I am all in a sea of wonders. I doubt; I fear: I think strange things

"I am glad that it is old and big. I myself am of an old family, and to live in a new house would kill me. A house cannot be made habitable in a day; and, after all, how few days go to make up a century. I rejoice also that there is a chapel of old times. We Transylvanian nobles love not to think that our bones may be amongst the commonest dead. I seek not gaiety nor mirth, not the bright voluptuousness of much sunshine and sparkling waters which please the young and gay. I am no longer young; and my heart, though weary years of mourning over the dead, is not attuned to mirth. Moreover, the walls of my castle are broken; the shadows m any, and the wind breathes cold through the broken battlements and casements. I love the shade and shadow, and would be alone with my thoughts when I may."
Somehow his words and his look did not seem to accord, or else it was that his cast of face made his smile look malignant, and saturnine.

Bram Stoker - Dracula

It must be abstract It must change It must give pleasure

the real unreal: the unnameable: the howl: the ineffable: the iridescent: the void: the origin of change: the muddy centre before we breathed: the myth before the myth: the first idea in violet space: a passion felt, not understood: the anonymous colour of the universe: the savage plainness: the silence: the vulgate: the gibberish: the hermit in poet’s metaphors: the to and fro both at once: the alpha omega: the round and round like wine at a table: dark things without a double: the exactest point at which the thing is itself: the movable, the moment: the permanent impermanent: the indifferent eye: the big X: the dominant blank, the unapproachable: the cold and earliness and bright origin: the bodiless half: the clearing for outpouring: the single sleep: the intricate evasions: the senseless element: the coming on and coming forth: the final form: the clearness: the traversing shade: the rugged and luminous, chants in the dark: the and yet, and yet, and yet: the possible, possible, possible…



Yves Klein, Wallace Stevens

sun warms my skin again

time passes quickly when i must change my mind again and grow swiftly into something else.
today i bit a thread of summer from the air, no chill. i don't know when it happened - the warm - all of a sudden it just was, as i just am, idyllic again.
what dream has passed, dissolved into the new? i can barely remember, the long sun makes all but the day vague.

the day is good, the sun is bright.

and in darkness - this phase of the moon holds just me in it; the orbits have shifted again. satellites, distant and intimate, adjust without commotion in orderly silence.

in the dark, i have much space around me and i sleep long sleeps in the simpleness of it.
wasn't there just a mist here with me? i wake up thirsty often.

the night is good, the sky is dark.

i am a quiet pagan, attuned to changes only;
now i am warm and i am all
bending in tiny grace to the small and giant eyes,
dissolving, unswayable.

Q: WHO ARE YOU EVEN TALKING TO ANYMORE?

∝: myself, nobody. a vacant pronoun, a flaccid 'you', the vaguest addressee...

there is nothing here to rail against, but such vast forces pinning me to the sea floor. new-slowed molten seeps out my mouth and nostrils, forming islands out of congealed primordial rage. the new rock faces maintain my dumbed look, unblinking.

in the old world, i could scream and fly and spit ash and never need land. in the old world, everything burned illuminated, unconsumed.
in the new world, i lay still enough to maybe grow an olive tree, for a dove to find when i am less inhospitable; when i lay still enough to leak out a mountain to populate, billions of quiet years from now.

Caravaggio

Judith Beaheading Holofernes, c. 1598


Narcissus, 1597-99


The Conversion of St. Paul, 1600-01

sanguine, such as celestial spirits may bleed

All heart they live, all head, all eye, all ear,
All intellect, all sense, and as they please,
They limb themselves, and colour, shape or size
Assume, as likes them best, condense or rare.

(John Milton, Paradise Lost, IV.350)