Photography enables you to grasp a place first time round. In fact, photography often tends to become impossible in a place you're already familiar with. Going back somewhere seldom accompanies a desire to take photos ... Photography is a means of exploration, it's a vital part of travel, almost as essential as a car or a plane.
Wim Wenders

It seems that Reckless Writer is having a go at this. Now that's what I call reckless!

The Heart is a Sleeping Beauty
The heart is the sleeping beauty
and love the only kiss it can't resist.
Even as eyes lay open wide,
there is a heart that sleeps inside,
and it's to there you must be hastening,
for all hearts dream,
they dream only of awakening.

Nicholas Klein

What you call passion is not spiritual force, but friction between the
soul and the outside world. Where passion dominates, that does not
signify the presence of greater desire and ambition, but rather the
misdirection of these qualities toward an isolated and false goal, with
a consequent tension and sultriness in the atmosphere. Those who direct
the maximum force of their desires toward the centre, toward true being,
toward perfection, seem quieter than the passionate souls because the
flame of their fervour cannot always be seen. In argument, for example,
they will not shout and wave their arms. But I assure you, they are
nevertheless burning with subdued fires.

Hermann Hesse, from 'The Glass Bead Game'

Breathless
It's up in the morning and on the downs
Little white clouds like gambolling lambs
And I am breathless over you
And the red-breasted robin beats his wings
His throat it trembles when he sings
For he is helpless before you
The happy hooded bluebells bow
And bend their heads all a-down
Heavied by the early morning dew
At the whispering stream, at the bubbling brook
The fishes leap up to take a look
For they are breathless over you
Still your hands
And still your heart
Still your face comes shining through
And all the morning glows anew
Still your mind
Still your soul
For still, the fare of love is true
And I am breathless without you
The wind circles among the trees
And it bangs about the new-made leaves
For it is breathless without you
The fox chases the rabbit round
The rabbit hides beneath the ground
For he is defenceless without you
The sky of daytime dies away
And all the earthly things they stop to play
For we are all breathless without you
I listen to my juddering bones
The blood in my veins and the wind in my lungs
And I am breathless without you
Still your hands
And still your heart
For still your face comes shining through
And all the morning glows anew
Still your soul
Still your mind
Still, the fire of love is true
And I am breathless without you

Nick Cave, from 'The Lyre of Orpheus'

These model boats were made by the artist Ian Hamilton Finlay. They are floating on the small loch in his garden at Little Sparta.

Tender
Tender is the night
Lying by your side
Tender is the touch
Of someone that you love too much
Tender is the day
The demons go away
Lord I need to find
Someone who can heal my mind

Come on, come on, come on
Get through it
Come on, come on, come on
Love's the greatest thing
That we have
I'm waiting for that feeling
I'm waiting for that feeling
Waiting for that feeling to come

Oh my baby, Oh my baby
Oh why, Oh my

Come on, come on, come on ...

Blur

hey! i've discovered that people use these blog things to publish a diary of stuff that actually happens to them every day! weird or what? well, i'm up for some of that, so here's my day. i woke up feeling a bit rough. nothing unusual in that except that before i had time to assess the degree of roughness i had to go into town to see my dentist, who is welsh. he had grown a beard the last time i saw him, which came as a shock because he's been poking around in my mouth for 20 years without a beard. anyway, today he had lost the beard, but kept the bushy grey moustache, which was, i suppose, a reasonable compromise. it would have been worse if he'd shaved the moustache and kept the beard, which is a sure sign of madness. nobody wants a mad person working on their teeth. anyway, he only buffed up my teeth and extracted the cash today.

most people would probably consider a visit to the dentist to be quite enough excitement for one day, but i'm a bit of a party animal so i decided to go and buy some razor blades and a pair of trousers. shock horror! mr wilkinson-sword has stopped making my brand of razor blades and it looks as if i might soon be forced down the same path as my dentist. i've never had a beard, but perhaps i will look more distinguished. there again i might look like a hobo. only time will tell. anyway, undeterred i made my way to the trouser shop where i bought a pair of dark blue trousers which are in a dark blue carrier bag beside me as i write, but if you open the bag you can't see the trousers because they're the same colour as the bag.

