feeding the five thousand » The language of cities

Susan Sontag and son, photographed by Diane Arbus.

‘We approach the world, futilely, as collectors. Travel demonstrates as much as any personal intimacy that we cannot elicit perfect, unmoving loyalty. Writing anything down is basically sentimental, an act of preservation, an attempt to hold a moment or image still. Travel writing wants to defeat the impermanence of being in any one place. In keeping records of the intangible—people or places or experiences—we attempt to forget that the things we love are not, in fact, things, and therefore can’t be kept, preserved, or possessed.’

from this

a cultivated mess, a decidedly grey palette, a heartfelt c90, a circular thought, cities obscured by trees, coastlines, compiling systems, compulsive repetition, condensation on glass, dead cities, deliberation, elegant degradation, entropy, hemispheres in your hair, iridescence, lights on water, luminosity, midnight blue, olfactory memory, opacity, plain words, quiet electronics, reciprocity, recursive lexicons, self between trains, sounds/transit, species of spaces, sublimation, symmetry of sentiment, the immutable, world of echo, what is, what was.

king midas sound — blue

‘In reality, and for the existentialist, there is no love apart from the deeds of love; no potentiality of love other than that which is manifested in loving; there is no genius other than that which is expressed in works of art. The genius of Proust is the totality of the works of Proust; the genius of Racine is the series of his tragedies, outside of which there is nothing. Why should we attribute to Racine the capacity to write yet another tragedy when that is precisely what he did not write? In life, a man commits himself, draws his own portrait and there is nothing but that portrait. No doubt this thought may seem comfortless to one who has not made a success of his life. On the other hand, it puts everyone in a position to understand that reality alone is reliable; that dreams, expectations and hopes serve to define a man only as deceptive dreams, abortive hopes, expectations unfulfilled; that is to say, they define him negatively, not positively. Nevertheless, when one says, ‘You are nothing else but what you live,’ it does not imply that an artist is to be judged solely by his works of art, for a thousand other things contribute no less to his definition as a man. What we mean to say is that a man is no other than a series of undertakings, that he is the sum, the organization, the set of relations that constitute these undertakings.’

— Jean Paul Sartre

scuba — before