Melancholy

Ye! who behold perchance this simple urn,
Pass on, it honours none you wish to mourn.
To mark a friend's remains these stones arise;
I never knew but one — and here he lies.

To build one's house is very much like making one’s will. When the time does arrive for building this house, it is not the mason’s nor the craftsman’s moment, but that moment in which every man makes one poem, at any rate, in his life. And so, in our towns and their outskirts, we have had during the last forty years not so much houses as poems, poems of an Indian summer, for a house is the crowning of a career.

Memories of being online

“Without vitamin C,” Anthony writes, “we cannot produce collagen, an essential component of bones, cartilage, tendons and other connective tissues. Collagen binds our wounds, but that binding is replaced continually throughout our lives. Thus in advanced scurvy”—reached when the body has gone too long without vitamin C—“old wounds long thought healed will magically, painfully reappear.”

In a sense, there is no such thing as healing. From paper cuts to surgical scars, our bodies are catalogues of wounds: imperfectly locked doors quietly waiting, sooner or later, to spring back open.

The Topography of Tears is a visual investigation of tears photographed through an optical, standard light microscope, a vintage Zeiss from the late 1970's, mounted with a digital microscopy camera.

Tears are the medium of our most primal language in moments as unrelenting as death, as basic as hunger, and as complex as a rite of passage. They are the evidence of our inner life overflowing its boundaries, spilling over into consciousness. Wordless and spontaneous, they release us to the possibility of realignment, reunion, catharsis, intractable resistance short-circuited. Shedding tears, shedding old skin. It’s as though each one of our tears carries a microcosm of the collective human experience, like one drop of an ocean.

The tower is just a common grater. It is not used to look out toward a distant world from above, but only to slice, grind and grate its surroundings.

Anyone who stepped inside would see an irremediably cold, metallic, empty void, and a few scattered holes where the world literally seeps through in pieces. It is a sad project.

Where long the shadows of the wind had rolled,
Green wheat was yielding to the change assigned;
And as by some vast magic undivined
The world was turning slowly into gold.
Like nothing that was ever bought or sold
It waited there, the body and the mind;
And with a mighty meaning of a kind
That tells the more the more it is not told.

So in a land where all days are not fair,
Fair days went on till on another day
A thousand golden sheaves were lying there,
Shining and still, but not for long to stay—
As if a thousand girls with golden hair
Might rise from where they slept and go away.

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They mourn, but smile at length; and, smiling, mourn:
The tree will wither long before it fall:
The hull drives on, though mast and sail be torn;
The roof-tree sinks, but moulders on the hall
In massy hoariness; the ruined wall
Stands when its wind-worn battlements are gone;
The bars survive the captive they enthral;
The day drags through though storms keep out the sun;
And thus the heart will break, yet brokenly live on.

When I worked as an opener, I was often the first to use the restroom, and I was the one who would often find the untouched toilet paper origami swan or boat or rose, lo que sea. Carmen wanted appreciation from our customers, not from another co-worker, but her labor and the flowers she left behind were something the customers would never see.

...Resetting usually happens at night, before the rest of the city wakes up. We like for maintenance to happen behind the scenes or after hours, and for the maintainers to remain an invisible workforce, even though it’s one that all others depend on. Similarly, iPhones now have an option for software updates to happen while you sleep. It's seldom to see the hand of service; it’s rare to have service people, like Carmen, as the starting point.

I didn't want to be the one to forget
I thought of everything I'd never regret
A little time with you is all that I get
That's all we need because it's all we can take

1. Leaves Expanded May Be Prevailing Blue Mixed With Yellow Of The Sand
2. I Used To Wonder At The Halo Of Light Around My Shadow And Would Fancy Myself One Of The Elect
3. Fearing That They Would Be Light-headed For Want Of Food And Also Sleep
4. Stirring Them Up As The Keeper Of A Menagerie His Wild Beasts
5. The Finest Qualities Of Our Nature Like The Bloom On Fruits Can Be Preserved
6. Perhaps The Wildest Sound That Is Ever Heard Here Making The Woods Ring Far And Wide
7. I Love To Be Alone
8. A Young Forest Growing Up Under Your Meadows
9. Their Roots Reaching Quite Under The House
10. The Rays Which Stream Through The Shutter Will Be No Longer Remembered When The Shutter Is Wholly Removed
11. After Soaking Two Years And Then Lying High Six Months It Was Perfectly Sound Though Waterlogged Past Drying
12. The Sun Is But A Morning Star
13. A Low And Distant Sound Gradually Swelling And Increasing
14. As If It Would Have A Universal And Memorable Ending
15. A Sullen Rush And Roar

And if your broken heart's heavy when you step on the scale,
You'll be lighter than air when they pull back the veil.
Consider the flowers: they don't try to look right;
They just open their petals and turn to the light.

