A collection of writings about place space writing and art …
There will be a book that includes these pages,
and she who takes it in her hands
will sit staring at it a long time,
until she feels that she is being held
and you are writing.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, from “Du dunkeInder Grund, gelduldig erträgst du die Mauern,” Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, trans. Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy (Riverhead Books, 1996)
if there is light
it will find
you.
— Charles Bukowski, from “the harder you try,” The People Look Like Flowers. (Ecco; First Edition edition (March 27, 2007)
Charles Bukowski — The Vale of Soul-Making
“There’s never really any originality. We live in a sort of large-scale exchange, a sort of grand intertext. Ideas circulate and languages too. In the end, the only thing we can do—and claim it as our own—is to combine them. That’s more or less how I see things. But you don’t create an idea—it’s there, it’s like a sort of major transaction in a large-scale economy. Ideas circulate and, at a certain point, you stop them, arrange them and edit them, a little bit the way they do in films, and that produces a work.”
Roland Barthes, ‘Simply a Particular Contemporary’, (trans. Chris Turner)
The lesson which life repeats and constantly enforces is, “Look under foot.” You are always nearer the divine and the true sources of your power than you think. The lure of the distant and the difficult is deceptive. The great opportunity is where you are. Do not despise your own place and hour. Every place is under the stars, every place is the centre of the world.
— John Burroughs, Studies in Nature and Literature (Fredonia Books [NL] July 27, 2002)
To know that one does not write for the other, to know that these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love (the other), to know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that it is precisely there where you are not–this is the beginning of writing.
— Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments. (Hill and Wang; Second Printing edition June 1, 1979) Originally published 1977.
Roland Barthes — The Vale of Soul-Making
When a poet digs himself into a hole, he doesn’t climb out. He digs deeper, enjoys the scenery, and comes out the other side enlightened.
― Criss Jami, Venus in Arms. (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform January 23, 2012)
Criss Jami — The Vale of Soul-Making
there is a loneliness in this world so great that you can see it in the slow movement of the hands of a clock.
― Charles Bukowski, from “the crunch,” Love Is a Dog from Hell: Poems, 1974-1977. (Ecco; Ecco edition May 31, 2002) Originally published 1977.
Charles Bukowski — The Vale of Soul-Making
Passivity is not just acceptance, not like amorphous, inert matter ready to fit into a form, but passive as under pressure of death — death whose silent intensity does not resemble a welcome reception, leaving its imprint without a word, a body being delegated to the past, a body seen as an interval, a being in suspension, whose syncope is produced by snipping of time and which we can only see as some unarticulated savage history that presently makes no sense. Passive here is a complete absence of narrative, leaving us with an event that cannot be cited and is impossible as a recollection of a forgotten thought, because it was never forgotten, always remaining outside the field of memory.
Passivité n’est pas simple réception, pas plus qu’elle ne serait l’informe et inerte matière prête à toute forme — passives, les poussées de mourir (le mourir, silencieuse intensité ; ce qui ne se laisse pas accueillir ; ce qui s’inscrit sans parole, le corps au passé, corps de personne, le corps de l’intervalle :
[…]
Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. there is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there. — Henry Miller
‘In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.’
Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism as quoted in – ‘Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted’ found at: cakeordeathsite – nothing is true everything is permitted
Naked Cities Journal 
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