I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you : T.S.Eliot (from Four Quartets)

I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you 

Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre, 

The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed 

With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness, 

And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama 

And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away— 

Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations 

And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence 

And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen 

Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about; 

Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing— 

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope 

For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, 

For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith 

But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting. 

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: 

So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing. T. S. Eliot. Four Quartets.

splash : Elizabeth Reninger

©fourteenth, 2009

splash


dawn's
baptism

gold light making
mountains fluid

again and again i melt
into You

(You turning might's
rivers into

bliss) receive the day's bright
touch as though

it were mine
with cupped hands offer

you This ...


Elizabeth Reninger

studio

On the nature of space and the image: Plato

©fourteenth

And there is a third nature, which is space, and is eternal, and admits not of destruction and provides a home for all created things, and is apprehended without the help of sense, by a kind of spurious reason, and is hardly real; which we beholding as in a dream, say of all existence that it must of necessity be in some place and occupy a space, but that what is neither in heaven nor in earth has no existence. Of these and other things of the same kind, relating to the true and waking reality of nature, we have only this dreamlike sense, and we are unable to cast off sleep and determine the truth about them. For an image, since the reality, after which it is modelled, does not belong to it, and it exists ever as the fleeting shadow of some other, must be inferred to be in another [i.e. in space ], grasping existence in some way or other, or it could not be at all. But true and exact reason, vindicating the nature of true being, maintains that while two things [i.e. the image and space] are different they cannot exist one of them in the other and so be one and also two at the same time. 

from Timaeus

Listening to the sap of life. (a new, less bluish photo...)

©fourteenth

Three sketches

13x18 cm rag paper

13x18 cm rag paper

#2

13x18 cm rag paper

Paul Valéry

"Entre la Voix et la Pensée, entre la Pensée et la Voix, entre la Présence et l’Absence, oscille le pendule poétique." - PAUL VALÉRY

#1

#2

#3

Paintings (stage 2) untitled

untitled stage 2   ©fourteenth

paintings

untitled stage1  ©fourteenth

To be great, be whole : Ricardo Reis (Fernando Pessoa)

dawning  ©fourteenth

To be great, be whole: nothing that's you
Should you exaggerate or exclude.
In each thing, be all. Give all you are
In the least you ever do.
The whole moon, because it rides so high,
Is reflected in each pool.

Odes
Ricardo Reis (Fernando Pessoa)

...immensity taps at your life : Jane Hirshfield

©fourteenth

Even in this
one lifetime,
you will have to choose.

Jane Hirshfield

Into Arcadia :Seamus Heaney

Ήφαιστος   ©fourteenth

Into Arcadia

It was opulence and amen on the mountain road.
Walnuts bought on a high pass from a farmer
Who'd worked in Melbourne once and now trained water
Through a system of pipes and runnels of split reed
Known in Hellas, probably, since Hesiod -
That was the least of it. When we crossed the border
From Argos into Arcadia, and farther
Into Arcadia, a lorry load
Of apples had burst open on the road
So that for yards our tyres raunched and scrunched them
But we drove on, juiced up and fleshed and spattered,
Revelling in it. And then it was the goatherd
With his goats in the forecourt of the filling station,
Subsisting beyond eclogue and translation.

Seamus Heaney
Sonnets From Hellas

To what shore would you cross, O my heart? : Kabir

here    ©fourteenth

To what shore would you cross, O my heart? there is no traveller

before you, there is no road:

Where is the movement, where is the rest, on that shore?

There is no water; no boat, no boatman, is there;

There is not so much as a rope to tow the boat, nor a man to draw it.

No earth, no sky, no time, no thing, is there: no shore, no ford!

There, there is neither body nor mind: and where is the place

that shall still the thirst of the soul? You shall find naught

in that emptiness.

Be strong, and enter into your own body: for there your foothold

is firm. Consider it well, O my heart! go not elsewhere,

Kabîr says: "Put all imaginations away, and stand fast in that

which you are."

