morning reading

"Her untidy blueprint reminded me of yet another kind of house: a memory palace.  This ancient mnemonic device was used by orators in Greece and Rome, and is still a trade secret of modern memory-contest champions.  A practitioner visualizes a large edifice with a warren of rooms that she furnishes with familiar objects.  She then attaches the items or thoughts that she wishes to recall to the objects.  As she walks mentally through the edifice, they act as prompts."

(Judith Thurman, "Drawn from Life: A Profile of Alison Bechdel", The New Yorker, April 23, 2012, 54)

"A few, the choicest, dreams compile a miscellany of places unbeholden to reality, with its more tedious details.  A dream occurred one night, then returned again, in such a way that, making my way at night towards a real place, I recognized the staircase of a house in the rue des Courcelles, and its wallpaper in raw jute.  But my nights reveal it printed with lions of periwinkle blue, beset with oak balusters, with treads and hand-rails of oak; a forest of oaks sacrificed to an 1890 staircase.... The periwinkle lions are pure creatures of dream, held fast in their oneiric alignment by the most authentic plinths and stylobates in their world.  Periwinkle blue, rimmed with a grey-blue border, the mouth heraldically gaping, the tongue a marine helix.  More or less upright, they have a heavy open forepaw.  Rather English lions, in fact.  How lucky that I can't draw.  I'd stick them in my margins for you, faithful copies of non-existent figures.  I take them for granted now, they serve as a firm link, an indispensable complement, to that pattern which is reality."

(from Evening Star, the last recollections of Colette, 50)

clove, coconut, sesame oil, nigella, black cumin seed, turmeric, fennel

gracious.

happy birthday

The Mountains in the Desert

The Mountains in the Desert

The mountains blue now
at the back of my head,
such geography of self and soul
brought to such limit of sight,

I cannot relieve it
nor leave it, my mind locked
in seeing it
as the light fades.

Tonight let me go
at last out of whatever
mind I thought to have,
and all the habits of it.

Robert Creeley

"The days of spring went on, flowers ablaze in the mountains, the skies cloudless and exalting, the foothills so full of wild mustard that at times it felt as if they were walking through avenues of light." (Abandon, Pico Iyer, 239)