Sometimes when I'm out,
I see people from behind
and, for a moment,
I think it is you.

The perception of colour is a gift just as definitely granted to one person, and denied to another, as an ear for music; and the very first requisite for true judgment of Saint Mark’s, is the perfection of that colour-faculty which few people ever set themselves seriously to find out whether they possess or not. […]

The fact is, that, of all God’s gifts to the sight of man, colour is the holiest, the most divine, the most solemn. We speak rashly of gay color and sad color, for color cannot at once be good and gay. All good color is in some degree pensive, the loveliest is melancholy, and the purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love colour the most.

But now, says the Once-ler, Now that you're here,
the word of the Lorax seems perfectly clear.
UNLESS someone like you cares a whole awful lot,
nothing is going to get better.
It's not.

Why am reaching again for the brushes?
When I paint your portrait
God, nothing happens
But I can choose to feel you
On my senses' horizon
You appear hesitantly like scattered islands

It's standing here, peering out
I'm all the time seen by you
A chorus of angels use up all of heaven
You're living in your very last house
You're living in your very last house
You're living in your very last house

Up on Melancholy Hill, there's a plastic tree
Are you here with me?
Just looking out on the day of another dream
Where you can't get what you want, but you can get me
So let's set out to sea, love
'Cause you are my medicine when you're close to me
When you're close to me

I am a sucker for stories in which seeds of cosmic revelation are found hidden inside everyday materials, especially when those materials are architectural in form.

In this case, it was “the imprint of a rare solar storm” that left traces in the rings of trees cut into logs by Vikings and used to build cabins 1,000 years ago on the Atlantic coast of Canada.

…While there is obviously more to say about the science behind this discovery—all of which you can read here—what interests me is simply the idea that astral events, cosmic storms, stellar weather, electromagnetic pulses from space, whatever you want to imagine, leave traces all around us. That in the depths of our buildings, in our walls and floors, even in the wooden dowels of mass-produced furniture, there can be evidence of immensely powerful and beautiful things, and I would like to remember to look for that again. It’s been a miserable couple of years.

Often I find myself nostalgic for things that haven’t disappeared yet. This feeling is enhanced by the strange conviction that once I stop looking at these things, I will never see them again, that I am living in the last moment of looking. This is sense is strongest for me in the interiors of buildings perhaps because, like items of clothing, they are of a fashionable nature, in other words, more impermanent than they probably should be.

...Datedness is the period between vintage and contemporary. It is the sentiment between quotidian and subpar. It is uncurated and preserved only by way of inertia, not initiative. It gives us a specific feeling we don’t necessarily like, one that is deliberately evoked in the media subcultures surrounding so-called “liminal” spaces: the fuguelike feeling of being spatially trapped in a time while our real time is passing. Datedness in the real world is not a curated experience, it is only what was. It is different from nostalgia because it is not deliberately remembered, yearned for or attached to sweetness. Instead, it is somehow annoying. It is like stumbling into the world of adults as a child, but now you’re the adult and the child in you is disappointed.

The boojum pattern is what remains after a more symmetric pattern has softly and suddenly vanished away.

I don't envision a very long life for myself.
Like, I think my life will run out before my work does, you know?
I've designed it that way.

Most of my clothes are broken. They have holes, they have stains, my jacket is kept together with electrical tape, and my shoes are worn down. And that's fine. It's also liberating. Something broken can't change state anymore since that's a one-way transformation. Things start in perfect condition and can only deteriorate and break down. Sure, you can repair them, but that's not the same thing. In order to keep something in perfect condition you have to put in some effort but once something's broken that's it, the transformation is complete. When that happens, I just stop worrying about it and it's incredibly liberating.

You've been here before.
You've seen it all,
But your conscience won't recall.
And your eyes are barely wide enough
To recognize what your heart keeps giving up.

