The Melancholy Gaze continued
And these things that live,
slipping away, understand that you praise them;
transitory themselves, they trust us for rescue,
us, the most transient of all. They wish us to transmute them
in our invisible heart–oh, infinitely into us! Whoever we are.
Rainer Maria Rilke (C. F. MacIntyre, translation) “The Ninth Elegy” Duino Elegies (1911-1922)
Eye Saw
“… an abyss into which the eye sinks, a voiceless germination.”
Cezanne (in Jean-Luc Marion The Crossing of the Visible, 1996)
Heretical Tree
“I am surrounded by a special void which repels me and which I wouldn’t know how to cross over”.
Maurice Blanchot, Thomas the Obscure (2005)
Force / Field
“… the spirits have to be recognized to become real.
They are not outside us, nor even entirely within, but flow back and foth between us and the objects we have made, the landscape we have shaped and move in .
We have dreamed all these things in our deepest lives and they are ourselves. It is our self that we are making out there, and when the landscape is complete we shall have become the gods who are intended to fill it.”
David Malouf, An Imaginary Life (1978)
“I feel that
there is much to be said for the Celtic belief that
the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive
in some inferior being, in an animal, in a plant, in
some inanimate object, and thus effectively lost to us
until the day (which to many never comes) when we
happen to pass by a tree or to obtain possession of
the object which forms their prison. Then they start
and tremble, they call us by our name, and as soon as
we have recognised their voice the spell is broken.
Delivered by us, they have overcome death and return
to share our life.”
Marcel Proust, The Remembrance of Things Past (1913)
(Tree images by J. Bowring)
