In the Shade of Our Names

“Our name shelters a stranger, about whom we know nothing except that he is we ourselves.”

~ Octavio Paz

 

Between Going and Staying
by Octavio Paz

Between going and staying the day wavers,
in love with its own transparency.
The circular afternoon is now a bay
where the world in stillness rocks.

All is visible and all elusive,
all is near and can't be touched.

Paper, book, pencil, glass,
rest in the shade of their names.

Time throbbing in my temples repeats
the same unchanging syllable of blood.

The light turns the indifferent wall
into a ghostly theater of reflections.

I find myself in the middle of an eye,
watching myself in its blank stare.

The moment scatters. Motionless,
I stay and go: I am a pause.

No Other Meaning

The House Was Quiet And The World Was Calm
by Wallace Stevens, from Harmonium

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

[Thanks Mark!]

Thinking Isn’t Personal

Excerpt from Question Your Thinking, Change the World by Byron Katie:

A thought is harmless unless we believe it. It’s not our thoughts, but the attachment to our thoughts, that causes suffering. Attaching to a thought means believing that it’s true, without inquiring. A belief is a thought that we’ve been attaching to, often for years.

Most people think that they are what their thoughts tell them they are. One day I noticed that I wasn’t breathing—I was being breathed. Then I also noticed, to my amazement, that I wasn’t thinking—that I was actually being thought and that thinking isn’t personal. Do you wake up in the morning and say to yourself, “I think I won’t think today”? It’s too late: you’re already thinking! Thoughts just appear. They come out of nothing and go back to nothing, like clouds moving across the empty sky. They come to pass, not to stay. There is no harm in them until we attach to them as if they were true.

No one has ever been able to control their thinking, although people may tell the story of how they have. I don’t let go of my thoughts—I meet them with understanding, then they let go of me.

Knocking

I have lived on the lip
of insanity, wanting to know reasons,
knocking on a door. It opens.
I’ve been knocking from the inside!

~ Rumi

Using My Existence to Change My Existence

From the introduction to Antony Gormley written by the artist:

I started with things close at hand, things that lay within arm’s reach, and have ended up making things bigger than houses. I went from dealing with bread and clothing, to the common ground of the body, having felt my way with trees and rocks.

Making sculpture stems from a need to leave a trace of existence, but there is an even greater need to challenge existence itself with mute objects that look back at us and question our materiality with their own.

Sculpture is a material measure—a form of physical thinking that can produce feeling. A form that can help us to think and feel in ways that we had not previously thought possible, as does the act of making the form. Sculpture has a bodily dimension—in touching you are also weighing, judging, anticipating. I am using my existence to change my existence.

A sculptural object is a testimony to the story of its own making, while having a dialogue with all the made and unmade things already in the world. The project moves forward by making, and looking at what one has made. Things demand to be made, but that demand comes from things that have already been made. At times it is difficult to know who is the maker, and who the made.

Sculpture can treat everything as raw material—whether it is a sophisticated readymade piece of technology, a body or a piece of wood. It achieves a self-sufficiency and independence whilst acknowledging a dependency on all that already exists.

Inside It You Find the Outside

“Architecture is supposed to be the location of security and certainty about where you are. It is supposed to protect you from the weather, from darkness, from uncertainty. Blind Light undermines all of that. You enter this interior space that is the equivalent of being on top of a mountain or at the bottom of the sea. It is very important for me that inside it you find the outside. Also you become the immersed figure in an endless ground, literally the subject of the work.”

~ Antony Gormley

Antony Gormley, Blind Light, 2007
Fluorescent light, toughened low iron glass,
ultrasonic humidifiers, aluminium, water
© Courtesy of the artist and Jay Jopling / White Cube
Photo Stephen White