And someday it might win
If your mind's giving in
Just try to lose yourself
Or do your best till then

And when you say you won't forget me
Well I can tell you that's untrue
'Cause every day since you left me
I thought less and less of you

And I've worn out all the reasons
To keep on knocking at your door
Could be the changing of the seasons
But I don't love you anymore

I have a dream every night. My mom had it. And her mom had it. It's like a memory. It's a picture of the world as it was. But it's terrible.

And it burns,
and it fills me every night,
and I can't sleep.

...I don't want the house.
I don't want the dream.
I don't want anything here.

A lacuna is a gap in a manuscript, inscription, text, painting, or musical work. A manuscript, text, or section suffering from gaps is said to be "lacunose" or "lacunulose".

Weathering, decay, and other damage to old manuscripts or inscriptions are often responsible for lacunae - words, sentences, or whole passages that are missing or illegible. Palimpsests are particularly vulnerable.

Certain things are only visible at certain frame rates. At certain times. In certain rooms. You found me, and I found myself. We became us. We became white foam when Cronos attacked his father. An airborne seed. A plastic bag. A parachute. A capsule. A file. A metaphor. A vocabulary. A thread. An environment. A contamination. A mantra we repeat to ourselves like the evening prayer I recited with my mother before sleep. A reminder of days, lunar cycles and Earth’s orbit around the sun. A practice expanding what the web is and can be. A web. A living web. All in plural.

You are so handsome and you look so happy. But deep inside your eyes there is no gaiety, there is only sorrow, as though your eyes knew that happiness did not exist and that all that is beautiful and lovely does not stay with us long.

If you missed the train I'm on
You will know that I am gone
You can hear the whistle blow a hundred miles

A hundred miles, a hundred miles,
A hundred miles, a hundred miles
You can hear the whistle blow a hundred miles

Her favorite photo of her mom
The caption says:
"I can't believe it
It's been a decade since you've been gone
Mama, I miss you
I miss sitting with you in the front yard
Still figuring out how to keep living without you
It's got a little better, but it's still hard
Mama, I got a job I love and my own apartment
Mama, I got a boyfriend, and I'm crazy about him
Your little girl didn't do too bad
Mama, I love you, give a hug and kiss to Dad"

“We always throw away old clothes. Ending is better than mending, ending is better than mending, ending is better…”

For me the noise of Time is not sad: I love bells, clocks, watches—and I recall that at first photographic implements were related to techniques of cabinetmaking and the machinery of precision: cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood.

Waiting for a train to go or a bus to come,
or a plane to go or the mail to come,
or the rain to go or the phone to ring,
or the snow to snow or waiting around for a Yes or No
or waiting for their hair to grow.

Everyone is just waiting.

To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it's because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that's where phrases like 'deadly dull' or 'excruciatingly dull' come from. But there might be more to it. Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that's dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient, low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention.

Recently, I've been thinking that I needed to empty the backpack, before I knew what to put back in it.

An IPA inspired by years of accumulated experience, and an expression of both past, present and future.

Eternal September or the September that never ended refers to a cultural phenomenon during a period beginning around late 1993 and early 1994, when Internet service providers began offering Usenet access to many new users. Prior to this, the only sudden changes in the volume of new users of Usenet occurred each September, when cohorts of university students would gain access to it for the first time. The periodic flood of new users overwhelmed the existing culture for online forums and the ability to enforce existing norms. AOL began their Usenet gateway service in March 1994, leading to a constant stream of new users. Hence, from the early Usenet hobbyist point of view, the influx of new users that began in September 1993 appeared to be endless.

The installation consists of two networked machines. Both display on their monitor a classic romantic poem. One of the two computers is infected with an encrypted stealth virus and contaminates itself as well as its connected partner. The virus contamination runs over the period of the whole exhibition, in which the visitor can witness the ongoing process by watching the mutations on the monitor texts slowly taking place. The poetries presented on the two monitors act as visual indicator and textual interface for the infection provoked by the active virus.

Too much rain
loosens trees.
In the hills giant oaks
fall upon their knees.
You can touch parts
you have no right to—
places only birds
should fly to.

"Just be yourself, mate! Be yourself in a relationship."

...What if they don't like you, man?

What if every relationship you've ever been in is just somebody slowly figuring out they didn't like you as much as they hoped they would?

