💬 Quotes
- A Providence will watch over me
- How then, does the bird live?
- If there is a god, he is not done
- Life is seen by life
- Be never bored
- Be the neighbor who notices
- In the meantime, there is always beauty
- Reteach all things its loveliness
- The world is my fourth dimension
- Let your yes be yes and your no be no
- The Truth shall make you free
- Preserve your ability to respond
- Shepherds are still tender in a time of war
- Let me stay tenderhearted, despite despite despite
- Love drives out all fear
- The world of the generous gets larger
- Keep a council of eunuchs, and consult them
- Find yourself a trinity
- Courage is the cure
- You are who you hang out with
- Faithfulness keeps me safe
- Choose integrity or die trying
- Not knowing when the dawn will come, open every door
- Read the full terms and consequences
- Hope is the thing with feathers
- After the final no there comes a yes / And on that yes the future world depends. / No was the night. Yes is this present Sun.
- After life, there must be life
- Desire, but do not grasp
- There are no rules
💬 Finished reading: Conversation in the Mountains: Collected Prose of Paul … by Paul Celan 📚
>“Once the poem is really there, the poet is dismissed, is no longer privy.”
>“Craft means handiwork, a matter of hands. And these hands must belong to one person, i.e. a unique, mortal soul searching for its way with its voice and its dumbness. Only truthful hands write true poems. I cannot see any basic differences between a handshake and a poem.”
>“Poems are also gifts—gifts to the attentive. Gifts bearing destinies.”
>“It begins, in Germany, here, today, with the Individual. May we spread a fourth possibility.”
>“La poésie ne s’impose plus, elle s’expose."
>“Poetry no longer imposes itself, it exposes itself.”
>“A poem, being an instance of language, hence essentially dialogue, may be a letter in a bottle thrown out to sea with the—surely not always strong—hope that it may somehow wash up somewhere, perhaps on a shoreline of the heart. In this way, too, poems are en route: they are headed toward. Toward what? Toward something open, inhabitable, an approachable you, perhaps, an approachable reality. Such realities are, I think are at stake, in a poem… racked by reality and in search of it.”
A Few North Stars I Can See
💬 💬 In an effort to clarify my core values over the past few months, I’ve been collecting what I call “North Stars” which are just quotes, poems, monostichs, old sermons from myself or others, etc. What I find myself returning to and needing to recite. I’ve also asked friends about theirs and have been delighted (I’ll share those at a later time). I’m not yet sure what will make it onto my final “map” project or how it will evolve, but I’m pleased with how these pieces already feel like they’ve been guiding and anchoring me to the sky. I hope you enjoy some of them as well. ⭐️ Stay up!
Contributing Voices
>Ashbery · Jesus Christ · Clarice Lispector · Wallace Stevens · Viola Davis · Kierkegaard · Emily Dickinson · Robert Duncan · Kinnell · Hopkins · Eugene Peterson · Viktor Frankl · Jim Rohn · Proverbs · the Psalms · the Epistles · Binchtopia · Lucie Brock-Broido · my beautiful father · a wise friend
Some North Stars
💬 King Lear:
So we’ll live,/ And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh/ At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues/ Talk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too-/ Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out-/ And take upon ’s the mystery of things,As if we were God’s spies; and we’ll wear out,/ In a wall’d prison, packs and sects of great ones/ that ebb and flow by th' moon.
💬 Finished reading: The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion 📚
> “A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.” — Philippe Ariès, quoted by Joan Didion
>“You can love more than one person — of course you can. But marriage is something different. Marriage is memory, marriage is time… Marriage is also, paradoxically, the denial of time. For forty years I saw myself through John’s eyes. I did not age.”
>“I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead.”
💬 “The death of a parent, despite our preparation—indeed, despite our age—dislodges something deep in us, sets off reactions that surprise us and that dredge up memories and feelings that we thought gone to ground long ago. We might, in that indeterminate period we call mourning, be in a submarine on an ocean’s bed, aware of the depth charges now near and now far, buffeting us with recollections. … Grief is different. Grief has no distance. It comes in waves, paradoxically sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.” - Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
💬 “And death with a top hat quietly laughing at us as he passed, even that we will miss. Even that we loved.” - Steve Scafidi
💬 “The true has about it an air of mystery or inexplicability. this mystery is an attribute of the elemental: art of the kind I mean to describe will seem the furthest concentration or reduction or clarification of its substance; it cannot be further refined without being changed in its nature. It is essence, ore, wholly unique, and therefore comparable to nothing. No “it” will have existed before; what will have existed are other instances of like authenticity. The true, in poetry, is felt as insight. It is very rare, but beside it other poems seem merely intelligent comment.” - Against Sincerity, Louise Glück
📖 Thoughts on On Photography by Susan Sontag
Finished reading: On Photography by Susan Sontag 📚
What a brutal criticism on photography.
I don’t think Susan Sontag would have had an Instagram, to say the least.
I agreed with a lot of her diagnosis of society’s relationship to the photograph and the camera: the way images can turn the world into something to be collected and consumed, how they push us toward spectatorship instead of action, and how easily they plug into surveillance, control, and commodified experience. But my problem starts when she absolutizes those insights.
Sontag’s moral positioning against photographers, sentimentality, art movements, and pretty much anyone who has ever been interested in taking a photo feels at points insufferable and, ironically, distant from reality. To morally reject all photography, surrealism (yep, that means Picasso), and Joseph Cornell (who doesn’t like Cornell boxes?!) on the grounds of their supposed lack of realism, which she seems to treat as the pinnacle, is a bold move. She fights hard for that stance with sharp articulation, extensive research, and genuinely lovely prose, but it still reads as an overreach.
However, some of the theories she puts forward really do shade in the non‑reality internet world we find ourselves in now, where so much of life is filtered through screens and feeds. Still, I’m not persuaded that her critique moves me enough to give up my film camera, or to treat every vacation snapshot—or every new parent taking another photo of their baby—as a moral or societal failure. Those photos can also simply be about care, memory, and connection, not just appropriation.
I’ve noticed recently (and share) a growing hostility toward the photograph, driven by privacy concerns around AI and the fallout of living in a social‑media and ad‑saturated culture. That’s where Sontag’s idea of an “image world” that hollows out experience feels newly useful. I will certainly be thinking about this book for awhile.
Some 💬 thoughtful quotes:
>“Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible; of making it stand still.”
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>“Whatever the moral claims made on behalf of photography, it’s main effect is to convert the world into a department store or museum-without -walls in which every subject is depreciated into an article of consumption, promoted into an item for aesthetic appreciation.”
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>“Life is not about significant details, illuminated a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are. The lure of photographs, their hold on us, is that they offer at one and the same time a connoisseur’s relation to the world and a promiscuous acceptance of the world.”
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>“Today everything exists to end in a photograph.”
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>“As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of a space in which they are insecure. Thus, photograph develops in tandem with one of the most characteristic of modern activities: tourism.”
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>“To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge–and therefore, like power.”
💬 Quote:
> Poetry gets as close as possible to the unsayable and then fails—that failure is poetry. - Elizabeth Metzger