Disappearers

Octavia

March 4th, 2010 | Author: F.

Now I will tell how Octavia, the spider web city, is made. There is a precipice between two steep mountains: the city is over the void, bound to the two crests with ropes and chains and catwalks. You walk on the little wooden ties, careful not to set your foot in the open spaces, or you cling to the hempen strands. Below there is nothing for hundreds and hundreds of feet: a few clouds glide past; farther down you can glimpse the chasm’s bed.

This is the foundation of the city: a net which serves as a passage and as a support. All the rest, instead of rising up, is hung below: rope ladders, hammocks, houses made like sacks, clothes hangers, terraces like gondolas, skins of water, gas jets, spits, baskets on strings, dumbwaiters, showers, trapezes and rings for children’s games, cable cars, chandeliers, pots with trailing plants.

Suspended over the abyss, the life of Octavia’s inhabitants is less uncertain than in other cities. They know the net will last only so long…

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

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March 2nd, 2010 | Author: F.

A Thousand Relationships

February 27th, 2010 | Author: F.

Govinda no longer saw the face of his friend Siddhartha. Instead he saw other faces, many faces, a long series, a continuous stream of faces -hundreds, thousands, which all came and disappeared and yet all seemed to be there at the same time (…).He saw the face of a fish, of a carp, with tremendous painfully opened mouth, a dying fish with dimmed eyes. He saw the face of a newly born child, red and full of wrinkles, ready to cry. He saw the face of a murderer, saw him plunge a knife into the body of a man; at the same moment he saw this criminal kneeling down, bound, and his head cut off by an executioner. He saw the naked bodies of men and women in the postures and transports of passionate love. (…) He saw all these forms and faces in a thousand relationships to each other, all helping each other, loving, hating and destroying each other(…)

Herman Hesse, Siddhartha

Time Runs in a Circle

February 23rd, 2010 | Author: P.

6000000000000

February 23rd, 2010 | Author: F.

“It’s very difficult, in fact nearly impossible, to escape the human world entirely and live in another. A very few people can do a Thoreau or a Ted Kaczynski – but even they still live in a fairly human world, only a few miles from town, able to walk or bike to the grocery store and to have their laundry done. There are a few hunters and trappers, prospectors and miners; a few lighthouse keepers, fire watchers, anchorites, disappearers. But even they usually rely on human artifacts, and in any case they don’t always last long. Chris McCandless set off to try it in Alaska and starved to death in a matter of weeks, a few miles from a highway. And the vast majority of us can’t even do that much, or anything like it – not with six billion people on the planet…”

Ophelia Benson

Float On

February 14th, 2010 | Author: F.

PennyWebb, 6 Word Story

This Is Not a Pipe

February 8th, 2010 | Author: P.

More details here.

I Will Disappear

February 2nd, 2010 | Author: W.

More than anything else, what Quinn liked to do was walk. New York was a labyrinth of endless steps and no matter how far he walked, it always left him with the feeling of being lost. Each time he took a walk, he felt he was leaving himself behind. By giving himself up to the streets, by reducing himself to a seeing eye, he was able to escape thinking. All places became equal and on his best walks, he was able to feel that he was nowhere. This was all he ever asked of things: to be nowhere. New York was the nowhere he had built around himself and he had no intention of ever leaving it again.

Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy

From Green to White

February 1st, 2010 | Author: F.

“Geography has no bearing on it, nor have the interests of the community in which I work.”

Yves Tanguy

Untitleds

January 30th, 2010 | Author: F.

Untitled (Julius Caesar) and Untitled (Abraham Lincoln) by Nick van Woert