A New Leif

It's a sad and beautiful world.

[apoetreflects]

"I think technique is different from craft.  Craft is what you can learn from other verse.  Craft is the skill of making … It can be deployed without reference to the feelings or the self.  It knows how to keep up a capable verbal athletic display; it can be content to be vox et praeterra nihil—all voice and nothing else—but not voice as in ‘finding a voice.’  Learning the craft is learning to turn the windlass at the well of poetry.  Usually you begin by dropping the bucket halfway down the shaft and winding up a taking of air.  You are miming the real thing until one day the chain draws unexpectedly tight and you have dipped into waters that will continue to entice you back.  You’ll have broken the skin on the pool of yourself.  Your praties will be ‘fit for digging.’

At that point it becomes appropriate to speak of technique rather than craft.  Technique, as I would define it, involves not only a poet’s way with words, his management of metre, rhythm, and verbal texture; it involves also a definition of his stance towards life, a definition of his own reality.  It involves the discovery of ways to go out of his normal cognitive bounds and raid the inarticulate: a dynamic alertness that mediates between the origins of feeling in memory and experience and the formal ploys that express these in a work of art.  Technique entails the watermarking of your essential patterns of perception, voice, and thought into the touch and texture of your lines; it is that whole creative effort of the mind’s and body’s resources to bring the meaning of experience within the jurisdiction of form.”

—Seamus Heaney, from his essay “Feeling into Words” in Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968-1978

[bitchkitty68-blog]

I am too alone in the world, and not alone enough to make every minute holy. I am too tiny in this world, and not tiny enough just to lie before you like a thing, shrewd and secretive. I want my own will, and I want simply to be with my will, as it goes toward action, and in the silent, sometimes hardly moving times when something is coming near, I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone. I want to be a mirror for your whole body, and I never want to be too blind, or to be too old to hold up your heavy and swaying picture. I want to unfold. I don’t want to stay folded anywhere, because where I am folded, there I am a lie. And I want my grasp of things true before you. I want to describe myself like a painting that I looked at closely for a long time, like a saying that I finally understood, like the pitcher I use every day, like the face of my mother, like a ship that took me safely through the wildest storm of all.

“7”, From A Book For The Hours of Prayer, By Rainer Maria Rilke (via bitchkitty68)

[litverve]

….for the night Hath been to me a more familiar face Than that of man; and in her starry shade Of dim and solitary loveliness, I learn’d the language of another world.

Lord Byron, from “Manfred”  (via apoetreflects)

[alexandrashostak]

While motherhood is an incredible vocation, it has no more inherent worth than a childless woman simply being who she is, to the utmost of her capabilities. To think otherwise betrays a belief that being a thinking, creative, productive, and fulfilled woman is, somehow, not enough. That no action will ever be the equal of giving birth.

Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman (via alexandrashostak)

[liberumarbitriumindifferentiae-]

