stripe-a-day: data visualization object

(january 1-6, 2010)

twenty-five stripes to go!

from experimental archives series

data visualization object

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Paz

There can be no society without poetry, but society can never be realized as poetry, it is never poetic. Sometimes the two terms seek to break apart. They cannot.

- Octavio Paz

Glide

I'm ridiculously enthralled by this...

poetry moment...

CORONA

Autumn eats its leaf out of my hand: we are friends.
From the nuts we shell time and we teach it to walk:
then time returns to the shell.

In the mirror it’s Sunday,
in dream there is room for sleeping,
our mouths speak the truth.

My eye moves down to the sex of my loved one:
we look at each other,
we exchange dark words,
we love each other like poppy and recollection,
we sleep like wine in the conches,
like the sea in the moon’s blood ray.

We stand by the window embracing, and people look up from the street:
it is time they new!
It is time the stone made an effort to flower,
time unrest had a beating heart.

It is time it were time.

It is time.

-Paul Celan

quilt scraps

(click to enlarge)

(click to enlarge)

Elizabeth Travelslight
2007

Paz

ENVOI

Imprisoned by four walls

(to the North, the crystal of non-knowledge

a landscape to be invented

to the South, reflective memory

to the East, the mirror

to the West, stone and the song of silence)

I wrote messages, but received no reply.

-Octavio Paz

Pieces of Thesis

more celan

VAST GLOWING VAULT

with the swarm of
black stars pushing them–
selves out and away:

on to the ram's silicified forehead.
I brand this image between
the horns, in which,
in the song of the whorls, the
marrow of melted
heart-oceans swells.

In–
to what
does he not charge?

The world is gone, I must carry you.

-Paul Celan

glittering charms

"Despite all efforts to tame it, manage it, control it, outsmart it, language resists your best efforts; language is still a bunch of sturdy, glittering charms in the astonished hand.

A utopia of possibility. A utopia of choice.

And I am huddled around the fire of the alphabet, still."

- Carole Maso, Rupture, Verge, and Precipice
Precipice, Verge, Hurt Not

artifacts mere

(click to enlarge)

from mere life in an unexpected manner, p. 17
Elizabeth Travelslight
2007

xvii is quoted from the lectures of Jean-Luc Nancy

poetry moment...

THE YEARS FROM YOU TO ME

Your hair waves once more when I weep. With the blue of your eyes
you lay the table of love: a bed between summer and autumn.
We drink what somebody brewed, neither I nor you nor a third:
we lap up some empty and last thing.

We watch ourselves in the deep sea's mirrors and faster pass
food to the other:
the night is the night, it begins with the morning,
beside you it lays me down.

-Paul Celan

dictionary poems

Elizabeth Travelslight, June 2006