wait, i've got mixed up. en route to the shopping i went into a couple of art galleries. in the first one there were oil paintings of a naked girl, sometimes with downy white wings on her back. in the biggest painting she was standing with her back to the viewer (in this case, me) on top of what looked like a gigantic caramel mousse against a blue sky with fluffy white clouds and sporting 2 violins for wings. it was called 'on top of the world'. no mention of the mousse. even though it cost a mere £2,500, i decided not to buy it. however, she did have a very pert bottom, so i went back and looked at it again on the way out. in the next gallery i saw an exhibtion by gerald laing, who i've met a couple of times and who lives in a castle type place north of inverness. he was showing sculptures, prints and some recent paintings about the iraq war. there's a gushing review of the exhibition here.

where was i? oh yes, after i bought the trousers i ate a 'new york deli' sandwich on a bench in the gardens beneath the castle, admiring the almost hallucinogenic haze of the autumn trees shimmering in the watery sunlight. it was ok but i threw away the bits of gherkin. then i came home and knitted a pair of socks.

lomo

Speaking of cracked kettledrums, I always enjoy a visit to engrish.com - as much for the comments as the actual examples.

Human language is like a cracked kettledrum on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when what we long to do is make music that will move the stars to pity.
Gustave Flaubert

Wild Geese
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Mary Oliver

I want to sing like the birds sing, not worrying about who hears or what they think.
Rumi

Art is not chaste. Those ill prepared should be allowed no contact with art. Art is dangerous. If it is chaste, it is not art.
Picasso

Maya
Maya manifests its force through the rolling universe and evolving forms of individuals. To understand that secret, to know how it works, and to transcend, if possible, its cosmic spell -- breaking outward through the layers of tangible and visible appearance and simultaneously inward through all the intellectual and emotional stratifications of the psyche -– this is the pursuit conceived by Indian philosophy to be the primary, and finally undeniable human task.
Henrich Zimmer

Dust of the rivers does murmur and weep
Hard and sharp laughter that cuts to the bone
Ah, but every face within your face does show
Going gladly now to give himself his own
And twelve yellow willows shall fellow the shallows
Small waves and thunder be my pillow
Upon the gleaming water two swans that swim
And every place shall be my native home
The east gate like a fortress dissolve it away
The west gate like a prison O come break it down
Island I remember living here
Wandering beneath the empty skies
In time her hair grew long and swept the ground
And seven blackbirds carried it out behind
It bore the holy imprint of her mind
As green-foot slow she moved among the seasons.

from 'Maya' ~ The Incredible String Band

Write the bad things that are done to you in the sand, but write the good things that happen in marble.
(Arabian saying)

one from the docks ...

keeping abreast ...
Ferrari is giving the Pope a £250,000 racing car to celebrate 26 years as pontiff. Jack Nicholson once interrupted his love-making to eat an entire apple pie. US schools have banned Halloween because they are worried about offending real witches. Women actually have four G-spots according to Desmond Morris. The Japanese are about to market vibrating condoms. Ukrainians are being offered a free striptease to encourage them to vote for Viktor Yanukovich in the presidential erections. A teacher in India was suspended for forcing students to eat cow dung. The entire staff at another school was sacked after it was found they hadn't been to work for 23 years. According to a survey the French have sex on average 137 times a year, the Japanese a mere 46. The British take longest to get warmed up. A 13-year-old Lincolnshire boy grew a 700lb pumpkin by feeding it a pint of beer a day. Callers reporting faults to British telecom company NTL were told: "We don't give a fuck about you. We are never here. We just will fuck you about, and we are not going to handle any of your complaints. Just fuck off." A model on a German reality TV show had honey licked off her body by two goats. Actress Kate Winslet tried to help a friend win a competition by offering her knickers on radio. "Do you want them clean or dirty?", she asked. A Slovakian pensioner fed up with footballs being kicked into his garden hired a tractor and ploughed up the pitch. A Japanese man has invented a mobile phone ring tone that increases women's breast size. A Romanian village was left deserted when its inhabitants fled in panic after mistaking disco lights in a nearby town for an alien invasion. A Serb fell asleep in shallow water and woke to find his penis clamped in the pincers of a large crayfish. A passing hiker alerted rescue services who forced the shellfish to loosen its grip. The man later cooked and ate it. An ice cream company in Chile has invented a lollipop that doesn't melt. A Scarborough man pulled his own teeth with rusty pliers because he couldn't find an NHS dentist. A Bedford couple named their son Drew Peacock before realising how it sounded.

