interlude / rosa
Love is the bone and sinew of my curse.
Sylvia Plath, The Colossus and Other Poems, 1960
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rifts & erasures / dartmoor
Erasure is never merely a matter of making things disappear: there is always some detritus strewn about in the aftermath, some bruising to the surface from which word or image has been removed, some reminder of the violence done to make the world look new again. Whether rubbed away, crossed out or reinscribed, the rejected entity has a habit of returning, ghostlike: if only in the marks that usurp its place and attest to its passing.
Brian Dillon, The Revelation of Erasure, Tate Etc. Issue 8, 2006
What the eyes had seen could not be erased.
Frank Herbert, Dune Messiah, 1987
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penthos III / the last letter
I need not describe the feelings of those whose dearest ties are rent by that most irreparable evil, the void that presents itself to the soul, and the despair that is exhibited on the countenance. It is so long before the mind can persuade itself that she whom we saw every day and whose very existence appeared a part of our own can have departed forever—that the brightness of a beloved eye can have been extinguished and the sound of a voice so familiar and dear to the ear can be hushed, never more to be heard.
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, 1818
Even broken in spirit as he is, no one can feel more deeply than he does the beauties of nature. The starry sky, the sea, and every sight afforded by these wonderful regions, seems still to have the power of elevating his soul from earth. Such a man has a double existence: he may suffer misery, and be overwhelmed by disappointments; yet, when he has retired into himself, he will be like a celestial spirit that has a halo around him, within whose circle no grief or folly ventures.
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, 1818
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caput mortuum / hertfordshire
When sunset, like a crimson throat to hell, is cavernous…
George Sterling, A Wine of Wizardry, 1908
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caput mortuum I / black grounds / foulness
Everywhere I looked were pivot-points and fulcrums, symmetries and proliferations: the thorax points of a winged world. Sand mimicked water, water mimicked sand, and the air duplicated the textures of both. Hinged cuckoo-calls; razor shells and cockle shells; our own reflections; a profusion of suns; the glide of transparent over solid. When I think back to the outer miles of that walk, I now recall a strong disorder of perception that caused illusions of the spirit as well as of the eye. I recall thought becoming sensational; the substance of landscape so influencing the mind that mind’s own substance was altered.
Robert Macfarlane, The Old Ways (Silt), 2012
There are no beautiful surfaces without a terrible depth.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Notebooks, 1869-70
The Broomway, the most perilous path in England -
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witherings IV / cynara cardunculus
According to Greek myth, the artichoke owes its existence to the philandering Zeus who, on a visit to his brother Poseidon, spotted a gorgeous girl, Cynara, bathing on the beach. He fell instantly in love, seduced her, made her a goddess, and took her back with him to Mount Olympus. Cynara, however, lonesome and missing her mother, soon took to sneaking home to visit her family. This duplicitous act so infuriated Zeus that he tossed Cynara from Olympus and turned her into an artichoke. The modern scientific name for artichoke, Cynara Cardunculus, refers.
Looking back on months and years of intimacy, to feel that your friend, while you still remember the moving words you exchanged, is yet growing distant and living in a world apart —all this is sadder far than partings brought by death.
Yoshida Kenko, Essays in Idleness: The Tsurezuregusa of Kenko, 1330 - 1332