gifts for question-askers

A vintage cup for reading the tea leaves. (More here and here.)

A dictonary of symbols, for deciphering meanings, and a dreamlike Borges oracle by Catalina Kobelt for finding questions.

An obsidian mirror for peering into the dark.

Uusi's Supra deck for Jungian reflection.

An enamel "he loves me, he loves me not" spinning top pendant, for protecting unwary daisies from the lovelorn.

A fortune-telling pencil sourced from a mystical machine in Des Moines that will provide a yes, no, or maybe so answer. 

A Hades Wool sweater with the lyrics to Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now" for cloudy realities.

Pat Perry's risograph-printed open call for guidance for anyone seeking to be "part of a collective search for perspective in confusing times." 

A 32-sided 1930s-era fortune-telling dice for more answers than you can get from a Magic-8 Ball.

Hysteric Glamour's "You Pay" keychain to end arguments over picking up the tab.

And for finding a fortune worth keeping, a bucket of cookies, plus a frame for the best one.

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I will add waaaaay down here, in an abashed moment of self-promotion, that I am the editor of a series of open-ended oracle decks written by Ellen Freeman and illustrated by Bethany van Rijswijk that are quite beautiful and interesting, if you happen to like mushrooms, flowers, seashells, fairy tales, rocks, cats, or space. Unlike tarot, these oracle decks do not offer traditional meanings, and they don't promise answers—instead, they are way to play with thoughts and ideas using imagery and scraps of myth, folklore, history, and science.

a fancied dot; a three instead of a two

 

The past has flown away,
the coming month and year do not exist;
Ours only is the present’s tiny point.

Time is but a fancied dot ever moving on
which you have called a flowing river stream. 

I am alone in a wide desert,
listening to the echo of strange noises.

Mahmoud Shabistaru, from "Time" in Rose Garden of Mystery.

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Neither the symbolic detail
of a three instead of a two,
nor that rough metaphor
that hails one term dying and another emerging
nor the fulfillment of an astronomical process
muddle and undermine
the high plateau of this night
making us wait
for the twelve irreparable strokes of the bell.
The real cause
is our murky pervasive suspicion
of the enigma of Time,
it is our awe at the miracle
that, though the chances are infinite
and though we are
drops in Heraclitus' river,
allows something in us to endure,
never moving.

Jorge Luis Borges, translated by W.S. Merwin. (Originally posted here on 12/31/2012.)

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Other poems for a new year.

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Rolling the dice:

Limestone dice from the Middle Ages.

Roman bone dice cup and dice.

Egyptian stone die, ca. 30 B.C.—364 A.D., in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Iranian astrological plaque and dice, ca. 1600-1700, in the collection of Victoria & Albert Museum.

Assorted ancient gaming dice in the collection of the British Museum.

1971

Two men walked on the surface of the moon.
Others will, later. What are words to do?
And what of the dreams and fashionings of art
before this real, almost unreal, event?
Heady with daring and with holy dread,
those sons of Whitman now have left their print
on the moon's wasteland, the unviolated
prehuman sphere, changing and permanent.
The love of Endymion in his mountain vigil,
the hippogriff, the curious sphere of Wells,
which in my memory is real and true,
now all take substance. Triumph belongs to all.
Today there is not a single man on earth
who does not feel more confident, more sure.
The unforgettable day thrills with new force
from the single rightness of the odyssey
of those benign magicians. The moon,
which earthly love still seeks out in the sky
with sorrowing face and still-unslaked desire,
will be its monument, everlasting, one.

Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Alastair Reid.

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Originally posted 11/17/2011.

odds and ends / 3.23.2017

I've sat down at my keyboard many times in the past few weeks, wanting to write, but I'm out of practice organizing my thoughts.

I find myself missing blogging circa 2008, when I still was figuring out what a blog could be and made a post out of whatever seemed interesting. In that spirit, here are some odds and ends — some shared on Twitter, some on Pinterest, and some rescued from the languishing depths of desktop folders and bookmark files:

Objects:
Haford Grange Goat's Beard paperweight
Drake's pocket squares (horse and tiger)
Yellow sandals (A Détacher Highsmith)
Dappled leather pom pom

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Q. What are the five important ingredients in your kitchen?  

A. Sea beets, dried mushrooms, apples, mint and dandelion.

Roger Phillips, interviewed in The Gannet (discovered thanks to Jessica Stanley).

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A stained glass cabin featuring an owl with agate eyes and a spiderweb with dewdrops made of antique cut-glass crystals that make rainbows when the light is right.

The same artist makes a honeycomb suncatcher.

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I wish I was a deliberate Kushner tortoise:



Tony Kushner, 'We Call That Failure Art.'

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'Translating Borges into Trees: An Interview With Book Artist Katie Holten'

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Tom Nichols, The Death of Expertise:

To reject the advice of experts is to assert autonomy, a way for Americans to insulate their increasingly fragile egos from ever being told they’re wrong about anything. It is a new Declaration of Independence: No longer do we hold these truths to be self-evident, we hold all truths to be self-evident, even the ones that aren’t true. All things are knowable and every opinion on any subject is as good as any other.

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A brass bubble machine.

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Two new(ish) books I want to read:
Teju Cole: Known and Strange Things.
Derek Walcott and Peter Doig: Morning, Paramin.

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'TV show contestants spend year in wilderness – with no one watching.'