When asked if my cup is half-full or half-empty my only response is that I am thankful I have a cup.
Samuel Lefkowitz

another from the suburbs ...

Why should I be ashamed to describe what Nature was not ashamed to create?
Pietro Aretino

I was in Glasgow yesterday. It rained all day, except for a short break in the afternoon when I ventured out into the leafy suburbs and took a few snaps.

Rooster
As long as a Rooster somewhere
is angry enough to claw at
the sun blood red rising and
pull it through, day will come:
the world will go on.
Olive Senior

This is quite funny because Glenn Gould loathed any kind of physical contact. No doubt he was concerned about his hands being injured, but he was also totally paranoid about his health and the possibility of picking up infections from other people. Most of all, however, I suspect he just didn't like being touched.

What sort of people keep a giant-sized model of Popeye in the garden?

let's have some fun :)
nutz
baabaa
carmina
spamologue
krankiebowie

the 'spamologue' is very nicely done by the way.

My Dear Someone
I wanna go all over the world,
And start living free.
I know that there's somebody who,
Is waiting for me.
I'll build a boat, steady and true.
As soon as it's done,
I'm gonna sail along in a dream,
Of my dear someone.

One little star, smilin' tonight.
Knows where he lies.
Stay, little star, steady and bright,
To guide me afar.
Rush, little wind, over the deep,
For now I've begun.
Hurry and take me straight into the arms,
Of my dear someone.

Hurry and take me into the arms,
Of my dear someone.

A song by one of my very favourite singer-songwriters, Gillian Welch, of whom Emmylou Harris said: 'Gillian writes with what at first seems to be childlike simplicity, but on closer listening, you realize you are in the presence of an old soul, one who knows the blue highways of the heart.'

Rudolph Lucasie and family - carte de visite

Isn't it strange how the Internet throws so many odd things in your path as you wander to and fro? For no particular reason I found myself looking at nineteenth century images of albinism last night. It reminded me that Salif Keita, one of Africa's greatest singers, is an albino. As for Rudolph Lucasie, I can't help feeling he needs to loosen up a bit, and possibly change his tailor.

'Woman is the promise that cannot be kept,' said the poet Paul Claudel.
But does she know that? She - her sexuality, her voice and eyes and skin and hair - is the promise that we men make to ourselves hour after hour every day, every day of our lives. If she is not the secret of the universe, then there is none. To us she appears in the clandestine and burning center of the mind as the form we most deeply desire and must create or die. There she is - dressed, or half-dressed, in her mysterious clothes, hair a little mussed, lips just moist enough; and from going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it - the real earth, and not just the enchanted fragment of it that blazes in the longing mind to furnish her setting - she becomes a hidden archetype to the beholder rendered godlike by her presence: his possession and promise, soulless and soulful at the same time, receding, flashing up with terrible certainty at the most inopportune times that she then makes opportune. Behind her are real women, giving to the ideal the substance it requires from the lived world, and serving to make more powerful and imperious those all-powerful creatures of the depths of our being, the slaves of our needs who enslave us. We have seen her in actual beds, and seen her satisfactions taking place hiddenly, deep in the body, from outward signs so powerful and intimate that we know, with awe and gratitude, that we could never attain anything of like consequence, or even approach it. We leave her sleeping, and retire to the center of the mind, where she has taken a new dimension, another hairdo, another set of magic lingerie. We love her there in another one of her endless changes, and wonder when she will come true again, taking on the mortal and identifying flesh without which all ideals die, as a real woman, perhaps not yet encountered, unhooks her bra with the strange motion that only women have ever mastered, smiling with infinite complicity.
James Dickey

thanks again to Whiskey River

I had 3.4 beers last night, so this offer was just too tempting to ignore:

Do you desire to experience worthwhile future forenoon? Our modern survey shows that it needs an average of only 3.4 drinks to produce a katzenjammer. But this tablets services you elude hang-overs and awake sentient splendid from head to stomach and all over else. Press to buy.
Arthur Zvar

If I suck hard enough maybe I can get my Irn Bru back.

Never relinquish the fiery sadness called desire.
Basho