The Impossible

There is no use trying, said Alice; one can't believe impossible things.

I dare say you haven't had much practice, said the Queen. When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. 

from here

The Impossible 

Haiti revisited: June 15, 2008 - before the earthquake...

Haitians searching for food or anything else at a dump. Rising food prices led to riots in April. Most Haitians earn less than $2 a day.

Malthus Redux:

 By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.

Published: June 15, 2008

Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

good intentions

what you need to know about donating to Haiti:
good intentions are not enough

Don’t send shoes, send money. Don’t send baby formula, send money. Don’t send old coats, send money.  

more: NY Times  

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Before

It was a sad song - I mean to say that she was sad and that she didn't know any other kind of song. She didn't sing loud and it was a song with no words, her mouth shut the song sticking in her throat like a moan... so what do you want? She sang as the black girls do, as if you're smothering a sob, and this song always ends by beginning again because it is made in the image of misery, and tell me, will misery ever end?"

Jacques Roumain, "Gouverneurs de la Rosée" ("Masters of the Dew") Translation by MADISON SMARTT BELL

---

The street of the La Saline market (Port-au-Prince, Haiti).

 Every day thousands of women from all over the city of Port-au-Prince try to resell supplies and food from questionable sources in the La Saline market. The informal sector significantly predominate within the poor Haitian economics and the regular shops virtually do not exist. La Saline is the largest street market area in Port-au-Prince. [July, 2008]

Photography Copyright © 2002-2010- more: Jan Sochor

Haiti in Ink and Tears: A Literary Sampler, By MADISON SMARTT BELL

more: NY Times 

DONATE  HERE

Iron Flowers

sluggish, semi-stagnant
the water in Haitian gutters,
small gullets, trickles green,
sewerage green, here even
the dirt is poor and
there is a cloying dullness
camouflaging even strongly
persistent colors

in squared, white walled
cemeteries
funeral flowers are made of
painted iron/ i see no roses
rising through this Port
Au Prince poverty

i hesitate to take pictures
it is like thievery
almost like
i am stealing precious light
that these, my brothers and sister,
need to live

IRON FLOWERS A POETIC REPORT ON A VISIT TO HAITI,  Kalamu ya Salaam.

1979
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ghostly heart

There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams--not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

image © All rights reserved. : tom palumbo 

Everything is strange.

 The Waves, Virginia Woolf
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Toys

"Why doesn't everybody see from childhood the passes, doors and crevices on the ground and above in the sky? If everybody saw them there would be history without murder or war.  
—Handke


We wanted something appealing, and we thought of a tiny bit of a mouse that would have something of the wistfulness of Chaplin — a little fellow trying to do the best he could. When people laugh at Mickey Mouse, it’s because he’s so human; and that is the secret of his popularity. I only hope that we don’t lose sight of one thing — that it was all started by a mouse.
— Walt Disney

NY Times: toys
Wings of Desire

"This is water, this is water."

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys, how's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?"

:image
David Foster Wallace
This is Water

Happy New Year

every day, every day i hear

enough to fill

a year of nights with wondering.

- denise levertov
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Last chance...

"There is still a point where the present, the now, winds around itself, and nothing is tangled. the river is not where it begins or ends, but right in the middle point, anchored by what has happened and what is to arrive. You can close your eyes and there will be a light snow falling in New York..."


Let the Great World Spin, Colum McCann
Kandinsky at the Guggenheim
through January 13, 2010

one moment

one moment your life is a stone in you, and the next, a star.

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Rilke: Sunset

Wants

You see, I want a lot.
Perhaps I want everything:
the darkness that comes with every infinite fall
and the shivering blaze of every step up.

Rilke

:image

Merry Christmas

it is not heard at all, but you are the music
while the music lasts

snow angel
T. S. Eliot "The Dry Salvages"

The Snow Queen

He was dragging along some pointed flat pieces of ice, which he laid together in all possible ways, for he wanted to make something with them; just as we have little flat pieces of wood to make geometrical figures with, called the Chinese Puzzle. Kay made all sorts of figures, the most complicated, for it was an ice-puzzle for the understanding. In his eyes the figures were extraordinarily beautiful, and of the utmost importance; for the bit of glass which was in his eye caused this. He found whole figures which represented a written word; but he never could manage to represent just the word he wanted–that word was “eternity”; and the Snow Queen had said, “If you can discover that figure, you shall be your own master, and I will make you a present of the whole world and a pair of new skates.”

The Snow Queen
Russian Snow Queen

Angels among us

When the child was a child, it was the time of these questions. Why am I me, and why not you? Why am I here, and why not there? When did time begin, and where does space end? Isn't life under the sun just a dream? Isn't what I see, hear, and smell just the mirage of a world before the world? Does evil actually exist, and are there people who are really evil? How can it be that I, who am I, wasn't before I was, and that sometime I, the one I am, no longer will be the one I am?....


It reached for cherries in topmost branches of trees
with an elation it still has today,
has a shyness in front of strangers,
and has that even now.
It awaited the first snow,
And waits that way even now.


Wings of Desire
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