« As she writes, [Emily Dickinson] erases herself. She disappears behind the blade of grass that, if not for her, we would never have seen. She does not write to express herself, perish the thought. [...S]he doesn’t write to be noticed. She writes to bear witness: here lived a flower, for three days in July, the year of 18**, killed by a morning shower. Each poem is a tiny tomb erected to the memory of the invisible.
[...] Emily writes about the world she inhabits, knowing that it would be more beautiful still if it were uninhabited.
[...] She would have liked to make a book with only flowers, like she did at age fourteen. [...] Her pen scratches like a bird. Her poems are at least one-half chickadee. She writes on paper, but that is because she was never able to put together an album big enough to contain the spring showers and the autumn wind – there is no herbarium for snow. She dreams of poems written with insects [...]. Of the golden sonnets bees trace in honey. »
There is no catastrophe, no tipping point, no rupture. Emily's withdrawal is gradual. Maybe quite simply, like most people who, as they age, grow more set in their ways and become more profoundly themselves, she gave into her natural penchant: solitude, and its corollary, silence. It isn't really that hard to imagine.
Dominique Fortier, from Paper Houses (tr. Rhonda Mullins, Coach House Books 2019)
And our paper houses reach the stars
Till we break and scatter worlds apart
Yeah, I paid the price and owned the scars
Why did we climb and fall so far?
36 Days of Type is a yearly challenge inviting artists to share their own creative take on the letters and numbers from the Latin alphabet — I associated each letter with a song.
we should talk more about cities that are vampires. cities that are cold and wet and sink into your bones and stay there. cities that are hungry and want to live. dead cities that dont know they're dead and suck the life force of their people to maintain the delusion. cities with harbors that are actually mouths; one-way entries. cities that are devastatingly lonely and see consumption as love