masks

Mit magischer Gewalt zog es ihn auf Friedhoefe.
Besucher beobachteten, wie er lange Zeit mit dem Zeigefinger auf einen Punkt von Jean Paul's Grabstein tippte.

"For me one of the greatest moments in Balthazar is almost parenthetical: when the vagabond Arnold, knowing that he is dying, says farewell to the road marker, then the telephone pole. Conversation with inanimate objects is of course habitual with alcoholics, but Arnold’s bonding with his surroundings acknowledges the way we all invest objects we love with a kind of sacred life; they become precious precisely because they will outlive us, and that is why when a loved one dies, the furniture, the paintings, treasured objects come to seem inhabited by their spirit."

ships

It was 25 years ago when the wings of death came low
And spread out on the ocean far and wide.
A great ship sailed away with her passengers so gay
To never, never reach the other side.
CHORUS:
Sailing out to winter pain, the Titanic was her name,
When she had sailed 500 miles from shore
Many passengers and her crew went down with that old canoe;
They all went down to never rise no more.

- Down with the old canoe

(original recording: The Dixon Brothers (Howard and Dorsey Dixon), Charlotte, NC, Jan 25, 1938.)

hospitals

Now for my life, it is a miracle of thirty yeares, which to relate, were not a History, but a peece of Poetry, and would sound to common eares like a fable; for the world, I count it not an Inne, but an Hospitall, and a place, not to live, but to die in. The world that I regard is my selfe, it is the Microcosme of mine owne frame, that I cast mine eye on; for the other, I use it but like my Globe, and turne it round sometimes for my recreation. Men that looke upon my outside, perusing only my condition, and fortunes, do erre in my altitude; for I am above Atlas his shoulders. The earth is a point not onely in respect of the heavens above us, but of that heavenly and celestiall part within us: that masse of flesh that circumscribes me, limits not my minde: that surface that tells the heavens it hath an end, cannot perswade me I have any; I take my circle to be above three hundred and sixty, though the number of the Arke doe measure my body, it comprehendeth not my minde: whilst I study to find how I am a Microcosme or little world, I finde my selfe something more than the great. There is surely a peece of Divinity in us, something that was before the Elements, and owes no homage unto the Sunne. Nature tels me I am the image of God, as well as Scripture; he that understands not thus much, hath not his introductions or first lesson, and is yet to begin the Alphabet of man. Let me not injure the felicity of others, if I say I am as happy as any, Ruat coelum, Fiat voluntas tua, salveth all; so that whatsoever happens, it is but what our daily prayers desire. In briefe, I am content, and what should providence adde more? Surely this is it wee call Happinesse, and this doe I enjoy, with this I am happy in a dreame, and as content to enjoy a happinesse in a fancy, as others in a more apparent truth and reality.

- Th.Browne, Religio Medici/John Atkinson Grimshaw, Liverpool from Wapping

Guest entry by flowerville (http://oneinten.blogspot.com/)

Lakes

ganz verlassen, ganz verlassen...

a love for girls and animals and plants

After his failure to establish himself even marginally in regular employment (Peter Altenberg) drifted ever more to the periphery of polite society. By 1920 he was living in a tiny room at the Hotel London, an establishment which was little different from a brothel, on Wallnerstrasse. There he stayed for more than a decade, building up a fabled collection of picture postcards and nude pinups with which he covered the walls. An artistic consequence of significance ensuing from his collecting mania can be found in Alban Berg's "Five Orchestral Pieces after Picture Postcard Texts of Peter Altenberg". The public uproar at the first performance in March 1913 has gone down in the annals of music history. Outraged listeners screamed for the composer to be committed to the lunatic asylum at Steinhof, where, as it happened, Altenberg himself had been confined since the previous December.

allusions

'To Die No More' : That we have not found anything to cope with death after the passing of the Christian concept of it. THIS VOID allows for anything.

Blind Pony Lake: An area named after the Blind Pony Community that once lived there - - : Poor freed slaves that settled there after the Civil War and farmed with blind horses, because they could buy them for little money.

hp/km

An Icon can be of high or not-so-high quality, but a genuine apprehension of otherworldliness, a genuine experience invariably constitutes its foundation.

- Pavel Florensky

I may get better

but I won't get well

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

- Gerard Manley Hopkins,
Spring and Fall, to a Young Child

saints

...if he is drowned, I hope he is happy.

'...and many die, it may be, on the road.'

'all of them mostly lost their minds'

k.

Not long before his death he said that he had been exiled from Canaan for forty years, and even the community which he sometimes longed for was basically suspect to him; he wanted only to dissolve away by himself, as the water runs into the sea.

last walks

"In his boundless helplessness,
Walser never lacked the strength
to keep silent."

- Roberto Calasso

JOKE :
"A patient in a large hospital room with many beds complains to the doctor about the constant noise and cries other patients are making, which are driving him crazy. After the doctor replies that nothing can be done if the patients are like that, that one cannot forbid them from expressing their despair since they all know they are dying, the patient goes on: 'Why don't you put them in a separate room for dying?' The doctor replies calmly: But this is the room for those who are dying..."

- Slavoy Zizek, The Christian-Hegelian Comedy