The Atlantic was born today, and I'll tell you how
The clouds above opened up and let it out
I was standing on the surface of a perforated sphere
When the water filled every hole
And thousands upon thousands made an ocean
Making islands, where no islands should go

Most people were overjoyed, they took to their boats
I thought it less like a lake and more like a moat
The rhythm of my footsteps crossing flatlands to your door
Have been silenced forevermore
And the distance is quite simply much too far for me to row
It seems farther than ever before

I need you so much closer

I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils.

Saudade is a deep emotional state of nostalgic or profound melancholic longing for an absent something or someone that one cares for and/or loves. Moreover, it often carries a repressed knowledge that the object of longing might never be had again.

I could not know that even then the little light was being drawn irresistibly into the great soundless whirl of darkness and that I was watching a light that was destined soon to blink out and disappear.

She would never know him. He would never know her. Human relations were all like that.

The character of nature can’t arise without the presence and the consciousness of death.

When we make our own attempt to create nature in the world around us, and succeed, we cannot escape the fact that we are going to die. This quality, when it is reached, in human things, is always sad; it makes us sad; and we can even say that any place where a man tries to make the quality, and be like nature, cannot be true, unless we can feel the slight presence of this haunting sadness there, because we know at the same time we enjoy it, that it is going to pass.

Supposing I found myself chasing another fly ball and ran head-on into a basketball backboard, supposing I woke up once again lying under an arbor with a baseball glove under my head, what words of wisdom could this man of thirty-odd years bring himself to utter? Maybe something like: This is no place for me.

This was never any place I was meant to be.

Hello darkness, my old friend
I’ve come to talk with you again

A mountain village
Where there is not even hope
Of a visitor:
If not for the loneliness,
How painful life here would be.

— Saigyo (Donald Keene translation)

Watching Alice talk, light a candle that had blown out, rush into the kitchen with the plates, or brush a strand of blonde hair from her face, I found myself falling victim to romantic nostalgia, which descends whenever we are faced with those who might have been our lovers, but whom chance has decreed we will never properly know. The possibility of an alternative love story is a reminder that the life we are leading is only one of a myriad of possible lives, and it is the impossibility of leading them all that plunges us into sadness.

Where do we go? Where do we stand?
In between a quick romance, somethin' that'll last long
Where do we go? Will you take my hand?
Meet me for a final dance, somethin' like a last call

So the world is always breaking; it's in its nature to break.

Donald: I loved Sarah, Charles. It was mine, that love. I owned it. Even Sarah didn't have the right to take it away. I can love whoever I want.

Charlie: But she thought you were pathetic.

Donald: That was her business, not mine. You are what you love, not what loves you. That's what I decided a long time ago.

We outgrow love like other things
And put it in the drawer,
Till it an antique fashion shows
Like costumes grandsires wore.

He feels envy toward those who now believe they have once before lived an evening identical to this and who think they were happy, that time.

Also in Raissa, city of sadness, there runs an invisible thread that binds one living being to another for a moment, then unravels, then is stretched again between moving points as it draws new and rapid patterns so that at every second the unhappy city contains a happy city unaware of its own existence.

And I lied to you when I knocked upon your door.
See, I was nowhere near your neighborhood.

It reminded him of the wool from his sheep...his sheep who were now seeking food and water in the fields of Andalusia, as they always had.

"They're not my sheep anymore," he said to himself, without nostalgia. "They must be used to their new shepherd, and have probably already forgotten me. That's good. Creatures like the sheep, that are used to traveling, know about moving on."

The Lorax said nothing. Just gave me a glance.
Just gave me a very sad, sad backward glance,
as he lifted himself by the seat of his pants.
And I'll never forget the grim look on his face
when he hoisted himself and took leave of this place,
through a hole in the smog, without leaving a trace.
And all that the Lorax left here in this mess
was a small pile of rocks, with one word...
UNLESS.

Life may have to show itself to us in some of its authentically tragic colors before we can begin to grow properly visually responsive to its subtler offerings.

But I know as well as anyone that these are empty dreams, and that having come this far, we cannot turn back.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

The quality which has no name includes these simpler, sweeter qualities. But it is so ordinary as well, that it somehow reminds us of the passing of our own life.

It is a slightly bitter quality.

For all his unresponsiveness to others’ affection, I now see, it was not them he despised but himself.

After a while, if you don't leave, then everything else begins to leave.