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Pablo Neruda

I want to go back to being what I have not been,
and learn to go back from such deeps
that amongst all natural things
I could live or not live; it does not matter
to be one stone more, the dark stone,
the pure stone which the river bears away

Paul Caponigro: Landscape: Theory

“My concern has most often been to use the camera to try and express the quiet forces moving in nature, to make visible the constant flow, to find the subtle dimension of the ‘landscape behind the landscape’.”

Lewis Baltz: Landscape: Theory

“Park City is of interest both as an example of standardised construction technology and because so much diverse, intensive development was taking place in one very contained location.”

William Stafford

You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.

Marcel Proust: In search of Lost Time, volume V

“the only true voyage would be not to visit strange lands, but to possess other eyes”

Edward O. Wilson: Biophilia

“I walked into the forest, struck as always by the coolness of the shade beneath tropical vegetation, and continued until I came to a small glade that opened onto the sandy path. I narrowed the world down to a span of a few meters. Again I tried to compose the mental set – call it the naturalist’s trance, the hunter’s trance – by which biologists locate more elusive organisms…
In a twist my mind came free and I was aware of the hard workings of the natural world beyond the periphery of ordinary attention, where passions lose their meaning and history is another dimension, without people, and great events pass without record or judgement. I was a transient of no consequence in this familiar yet deeply alien world that I had come to love. The uncounted products of evolution were gathered there for purposes that had nothing to do with me; their long Cenozoic history was enciphered into a genetic code I could not understand. The effect was strangely calming. Breathing and heartbeat diminished, concentration intensified. It seemed to me that something extraordinary in the forest was very close to where I stood, moving to the surface and discovery.”

Lao-tzu

“the secret of the Tao is found in the smallest detail of the ordinary day”

David Hodges: untitled

With our divided minds
distracted by the past and future,
unable to abandon
to the eternal present,
out of tune
with nature’s rhythm,
yet we must find
that undisturbed space…

Gwen John: from a letter to Ursulla Tyrwhitt

“I may never have anything to express, except this desire for a more interior life.”

Jean Paul Sartre: The Diary of Antoine Roquentin

“I couldn’t remember it was a root anymore. The words had vanished, and with them, the significance of things….and the feeble points of reference men have traced on their surface. I was sitting…before this knotty mass, entirely beastly, which frightened me…It left me breathless. Never, until these last few days, had I understood the meaning of existence.
I was like the others…I said with them: The ocean is green, that white speck up there is a seagull, but I didn’t feel that it existed…And then suddenly existence had revealed itself. It had lost the look of an abstract category; it was the very paste of things; this root was kneaded into existence.”

David Hodges

beyond thought,
the heart filled
with delight;
time stopped,
the senses frozen,
listening
to the least stir
of the imagination

Paul Caponigro: Landscape: Theory

“My concern has most often been to use the camera to try and express the quiet forces moving in nature, to make visible the constant flow, to find the subtle dimension of the ‘landscape behind the landscape’.”

Jorges Luis Borges: This Craft of Verse (1967)

“I think we may perhaps suppose that a time will come when men will no longer be as aware of history as we are. A time will come when men shall care very little about the accidents and circumstances of beauty; they shall care for beauty itself. Perhaps they shall not even care about the names or the biographies of the poets.”

James McNeil Whistler: ‘The 10 o’clock lecture’

“Art happens – no hovel is safe from it, no Prince may depend upon it, the vastest intelligence cannot bring it about, and puny efforts to make it universal end in quaint comedy, and coarse farce.”

Paul Caponigro: Landscape: Theory

“I strive to have a facile technique because only when I am free of concern over technique and least conscious of technical problems do dreamlike images emerge.”

R S Thomas: The River

And the cobbled water
Of the stream with the trout’s indelible
Shadows that winter
Has not erased – I walk it
Again under a clean
Sky with the fish, speckled like thrushes,
Silently singing among the weeds
Branches.

Haruki Murakami: After Dark (2007)

Hmmm, let’s see…You send the music deep enough into your heart so that it makes your body undergo a kind of physical shift, and simultaneously the listener’s body undergoes the same kind of physical shift. It’s giving birth to that kind of shared state. Probably.

H. Rider Haggard: She (1887)

Still are they one, for the wrappings of our sleep shall roll away as thunder-clouds before the wind; the frozen voices of the past shall melt in music like mountain snows beneath the sun; and the weeping and the laughter of lost hours shall be heard once more most sweetly echoing up the cliffs of immeasurable time. Therefore, have no fear, Kallikrates, when thou – living, and but lately born – shall look upon thine own departed self, who breathed and died so long ago. I do but turn one page in thy Book of Being, and show thee what is writ thereon. Behold!

Evelyn Waugh: Decline and Fall (1928)

‘When you’ve been in the soup as often as I have, it gives you a sort of feeling that everything’s for the best, really. You know, God’s in His heaven: all’s right with the world. I can’t quite explain it, but I don’t believe one can ever be unhappy for long provided one does just exactly what one wants to and when one wants to. The last chap who put me on my feet said I was “singularly in harmony with the primitive promptings of humanity.“ I’ve remembered that phrase because somehow it seemed to fit me. Here comes the old man. This is where we stand up.‘
As the bell stopped ringing Dr Fagan swept into the hall, the robes of a Doctor of Philosophy swelling and billowing about him. He wore an orchid in his buttonhole.

Siegfried Sasson: Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928)

The mornings I remember most zestfully were those which took us up on to the chalk downs. To watch the day breaking from purple to dazzling gold while we trotted up a deep-rutted lane; to inhale the early freshness when we were on the sheep-cropped uplands; to stare back at the low country with its cock-crowing farms and mist-coiled waterways; thus to be riding out with a sense of spacious discovery - was it not something stolen from the lie-a-bed world and the luckless city workers - even though it ended in nothing more than the killing of a leash of fox-cubs? (for whom, to tell the truth, I felt an unconfessed sympathy). Up on the downs in fine September weather sixteen years ago. It is possible that even then, if I was on a well-behaved horse, I could half forget why we were there, so pleasant was it to be alive and gazing around me.“

T E Lawrence: Letter to Robert Graves, 4th February 1935

..and here enters my last subject for this letter, your strictures upon the changes I have made in myself since the time we felt so much together at Oxford. You’re quite right about the change. I was then trying to write; to be perhaps an artist (for The Seven Pillars had pretensions towards design, and was written with great pains as prose) or at least to be cerebral. My head was aiming to create tangible things. That’s not well put: all creation is tangible. What I was trying to do, I suppose, was to carry a superstructure of ideas upon or above everything I made.

Siegfried Sassoon: The Weald of Youth (1942)

At Deal, by the way, we watched one of Harry Vardon’s graceful victories, in a thirty-six-hole match against the burly Basque Frenchman Arnaud Massy, who, I think, tied with Vardon for the Open Championship in the following year and was defeated in the replay. Such a match would nowadays be followed by about ten thousand spectators; but on that pleasant breezy morning at Deal only a few hundred people were there, and the proceedings were in no danger of developing into a stampede. It was a decently-conducted game between two experts, and not an agglomeration of golf-ball advertisement and mass suggestion. But I must not give way to regretful thoughts on things as they were when famous golfers had yet to learn to play their strokes to the click of cameras. Rather must I rejoice that - until September 1939 - all forms of sport could attract a multiplicity of adherents, and that the whole affair had become a sound commercial proposition for everyone concerned, and that the simplicity and vintage variety of games playing had been superseded by a general uproar of unruminative technicality.
Nevertheless I retain a wistful regard for - among other matters - the county cricket I used to watch when I was young.

Edmund Blunden: Undertones of War (1928)

Headquarters - officers, signallers, servants, runners and specialists - arrived in the blind gloom at the trench occupied by the Hampshire headquarters, and it is sufficient to indicate the insensate condition of the relief when I say that we did not notice any unusually close arrival of shells as we drew near to the trench, but as we entered it we found there had just been one. It had blown in some concrete shelters, and killed and wounded several of our predecessors; I was aware of mummy-like half-bodies, and struggling figures, crying and cursing. Passing along towards the officers’ dugout, We found the Hampshire colonel, sardonic and unshaken, who waited with us long hours while the relief, so simple in the mention, so perplexing in the midnight morass, was being completed. He told us that in daylight one only reached the front companies through a machine-gun barrage. He intended to have taken out with him a German soft cap, but eventually he forgot it; and perhaps I ought to be ashamed of saying that I have it to this day. It was the chief museum piece in the dugout, except for a stack of German ration tobacco, which made a pretty comfortable seat. The smell of this little concrete hutch, like all other german dugouts, was peculiar and heavy; I do not know how they found the British lines, but probably their experience would be parallel.

René Descartes: A Discourse on the Method of rightly conducting the Reason and seeking Truth in the Sciences (1637)

But it has rarely happened that anything has been objected to me which I had myself altogether overlooked, unless it were something far removed from the subject: so that I have never met with a single critic of my opinions who did not appear to me either less rigorous or less equitable than myself. And further, I have never observed that any truth before unknown has been brought to light by the disputations that are practised in the schools; for while each strives for victory, each is much more occupied in making the best of mere verisimilitude, than in weighing the reasons on both sides of the question; and those who have been long good advocates are not afterwards on that account the better judges.

Philip Larkin: Here (8 October 1961) (from Collected Poems)

Loneliness clarifies. Here silence stands
Like heat. Here leaves unnoticed thicken,
Hidden weeds flower, neglected waters quicken,
Luminously-peopled air ascends;
And past the poppies bluish neutral distance
Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach
Of shapes and shingle. Here is unfenced existence:
Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach.

Rainer Maria Rilke: Letters to a Young Poet (1929)

“There must be an enormous silence to give space for so much sound, so much movement, and when one remembers that in addition to all this, accompanying it, there is the distant presence of the sea, perhaps the very innermost sound in this whole prehistoric harmony, then one can only hope that you will permit this marvellous isolation to work upon you, for it is something that can never be deleted from your life; it will abide with you as an anonymous voice and will direct you in all your living and doing…”

Aphex Twin: Selected Ambient Works Vol.1 1985-1992

We are the music makers, and
We are the dreamers of dreams.