glowing pearls
“I send you a box
Of glowing pearls.
Wear them with irises
And orange blossoms.”
—Yakamochi, translated by Kenneth Rexroth, One Hundred Poems From The Japanese, 1955.
the white dew
“In a gust of wind the white dew
On the Autumn grass
Scatters like a broken necklace.”
—Bunya No Asayasu, translated by Kenneth Rexroth, One Hundred Poems From The Japanese, 1955.
The gazing eye
“As certain as color
Passes from the petal,
Irrevocable as flesh,
The gazing eye falls through the world.”
—The Poetess Ono No Komachi, translated by Kenneth Rexroth, One Hundred Poems From The Japanese, 1955.
flat bats
“Every Tuesday a man comes and gets me out of social studies and we go to a room and talk about it all.
Last week he spread out pictures of flat bats for me to comment on. I mostly saw flat bats. Then I saw big holes a body could fall right into. Big black deep holes through the table and the floor. And then he took off his glasses and screwed his face up to mine and tells me I’m scared.
I used to be but I am not now is what I told him. I might get a little nervous but I am never scared.”
—Kaye Gibbons, Ellen Foster, 1987.
a lazy guy
“[Ren] Descartes never got up before noon . . . and it earned him the reputation of being lazy. Still, he managed to revolutionize the fields of physics, mathematics, and philosophy. Not bad for a lazy guy.”
—Leonard Mlodinow, Feynman’s Rainbow, 2003.
the salient feature of the rainbow
“‘Do you know who first explained the true origin of the rainbow?’ I asked.
‘It was Descartes,’ [Richard Feynman] said. After a moment he looked me in the eye.
‘And what do you think was the salient feature of the rainbow that inspired Descartes? mathematical analysis?’ he asked.
‘Well, the rainbow is actually a section of a cone that appears as an arc of the colors of the spectrum when drops of water are illuminated by sunlight behind the observer.’
‘And?’
‘I suppose his inspiration was the realization that the problem could be analyzed by considering a single drop, and the geometry of the situation.’
‘You’re overlooking a key feature of the phenomenon,’ he said.
‘Okay, I give up. What would you say inspired his theory?’
‘I would say his inspiration was that he thought rainbows were beautiful.’”
—Leonard Mlodinow, Feynman’s Rainbow, 2003.
our ability to imagine
“There is nothing we imagine which we do not already know. And our ability to imagine is our ability to remember what we have already once experienced and to apply it to some different situation.”
—Stephen Spender; quoted in Feynman’s Rainbow by Leonard Mlodinow, 2003.
out of chaos
“Invention does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos.”
—Mary Shelley; quoted in Feynman’s Rainbow by Leonard Mlodinow, 2003.
Removal from the Social Unit
Removal from the Social Unit, a collage by Jimmy Kellough, 12.5″x12.5″, 2005. Kellough, a multi-media artist who lives in Durham, North Carolina, has inspired countless other artists, including myself. I love this guy!
the White Face and the Red Nose
“‘There are two types of comedian . . . both deriving from the circus, which I shall call the White Face and the Red Nose. Almost all comedians fall into one or the other of these two simple archetypes. In the circus, the White Face is the controlling clown with the deathly pale masklike face who never takes a pie; the Red Nose is the subversive clown with the yellow and red makeup who takes all the pies and the pratfalls and the buckets of water and the banana skins. The White Face represents the mind, reminding humanity of the constant mocking presence of death; the Red Nose represents the body, reminding mankind of its constant embarrassing vulgarities. . . . The emblem of the White Face is the skull, that of the Red Nose is the phallus. One stems from the plague, the other from the carnival. The bleakness of the funeral, the wildness of the orgy. The graveyard and the fiesta. The brain and the penis. Hamlet and Falstaff. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Laurel and Hardy.’”
—Eric Idle, The Road To Mars, 1999.