Still and Hushed, yet Trembling, As a Whisper, As a Wire....

“I’m involved in stasis. It’s frozen, at the same time it’s vibrating.” ~ Morton Feldman

Reading a book about Fernand Khnopff’s “Portrait of Jeanne Kéfer” – a painting somehow as much about the trembling stillness of her hands…

Like a whisper, like a wire…

As something, small, quiet, still, and close may hold or convey what is most felt; whereas volume and broad gestures diminish and distance.

A breathcrystal...

The sound of the stars’ heavy millstones
that scrape slowly around the huge hubs, and
turn their hoarfrosted faces toward each other
and bend them away again behind a million miles,
– everything that moves in outer space
on gigantic ball bearings, transmits faint sounds,
a whining song that dies out in the great distances.
This is what we hear in the hiss from the telephone wires,
they are antennae that capture the signals from space
and cry them out over desolate moors at night
when the poles are murmuring and calling anxiously
as when a person dreams dark dreams […]

~ Rolf Jacobsen, “Vibrating Telephone Poles”

Images (from top to bottom) * Detail from "Arum Lily" by Fernand Khnopff (1895) * Details from old photographs in my tiny collection * Album cover for Alan Lamb's Night Passage * Photogram by Robert Rauschenberg

Once More Amid Lunar Stones....

Komiko Kogure, Rice Paddy, 1990, charcoal, encaustic, chalk, and redwood bark

Shepherds have buried the sun in the bare forest.
A fisherman has hauled
The moon in a fine-spun net from the freezing pond.

In a blue crystal,
Pallid, man dwells, and his cheek leans on his stars;
Or he bows his head in purple sleep.

Yet still by birds’ black flight the visionary
Is touched, and by blue flowers’ holiness,
And the near-by silence ponders forgotten things,
extinguished angels.

Night envelops the brow once more amid lunar stones;
And a radiant youth
The sister appears amid autumn and black corruption.

"Rest and Silence" by Georg Trakl, translated by David Luke

*Image from The Undiminished Landscape catalog, an exhibition at the Security Pacific Gallery, SF*

And Now We Shall Get Frostflowers on Our Eyes, or When We Notice the Silent Kingdom of Conceptual Shadows....

“There are days when everything about one is bright, light, scarcely stated in the clear air and yet distinct. Even what lies nearest has tones of distance...”

Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurid Brigge, 1910

.*.*.*.*.

“The beginning of all wisdom is to look fixedly on Clothes until they become transparent… The thing Visible, nay the thing Imagined, the thing in any way conceived as visible, what is it but a Garment, a clothing of the higher, celestial Invisible […] What is man himself and his whole terrestrial life, but an Emblem: a Clothing or visible garment for that divine me of his, cast hither, like a light-particle, down from Heaven?”

Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Restartus, 1833

.*.*.*.*.

“a music of the spirit, a pure art, removing us far away from the deafening turmoil of life to lead us to the silent kingdom of conceptual shadows.”

Karl Kostlin describing a string quartet, 1850, from Fragments – Stille, An Diotima liner notes

.*.*.*.*.

“a more secret world / in rich silence / born from ether / in the eternal silent light / emerging into air and light”

Luigi Nono, notes to performers, taken from Holderlin

.*.*.*.*.

The first time I remember looking at a painting is during a trip to the Palace of Fine Arts with my mom at about age five. Although eating almond cookies at the Japanese Tea Garden prior to the The Palace and being fascinated by a woman dancing is what I remember most, one memory persists from my time with the paintings that day: staring up at and somewhat awe-struck by what seems to have been a Fifteenth-Century Italian painting of the Madonna...

All I saw were the peripheral spaces; a veil that seemed to hover on the surface and appeared to embody invisible fibers; folds of a paper-thin fabric around her neck and hands; points of light, sparkles, and dark interiors; a golden "sky" or "boat" falling quietly behind her...

I remember feeling my breath suspended, as if I had been allowed to glance at something secreted and truly magical... Yes, almost as awe-struck as when, that same year, a boy I knew passed his finger through a candle flame without being burned and somehow convinced me he had superpowers (oh, was I impressed)...

I like to think this early encounter with painting has given me my love of peripheral spaces; things glanced at from the side and behind lashes; experiencing art, sound, and poetry as moving through a landscape with "frostflowers on my eyes" so to speak...

.*.*.*.*.

Some sounds that remind...

