No Road

Since we agreed to let the road between us

Fall to disuse,

And bricked our gates up, planted trees to screen us,

And turned all time's eroding agents loose,

Silence, and space, and strangers - our neglect

Has not had much effect.

Leaves drift unswept, perhaps; grass creeps unmown;

No other change.

So clear it stands, so little overgrown,

Walking that way tonight would not seem strange,

And still would be allowed. A little longer,

And time will be the stronger,

Drafting a world where no such road will run

From you to me;

To watch that world come up like a cold sun,

Rewarding others, is my liberty.

Not to prevent it is my will's fulfilment.

Willing it, my ailment.

 
Philip Larkin (1922 - 1985), in The Less Deceived (1950)

The Sound Collector

A stranger called this morning
Dressed all in black and grey
Put every sound into a bag
And carried them away.

The whistling of the kettle
The turning of the lock
The purring of the kitten
The ticking of the clock

The popping of the toaster
The crunching of the flakes
When you spread the marmalade
The scraping noise it makes

The hissing of the frying-pan
The ticking of the grill
The bubbling of the bathtub
As it starts to fill

The drumming of the raindrops
On the window-pane
When you do the washing up
The gurgle of the drain

The crying of the baby
The squeaking of the chair
The swishing of the curtain
The creaking of the chair

A stranger called this morning
He didn’t leave his name
Left us only silence
Life will never be the same

Roger McGough 

An Irish Airman Foresees His Death

I know that I shall meet my fate

Somewhere among the clouds above;

Those that I fight I do not hate,

Those that I guard I do not love;

My country is Kiltartan Cross,

My countrymen Kiltartan's poor,

No likely end could bring them loss

Or leave them happier than before.

Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,

Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,

A lonely impulse of delight

Drove to this tumult in the clouds;

I balanced all, brought all to mind,

The years to come seemed waste of breath,

A waste of breath the years behind

In balance with this life, this death.

William Butler Yeats (1865 - 1939), in The Wild Swans at Coole (1919)

Like fingers crossed

"Our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest. The maple and the pine may whisper to each other with their leaves ... But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also hang together through the ocean's bottom."


William James, psychologist and philosopher (1842-1910)

Of course not.

"Do you ever read any of the books you burn?" He laughed.
"That's against the law!"
"Oh. Of course."


Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury, science-fiction writer (1920-2012) 

See-ker

"Seek not to follow in the footsteps of men of old; seek what they sought."

Matsuo Basho, poet (1644-1694)

Teach-irt

“Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.”

The Dalai-Lama

(seen on the back of a tee-shirt in McLeodGanj, 24.10.11)

G(old)en

"You must have been warned against letting the golden hours slip by. Yes, but some of them are golden only because we let them slip by."

James M. Barrie, novelist and playwright (1860-1937)

Beauty must lie somewhere

Here are two links on the same topic: Mr Toledano's new exhibition on beauty in LA, and the Huffington Post's cover of the event. Starting tomorrow.

I regret the absence of comment from the people who were photographed in any of the articles I have read. If anyone visits the exhibition over the next month, could he or she kindly tell me if comments/reaction are available with the pictures. I'd be curious to have these men and women's take on the representation and staging of themselves. And what 'self' means.

Our galaxy on a collision course with another: NASA

WASHINGTON (AFP)

Our galaxy is on a collision course with its nearest neighbor, Andromeda, and the head-on crash is expected in four billion years, the US space agency NASA said on Thursday.

Astronomers have long theorized that a clash of these galaxy titans was on the way, though it was unknown how severe it might be, or when, with guesses ranging from three to six billion years.

But years of "extraordinarily precise observations" from NASA's Hubble Space telescope tracking the motion of the Andromeda galaxy "remove any doubt that it is destined to collide and merge with the Milky Way," NASA said in a statement.  

"It will take four billion years before the strike."

After the initial impact it will take another two billion years for them "to completely merge under the tug of gravity and reshape into a single elliptical galaxy similar to the kind commonly seen in the local universe," NASA added.

The stars inside each galaxy are so far apart that they are not likely to collide with each other, but stars will likely be "thrown into different orbits around the new galactic center."

Scientists have long known that Andromeda, also known as M31, is moving toward the Milky Way at a speed of 250,000 miles (402,000 kilometers) per hour, or fast enough to travel from the Earth to the Moon in one hour.

But the nature of the crash depended on the galaxy's sideways motion in the sky, and that trajectory remained a mystery for more than 100 years until the latest analysis of Hubble's findings were revealed.

"This was accomplished by repeatedly observing select regions of the galaxy over a five- to seven-year period," said Jay Anderson of Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.

Andromeda was first spotted as "a little cloud" by the Persian astronomer Abd-al-Rahman Al Sufi in 964.

"In the worst-case-scenario simulation, M31 slams into the Milky Way head-on and the stars are all scattered into different orbits," said Gurtina Besla of Columbia University in New York.

"The stellar populations of both galaxies are jostled, and the Milky Way loses its flattened pancake shape with most of the stars on nearly circular orbits," Besla added.

"The galaxies' cores merge, and the stars settle into randomized orbits to create an elliptical-shaped galaxy."

Source: AFP website and article.