Nacre upon nacre upon nacre, bluish upon bluish upon bluish, each age and each house in which I have dwelled (if it was not all a hallucination of nothingness) is a filter deforming the previous one, blending itself with them, making them narrower and more heterogenous bands. For you do not describe the past by writing about old things, but the misty air between you and it.
Thinking about myself at different ages, as so many consumed previous lives, it is as though I spoke about a long, uninterrupted chain of corpses, a tunnel of bodies dying one within the other. A moment ago, the one who, reflected by the dark lacquer of the coffee cup, had written here the words “dying one within the other” collapsed off the stool, his skin cracked, the bones of his face became visible, his eyes leaked out oozing black blood. In a moment, the one who will write “the one who will write” will also collapse down upon the other’s dust. How could you penetrate this ossuary? And why would you do so? And what gauze mask, what surgical gloves would protect you from the infection emanated by memory?
from Mircea Cărtărescu's novel Orbitor, translated into English as Glaring (vol. 1)
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And yet we lament the fate of those who have entered the misty realm of Memories Lost...who swim into and out from and all around what we remember of and for them.
ReplyDeleteHello my beautiful friend, this is another one of your masterpeices.It is a perfect marriage of the text and the image.It is almost as if the subject of the photo has grown insane from relentless suffering.
ReplyDeleteand to comment our last dialogue-there is no remembering the beauty of the universe here, it becomes an impossible task.
and this post is a magnificent meditation for all those who have lost the beauty of past lives.a reminder to suffer for others even when and if the world treats us right.
sending you soft summer soul kisses my beautiful friend.
cum isi aminteste ea,mereu partial,mereu cu cate un val matasos peste.dar este amintirea ei,cu desavarsire a ei,atat de sigur si strans tinuta in pupila...
ReplyDeletewe, all of us are stranded by our own memories due to sheer limitations of the brain.
ReplyDeleteit is something i am fascinated with and overwhelmed at the same time (will be writing about in the next few days).
your images are in perfect sync to the passage, eyes open and closed beneath shades & strands (of memories). . .
thank you.
what a macabre vision, shedding our own dead bodies like leaves constantly falling from us -- and yet true, i think we know it deep under the skin!! ... or perhaps the truth is even more grotesque -- our dead selves do not fall from us with an autumnal soughing ... rather we must claw our passage through the chest, continually tunneling from the wet charnel cell of each dying self, even this present self that will slump away as i write, this present self that will slump away as i write
ReplyDeleteand yet, what a contrast she makes with this horror!! are we supposed to remember that this version, this moment, of her, represented in these photos, is lost forever now, is lying discarded somewhere on the secret floor of her self? no, no, it is impossible. she lives. the longing enigma of this smile rises from the page and floats through me, abolishes the macabre ... it is like opening some musty Kunstkammer of bones and teeth and rattling finger-joints and finding, instead of what i expected, a skyblue butterfly that flies out and settles on the back of my hand, opening and shutting its wings quietly in a gentle slant of sun ...
Am watching, as always, awestruck...
ReplyDeletean intriguing passage and the photographs illustrate it perfectly, the woman looks uncannily like someone I used to know...
ReplyDeleteSpeechless. Owens says it all.
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ReplyDeleteand another little thought here - all is fluid like rivers of thought running through our souls from time immemorial and we always want to grasp at something even the moment how can there be a moment as if something could be static-this idea of a moment is erroneous like the thin blue line of existence of a blue blue planet and perhaps it is this damning up of the fluidity that causes the most suffering.with outstretched hands we receive life giving water that flows through our existence.
.......sigh........
ReplyDeleteoh... and yes I do love James' skyblue butterfly.it flutters straight to my heart .no not a curved path but directly to it you know.
ReplyDeleteHaunting. The landscape and weather of this face... Always moving...
ReplyDeleteis this you, Roxana?
ReplyDeletethank you from all my heart... i think that these words speak to many of us, if not all, who are interested in (not to say obsessed with :-) photography...
ReplyDeleteyes, it is a horror that that moment, that self of hers is forever lost. sometimes i think that photographs, like these ones, can really fight that, make that _unhappen_, and then i almost believe it :-)
no, it is not me, but someone very dear to me.
I have missed being here. Please accept my apologies for staying away too long. This post reminds me that I must not do that to myself again! Thank you for these gorgeous images and the words that mean very much to me right now.
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