Max Richter (The Blue Notebooks / Memoryhouse) * Johann Johannson (ibm 1401, a user’s manual) * Gavin Bryars (The Sinking of the Titanic) * Bernhard Gunter (Crossing the River (Night Music)) * Sylvian Chaveau (Un Autre Decembre) * David Sylvian (ember glance: the permanence of memory / when loud weather buffeted) * Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson (Ship) * Keith Berry (The Golden Boat) * Colleen (les ondes silencieuses) * Thomas Koner (Zyklop) * Steve Roden (one stone and arcs and ears) * ákos garai (Til Ødslig Horisont) * Nurse with Wound (Salt Marie Celeste) * Richard Skelton (all the Landings recordings) *

{First title from Rilke's Notebooks; second title fromKostlin} * {Click here for image credits}

As Mingled Clearness and Obscurity....

Some years ago, on New Years Day, I found the following text and made a book to house it in; a book for T... I can't remember how it came to be, except that I glanced through one Herr Swiezynski's Oxford English Dictionary and, through some sort of made up game with a set of hazy rules, I opened to and transcribed the series of chanced upon words below...

Fin-like,

.....an aspen,

..........of distillation,

the turning to distill,

.....still the distant transition,

..........to form,

volte-face,

..........twilight of the twentieth,

....................among the old,

a fork,

.....to branch,

..........a divergence,

...............this way,

....................sweet demarcation, demarche,

.........................a destiny,

reflection...

..........to obtain a clearer view,

...............a relation to the things of yesterday

...............perils that we shall not

again encounter,

a mirror,

.....to time,

.....to see, layer upon layer,

....................beneath which, a palimpsest,

..........beyond which, a movement

....................to move beyond,

....................to crez...create anew,

.........................invoking the old,

a turning point, to spin a tendril,

.....pass over,

..........step over,

...............carefully...

........................................a prospect,

.....usually forbidding,

......................................an expectation,

..........usually forbidden,

the prospect of a premonition,

..........clairvoyant,

...............clarity,

.......core,

.....to collect,

..........make a collection of the days,

to correspond with a century,

..........dove,

...............starling,

....................tails and tales, entails,

.....the seeking out,

...............of,

..........the correspondence between old and new,

...................................clair-obscure...

chiaroschuro,

.....as mingled clearness and obscurity,

..........a moment when the old borders the new,

...............brushes,

....................becomes,

........................................silence,

to know when something has stilled,

.....a lucid stilling,

.....the rift within a veil

..........the order in which to begin,

...................................an aurora, to enter,

........................................upon,

...................................................to hatch

...the beginning

A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment....

“As I recover it in recalling my child-wrought memories, it is no complete building; it is all broken up inside me; here a room, there a room, and here a piece of hallway that does not connect these two rooms but is preserved, as a fragment, by itself. In this way it is all dispersed within me – the rooms, the stairways that descend with such ceremonious deliberation, and other narrow, spiral stairs in the obscurity of which one moved as blood does in the veins; the tower rooms, the high-hung balconies, the unexpected galleries onto which one was thrust out through a little door – all that is still in me and will never cease to be in me. It is as though the picture of this house had fallen into me from an infinite height and had shattered against my very ground.”

~Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, translated by M.D. Herter Norton



“And that house was a magnet, an absolute magnet, and it grew because it had my mother’s love in it. It’s odd, because the daughter who takes most after my mother, Maisie, her house is the same, it draws people. Some houses do.”

~Terence Davies in an interview with Paul Farley, Distant Voices, Still Lives, BFI, 2006

I’ve been saving up the Rilke quote for some time, hoping to find an image that would keep it company – some other expression tied to the love of a house, loosely wrapped in some early experience - a network of memories forming a place present throughout life. Something elusive, something…

…fallen into me from an infinite height and shattered against my very ground…

All film stills from Distant Voices, Still Lives

Distant Voices, Still Lives, directed by Terence Davies, beautifully materializes this atmosphere of pure memory, small glances, and colliding passages; through doorposts, windows, floors, and light… A film about a house as much as a family, and the memory of a space as well as the memory within a space…

This idea that a house breathes…

The invisible effects of its architecture – sounds, light, warmth, a place between rooms…

...

“I’ve tried to paint for the ear of the inner eye. I’ve tried to appeal to the eye of the inner ear.”

