christinasanantonio, My Room, 2017
We carry the lives we’ve imagined as we carry the lives we have, and sometimes a reckoning comes of all the lives we have lost.
Helen Macdonald, from H is for Hawk (Grove Press, 2014)
The past […] is always this argument between counterclaimants. Memories dim with age. There is no repository for our images. The loved ones who visit us in dreams are strangers. To even see aright is effort. We seek some witness but the world will not provide one. This is the third history. It is the history that each man makes alone out of what is left to him. Bits of wreckage. Some bones. The words of the dead. How make a world of this. How live in that world once made?
Cormac McCarthy, from The Crossing (Vintage, 1994)
Fictions could be as powerful as histories, revealing the new people to themselves, allowing them to understand their own natures and the natures of those around them, and making them real. This is the paradox of the whispered stories: they were no more than make-believe but they created the truth,
— Salman Rushdie, from Victory City (Random House, 2023)
Darren Braun, photo illustration for the article "The Truth Is Out There," Texas Monthly (June 2006)
The Panhandlers, "Moonlight in Marfa," Tough Country LP (The Next Waltz, 2023)
I'm writing this in the present, and you're reading it in the present. Except there is a gulf of time between between us.
I might even be dead.
Yet, here I am.
Between the page and your eye.
Countless paradoxes like this redeem language.
But the voice cleaved in two during childhood is not a paradox of language. It’s a division of self, which is the multiplication of possibility. Don’t worry. Again, I’m not saying it’s bad. It might even ripen in us the appetite for love, the impulse to dab color onto stretched cotton, to make sounds that are beyond anything rational, but that sharpen rationality and make us see for the first time what we’ve been looking at our whole lives.
— Simon Van Booy, from The Presence of Absence (Godine, 2022)
Everything you do closes a door somewhere ahead of you. And finally there is only one door left.
Cormac McCarthy, from The Sunset Limited (Vintage, 2006) Requiesce in pace
“She patted his hand. Gnarled, ropescarred, speckled from the sun and the years of it. The ropy veins that bound them to his heart. There was map enough for men to read. There God’s plenty of signs and wonders to make a landscape. To make a world.”
— Cormac McCarthy, Cities of the Plain
(Alfred A. Knopf, 1998)
We knew only the ruins that remained, and our memory of its history was ruined as well, by the passage of time, the imperfections of memory, and the falsehoods of those who came after.
— Salman Rushdie, from Victory City (Random House, 2023)
sacred places | summer memories
21/07/03-46
The Axiom of Landscape Obscurity: Most objects in the landscape–although they convey all kinds of ‘messages’–do not convey those messages in any obvious way.
Pierce K. Lewis, from “Axioms for Reading the Landscape: Some Guides to the American Scene,” The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes: Geographical Essays, ed. Donald W. Meinig (Oxford University Press, 1979)
How shall we find our way in-
to this moment which stands between
us and a remembered future?
Karl Kirchwey, from “Roman Park, Noon,” At the Palace of Jove: Poems (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2002)
It comes so soon, the moment when there is nothing left to wait for.
Marcel Proust, from Swann’s Way, volume one of In Search of Lost Time (Grasset, 1913)
Remember, we do not wake from dreams into reality, but into other dreams.
—Simon Van Booy, from The Presence of Absence (Godine, 2022)
apoetreflects
It is not memory we want, but forgiveness. We rub our hands against the dusk. Out of which sunsets blossom. Out of which your footsteps weigh, but lightly, on my soul, you, from whom relation darts wildly about like a bat in the rafters, gathering the last scraps of daylight held in abandoned mirrors, you, hoisting the heaviness of each failed dream, for it is you I touch as we shift the burden of our desires from one shoulder to another, as we watch the swallow’s flight decipher the landscape, as the scarecrows of feeling are trying on our words, for who can say, now, how many stars are missing?
—Richard Jackson, closing lines to “Possibility,” from Heartwall (University of Massachuetts Press, 2000)
When it is raining it is raining for all time and then it isn’t and when she looked at him, as he remembers it, the landscape moved closer than ever and she did and now he can hardly remember what it was like.
Martha Ronk, “In a landscape of having to repeat,” from In a Landscape of Having to Repeat (Omnidawn, 2004)
I finger each memory as if it were a prayer bead, but each crumbles as salt to the touch.
Eric Pankey, from “The Back-Story,” in Reliquaries (Ausable Press, 2005)
