a realm between, a realm akin to that ultimate realm where motion becomes rest and rest motion.

Suppose I flay about me with my arms. As I do so, I lose a certain amount of intellectual blood. Suppose I allow myself, however briefly, to think before I strike. At that moment, my blow is doomed to failure.

Somewhere, I told myself, there must be a higher principle that manages to bring the two together and reconcile them.

That principle, it occurred to me, was death.

And yet, my idea of death was too mystical; I was forgetting the plain, physical aspect of death.

Yukio Mishima, Sun and Steel, pg. 92