~Terence Davies, quoted in the book Terence Davies by Wendy Everett

Images from Steve Roden's schindler house, Mak Center for Art & Architecture, 2001
(Last image: drawings done with eyes closed listening to the house)

Somehow Steve Roden’s schindler house seems part of this, too. Certainly threaded through with personal memory, the work is, perhaps, also another materialization of the memory that exists within a house – in its walls, gardens, windows, and doors – sounds that gather and resonate in a space somewhere between our awareness of the physical structure and our internal experience of both being present and remembering at the same time…

“Sitting in the rooms at night, with eyes closed listening, and gently running contact microphones along the surfaces of glass windows, fireplaces, wooden beams, concrete walls, canvas sliding doors, metal door springs, etc. once again, for me, it was the material presence, the details, and the intimacy of the spaces that found their way to the surfaces of my experiences and consciousness.”

~ From schindler house liner notes by steve roden

~Post title from T.S. Eliot’s The Four Quartets {Thanks to Diane Granahan for reminding me...}

How Quiet the Night, Blooming....

{Untitled Night Blooming series by Rauschenberg, circa 1951}

Very recently I traveled south and slept in a house surrounded by the most wonderful giant oak trees nearly enveloped in Spanish moss. One of these was also covered in a cactus vine called Night Blooming Cereus... Our host told me how the vine’s lovely white flower blooms just one midsummer’s night each year as evening falls…

The Latin name for Night Blooming Cereus is Selenicereus, which reminds me of the French word Silencieuse and, of course, the word silence...

I try to imagine what it would be like to stand under the oak and see the white flower open in that evening shade. How the atmosphere (both aural and physical) might respond to the moment and bloom alongside the blossom, an ambient pressure growing out of the stillness and silence, a sort of mirror sounding of the Selenicereus...

I think of Rauschenberg, who began his Night Blooming series, as well as his White Paintings, in Black Mountain, North Carolina, amidst this kind of atmosphere... And then I think of John Cage (certainly inspired by the White Paintings and perhaps even partly by Black Mountain's atmosphere) going on to imagine his great work of silence 4' 33".

{Untitled Gold Paintings by Rauschenberg, 1952-1953}

And then, apparently, the Cereus blossom closes forever with the first rays of the morning sun... Like Cage's description of the White Paintings, I like to think the flower lives on as a "landing strip for dust motes, light, and shadow."

A Transmutation....

"Love isn't love at all. It's a bodily encounter of fantasies! A transmutation of (as her eyes wander, searching for comparisons) chairs... curtains... trees... And in the center a person!"

~Robert Musil, from the play Die Schwarmer...

Though not certain love is not love after all, it's nice to think it may contain, in part, a transmutation of trees and curtains...

The Sound of Water Builds Nests Into the Feathered Silence....

My sky
interchanges with yours,
so does my dove
now
it flies over yours,
I see two shadows
falling
in the oatfield

We look with
each other’s eyes,
we find
a place:
rain
we say
like a story
the half-sentence
green,
I hear:

Your mouth
with the speech
of birds
carries twigs and feathers
up to my brow

...

"Bird's Nest" by Johannes Bobrowski

{Post title from "Undine" by Brobrowski}

A Shawl of Shadows on My Shoulder, as Under the Edge of Night....

One Day we shall have
both hands full of light –
the strophes of night, the moving
waters meeting the banks
again, the rough eyeless
sleep of beasts in the reeds
after the embrace – then
we shall stand against the slope,
outside, against the white
sky which comes cold
over the hill, the cascade of radiance,
and is frozen, ice,
as if fallen from stars.

I want to rest for that
little while upon your brow,
forgetful, letting,
my blood wander silent
through your heart.

That time of lilac-colour
when birds hung in the moving
sky, in the vanishing
light; the sky
stood still,
halted above the barn roof,
silent, drew in the shadows.

Light, falling
with the curve
of the burdock-leaf, the line of light –
Wind, the glassy wing
stirs on the bank.

Come and go and come again,
come and stay, a house,
a house of mist, stands before the forest,
roofs of smoke,
towers of birdcalls,
birch-branches secure the door at evening.

Darkness, whoever lives here
speaks with the bird’s voice.
Lanterns have glided
above the forests.
No breath has moved them.

