"She was tiny and boyish and my most measures, quite plain. Her hair was long and spiderweb-thin, her skin an impoverished yellow left thin and smooth by life. Eyes the color of roiled water were much too large for the narrow, sharp-boned face, while her mouth was a thin, inexpressive line almost lost beneath the simple long nose. Yet those big eyes had a watchful quality and an obvious intelligence, the slight body possessed a surprising strength, and on those rare occasions when she spoke, she had a musical and memorable if somewhat sad little voice."

r reed
the well of stars

"... some secrets are beyond the expression of those who experience them."

V. Vinge
Rainbows End

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p. k. dick

"Life is short, he thought. Art, or something not life, is long, stretching out endless, like concrete worm. Flat, white, unsmoothed by any passage over or across it."

from "The Man in the High Castle" by P. K. Dick

excerpts from the work of Bruno Schulz

My plan was to add some excerpts from Bruno Schulz's The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories while re-reading the book, for how many times? However, I am finding it difficult to dissect his work. Like a fractal, any part of the whole is complete and noteworthy, yet it is difficult for me to select any given slice, since the text on either side of my demarcation is just as profound as what I originally roped off. I find myself scooping up more and more border material until I am left holding the entire contents of the book. If you have never read the collection of stories, my suggestion is to purchase a copy and place it beside the bed. The following might give you an idea if this suggestion is appropriate.

An attempt:

Excerpts from Street Of Crocodiles and Other Stories by Bruno Schulz, translated by Celina Wieniewska

(from forward by Jonathan Safran Foer)
There are things Schulz wrote, "that cannot ever occur with any precision. They are too big and too magnificent to be contained in mere facts. They are merely trying to occur, they are checking whether the ground of reality can carry them. And they quickly withdraw, fearing to lose their integrity in the frailty of realization." Our lives, the big and magnificent lives we can just barely make out beneath the mere facts of our lifestyles, are always trying to occur. But save for a few rare occasions--falling in love, the birth of a child, the death of a parent, a revelatory moment in nature--they don't occur; the big magnificence is withdrawn. Stories rub at the facts of our lives. They give us access--if only for a few hours, if only in bed at the end of the day--to what's beneath.

But rub is too gentle a word for Schulz's writing. And what it uncovers is nothing like a fairy tale. I remember the first time I read The Street of Crocodiles. I loved the book, but didn't like it. The language was too heightened, the images too magical and precarious, the yearnings too dire, the sense of loss too palpable--everything was comedy or tragedy. The experience was too intense to be pleasant, in large part because it reminded me of how mundane--how unintense--my life was.

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(from introduction by David A Goldfarb)
Schulz maintains that, when viewed through the "poetic" imagination, any degraded scrap of reality-- anything that might be found in the world's tandeta, a Polish word describing goods that are shoddy, cast off, second-rate, or trashy--might reveal the qualities of the sublime.

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(from The Street of Crocodiles)
Once Adela took me to the old woman's house. It was early in the morning when we entered the small blue-walled room, with it's mud floor, lying in a patch of bright yellow sunlight in the still of the morning broken only by the frightening loud ticking of a cottage clock on the wall. In a straw-filled chest lay the foolish Maria, white as a wafer and motionless like a glove from which a hand had been withdrawn. And, as if taking advantage of her sleep, the silence talked, the yellow, bright, evil silence delivered it's monologue, argued, and loudly spoke its vulgar maniacal soliloquy. Maria's time--the time imprisoned in her soul--had left her and--terribly real--filled the room, vociferous and hellish in the bright silence of the morning, rising from the noisy mill of the clock like a cloud of bad flour, powdery flour, the stupid flour of madmen.

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the flower

Once in a golden hour
I cast to earth a seed.
Up there came a flower,
The people said, a weed.

To and fro they went
Thro’ my garden-bower,
And muttering discontent
Cursed me and my flower.

Then it grew so tall
It wore a crown of light,
But thieves from o’er the wall
Stole the seed by night;

Sow’d it far and wide
By every town and tower,
Till all the people cried,
‘Splendid is the flower.’

Read my little fable:
He that runs may read.
Most can raise the flowers now
For all have got the seed.

And some are pretty enough,
And some are poor indeed;
And now again the people
Call it but a weed.

~Tennyson

a woolf's thoughts on dostoevsky

"The novels of Dostoevsky are seething whirlpools, gyrating sandstorms, waterspouts which hiss and boil and suck us in. They are composed purely and wholly of the stuff of the soul. Against our wills we are drawn in, whirled round, blinded, suffocated, and at the same time filled with a giddy rapture. Out of Shakespeare there is no more exciting reading."

From the essay 'The Russian Point of View' by Virginia Woolf (The Common Reader)

framing a better tomorrow through social change

I convinced the Eugene Public Library to acknowledge the existence in Robert Walser's book, Jakob Von Gunten. They have not yet purchased the book, nor have they promised to, nor are they likely to do so, but they have acknowledged in their database that the book exists. This is my greatest, most profound effect on society to date. I feel more powerful than I have ever felt before.

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"One learns very little here, there is a shortage of teachers, and none of us boys of the Institute Benjamenta will come to anything, that is to say, we shall all be something very small and subordinate later in life. The instruction we enjoy consists mainly in impressing patience and obedience upon ourselves, two qualities that promise little success, or none at all."

from 'Jakob Von Gunten' by Robert Walser

excerpts from kafka's diary

A few quotes from the diary of Franz Kafka (Translated by Joseph Kresh):

16 March. (1912) Saturday. Again encouragement. Again I catch hold of myself, as one catches hold of a ball in it's fall. Tomorrow, today, I'll begin an extensive work which, without being forced, will shape itself according to my abilities. I will not give up as long as I can hold out at all. Rather be sleepless than live on in this way.

15 September. (1912)...The hollow which the work of genius has burned into our surroundings is a good place into which to put one's little light. Therefore the inspiration that emanates from genius, the universal inspiration that doesn't only drive one to imitation...

11 February. (1913)...because the story came out of me like a real birth, covered with filth and slime, and only I have the hand that can reach to the body itself and the strength of desire to do so...

21 June. (1913)...The tremulous world I have in my head. But how to free myself and free it without being torn to pieces. And a thousand times rather be torn to pieces than retain it in me or bury it. That, indeed, is why I am here, that is quite clear to me.

3 July. (1913)...When I say something it finally and immediately loses it's importance, when I write it down, it loses it too, but sometimes gains a new one...