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'a magic salt circle for ensnaring the sensory systems of autonomous vehicles'

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From Heidi Julavits's profile of Rachel Cusk: 

gifts for writers and readers

 

Walker Evan's copy of The Waste Land from Honey & Wax Booksellers / Annina Vogel signet ring engraved with an Edith Wharton quote / gold and linen journal by paperiaarre / Redecker book brush / Biblioteca de Babel Agua de Perfume by Fueguia 1833 Patagonia / Olympia SM3 typewriter / walnut bookmark at Alder & Co. / flats for the Borges fan / pen case from Kaufmann Mercantile / Carl Aubock magnifiers for fine print.

Also: a week-long class on Paradise Lost, a subscription to the NYRB classics book club, and a membership at The New York Society Library.

the outward course of my life has been the common one, but in my dreams i always saw tigers

A few favorite fragments of Borges:

A famous poem by Blake paints the tiger as a fire burning bright and an eternal archetype of Evil; I prefer the Chesterton maxim that casts the tiger as a symbol of terrible elegance. Apart from these, there are no words that can rune the tiger, that shape which for centuries has lived in the imagination of mankind. I have always been drawn to the tiger. I know that as a boy I would linger before one particular cage at the zoo; the others held no interest for me. I would judge encyclopedias and natural histories by their engravings of the tiger. When the Jungle Books were revealed to me I was upset that the tiger, Shere Kahn, was the hero's enemy. As the years passed, this strange fascination never left me; it survived my paradoxical desire to become a hunter as it did all common human vicissitudes ... The outward course of my life has been the common one, but in my dreams I always saw tigers.

From 'Blue Tigers', translated by Andrew Hurley.


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My childhood passed and my passion for tigers faded, but they still appear in my dreams. In the unconscious or chaotic dimension, their presences persist, in the following way: While I am asleep, some dream or other disturbs me, and all at once I realize I am dreaming. At these moments, I tend to think to myself: This is a dream, simply an exercise of my will; and since my powers are limitless, I am going to dream up a tiger.

Utter incompetence! My dreaming is never able to conjure up the desired creature. A tiger appears, sure enough, but an enfeebled tiger, a stuffed tiger, imperfect of form, or the wrong size, or only fleetingly present, or looking something like a dog or a bird.

From 'Dreamtigers', translated by Alastair Reed.


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All the other overwhelming colors,
in company with the years, kept leaving me,
and now alone remains the amorphous light,
the inextricable shadow and the gold of the beginning.
O sunsets, O tigers, O wonders
of myth and epic,
O gold more dear to me, gold of your hair
which these hands long to touch.

From 'The Gold of Tigers', translated by Alastair Reid.


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Evening spreads in my spirit and I keep thinking
that the tiger I am calling up in my poem
is a tiger made of symbols and of shadows,
a set of literary images,
scraps remembered from encyclopedias,
and not the deadly tiger, the fateful jewel
that in the sun or the deceptive moonlight
follows its paths, in Bengal or Sumatra,
of love, of indolence, of dying.
Against the tiger of symbols I have set
the real one, the hot-blooded one
that savages a herd of buffalo,
and today, the third of August, '59,
its patient shadow moves across the plain,
but yet, the act of naming it, of guessing
what is its nature and its circumstance
creates a fiction, not a living creature,
not one of those that prowl the earth.

From 'The Other Tiger', translated by Alastair Reid.


Postcard of a tiger in the Leningrad Zoo found here.

mute surfaces

From the remote depths of the corridor, the mirror spied upon us. We discovered (such a discovery is inevitable in the late hours of the night) that mirrors have something monstrous about them. Then Bioy Casares recalled that one of the heresiarchs of Uqbar had declared that mirrors and copulation are abominable, because they increase the number of men.

Jorge Luis Borges, 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius'

Photo by Saul Leiter, via all things amazing.

things

My cane, my pocket change, this ring of keys.
The obedient lock, the belated notes
The few days left to me will not find time
To read, the deck of cards, the tabletop,
A book and crushed in its pages the withered
Violet, monument to an afternoon
Undoubtedly unforgettable, now forgotten,
The mirror in the west where a red sunrise
Blazes its illusion. How many things,
Files, doorsills, atlases, wine glasses, nails,
Serve us like slaves who never say a word,
Blind and so mysteriously reserved.
They will endure beyond our vanishing;
And they will never know that we have gone.

Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Stephen Kessler.

Set of keys with group of assorted gold and metal charms from the Estate of Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. Found via Mary Caple.

... In That Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography. 

Suárez Miranda, Viajes De Varones Prudentes, Libro IV, Cap. XLV, Lérida, 1658 

Jorge Luis Borges, 'On Exactitude in Science'. Translated by Andrew Hurley.

creatures of the information

We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and of the future, collecting our thoughts and collecting the thoughts of others, and every so often glimpsing mirrors, in which we may recognize creatures of the information.

Jorge Luis Borges, 'The Library of Babel'

Related: Freeman Dyson, 'How We Know' in the 3/10/11 NYRB (I'm still thinking about this essay).

little find

Jorge Luis Borges' drawing of dancers from a post of idle doodles by famous writers.

i have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library

Library at the Rijksmuseum via this fantastic list of the world's most beautiful libraries. I was lucky enough to study at this one.

(Post title courtesy of this dude.)