green in literature
“He was describing, as all young poets are for ever describing, nature, and in order to match the shade of green precisely he looked (and here he showed more audacity than most) at the thing itself, which happened to be a laurel bush growing beneath the window. After that, of course, he could write no more. Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. . . . The shade of green Orlando now saw spoilt his rhyme and split his metre.”
—Virginia Wolfe, from Orlando, 1928.
color itself
“I do believe [San Francisco mural painter Hilaire] Hiller knows more about color than any man alive. He eats and drinks color. Himself he’s the color of color. He’s not just colorful, as we say of certain gay and charming birds, but he’s color itself. That means that he refracts light extraordinarily well. Sometimes he becomes a veritable aurora borealis.”
—Henry Miller, from The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, 1945.
the morning of the day after the night before
“A little beyond looms the face of the beloved. Ever larger, ever fuller, ever clearer it grows: a moon-glow that saturates an empty sky. Slowly, slow as claustral fever, the nebulae arrive. Little medallions constellate the panic that clouds the orifices of fright. Intaglio depths gleam from the precipitious walls of new world hearts. Through the laughing mouth oceans leap in to being and pain still-born is cried down again. The marvels of emptiness parade their defilement, the embryonic unsheath their splendor. Echolalia mounts her throne. The web stretches tighter, the ravisher is ravished. A slat gives way, an axe falls; little children drop like flowers on the burnished hearth beneath the open door. It is the morning of the day after the night before on the threshold of unsubjugated repetition. It fits like a silver-studded bracelet on a warm wrist.”
—Henry Miller, from The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, 1945.
Linds and Lu
Linds and Lu, collage by Paul Dean, 2006. Lu is Lindsay’s favorite poodle, Lulu.
stochastic resonance
“Put a crayfish in a silent aqaurium, add a turtle and it gets eaten, but add some random background noise to simulate the crackling and popping we can hear on underwater recordings made with hydrophones and the crayfish escapes. This is called stochastic resonance. Aural white noise or visual white noise can help both humans and crayfish to distinguish the event they want to see or hear. The randomness of white noise allows more possiblilites of a very faint sound wave finding another wave with which it can resonate and so be reinforced.”
—David Toop, from Haunted Weather: Music, Silence and Memory, 2004.
the tiniest of holes
“I sat at my desk in the office staring down at the white tablet. It was more or less flying-saucer-shaped, a streamlined disk with the tiniest of holes at one end. It was only after moments of intense scrutiny that I’d been able to spot the hole.”
—Don DeLillo, from White Noise, 1985.
[I]t was dark
“[I]t was dark—all dark—the intense and utter raylessness of the Night that endureth for evermore.”
—Edgar Allen Poe, from The Premature Burial, 1844.
A spiral scratch
“Unlike CDs and other digital playback formats, the record is an object that perfectly symbolises and embodies its morbid role in the preservation and transmission of sonic culture. A spiral scratch, its gleaming dark circle is the black hole into which memories are poured, only to emerge again as ghost voices, life preserved beyond death.”
—David Toop, from Haunted Weather: Music, Silence and Memory, 2004.
My Star
All I know
Of a certain star
Is, it can throw
(Like the angled spar)
Now a dart of red,
Now a dart of blue;
Till my friends have said
They would fain see, too,
My star that dartles the red and the blue!
Then it stops like a bird; like a flower, hangs furled:
They must solace themselves with the Saturn above it.
What matter to me if their star is a world?
Mine has opened its soul to me; therefore I love it.
—Robert Browning (1812-89).
the celebrated Phaenomena of Colours
“I procured me a Triangular glass-Prisme to try therewith the celebrated Phaenomena of Colours. And in order thereto having darkened my chamber, and made a small hole in my window-shuts, to let in a convenient quantity of the Sun’s light, I placed my Prisme at his entrance, that it might be thereby refracted to the opposite wall. It was at first a very pleasing divertisement, to view the vivid and intense colours produced thereby; but after a while applying my self to consider them more circumspectly, I became surprised to see them in an oblong form; which, according to the received laws of Refraction, I expected should have been circular.
And I saw . . . that the light, tending to [one] end of the Image did suffer a Refraction considerably greater then the light tending to the other. And so the true cause of the length of that Image was detected to be no other, then the Light consists of Rays differently refrangible, which, without any respect to a difference in their incidence, were, according to their degrees of refrangibility, transmitted towards divers parts of the wall.
Then I placed another Prisme . . . so that the light . . . might pass through that also, and be again refacted before it arrived at the wall. This done, I took the first Prisme in my hand and turned it to and fro slowly about its Axis, so much as to make the several parts of the Image . . . successively pass through . . . that I might observe to what places on the wall the second Prisme would refract them.
When any one sort of Rays hath been parted from those of other kinds, it hath afterwards obstinately retained its colour, notwithstanding my utmost endeavours to change it.”
—Sir Isaac Newton, from Optics, written during the plague years of 1665-66, first published in 1704.