and then he began to write - epigraphs

Early in 1885John Ruskin sat down to write his autobiography Praeterita (the title 'means merely past things', he told his friend Kate Greenaway). The art critic was at Brantwood, his home at the side of Lake Coniston. In its study, whose windows gave lovely views over meadow, water and Lancashire mountains, were the diaries Ruskin had kept since 1835. There were some thirty of these jhournals. On other Brantwood shelved were hundreds of packets of correspondence. Many of them contained family letters, the earliest from the beginning of the nineteenth century. There were also letters from Ruskin's friends and contemporaries, men and women he had know in a long life as writer, teacher and social reformer.

The instant of composition keeps the memory alive, raw. He will walk forward, with pain and difficulty, into the past and make it cohere. The church spire is a needle to his pole.

Memory Maps: 'The Edge of the Orison: In the Traces of John Clare's

'Journey Out of Essex'' by Iain Sinclair http://www.vam.ac.uk/

'The virgin finds pleasure in her rising desire,

The young tiger finds pleasure in his consummation,

The old man finds pleasure in his fertile memory:

Drukpa Kunley’s “Sutra of Sex” (redux)

Translation from Bhutanese by Keith Dowman and Sonam Paljor

I suppose the ‘font’ of ambition is the desire not to be forgotten—I would like to right [sic] poems for you that will make you the subject of thought and dreams, years after we are gone—Abellard and Eloise [sic] have never been forgotten—Dante’s Beatrice is still alive—Why not my lover, who will be remembered for his services to his country, why should he not be known too, because of me?

Mary Borden (letter)

"Time wakens a longing more poignant than all the longings caused by the division of lovers in space, for there is no road back into its country. Our bodies were not made for that journey; only the imagination can venture upon it; and the setting out, the road, and the arrival: all is imagination."

Edwin Muir, An Autobiography (The Hogarth Press 1954), page 224.

“What I said before about you & me perhaps is what really applies: we met on top of a mountain & should leave it at that”. For all his newspaper-reading, pub-going, and hymning of the ordinary life, a significant part of MacNeice remained in residence on that mountain top, and it was on its difficult heights that he was able to reveal himself more fully and humanly than ever before or afterwards. Jonathan Allison, editor LETTERS OF LOUIS MACNEICE

Reading and writing as a magical ploy to get closer to a loved one after his death, and to discover oneself. Writing, which she refers to in another part of the book, as "the food of the gods", offers the chance to break out of the confines of daily life and on the wings of language, to intoxicate oneself with thoughts, and reveal oneself stripped bare.

What is indispensable is the opening of all flood-gates while maintaining the strictest standards and exercising ruthless discipline and rigour’. There is wildness in the first and second drafts, she has said, but the iron fist comes in with the third and fourth. Friedericke Mayrocker

If one sees music as a spiritual journey, as I do, then it must always go forward, and I think it must eventually end in silence. I never understood that with Stockhausen: why it didn't end in silence. Perhaps it will [...] I think it must end in silence, and go on to prayer, which is a higher form of creativity. (Paul Griffiths, New Sounds, New Personalities. British Composers of the 1980s, London: Faber, 1985, 111)

music of love

magic melody

dangerous dissonance

baroque being

senile silence

And it was at that age . . . Poetry arrived

in search of me . . . I don't know where

it came from ~ Pablo Neruda

The arrival of poetry is catastrophic. You are seized by indescribable wonder and an equally incomprehensible terror. You face a blank page to write what no one has asked you to write, with very little idea of what you will end up writing. The absence of a commandment marks your freedom. You stray away from the familiar house of grammar, and for the first time feel lured by the forest of language. It is a fearful moment of infinite responsibility. Nicanor Parra's advice to young poets is precisely this: "In poetry everything is permitted. / With only this condition of course, / You have to improve the blank page."

But I refuse to leave the book only I can write be unwritten because of laziness or fear. http://bsailors.wordpress.com/

PRAETERITA - OUTLINES OF SCENES AND THOUGHTS PERHAPS WORTHY OF MEMORY IN MY PAST LIFE by John Ruskin

"To my farther great benefit, as I grew older, I thus saw nearly all the noblemen's houses in England ; in reverent and healthy delight of uncovetous admiration, — perceiving, as soon as I could perceive any political truth at all, that it was probably much happier to live in a small house, and have Warwick Castle to be astonished at, than to live in Warwick Castle and have nothing to be astonished at ; but that, at all events, it would not make Brunswick Square in the least more pleasantly habitable, to pull Warwick Castle down.

And at this day, though I have kind invitations enough to visit America, I could not, even for a couple of months, live in a country so miserable as to possess no castles."