Kabir

From: Songs Of Kabir

Translated by Rabindranath Tagore

New York, The Macmillan Company 1915

                                                           

It's up to us to see.

in search of white space

untitled i

we are at an edge
we are on one side
and everything else is on the other
we do not know if we will ever wake up again
we do not know if we will ever make love again
we do not know if we will ever create again
happiness, joy, comfort, we do not know
we are at an edge
we are on one side
and everything else is on the other

erin


                                         

                                         

mountains and water | form is void

Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849)


Chaudron

a journey : Li Po

journeys  ©fourteenth

  Journeying is hard,
  Journeying is hard.
  There are many turnings --
     Which am I to follow?....
  I will mount a long wind some day and break the heavy waves
  And set my cloudy sail straight and bridge the deep, deep sea.

Li Po

Adolfo Bioy Casares : The Invention of Morel

Aegean  ©fourteenth

The sea is endless when you are in a rowboat.

Adolfo Bioy Casares
The Invention of Morel

Epictetus on freedom

West Pediment, Acropolis Museum   ©fourteenth

He is free who lives as he wishes to live; who is neither subject to compulsion nor to hindrance, nor to force; whose movements to action are not impeded, whose desires attain their purpose, and who does not fall into that which he would avoid. Who, then, chooses to live in error? No man. Who chooses to live deceived, liable to mistake, unjust, unrestrained, discontented, mean? No man. Not one then of the bad lives as he wishes; nor is he, then, free. And who chooses to live in sorrow, fear, envy, pity, desiring and failing in his desires, attempting to avoid something and falling into it? Not one. Do we then find any of the bad free from sorrow, free from fear, who does not fall into that which he would avoid, and does not obtain that which he wishes? Not one; nor then do we find any bad man free.

Epictetus
From The Discourses

Book 4

Anaximander : Fragments

κόσμος        ©fourteenth

Anaximander of Miletos, son of Praxiades, a fellow-citizen and associate of Thales,said that the material cause and first element of things was the Infinite,he being the first to introduce this name for the material cause. He says it is neither water nor any other of the so-called elements, but a substance different from them, which is infinite, from which arise all the heavens and the worlds within them.  Phys. Op.(R. P. 16)
τῶν δὲ ἓν καὶ κινούμενον καὶ ἀπειρον λεγόντων Ἀ. μἐν Πραξιάδου Μιλήσιος Θαλοῦ γενόμενος διάδοχος μαθητὴς ἀρχήν τιx καὶ στοιχεῖον εἴρηκε τῶν ὄντων τὸ ἄπειρον, πρῶτος τοῦτο τοὔνομα κομίσας τῆς ἀρχῆς. λέγει δ' αὐτὴν μήτε ὕδωρ μήτε ἄλλο τι τῶν καλουμένων εἶναι στοιχείων, ἀλλ' ἑτέραν τινὰ φύσιν ἄπειρον, ἐξ ἧς ἅπαντας γίνεσθαι τοὺς οὐρανοὺς καὶ τοὺς ἐν αὐτοῖς κόσμους· ἐξ ὧν δὲ ... τάξιν [Β 1], ποιητικωτέροις οὕτως ὀνόμασιν αὐτὰ λέγων.

look within

©fourteenth

look within

a world of

solid stone hits back

If love unfolds, it unfolds here.

wing    ©fourteenth












If love unfolds, it unfolds here.

Linda Gregg

Συνείδηση φανέρωμα συγκίνησης περιπαίζεις τὴν ὕπαρξη

shore feathers      ©fourteenth

Συνείδηση φανέρωμα συγκίνησης

περιπαίζεις τὴν ὕπαρξη

Οἱ ἀγάπες τοῦ χρόνου

συχνάζουν τὰ τοπία σου

τρέμεις στὰ φύλλα τοῦ εἶναι

γεμίζεις τὸ σύμπαν

δὲν ξέρεις φυγὴ

ποθεῖς ταξίδια

Στὶς πλάτες σου φτερουγίζει ὁ κόσμος

φῶς σὲ λούζει ὁ ἥλιος.

Γιώργος Σαραντάρης

Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment

fragile instruments            © fourteenth

Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.

Rumi

We forget so to remember

pebbles beneath sea surface     ©fourteenth

pebbles beneath   ©fourteenth

To see in every day and year a symbol of all the days of man

rock cliff reed    ©fourteenth

To see in every day and year a symbol
of all the days of man and his years,
and convert the outrage of the years
into a music, a sound, and a symbol.

Jorge Luis Borges from The Art of Poetry