Why were you born when the snow was falling?
You should have come to the cuckoo's calling
Or when grapes are green in the cluster,
Or, at least, when lithe swallows muster
For their far off flying
From summer dying.
Why did you die when the lambs were cropping?
You should have died at the apples' dropping,
When the grasshopper comes to trouble,
And the wheat-fields are sodden stubble,
And all winds go sighing
For sweet things dying.

- Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830-1894) , "A dirge"

The dead make things never be the same.


- text fragment: flowerville (http://oneinten.blogspot.com/)
'to those our dead whom we mourn secretly and to those who mourn them secretly'

- images: http://anonymousworks.blogspot.com/

closing sequence from
georg wilhelm pabst's the three penny opera, 1931

Guest entry by THE ART OF MEMORY
(http://theartofmemory.blogspot.com/)

We do not think enough of the Dead as exhilirants - they are not dissuaders but Lures-Keepers of the great Romance still to us foreclosed - while coveting (we envy) their wisdom we lament their silence.

Grace is still a secret.

Emily Dickinson (Prose fragment 50)

At the last

She cometh no more:
Time too is dead.
The last tide is led
To the last shore.

Eternity!
What is Eternity,
But the sea coming,
The sea going
Forevermore?

a deep grave surely

"The stillness was that of a deep grave, save for the raindrops, falling light as thistledown, with a faint, monotonous sound like a whisper that dies and begins again and dies there behind the wet, glistening trunks."

~J. P. Jacobsen, Marie Grubbe, 1876

shadows and smells

the army is imaginary...

Lazarus - he already stinks.

-Kierkegaard - Journals and Papers v.3

Darwin, who was born into a large family that for two generations had been scientists, engineers, industrialists, and well-to-do landowners, and yet who, despite his genius, was a sufferer of neuroses, constant illnesses (he vomited every afternoon at four), a kind of hysteria that took the form of gasping and palpitation, and seizures of depression in which he wept uncontrollably.
- Guy Davenport

(the image is by Etienne Leopold Trouvelot of an "ideal section of the atmosphere of the sun."
From the fine woolgathersome.blogspot.com)

normal

caffeine

LSD

mescaline

1)
"Nourished on the blood of a schizophrenic, a spider weaves crazy webs."

-Guido Ceronetti, The Silence of the Body

2)
During the 1950s, a swiss pharmacologist named Peter Witt conducted a set of experiments in spider doping. He found that the spiders spun uniquely cockeyed webs depending on which substance they had ingested.

-images and Peter Witt information from the great http://www.kirchersociety.org/blog

A Moon Piece, describing that notable Battel between Axalla,
General of Tamerlane, and Camares the Persian, fought by the
light of the Moon.

- Sir Thomas Browne, Musaeum Clausum II

(Thank you James Walsh)