I found a nice copy of the Larousse Encyclopedia of Astronomy by Lucien Rudaux, circa 1959. Leafing through the pages in search of all the images I usually find so wondrous – ones that show the principle of the pendulum, the procession of the equinoxes, celestial lanterns, planetary abstractions, and solar prominences – I found myself looking more and more at some breathtakingly mysterious photographs (many taken by Rudaux) of moon and star-lit townscapes, shadowy rooftops, and dusky seashores. Was I more interested in wandering through these landscapes, nesting among those darkened lanes, to stare up at the astronomical twilight from an earthly alcove? Most definitely…

{Poems by Johannes Bobrowski and beautifully translated by the Meads, Shadow Lands, New Directions, 1984. Last three poems are excerpts from "Sanctuary," "Shadow Land" and "Winterlight."}

Silencieuse Comme L’étreinte....

March 22, 2008

"I suggest you try looking at a mirror in the night: it's dark, it's black, you see almost nothing at all; and yet this nothing is something quite distinctly different from the nothing of the rest of the darkness. You sense the glass, the doubling of depth, some kind of remnant of the ability to shimmer..."

~ Musil

Kazimir Malevich, Black Square, 1915

The shadow has fallen
Over summer’s dusty mirrors,

Between faltering fingers
Their shine is clear,
And distant

~ Ungaretti

{Title from Jean Daive's poem Décimale blanche}

Beaming, Dreaming....

{click to read the lyrics - sing-a-long at home}

Courtesy of the NYPL Digital Library...

To be Wrecked in Seas Like These....

Thomas Cowper, An Account of Some Astronomical Phaenomena, 1776

Johann Schroeter, Selentopographische fragment, 1791

Thomas Wright, An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe, 1750

I’ve always loved this lonesome hill
And this hedge that hides
The entire horizon, almost, from sight.
But sitting here in a daydream, I picture
The boundless spaces away out there, silences
Deeper than human silence, an unfathomable hush
In which my heart is hardly a beat
From fear. And hearing the wind
Rush rustling through these bushes,
I pit its speech against infinite silence –
And a notion of eternity floats to my mind,
And the dead seasons, and the season
Beating here and now, and the sound of it. So,
In this immensity of my thoughts all drown;
And it’s easeful to be wrecked in seas like these.

~ Infinitive, Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837)

.*.*.*.*.*.

Sometimes I sit in a deserted spot
On a bank at the edge of a lake
Bordered by trees that make no sound.
There, in the middle of the afternoon,
The sun casts its still reflection on water,
And not a breath of wind stirs a single leaf
Or a single blade of grass, and you can’t
See or hear, near or far, a ripple of water
Nor a cricket chirping, nor a wingbeat
Flittering in the leaves, nor an insect buzzing,
Nor any sound or any movement at all.
A profound hush settles, and sitting quite still
I almost forget myself and the world:
My body seems to melt away and my limbs
Seem drained of spirit and motion, their ancient calm
Dissolving into that deep silence

~ The Life of Solitude (excerpt), Giacomo Leopardi

What We Hear and Call Silence....

"Give me your hand:
Now I'm going to tell you how I went into that inexpressiveness that was always my blind, secret quest. How I went into what exists between the number one and the number two, how I saw the mysterious, fiery line, how it is a surreptitious line. Between two musical notes there exists another note, between two facts there exists another fact, between two grains of sand, no matter how close they are, there exists an interval of space, there exists a sensing between sensing - in the interstices of primordial matter there is the mysterious, fiery line that is the world's continual breathing, and the world's continual breathing is what we hear and call silence."

~ From The PASSION according to G.H. by Clarice Lispector

.*.*.*.*.*.

Stumbled upon this lovely passage while looking at Jessica Dickinson's beautiful paintings and drawings here....

A Message, A Secret, A Lovely Pattern....

Some ciphers found in this exhibit from the National Archives in the United Kingdom...

Starry Silence....

And the trees and the night
Don't move anymore
Except from nests

***

I turn luminous
in an immensity of spaces

Two tabula rasa by Giuseppe Ungaretti and an etching by Gisele Celan-Lestrange...

All three remind me of another passage I recently stumbled upon; one by C. E. Montague...

Something simple, minute, and obscure, wholly good
and not puffed up at all, something almost atomic — a
grain of wheat, a thread of wool, a crystal of clean salt...

*Starry title by Ungaretti

A Florilegium....

Part two...

Including gardens, trees, and even stones...

{Stan Brakhage, The Garden of Earthly Delights (film stills)}

These tiny plants were engaged in their tortured struggles too; they reach for a space in the soil and among the competing vegetation where they can find purchase – and they hunger for light.