Don’t expect me to be sane anymore. Don’t let’s be sensible. It was a marriage at Louveciennes—you can’t dispute it. I came away with pieces of you sticking to me; I am walking about, swimming, in an ocean of blood, your Andalusian blood, distilled and poisonous. Everything I do and say and think relates back to the marriage. I saw you as the mistress of your home, a Moor with a heavy face, a negress with a white body, eyes all over your skin, woman, woman, woman. I can’t see how I can go on living away from you—these intermissions are death. How did it seem to you when Hugo came back? Was I still there? I can’t picture you moving about with him as you did with me. Legs closed. Frailty. Sweet, treacherous acquiescence. Bird docility. You became a woman with me. I was almost terrified by it. You are not just thirty years old—you are a thousand years old. Here I am back and still smouldering with passion, like wine smoking. Not a passion any longer for flesh, but a complete hunger for you, a devouring hunger. I read the paper about suicides and murders and I understand it all thoroughly. I feel murderous, suicidal. I feel somehow that it is a disgrace to do nothing, to just bide one’s time, to take it philosophically, to be sensible. Where has gone the time when men fought, killed, died for a glove, a glance, etc? (A victrola is playing that terrible aria from Madama Butterfly—”Some day he’ll come!”) I still hear you singing in the kitchen—a sort of inharmonic, monotonous Cuban wail. I know you’re happy in the kitchen and the meal you’re cooking is the best meal we ever ate together. I know you would scald yourself and not complain. I feel the greatest peace and joy sitting in the dining room listening to you rustling about, your dress like the goddess Indra studded with a thousand eyes. Anaïs, I only thought I loved you before; it was nothing like this certainty that’s in me now. Was all this so wonderful only because it was brief and stolen? Were we acting for each other, to each other? Was I less I, or more I, and you less or more you? Is it madness to believe that this could go on? When and where would the drab moments begin? I study you so much to discover the possible flaws, the weak points, the danger zones. I don’t find them—not any. That means I am in love, blind, blind. To be blind forever! (Now they’re singing “Heaven and Ocean” from La Gioconda.) I picture you playing the records over and over—Hugo’s records. “Parlez moi d amour.” The double life, double taste, double joy and misery. How you must be furrowed and ploughed by it. I know all that, but I can’t do anything to prevent it. I wish indeed it were me who had to endure it. I know now your eyes are wide open. Certain things you will never believe anymore, certain gestures you will never repeat, certain sorrows, misgivings, you will never again experience. A kind of white criminal fervor in your tenderness and cruelty. Neither remorse nor vengeance, neither sorrow nor guilt. A living it out, with nothing to save you from the abysm but a high hope, a faith, a joy that you tasted, that you can repeat when you will. All morning I was at my notes, ferreting through my life records, wondering where to begin, how to make a start, seeing not just another book before me but a life of books. But I don’t begin. The walls are completely bare—I had taken everything down before going to meet you. It is as though I had made ready to leave for good. The spots on the walls stand out—where our heads rested. While it thunders and lightnings I lie on the bed and go through wild dreams. We’re in Seville and then in Fez and then in Capri and then in Havana. We’re journeying constantly, but there is always a machine and books, and your body is always close to me and the look in your eyes never changes. People are saying we will be miserable, we will regret, but we are happy, we are laughing always, we are singing. We are talking Spanish and French and Arabic and Turkish. We are admitted everywhere and they strew our path with flowers. I say this is a wild dream—but it is this dream I want to realize. Life and literature combined, love the dynamo, you with your chameleon’s soul giving me a thousand loves, being anchored always in no matter what storm, home wherever we are. In the mornings, continuing where we left off. Resurrection after resurrection. You asserting yourself, getting the rich varied life you desire; and the more you assert yourself the more you want me, need me. Your voice getting hoarser, deeper, your eyes blacker, your blood thicker, your body fuller. A voluptuous servility and tyrannical necessity. More cruel now than before—consciously, willfully cruel. The insatiable delight of experience.

Henry Miller to Anaïs Nin (via untilasinglesolitonsurvives)

[vivialic-deactivated20160626]

I am the wound and the knife! I am the slap and the cheek! I am the limbs and the rack, And the victim and the executioner! I am the vampire of my own heart.

Charles Baudelaire (via cigarette-curls)

[ladiesofthe70s]

Visit Original Link

Sandy Denny with Fairport Convention singing “Who Knows Where The Time Goes”  Beautiful song, haunting voice.

[likeafieldmouse-deactivated2015]

The only obsession everyone wants: ‘love’. People think that in falling in love they make themselves whole? The Platonic union of souls? I think otherwise. I think you’re whole before you begin. And the love fractures you. You’re whole, and then you’re cracked open.

Philip Roth, The Dying Animal (via likeafieldmouse)

[journalofanobody]

Fallen Blossoms by Otagaki Rengetsu

The blossoms have fallen,

The fetters of my heart 

Have also loosened,

And it has become summer;

A rivulet murmurs cool and clear.

[ze-reviewer-of-odd-volumes-deac]

“Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them.”

 ― Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

[celtic-studies]

Leaf-shaped plaque of silver bearing two symbols of the early sculptured stones of Scotland, Pictish, from Norrie’s Law, near Largo, Fife, 7th century

[aseaofquotes]

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, “White Nights”

[creatingaquietmind-deactivated2]

“I read once, which I loved so much, that this great physicist who won a Nobel Prize said that every day when he got home, his dad asked him not what he learned in school but his dad said, ‘Did you ask any great questions today?’ And I always thought, what a beautiful way to educate kids that we’re excited by their questions, not by our answers and whether they can repeat our answers.”

Diane Sawyer (via mymangotree)

[indigofree-blog]

Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days have been your sonnets.

The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde (via theglasschild)

[gypsji]

“In our deepest moments we say the most inadequate things.”

