Fontaine, Je Ne Boirai Pas De Ton Eau!
I know I might have lived in such a way
As to have suffered only pain:
Loving not man nor dog;
Not money, even; feeling
Toothache perhaps, but never more than an hour away
From skill and novocaine;
Making no contacts, dealing with life through Agents, drinking
one cocktail, betting two dollars, wearing raincoats in the rain.
Betrayed at length by no one but the fog Whispering to the wing of the plane.
“Fountain,” I have cried to that unbubbling well, “I will not
drink of thy water!” Yet I thirst
For a mouthful of—not to swallow, only to rinse my mouth in
—peace.
And while the eyes of the past condemn,
The eyes of the present narrow into assignation. And—
worst—
The young are so old, they are born with their fingers crossed;
I shall get no help from them.
- Edna St. Vincent Millay
Colonel William F. Friedman’s most elaborate example of how to make anything signify anything using Bacon’s biliteral cipher. Courtesy the Bacon Cipher Collection, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library.
Erwin Blumenfeld; Lisa Fonssagrives, Eiffel Tower, Paris, France, 1939
(Source: liquidnight, via valse-des-fleurs)
(via forbiddenalleys)
Helen Levitt, New York, 1980
Ms. Levitt photographed instances of guilelessly cinematic street life that, as Yeats put it, captured “the ceremony of innocence.”
Sophie Calle, Autobiographie La Robe de Mariée, 1988
“One would hope that, beyond cultural hypnosis, vast reservoirs of international imaginations do flourish. One would hope that there are better reasons to scope out undulating living abstractions than the propping up of market schemes. Is it naïve to think that Aesthetes are not all just echoes of capital-intensive trends? Is it politically incorrect to dream that it might be possible to hunt beauty for pleasure… for pleasure without apology? Broad, heterogeneous swaths of ideation course outside of the status quo. This prophetic, often dystopic, expressive and unregulated meme-surplus seduces some engineers. The glut of creative fantasy is a gold mine and a minefield. From the excess of possibilities comes the impetus for actuated technologies. Ahhh, refinement, so pleasurable and deadly.”
(Source: emutagen.com)
