As flowing waters disappear into the mist
We lose all track of their passage.
Shih-shu, 1703
A Drifting Boat: Chinese Zen Poetry, Edited by J. P. Seaton & Dennis Maloney, 1995
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And part of the soil is called to wash away
In storms and streams shave close and gnaw the rocks.
Besides, whatever the earth feeds and grows
Is restored to earth. And since she surely is
The womb of all things and their common grave,
Earth must dwindle, you see and take on growth again.
Titus Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, First-century BC
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Nothing that lives is, or can be, rigidly perfect; part of it is decaying, part nascent….
And in all things that live there are certain irregularities and deficiencies which are not only signs of life, but sources of beauty….
To banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyse vitality.
John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, 1851
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in small compass the dark waters cram.
Mervyn Peake, Collected Poems, 2008
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These fragments I have shored against my ruins.
T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, 1922
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You'll stand aside as a great complexity intrudes, tearing apart, piece by piece, all of your carefully conceived denials...
fighting with everything you've got not to face the thing you most dread...
the creature you truly are... buried in the nameless black of a name.
Mark Z Danielewski, House of Leaves, 2000
cave cartography / 8 exposures taken hourly / 4 days
Upon returning from a trip to Seattle, the Navidson family discovers a change in their home. A closet-like space shut behind an undecorated door appears inexplicably where previously there was only a blank wall. A second door appears at the end of the closet, leading to the children's room. As Navidson investigates this phenomenon, he finds that the internal measurements of the house are somehow xlr than external measurements. Initially there is less than an inch of difference, but as time passes the interior of the house seems to expand while maintaining the same exterior proportions. A third and more extreme change asserts itself: a dark, cold hallway opens in an exterior living room wall that should project outside into their yard, but does not. Navidson films the outside of the house to show where the hallway should be but clearly is not. The filming of this anomaly comes to be referred to as "The Five and a Half Minute Hallway". This hallway leads to a maze-like complex, starting with a xl room (the "Anteroom"), which in turn leads to a truly enormous space (the "Great Hall"), a room primarily distinguished by an enormous spiral staircase which appears, when viewed from the landing, to spiral down without end. There is also a multitude of corridors and rooms leading off from each passage. All of these rooms and hallways are completely unlit and featureless, consisting of smooth ash-gray walls, floors, and ceilings. The only sound disturbing the perfect silence of the hallways is a periodic low growl, the source of which is never fully explained, although an academic source “quoted" in the book hypothesizes that the growl is created by the frequent re-shaping of the house.
source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Leaves
cave extractions / ferruginous sediment / exhibits a-c
In the end Navidson is left with one page and one match. For a long time he waits in darkness and cold, postponing this final bit of illumination.
At last though, he grips the match by the neck and after locating the friction strip sparks to life a final ball of light.
First, he reads a few lines by match light and then as the heat bites his fingertips he applies the flame to the page. Here then is one end: a final act of reading, a final act of consumption. And as the fire rapidly devours the paper, Navidson’s eyes frantically sweep down over the text, keeping just ahead of the necessary immolation, until as he reaches the last few words, flames lick around his hands, ash peels off into the surrounding emptiness, and then as the fire retreats, dimming, its light suddenly spent, the book is gone leaving nothing behind but invisible traces already dismantled in the dark.
Mark Z Danielewski, House of Leaves, 2000
Darkness is impossible to remember. Consequently cavers desire to return to those unseen depths where they have just been.
It is an addiction. No one is ever satisfied. Darkness never satisfies.
Especially if it takes something away which it almost always invariably does.
Mark Z Danielewski, House of Leaves, 2000
