AGAINST THE BLUE DESERT

A Book of Aphorisms & Reflections by Carlos Penela

[againstthebluedesert]

Words that we make burn

(17.02.26)

As those colors that sink into the shadow and the cold, so also we darken with the silence. Between one night and another, we fight to bring some light with each of the words that we make burn with despair.

Photo: from the film "The Pillow Book", by Peter Greenaway, 1996.

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Understanding love

(07.12.25)

Addition to Chesterton: to love something is to realize that it can be lost; and not wanting to lose it completely is proof that love survives everything, even its own loss.

Photo: Masao Yamamoto, 'Nakazora #1058', 2008.

(The term Nakazora (中空) is a Japanese word that literally translates as "empty space" or "middle of the sky" , with naka 中 meaning "middle" and zora 空 meaning "sky" or "void").

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Profaning the language

(11.10.25)

One can desecrate a human being's life, but it is not possible to also desecrate his death without at the same time profaning the language of silence — that last refuge of dignity which the vileness of time cannot reach.

Photo: Still from the film The Mirror (Zerkalo) by Andrei Tarkovsky, 1975

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Beyond the veil of words

(11.09.25)

Beyond the veil of words lies something more, something words can scarcely express. Perhaps that is what we call night, enchantment, poetry.

Photo: Nádia Maria

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A river flowing

(06.09.25)

Evil belongs to the heart of stone—perpetual, untouched by change. The possibility of breaking that sordid silence is the possibility that opens with goodness: a river flowing among those who seek its center, that music of days without shadow.

Elger Esser, Les Andelys II, 2008

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An infinite learning

(24.08.25)

The possibility of infinite learning — a metaphor for the very infinity of the world, for life understood as a source of wonder that does not repeat the same pain, but continually invents new marvels.

Photo: Saul Leiter, "Jean", c.1948

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The courage, the fall, the redemption

(11.08.25)

If love is the most dangerous of all curiosities, as Elias Canetti claimed, then the most dignified way of living would be a constant struggle with that abyss. The courage, the fall, the redemption.

Photo: Rinko Kawauchi, "Untitled, from the series Ametsuchi, 2012"

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About a poem

(03.05.25)

There's something humbly miraculous about a poem. For an instant, a poem can stop all the pain in the world. For an instant, a poem can embrace the deepest sweetness of silence. For an instant, a poem can be the image of everything that won't break in the mirror.

Image: Manuskriptseite aus dem sogenannten Stuttgarter Foliobuch mit Hölderlins Gedichtentwurf ›Sapphos Schwanengesang‹, WLB Stuttgart, Cod.poet.et.phil.fol.63,I,6_18r.

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Before the night came

(27.02.25)

The words spoken before the night came. The night that could not overcome the fire. The fire that no one remembered anymore. The memory that became a fearsome river. The river that crossed our hearts for the last time. Our hearts waiting for all the tides. Such were the days, the tremble, we.

Photo: Deborah Turbeville

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November

(13.11.24)

November is the month when everything breaks. The light breaks and through its cracks a grey silence of ash and orphanhood enters. Promises are broken, its warmth and the centre of those days that were like rivers, that were like incandescent foals. November does not really exist, it is a desert from which someone wanted to escape before the beginning of the world, before the winters were founded.

Photo: Natalia Deprina, "Apprehension - Closer to the autumn"

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Wounds of time

(26.09.24)

The wounds of time cannot be rewritten or hidden. Nor is there any grammar to translate them into a comprehensible language. We are the torn body of that palimpsest of our memory and our finitude.

Photo: Laura Makabresku

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A river

(26.04.24)

A river whose waters no one will be able to stop. A river at sunset whose waters have been devoured forever by the shadow. Life, that body that still struggles not to be lost in the meeting of those waters.

Photo: Sally Mann, "Nottaway, 2010-2015”

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The oldest, the noblest battle

(17.04.24)

To rebel against the impossibility of love: perhaps that’s the oldest, the noblest battle we have always fought. To understand that it’s not possible to get out of the prison of time: perhaps that’s the most honourable capitulation we should accept. Love in the prison of time: life felt as true liberation and resistance.

Photo: from „A visitor to a museum“, by Konstantin Lopushansky

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Smoke in front of the mirrors

(27.03.24)

Smoke in front of the mirrors, a beach devoured by winter, that twilight whose light will never be felt as before. All that we are saying goodbye to. All that which returns us to astonishment. All that which will remain after the tears have been burned away.

Photo: from “The Mirror (Zerkalo)”, Andrei Tarkovsky, 1975.

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Little winter tale

(29.11.23)

They contemplated that miracle of the end of December, the candles burning with the fragile breath of the silence animals, the old words emerging from the ashes, the pact of the bodies returning to their light. No one wanted to think any more of the broken mirrors, of the return of pain. The snow stops all apocalypses.

Image: from „Mirror“ (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1975)

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Vision of snow

(29.11.23)

There’s something timeless in the vision of snow and, at the same time, very intimate. If eternity had a color, it would be, perhaps, that of snow. A color that’s also a border, a limit, a cold fire where all silence is devoured and engendered again and again.

Photo: Ragnar Axelsson - From the serie „Where the world is melting.“

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Pain, no colors

(23.10.23)

If we wanted to remember pain, in reality, we could not, because there would be no colors in the world to recreate its very stigmata, no words to describe its abyss, no music to imitate the tremor of its language. That is why, really, pain cannot be remembered, it can hardly be remembered that day when we were freed from it, the distance between its vortex and our escape. Pain does not raise its flags twice.

Photo: Kukkong Thirathomrongkiat