Five Rings

alchemical, Hermeticist, winter woman.

[cavatas]

"I'm in the service of something beyond me."

— Melanie De Biasio

[the--framed--maelstrom]

The verb ‘to leave oneself [se laisser]’: signature of the writer.

— Hélène Cixous, Selected Interviews

[thekimonogallery]

Movable type for Japanese printing press, with hundreds of characters, 1938.  Image via Nationaal  Archief on  Flickr

[macrolit]

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the workers to gather wood, don’t divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”

—

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900-1944) French writer, aviator

[cavatas]

"The animal must have known Adam as well. We too display a psychic image. We are each an open book to the animal eye. Especially to our household pets, who can call on your state of soul before you have any notion of it. Not only are pets part of the larger family, but they are intimately familiar observers of your unconscious presentation in everyday household life. They were the first psychoanalysts. Is that the psychological reason for the domestication of dogs and cats, of birds, pigs, cows, elephants, goats? The animals could make us aware of ourselves. When we are present to the animal Adam is there, and Eve, and we are in the Garden from which the animals, unlike us, were never ejected."

— James Hillman, Animal Presences

[clementbrunner]

[bluebeardsbride-archive]

“A rose is a rose is a rose, but not to the perfumer. Russian rose is softer, Indian thinner, Egyptian richer, Turkish sweeter, Bulgarian rounder, Moroccan brighter. Jasmine sambac is sharp, while grandiflorum jasmine is more full-bodied. Deepgreen Tasmanian boronia has a rich herbal scent, whereas the bright orange kind has a sweet-tart citrusy odor. Spanish, Tunisian, and French orange flower absolute all vary in sweetness and depth.”

—

Mandy Aftel, Essence and Alchemy: A Natural History of Perfume

[nousrose]

The snake symbolizes something unconscious; it is the instinctive movement or tendency; it shows the way to the hidden treasure, or it guards the treasure. The snake has a fascinating appeal, a peculiar attraction through fear. Some people are fascinated by this fear. Things that are awe-inspiring and dangerous have an extraordinary attraction. The serpent shows the way to hidden things which leads man to go beyond the point of safety, and beyond the limits of consciousness.

1925 Seminar

Carl Jung

[cavatas]

Madame Grey by Bergdorf Goodman

[pointandshooter]

Waterfall Hiroshi Senju (b. 1958) Japan and United States, 2024 Pair of six-panel folding screens; natural pigments on Japanese mulberry paper

photo: David Castenson

[the--framed--maelstrom]

For we are capable of doing only what we are inclined to do. And again, we truly incline only toward something that in turn inclines toward us, toward our essential being, by appealing to our essential being as the keeper who holds us in our essential being. What keeps us in our essential nature holds us only so long, however, as we for our part keep holding on to what holds us. And we keep holding on to it by not letting it out of our memory. Memory is the gathering of thought.

— Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking

[tender-somethings]

"This gorgeous green, / this searing lilac, / this heart that is nothing but mystery.”

— Alejandra Pizarnik, “Poem 9″, Diana’s Tree (trans. Yvette Siegert).

[joeinct]

Parrot Tulips, Photo by Robert Mapplethorpe, 1988

[proustian-dream]

Baudelaire was a lover of depth, understood in the strictly spatial sense. He waited, like some marvel always ready to flare into being, for certain moments in which space eluded its customary flatness and began to reveal itself in a potentially inexhaustible succession of stage wings. Then things – every single negligible object – suddenly took on an unexpected significance. In those moments, he wrote, ‘the exterior world offers itself with a powerful emphasis, a clearness of outline, a wealth of exquisite colors.’ As if to say that thought was possible only when the world presented itself in this way. These were also ‘the moments of existence in which time and extension are more profound, and the sentiment of existence has grown enormously.’ So, in Western terms, Baudelaire was getting close to describing what for Vedic seers, and later for Buddha, was bodhi, the ‘awakening.’ And in an equally literal Western spirit, he made this coincide with physiological awakening, with the moment in which ‘the eyelids have just been unburdened of the sleep that sealed them.’ This is what drugs are for: opium makes space deep (‘Space is deepened by opium’), while hashish ‘spreads over the whole of life like a magic varnish’ (perhaps similar to Vauvenargues’s comment ‘clarity is the vernis des maîtres’?). Yet Baudelaire also pointed out that drugs are only a surrogate for physiology, since ‘every man carries within himself the right dose of natural opium, which he unceasingly secretes and renews.’

Roberto Calasso, 'The Natural Obscurity of Things', La Folie Baudelaire

[orendarling]

Merkurker, Iceland May, 2024

[casadabiqueira]

Rice Field and Pine Forest, Japan

John Sexton, 1985

[cavatas]

"How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say, God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words get it wrong. We say bread and it means according to which nation. French has no word for home, and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people in northern India is dying out because their ancient tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost vocabularies that might express some of what we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would finally explain why the couples on their tombs are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated, they seemed to be business records. But what if they are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light. O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper, as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind's labor. Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this desire in the dark. Perhaps this spiral Minoan script is not a language but a map. What we feel most has no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses and birds."

— Jack Gilbert, The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart