Beautiful
morning with no need of myths, sipping honey without blasphemy.

Beautiful
morning, this or some other morning,
this life or some other invention,
without any ghosts in the shadows.

The sand's dampness clings to my feet.
I swallow the sea, which swallows me.
Seashells, curved thoughts, shades of complete
blue
light
over materialized forms.

Beautiful
passing body, blended into the whole
body of the world.

An urge to sing, but so intense
I hold my tongue, replete.

Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Sponge Song, from Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Multitudinous Heart: Selected Poems: A Bilingual Edition, trans. Richard Zenith

Toshihiko Shimizu
Letter Picture No.2
1967-1970

Louise Bourgeois
From La Réparation
2003

“But over and beyond our memories, the house we were born in is physically inscribed in us. It is a group of organic habits. After twenty years, in spite of all the other anonymous stairways; we would recapture the reflexes of the "first stairway," we would not stumble on that rather high step. The house's entire being would open up, faithful to our own being. We would push the door that creaks with the same gesture, we would find our way in the dark to the distant attic. The feel of the tiniest latch has remained in our hands.”

— Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

The successive houses in which we have lived have no doubt made our gestures commonplace. But we are very surprised, when we return to the old house, after an odyssey of many years, to find that the most delicate gestures, the earliest gestures suddenly come alive, are still faultless. In short, the house we were born in has engraved within us the hierarchy of the various functions of inhabiting. We are the diagram of the functions of inhabiting that particular house, and all the other houses are but variations on a fundamental theme. The word habit is too worn a word to express this passionate liaison of our bodies, which do
not forget, with an unforgettable house.

— Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

Helena Almeida
Desenhos Habitados / Inhabited Drawings
1975

And shall we have to deny thee then,
God of the tumors, God of the living
flower, begin with a no to the obscure
rock "I am," consent to death
and on each tomb inscribe our only
certainty: "thanatos athanatos"?
Without a name to tell the dreams the tears the furors of this man defeated by still-open questions.
Our dialogue alters; now the absurd
becomes possible. There, beyond
the smoke of fog, within the trees
the potency of leaves awakes, true is the river pressing on the banks.
Life is not dream. True is man
and his jealous plaint of silence.
God of silence, open solitude.

Salvatore Quasimodo, Thanatos Athanatos, from The Selected Writings of Salvatore Quasimodo, trans. Allen Mandelbaum

Horst P. Horst
Lucia Bosé
c. 1950

Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes
1975

“How can another see into me, into my most secret self, without my being able to see in there myself? And without my being able to see him in me. And if my secret self, that which can be revealed only to the other, to the wholly other, to God if you wish, is a secret that I will never reflect on, that I will never know or experience or possess as my own, then what sense is there in saying that it is my secret, or in saying more generally that a secret belongs, that it is proper to or belongs to some one, or to some other who remains someone. It's perhaps there that we find the secret of secrecy. Namely, that it is not a matter of knowing and that it is there for no one. A secret doesn't belong, it can never be said to be at home or in its place. The question of the self: who am I not in the sense of who am I but rather who is this I that can say who? What is the - I and what becomes of responsibility once the identity of the I trembles in secret?”

— Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, Second Edition & Literature in Secret (Religion and Postmodernism

Berenice Abbott
Parabolic Mirror
Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1958–1961

Paul Klee, The Cat, from Some Poems By Paul Klee, trans. Anselm Hollo

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