Little One, In Whispers...

If it’s a ray, if it’s light,
that’s only because
the whisper and chatter of lovers
strengthen and warm it.

And I want to tell you
that I’m whispering,
I’m giving you the ray,
little one, in whispers.

...

~ Text: from Selected Poems of Osip Mandelshtam translated by Clarence Brown

~ Image: Vittore Carpaccio

A Life Remembered...

It is of that world at the same time past and desired, mysteriously mingled with the world of my life, mysteriously suggested by it, that I wish to speak... Nevertheless, I do not think that it is the sole mystery of one will, one divinity, but rather of a life remembered with my past life, of a landscape which the actual landscape makes me desire. I shan't find, like Gide, words on the actual landscape which suggest the mystery, instead I'll describe the other mysterious landscape.

...

~ Text: Alain-Fournier on his writing, from the introduction to The Wanderer

~ Image: Hercules Seghers, The Two Trees, 17th Century

At the Back of the North Wind...

"He took my hand and led me down the stair again, and through a narrow passage, and through another, and another, and another. I don't know how there could be room for so many passages in such a little house. The heart of it must be ever so much farther from the sides than they are from each other. How could it have an inside that was so independent of its outside..."

...

Text From the story "Nanny's Dream" in At the Back of the North Wind, Blackie & Son, London, 1886, by George MacDonald.

Imperceptible...

“It is the inaudible and the imperceptible that slowly... does not fill the space, but discovers it, unveils it. And this provokes an unexpected being in the sound... signals of the very rich acoustic life within and without us... in order to be able to discover, to be able to be amazed at the unknown, at the almost impossible to perceive...”

- Luigi Nono

Like a Small Vibration in Long Wires...

"They were floating, almost at one with the darkness, reflecting no light. Their footsteps could not be heard. But their breathing could, and perhaps the heart. They mingled with other almost inaudible nocturnal stirrings, like a small vibration in long wires."

...

Text: Tarjei Vesaas, The Ice Palace

Image: Hercules Seghers, Mountain Gorge with an Impression of the Rigging of a Ship

A Music of Murmurs...

“There is an instrument that can hardly be heard; it is played in Africa for oneself alone, inside the hut, or outside without bothering or attracting anyone. Rudimentary, archaic, apparently put together haphazardly, freely, by the village blacksmith, the sanzas (that is its name): no two the same, no good even for a slightly elaborated melody, it is independent of any scale, anarchical! A music of murmurs, the opposite of music for competitions, compositions. Instrument to relieve us dreamily from all the noisemakers of the world.”

~ Henri Michaux, In the Changing Waters of Resonance, 1975

The Word Brambles, You Say

V

I go out.
I dream that I am going out into the snowy night.
I dream that I am carrying
With me, far, outside, there is no turning back,
The mirror from the upstairs bedroom, the mirror from
Summers past, the boat at whose prow
We, simple, pushed forward...

VI

But here I am now
Standing outside the house; everything is motionless
Since it is only a dream. And so I go on, leaving,
It hardly matters where, against a wall, beneath the stars,
This mirror, our life. And may night’s dew
Condense and flow, over the images…

...

~ Text and title: “The Top of the World,” Yves Bonnefoy, included in John Naughton’s translation of Bonnefoy’s In the Shadow’s Light, University of Chicago Press, 1991.

~ Image: Antonio Victor, Untitled photogram, 1918

A Canopy of Heaven, Full of Whispers...

“On that night the sky laid bare its internal construction in many sections which, like anatomical exhibits, showed the spirals and whorls of light, the pale-green solids of darkness, the plasma of space, the tissue of dreams...”

“From all the crevices in the floor, from all the moldings, from every recess, there grew slim shoots filling the gray air with a scintillating filigree lace of leaves: a hot-house jungle, full of whispers and flicking lights – a false and blissful spring. Around the bed, under the lamp, along the wardrobes, grew clumps of delicate trees which, high above, spread their luminous crowns and fountains of lacy leaves, spraying chlorophyll, and thrusting up to the painted heaven of the ceiling.”

...

~ Text: The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz, translated by Celina Wieniewska

~ Image: Charles Burchfield, Orion in December, 1959