~ Brakhage, in conversation with Scott MacDonald

{Rose Lowder, Rue des teinturiers (film still)}

{herman de vries, collage trouve, filter paper with plant remains}

{herman de vries, 64 x daucus carota, 2001 (detail)}

{herman de vries, 148 x salix elaeagnos, 1993}

{herman de vries, petasites hybridus, 22.05.02}

The history of paradise is perhaps not a fable: looking, speaking must have been born when one ceased to exist completely in the world, in harmony with it, as the plants and stones still seem to us to be […] to the ‘marvelous’ world of things without eyes or voice: to the world of flowers and snowflakes on the flowers: those already open, or beginning to unfold.

~ Philippe Jaccottet, Truinas, Le 21 avril 2001

{herman de vries, monochrome painting, 1958}

{Antonio Lopez Garcia, Bare Trees and Moon, 1965, pencil on paper}

When the wild apple blossoms
often the moon shows up as a flower,
paler than the rest,
and shines above the tree.

~ Rolf Jacobsen, “The Moon and the Apple Tree” (excerpt)

{John Cage , Plant Watering Instructions}

{John Cage, R3 (Where R=Ryoanji), 1983, drawing around stones}.

If I am to tell you where my all-greatest feeling, my world-feeling, my earthly bliss was to be found, I must confess to you: it was to be found time and again, here and there, in such inseeing, in the indescribably swift, deep, timeless moments of this divine inseeing.

~ Rilke, Briefwechsel mit Benvenuta, 1954

{Kim Hiorthøy, sleeve design for food CD last supper}

{Mark Tobey, Hollyhock & Hollyhocks II, 1953}

{Adam Fuss, Untitled, 1988, cibacrome photogram}

{ William Henry Fox Talbot, Honeysuckle, 1844, salt print from calotype}

{Fox Talbot, Melancholy Gentleman, 1838, photogenic drawing}

{Fox Talbot, Branch of Leaves (Mercurialis) , 1839, photogenic drawing}

Leaves take all kinds of strange shapes, as if to invite us to examine them. Star-shaped, heart-shaped, spear-shaped, arrow-shaped, fretted, fringed, cleft, furrowed, serrated, sinuated; in whorls, in tufts, in spires, in wreaths endlessly expressive, deceptive, fantastic, never the same from footstalk to blossom; they seem perpetually to tempt our watchfulness, and take delight in outstripping our wonder.

~ John Ruskin

{Fox Talbot, A Cascade of Spruce Needles, 1839, photogenic drawing}

At night when the small orchestras travel home
and all the drums are tired of drumming,
tall trees stand along the streets like gates
of soundlessness, like high candelabras
before a Gothic universe we do not grasp.

[…]

For soon all the sounds in the world will go home and sleep
and all the colors will get tired of coloring
and travel away from us to unknown places
and everything will be rubbed by soft cloths
as now, tonight, by powdered-silver rain
over all the parks looming like gates
to a kingdom we once parted from
and the silence will break out
in all the trees.

~ Rolf Jacobsen, “The Silence in the Trees” (excerpt)

{Fox Talbot, Erica Mutabilis (Present to Sir John Herschel) , 1839, photogenic}

{For Diane Marie Varsi, who first introduced me to painting and Rilke, and who taught me to build faerie houses in the garden with petals and twigs, sugar cubes and white rice, dew drops and dandelions...}

{Many thanks, again, to Matthew Swiezynski for capturing the Brakhage stills}

{As always, gratitutde to Tarrl Morley for his searching}

A Long Gaze....

Some recent brushes with memory and when we were small...

The Garden of Earthly Delights (film still), Stan Brakhage

Almost like legends were the clickers or marbles we played with [...] They were Arabian stones, ringed with red or green, sometimes with stars, even with miniaturized lands; these were carried in our pockets. But it was at six in the evening, out on the field, I hear the bells ringing in the clock tower. I was gathering pebbles from the Rhine; as I looked right at them in the dusk and the clock struck, the little men were moving there fleet as shadows...

[...]

Eight years, and the most remarkable thing was the sewing box in a shop window on the way to school; it stood between skeins and mats, embroidered by feminine hands... on the box was an illustration with many dots or flecks of color on the smooth paper, as though the paint had run. It showed a hut and much snow; the moon was high and yellow in the blue winter sky; in the windows of the hut burned a red light. Below the little image stood "Moon Landscape," and at first I believed it was a landscape on the moon...


Untitled (Snow Maiden), Joseph Cornell, 1933, detail

[...]

In short, there was almost no everyday in those times beyond school; everything was amplified, or became completely still in first love, by the fountains of the rococo gardens, in the intoxication of the first speculative looks. We felt ourselves drawn, to the point of pain, into the beauty of trees, clouds, the night sky, with a sorrow of muteness before it all that drove us almost to hallucinations.

[...]

The "same" had become magical; a long gaze would transport us into that constellation

~ Ernst Bloch, excerpts from Spirit Still Taking Shape, an essay in Traces...


The Window, Antonio Lopez Garcia, 1966

Who walked past the window of my childhood
and breathed on it?
Who walked past in the deep night of childhood,
that still was starless?

With his finger he made a sign on the pane,
on the moist pane
with the ball of his finger,
and then passed on to think of other things...

~ Par Lagerkvist, Aftonland

***

"We see the world once, in childhood.
The rest is memory."

~ Loiuise Gluck

{Many thanks to the kind folks at Art of Memory for the Brakhage captures}

Like Tiniest Bells on the Garment of Silence....

"But now it had the charm for her which any broken ground, any mimic rock and ravine, have for the eyes that rest habitually on the level; especially in summer, when she could sit on a grassy hollow under the shadow of a branching ash, stooping aslant from the steep above her, and listen to the hum of insects, like tiniest bells on the garment of Silence…"

~ From the always beautiful The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot

Ribbons Resemble Lullabies....

I wind, I wind these ribbons
over my beloved’s eyes, over her soul
With brown, almost faded ink
I will write in my linen ribbons
secret signs
and I will wind them like a lullaby
around my beloved’s soul –
O never exuded balms
O narrow ribbons
wound in layer on layer of artful braid!
Don’t you already seem like the pupa of a butterfly
as it hangs on the rose bush!
You with the great eyes I gave you!
You with the immaculate face!

~ Arsinoë by Gunnar Ekelof


And threads are found in solar systems...





On foot
I had to walk through the solar systems,
before I found the first thread of my red dress.
Already, I sense myself.
Somewhere in space hangs my heart,
sparks fly from it, shaking the air,
to other reckless hearts.

~ By Edith Sodergran (1892-1923)

It Too Can Sing...

T. Tekedlen = The Tea-Kettle
"Though the kettle ranks as a lowly thing,
like the silver tea-urn, it too can sing"

***

~ Words by Hans Christian Andersen, Fabric Appliques by Dagmar Starcke...

~From Hans Christian Andersen's Alphabet, published in 1955 to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the author's birth... A small book with many beautiful illustrations by Starcke and some rather odd words by the inimitable Andersen...

A Florilegium....

Part One...

"Any great realization is only half completed in the brain's pool of light; the other half is formed in the dark soil of our innermost being, and above all it is a state of the soul on whose furthest tip the thought sits perched, like a flower..."

~ Robert Musil, Young Torless


Otto Marseus, Forest Floor......


Morris Graves, Bramble #18, 1970


Adam Fuss, Untitled, Cibachrome photogram, 1993


John B. Stair, Coconut No. 1-8, 1843


Garry Fabian Miller, Honesty, 1990

The temple bell stops,
but the sound keeps coming out of the flowers

~Basho



Garry Fabian Miller, Foxglove, Home Land, 1990


Piet Mondrian, Chrysanthemum, 1909


Piet Mondrian, Chrysanthemum, 1908


Albrecht Durer, Orpine and Bugle


Albrecht Durer, Daffodils and Other Flowers ....


Egon Schiele, Sunflowers IV, 1914


Dawson Turner, Fucus Digitatus, 1808 (Sea Flower)


Anselm Kiefer, For Robert Fludd, book pp. 19-20, 2003


Anslem Kiefer, Johannisnacht, 1987-1991


Karl Magdefrau, after Turpin, Ur-plant, 1837


John Blakemore, Chimerical Landscapes 3, from Inscape


Basilius Besler's Book of Plants, Peony & Adder's Tongue


Basilius Besler's Book of Plants, Primrose & Such...

Suddenly, softly, as if a breath breathed
On the pale wall, a magical apparition,
The shadow of the jasmine, branch and blossom!

It was not there, it is there, in a perfect image;
And all is changed. It is like a memory lost
Returning without a reason into the mind...

And it seems to me that the beauty of the shadow
Is more beautiful than the flower; a strange beauty,
Pencilled and silently deepening to distinctness.

As a memory stealing out of the mind's slumber,
A memory floating up from a dark water,
Can be more beautiful than the thing remembered.

~ Laurence Binyon (1869-1943)

Albumen print photogram, circa mid-1900s, *****