Sarah Belfort

As a child, didn’t you find it calming to imagine
pinworms as some kind of tiny batons
giving cadence to the squeezes and releases
around the downward march of debris?
Didn’t you glimpse in the monarchs
what seemed your own inner blazonry
flapping and gliding, in desire, in the middle air?
Weren’t you reassured to think these flimsy
hinged beings, and then their offspring,
and then their offspring’s offspring, could
navigate, working in shifts, all the way to Mexico,
to the exact plot, perhaps the very tree,
by tracing the flair of the bodies of ancestors
who fell in this same migration a year ago?

— Galway Kinnell, excerpt from ‘Why Regret?’

Needed a reprieve from revision so I wandered around the National Museum. I’ve been going two or three times a week; it clears the mind without numbing it.  The exhibitions are consistently absorbing but there’s an especially great one up at the moment— Treasured: Wonderful Things, Amazing Stories. Samurai armour, nautical equipment from early arctic expeditions, and an unbelievable collection of glass sea anemones are a sample of the things on display. But my attention was monopolised by this stuffed tigress and cub.  ‘Man is an analogist,’ as Emerson said, so perhaps it has something to do with a sublimated desire to be carried.

From airchitectur to ingineerin to fuid and farin. Handy if you have a tantrum-inclined Scottish colleague*

*Alternate link

Longed for him. Got him. Shit.
— Margaret Atwood

LOVELY SPRING WEATHER BUBONIC PLAGUE RAGING.
— Evelyn Waugh

Lie detector eyeglasses perfected: Civilization collapses.
— Richard Powers

Thought I was right. I wasn’t.
— Graeme Gibson

I’m your future, child. Don’t cry.
— Stephen Baxter

I mark this day most specially with a white stone.

Camera was stolen and baggage was lost on outward AND return journeys. Plans to poke around dubious muti shops were thwarted. Well. Worse things have happened to better people. And elephants.

Flight delayed, thumbs a-twiddling. At least security had no qualms with the kudu horn in my hand luggage.

And glad to find, on again looking at it,
It meant even less to me than I had thought –
You know the ship is moving when you see
The boxes on the quayside sliding away
And growing smaller – and feel a calm delight
When the port’s cleared and the coast out of sight,
And ships are few, each on its proper course,
With no occasion for approach or discourse.

— Robert Graves

Everyone runs the risk of being the first immortal

Self Portrait (Hermitage, St. Petersburg), 1835, Horace Vernet