— Edna O’Brien, from “Sister Imelda” (via the-final-sentence)

[sagansense]

Heracleion Photos: Lost Egyptian City Revealed After 1,200 Years Under Sea

CNN Video [Breaking News]: Lost Egyptian City Revealed

It is a city shrouded in myth, swallowed by the Mediterranean Sea and buried in sand and mud for more than 1,200 years. But now archeologists are unearthing the mysteries of Heracleion, uncovering amazingly well-preserved artifacts that tell the story of a vibrant classical-era port. Known as Heracleion to the ancient Greeks and Thonis to the ancient Eygptians, the city was rediscovered in 2000 by French underwater archaeologist Dr. Franck Goddio and a team from the European Institute for Underwater Acheology (IEASM) after a four-year geophysical survey. The ruins of the lost city were found 30 feet under the surface of the Mediterranean Sea in Aboukir Bay, near Alexandria.

A new documentary highlights the major discoveries that have been unearthed at Thonis-Heracleion during a 13-year excavation. Exciting archeological finds help describe an ancient city that was not only a vital international trade hub but possibly an important religious center. The television crew used archeological survey data to construct a computer model of the city (above, last image).

According to the Telegraph, leading research now suggests that Thonis-Heracleion served as a mandatory port of entry for trade between the Mediterranean and the Nile.

So far, 64 ancient shipwrecks and more than 700 anchors have been unearthed from the mud of the bay, the news outlet notes. Other findings include gold coins, weights from Athens (which have never before been found at an Egyptian site) and giant tablets inscribed in ancient Greek and ancient Egyptian. Researchers think that these artifacts point to the city’s prominence as a bustling trade hub.

Researchers have also uncovered a variety of religious artifacts in the sunken city, including 16-foot stone sculptures thought to have adorned the city’s central temple and limestone sarcophagi that are believed to have contained mummified animals.

For more photos, visit Goddio’s Heracleion website.

Experts have marveled at the variety of artifacts found and have been equally impressed by how well preserved they are.

“The archaeological evidence is simply overwhelming,” Professor Sir Barry Cunliffe, a University of Oxford archeologist taking part in the excavation, said in a press release obtained by The Huffington Post. “By lying untouched and protected by sand on the sea floor for centuries they are brilliantly preserved.”

A panel of experts presented their findings at an Oxford University conference on the Thonis-Heracleion excavation earlier this year.

But despite all the excitement over the excavation, one mystery about Thonis-Heracleion remains largely unsolved: Why exactly did it sink? Goddio’s team suggests the weight of large buildings on the region’s water-logged clay and sand soil may have caused the city to sink in the wake of an earthquake.

WATCH: Colossal Sunken Statues Of Thonis-Heracleion

PHOTO GALLERY: Lost city of Heracleion

From Legend to Reality Thonis-Heracleion (the Egyptian and Greek names of the city) is a city lost between legend and reality. Before the foundation of Alexandria in 331 BC, the city knew glorious times as the obligatory port of entry to Egypt for all ships coming from the Greek world. It had also a religious importance because of the temple of Amun, which played an important role in rites associated with dynasty continuity. The city was founded probably around the 8th century BC, underwent diverse natural catastrophes, and finally sunk entirely into the depths of the Mediterranean in the 8th century AD.

Prior to its discovery in 2000 by the IEASM, no trace of Thonis-Heracleion had been found. Its name was almost razed from the memory of mankind, only preserved in ancient classic texts and rare inscriptions found on land by archaeologists. The Greek historian Herodotus (5th century BC) tells us of a great temple that was built where the famous hero Herakles first set foot on to Egypt. He also reports of Helen’s visit to Heracleion with her lover Paris before the Trojan War. More than four centuries after Herodotus’ visit to Egypt, the geographer Strabo observed that the city of Heracleion, which possessed the temple of Herakles, is located straight to the east of Canopus at the mouth of the Canopic branch of the River Nile.

The Discovery With his unique survey-based approach that utilises the most sophisticated technical equipment, Franck Goddio and his team from the IEASM, in cooperation with the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities, were able to locate, map and excavate parts of the city of Thonis-Heracleion, which lies 6.5 kilometres off today’s coastline. The city is located within an overall research area of 11 by 15 kilometres in the western part of Aboukir Bay. Franck Goddio has found important information on the ancient landmarks of Thonis-Heracleion, such as the grand temple of Amun and his son Khonsou (Herakles for the Greeks), the harbours that once controlled all trade into Egypt, and the daily life of its inhabitants. He has also solved a historic enigma that has puzzled Egyptologists over the years: the archaeological material has revealed that Heracleion and Thonis were in fact one and the same city with two names; Heracleion being the name of the city for the Greeks and Thonis for the Egyptians.

