Marvels of Creatures and Strange Things Existing

Kitab Aja'ib al-makhluqat wa Gharaib al-Mawjudat

literally "The Wonders of Creation and the Curiosities of Existence", or

Marvels of Creatures and Strange Things Existing

Merchant from Isfahan Flying


Kitab Aja'ib al-makhluqat wa Gharaib al-Mawjudat, literally "The Wonders of Creation," compiled in the middle 1200s in what is now Iran or Iraq. The vibrantly illustrated work is considered one of the most important natural history texts of the medieval Islamic world.

Heinrich von Kleist, On the Puppet Theater

Paradise is locked and bolted and the Cherub is behind us. We must make a journey around the world, to see if a back door has perhaps been left open

Heinrich von Kleist (18 October 1777 – 21 November 1811)

Moon

you'll be beautiful in my manner

John Adams Whipple, View of the Moon, Feb 26, 1852 (Daguerreotype )

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The Moon’s Favors

Meanwhile, in the expansiveness of her joy,
the Moon filled all of the room like a phosphoric atmosphere,
like a luminous poison; and all of that living light thought and said:
“You will be eternally subject to the influence of my kiss.
You will be beautiful in my manner.

You will love what I love and who loves me:
water, the clouds, silence, and the night; the immense, green sea;
formless and multiform water; the place where you will not be;
the lover you will not know; monstrous flowers;
perfumes that make you delirious; cats who swoon on pianos,
and who moan like women, with a hoarse, gentle voice!

Charles Baudelaire

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This Web of Time

Anselm Kiefer, Andromeda, 2001

"This web of time—the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect or ignore each other through the centuries—embraces every possibility. We do not exist in most of them. In some you exist and not I, while in others I do, and you do not, and yet in others both of us exist. In this one, in which chance has favored me, you have come to my gate. In another, you, crossing the garden, have found me dead. In yet another, I say these very same words but am in error, a phantom...Time is forever dividing itself toward innumerable futures..."

- Jorge Luis Borges (1899 - 1986)
Garden of Forking Paths, Ficciones

a glimpse of the cosmic dance

Furu ike ya
kawazu tobikomu
mizu no oto

Matsuo Bashô

31 english translations of Bashô's famous frog haiku

Seitei (Shotei) Watanabe 1851-1918 - Two Frogs in a Pond

Time Lapse - Wind of Impermanence

All the while, across the face of the earth
moves the restless wind of impermanence,
dissolving all that it touches.

 

The blossom that opens in the morning
is scattered by the evening breeze,
and the dew, condensed in hours of darkness
before dawn, is dispelled by the rays of the morning sun.

Heedless or willfully ignorant of this
procession of changes, we dream of prosperity
all through life and, without understanding
the nature of transience, hope for longevity.

All the while, across the face of the earth
moves the restless wind of impermanence,
dissolving all that it touches.

Hōnen (法然 1133-1212)

watch the video below

Time Lapse - Rising Moon

Thou art hidden from mine eye.
Yet my sadness thou well knowest ...

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Borges, El Aleph (Quote)

On the thirtieth of April, 1941, along with the sugared cake I allowed myself to add a bottle of Argentine cognac. Carlos Argentino tasted it, pronounced it "interesting," and, after a few drinks, launched into a glorification of modern man.

"I view him," he said with a certain unaccountable excitement, "in his inner sanctum, as though in his castle tower, supplied with telephones, telegraphs, phonographs, wireless sets, motion-picture screens, slide projectors, glossaries, timetables, handbooks, bulletins..."
He remarked that for a man so equipped, actual travel was superfluous. Our twentieth century had inverted the story of Mohammed and the mountain; nowadays, the mountain came to the modern Mohammed.

So foolish did his ideas seem to me, so pompous and so drawn out his exposition, that I linked them at once to literature and asked him why he didn't write them down. As might be foreseen, he answered that he had already done so -- that these ideas, and others no less striking, had found their place in the Proem, or Augural Canto, or, more simply, the Prologue Canto of the poem on which he had been working for many years now, alone, without publicity, with fanfare, supported only by those twin staffs universally known as work and solitude. First, he said, he opened the floodgates of his fancy; then, taking up hand tools, he resorted to the file. The poem was entitled The Earth; it consisted of a description of the planet, and, of course, lacked no amount of picturesque digressions and bold apostrophes.
I asked him to read me a passage, if only a short one. He opened a drawer of his writing table, drew out a thick stack of papers -- sheets of a large pad imprinted with the letterhead of the Juan Crisóstomo Lafinur Library -- and, with ringing satisfaction, declaimed:
.
Mine eyes, as did the Greek's, have known men's towns and fame,
The works, the days in light that fades to amber;
I do not change a fact or falsify a name --
The voyage I set down is... autour de ma chambre.
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from: Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph (El Aleph, 1945)