post-rapture city, night-drive

Have you ever considered, beloved Other, how invisible we all are to each other? Have you ever thought about how little we know each other? We look at each other without seeing. We listen to each other and hear only a voice inside ourself.

 

The words of others are mistakes of our hearing, shipwrecks of our understanding. How confidently we believe in our meanings of other people’s words. We hear death in words they speak to express sensual bliss. We read sensuality and life in words they drop from their lips without the slightest intention of being profound.

The voice of brooks that you interpret, pure explicator … The voice of trees whose rustling means what we say it means … Ah, my unknown love, this is all just us and our fantasies, all ash, trickling down the bars of our cell!












from: The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa

the secret life of these stone women and men

Florence, 2013

like the rustling leaves

His heart, grown cold,
has become my body’s autumn.
Many sorrowful words
may yet fall
like the rustling leaves.


Ono no Komachi
(tr. Hirshfield & Aratani)

loneliness in pain, loneliness in love

We are as forlorn as children lost in the wood. When you stand in front of me and look at me, what do you know of the grief that is in me and what do I know of yours? And if I were to cast myself down before you and tell you, what more would you know about me that you know about Hell when someone tells you it is hot and dreadful? For that reason alone we human beings ought to stand before one another as reverently, as reflectively, as lovingly, as we would before the entrance to Hell.

Franz Kafka




But I am satisfied with what I did. How can you be satisfied? Cause everything escapes you, you know that perfectly well, you know – even when you are in love with somebody, everything escapes you, you would want to be near that person – how can you cut your flesh open and join it with the other person, it is an impossibility to do. So it is with art, it is almost like a long affair with objects and images and sensations and what one would call a passion. It is very much like that. You may love somebody very much but how near can you get to that person. You are still always unfortunately sort of strangers.

Francis Bacon