The objects recovered from the excavations illustrate the cities’ beauty and glory, the magnificence of their grand temples and the abundance of historic evidence: colossal statues, inscriptions and architectural elements, jewellery and coins, ritual objects and ceramics - a civilization frozen in time.

The quantity and quality of the archaeological material excavated from the site of Thonis-Heracleion show that this city had known a time of opulence and a peak in its occupation from the 6th to the 4th century BC. This is readily seen in the large quantity of coins and ceramics dated to this period.

The port of Thonis-Heracleion had numerous large basins and functioned as a hub of international trade. The intense activity in the port fostered the city’s prosperity. More than seven hundred ancient anchors of various forms and over 60 wrecks dating from the 6th to the 2nd century BC are also an eloquent testimony to the intensity of maritime activity here.

The city extended all around the temple and a network of canals in and around the city must have given it a lake dwelling appearance. On the islands and islets dwellings and secondary sanctuaries were located. Excavations here have revealed beautiful archaeological material such as bronze statuettes. On the north side of the temple to Herakles, a grand canal flowed through the city from east to west and connected the port basins with a lake to the west. ————————————————————— This is absolutely breathtaking. I’m literally speechless with chills from this video footage and photos. If anyone can find the documentary on this (in English, please), send it my way because I’d love to immerse myself in this excavation. The documentary is titled ‘Egypt’s Sunken City: A Legend Is Revealed’. So far, this is all Franck Goddio’s team has published as far as I know; yet, the documentary was produced by the Discovery Channel, so it has to be out there somewhere. Science team…assemmmmmmble…

[thenewenlightenmentage]

Damn, this Periodic Table is Beautiful

Say hello to your new desktop background.

In May 1949, LIFE Magazine published a stunning series of images to accompany an issue dedicated largely to The Atom. You can check out the feature in its entirety here, but the reimagination of the periodic table of elements as a colorful spiral is easily one of the most striking graphics of the lot. [Click here to see it in hi-res]

Here in its entirety is the caption that accompanied the original graphic:

The irregular spiral above is a systematic arrangement of the 92 natural elements, the four new elements so far created by man and eight more elements which is theoretically possible to create. It is called the periodic table of the elements. The sequence begins with hydrogen (at the center of the spiral), which is the first and simplest element. Under its name appears its chemical symbol (left), its atomic weight (right) and a larger numeral which gives the total number of electrons in its atom. It is on the basis of this number that the elements are arranged in sequence: after hydrogen, with its single electron, come helium with two, lithium with three, beryllium with four and so on around the spiral.

The colors and construction of the table express another kind of relationship among the elements: the repetition, at regular intervals, of the chemical properties of the first few. Characteristics are thus repeated periodically in the progression form the simplest to the most complex. The table is so organized that elements whose chemistry is almost identical are grouped together in blocks of connected by solid arrows (all the inert gases–helium, neon, etc.–fall in the single gray block at the left). Broken arrows relate groups of elements which are similar in most respects but differ in a few of their properties. All related elements are given different shades of the same color. The key to this similarity among elements is found in the arrangement rather than the number of the electrons in their atoms. Only the electrons in the outer shell affect an atom’s chemical nature. Therefore all elements whose atoms have identical outer shells are chemically related, regardless of the total umber of electrons which each of them may possess. For example, lithium, sodium and the other elements in the red segment at left all have one electron in their outer shells and are therefore similar though they differ in the total number of their electrons. Each complete circuit of the table starts with one of these elements and ends with an element in the adjacent gray segment whose atom’s outer shell is complete.

This table, like all attempts to reduce the basic phenomena of nature to a simple pattern, falls somewhat short of its objective. For one thing, there are variations in the sequence of elements which do not fit readily into its graphic form. For another, it is not so much a simplification as an orderly presentation which specifies the relationship between elements but leaves much about them to be explained… Yet in expressing this relationship the table reveals the extraordinary symmetry and order which underlie the universe.

More beautiful science art from LIFE Magazine.