To walk is to lack a place. It is the indefinite process of being absent and in search of a proper. The moving about that the city mutliplies and concentrates makes the city itself an immense social experience of lacking a place – an experience that is, to be sure, broken up into countless tiny… Continue reading Michel de Certeau
There is always some limit which the individual accepts. He identifies this limit with himself. Horror seizes him at the thought that this limit may cease to be. But we are wrong to take this limit and the individual’s acceptance of it seriously. The limit is only there to be overreached. Fear and horror are… Continue reading Georges Bataille
[sometimes i am alive because with] sometimes i am alive because with me her alert treelike body sleeps which i will feel slowly sharpening becoming distinct with love slowly, who in my shoulder sinks sweetly teeth until we shall attain the Springsmelling intense large togethercoloured instant the moment pleasantly frightful when, her mouth suddenly rising,… Continue reading E.E. Cummings
To perceive a landscape is therefore to carry out an act of remembrance, and remembering is not so much a matter of calling up an internal image, stored in the mind, as of engaging perceptually with an environment that is itself pregnant with the past. — Tim Ingold, from “The Temporality of the Landscape,” World… Continue reading Tim Ingold
Poetry remakes and prolongs language; every poetic language begins by being a secret language, that is, the creation of a personal universe, of a completely closed world. The purest poetic act seems to re-create language from an inner experience that … reveals the essence of things. — Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. (Princeton… Continue reading Mircea Eliade
The dying sun will glow on you without burning, as it has done today. The wind will be soft and mellow and your hilltop will tremble. As you reach the end of your dance you will look at the sun, for you will never see it again in waking or in dreaming, and then your… Continue reading Carlos Castaneda
The aim is to balance the terror of being alive with the wonder of being alive. — Carlos Castaneda, The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge. (TOUCHSTONE BOOKS; Reprint. edition 1968)
I think I fell in love with her, a little bit. Isn’t that dumb? But it was like I knew her. Like she was my oldest, dearest friend. The kind of person you can tell anything to, no matter how bad, and they’ll still love you, because they know you. I wanted to go with… Continue reading Neil Gaiman
THOU liest dead, and there will be no memory left behind Of thee or thine in all the earth, for never didst thou bind The roses of Pierian streams upon thy brow; thy doom Is now to flit with unknown ghosts in cold and nameless gloom. Sappho, “The One Who Loved Not Poetry,” Greek Poets… Continue reading Sappho
The Vale of Soul-Making 