Via Negativa

Journey to the Center
Some names were as familiar as my own — Argiope aurantia, Anatis mali, Erythemis simplicicollis…. well, there were dozens and dozens of them. In the weeks after we began our fight with cancer, those names would gradually be replaced by the names of chemo agents, bones requiring radiation treatments, drugs available under clinical trials, and so on. Gradually, over time, it was as though some strange cloud of selective amnesia descended upon me.
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Creature of the Shade
One of the most basic pleasures of the Australian landscape, to me, is the complex sensation of being watched by a kangaroo.
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Coyote Crossing
Longing and terror are both of them valid responses to the immensity of this landscape. It seems a shame to me that there are people who have never seen a thing like this, who have never once been out of sight of civilization’s scars upon the earth. Those are the only places I feel whole. What kind of truncated life it must be, to have all your skies dissected by overhead wires, all your earth parceled out in neat lots.
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Hoarded Ordinaries
Titian’s Venus and Tintoretto’s Susannah aren’t young girls or wispy waifs; they are mature, substantial women who would never stoop to squeeze themselves into skinny jeans. Standing in a room where voluptuous Venuses hung on every wall, I had a moment of clarity: “Maybe this is what mature Italian women actually look like.”
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(p) (b)
In looking at a Titian, I retrace his looking. I try to teach my eyes to agree with his. What does looking look like? This story has not really been told. We know what a picture looks like, but not what it looks like to look at a picture.
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Clumps and Voids
Normalcy is an annoying puzzle for the self-taught: no box photograph or corners, no estimate of piece-count. I spent years as a lawyer reassembling past events in moment by moment chronologies, using daytimers and phone-records and credit card receipts. Why isn’t normalcy discoverable?
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The House & other Arctic musings
Without the wind -34 is more than bearable, it is exhilarating. Dogs yelp and bark, amidst the roar of lone snowmachines. The horizon is a light show that slides from orange to pink to a blue so delicate that flax dreams of the colour.
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Switched at Birth
Evenings were spent in the dim-lit dining room/bar, Le Salon Noir. We savored rich French meals with a Caribbean accent, and lingered over espresso and cognac, doors open to the sensuous warm night air. There, in the flicker of tall, white candles, embraced by butter-soft black leather furniture, it was easy to forget that any other world existed beyond that walled compound.
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Icebus
Skating on the lake, every inch of the surface is criss-crossed by the skaters boots like a giant web. The deep black ice shows its shining fractures and sometimes cracks into life with an unearthly echoing boom.
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Slow Reads
My Coolpix has a beach/snow setting. The extremes, like Stalin and Hitler, meet with a handshake.
[photo]
Editing in iPhoto, I turn my beach pics into snow pics by turning down the temperature. When the sand turns white, the haze turns blue.
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Questions
Imagine, when you look, how the eyes
Of Rembrandt and Picasso widen,
Their bleak gaze, hard and black,
Your book open like a laugh,
Pencil sharp as an angel’s foot,
Your eyes on the scrounge.
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Hydragenic
I remembered something that I used to do when I was young. When we went on long car journeys, I’d sit there with a pad of paper in my lap and a pencil in my hand, trying to move my wrist smoothly along each line, but letting myself be influenced by the bumps in the road. I imagined myself as a human seismograph, making a “recording” of our journey that I could then “play back” in future.
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Harriet Blog (Craig Santos Perez)
as i woke this morning several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a 21st century Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which I possess so enormously—I mean Negative Bloggability, that is, when a man is capable of blogging in uncertain opinions, mysterious logic, and doubtful conclusions, without any irritable reaching after supporting facts and reasonable arguments.
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Olivia Judson
Some dinoflagellates have eyes. Others give off light. Some, like plants, make energy from the sun; others, like animals, capture and eat their prey. Some do both.
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mole
One of the peculiarities of the time was the conviction that nobody could be meaningfully happy until everyone was happy. [...] Property had to abolished, authority abrogated, sex roles abandoned, oppression eradicated, before I could begin to become happier.
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Hoarded Ordinaries
It is in these winter months when it is natural to wonder about time and its passing, or about the nature of love and loss. How long have we humans been treading this old, tired earth, tracking mud on our soles and brushing snow from our boots? All these generations–all these endless eras–and what at all have we learned about heartbreak and how to weather it?
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Drawing the Motmot
The last time I saw trumpeter swans, they were on their nests in the muskeg of Alaska, heads high and alert on those long white necks, emblems of true rugged wilderness. Today I grabbed my scope and sketchbook and drew all eight of the majestic birds, wild as anything that ever lived, dunking their heads and long necks into the cold ignoble water of a housing tract pond, going bottoms up and paddling the air with their shiny black feet.
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thinkBuddha.org
What I want to know is this: how transparent? How inerrant is this knowledge that comes from meditation? Because I see no a priori reason to assume that this knowledge gained from meditation is any less subject to distortion, confabulation and “spin” than the daily, non-meditative chunterings of our mind.
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Clive Hicks-Jenkins’ Artlog
Last night after midnight I slipped out into a world startlingly bright with moonlight, the apple trees casting shadows as strong and as sharp as if it were a midsummer’s day. Pip wound her way across the paddock, her hooves splintering the turf with icy crackles.
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box elder
All is beset, complicated, compromised by feed, need, and greed, by squalor and cruelty and by kindness and talk, by muster and requirement, the messy, unenraptured threads and loops of custom and connection.
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Hoarded Ordinaries
On January 2nd, my emotions become my own again, free from the external input of holiday hoopla. New Year’s Eve offers the once-a-year opportunity to see one year transform into another… but every day offers the opportunity to see one moment dissolve into the next.
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Graceriver
I am full of a shining,
lost in a forest of sun.
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Creature of the Shade
Interrupted by many new buildings, ignored by all of the new urban structure, the wall survives as two rows of stones wandering drunkenly like a lost time traveller, sometimes in the street, sometimes on the sidewalk, sometimes lurching on a diagonal across some new square whose designers were consciously heedless of it … as if “consciously heedless” were not a contradiction in terms. We remember, or we forget, but if we remember, the memory shows in what we do, no matter what we intend.
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slow reads
A lot of the stuff I write on Twitter is about death. Unless I am mistaken and am already dead, these posts are imaginative rehearsals, among other things.
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Olivia Judson
This, then, is what the International Year of Biodiversity should be about: it should be about conveying the excitement of discovery in biology, coupled with an intimate knowledge of the majesty of nature.
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