a dry psyche is most skilled

03.10.20

“The stuff of the psyche is a smoke-like substance of fine particles that give rise to all other things, particles of less mass than any other sustance and constantly in motion: only movement can know movement. . . . The psyche rises as a mist from things that are wet. . . . A dry psyche is most skilled in intelligence and is brightest in virtue. . . . A drunk man, staggering and mindless, must be led home by his son, so wet is his psyche.”
—Heraclitus
from "I Have Looked Diligently at My Own Mind"
(trans. Guy Davenport)

attribution unknown

I'm afraid I've caught poetry

03.01.20




Dennis Moore (customer) and John Cleese (shopkeeper) in a skit from Monty Python's Flying Circus, ca. 1973.

everything has already been said

02.21.20

"Everything has already been said, but since nobody listens, we must continually start again."
—André Gide
from Le traite du Narcisse
(my translation)

Early emoticons in the American humor magazine Puck in 1881.
Interesting related article here.

willfully in public

02.10.20

“A person who publishes a book appears willfully in public with his pants down.”
—widely attributed to Edna St. Vincent Millay
original context unclear

Melanie Bourget – The Antidote

let us read and let us dance

01.12.20

“Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world."
—Voltaire
from The Portable Philosophical Dictionary

Allan Ginsberg dancing

bunch of idiots

09.16.19

“An art whose medium is language will always show a high degree of critical creativeness, for speech is itself a critique of life: it names, it characterizes, it passes judgment, in that it creates."
—Thomas Mann
from a 1929 speech reprinted in Essays of Three Decades

André Breton at a Dada festival in Paris, March 27, 1920, wearing a slogan by Francis Picabia that says: "In order to love something you need to have seen and heard it for a long time bunch of idiots"

human consciousness

07.01.19

“Human consciousness: is it the projector
or the screen?”
—Dean Young
from "I Am But A Traveler in This Land & Know Little of Its Ways"

attribution unknown but possibly «Fotograf i model'» by Aleksey Andreyev

he who hides his madman

06.30.19

“He who hides his madman, dies voiceless.”
—Henri Michaux
from “My Properties”

Source unclear—possibly a clip from a performance by the Licedei Clown Troupe (Soviet, 1960's)

one mind's imagining into another

05.08.19

“One of the most mysterious of semi-speculations is, one would suppose, that of one Mind’s imagining into another.”
—John Keats
from his marginalia in Paradise Lost

Wooden sculpture of a monk's head bearing an inscription on the interior, Japan, 1328 from Sign, Image, Symbol (ed. George Kepes)

all those commas

04.29.19

“You mean that’s your idea of desire, with all those commas?”
—Michael Palmer
from “Idem 1"

attribution unknown

you say my way of thinking cannot be tolerated?

03.20.19

“You say that my way of thinking cannot be tolerated? What of it? The man who alters his way of thinking to suit others is a fool. My way of thinking is the result of my reflections. It is part of my inner being, the way I am made. I do not contradict them, and would not even if I wished to. For my system, which you disapprove of, is also my greatest comfort in life, the source of all my happiness—it means more to me than my life itself. ”
—Marquis de Sade
from a letter written to his wife while he was in prison, as quoted in Portrait of De Sade by Walter Lennig

Photograph by Anya Teixeira of Lindsay Kemp performing in Oscar Wilde’s Salomé

most people know what a story is until

03.05.19

“I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.”
—Flannery O’Connor
from The Habit of Being (collected letters)

Carolee Schneemann – still from "Up to and Including Her Limits," 1976

no greater agony

02.26.19

"There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you."
—Maya Angelou
from I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Dress sculpture by Louise Richardson

until it shines

01.16.19

“I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word. Sometimes I write one, and I look at it, until it begins to shine.”
—widely attributed to Emily Dickinson
original context unclear

Carl Andre – foot 1963

usefulness from what is not there

01.02.19

Shape clay into a vessel;

It is the space within that makes it useful.


Cut doors and windows for a room;


It is the holes which make it useful.


Therefore benefit comes from what is there;


Usefulness from what is not there.
—Lao Tzu
from Tao Te Ching, Chapter 11

Belma Arslan - Afoot

literature is love

12.04.18

"To begin with, let us take the following motto... Literature is love. Now we can continue."
—Vladimir Nabokov
from Despair

Flannery O'Connor as a girl, reading, 
via the Ina Dillard Russell Library, Georgia College & State University

mistranslations result in beauty

11.16.18

"Great literature is written in a sort of foreign language. To each sentence we attach a meaning, or at any rate a mental image, which is often a mistranslation. But in great literature all our mistranslations result in beauty."
—Marcel Proust
as quoted by Gilles Deleuze in Dialogues II

Julius Kirchner, 1914
Blind children studying the hippopatamus

transforming milk

0.30.18

“Overambitious projects may be objectionable in many fields, but not in literature. Literature remains alive only if we set ourselves immeasurable goals, far beyond all hope of achievement. Only if poets and writers set themselves tasks that no one else dares imagine will literature continue to have a function.”
—Italo Calvino
from Six Memos for the Next Millennium

An annotated photograph by Allen Ginsberg of the artist Harry Smith "transforming milk into milk," 1985

nothing, really, dies

09.29.18

"In college I had a physics professor who wrote the date and time in red marker on a sheet of white paper and then lit the paper on fire and placed it on a metallic mesh basket on the lab table where it burned to ashes. He asked us whether or not the information on the paper was destroyed and not recoverable, and of course we were wrong, because physics tells us that information is never lost, not even in a black hole, and that what is seemingly destroyed is, in fact, retrievable. In that burning paper the markings of ink on the page are preserved in the way the flame flickers and the smoke curls. Wildly distorted to the point of chaos, the information is nonetheless not dead. Nothing, really, dies. Nothing dies. Nothing dies."
Nicholas Rombes
from The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing

Tim Rollins and K.O.S. - from the series
The Temptation of Saint Anthony