Filaments of Desire...

“In a sky reflected downward on a lake, the clouds whirl around like summer spirits, and as you row across this sky of water your oar dips quietly towards evening like a dark wooden spoon into the cloud-milk. You feel giddy in a silent and private feeling of detachment, simultaneously lost and at home in the light playing tricks among the reflections, and you continue rowing both in water and in baffling sky. The boat casts a shadow in a heaven of water and the keel’s wake wrinkles the glass mountain. Far away you see a ripple of forest wind stir the reflections of sunlit leaves. The mirrored greenery buckles in the boat’s waves. On the shore a woman in a yellow blouse is also reflected, her liquid image is pulled out into filaments of desire fluttering like tongues of fire in the purity of water.”

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Text: Harry Martinson, Views from a Tuft of Grass

A Happiness in Itself...

"He remembered the joy which the sight of the big night-bird always caused to the heart of Childerique. 'I count that a great stroke of luck, a great happiness, to see an owl,' she had said to him. He had asked her if she believed that the birds were omens of happiness. 'I do not know,' she said, 'I think it is a great happiness, in itself, to see them.'"

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~ Text: Isak Dinesen's "The Caryatids" in Last Tales

Of Secret Thoughts and of Heaven...

“If, in planting a coffee tree, you bend the taproot, that tree will start, after a little time, to put out a multitude of small delicate roots near the surface. That tree will never thrive, nor bear fruit, but it will flower more richly than the others … Those fine roots are the dreams of the trees. As it puts them out, it need no longer think of its bent taproot. It keeps alive by them – a little, not very long … If you want to go to sleep at night, Lincoln, you must not think, as people tell you, of a long row of sheep or camels passing through a gate, for they go in one direction, and your thoughts will go along with them. You should think instead of a deep well. In the bottom of that well, just in the middle of it, there comes up a spring of water, which runs out in little streamlets to all possible sides, like the rays of a star. If you can make your thoughts run out with that water, not in one direction, but equally to all sides, you will fall asleep.”

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~ Text and title: From "The Dreamers" Seven Gothic Tales by Isak Dinesen

~ Image: Frank Borzage, The Pilgrim, 1916

Accumulator and Conductor....

“To find a kinship between image, sound and silence. To give them an air of being glad to be together, of having chosen their place. Milton: Silence was pleased.”

“Slow films in which everyone is galloping and gesticulating; swift films in which people hardly stir.”

“Image. Reflection and reflector, accumulator and conductor.”

“Silence, musical by an effect of resonance. The last syllable of the last word, or the last noise, like a held note.”

“To translate the invisible wind by the water it sculpts in passing.”

“Your film’s beauty will not be in the images but in the ineffable that they will disengage.”

“Your camera catches not only physical movements that are inapprehensible by pencil, brush or pen, but also certain states of soul recognizable by indices which it alone can reveal.”

“You illumine him and he illumines you. The light you receive from him is added to the light he receives from you.”

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~ Text: From Robert Bresson's Notes on the Cinematographer

And the Milky Way Enveloped a Tiny Ship...

The Great Orion Nebula, 1874-1875 by Etienne Leopold Trouvelot, pastel

Part of the Milky Way Visible in Winter: Observed in 1874-1875 by Etienne Leopold Trouvelot, pastel

Crowded with Shadows...

George H. Seeley, Winter Landscape, 1909

“It was no wonder to them now that they had not been able to tell what it was, for this surface was everywhere crowded with shadows. The mass was chiefly made up of shadows of leaves innumerable, of all lovely and imaginative forms, waving to and fro, floating and quivering in one breath of a breeze whose motion was unfelt, whose sound was unheard […] As they walked they waded knee-deep in the lovely lake. For the shadows were not merely lying on the surface of the ground, but heaped up above it like substantial forms of darkness, as if they had been cast upon a thousand different planes of the air.”

~ George MacDonald, The Golden Key

So Blossoms from Star to Star...

La Recherche Expedition, 1838-1840

The northern lights bring silence.

The northern lights lower the eyelids.
The northern lights waft in you and surge over you,
For a world sinks gloriously down to you...

~ Text from Däubler’s book on the Northern Lights, Das Nordlicht

A Handkerchief of Seaweed...

"Elfride never went out on horseback but she brought home something - something found, or something bought. If she trotted to town or village, her burden was books. If to hills, woods, or the seashore, it was wonderful mosses, abnormal twigs, a handkerchief of wet shells or seaweed."

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~ Text: Thomas Hardy, A Pair of Blue Eyes, 1873

~ Images: Swedish Botanical, 1920s

Gathered Into Invisible Arms...

The Moon: Sculpture by James Nasmyth

The Sun: Studies of the Solar Spectrum by Jules Janssen

“The three people, the captain, a gentleman, and a young girl, climb into the basket, the anchoring cords are loosed, and the strange house flies, slowly, as if it had first to ponder something, upward […] Everything has an almost brownish clarity. The beautiful moonlit night seems to gather the splendid balloon into invisible arms, gently and quietly the roundish flying body ascends, and now, hardly so that one might notice, subtle winds propel it northward […] How beautiful it is, the round, pale, dark depth below. The moonlight, tender and evocative, picks the rivers out, silver […] The forests seem to be chanting somber and ancient songs, but this chanting strikes one as being more like a noble silent knowledge […] The loneliness of remote regions has a special tone, such that one believes one ought to understand and even see this special thing that slips away from thought […] One peers down into regions where one’s feet would never, never have trod, because in certain regions, indeed in most, one has no purpose whatever. How big and unknown to us the earth is, thinks the feather-hatted gentleman. Yes, your own country does finally become intelligible from up here, looking down […] and onward one flies, onward, and finally the glorious sun appears, and, attracted by this proud star, the balloon soars upward into a magical dizzy height.”

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~ Text: Robert Walser, Balloon Journey