markings

 

.

A field of water betrays a spirit that is in the air. It is continually receiving new life and motion from above. It is intermediate in its nature between land and sky. On land only the grass and trees wave, but the water itself is rippled by the wind. I see where the breeze dashes across it by the streaks or flakes of light. 

It is remarkable that we can look down on its surface. We shall, perhaps, look down thus on the surface of air at length, and mark where a still subtler spirit sweeps over it. 


—Henry David Thoreau 
Walden, the pond

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life before death

.

The capital-T Truth is about life before death.

It is about the real value of a real education, 
which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, 
and everything to do with simple awareness; 

awareness of what is so real and essential, 
so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we 
have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

"This is water."
"This is water."

It is unimaginably hard to do this, 
to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and 
day out.

 

—David Foster Wallace

. 

body of water

 

.

Water does not resist. Water flows. 
When you plunge your hand into it, 
all you feel is a caress.  

Water is not a solid wall, it will not stop you. 
But water always goes where it wants to go, 
and nothing in the end can stand against it.  

Water is patient. Dripping water wears away a stone. 
Remember that, my child. 
Remember you are half water.  

If you can’t go through an obstacle, go around it. 
Water does.

—Margaret Atwood

.

recipe

 

.

Prep Time  
2 min 

Total Time  

19 hrs 6 min 

Servings  

1

Ingredients  

1 glass
some water

Directions   

1. fill glass with water. 

2. don't drink anything for 19 hours. 

3. drink the water.  

.





 

blood, sea

 

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In 1976, the Italian writer Italo Calvino published a famous collection of poetic prose, t zero. The story “Blood, Sea" recounts a sequence of events narrated from the first-person perspective of a blood cell, alternating with a story about human protagonists, told in the conventional perspective of the third person. 

In the story, among a lot of other astonishing relations, Calvino explores the fact that the water of the earth’s oceans shows a mineral composition which strikingly resembles that of our body fluids. The blood plasma is the sea in which life once began. This ocean still fills us, as it fills all other lifeforms. 

Calvino imagined a narrative told by a blood cell, a cell which is suspended in this primordial ocean within our bodies. He told a story from the perspective of life itself, or rather from the perspective of the life-giving ability of the primal fluid and its invitation to make intimate connections. 

He spoke from the standpoint of an outside which is also an inside. Calvino invented “Biopoetics” avant la lettre. He envisioned a first-person account of what is not human through our shared qualities, through our participation in a vast web of transformations. 

For Calvino, the poet, it was only evident that we are able to make statements about this network of changes and exchanges because we are a part of it, and we are concerned by it, as we are by our own fate. 

Poetic creativity is the power to know something through intimate participation. […] Calvino is a poet, and as such he knows about the fact that true novelty in this world, and also true experiences of connection, only arise through the exchange, the breakdown and recreation of what is real.

—Andreas Weber

Biopoetics

.

the nature of water

.

Thence it was that Thales, of Miletus, and Hesiod concluded that Water was the beginning of all things, and said it was the first of all the Elements, and the most potent, and that because it hath the mastery over all the rest. For, as Pliny saith, Waters swallow up the Earth, extinguish flames, ascend on high, and by the stretching forth of the clouds, challenge the Heaven for their own; the same falling becomes the cause of all things that grow in the Earth. Very many are the wonders that are done by Waters, according to the writings of Pliny, Solinus, and many other historians of the wonderful virtue whereof.

—Agrippa
The Philosophy of Natural Magic
CHAPTER VI. Of the Wonderful Natures of Water, Air and Winds

.

wait - what ?

.

siesta hour

 

.

  

to bury our

face

in you, and

our hair, and

the soul!

When we're thirsty

we glimpse you

like

a mine or a mountain

of feasts,

but

among our longings and our teeth

you change

simply

into cool light

that slips in turn into

spring water

that touched us once

singing.

And that is why
you don't weigh us down,
in the siesta hour
that's like an oven,
you don't weigh us down,
you just
go by
and your heart, some cold ember,
turns itself into a single
drop of water.

—Pablo Neruda

.